The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History - Volume 1: Projectiles for the People (Red Army Faction - compiled and translated by J. Smith and Andre Moncourt)

The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History - Volume 1: Projectiles for the People
Author	Red Army Faction - compiled and translated by J. Smith and Andre Moncourt
Written in	1968-1977
First published	2009

“We are a projectile,” Andreas Baader wrote to the group, thereby articulating an ethical point of view in which the subject and his objective became a single thing. It also meant that if no further separation existed between the “subject” and “object” it was obvious how it would end: in death.

Karl-Heinz Dellwo

Reviews

This book about the Red Army Faction of American-occupied Germany is one that should be read by any serious student of antiimperialist politics. “Volume 1: Projectiles for the People” provides a history of the RAF’s development through the words of its letters and communiqués. What makes the book especially important and relevant, however, is the careful research and documentation done by its editors. From this book you will learn the mistakes of a group that was both large and strong, but which (like our own home-grown attempts in this regard) was unable to successfully communicate with the working class of a “democratic” country on a level that met their needs. While the armed struggle can be the seed of something much larger, it is also another means of reaching out and communicating with the people. Students interested in this historic era would do well to study this book and to internalize both the successes and failures of one of the largest organized armed anti-imperialist organizations operating in Western Europe since World War II.

—Ed Mead, former political prisoner, George Jackson Brigade

Clear-headed and meticulously researched, this book deftly avoids many of the problems that plagued earlier attempts to tell the brief but enduring history of the RAF. It offers a remarkable wealth of source material in the form of statements and letters from the combatants, yet the authors manage to present it in a way that is both coherent and engaging. Evidence of brutal—and ultimately ineffective—attempts by the state to silence the voices of political prisoners serve as a timely and powerful reminder of the continued need for anti-imperialist prisoners as leaders in our movements today. At once informative and inspirational, this is a much-needed contribution to the analysis of armed struggle and the cycles of repression and resistance in Europe and around the world.

—Sara Falconer, Toronto Anarchist Black Cross Federation

This first volume about the RAF is about a part of WWII that did not end when the so called allies defeated the nazis. The RAF warriors come from a strong socialist history and knew they were fighting for the very life of their country. Many victories and many errors were scored which provide this important look into REAL her/history lessons. A must read for all serious alternative history students who then in turn can use it as a teaching tool towards a better future.

—b♀ (r.d. brown), former political prisoner, George Jackson Brigade

Starting in the Sixties, a new revolutionary strategy began to plague the capitalist metropolis—the urban guerilla. Warfare once waged by peasant armies in the countryside of a Cuba, a China, or a Guinea-Bissau, was suddenly transferred to small cells of ex-students in the imperialist centers of Berlin, Rome, and New York. No urban guerrillas became more famed or more demonized than West Germany’s Red Army Faction (RAF). We knew their signature bold actions in the headlines: from the damaging bombing of the u.s. army V Corps headquarters in Frankfurt in 1972, in response to Washington’s mining of Hanoi’s harbor in an escalation of the Vietnam War, to the kidnapping and later execution of the head of the West German industrialists’ association, in an effort to negotiate for the release of revolutionary prisoners. But we never heard their political voices. Since the RAF’s political statements, debates, and communiqués were untranslated and unavailable in English even within the left.

Now, at last, a significant documentary history of the RAF has come into the spotlight, complete with a readable account of the postwar German New Left from which it emerged. Even better, this work was done by editors/translators who reject the obedient capitalist media’s trivializing of the RAF as “pathological” death-wishing celebrities. In their hands, the words of the RAF are revealed as serious responses to the failure of parliamentary reformism, trade-unionism, and pacifism, to stop the solidification of Germany’s own form of a neofascist capitalism (lightly cosmeticized with a layer of that numbing “consumer democracy”). The young RAF fighters hoped for liberation in their dangerous experiment but were willing to accept tragic consequences, and their story is emotionally difficult to read with eyes open. Controversial as the RAF was, their systematic torture in special “anti-terrorist” facilities stirred worldwide unease and even protest. In fact, those special prisons were the eagerly studied forerunners for the u.s. empire’s own latest human rights abuses, from Guantanamo to the domestic “maxi-maxi” prisons. We all and the RAF are much closer than the capitalist public wants to believe. It is all here, in this first volume of the Red Army Faction documentary histories, and we should thank all those who worked on this book.

—J. Sakai, author of Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat

Foreword by Bill Dunne

Projectiles for the People, Volume One of The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History, is an important exposition of what it means to wage armed struggle as an urban guerilla in the post WWII western imperial-capitalist paradigm. Via the fast-turning pages of Projectiles, Smith and Moncourt usher us through the RAF’s emergence in Germany from a moribund and constrained left opposition misdirected and suppressed by U.S. imperialism and a quisling bourgeoisie. The RAF’s “projectiles for the people” documented their political, practical, intellectual, and emotional trajectory into taking up and using the gun in service of revolutionary communist class war. Projectiles brings us their voices and links their context to ours.

Projectiles shows us how the RAF engaged in people’s warfare without descending into adventurism. It reveals how the guerilla was able to work with apparently unlikely allies and eschew involvement with ostensibly likely ones based on sophisticated analysis of the demands of conditions, time, and place. It illustrates how the comrades were able to internalize the trauma of frequently fatal mistakes and defeats as well as the euphoria of correct practice and victories. It explains how the organization recognized and responded to the enemy’s slanderous campaign of vilification aimed at creating a false opposition to the underground. Projectiles, in this exploration of these and many other elements of RAF praxis, thus illustrates that and how the RAF developed arguably the highest expression of armed struggle in the late capitalist first world.

Projectiles for the People is more than a dry historical treatise, however; it is a highly accessible rendition of a story of struggle that puts us into both the thought and the action. That placement conveys more than a sense or understanding of the RAF’s praxis. It transmits a connection in a visceral way. Not since reading Ten Days that Shook the World have I been so drawn into a political narrative. Reading like a historical thriller notwithstanding, Projectiles lets us see a rare confluence of theory and practice of which anyone who aspires to make revolution should be aware. The RAF may no longer be with us, but it has prepared the ground for and can yet aid the current movement for the most equitable social reality in which all people will have the greatest possible freedom to develop their full human potential. Nowhere else has the RAF’s life, times, and legacy been so clearly laid out.

A Word from Russell "Maroon" Shoats

In today’s world ANYONE who dares to raise their voice against ANYTHING being heaped on them by those in power needs to read this book. The repressive methods that the West German state brought to bear against the RAF­—detailed by the authors—have been adopted, universalized, and refined, and can be found in use in a prison, jail, detention center or other “holding facility” not far from you.

In the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, world-wide capital—led by U.S. imperialism—is possibly in the endgame struggle, not of Marx’s “Socialism or Barbarism,” but of what is beginning to be understood by a majority of our planet’s humans: 21st century capitalism/imperialism… equals EXTERMINISM!

The prison isolation and torture methods detailed in this volume are one of the repressive forces’ last ditch efforts to arrest the global material forces that signal their demise.

After being subjected to similar methods of isolation and torture for decades, I can only offer one piece of advice: either stand up and struggle against this monster—and face the horrors detailed in this book— or lay down and accept the idea (and reality) that 21st century capital/ imperialism—unchecked—will destroy EVERYTHING it comes into contact with.

Bill Dunne was captured on October 14, 1979. He had been shot three times by police, and according to the state had been involved in an attempt to break a comrade out of the Seattle jail, as part of an unnamed anarchist collective. In 1980, he received a ninety-five-year sentence, and in 1983 had a consecutive fifteen years with five concurrent added due to an attempted escape. As he has stated, “The aggregate 105 years is a ‘parole when they feel like it’ sort of sentence.”

In 1970, Russell “Maroon” Shoats was accused of an attack on a Philadelphia police station in which an officer was killed. He went underground, functioning for eighteen months as a soldier in the Black Liberation Army. In 1972, he was captured and sentenced to multiple life sentences. He escaped twice—in 1977 and 1980— but both times was recaptured. Most of his time in prison, including at present, has been spent in isolation conditions, locked down 22 to 24 hours a day.

Acknowledgements

Many, many people were very helpful to us as we worked on this book.

Many, many more had already laid the basis for our study through years of hard work providing a voice for the underground. In the days before the internet, a number of movement publications took responsibility for translating and distributing texts by illegal groups like the Red Army Faction. In this regard, we would like to thank those who worked on Resistance (based in Vancouver, Canada in the 1980s), Arm the Spirit (based in Toronto, Canada in the 1990s), and l’Internationale (based in France, 1983-1984). While it did not specifically focus on the guerilla, the Toronto-based newspaper Prison News Service, which appeared in the 1980s and early 1990s, is worth also mentioning in this regard.

We must certainly thank Maspero, the French publisher, several of whose books were of great use to us, as well as Nadir, Extremismus, Zeitgesichte, and the Marxist Internet Archive, all of which maintain excellent websites.

Anthony Murphy translated the RAF’s The Urban Guerilla Concept in 2003; while we did not end up using his version, we are nevertheless grateful for his work and assistance.

This project would have been impossible in its present form if not for the excellent Rote Armee Fraktion Collection of the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, maintained online as an archive by former RAF member Ronald Augustin. We are grateful to both the IISH and to Augustin in particular.

Many of the graphics in this book come from the book and CD Vorwärts bis zum nieder mit, compiled by Sebastian Haunss, Markus Mohr, and Klaus Viehmann from a variety of archives and published by Verlag Assoziation A. The interested reader can view the entire contents of this CD online at http://plakat.nadir.org/. All those involved in producing this artwork, and the book and website in question, have our thanks.

Dan Berger and Matthew Lyons provided very useful feedback to earlier dRAFts of our text. Henning Böke, Jutta Ditfurth, comrades from the Parti Communiste Marxiste-Léniniste-Maoïste, members of the Leftist Trainspotters and Marxmail email lists, all provided very useful answers to questions regarding the West German radical left and the guerilla. Muhammad Abu Nasr provided helpful insight into the Palestinian resistance, specifically around the Black September action in Munich. Romy Ruukel provided much needed help and advice, proof reading the text and teaching us how to compile a bibliography. Many others provided great assistance to us in this project, yet would rather not be named here. They too have our thanks.

It should go without saying that none of these individuals or groups are likely to agree with everything we have stated in this book, nor do they necessarily approve of the conclusions we have drawn. It goes without saying that they have no responsibility for any errors contained herein.

Finally, and with our tongues planted firmly in our cheeks, we would like to thank the U.S. military for creating the internet, without which this project might not have been possible.

Translators' Note

In preparing these texts, we consulted the many existent versions in both French and English. However, in each case these translations were found to have serious shortcomings. Not surprisingly, many of them, the work of committed activists whose grasp of German was limited, were marred by erroneous translation—usually these errors were predictable given the complexity of the German language. In no few cases, segments of the original text were found to be missing from the available translations. It was also not uncommon to encounter what might best be called transliteration—the translator “adjusted” concepts to suit the milieu for which he or she was translating the document. The end result of this latter phenomenon was often, however unintentional, the ideological distortion of the original document—usually only slight in nature, but occasionally egregious. Perhaps the oddest thing we encountered on more than a few occasions was the existence of accretions in the translated documents we referred to; usually only a phrase or a sentence or two, but occasionally entire paragraphs.

After several months of poring over the existing translations, hoping to tweak them into publishable shape (about two thirds of the documents in this book existed in some form of translation in the two languages accessible to us), we were obliged to accept the inevitable: all of the documents we hoped to use would have to be checked against the originals before going to publication. Then began the task of hunting down the originals, a process greatly facilitated by the existence of several online sources, including an indispensible website maintained by former RAF prisoner Ronald Augustin. Of no less importance was the discovery, in pdf form, of the entire 1997 id-Verlag book, Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF on the Nadir website. With these two resources in hand, we had all the documents we needed to complete this book save a small handful that we tracked down elsewhere.

The process of translation we used was to some degree unique. Only one of the two “translators” was actually conversant in German, and so it fell to him to prepare the translations. Once a document was translated, he would forward it to the other “translator” who would meticulously examine it and make suggestions for improving (de-Germanizing) the English used. These suggested changes—always numerous—would then be checked against the original to assure that the intent was not being skewed. This process would usually involve two or three rounds of the document going back and forth between the translators, before a finalized version acceptable to both of us was arrived at. On three occasions, each involving a single sentence, neither of us was happy with the other’s proposal and so a compromise had to be arrived at—this would affect in total approximately a half a page of the book you are holding. The end result was that no document in this book was examined fewer than three times and most of the major ones were examined at least five or six times.

Are we saying that these translations are perfect? Undoubtedly not. In a project of this grandeur, involving the translation of between four and five hundred pages, disagreements about decisions we made and interpretations we arrived at are de facto inevitable, as are errors—hopefully none of them significant.

That said, we are confident that the documents in this book accurately represent the history and the ideology of the Red Army Faction and provide the reader with a resource unparalleled elsewhere in English.

Before closing one other issue cries out to be addressed. We refer to this work as the complete texts of the Red Army Faction. The meaning of that statement seems indisputable, but that is not the case, and so we must explain what we mean by “complete.” To the best of our knowledge, we have included every document issued by the RAF in its close to thirty-year history in either this volume (1968-1977) or the forthcoming second volume (1978-1998). By this, we mean every theoretical manifesto, every communiqué accompanying an action, and every letter sent by the organization to the media.

After some discussion we decided not to include Über den bewaffneten Kampf in Westeuropa (Regarding the Armed Struggle in West Europe) penned by Horst Mahler. This 1971 document, a sprawling theoretical text, was rejected by the other members of the RAF and played no small role in the decision to expel Mahler from the group—making him the only member ever publicly expelled. (The interested reader proficient in German will have no difficulty finding this document online, including in the aforementioned ID-Verlag book.)

We also did not include, with several exceptions, letters written by imprisoned RAF members. There are literally thousands of them, a significant selection of which have been published in German in a book entitled Das Info, edited by former lawyer to RAF prisoners Pieter Bakker Schut. This book can be found in its entirety on the site maintained by Augustin, as can Bakker Schut’s invaluable historical analysis of the Stammheim trial, simply entitled Stammheim. Nor did we publish, with the exception of a handful, any of the hundreds of court statements, often of epic length, made by RAF defendants over the years. In the cases where we did choose to publish a letter or a court statement, it was because the document in question filled out some theoretical or historical aspect of the RAF’s history that we felt was not adequately addressed elsewhere. This is also true of the open letter from the RZ to the RAF that we publish in this volume—a number of similar documents from other German and European guerilla groups will appear in the second volume of this work.

Preface

The book you hold in your hands, along with its companion volume, constitute the most complete works and history of the Red Army Faction ever published in the English language.

The Red Army Faction was formed in 1970 when a small group of West German revolutionaries decided to go underground and carry out armed actions against U.S. imperialism. Within a few years, almost all of the original members were either dead or captured, yet the harsh treatment the latter received as prisoners garnered them a degree of sympathy, and their own unflagging resistance earned them the respect of many.

Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that they captured the imagination of a generation of West German youth. Certainly, before they fell, they had already succeeded in inspiring others to pick up their banner.

In fact, the RAF was to remain a factor in German politics for almost thirty years as successive waves of radicals extended the struggle, carrying out increasingly sophisticated and daring campaigns of assassination and bombings against key members of the West German ruling class and American armed forces stationed in the Federal Republic. On more than one occasion, they shook their society to its core, baiting its ruling class into dictatorial reactions that shocked the consciences of even their own supporters. Eventually, the RAF became emblematic of the “euro-terrorism” of the 1970s and 80s, yet like so many things that are emblematic, it was never typical of that which it represented.

