The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (65 page)

Stammheim, where a mass of falsified and fabricated criminal details are meant to undermine the political content of the confrontation, makes it clear what the issue is in the Federal Republic: fascism. The filthy, old political machine we know so well, in a new and more monstrous form—no longer as a function of national monopoly capitalism, but as part of the globalization of U.S. capital.

The prisoners say that it is because of the strategic function that the Federal Republic plays for U.S. capital that the urban guerilla can destabilize things here—and it makes no difference how small a minority they are. Their strategy clarifies why it is extremely difficult to develop a revolutionary position in the Federal Republic, as well as why it is necessary to do so. That it is possible has been proven in the six years since the first action.

I
N
1976,
THE
RAF
REMAINED
a recognized part of the revolutionary left. Years of psychological operations may have seriously compromised it in the eyes of liberals and the general public, but the state had failed to completely isolate it despite all its efforts to do so. The group benefited from sympathy in some quarters, and a smaller number of people even found its struggle inspirational.

Yet, the left itself was changing; the RAF, with its core cadre in prison and its supporters focused almost solely on their release, was not in a position to follow these developments as closely as it should have.

With the collapse of the APO, many leftists turned towards the Social Democrats, the SPD acquiring over 200,000 new members between 1969 and 1974.
¹
For all the youthful exuberance of the sixties movement, in the end, many students had been integrated into the system. The situation only worsened, the SPD’s drift to the right accelerating in 1974 when an espionage scandal forced Brandt to relinquish the Chancellor’s office to Helmut Schmidt.

Nevertheless, throughout the 1970s, the numbers of people organizing politically outside of the establishment continued to grow, albeit in a less culturally spectacular way than in the preceding decade.

THE K-GROUPS

As we have already seen, the APO as it had existed was incapable of rising to the challenge posed by the Social-Liberal Coalition, and many of those who retained their radical opposition to capitalism found themselves joining one of the many newly-founded Marxist-Leninist organizations, the K-groups. These had much in common with other new communist parties which sprang up throughout the western world at this time, combining an enthusiastic (if somewhat unhealthy)
esprit de corps
with a more conservative approach to political organizing. As elsewhere, Maoism in the FRG peaked in the first half of the 1970s, declining rapidly near the end of the decade.

As the years wore on, some of these Marxist-Leninist organizations would develop positions reminiscent of the postwar KPD’s “patriotic communism.” The Bavaria-based
Arbeiterbund
, for instance, held that the German nation was divided and oppressed by both U.S. imperialism and Soviet “social imperialism,” and thus advanced the troublesome slogan, “Germany to the Germans.”

The RAF’s insistence that West Germany was itself an oppressor nation, and that even its working class constituted a labor aristocracy, would contrast sharply with this.

“
Forward in the struggle for the rights of the working class and the people—Forward in the struggle for the victory of socialism”

The K-groups could not be expected to offer any substantial support to the RAF given their opposition to guerilla activities in the First World, which most of them perceived as adventurist and even counterrevolutionary. Perhaps of equal importance, their “anti-revisionist” trajectory and uncritical support for China’s foreign policy led many Maoists to oppose those national liberation movements in the Third World which received aid from the East Bloc countries. Eventually, some K-groups would even go so far as to support the same anticommunist guerillas that the United States was backing at the time.

Despite these differences, certain K-groups—notably the KPD/ML—did offer important and much appreciated support to the prisoners during their third hunger strike in 1974.

THE SPONTIS AND THE REVOLUTIONARY CELLS

If the K-groups represented one answer to the APO’s shortcomings, other militants, especially those who remained based in the universities and the counterculture, had set out on a very different trajectory. Anarchism, anti-vanguardist Marxism, and even simple “actionism” revealing a bias against any political theory, combined and fed into the
sponti
scene. These activists placed great store in the politicization of everyday life, and one’s personal liberation from authoritarian institutions—a process which they felt could only be made possible in spaces freed from capitalist domination. Later in the decade, parts of this scene would be instrumental in spreading the ideas of autonomist communism from Italy to the Federal Republic.

In the early seventies, the
spontis
lead militant squatters’ movements in Frankfurt and Hamburg, although these were unfortunately unable to survive repeated police attacks. More than one RAF member came out of these squatting scenes
¹
that during their brief existence played a role similar to that of the communes in the APO days, providing spaces where people could create their own cultures and relationships while being pulled in a militant direction by the very fact that they were living in illegal conditions.

