March
2004
The
Baader-Meinhof Gang / Red Army Faction
By Richard Huffman
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It wasn’t just about killing Americans and killing
“pigs” (police), at least not at first. It was about attacking
the illegitimate state that these pawns served. It was about scraping
the bucolic soil and exposing the fascist, Nazi-tainted bedrock that
the modern West German state was propped upon. It was about war on the
forces of reaction. It was about Revolution.
The years between 1968 and 1977 represented the most tumultuous era
in West Germany’s internal social-political history. The student
protests of 1968 that had promised so much hope, quickly fizzled into
riots. Many of the leftist students would follow student leader Rudi
Dutschke’s clarion call to gradually change the institutions from
within. But a select few of the radicals had no time for any nebulous
march—they wanted Revolution now, and sought to kickstart the
cause through terrorism. In 1968 Andreas Baader and his girlfriend Gudrun
Ensslin attempted to do just that by firebombing two Frankfurt department
stores—symbols of capitalism.
The Baader-Meinhof Gang didn’t expect to achieve Revolution by
themselves. They assumed their wave of terror would force the state
to respond with brutal, reflexive anger; that the proletarian West Germans
would react in horror as the true nature of their own government was
revealed; and that factory workers, bakers, and miners would rise up
and overthrow their oppressors. They assumed they would be the vanguard
of a joyous Marxist Revolution.
Much of what they assumed about the German state proved true. Light
armored tanks and machine gun-wielding police became common sights on
the streets of Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich. Police would search entire
apartment complexes on the slightest hint of Baader-Meinhof activity.
Random police searches of the vehicles of young, long-haired Germans
became common. It seemed perfectly clear to the members of the Baader-Meinhof
Gang that they had brought to the surface the fascism that had plagued
Germany since 1933—a power structure that had changed little since
the Nazi regime.
For a time, it seemed as if their leftist urban guerrilla warfare might
have a measure of success. Polls showed an extraordinary number of Germans
supported their cause in one way or another: 20 percent of Germans under
the age of 30 expressed “a certain sympathy” for the Baader-Meinhof
Gang; one in ten young northern Germans indicated they would willingly
shelter a member for the night. For the leaders of the Baader-Meinhof
Gang, this was empowering proof that millions of Germans were lining
up behind their cause.
But save for killing a few policemen in shootouts, the Baader-Meinhof
hadn’t really begun their Revolution. There were no decapitated
GIs yet, no maimed press operators. It was therefore easy to support
them; they hadn’t yet truly turned their theory into praxis. This
would all change one year later.
After their weeklong campaign of terror in mid-May of 1972, few Germans
were interested in marching behind the Baader-Meinhof Gang. After the
Heidelberg bomb that shredded U.S. Army Captain Clyde Bonner and his
friend Ronald Woodward into confetti; after that same bomb knocked over
a Coca-Cola machine, crushing another soldier; after the Frankfurt bomb
that sent shards of glass into Lt. Colonel Paul Bloomquist’s neck,
severing his jugular; after the bombs placed in the hated Springer press
offices in Hamburg injured and maimed 17 typesetters and other workers;
after the bomb that almost killed five policemen in Augsburg; after
a car bomb destroyed 60 cars in a Munich parking lot of the federal
police force; after the bomb planted under the seat of Judge Wolfgang
Buddenburg’s Volkswagen exploded, severely injuring his wife;
after all of this terror, the Baader-Meinhof Gang had no support. The
millions of ordinary Germans, whom the faction’s leadership believed
would rise up, never materialized.
Within five days after the bombing spree, they were all in jail. Within
five years they were all dead.
The First Celebrity Terrorists
The Baader-Meinhof Gang were the world’s first celebrity terrorists.
Although they called themselves “The Red Army Faction,”
they were only known in the public’s mind by the last names of
Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, a popular journalist who had helped
free Baader from prison custody. Coverage of the group was so ubiquitous
that the story index of Der Speigel (Germany’s equivalent of Time
magazine) regularly listed a simple “B-M”—no one needed
the letters explained to them.