In its halcyon days, many people considered the guerilla a legitimate political force, and one can read reports of soccer fans wearing RAF insignia and of young people secretly keeping photos clipped from wanted posters in their wallets. As this naïve and romantic honeymoon period faded, the group became the object of mass hatred and hysteria, the most egregious example of things going “too far,” of people “losing their moral compass.”

As with any powerful symbol, for much of its history what seemed most important about the RAF was what people thought about it. For many, fascination with the group grew out of a fascination with its founding members. In the 1960s, Ulrike Meinhof was already a well known journalist who seemed able to combine radical politics with an increasingly successful career. At the same time, Andreas Baader had a reputation for being the charming rogue of the Berlin hipster scene, his panache enhanced as he and a group of his friends were brought to trial for firebombing a Frankfurt department store.

People may not have agreed with what they did next, or with why they did it, but if nothing else, the misnamed “Baader-Meinhof Gang” had style, and as the media played up every detail and the old fogies in power got more and more freaked out, they were briefly loved for simply being the most hardcore urban guerillas around.

Much could be written about this bizarre fascination, this production of guerilla cachet, but to do so would be to write a cultural history, and we intend something else altogether.

Except in passing, these books will not deal with the private lives or personalities of the RAF combatants. How the guerillas got along with their parents, friends, or each other is not really our concern. We will not concentrate on the kind of cars they liked or their taste in music or what kind of childhood they had. We will not guess at who was “nice” and who was a “prick,” or go over who slept with whom, or catalog the names people called each other when they were arguing.

To have to provide such a disclaimer may seem absurd, for most political histories pass over such details as a matter of course. Yet, a brief survey of the few books available about the RAF will show that these questions have been the major preoccupation of almost anyone who has approached this subject. Nor are we unaware of the point that the RAF prisoners themselves would make on more than one occasion: that efforts to explain their actions in psychological terms were part of a conscious state strategy of pathologizing them and their politics, or at least shifting people’s attention onto trivial and often fabricated personal details. While there are things we consider mistaken in the RAF’s broader analysis, on this question they appear to have been 100% correct.

While the personal may be political, we believe that the RAF’s greatest significance is not to be found in the part it played in the individual lives of its members or supporters. Rather, to appreciate what it was and what it meant, and as a first step towards being able to evaluate its praxis, the RAF must be placed within the context of left-wing revolutionary struggle in the First World at a very particular point in time. As such, we are most interested in the group’s ideas, its line as established in its communiqués and other documents, how it put this line into practice through its actions and campaigns, and the relationship the group enjoyed with its supporters and other leftists.

Some may accuse us of being uncritical, or of even supporting the RAF’s politics and their practice. We would answer that in order to be critical one must first be in possession of the facts. While we consider questions of morality and means and ends to be very important, given that this is the first time most of this material has been made available to English-readers, we prefer not to muddy the waters by condemning or praising the guerilla every step of the way.

Certainly we will offer no blanket denunciation—nor will we indulge in cheap praise. What has been written so far is replete with judgment, and often contains very little factual content or political analysis. We hope with these books to do our small part in correcting this imbalance.

In order for the guerilla’s actions and statements to be at all comprehensible, they need to be placed in the context of their times and of the wider left-wing movement in West Germany. Even as these events were unfolding, this context was not well understood by many of us in North America; now, decades later, it is even harder to grasp. For that reason, we have provided two background chapters providing an overview of postwar West Germany, as well as a series of introductory texts to the different documents from the guerilla. These are overviews and as will be clear, they have been written from a particular perspective. It is here that our analysis most obviously departs from that of the RAF, our sympathy for many of its aims notwithstanding.

We offer these documents to the comrades of today—and to the comrades of tomorrow—both as a testament to those who struggled before and as an explanation as to how they saw the world, why they made the choices they made, and the price they were made to pay for having done so.

Acronym Key

2JM	Bewegung 2. Juni (2nd of June Movement); Berlin-based anarchist guerilla group formed in early 1972, its name comes from the date of the police shooting of protester Benno Ohnesorg in 1967.
APO	Außerparlemtarische Opposition (ExtraParliamentary Opposition); the name given to the broad-based militant opposition with its roots in the student movement that encompassed the left-wing anti-imperialist and social revolutionary movements of the late sixties and early seventies.
ARD	Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Syndicate for Publicly Regulated Radio Stations in the Federal Republic of Germany); state-funded radio.
BAW	Bundesanwaltschaft (Federal Prosecutors Office); noted for its aggressive prosecution of cases against the guerilla and the left.
BGS	Bundesgrenzschutz (Federal Border Patrol); border security police.
BKA	Bundeskriminalamt (Federal Criminal Bureau); the German equivalent of the FBI, particularly active in police activities against the guerilla and the left.
BND	Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service); the FRG’s foreign intelligence service.
CDU	Christlich Demokratisches Union Deutschlands (Christian Democratic Union of Germany); Germany’s mainstream conservative party.
CSU	Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern (Bavarian Christian-Social Union); Bavaria’s mainstream conservative party, the Bavarian partner to the cdu.
DGB	Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (German Union Federation); the largest union federation in the FRG.
DKP	Deutsche Kommunistische Partei (German Communist Party); the pro-Soviet communist party founded in 1968, in effect the rebranding of the KPD (Communist Party of Germany), which was banned in 1956.
FAZ	Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; a high-quality, national, moderate conservative, German daily newspaper.
FDP	Freie Demokratische Partei (Free Democratic Party); Germany’s mainstream liberal party.
GIM	Groupe Internationale Marxisten (International Marxist Group); West German section of the Trotskyist Fourth International active in the FRG in the seventies and eighties, fused with the KPD/ML to form the VSP in 1986.
GSG-9	Grenzschutzgruppe 9 (Border Patrol Group 9); officially part of the BGS, in practice Germany’s antiterrorist special operations unit.
KB	Kommunistischer Bund (Communist League); a small Maoist group active in the seventies.
KBW	Kommunistischer Bund Westdeutschland (West German Communist League); founded in Bremen in 1973. A Maoist organization originally associated with China, subsequently shifted their support to Albania and Pol Pot’s Cambodian regime. Dissolved in 1985.
KPD	Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Communist Party of Germany); pro-Soviet communist party founded in 1919, banned under Hitler in 1933 and under Adenauer in 1956, rebranded as DKP (German Communist Party) in 1968. Also a Maoist party founded by the KPD/AO in 1971 and dissolved in 1980.
KPD/AO	Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands/ Aufbauorganisation (Communist Party of Germany/ Pre-Party Formation); a Maoist organization founded in 1970, became the KPD in 1971.
KPD/ML	Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands/Marxisten-Leninisten (Communist Party of Germany/Marxist-Leninist); a Maoist party founded on December 31, 1968. It fused with the Trotskyist GIM in 1986 to form the VSP.
KSV	Kommunistische Studentverband (Communist Student Association); student wing of the KPD/AO and later the KPD, founded in 1971 and dissolved in 1980.
ID	Informationsdienst; a left-wing news service published weekly from 1973 until 1981. In 1988, its archives were used to launch the left-wing publisher, Verlag Edition ID-Archiv, specializing in books about the German far left.
LG	Landesgericht (Land Court); each of the Länder had it’s own court system.
LKA	Landeskriminalamt (Land Criminal Bureau); the equivalent of the BKA functioning at the level of a state or province.
LWA	Landesanwaltschaft (Land Prosecutors Office); the equivalent of a state or provincial prosecutors office.
NPD	Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (National Democratic Party); far-right political party, supported by many neo-nazis.
OLG	Oberlandesgericht (Land Court of Appeal); each of the Länder had it’s own Court of Appeal.
ÖTV	Gewerkschaft öffentliche Dienste, Transport und Verkehr (The Public Service, Transport, and Communication Union).
PFLP	Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; founded in 1953, secular nationalist and Marxist, the second largest tendency within the PLO after Fatah.
PFLP (EO)	Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (External Operations); originally a section of the pflp, expelled in the early seventies for conducting controversial actions outside of Israel, effectively dissolved in 1978 after the death of its leader Waddi Haddad, who had been poisoned by the Mossad.
RAF	Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction).
RH	Rote Hilfe (Red Aid); an important prisoner support network which came out of the APO.
RH e.v.	Rote Hilfe e.v. (Red Aid registered association); a Red Aid network set up by the KPD/AO in 1970.
RZ	Revolutionäre Zellen (Revolutionary Cells); founded in 1973, most groups within its structure ceased activity in 1991, with the final action occurring in 1994.
SDS	Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist German Students Federation); founded by the SDS in 1946. By the late sixties it was an independent left-wing student federation and the most significant organization in the APO. It dissolved in 1970.
SHB	Sozialdemokratischer Hochschulbund (Social Democratic Student Federation); founded in 1960 by the SPD, dissolved in 1992.
SPD	Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany); Germany’s mainstream social democratic party.
SPK	Socialistiches Patientenkollektiv (Socialist Patients’ Collective); founded in 1970, part of the antipsychiatry movement. It dissolved under extreme state pressure in 1971, many of its core members later joining the RAF.
VSP	Vereingte Sozialistische Partei (United Socialist Party); formed in 1986 through the fusion of the KPD/ML and the GIM, splintered into various groups in 1993.
ZDF	Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (Second German Television); German publicly regulated television, Europe’s largest broadcasting corporation.

German Terms

This is by no means a complete list of German words and terms used in this volume, most of which are explained in the text or by means of footnote. What follows are simply some of the more frequently recurring words the reader will encounter.

Bundestag: The federal parliament of West Germany

Bundeswehr: The armed forced of West Germany, re-established in 1954.

Jusos: Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Jungsozialistinnen und Jungsozialisten in der SPD (Workers Association of Young Socialists in the SPD); the SPD’s youth wing.

Kripo: Short for Kriminalpolizei (Criminal Police); the principal German police force.

Land/Länder: The singular and plural for the German equivalent of states or provinces.

Ostpolitik: the FRG’s official policy towards the GDR and the east bloc.

Rote Zora: the independent feminist affiliate of the RZ. Its members were originally active as the Women of the Revolutionary Cells in 1975. The last Rote Zora action occurred in 1995.

Stasi: The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security), better know as the Stasi, was the East German secret police force that tracked both internal dissent and foreign threats. It was similar in some ways to the FBI or the BKA, but played a more central role in policy decision-making.

Verfassungsschutz: Literally “Protection of the Constitution” or Guardians of the Constitution; the German internal intelligence service, primary police force for intelligence actions against the guerilla and the left.

1 - “Democracy” Comes to Deutschland: Postfascist Germany and the Continuing Appeal of Imperialism

It is impossible to really understand the rise of the New Left or the development of armed struggle in West Germany in the late sixties and early seventies without understanding the nature of the country and the role it played within the hegemonic, anticommunist strategy developed by the United States in the period following World War II.

The Federal Republic of Germany was a hybrid state, some elements—its institutions, some legislation, many personnel—seamlessly persisting from the Nazi period, and others grafted on by the Americans. As a nation almost constitutionally defined as a junior partner of U.S. imperialism, West Germany remained subordinate to it in the first postwar decades in a way that even Britain or France were not. Making matters even worse, in return for their allegiance, the West German ruling and professional classes were given free reign to negotiate their own stiflingly conservative and authoritarian post-Nazi culture and identity.

All of this was built on a post-genocidal basis; dead Jews remaining the elephant in the corner, alternately ignored or explained away as a tragic consequence of the “lack of morals” under Hitler. Many Germans growing up after the war would not know any Jews personally, and would be only vaguely aware of the horrors that had befallen them: bitter testimony to the way in which the dead, precisely because they are dead, have no say over how their murderers explain or ignore their absence.

At first, the defeat of Nazism in May 1945 seemed to spell the end of Germany’s national sovereignty, its territory occupied by France, Britain, and the United States in the West, and the Soviet Union in the East.

In this Soviet Zone, which would eventually become the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the Socialist Unity Party (SED) held power. The Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries had borne the brunt of Germany’s war, and so for many years rehabilitation took second place to reparations in the GDR. Throughout its existence, East Germany bore many of the hallmarks of “real existing socialism”: compared to the capitalist west, there was less abject poverty and less involvement in the pillage of the Third World; at the same time, there was next to no room for political dissent or protest. Even communists suspected of differing from the dominant party line could find themselves arrested and tortured by the Stasi, the secret police. Society and culture were not frozen, yet they were certainly chilled, creating a distinctly “socialist” kind of conservatism.

Yet more than a few lifelong Communists felt that this was an unfortunate but acceptable price to pay to fetter the German aggression that had defined the first half of the century. As Markus Wolf, head of the dreaded Stasi during the period covered by this book, would explain in his post-wall apologia:

We East German Socialists tried to create a new kind of society that would never repeat the German crimes of the past. Most of all, we were determined that war should never again originate on German soil.

In the Western Zone too, initially the United States had toyed with the idea of deindustrializing the country, so as to cripple its development and preclude any future German wars. Very soon, however, this approach was rejected, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive of June 1947 finding that, “An orderly, prosperous Europe requires the economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany.”

It didn’t hurt that corporations such as Ford, General Motors, Chase Manhattan Bank, IBM, and Standard Oil had had huge prewar investments in Germany and were all lobbying for a rapid resumption of business-as-usual.

The geopolitical goals of the United States, always foremost amongst the western occupiers, combined with the interests of the German middle and upper classes, effectively sabotaging any real efforts at denazification in the West. In no time at all, important sections of the establishment that had helped maintain the Third Reich were being welcomed into the new pro-American administration. As the late William D. Graf observed:

Almost all the representatives of big business labeled as war criminals by the American Kilgore Commission in 1945 were back in their former positions by 1948; and of roughly 53,000 civil servants dismissed on account of their Nazi pasts in 1945, only about 1,000 remained permanently excluded, while the judiciary was almost 100% restored as early as 1946.

The result, much as desired, was a political system which remained significantly tilted to the right.

This period marked the beginning of the American “Cold War” against the Soviet bloc, in which Germany was to become an important chip. In keeping with the Truman Doctrine, the zone occupied by the western Allies was built up as an anticommunist bulwark. The vehicle for this project was the European Relief Program, a blueprint for the economic and military reconstruction of Western Europe, which U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall convinced the U.S. Congress to pass in 1948. Almost one-and-a-half billion dollars were pumped into West Germany through the Marshall Plan, its economy rebuilt in such a way as to guarantee the expansion of U.S. economic influence in Europe, to serve as the foundation for the military and political integration of West Europe into the anticommunist bloc, and to facilitate the cultural and technological Americanization of European societies, especially West Germany itself.

In short, demolished by war and in social and economic chaos, West Germany was offered reconstruction, rapid economic growth, and integration into the Allied Bloc in exchange for offering its support to international capitalism and the use of its territory as a front line position in the Cold War with the U.S.S.R.. This was an appeal aimed not only at the ruling class, but also at “ordinary” Germans, who may have benefited from the Third Reich’s policies of plunder and genocide, but who now, in defeat, found themselves thrown into economic insecurity. An early propaganda document from the western occupation government, issued just weeks after a pro-Soviet coup in neighboring Czechoslovakia, explained what was at stake:

The fate of the Marshall Plan will determine who is to be the victor in the great ideological conflict of democracy versus totalitarianism. Unless the Germans can get enough to eat and decent homes to live in, no amount of fine words about the benefit of democracy and no amount of repression will prevent them from going over to Communism.