Poster for a sponti demonstration: “The LHG Struggles Against the Education Factory”

In 1974, the movement acquired its own national newspaper,
Info-BUG,
²
based in West Berlin. The other important newspaper associated with the
spontis
was Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s
Pflasterstrand
, founded in 1976 and based in Frankfurt.
Informationsdienst
, more radical than
Pflasterstrand
and also with a broader appeal, was yet another regular movement publication that had been coming out of that city since 1973.

The
spontis
formed the radical edge of the undogmatic left, and of all the various non-guerilla scenes, they were closest to
the RAF. As a result of their squatting experiences, the Frankfurt scene in particular had had to develop a capacity to defend itself from the police, and had even built up a fighting squad, the Putz Group,
¹
whose job it was to take on the cops at demos. In regular training sessions, the Putz members practiced stone-throwing, one-on-one combat, unarresting comrades, and, according to some accounts, the use of molotov cocktails. As one former member recalled, “We had the complete gear that the cops had, except for guns.”
²

According to one historian of the period, there was a great deal of overlap and cross-pollination between the
spontis
and squats and the circles in which the guerillas and their supporters moved.
³
Perhaps for this precise reason, the most acrimonious debate over armed politics occurred within this scene.

Shortly after Holger Meins’ death in 1974, the organization Revolutionary Struggle, led by Cohn-Bendit and his friend Joschka Fischer, had joined with the squatting council and other
sponti
groups to issue a declaration of unambiguous solidarity with the guerilla.
⁴
Shortly afterwards, however, Revolutionary Struggle issued another statement, “Mass-Militancy vs. the Guerilla,” meant to initiate debate over the most appropriate use of political violence in the scene and questioning the logic of clandestine armed struggle.
⁵

At the same time, another guerilla organization had formed which represented the politics and practice of the
sponti
scene far better than the RAF: this was the Revolutionary Cells, or RZ.

The RZ’s first actions were carried out in November 1973, two months after a CIA-backed coup had toppled the socialist Allende government in Chile. On the weekend of November 16 and 17, bombs went off at the offices of an ITT subsidiary in both West Berlin and Nuremberg, causing over $200,000 in damages.
⁶

A communiqué explained:

The Revolutionary Cells claim responsibility for the attack on the ITT branches in Berlin and Nuremberg on November 16 and 17, 1973. We attacked the ITT branches, because ITT is responsible for the torture and murder of women, workers, and peasants.

As early as 1971, ITT wanted, with the help of the then head of the CIA, McCone, who also sat on ITT’s Board of Directors, to prevent Allende’s electoral victory, using ITT’s own domestic politics section, the news services, and the counterintelligence services, while, of course, supported by the mass murderer Nixon. Towards this end, ITT provided the CIA with 1 million dollars. ITT allowed the assassination of the much-loved General Schneider, so as to provoke a putsch. This was unsuccessful, because the Chilean people knew that they had to fight for their freedom and that the ruling class would use all the means at its disposal to oppress the people—the capitalist system—they don’t give a shit how many people must die in the process.
⁷

These were the opening salvos of one of West Germany’s most interesting, and least known, guerilla groups.

Dubbed “the after work guerillas,” the RZ adopted a very different approach from either the RAF or the 2JM. Anybody could carry out an action within the context of the RZ’s politics—defined as anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism, and “supporting the struggles of workers, wimmin and youth”
⁸
—and claim it as an RZ action. In line with this, the Cells did not field underground militants, but rather advised comrades to maintain their “legal” existence while carrying out clandestine armed activities. Finally, the group’s domestic wing purposefully stopped short of carrying out lethal attacks, the sole fatality during their entire nineteen-year existence being a politician who bled out when an RZ cell knee-capped him in 1981. (The group subsequently issued a communiqué explaining that they had not meant to kill him.)

The RZ would suffer few arrests, and even fewer casualties, all the while carrying out far more attacks than the RAF and 2JM combined. It should, however, be noted that many of these attacks were of a limited nature similar to those carried out by RAF supporters who were likewise living and working in the legal movement. Apart from bombing the Chilean consulate, the offices of El Al, police stations, U.S. army bases, government buildings, and bosses’ cars, for years the RZ also forged transit passes which were widely distributed, and food vouchers which were passed out to homeless families. Starting on May Day 1975, the Cells issued an annual newspaper,
Revolutionärer Zorn
(Revolutionary Rage), explaining their positions and actions; it was immediately banned under §88a, but broadly distributed and widely read in the scene regardless.