The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (67 page)

Famous leaflet produced by the “Broad’s Council” of the SDS in 1968: “Liberate the Socialist Men from their Bourgeois Dicks.” The men whose six penises were mounted on the wall above the axe-wielding woman had their names listed below: Helmut Schauer, Peter Gäng, Dieter Kunzelmann, Hans-Jürgen Krahl, Bernd Rabehl, and Reimut Reiche were all leading men in the APO. A space for a seventh name was left blank.

As the APO declined, the women’s liberation movement entered a period of rapid advance. While many feminists continued to work within the male-dominated left, others separated themselves from its campaigns and organizations to a degree greater than what occurred in most other countries at that time.
¹
These women had no lack of areas in which to put their energies, areas which had often been neglected by their male “comrades”: opposing violence against women, organizing collective childcare, struggling for reproductive rights, and much more. This work was often based in autonomous women’s centers, the first ones being established in Frankfurt and West Berlin in 1972, but others soon appearing in cities across the country.

If the contours of the West German women’s movement were similar to those in other imperialist countries in the seventies, they were not identical. Most observers agree, for instance, that the West German experience was marked by the lack of an official national organization, such as the American National Organization of Women, and also by less contact with professional political women’s organizations in the main parties. These differences allowed the West German movement to develop a far greater emphasis on autonomy, not only from men, but also from the political establishment and the political left.
²

A variety of issues, ranging from sexism in the media to wages for housework, attracted political action, which in turn ranged from petitions to demonstrations to disruptive “go-ins.” However, by far the most important and unifying struggle was the campaign to repeal §218 of the Basic Law, the paragraph of the constitution banning abortion under any circumstances. Under §218, a woman who had an abortion was liable to a five-year prison term; anyone who performed such a procedure was liable to a ten-year term.
³
It was estimated that 1,000,000 abortions were nevertheless performed every year, either in often perilous conditions or else necessitating travel to Holland or England where the procedure was not illegal.
⁴

The movement against §218 stormed its way onto the public stage on June 2, 1971, when feminist journalist Alice Schwarzer arranged
to have 374 women publicly “confess” to having had abortions in the pages of the mainstream magazine
Stern
. Two months later, Schwarzer had collected thousands more “confessions” and tens of thousands of solidarity signatures.
¹

Within a year, the sensation had become a movement, putting its feet on the ground in Frankfurt in March 1972 at the first National Women’s Conference of the postwar period. It was here that an “Aktion 218” working group established plans for a renewed campaign to decriminalize abortion, the beginning of what one German feminist would call “a children’s crusade against the patriarchy.”
²

The movement grew by leaps and bounds, bringing together women from a variety of political perspectives, including many radicals. A national day of action was called by the Berlin Women’s Center, and on March 16, 1974, thousands of women took to the streets against §218, while 329 doctors gambled their professional licenses by declaring in
Spiegel
that they had helped women to obtain illegal abortions. At the same time, a current affairs television program prepared a show in which thirteen doctors were all to assist in an illegal abortion. Following protests from the Churches and the CDU (“[the telecast would be] an unheard of offense to the moral sense of millions of citizens and an acme of tastelessness”
³
), the show was banned, and all that appeared during the prime time slot was a blank screen.
⁴

Poster for demonstration against the antiabortion §218.

The campaign seemed to have made a breakthrough, and the
Bundestag
passed an SPD bill in April permitting abortion in the first trimester, which most considered to be a real victory. When the bill became law in July of that year, though, the CDU and CSU immediately appealed to the Federal Constitutional Court, which voted six to two in February 1975 that the legislation violated the Constitution.
⁵
The movement had been dealt a major blow.
⁶

One week later, bombs went off in the court’s chambers in Karlsruhe. As a communiqué explained:

On March 4, 1975, the women of the Revolutionary Cells carried out an attack against the Federal Constitutional Court.

Not to “defend the constitution from the Federal Constitutional Court”… but to defend ourselves from the constitution. A constitution that provides the legal framework for the daily exploitation, grinding down, and psychological destruction of millions of women and men. A constitution that criminalizes women—many driven to their deaths—if they do not allow the doctors’ mafia and the judges’ mafia to control their sexuality, as well as decisions regarding their own bodies and the number of children they will have.
⁷

From informal conversations, we gather that this was a well-received action, serving to galvanize militant feminism and strengthen the struggle for free and accessible abortion for all women.

This was one of three bombings carried out by the Women of the Revolutionary Cells in 1975; there were no similar attacks until Rote Zora’s appearance in 1977. Clearly there was room to experiment with feminist armed politics, and some militants were taking up this challenge. This was not the case with the RAF.