Former Nazis, provided they were not personally too notorious or unwilling to play by the new rules, appeared to the Americans as far preferable to communists or their presumed fellow travelers. Indeed, it has been noted that for much of the West German establishment, “anticommunism provided a point of common cause with the Western victors and hence… a means of avoiding being called to account for their complicity” with the Hitler regime.

By the time the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was granted semi-sovereign statehood in 1949, this set of common interests had become embodied in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), under the iron fist of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Ruling for almost twenty years, normally in coalition with the much smaller liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the slightly more rabid Christian Social Union (CSU) in Bavaria, the CDU soon became almost synonymous with the state itself.

Showpiece Capitalism

West Germany was to be more than just a shield against the “encroaching red menace”; it was to be western imperialism’s visible model of economically and socially “progressive” capitalism. Modell Deutschland (“Model Germany”), as it became known, was to serve as an example to other West European states and as a taunt to the working class on the other side of the “wall.”

As an anticommunist showpiece, the FRG soon payed for itself in a time honored capitalist fashion—on the backs of the proletariat, especially the most desperate and oppressed layers.

Heightened levels of exploitation combined with the financial assistance offered by the Marshall Plan made the FRG the envy of other western capitalist states. By every measure of the ruling class, the West German economy shone. Real wages in the period 1948-1958 were at the level already established by the fascist regime, roughly 25% below that of workers in the United States, while the working week in 1955 could go as high as fifty hours, longer in key sectors like the steel industry. In that year, West German industrial workers had a work-week two and a half hours longer than their counterparts in Britain and eight hours longer than industrial workers in the United States and Canada.

The profits made possible by this arrangement encouraged an extremely high rate of investment, which grew from 19.1% in 1950 to 26.5% in 1965; even with the recessions of the seventies, it wasn’t until 1976 that it had fallen back to 20%. In 1960, when France was showing a rate of investment of 17.4% and both Britain and the U.S. only registered 16%, West Germany was already showing an investment rate of 24%.

As Werner Hülsberg notes:

The ‘economic miracle’ merely indicated the existence of ideal conditions for the exploitation of wage labor and, as such, is somewhat of a cynical myth. The long-term upswing in the economy, however, did lead to a continuous rise in the living standards of the West German population. While net wages and salaries during the period 1950 to 1962 grew by 143 per cent, the income of independent entrepreneurs during the same period grew by 236 per cent.

This boom was also based on real divisions in the working class, with German men in their prime being lifted into higher status and better paying jobs than the “pariah layers” which included young and older German men, but were fundamentally built around immigrant and female labor.

In the immediate aftermath of German defeat, working class women had borne the brunt of reconstruction unpaid and off the books, but absolutely necessary for survival, to the point that the term Trümmerfrauen (“women of the rubble”) was coined for those who hauled away the debris of bombed out buildings with their bare hands. At the same time, in October 1945, the Allied Control Council had declared it a duty of all women between the ages of fifteen and fifty to also work in the official economy: the female labor force, which had already earned only 86 cents to the male dollar under the Nazis, now saw its relative wages dropping, until in the 1950s and 60s women’s wages were on average just 60% of those of their menfolk.

Throughout the 1950s, seven million refugees and displaced persons, many of whom were highly skilled, streamed into the country from the East. The German industries which had been structured around the use of forced labor during the Nazi period soon found they could fill this same niche with immigrant labor.

As New Left historian Karl Heinz Roth has remarked, from the point of view of big business, “this exceptionally mobile subproletariat compensated completely for the loss of the slaves condemned to forced labor in the Nazi era.” Yet, with a crucial difference: unlike the slave labourers, who were literally worked to death under Nazism, these new immigrants were to be highly favored. They were overwhelmingly loyal and politically reliable in the eyes of the ruling class, seeing as they came from the “Communist East” where more than a few of them had lost real privileges as ethnic Germans when the Nazi occupation came to an end. Indeed, these expellees and refugees from the East, exploited as they were, were naturally drawn towards the most virulent anticommunism, and catalyzed shopfloor and grassroots resistance to the left within the working class.

Following this initial wave of cheap labor, which was regimented by its own political sympathies, came guest workers, many of whom were politically active on the left, and who were thus subjected to greater external regimentation and control. As the source of this labor switched from the East to southern Europe, these workers would be politically screened before entry, and targeted with deportation if identified as “troublemakers.”

So, at the same time as the German working class was highly exploited, it was also deeply divided. An inevitable consequence of this was that its more privileged layers would develop a different political orientation from the more oppressed.

To quote Hülsberg once again:

Greek workers in a West German bottling factory: by the end of the 1960s, women constituted almost a third of all “guest workers” in West Germany.

It is against this background that we must see the tragedy of the integration of the West German working class into the capitalist system and the loss of political strength. Class struggle was replaced by the “American way of life”. Even the king of rock’n’roll, Elvis Presley, paid tribute to it while on his tour of military duty in Germany… For the German petit-bourgeois soul this was the purest balm.

These hierarchies within the working class resonated within its supposed institutions, the trade union movement and the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

In the first years of the Federal Republic, the trade unions were reorganized by the Allied victors with the express goal of avoiding the “economic chaos” the bourgeoisie feared most. These unions focused on Mitbestimmung (co-management, whereby workers would have some token representation in corporate boards of directors), thus further guaranteeing that the official labor movement would remain hostile to revolutionary politics. This degeneracy reached such a point in the 1960s that union members formed the backbone of the “factory militias” whose job it was repress wildcat strikes and unruly workers, and one foreign journalist began an article on the German labor market with the question, “What is a country to do when its trades unions decline to ask for more money?”

As a complement to this sad political trajectory, the SPD “led the less class-conscious workers and the petit bourgeoisie into the arms of the reactionaries,” with a program that “in the immediate postwar period consisted of a crude mixture of nationalism and anti-communism garnished with a meaningless proclamation of the actuality of socialism.” Left-wing trade unionists were expelled from the party, as were the editors of the socialist newspaper Die Andere Zeitung, while the SPD leadership used its position as the official opposition to repeatedly mislead and sabotage any grassroots revolt.

Needless to say, neither the SPD nor the trade union leadership had any interest in bridging the divide between their (increasingly privileged) base and the growing “pariah layers” of the proletariat:

As a consensus-producing mechanism that united the most powerful interests in the corporate and labour organizations, Social Democratic corporatism consciously excluded the weaker elements: foreigners, women, youth and older workers, thus converting class struggles to group struggles and doing nothing to reduce racism, sexism and anti-welfarism within the subordinate classes.

An Imperialist Team Player

Of course, the Marshall Plan was not simply a local economic project: from the very beginning it was intended that West Germany also be a European outpost of U.S. imperialism. This is indicated not only in the virtually simultaneous foundation of both NATO and the FRG in 1949, but in the very nature of the Federal Republic as a state: when it was granted formal sovereignty in 1955, it was only on condition that it allow the western powers to station their armed forces within its borders, and within four days of achieving its new condition, it had joined the Atlantic Alliance. Perhaps most significantly, in the event of a military conflict, the commanding officer in NATO—always an American—would also become the Commander-in-Chief of the West German armed forces.

As Rudolph Augstein, the editor of the influential liberal magazine Spiegel, stated in 1955: “The new German army has not been founded to guarantee the safety of Bonn; rather the new state has been founded to be able to build up an army against the Soviet Union.”

The result was a West Germany with more than one hundred U.S. bases on its territory and a ruling class eager to support American imperialism around the world. This was achieved by (1) acting as a conduit for financial and military support to anticommunist regimes opposing the national liberation movements, (2) establishing neocolonial penetration of former colonies on behalf of the West, and (3) providing logistical support for American military interventions around the world.

Some important examples of this first role—that of being a conduit to repressive regimes—could include West Germany’s support for the South African apartheid regime, for the fascist Salazar dictatorship in Portugal in its continuing war against freedom fighters in Mozambique and Angola, military and political support for the killers of Patrice Lumumba and for imperialist intervention in the Congo, massive financial aid (disguised as reparations) to the state of Israel, imperialism’s new colonial beachhead in the Middle East, and economic support for the South Vietnamese puppet regime.

Apart from loans, economic investment, military sales, and eventually the sharing of nuclear technology, these reactionary regimes would also benefit from the occasional intervention of German soldiers and mercenaries, including veterans of the Nazi SS.

The task of entangling the former colonies in the western sphere was accomplished primarily through “development aid,” much of which took the form of weapons shipments to the new so-called “national states.” While such aid was often used to pressure the new national states to join pro-American military alliances, or else to refuse recognition to the GDR, it was equally important simply as a method of maintaining and entrenching the ties between Western capitalism and Third World elites.

By the late 1950s, the FRG had established itself as an important “donor” nation, for a while providing more “aid” than any Western government other than the United States. It was a logical candidate for this role given the fact that it had lost its own colonies decades earlier; as the Stuttgarter Zeitung noted in 1963:

It is clear why African states turn to Bonn and not to Paris or London… They turn to a country which is not tainted by colonialism.

Or, as the American Evening Star wrote that same year:

West Germany has been specifically authorized by the Atlantic Alliance to grant military aid to Africa and other countries; the simple reason is that no other western country is as well suited for these tasks. West Germany is free from the blemish of colonial rule…

The prime examples of the FRG’s third role—providing direct support for American military forces—were the many U.S. military bases scattered throughout the country. These served both as a threat to the East Bloc countries, as well as staging areas for special operations. As military strikes against Third World targets became increasingly important to western imperialism, the Federal Republic’s airbases were all the more appreciated.

All U.S. bases had extra-territorial status and functioned under American law. They were, of course, also sites for CIA interventions in the FRG and in Western Europe in general, not only against Soviet influence, but also against independent left opposition. According to Operation Plan 101-1, the U.S. Commander-in-Chief in Europe was legally entitled to intervene in cases of internal unrest in West Germany. Furthermore, in cooperation with both former Nazis and a new generation of neo-nazis, the CIA established “stay behind” networks which were to carry out terrorist attacks should communists ever come to power in Germany.

Better Dead Than Red

“All Marxist Roads Lead to Moscow”: election poster for the CDU, 1953.

While both the economic and military aspects of Modell Deutschland were, to a greater or lesser degree, formulated in the public forum, and in some cases faced public opposition, the model had another equally important aspect, one which was never up for debate, and yet it bears directly on the topic under discussion here: anticommunism, described as the third pillar of West German society.

As we shall see, this anticommunism was far more than a mere ideological construct; rather, the legal structure of West German “constitutional democracy” was from its earliest days intended to prevent and/or eliminate all revolutionary left-wing opposition. This found its legal basis in the way that personal rights were framed in the Federal Republic’s Constitution, the Grundgesetz (Basic Law), which came into effect in 1949. While the Basic Law established the same personal rights and freedoms normally found in bourgeois democracies, it did this with one recurrent caveat: these rights could be withdrawn from those designated as enemies of the state.

This qualification was stated unambiguously in Article 18:

Whoever abuses the freedom of expression, in particular the freedom of the press (paragraph (1) of Article 5), the freedom of teaching (paragraph (3) of Article 5), the freedom of assembly (Article 8), the freedom of association (Article 9), the privacy of correspondence, posts and telecommunications (Article 10), the rights of property (Article 14), or the right of asylum (Article 16a) in order to combat the free democratic basic order shall forfeit these basic rights. This forfeiture and its extent shall be declared by the Federal Constitutional Court.

The following restriction to Article 21, limiting the right to form political parties, was added to this already ominous provision:

Parties that, by reason of their aims or the behavior of their adherents, seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany shall be unconstitutional. The Federal Constitutional Court shall rule on the question of unconstitutionality.

These passages were marked by the experience of political instability that had traumatized the Weimar Republic. Their design owed very much to the desire to prevent any future such upheaval. Constraints on political freedoms were further rationalized by some observers as necessary to prevent a resurgence of Nazism, a credulous argument which would soon be disproved by the fact that the chief target of these exclusions would be the left.

In 1951, the CDU moved to further tighten the legal framework of repression with a volley of state security legislation, defined in the following five sections: High Treason, Dangers to the State, Offenses against Constitutional Organs, Resistance to the Authority of the State, and Offenses against Public Order. Minister of Justice Thomas Dehler explained that these laws would be used to combat “ideological high treason,” “ideological subversion,” and “ideological sabotage.” In short, thought crime.

The immediate target of all these statutes and constitutional restrictions became clear with due haste. On November 23, 1951, the federal government applied to the Constitutional Court to have the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) proscribed, on the basis of the aforementioned Article 21 of the Basic Law. This was at a time when the party held fifteen seats in the Bundestag.

The Communists had opposed integration into NATO and as late as 1952 paid lip service to the revolutionary overthrow of the Adenauer regime. While it clearly didn’t have mass political support—it had garnered only 2.2% of the vote in the 1952 elections—the KPD nevertheless constituted a potential nuisance as the only political institution to speak up for a number of popular interests which were poorly represented by the major parties:

Its continued advocacy of an anti-fascist, socialist front, its opposition to rearmament and atomic weapons, its resistance to authoritarian trends such as restrictions on free speech and emergency laws, and its demands for a greater measure of economic democracy were aims shared by members of a great range of groups, including neglected interests within the established parties. It was evident… that to discredit or even criminalize the KPD would also be to reduce the appeal of all groups that shared any of its aims.

The trial of the KPD began on November 11, 1954. Sensing the direction things were going in, the party distanced itself from revolutionary politics in public statements in early 1956. It was already too late: on August 17 of that year, the KPD was declared illegal. Hundreds of arrests followed; not only party members, but also their families, members of alleged front groups, and anyone suspected of communist sympathies, were targeted, and a comprehensive apparatus developed to undertake surveillance of all these individuals and organizations.

The suppression of the KPD was just the most obvious volley in a broader process of constitutional repression. On August 2, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that the organization and promotion of demonstrations, meetings, and strikes could also constitute treason. A few months later, the Federal Supreme Court ruled that, “No action in a strike which goes beyond the cessation of work and violates interests protected by the law is justified by the so-called strike law.” In 1955, the essential nature of the Basic Law was further confirmed by a general ban on all political strikes.

At the same time, ample use was made of Dreher’s new security measures. By the 1960s, thousands of cases of treason were being brought before the courts:

…in 1963 10,322 actions were started against people alleged to have committed treasonable offenses of one kind or another. In many cases these actions were against more than one person. In 1961 a total of 442 people were sentenced for various categories of “treason”. Admittedly, of these 36 were only fined and 212 only got between 9 months and 5 years and 5 were sentenced to between 5 and 15 years. Many others had their careers ruined by court actions in which the State failed to prove its case.

With its culture sterilized and its traditions of worker militancy broken, the postfascist, post-genocidal society provided an ideal foundation for a new authoritarian and technocratic capitalist state.