They were the true embodiment of the term “radical chic.”
They had style; they set trends. When Andreas Baader was eventually
captured in a nationally televised siege in a Frankfurt neighborhood,
he had the presence of mind to keep his Ray-Bans on as he was being
dragged into a police van, a bullet in his thigh.
The public and the media weren’t interested in the true dynamics
of the membership of the Gang. For most people, the group became a prime
vehicle to project their own assumptions, fears, and ambitions. Nothing
reflected this more than in the late summer of 1971, when seemingly
overnight every bakery window, U-bahn station, kiosk, and lamp pole
became covered with wanted posters, supplied by the BKA, the West German
federal police force, featuring rows of the faces of almost two dozen
young Germans sheepishly confronting them.
The reach of the Baader-Meinhof wanted poster was enormous and unprecedented;
seven million posters were printed and distributed across a country
with only 60 million residents. The photos on the poster were relatively
benign; many clearly came from school photos or from family albums.
But if the photos weren’t particularly menacing, the poster itself
certainly was; its ever-present nature left many Germans fearing that
terrorists were behind every lamppost and phone box. What the authorities
did not anticipate however, was that their poster would communicate
an equally powerful message—unintended, yet devastating in its
allure—to many young German women. Of the 19 faces, almost half
were women.
Radicals?
Rudi Dutschke, a brilliant Berlin student leader, advocated a “long
march through the institutions.” He proposed a decades-long Revolution
by entering the systems of power, working into positions of leadership,
and effecting peaceful, gradual change from within. His arguments held
considerable sway, inspiring many young Germans to begin their own long
marches. Joschke Fisher, Germany’s extraordinarily popular current
Foreign Minister, and so instrumental in the German decision to oppose
the 2003 American war in Iraq, was the most noted of hundreds of former
radicals who deferred their immediate goals and steadily marched into
the upper echelons of the German power structure.
But Meinhof, Ensslin, and their cohort were baldly dismissive of this
approach. Their very first communiqué made this evident: “You
have to make clear that it is…garbage to assert that imperialism…would
allow itself to be infiltrated, to be led around by the nose, to be
overpowered, to be intimidated, to be abolished without a struggle.
Make it clear that the Revolution will not be an Easter Parade, that
the pigs will naturally escalate the means as far as they can go.”
Compared with the coming actions of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the radical
German student movement of 1968 was “radical” in name only.
The End
Most of the leaders of the Baader-Meinhof Gang were captured in mid-1972.
Their followers would kidnap and kill close to a dozen people over the
next five years in an effort to secure their leaders’ release
from prison, but it was all in vain. The German government had no intention
of releasing them.
The German government used the terrorist crisis to approve new laws
giving them broad powers in combating terrorism. Hard-core leftists
grumbled, but the majority of the German people were firmly on the side
of the government.
After an airplane hijacking by Palestinian comrades failed to secure
the release of the three imprisoned leaders of the Baader-Meinhof Gang,
Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe all committed suicide
deep in the night of October 17, 1977.
Some would say that the era when West German leftist terrorist action
seemed like a viable vehicle for bringing about revolution ended then.
But the Red Army Faction, founded by Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin,
Ulrike Meinhof, and their comrades, continued right on bombing, maiming,
and killing for almost another 20 years. Finally in April of 1998, the
few remaining RAF members issued a communiqué officially disbanding
the RAF.
For a group whose ideology revolved constantly around self-criticism
and reflection, they were oddly incapable of asking themselves the most
obvious of questions: have we failed? Could we have ever succeeded?
Why hasn’t the proletariat, inspired by their actions, spontaneously
risen up and destroyed those that oppressed them?
Richard Huffman is author of the forthcoming book
The Gun Speaks: The Baader-Meinhof Gang and the West German Decade
of Terror 1968-1977. This is an edited excerpt from Huffman’s
extensive website, www.baader-meinhof.com.
Reprinted with kind permission.
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