Later in the decade, a number of efforts would be made to define, or at least explore, the relationship between feminism and armed antiimperialism. This was as a result of developments on the ground, as certain women attempted to grapple with the meaning of the guerilla’s politics, and with the prominence of so many women in the RAF. The process received added impetus as activists from both milieux were brought together within the peace and antinuclear movements that emerged from the other trend the RAF was ignoring: the rise of the Citizens Initiatives.

BÜRGERINITIATIVEN: THE CITIZENS INITIATIVES
The Citizens Initiatives had developed from the least radical section of the APO in combination with segments of the SPD. The term itself covers what is described in North America as “civil society,” with the proviso that the groups involved tended to be based in one locality and focused on one single issue. This varied wildly from opposition to nuclear power, highway expansion, or deforestation, to promotion of the rights of guest workers, tenants, or the elderly, or work around some particular government policy or piece of legislation, for instance the
Berufsverbot
.
¹

It is difficult to draw a hard and objective line between the Citizens Initiatives and various left or feminist projects, and indeed there was always overlap. However, the explicitly non-ideological and reformist approach that characterized the Initiatives makes the term a meaningful one in examining the struggle in the 1970s. While individuals might work with a Citizens Initiative for their own ideological reasons (i.e., against the
Berufsverbot
because they were communists), the idea behind the Initiative itself was the issue being tackled, not how it fit into some greater political scheme. At least initially, the campaigns were ends in themselves, not aspects of some broader strategy.

As such, the Citizens Initiatives were always consciously reformist, even system-supportive, often firmly anchored in the SPD and hoping to win over politicians so that they could enact the changes deemed necessary.

From about a thousand such groups in 1972, the numbers grew several fold by 1975 to an estimated 60,000 to 160,000 people; by the end of the seventies, the total membership has been estimated as anywhere
between 300,000 and a half million,
²
all the way up to two or three million people.
³

Initially, these citizens’ groups may have been based in the SPD, but as the Schmidt administration carried out a series of massive public investments in new highways, nuclear plants, and heavy industries, those involved became more susceptible to radical ideas, especially those which questioned the logic of capitalist development and environmental destruction.
⁴

West Germany’s ecology movement grew directly out of these Initiatives, and opposition to nuclear power became the common denominator binding it together. Even people committed to strictly reformist goals began to find themselves standing against the state, and in certain circumstances were radicalized by the force of events. In this way, the Initiatives defied the skepticism of many on the revolutionary left, who had not thought them capable of overcoming their reformist origins and moving beyond their limited goals.

It was only a bit of a stretch to tie the German nuclear program to relations with the global south, given that atomic energy was proposed as a salve following the OPEC “oil shock” in 1973; some would even try to conceptualize the antinuclear movement as part of the resistance to imperialism.

This new antinuclear movement first showed its promise in February 1975, when news spread that police had attacked a small protest outside a nuclear power plant: within days, tens of thousands of people had descended on the Wyhl plant.
⁵
Over the years to come, similar rallies outside nuclear power stations mobilized greater and greater numbers as protests evolved into occupations, and police attacks were met with increasingly sophisticated tactics and mass militancy. The BKA eventually responded by opening files on “all persons who take part in the preparation for and/or carrying out of violent demonstrations, especially against the building or operation of atomic energy plants.”
⁶

Most of the left took note of the growing antinuclear movement, and of the more general spread of the Citizens Initiatives, and reacted
with varying measures of interest and support. Many in the feminist movement discovered a synergy with the new concern with peace and environmentalism, easily framed as women’s issues. To the K-groups, such single-issue campaigns could serve as hunting grounds for new recruits, though by a twist of the dialectic, it was eventually they who were often recruited. Sections of the undogmatic left, more enthusiastic about movementism, found a hospitable home in these increasingly militant protests and the communities of resistance which developed around them. Previous misgivings notwithstanding, as the
sponti
scene entered its period of decline, the antinuclear movement provided a convenient home for many, including not a few erstwhile street fighters.

But the RAF and its support base were focused on the prisoners and did not respond to these new developments. Guerilla anti-imperialism was by definition illegal, and the only supporters the RAF felt it needed were those who were already prepared to support its actions. In the mid-seventies, at least, it showed little interest in reaching out to people who would have to be struggled with on this point.

While there are plenty of good reasons to be wary of tailing popular mobilizations, such a strategy also comes with an inevitable cost when there is no large revolutionary movement from which to draw strength. The founding members of the RAF had almost all been politically active in the sixties APO, a youth rebellion against the stifling postwar culture, which drew strength and inspiration from the anticolonial revolutions sweeping the world at the time. While they looked to the Third World as the most important theater in the global revolution, the first RAF members were all firmly rooted in the German radical left.