Not Wanted in the Model: The KPD

Immediately after the war, the KPD benefited from an unambiguous anti-Nazi track record, but this strong position quickly crumbled due to a variety of factors. Patrick Major of Warwick University has provided a valuable overview of this decline in his book The Death of the KPD: Communism and Anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945-1956. According to Major, the postwar Party leadership found itself frequently at odds with its more radical rank and file. It was ill placed to connect with its supposed constituency—the proletariat—as many working class grievances took aim at the occupying powers, one of which was the Soviet Union. Indeed, as Major notes, “the earliest proponents of strikes tended to be Social Democrats, whereas, like their French comrades, the German Communists placed national reconstruction before wage increases or even denazification of management.” The Party was further handicapped by its ties to East Germany’s ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED). The SED encouraged the KPD’s conservative tendencies, insisting that it prioritize forging a progressive nationalist opposition to the Western occupiers, relegating class struggle to the back burner. Not only was it still hoped that the “Western Zone” could be pried out of the hands of imperialism, but it was also recognized that the KPD’s chief competition—the SPD—was winning support with its own “nationalistic rabble rousing.” During this patriotic phase, anticapitalist rhetoric was toned down; in some Länder, Party members were instructed to stop singing the Internationale in public, and the hammer and sickle and Soviet star emblems were removed from their paraphernalia. To the disgust of many comrades who had barely survived the Third Reich, the KPD even briefly attempted to establish a broad “anticolonialist” National Front, appealing to middle class elements, patriotic capitalists, and even former Nazi supporters. Although the KPD was banned in 1956, this dubious “anticolonialism” represented real class forces, and a significant section of progressive opinion. While these gestures failed to win the Communists any significant nationalist support, the politics they represented remained visible in the future campaigns against rearmament and nuclear weapons. Though overwhelmingly left-wing, these campaigns were still able to attract (and accept) support from conservatives and even fascists who opposed integration within the western bloc as “unpatriotic.” The connection to East Germany’s SED became an ever-greater liability as the Cold War descended: while western communists opposed rearmament in the FRG, they had to make excuses for it in the GDR; while they decried exploitative work conditions in the west, they had to defend piece work policies in the east; while they complained of “colonization” of the FRG by the Americans, they had to remain pointedly silent about “integration” of the GDR into the Soviet Bloc. Thus, even as the Party played an important role in articulating opposition to the authoritarian Adenauer regime, it faced an uphill battle, not only because of right-wing repression, but also due to the contradictory demands of struggling in the Western Zone while its counterpart ruled in the East. These political weaknesses, combined with the deep changes to Germany’s class structure that occurred during the Hitler period, prevented the KPD from ever mounting a serious challenge to the new FRG. So much so that according to Major, “In some ways the KPD leadership was ‘saved by the bell’, banned before an internal party discussion could look for scapegoats for the disastrous policies of the past decade.”

2 - The Re-Emergence of Revolutionary Politics in West Germany

In the years before the Hitler regime, Germany was home to one of the strongest and most militant left-wing movements in Europe, firmly based in the country’s large and well organized working class. The years after World War I saw insurrections in Bavaria and the Ruhr region, and had it not been for errors and betrayals on the left, many still believe that communist revolution in Germany could have succeeded in giving birth to a radically different twentieth century.

That, of course, is not what happened, and as events unfolded the left that had impressed generations of European socialists was decimated by the rise of German fascism, forced into exile, reduced to inactivity, or sent off to the camps.

When the organized institutions of the left reappeared in the postwar period, they were incapable of overcoming their own historical weaknesses, weaknesses that were actively reinforced by the Allies’ corrupt and repressive policies. Those few independent antifascist groups which had formed in the last days of the war quickly found themselves banned, unwelcome intruders on the victors’ plans, this Allied suppression of any autonomous workers’ or antifascist revolt constituting the flipside to the charade of denazification.

The eclipse of any authentic left-wing opposition continued in the years following the division of Germany. The Christian Democratic Union, the concrete expression of the alliance between the German ruling class and American imperialism, experienced little in the way of opposition as it helped implement the Marshall Plan and establish the legal machinery with which to fight any resurgence of left-wing militancy.

Yet, while the political aspects of the Marshall Plan were carried out with little difficulty, the rearming of West Germany, not surprisingly when one considers the outcome of both World Wars, met with intense opposition.

In the immediate postwar period, West Germans were overwhelmingly opposed to rearmament. By 1952, this sentiment had coalesced into a broad movement, including the not-yet-banned KPD, trade unions, socialist youth groups, Protestant church groups, pacifists, and, at times, sections of the SPD. This progressive alliance was flanked on its right by small numbers of nationalists and even fascists who objected to the way in which rearmament would anchor the country in the western bloc. Despite this, the “Without Us Movement” (as it was known) was a predominantly left-wing amalgam. It was the first large protest movement in the new Federal Republic, and while it may appear timid and ineffectual in retrospect, it represented a real break in the postwar consensus at the time.

The response from the Adenauer regime revealed the limits of CDU democracy: in 1951, a KPD referendum initiative on the question was banned, as according to the Basic Law only the federal government was empowered to call a plebiscite. The Communists decided to go ahead anyway, polling people on street corners, through newspaper questionnaires, and at popular meeting places. The “referendum” was more agit prop than a scientific study; at one movie cinema in the town of Celle, for instance, there is a report that just as the feature film ended an eager pollster asked everyone opposed to rearmament to stand up—100% opposition was recorded. Little surprise that the KPD eventually found that almost six million West Germans had “registered” their opposition to the government’s plans.

Suffice it to say that Adenauer was not amused, and polling people soon became a risky endeavor: there were a total of 7,331 arrests, and the KPD Free German Youth front group was banned simply for engaging in what amounted to a glorified petition campaign.

Philipp Müller, April 5, 1931– May 11, 1952

At the same time, as if to make matters crystal clear, on May 11, 1952, a peace rally in the city of Essen was attacked by police, at first with dogs and clubs, and then with live ammunition. Philipp Müller, a member of Free German Youth, became the first person to be killed in a demonstration in the new Federal Republic. As a sign of things to come, no police officer would ever face charges for Müller’s death, but eleven demonstrators were subsequently jailed for a total of six years and four months for disorderly conduct and “crimes of treason against the Constitution.”

Not that repression was the only tool against incipient revolt: misdirection also remained an important weapon in the ruling class arsenal. Throughout 1953, there were almost one hundred strikes at different factories to protest against the CDU’s rearmament policies. As the politicized sections of the working class were moving aggressively against Adenauer’s plans, the SPD and trade union leadership lined up to rein things in. All energy was now funneled into one big rally in Frankfurt. However, the initiative was removed from the rank and file, and in the end the rally was simply used to drum up support for the SPD. As the CDU moved ahead regardless, the Social Democrats withdrew organizational support, and the movement (now robbed of any autonomous basis) dissipated almost immediately.

With its most steadfast opponents kept in disarray by their “leaders,” the Adenauer regime easily ratified rearmament through the Treaty of Paris in 1954. The next few years saw the establishment of voluntary military service, universal male conscription, and the production of war materials, further sealing the ties between big business and the state. Demoralized by their failure to prevent any of this, the opposition began to melt, a 1955 poll finding that almost two thirds of the population now considered remilitarization to be a “political necessity.”

For the CDU, rearmament, like the Basic Law, was simply part of the Federal Republic acquiring the powers of a “normal” state, part of West Germany’s integration into the imperialist bloc. While there were numerous such state powers bestowed during this period, one which will bear some relevance to our study is the 1951 establishment of the Bundesgrenzschutz, the Federal Border Guard, also known as the BGS. Under the jurisdiction of the Federal Ministry of the Interior, the BGS was initially a paramilitary force of 10,000, its activity restricted “to the border area ‘to a depth of thirty kilometres.”

In 1951, most leftists had feared that the BGS was a roundabout way to establish a standing army. As we have seen, such a ploy did not prove necessary (although many border guards would be integrated into the new armed forces). Rather, the Border Guard would eventually serve as the basis for a national semi-militarized police force.

Despite these discouraging beginnings, antimilitary sentiment remained high, and when, in 1956, the Adenauer government responded favorably to a U.S. “offer” of tactical nuclear weapons, this set off a series of spontaneous mobilizations across the country. In 1957, members of West Germany’s second largest union, the Public Service, Transport, and Communication Union (ÖTV) voted 94.9% in favor of a strike against nuclear armament, a call which was echoed by the president of the powerful IG Metall trade union. In Hannover, 40,000 people demonstrated against nuclear arms, while in Munich there was a turnout of 80,000, and in Hamburg 120,000 people took to the streets. Opinion polls showed 52% of the population supporting an antinuclear general strike.

The SPD and trade union brass moved to quash this mass movement, which was spinning out of control, by redirecting the campaign away from the streets and factories and into the ballot boxes, proposing a referendum instead of a general strike. Predictably, the government challenged this referendum proposal before the Constitutional Court, where it was ruled unconstitutional in 1958.

The ploy worked, the momentum was broken, and the antinuclear weapons movement entered a period of sharp decline. For years to come, its only visible legacy would be the annual peace demonstrations held every Easter Weekend, the so-called Easter Marches.

Of great relevance to the future history of the West German left, and our story in particular, an important counterpoint to the disreputable machinations of the SPD emerged from its own youth wing: the Socialist German Student Union (SDS).

The SDS had been founded in 1946 as a training ground from which to groom the future party elite (Helmut Schmidt, West Germany’s future Chancellor, was the group’s first president). In the context of the anti-rearmament movement, though, a shift began to occur, and at its 1958 conference, the leadership of the SDS was won by elements significantly to the left of the SPD:

Their main interest was in the development of socialist policies and, in particular, they wanted to build the campaign against nuclear weapons, a campaign which the SPD had already deserted. The resolutions of the SDS conference were a “declaration of war” on the SPD leadership. The SDS first of all developed an anti-imperialist position and demanded the right of national self-determination for the Algerians and the withdrawal of French colonial troops. After this there were congresses against nuclear weapons, for democracy and in opposition to militarism. The SPD strongly condemned this development.

In May of 1960, to counter this leftwards drift, students loyal to the SPD leadership formed the Social Democratic Student Union (SHB).

This move by the right was answered in October 1961 by SPD left wingers forming the Society for the Promotion of Socialism (SF). Unable to neutralize this growing left-wing revolt, the SPD leadership decided to do what it could to isolate it, purging the SF and SDS in a move which completed the alienation of the critical intelligentsia and youth from the party for years to come. (Ironically, the SHB itself continued to be pulled to the left, forced to tail positions staked out by the SDS, until it too would find itself expelled in the 1970s.)

Things were brewing beneath the surface, and a new generation was finding itself increasingly miserable within the suffocating and conservative Modell Deutschland. American expatriate Paul Hockenos describes the fifties cultural climate that surrounded these young people:

Corporal punishment in schools… was still routine, and at universities students could be expelled for interrupting a lecture. The Federal Republic still had “coupling laws” on the books that forbade single men and women under twenty-one to spend the night together—or even to spend time together unchaperoned. Parents who allowed their children to stray could face legal penalties. In contrast to the GDR’s school curricula, in which the churches had no say, in the West German schools there weren’t sexual-education programs until the 1960s.

The Old Left and the New Reality

Under the postwar occupation regime, various intellectuals who had been exiled under Nazism returned home, while others who had remained silent found their voices. While this was a broader phenomenon, two groups in particular stand out: the Frankfurt School and the Gruppe 47. The Frankfurt School had emerged from the Institute for Social Research, founded at the University of Frankfurt in 1924 under the tutelage of one of its prominent members, Max Horkheimer. Critical of the narrow intellectual nature of traditional Marxism, members integrated new ideas from the fields of sociology, philosophy, and psychiatry to produce a highly influential and intellectually rigorous theoretical platform, eventually known as “Critical Theory.” Key members, almost all of them men, many of them Jewish, included Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas. Going into exile in 1933, the Frankfurt School was based out of Columbia University in New York City until 1943. While Horkheimer and Adorno chose to return to Germany after the war, many others remained in the United States. The Gruppe 47 was a literary circle founded in 1947 to help give expression to a new generation of German writers who had lived through the war, and who hoped to use their cRAFt as a way to reckon with the with the Nazi experience. Key members included Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Alexander Kluge, Ilse Aichinger, and Erich Fried. There were few Jews or women involved, and amongst the Germans, some were later revealed to have previously been active Nazis. Yet, despite these shortcomings, the Gruppe 47 established itself as an important progressive influence on postwar German culture. While they may have all initially sympathized with the sixties revolt, many of these intellectuals soon felt alienated by the younger generation’s goals and methods of direct action and violent protest. Ironically, while the Frankfurt School influenced many of the sixties revolutionaries, it also provided the strongest negative reaction, with Jürgen Habermas going so far as to accuse student radicals of flirting with “left-wing fascism.” Though an inability to agree about the meaning of the student revolt led to the precipitous decline of the Gruppe 47, some of its members remained vocal critics of the political establishment. Heinrich Böll and Erich Fried in particular continued to denounce the state’s penchant for authoritarian solutions, even in regards to its war against the guerilla.

In the words of Detlev Claussen, who would later participate in his generation’s revolt, “They try to make it look better than it was but it really was that bad! It was a terrible, terrible time to grow up.”

Another indication of what life was like in the post-genocidal society came in the winter of 1959-60, as a wave of antisemitic graffiti and attacks on Jewish cemeteries swept over the country. This prompted some Frankfurt School sociologists to carry out a study which revealed that behind an apathetic 41% who remained indifferent, a hardcore 16% of the population was openly antisemitic, supportive of the death penalty (banned under the Basic Law) and expressing “an excessive inclination for authority.”

One of the projects most responsible for challenging this reactionary and stultifying culture was the magazine konkret, published in Hamburg by Klaus Rainer Röhl. An increasingly important forum for progressive youth who rejected the CDU consensus and the country’s conservative cultural mores, the magazine was widely read within the SDS. As Karin Bauer notes, “the magazine thrived from the happy union of intellectual, aesthetic, and popular appeal…” Decidedly political, “Recurrent themes were Cuba, anticolonialism, German fascism, the antinuclear struggle, human rights, and social justice.”

Unbeknownst to its public, konkret was actually funded and in part controlled by one of the remaining clandestine KPD cells which had gone into exile in East Germany. The magazine’s chief editor was Röhl’s wife, a woman who had been active in the SDS since 1957, and had secretly joined the illegal KPD in 1959. Her name was Ulrike Meinhof.

Another radicalizing event for many young people at the time was the Auschwitz trials, held in Frankfurt between 1963 and 1965. Largely a propaganda exercise to cover up the far greater number of Nazis who had found their way into the new West German establishment, twenty-two former SS-men and one Kapo were tried for murder or complicity in murder. Regardless of the hypocritical aspect of the trial, the fact that for two and a half years almost three hundred witnesses came and testified, and had their testimony reported in the media, gave an inkling of what Auschwitz meant to a generation of German youth, who—quite understandably—now saw their teachers, civic leaders, and even their parents in a horrible new light.

These trials, and the general “discovery” of the Holocaust, were a radicalizing event for many young people at that time; as one veteran of the New Left would later recall:

That the Germans could kill millions of human beings just because they had a different faith was utterly inexplicable to me. My whole moral world view shattered, got entwined with a rigorous rejection of my parents and school. If religion had not prevented this mass destruction of human beings, then it is no good for anything, then the whole talk of love of your neighbor and of meekness. . . was just a lie.

Despite what in retrospect may seem to have been a growing potential for revolt, during these early years, the SDS was silent, turned inward, engaging in “seminar Marxism” as it found its bearings outside of the SPD and struggled to elaborate a consistent analysis and strategy. When it did return to the public arena, it was as a small, consciously anti-imperialist organization influenced by the experiences of China, Cuba, Algeria, and Vietnam, advancing the analysis that “liberation movements in the Third World, marginal groups in society, and socialist intellectuals now constituted the revolutionary subject in society and the appropriate strategy was direct action.” (It is worth noting that the German Democratic Republic was pointedly not one of the ideological reference points for the new SDS.)

A line was crossed when Moise Tschombe visited Berlin in December 1964. To the applause of the West German ruling class, and with the help of German mercenaries, Tschombe had led a bloody, anticommunist secession in the Congolese province of Katanga. He was considered responsible for the 1961 murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first president of the Congo and a beloved symbol of the anticolonial struggle in Africa.

Hundreds of protesters turned out against Tschombe, and when the police tried to clear them away, they fought back in what would later be described as the starting point of the antiauthoritarian revolt in West Germany.

The SDS played a prominent part in this protest. Based on university campuses, it was becoming the most important organization in the growing and increasingly militant protest movement against imperialist domination of the global South, most especially against the war in Indochina. Demonstrations ceased to be the timid rituals they had been; for the first time in decades, student protests escalated into street fighting.

1964 was also a year of change for konkret. The communist world was at the time deeply divided by the falling out between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Over the years, this split would only become more bitter until each side came to see the other as being objectively as bad as—or even worse than!—the imperialism represented by the United States. Despite its ties to the KPD, konkret was taking an increasingly pro-Chinese line, going so far as to support China’s acquiring nuclear weapons. At this, its East German patrons lost patience, and after failing to browbeat Meinhof into submission at a secret meeting in East Berlin, they cut off all funding. In their turn, Meinhof and Röhl resigned from the kpd. As a solution to this new lack of money, Röhl made drastic changes to the magazine’s presentation, turning it into a glossy publication which now featured scantilyclad women in every issue—its circulation almost tripled. Far from suffering as a result of their separation from the SPD, the SDS, konkret, and others on the left were now particularly well placed to benefit from a series of economic and political developments, even though these were not of their doing and lay well beyond their control.

In 1966-67, a recession throughout the capitalist world pushed unemployment in the FRG to over a million for the first time in the postwar era, a situation the ruling class attempted to exploit to tip the balance of power even further in its favor. As Karl Heinz Roth explains:

Threats of job losses and elimination of all the groups of workers who would have been able to initiate advanced forms of struggle laid the basis for a general anti-worker offensive.

Furthermore:

The bosses freely admitted that they were using the crisis to intensify work conditions amongst all layers of the global working class. From their point of view, the temporary investment strike was necessary to create the basis for a recovery through a “cleansing of the personnel.” Three hundred thousand immigrant workers and almost as many German workers were thrown out into the street.

In a move to consolidate support amongst more privileged German workers and thus exploit the divisions within the proletariat, the SPD was brought into a so-called “Grand Coalition” government alongside the Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union. This created a situation in which former resistance fighter and SPD chief Willy Brandt was now vice-chancellor alongside former Nazi Georg Kiesinger of the CDU, and the CSU’s far-right Franz Josef Strauß was Minister of Finance alongside the SPD’s young luminary, Karl Schiller, who held the Economics portfolio.

The SPD was completely discredited by its open embrace of these reactionaries, and it now appeared that any real change could only come about outside of government channels. Disenchantment struck at West Germany’s youth in the universities, in the factories and on the street, as younger workers were increasingly marginalized by the new corporatist compact. The Außerparlamentarische Opposition (APO), or Extra-Parliamentary Opposition, was born.

The revolt was focused in West Berlin, an enclave that was a three-hour drive into East Germany, and which remained officially under western Allied occupation, and so enjoyed the bizarre status of being a de facto part of the Federal Republic even though it remained legally distinct. In a sense, West Berlin afforded the personal freedoms of the capitalist west while its odd diplomatic status provided its residents with extra room to maneuver outside of the west’s constraints. This had many important consequences, not the least of which was that young men who moved to West Berlin could avoid the dRAFt, as they were technically living outside of the FRG.

Not surprisingly, the city became a magnet for the radicals and counterculture rebels of the new generation. In the words of one woman who lived there, it was “a self-contained area where political developments of all kinds… become evident much earlier than elsewhere and much more sharply, as if they were under a magnifying glass.”

Andreas Baader, Dorothea Ridder and Rainer Langhans, dancing in the streets of West Berlin (August, 1967)

Thus, it was in West Berlin that a group of students, gathered around Hans-Jürgen Krahl and the East German refugees Rudi Dutschke and Bernd Rabehl, began questioning not only the economic system, but the very nature of society itself. The structure of the family, the factory, and the school system were all challenged as these young rebels mixed the style of the hippy counterculture with ideas drawn from the Frankfurt School’s brand of Marxism.

Communes and housing associations sprung up. Women challenged the male leadership and orientation within the SDS and the APO, setting up daycares, women’s caucuses, women’s centers, and women-only communes. The broader counterculture, rockers, artists, and members of the drug scene rallied to the emerging political insurgency. Protests encompassed traditional demonstrations as well as sit-ins, teach-ins, and happenings. So called “Republican Clubs” spread out to virtually every town and city as centers for discussion and organizing, bridging the divide between the younger radicals and veterans of the earlier peace movements.

As one historian has put it:

Everywhere it could, the 1960s generation countered the German petit bourgeois ethic with its antithesis, as they interpreted it: prudery with free love, nationalism with internationalism, the nuclear family with communes, provincialism with Third World solidarity, obedience to the law with civil disobedience, tradition with wide-open experimentation, servility with in-your-face activism.

Or, as one former SDS member would recall, it was a time when “everything”—hash, politics, sex, and Vietnam—“all seemed to hang together with everything else.”

Despite its growing popularity on campus and amongst hipsters, this new radical youth movement was not embraced by the population at large, and demonstrations would often be heckled or even attacked by onlookers. This widespread hostility was a green light for state repression, with results which would soon become clear for all to see.

On June 2, 1967, thousands of people turned out to demonstrate outside the German Opera against a visit by the Shah of Iran, whose brutal regime was a key American ally in the Middle East. Many wore paper masks in the likeness of the Shah and his wife; these had been printed up by Rainer Langhans and Holger Meins of the K.1 commune, “So the police couldn’t recognize us [and so] they only saw the face of the one they were protecting.” Thus adorned, the protesters greeted the Iranian monarch and his wife with volleys of rotten tomatoes and shouts of “Murderer!”

(As Ulrike Meinhof would later write in konkret: “the students who befouled the Shah did not act on their own behalf, but rather on behalf of the Persian peasants who are in no position to resist under present circumstances, and the tomatoes could only be symbols for better projectiles…”)

The June 2 rally would be a turning point, as the protesters were brutally set upon by the police and SAVAK, the Iranian secret service. Many fought back, and the demonstration is reported to have “descended into the most violent battle between protesters and police so far in the postwar period… It was only around 12:30 am that the fighting came to an end, by which time 44 demonstrators had been arrested, and the same number of people had been injured, including 20 police officers.”

Benno Ohnesorg, shot by police, lies dying in the arms of fellow student Fredericke Dollinger.

Most tragically, a young member of the Evangelical Student Association, Benno Ohnesorg, attending his first demonstration, was shot in the back of the head by Karl-Heinz Kurras, a plainclothes police officer with the Red Squad. Even after Ohnesorg was finally picked up by an ambulance, it was another forty minutes before he was brought to a hospital. He died of his wounds that night.

This police murder was a defining event, electrifying the student movement and pushing it in a far more militant direction. It has been estimated that between 100,000 and 200,000 students took part in demonstrations across the country in the days immediately following Ohnesorg’s death. For many, especially those outside of West Berlin, it was their first political protest. As has been noted elsewhere, “Although two-thirds of students in the period before the shooting declared themselves to be apolitical, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting a survey found that 65 per cent of students had been politicized by Ohnesorg’s death.”

The murder catapulted the SDS into the center of student politics across the Federal Republic. As one student activist later recalled years later:

The SDS didn’t have more than a few hundred members nationwide… and then all at once there was such a huge deluge that we couldn’t cope. Our offices were overrun. So we just opened SDS up and decentralized everything. We let people in different cities and towns organize themselves into autonomous project groups and then we’d all meet at regular congresses to thrash things out. More or less by chance it turned out to be an incredible experiment in participatory democracy.

Initially, the state and the newspapers owned by reactionary press magnate Axel Springer tried to justify this murder, repeating lies that the protesters had had plans to kill police and that Kurras had shot in self-defense. Springer’s Bild Zeitung ominously warned that “A young man died in Berlin, victim of the riots instigated by political hooligans who call themselves demonstrators. Riots aren’t enough anymore. They want to see blood. They wave the red flag and they mean it. This is where democratic tolerance stops.”

On June 3, the Berlin Senate banned demonstrations in the city— twenty-five year old Gudrun Ensslin was one of eight protesters arrested for defying this ban the next day—and the chief of police Duensing proudly explained his tactics as those he would use when confronted with a smelly sausage: “The left end stinks [so] we had to cut into the middle to take off the end.” As for the Shah, he tried to reassure the Mayor of Berlin Heinrich Albertz, telling him not to think too much of it, “these things happen every day in Iran…”

Nevertheless, given the widespread sense of outrage and the increasing evidence that Ohnesorg had been killed without provocation, Duensing was forced out of his job, and Senator for Internal Affairs Büsch and Mayor Albertz were eventually made to follow suit.

If June 2 has been pointed to as the “coming out” of the West German New Left mass student phenomenon, the international circumstances in which this occurred were not without significance. Just three days after Ohnesorg’s murder, West Germany’s ally Israel attacked Egypt, and quickly destroyed its army—as well as Jordanian and Syrian forces—in what became known as the Six Day War.

In the FRG, the Six Day War provided the odd occasion for a broad-based, mass celebration of militarism. To some observers, it suddenly seemed as if the same emotions and social forces that had supported German fascism were now expressing themselves through support for the Israeli aggressors, described (approvingly) as the “Prussians of the Middle East.” Although the SDS was already pro-Palestinian, most leftists had previously harbored sympathies for the Jewish state. The 1967 war put a definite end to this, establishing the New Left’s anti-Zionist orientation; as an unfortunate side effect of this turn, it also discouraged attempts to grapple with the gravity of Germany’s antisemitic past from a radical, anticapitalist point of view. (For more on Germany’s relationship to Israel, see Appendix III—The FRG and the State of Israel, pages 550-553.)

An uneasy calm reigned in the wake of the June 2 tragedy, and yet the movement continued to grow. More radical ideas were gaining currency, and at an SDS conference in September Rudi Dutschke and Hans-Jürgen Krahl went so far as to broach the possibility of the left fielding an urban guerilla. This was the first time such an idea had been mentioned in the SDS or the APO, and for the time being, such talk remained a matter of abstract conjecture.

On February 17 and 18, 1968, the movement reached what was perhaps its peak when 5,000 people attended the International Congress on Vietnam in West Berlin, including representatives of anti-imperialist movements from around the world. Addressing those present, Dutschke called for a “long march through the institutions,” a phrase with which his name is today firmly associated. (By this, the student leader did not mean joining the system, but rather setting up counterinstitutions while identifying dissatisfied elements within the establishment that might be won over or subverted.) The congress closed with a demonstration of more than 12,000 people, and would be remembered years later as an important breakthrough for the entire European left.

The establishment mounted its response on February 21, as the West Berlin Senate, the Federation of Trade Unions, and the Springer Press called for a mass demonstration against the student movement and in support of the U.S. war against Vietnam. Eighty thousand people attended, many carrying signs reading “Rudi Dutschke: Public Enemy Number One” and “Berlin Must Not Become Saigon.”

Increasing polarization was leading to a definitive explosion: less than one year after Ohnesorg’s murder, another violent attack on the left served as the spark.

On April 11, 1968, Josef Bachmann, a young right-wing worker, shot Rudi Dutschke three times, once in the head, once in the jaw, and once in the chest. Dutschke, who was recognized as the leading intellectual in the SDS and the APO, had been the target of a massive anticommunist smear campaign in the media, particularly the Springer Press, which would be widely blamed for setting the stage for the attack. Indeed, Bachmann would later testify in this regard, saying, “I have taken my daily information from the Bild Zeitung.”

The shooting occurred one week after Martin Luther King had been assassinated in the United States, and to many young German leftists, it appeared that their entire international movement was under attack. One young working-class rebel, like Dutschke a refugee from the East, summed up how he felt as follows:

Up to this point they had come with the little police clubs or Mr Kuras(sic) shot; but now it had started, with people being offed specifically. The general baiting had created a climate in which little pranks wouldn’t work anymore. Not when they’re going to liquidate you, regardless of what you do. Before I get transported to Auschwitz again, I’d rather shoot first, that’s clear now. If the gallows is smiling at you at the end anyway, then you can fight back beforehand.

Bachmann had carried out his attack on the Thursday before Easter, and the annual peace demonstrations were quickly transformed into protests against the assassination attempt; it has been estimated that 300,000 people participated in the marches over the weekend, the largest figure achieved in West Germany in the 1960s. Universities were occupied across the country, and running battles with the police lasted for four days. “Springer Shot Too!” became a common slogan amongst radicals, and in many cities, the corporation was targeted with violent attacks. Thousands were arrested, hundreds were hospitalized, and two people (a journalist and a protester) were killed, most likely by police. On May 1, 50,000 people marched through West Berlin.

Unprecedented numbers of working-class youth took part in these battles, with university students constituting only a minority of those arrested by police, a development that worried the ruling class.

By the time it was over, there had been violent clashes in at least twenty cities. Springer property worth 250,000 dm (roughly $80,000) was damaged or destroyed, including over 100,000dm worth of window panes.

This rebellion and the police repression pushed many radicals’ thinking to an entirely new level. Bommi Baumann, for instance, credited the riots with opening his eyes to the possibility of armed struggle:

On the spot, I really got it, this concept of mass struggle-terrorism; this problem I had been thinking about for so long became clear to me then. The chance for a revolutionary movement lies in this: when a determined group is there simultaneously with the masses, supporting them through terror.

Ulrike Meinhof was clearly thinking along similar lines, only she put her thoughts in print, sharing them with the public in a groundbreaking konkret article entitled “From Protest to Resistance.” Arguing that in the Easter riots “the boundaries between protest and resistance were exceeded,” she promised that “the paramilitary deployment of the police will be answered with paramilitary methods.”

On May 31, the Bundestag passed the Notstandgesetze, or Emergency Powers Act, which besides providing the state with tools to deal with crises such as natural disasters or war, was also intended to open the movement up to greater intervention. The CDU had been trying to pass such repressive legislation for years, and short-circuiting opposition to it had been one of the advantages of forming a Grand Coalition along with the SPD. Coming as it did on the heels of the April violence, the legislation passed easily. (The fact that, just across the Rhine, France seemed also on the brink of revolution, enjoying its defining rebellion of the sixties, certainly didn’t hurt matters.)

Under the new Act, the Basic Law was amended to allow the state to tap phones and observe mail unhindered by previous stipulations requiring that the targeted individual be informed. Provisions were introduced in particular for the telephone surveillance of people suspected of preparing or committing “political crimes,” especially those governed by the catch-all §129 of the penal code, criminalizing the “formation or support of a criminal association.” The Emergency Powers Act also officially sanctioned the use of clandestine photography, “trackers” and Verfassungsschutz informants and provocateurs.

Poster for a demonstration against the Emergency Powers Act, organized by the Munich Board for the Emergency Facing Democracy: “The Emergency Powers Act Plans for War, Not Peace!” Amongst those who gave closing speeches was one Rolf Pohle, at the time a law student prominent in the Munich APO.

Throughout the month of May, as the Act was being passed into law, universities were occupied, students boycotted classes, and tens of thousands of people protested in demonstrations across the country, while a similar number of workers staged a one-day strike. To its critics, the Act represented a dangerous step along the road to re-establishing fascism in the Federal Republic, and this fear was simply reinforced by the way in which the Grand Coalition could pass the legislation regardless of the widespread protests against it.

Anti-Notstandgesetze activities were particularly impressive in Frankfurt, the financial capital of West Germany, which had also become something of an intellectual center for the student movement. On May 27, students occupied the Frankfurt University, and for several days held seminars and workshops addressing a variety of political questions. It took large scale police raids on May 30 to clear the campus.

All this notwithstanding, the Act was passed into law.

The failure of the anti-Notstandgesetze movement was experienced as a bitter defeat by the New Left. Many entertained alarmist fears that the laws would be used to institute a dictatorship, in much the same way as Hindenburg had used similar powers in 1930 and 1933 to create a government independent from parliament, which had facilitated the Nazi dictatorship. In the words of Hans-Jürgen Krahl:

Democracy in Germany is finished. Through concerted political activism we have to form a broad, militant base of resistance against these developments, which could well lead to war and concentration camps. Our struggle against the authoritarian state of today can prevent the fascism of tomorrow.

In this heady climate, matters continued to escalate throughout 1968, sections of the movement graduating to more organized and militantly ambitious protests. The most impressive examples of this were probably those that accompanied attempts to disbar Horst Mahler.

Mahler was a superstar of the West Berlin left, known as the “hippy lawyer” who defended radicals in many of the most important cases of this period. He had been involved with the SDS, and was a co-founder of the West Berlin Republican Club and the Socialist Lawyers Collective. He had been arrested during the anti-Springer protests that April, and in what would prove to be a foolish move, the state had initiated proceedings to see him disbarred.

Mahler’s case became a new lightning rod for the West Berlin left, which felt that the state was trying to muzzle their most committed legal defender. The student councils of the Free University and the Technical University called for protests the day of his hearing, one organizer describing the goal as “the destruction of the justice apparatus through massive demonstrations.”

The street fighting which broke out on November 3 would go down in history as the “Battle of Tegeler Weg.” On the one side, the helmet-wearing protesters (roughly 1,500) attacked with cobblestones and two-by-fours, on the other the police (numbering 1,000) used water cannons, tear gas, and billy clubs:

Several lawyers and bystanders were hit by cobblestones ripped from the sidewalks and hurled by the youths, most of them wearing crash helmets, as they moved forward in waves directed by leaders with megaphones. Injured demonstrators were carried to waiting ambulances marked with blue crosses and staffed by girls wearing improvised nurses’ uniforms.

Nor were the police spared. As another newspaper reported:

The demonstrators caused a heavy toll of police casualties with their guerrilla style of battle: thrusting at police, withdrawing, consolidating and then thrusting again from another angle. At one stage they managed to beat back a 300-man police force a distance of 150 yards… Police counted 120 injured in their own ranks. Ten of them had to be treated at a hospital. A police spokesman said seven of 21 injured demonstrators were taken to a hospital. The number of arrests was placed at 46.

That same night a horse was injured when several molotov cocktails were thrown into the police stable. It would later be suggested that this attack was the work of an agent provocateur by the name of Peter Urbach.

The court declined to disbar Mahler. Within a few days, the firebrand lawyer was once again making headlines with his latest case: the defense of the young antifascist Beate Klarsfeld, who had smacked CDU Chancellor—and former Nazi—Kurt Georg Kiesinger, hitting him in the face. Mahler would eventually win Klarsfeld a suspended sentence, at which point he counter-sued Kiesinger on her behalf, arguing that the very fact that a former Nazi was Chancellor constituted an insult to his client.

The Battle of Tegeler Weg was another milestone, representing a willingness to engage in organized violence the likes of which had not been seen for decades. This period also saw the first experiments with clandestine armed activities, a subject to which we will soon return.

Thus, we can see that even as the spectre of increased repression haunted sections of the militant left, there existed both the desire and the capacity to rise to the next level.

At the same time, however, other developments offered the tempting promise that change might come about in a more comfortable manner by backing down and working within the system.

In October, 1969, the Grand Coalition came to an end, and under the slogan “Let’s Dare More Democracy!” an SPD government (in coalition with the FDP) was elected. SPD leader Willy Brandt was now Chancellor, and FDP leader Walter Scheel became Foreign Minister. The largely symbolic post of president went to political old-timer Gustav Heinemann, widely considered one of the Federal Republic’s most liberal politicians, despite the fact that he had been the Grand Coalition’s SPD Minister of Justice.

For the first time in its history, the Christian Democrats had lost control of the West German parliament.

The new SPD government announced a series of measures which partially fulfilled the students’ more “reasonable” demands: there were new diplomatic overtures to East Germany, it was made easier to be declared a conscientious objector, the age of consent and the legal voting age were lowered from twenty-one to eighteen, no fault divorce legislation was passed, and a series of reforms aimed to modernize and open up the stuffy, hierarchical German school system.

For many, it seemed like a brand new day.

At the same time, Brandt announced an “immediate program to modernize and intensify crime prevention,” which included:

strengthening of the Criminal Investigation Bureau, the modernization of its equipment and the extension of its powers, the re-equipping and reorganization of the Federal Border Guard as a Federal police force, together with the setting up of a “study group on the surveillance of foreigners” within the security services.

Nevertheless, these measures would not affect most activists, and the government shift away from the anachronistic conservatism of the CDU helped confuse and siphon off less committed students, draining potential sources of support for the radical left. At the same time, the movement itself was beginning to fragment.

Problems of male supremacy in the APO had become increasingly difficult to bear for radical women inspired by the feminist movements in the United States, France, and England. In September 1968, things had come to a head at an SDS conference in Frankfurt, where Hans-Jürgen Krahl found himself being pelted by tomatoes after he refused to address the question of chauvinism in the SDS. While many (but not all) of the women from the APO would continue to identify as being on the left, their political trajectory became increasingly separate, both as a result of dynamics internal to the women’s movement and of the continuing sexism outside of it.

The different tendencies to emerge from the APO tapped into different aesthetic traditions—above: a call-out from the radical magazine Agit 883 for a demonstration against the Vietnam War.

The decline of the APO also occurred alongside renewed attempts to build various workers’ parties in line with the “correct” Marxist analysis. In 1968, the banned KPD (“Communist Party of Germany”) had been re-established under a new name as the DKP (“German Communist Party”), but boasting the same program and leadership. To most young radicals, though, this “new” Communist Party was of little interest, not only because of its association with the clearly unattractive East German regime, but also because of what was seen as its unimpressive and timid track record in the years before Adenauer had had it banned.

“Everybody Out to the Red May 1st; Resist Wage Controls; Resist Wage Slavery; A United Working Class Front Against the Betrayal of the SPD Government”

Rather, there followed a veritable alphabet soup of Maoist parties, most of which were as virulently anti-Soviet as they were anti-American. These were joined by a much smaller number of Trotskyist organizations, and together all these would eventually become known as the “K-groups,” in a development roughly analogous to the New Communist Movement which developed at the same time in North America.

Those who remained to the left of the SPD while not joining any of these new party-oriented organizations included the sponti (“spontaneous”) left which had grown out of the APO’s antiauthoritarian camp, anarchists, and assorted independent socialists. Together, these were referred to as the “undogmatic left,” their bastions being the cities of Frankfurt, Munich, and—of course—West Berlin.

The movement continued to struggle, but with increasing difficulty, fragmenting in all directions, as the APO seemed to be coming apart at the seams.

In March 1970, following a chaotic congress at the Frankfurt Student Association Building, the SDS was dissolved by acclamation. In a brilliant ploy, two months later the government decreed an amnesty for protesters serving short sentences, thereby winning many of these middle class students back to the establishment. The student movement in West Germany was particularly vulnerable to this kind of recuperation, being overwhelmingly comprised of young people for whom there was a place in the more comfortable classes; in 1967, for instance, only 7% of West German students were from working class families (by comparison, in England the figure was almost one in three).

Despite the APO’s inability to meet the challenges before it, one cannot deny that in just a few years it had thoroughly transformed West German society:

Among the consequences were the reform of education; a new Ostpolitik; the deconstruction of the authoritarian patriarchal relations in the family, school, factory and public service; the development of state planning in the economy; a greater integration of women into professional life and a reform in sexual legislation… the APO also provided the impetus to a socio-cultural break with the past. There was a very rapid change in social outlook and behavior patterns. The old ascetic behavior based on the notion of duty came to an end. Along with a different conception of social roles came a new set of sexual mores and a dissolution of the old respectful and subservient attitude towards the state and all forms of authority. There developed, in other words, a new culture which was to pave the way for the new social movements of the 1970s and 1980s.

3 - Taking up the Gun

As the APO foundered, the majority of those to the left of the SPD remained committed to legal, aboveground activism. Nevertheless, a section of the movement had begun testing the waters with another kind of praxis, and for the purposes of our study, it is to this that we will now turn.

The first experiments with armed struggle developed out of the counterculture, as individuals around the K.1 commune in West Berlin began carrying out firebombings and bank robberies. Coming from a milieu where drugs and anarchism mingled freely, these young radicals hung out in a scene known as “the Blues,” and would take on the purposefully ironic name of the “Central Committee of the Roaming Hash Rebels.” As Bommi Baumann later explained, with perhaps a tongue in his cheek:

Mao provided our theoretical basis: “On the Mentality of Roaming Bands of Rebels.” From the so-called robber-bands, he and Chu-Teh had created the first cadre of the Red Army. We took our direction from that. We directed our agitation to make the dopers, who were still partly unpolitical, conscious of their situation. What we did was mass work.

The Hash Rebels carried out actions under a number of different names, but became best known as the Tupamaros-West Berlin, after the urban guerillas in Uruguay. Initially, this antiauthoritarian, pre-guerilla tendency suffered from anti-intellectualism, unquestioned male chauvinism, and a lack of any coherent strategy. It has also been criticized for tolerating and engaging in antisemitism under cover of anti-Zionism, one of its first actions being to firebomb a cultural centre housed in a synagogue on the anniversary of a Nazi pogrom.

On the other hand, it did seem to enjoy an organic relationship with its base, such as that was.

As the APO fell apart and many of the Hash Rebels’ leading members were arrested or simply had a change of heart, what remained of this tendency would crystallize into a guerilla group known as the 2nd of June Movement (2JM—a reference to the date when Benno Ohnesorg had been killed in 1967). Rooted in West Berlin, this group eventually overcame many of its initial weaknesses while retaining an accessible and often humorous rhetorical style that resonated with many in the anarchist and sponti scenes throughout the country.

The second guerilla tendency, with which we are more directly concerned, brought together individuals who were peripheral to the countercultural milieu of the Hash Rebels, and of a somewhat more serious bent. As Bommi Baumann would later explain, they “formed at about the same time as we did, because they considered us totally crazy.” This second tendency was much more theoretically rigorous (or pretentious, to its critics), and heavily influenced not only by Marx, Lenin, and Mao, but also by New Left philosophers ranging from Nicos Poulantzas to the Frankfurt School.

A cartoon from the radical counterculture magazine Agit 883 shows a young man bearing a striking resemblence to Holger Meins (who was a member of the newspaper’s editorial collective) throwing an incendiary device of some sort out of a car. He gets busted because he forgot to change the car’s license plates, but luckily some of his friends are willing to vouch for him and the police are forced to release him, even though they know he did it.

This nascent Marxist-Leninist guerilla scene had its earliest manifestation in the firebombing of two Frankfurt department stores on April 3, 1968, one week before Rudi Dutschke was shot. Petrol bombs with rudimentary timing devices were left in both the Kaufhaus Schneider and Kaufhof buildings, bursting into flames just before midnight. The fires caused almost 700,000 dm ($224,000 U.S.) in damage, though nobody was hurt.

On April 5, Horst Söhnlein, Thorwald Proll, Gudrun Ensslin, and Andreas Baader, who had all traveled from West Berlin to carry out the action while attending an SDS conference, were arrested and charged with arson.

The four had taken few precautions to protect their identities and avoid arrest. They had issued no communiqué, and in retrospect, the action appears almost flippant in its execution. Indeed, some of those arrested initially denied their participation, and later tried to minimize it all, Baader claiming, “We had no intention of endangering human life or even starting a real fire.”

In court, the four had no united strategy; apparently without bitterness or recrimination, Baader and Ensslin at first tried to present a legal defense, and then switched to accepting full responsibility while insisting that Proll and Söhnlein were both completely innocent. For their part, these two did not deny their involvement, yet chose not to defend themselves, though Proll did offer an eloquent denunciation of the court and judicial system (see pages 66-78).

In the end, there was no denying that this was a political action, albeit an ill-defined one. In court, Ensslin explained that that the arson was “in protest against people’s indifference to the murder of the Vietnamese,” adding that “We have found that words are useless without action.”

Then, in a statement that could only be appreciated in retrospect, she told a television reporter, “We have said clearly enough that we did the wrong thing. But there’s no reason for us to discuss it with the law or the state. We must discuss it with people who think as we do.”

While the four were repudiated by the SDS, they were embraced by others for whom the step into illegality seemed both appropriate and timely. “They were like little media stars for the radical left,” Thorwald’s younger sister Astrid Proll would recall years later.

One of these admirers was Ulrike Meinhof, who had divorced konkret publisher Klaus Rainer Röhl and moved to West Berlin with their twin daughters in 1967. Meinhof visited Ensslin in prison, and would approvingly write about the case in her magazine column. “[T]he progressive moment of arson in a department store does not lie in the destruction of goods,” she opined, “but in the criminality of the act, the breaking of the law…”

Publicly, the arsonists’ friends from the K.1 commune declared their solidarity, Fritz Teufel paraphrasing Bertolt Brecht to the effect that “It’s always better to torch a department store than to run one.” Privately, however, they wondered at how clumsily the whole thing had been carried out, some even supposing that the four might suffer from some “psychic failure,” a subconscious desire to go to jail.

In October 1968, the four were each sentenced to three years in prison.

As the judge read out the verdict a familiar figure stood up: “This trial belongs before a student court,” Daniel Cohn-Bendit shouted, at which point the gallery erupted into pandemonium, spectators swarming the guards as two of the accused attempted to make a break for it. Three people, including Cohn-Bendit, were arrested as a result of this melee, and all four young arsonists remained in custody.

The next day, persons unknown lobbed three molotov cocktails into the Frankfurt courthouse. Again, no one was hurt.

The arsonists had been represented by Horst Mahler, whom the state failed to have disbarred just days after this defeat, in the hearings which would provoke the aforementioned Battle of Tegeler Weg. The four would not be able to participate in that historic rout of the West Berlin police: despite appealing their sentence, they remained imprisoned until June of 1969. Only then were they finally released on their own recognizance until such a time as the court finally reached its decision.

As the summer of 69 turned to fall and the court continued to deliberate, the newly released Ensslin, Baader, and Proll would busy themselves working in the “apprentices’ collectives” scene. These collectives consisted of young runaways from state homes, and were at the time the object of political campaigning from the disintegrating APO. As Astrid Proll would recall:

When Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin were released from custody they knew exactly what they wanted. Unlike the drugged “communards” they radiated great clarity and resolve… Gudrun and Andreas launched a big campaign in Frankfurt against the authoritarian regimes in young offender institutions. We lived with youths who had escaped from closed institutions, joined them in fighting for their rights, and managed to achieve some successes. Ulrike Meinhof, as a commited (sic), critical journalist, joined us and became friends with Gudrun and Andreas.

In November 1969, the court denied their appeal and ordered the four back to prison: only Söhnlein turned himself in. Ensslin and Baader went underground and set about establishing the contacts that would be necessary for a prolonged campaign of armed struggle. Thorwald Proll was soon abandoned—he was not considered serious enough— but his sister Astrid joined them.

Over the next months, the fugitives would cross into France and Italy and back to West Berlin again, laying the groundwork for the future organization. At this point, they resumed contact with their lawyer Horst Mahler, who was still facing criminal charges stemming from the April 1968 revolt. While enduring these legal battles, Mahler had himself been trying to set up a “militant group” in Berlin, and so joining forces with his former clients simply seemed like a wise strategic decision.

At the same time, the serious Marxist-Leninists considered—and rejected—the idea of joining forces with the anarchist guerilla groups that were coalescing within the Roaming Hash Rebels scene. The reasons for this decision to continue following separate paths are not clear-cut, and the consequences were more nuanced than might be expected. It is important to remember that many of the figures involved knew each other from the APO, in some cases were friends, and certainly would have had opinions about each other’s politics and personalities. It has been said that Dieter Kunzelmann, a prominent figure in the Hash Rebels scene, was wary of Baader claiming leadership. It has also been suggested that the RAF as a whole had a haughty manner, and was made up of middle-class students who didn’t fit in with the supposedly more proletarian 2JM.

While none of the guerillas have ever said as much, one cannot help but wonder what RAF members might have thought of the countercultural scene out of which the Hash Rebels had developed, specifically the sexual arrangements. The K.1 commune was not only famous for its brilliant agit prop, its radical cultural experiments, and its phenomenal drug consumption, but also for its iconic role in the sexual revolution which swept the Federal Republic in the years of the apo. At the same time as K.1’s sexual politics constituted a reaction to the oppressive conservatism of Christian Germany, it was also very much a macho scene built around the desires of key men involved. Polygamy was almost mandatory, and women were passed around between the “revolutionaries”—as one male communard put it, “It’s like training a horse; one guy has to break her in, then she’s available for everyone.” As Bommi Baumann would later admit regarding the Hash Rebels, “They were just pure oppressors of women; it can’t be put any other way.”

There were always many women playing central roles in the RAF. It is difficult to imagine Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, or Astrid Proll putting up with the kind of sexist libertinage which has been documented in the West Berlin anarchist scene. Indeed, during her own period in the wild depths of the counterculture, Proll had not gone to K.1 but had chosen to live in a women’s only commune, helping to form a short-lived female version of the Hash Rebels, the Militant Black Panther Aunties.

These various explanations, however, are not only difficult to evaluate, they also risk obscuring the fact that cooperation between the anarchist guerilla scene and the Marxist-Leninists would continue throughout the seventies, many members of the former eventually joining the RAF, while a few individuals continued to carry out operations with both organizations. Certainly, from what can be seen, a high level of coordination and solidarity existed between the groups at all times. While their supporters might occasionally engage in unpleasant disputes, the actual fighters seem to have maintained good relations even as they traveled their different roads.

Ultimately, in the early 80s, the 2nd of June Movement would publicly announce that it was joining the RAF en masse. This provided the opportunity for some 2JM political prisoners who opposed the merger to give their own explanation as to why they had always chosen to fight separately. Although these observations were made over ten years later, they help shed light on relations in these early days:

The contradiction between the RAF and the 2nd of June at that time was the result of the different ways the groups had evolved: the 2nd of June Movement out of their members’ social scene and the RAF on the basis of their theoretical revolutionary model. And, equally, as a result of the RAF’s centralized organizational model on the one hand, and our autonomous, decentralized structures on the other. Another point of conflict was to be found in the question of the cadre going underground, which the RAF insisted on as a point of principle.

As such, the immediate forerunners to the 2nd of June Movement were always open to a practical—proletarian—alternative; an alternative that had nothing to do with competition, but more to do with different visions of the revolutionary struggle.

There was strong mutual support and common actions in the early period of both groups… At the time both groups proceeded with the idea that the future would determine which political vision would prove effective in the long run.

So, during this germinal period, friendly contacts were maintained even as differences were clarified between the various activists who were choosing to take the next step in the struggle.

For shelter and support, those who were underground became dependent on the goodwill and loyalty of friends and allies who maintained a legal existence. One of those who occasionally sheltered Baader and Ensslin was Ulrike Meinhof, who was already feeling that their commitment and sense of purpose contrasted sharply with what she experienced as her own increasingly hollow existence as a middle class media star, albeit one with “notorious” left-wing politics. At the same time, Meinhof continued to work with young people in closed institutions, specifically girls in reform school, with whom she began producing a television docudrama.

While Meinhof eventually became world famous for what she did next in life, it is worth emphasizing that her time as a journalist was far from insignificant. As her biographer Jutta Ditfurth has argued:

With her columns, and above all with the radio features about things like industrial labor and reform school children, Meinhof had an enormous influence on the thinking of many people. Much more than she realized. She took on themes that only exploded into view years later. For instance, the women’s question. When women in the SDS defended themselves from macho guys, they did it with words and sentences from Meinhof’s articles. She could formulate things succinctly.

Baader was captured in West Berlin on April 3, 1970, set up by a police informant. Peter Urbach had been active around the commune scene for years, all the while secretly acting on behalf of the state. He was particularly “close” to the K.1 commune, and had known Baader since at least 1967. While the bombs and guns Urbach supplied to young rebels never seemed to work, the hard drugs he provided did their job nicely, showing that even as theories of the “liberating” effects of narcotics were being touted in the scene, the state knew on which side its bread was buttered.

While it has always been stressed that there were neither hierarchies nor favorites amongst the various combatants, Baader seemed to bring with him a sense of daring and possibility which would always make him first amongst equals, for better or for worse. As such, following his capture, all attention was focused on how he could be freed from the state’s clutches.

A plan was hatched, whereby Meinhof would use her press credentials to apply for permission to work with Baader on a book about youth centers, an area in which by now they both had some experience. The prison authorities reluctantly agreed, and on May 14 Baader was escorted under guard to meet her at the Institute for Social Issues Library in the West Berlin suburbs.

This provided the necessary opportunity. Once Baader and Meinhof were in the library, two young women entered the building: Irene Goergens, a teenager who Meinhof had recruited from her work with reform school kids, and Ingrid Schubert, a radical doctor from the West Berlin scene. They were followed by a masked and armed Gudrun Ensslin, and an armed man. Drawing their weapons, these rescuers moved to free Baader. When an elderly librarian, Georg Linke, attempted to intervene, he was shot in his liver. The guards drew their weapons and opened fire, missing everyone, and all six jumped out of the library window and into the getaway car waiting on the street below.

Barely a month after his arrest, Baader was once again free.

The library breakout made headlines around the world, both Meinhof and Ensslin being identified as likely participants. Journalists tried to outdo each other in their sensationalist tripe, describing the one as a middle class poseur and the other as a former porn actress. Headlines continued to be made when a neofascist arms dealer, Günther Voigt, was arrested and charged with selling the guerilla their guns. Then, French journalist Michele Ray declared that she had met with Mahler, Meinhof, Ensslin, and Baader in West Berlin—she promptly sold the extensive interviews she had taped to Spiegel.

The group had made an impression. Its first action had struck a chord. Yet this was very much a mixed blessing, as Astrid Proll, who had driven the getaway car during the jailbreak, would later explain:

I think we were all very nervous; I remember some people throwing up. Because we weren’t so wonderful criminals, we weren’t so wonderful with the guns, we sort of involved a socalled criminal who could do it so much better than we, and… he was so nervous that he shot somebody. He didn’t kill him, but he shot him very very badly, and that was really really very bad for the whole start of it.

As she elaborated elsewhere:

After a man had been severely hurt… we found ourselves on wanted lists. It was an accident that accelerated the development of the underground life of the group. Ulrike Meinhof, who had so far been at the fringes of the group, was all of a sudden wanted on every single billpost for attempted murder against a reward of dm 10,000… When we were underground there were no more discussions, there was only action.

In what would be a recurrent phenomenon, the state made use of the media frenzy around the prison-break to help push through new repressive legislation—in this case the so-called “Hand Grenade Law,” by which West Berlin police were equipped with hand grenades, semiautomatic revolvers, and submachine guns.

This was all hotly debated on the left, prompting the fugitives to send a letter to the radical newspaper 883, in which they explained (somewhat defensively) the action and their future plans. At the insistence of the radical former film student Holger Meins who was working at 883 at the time and who would later himself become a leading figure in the RAF, the newspaper published the statement, making it the first public document from the guerilla. (Even without Meins’ support, it would have been odd for 883 to not publish the text: Baader, Meinhof, Mahler, and Ensslin had all formerly served in the editorial collective, as had several other individuals who would go on to join the guerilla.)

The Red Army Faction had been born.

The next year was spent acquiring technical skills, including a trip to Jordan where more than a dozen of the aspiring German guerillas received training from the PLO. While this first trip may not have had great significance for the group, given the subsequent importance of its connection with certain Palestinian organizations, it may be useful to examine the context in which it occurred.

At the time, Jordan contained a very large Palestinian refugee population, one which had swollen since the 1967 Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip; by 1970, the Palestinians constituted roughly 1,000,000 of the country’s total population of 2,299,000

Based in the refugee camps, the PLO managed to constitute itself as a virtual parallel state within the country. Indeed, many considered that revolution in Jordan could be one step towards the defeat of Israel, an idea expressed by the slogan, “The road to Tel Aviv lies through Amman”—a sentiment which worried King Hussein, to say the least— as did the increasing use of Jordanian territory as a rear base area for all manner of Palestinian radical organizations.

In September 1970, the left-wing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine skyjacked three western aircRAFt, landing them in Dawson’s Field, a remote desert airstrip in Jordan. This provided Hussein with the excuse he needed, and the PLO soon came under attack from the monarch’s armed forces, supported by Israel. By the time a truce was brokered, between 4,000 and 10,000—Yassir ARAFat would claim as many as 20,000—Palestinians had been killed, including many noncombatants. (This would be remembered as “Black September,” and it was in memory of this massacre that the PLO’s unofficial guerilla wing would adopt that name.)

Prior to this, the Palestinians’ Jordanian bases were important sources of inspiration and education for revolutionaries, not only in the Arab world, but also in many European countries. While the largest number of visitors came from Turkey—many of whom would stay and fight alongside the Palestinians—there were also Maoists, socialists, and aspiring guerillas from France, Denmark, Sweden, and, of course, West Germany. (It would be claimed that members of the Roaming Hash Rebels scene had already received training from the Palestinians, and Baumann has pointed to this as a turning point in its transformation into a guerilla underground.)

Even during their Middle Eastern sojourn, the RAF continued to make headlines in Germany, Horst Mahler sending a photo of himself waving a gun and dressed like a fedayeen to a radical newspaper with the message, “Best wishes to your readers from the land of A Thousand and One Nights!”

Juvenile theatrics aside, this trip signaled the very public beginning of an aspect of the RAF which would bedevil the police, namely, their proficient use of foreign countries as rear base areas. As has been discussed elsewhere:

Rear base areas are little discussed, but essential to guerillas. This is something precise: a large area or territory, bordering on the main battle zone, where the other side cannot freely operate. Either for reasons of remoteness or impenetrable mountain ranges, or because it crosses political boundaries.

The RAF would make extensive use of various Arab countries as rear base areas throughout their existence, places where one could go not only to train, but also to hide when Europe got too “hot.” During the 1970s at least, it does not seem to have been the governments of these countries which provided the group with aid and succor, but rather various revolutionary Palestinian organizations which were deeply rooted in the refugee populations throughout the region. In this way, in the years following the Palestinians’ defeat at the hands of Jordan’s armed forces in 1970, Lebanon and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen emerged as homes away from home for more than one West German revolutionary.

Another source of foreign support, of course, was the “communist” German Democratic Republic—East Germany—from which the RAF and other guerilla groups would receive various forms of assistance over the years. As far as the RAF is concerned, it is unclear exactly how or when this relationship began. Certainly if it existed in the early seventies, this was very secret, and indeed unimagined on the radical left, for which the “other” German state remained a corrupt and authoritarian regime, alternately “Stalinist” or “revisionist,” but in any case one from which little good could come.

And yet it is known that, as early as 1970, the GDR did choose to knowingly allow the guerilla to pass through its territory, for instance on flights to and from the Middle East. After the first trip to Jordan, it even detained one member—Hans-Jürgen Bäcker—and questioned him about the underground for twenty-four hours, but then released him. Clearly, by the end of the decade, this policy had been extended to provide other sorts of assistance. It has also been claimed that even at the time of the 1970 training expedition, there were plans to relocate Meinhof’s twin daughters to East Germany if their father won custody away from her sister.

Given the unpopularity of the GDR, why was this aid accepted, and what effects did it have on the RAF?

The answer to the first of these questions is easy enough to guess: at first, East German “aid” seems to have been very limited in scope, really little more than turning a blind eye to what was going on. Who could complain about that?

Eventually, as we will see, more substantial favors would be forthcoming: shelter, training, even new identities—and yet, for most of its history, there is absolutely no indication that the RAF was choosing its targets or formulating its ideology to please foreign patrons. This would become more debatable near the end, but certainly in the 1970s, the RAF-Stasi connection seems to have been casual if not ephemeral.

At most, one might perhaps argue a case of the GDR egging the guerilla on as a way to get at the Americans, in the context of the ongoing conflagration in Vietnam.

Certainly, throughout the 1970s, the Palestinian connection was of far greater importance, and yet the guerilla’s first visit to the Middle East ended on an unpromising note: according to several reports, the West Germans were far from ideal guests, and the Palestinians eventually sent them on their way.

They returned to West Berlin—via the GDR—as the summer of 1970 came to an end.

The group now set about obtaining cars and locating safehouses. New contacts were made, and new members were recruited, among them Ilse Stachowiak, Ali Jansen, Uli Scholze, Beate Sturm, Holger Meins, and Jan-Carl Raspe, this last being an old friend of Meinhof’s, and himself a founding member of Kommune 2. Some of these individuals would soon think better of their decision and drop out at the first opportunity, others would determine the very course of the RAF, and in some cases give their lives in the struggle.

But first, the young guerilla needed to acquire funds, and to this end a daring combination of bank raids was planned in cooperation with members of the Roaming Hash Rebels scene. Within ten minutes, on September 29, three different West Berlin banks were hit: the revolutionaries managed to make off with over 220,000dm (just over $60,000) without firing a shot or suffering a single arrest. As Horst Mahler’s former legal assistant Monika Berberich, who had herself joined the RAF, would later explain, “It was not about redistributing wealth, it was about getting money, and we weren’t going to mug grannies in the streets.”

The “triple coup” was a smashing success. Things were looking good.

Then, on October 8, police received an anonymous tip about two safehouses in West Berlin: Mahler and Berberich, as well as Ingrid Schubert, Irene Goergens, and Brigitte Asdonk, were all arrested. (It was suspected that Hans-Jürgen Bäcker had snitched to the police. He was confronted and denied the charge, but quickly parted ways with the guerilla. The fact that he was left unmolested should be taken into account when evaluating later claims that the RAF executed suspected traitors or those who wished to leave its ranks.)

Following these arrests, the RAF moved to transfer operations outside of West Berlin, and members of the group began crossing over into West Germany proper. During this period, the fledgling guerilla burglarized the town halls of two small towns, taking blank id cards, passports, and official stamps for use in future operations.

On December 20, Karl-Heinz Ruhland and RAF members Ali Jansen and Beate Sturm were stopped by police in Oberhausen. Ruhland, who was only peripheral to the group, surrendered while Jansen and Sturm made their getaway. The next day Jansen was arrested along with RAF member Uli Scholze while trying to steal a Mercedes-Benz. (Sturm soon left the guerilla, as did Scholze when he was released one day after his capture. Ruhland cooperated with police, helping to reveal the location of safehouses and testifying in court against RAF members. Jansen received a ten year sentence for shooting at police.)

On February 10, 1971, Astrid Proll was spotted by Frankfurt police along with fellow RAF member Manfred Grashof. The police opened fire in a clear attempt to kill the two as they fled; luckily, they missed. Subsequently, the cops involved would claim that they had shot in self-defense, yet unbeknownst to them the entire scene had been observed by the Verfassungsschutz, who filed a report detailing how neither of the guerillas had even drawn their weapons. This fact would remain suppressed by the state for years.

The alleged “firefight” with Proll and Grashof was added to a growing list of propaganda stories used by the police to justify a massive nationwide search, with Federal Minister of the Interior Hans-Dietrich Genscher publicly declaring the RAF to be “Public Enemy Number One.” Apartments were raided in Gelsenkirchen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Bremen, yet the guerilla managed to elude capture.

Meanwhile, the trial of Horst Mahler, Ingrid Schubert, and Irene Goergens opened in West Berlin on March 1. Schubert and Goergens were charged with attempted murder and using force in the Baader jailbreak, while Mahler (who had arranged to be in court during the action, and so had an alibi) was charged as an accessory, and with illegal possession of a firearm.

This first RAF trial would set the tone for twenty years of collusion between the media, the police, and shadowy elements intent on presenting the guerilla in the most horrific light. The term “psychological warfare” was eventually adopted by the left to describe the phenomenon.

Already in February, police had announced that the RAF had plans to kidnap Chancellor Willy Brandt in order to force the state to release Mahler. The guerilla would subsequently deny this charge, claiming it was intended to make them look like “political idiots.”

Then, on February 25, a seven-year-old boy was kidnapped. Newspapers announced that his captors were demanding close to $50,000 ransom as well as the release of “the left-wing lawyer in Berlin,” which journalists quickly explained must be a reference to Mahler.

Clearly horrified, Mahler made a public appeal to the kidnappers to release the child. At the same time the provincial government of North Rhine-Westphalia agreed to pay the ransom—the boy was from a working class family that could not afford such a sum.

Arrangements were made, a well-known lawyer agreeing to act as the go between. The money was delivered on Saturday February 27 and a young Michael Luhmer was released in the woods outside Munich, suffering from influenza but otherwise unharmed. According to the lawyer who personally delivered the money to the kidnappers, they denied being in the least bit interested in Mahler or anyone else from the RAF. Indeed, he came away with the impression that they were in fact “a rightist group like the Nazi party.” Police later announced that they suspected the son of a former SS officer of being involved in the plot.

This first kidnapping occurred just as Mahler, Schubert, and Goergens were about to go on trial. This is what could be called a “false flag” action, a term referring to an attack carried out by certain parties under the banner of another group to which they are hostile in order to discredit them. As we shall see, false flag attacks were to plague the RAF throughout the 1970s, as all manner of antisocial crimes would be carried out or threatened by persons pretending to be from the guerilla.

The RAF repeatedly denied its involvement in these actions, and yet the slander often stuck.

Doubly vexing is the fact that in most of these false flag actions, no firm evidence has ever come to light proving who in fact was responsible. Suspicions have ranged from some secret service working for the state, or for NATO, or else perhaps neofascists, or some combination thereof. Or perhaps these were “normal” criminal acts, and it was the media or police who were fabricating details to tie them to the RAF.

Judging from experiences elsewhere in Europe, it is entirely possible that elements within the state, within NATO, and within the far right collaborated in some of these attacks. Such scenarios are known, for instance, to have played themselves out in France, Italy, and Turkey. The goal for such operations was generally not simply to discredit the left-wing guerilla, but rather to create a general climate of fear in which people would rally to the hard right.

In most cases, we may never know, but amazingly enough, there was a second false flag kidnapping during the first RAF trial, and the authors of this second crime actually ended up admitting the ruse.

On Sunday April 25, newspapers reported that a university professor and his friend had been kidnapped by the guerilla, which was threatening to execute them if Mahler, Schubert, and Goergens were not released. The kidnappers were allegedly demanding that the three be allowed to travel to a country of their choosing, and insisted that this be announced on television.

Two days later, the men were found, one of them tied to a tree. The kidnappers, however, were nowhere in sight. After some questioning, the “captives” broke down and admitted that they had staged the entire thing in the hopes of scaring people into voting against the “left-wing” SPD in the provincial elections in Schleswig-Holstein. The mastermind behind this plan, Jürgen Rieger, was active in neofascist circles; he would eventually be sentenced to six months in prison as a result.

As a corollary to these staged actions, the police were happy to oblige by setting the scene at the trial itself:

The criminal court in the Moabit prison had been transformed into a fortress for the trial. There were policemen armed with submachine guns patrolling the corridors, the entrances and exits; outside the building stood vehicles with their engines running and carrying teams of men, there were officers carrying radio equipment, and more units waited in the inner courtyard to go into action if needed.

Far-right hoaxes were helping to justify shocking levels of police militarization and repression. One did not need to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist to think that the state was more than willing to play dirty in order to get rid of its new armed opponents and that the talk of a “fascist drift” was more than mere rhetoric.

Not that the radical left was unwilling to fight for the captured combatants, though kidnapping innocent children or academics would never feature amongst its strategies. When kidnappings would eventually be carried out, the targets would always be important members of the establishment, men with personal ties to the system against which the guerilla fought.

In 1971, however, nobody was in a position to carry out such operations, and so the struggle for the prisoners’ freedom took place largely in the streets. As the trial wrapped up, rioting broke out for two days in West Berlin: “youths blocked tRAFfic, and smashed store and car windows,” all the while shouting slogans like “Free Mahler!” and “Hands off Mahler!”

Clearly, although its capacities were not yet developed, a section of the left was willing to carry out militant actions in support of the guerilla, while itself preferring to remain aboveground.

In late May, after twenty-two days in court, the verdicts came down. Goergens was sentenced to four years youth custody, and Schubert received a six-year sentence.

It should be noted that both women would soon have additional years tacked on, as they also faced charges relating to various bank robberies.

Throughout the trial, other combatants had been picked up by the state.

On April 12, 1971, Ilse Stachowiak was recognized by a policeman and arrested in Frankfurt. Known by her nickname “Tinny,” Stachowiak was probably the youngest member of the guerilla, having joined in 1970 at the age of sixteen.

The next day, Rolf Heissler was arrested trying to rob a bank in Munich. Heissler had previously been active in the Munich Tupamaros (a Bavarian group inspired by the West Berlin Tupamaros), but had followed his ex-wife Brigitte Mohnhaupt into the RAF.

Then, on May 6, not three months after her narrow escape in Frankfurt, Astrid Proll was recognized in Hamburg by a gas station attendant who called the police—she tried to escape by car, but was surrounded by armed cops and arrested.

Two documents appeared about this time, each allegedly produced by the RAF. The first of these, Regarding the Armed Struggle in West Europe, was published under the innocent title “New TRAFfic Regulations” by the radical West Berlin publishing house of Klaus Wagenbach. Not only did this lead to Wagenbach receiving a suspended nine-month sentence under §129 —the catch-all “supporting a criminal organization” paragraph of the Orwellian 1951 security legislation— but the document was quickly disavowed by the RAF itself: it had been written by Mahler in prison, without consultation with any of the others, and did not sit well with the rest of the group.

While Mahler would remain in the RAF for the time being, this was the first visible sign of an ongoing process of estrangement between the former attorney and the rest of the guerilla.

Almost at the same time as Mahler’s document began to circulate, a second text, one which enjoyed the approval of the entire RAF, was released. On May 1, at the annual May Day demonstrations, supporters distributed what became known as the RAF’s foundational manifesto, emblazoned with a red star and a Kalashnikov submachine gun: The Urban Guerilla Concept. This text was widely reprinted, not only in radical publications like 883, but in the mainstream Spiegel, the result of a deal whereby the liberal weekly agreed to “donate” 20,000 dm to youth shelters.

Faced With This Justice System, We Can't Be Bothered Defending Ourselves

This was Thorwald Proll’s closing statement in the Frankfurt Department Store Firebombing Trial. (M. & S.)

The trial for conspiracy to commit arson followed the trial for committing arson. But that’s obviously another question. Justice is the justice of the ruling class. Faced with a justice system that speaks in the name of the ruling class—and speaks dishonestly—we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that forced a student couple underground by using laws regarding breach of the public peace and causing a disturbance from the year 1870/71 to sentence them to 12 months without parole, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves (breachers of the public peace, torch their ramshackle peace).

Faced with a justice system that uses laws from 1870/71 and then talks about what’s right—and speaks dishonestly—we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that gave Daniel Cohn-Bendit (lex Benda, lex Bendit) an 8-month suspended sentence for jumping over a security fence, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that, on the other hand, only pursued most Nazi trials in order to ease their own guilty right-wing conscience, trials in which they charge anyone that swore the Führer Oath as a criminal, an act which the entire justice system quite willingly engaged in itself in 1933; faced with a justice system like that, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Faced with a justice system that prosecutes the minor murderers of Jews and lets the major murderers of Jews run around free, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that in 1933 shamelessly plunged into fascism and in 1945 just as shamelessly deserted it, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Furthermore, faced with a justice system that already in the Weimar Republic always sentenced leftists more heavily (Ernst Niekisch, Ernst Toller) than right wingers (Adolf Hitler), that rewarded the murderers of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (and in so doing became complicit in their deaths), we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Comrades, we want to take a moment to remember Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht—stand up!—the eye of the law sits in this court.

Faced with a justice system that never dismantled its authoritarian structure, but constantly renews it, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that says might makes right and might comes before right (might is always right), we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. All power to freedom! Faced with a justice system that defends property and possessions better than it does human beings, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that is an instrument of social order, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Faced with a justice system that makes laws against the people rather than for them, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Human rights only for the right humans (the state that leans to the right). Right is what the state does, and it’s always right. The state is the only criminal activity allowed. In a capitalist democracy such as this, in an indirect democracy such as this, it is possible for anyone to end up ruling over anyone, and that’s how it should stay, and don’t ask for how much longer. The ruling morality is bourgeois morality, and bourgeois morality is immoral. Bourgeois morality is and will remain immoral. If it is reformed, it will only result in a new form of immorality (and nothing more). Faced with a justice system that undermines the ethical underpinnings of the people (whatever they may be), we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. This state prosecutor is nothing more than a piece of the criminal justice system. He requested 6 years of prison time.

Furthermore, faced with a justice system that says it represents the people, but means that it represents the ruling class, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that works to assure the ongoing reproduction of existing relationships, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system for which the (so-called) criminal class is and will remain the criminal class, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. What does return to society mean? Back to which society? Back to the capitalist society where you will have the opportunity to re-offend? Back to the bourgeois, capitalist society that is itself a prison, which amounts to going from one hole to another

Every reform to criminal law only reforms the existing criminal injustice; criminal law is criminal injustice; the sentence is the injustice. I wouldn’t again offend against society, if they didn’t give me another reason to do so. How am I supposed to return changed to an unchanged society, and so on, and so forth. It is not the laws that need to be changed; it’s the society that must be changed. We want a socialist society. Faced with a justice system that plays homage to an abstract concept of law (Roman law is Bohemian law) and does not see individuals as the result of their society, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that treats defendants as second-class citizens, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Furthermore, faced with a justice system that is a system of the ruling class, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. (And furthermore) faced with a justice system that doesn’t reduce delinquency, but creates ever more of it (guilty verdicts and acquittals), we can’t be bothered defending ourselves (the outcome can only serve their interests). In an authoritarian democracy like this one, it can never amount to more than an assessment of guilt or innocence. The judge sentences the individual, not the society and not himself. What’s the magic word? The magic word is power, and it means the death of freedom! What do we have here that does not come from Nietzsche, that sociopath? For example, the will to power. You should think about power, but do not think that power thinks about disempowering itself at some point; ergo: destroy power (the question of power, the power of the question). Faced with a justice system that wants power and not freedom, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves (what freedom do you mean—bourgeois freedom is servitude, and socialist freedom is a long way off).

Furthermore, faced with a justice system that seeks to criminalize Kommune 1 and has persecuted them with an endless series of trials, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Such a justice system should itself be put on trial. Faced with a justice system that seeks to criminalize a section of the SDS, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. How can the public peace of 1870/71 be broken in 1967/68? Yet again: torch this ramshackle peace!

Furthermore, faced with a justice system with a concept of law—a deceitful concept—that is shaped by the opinions of the ruling class (already the case with Franz von Liszt in 1882) we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Furthermore, faced with a justice system that doesn’t see crime as a social phenomenon and which passes sentences that serve no social function (Franz von Liszt), we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system that speaks of punishment— meaning oppression, meaning repression—helping the offender, while in fact defending bourgeois society, always defending it, defending it to the end; faced with such a justice system, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Quotes from the first draft of the reforms to the criminal code: “The bitter necessity of punishment.” “Responsibility lies with the law breakers” (and not the representatives of the law), “given the flawed nature of people” (and so it will remain in a capitalist society such as this, in which antiauthoritarian structures that promote perfection don’t exist and there are no examples of moral perfection—the principle of guilt, which guarantees the continuation of the principle of punishment, lives on, spelling the death of freedom and assuring the integrity of power). Another quote from the first draft of the criminal law reforms (this will be the last one): “(W)hat the principle of punishment presupposes is a virtually unchallenged standard of criminal law, etc., etc.” When will this stop?

Faced with a justice system that holds that the irrational standards of criminal law and criminology are appropriate, that denies the reality of the capitalist social order, that denies and suppresses psychology and the study of crime in a particularly nauseating way, constantly impeding them, that treats criminology as a science of social relationships; faced with such a justice system, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Furthermore, faced with a justice system that represents the law of the ruling class—represents duplicity—we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Furthermore, bourgeois morality is and remains immoral, and if reformed, it is only as a new immorality. All attempts at reform are pointless, because they are inherent to the system. We demand the resignation of Minister of Justice Heinemann (also a pointless demand). Where is the judge who will turn his back on this crap and join the general strike, instead of remaining eternally stuck up to his armpits in this shit? Where are the antiauthoritarian judges? I can’t see them. This is your chance, Herr Zoebe, to be the first. I wrote that before I knew you. Later, you responded to the word democracy like it was leprosy, which is to say, you shrunk away from the concept. And for you, resocialization sends you into a rage; it’s the final blow. And for you it should be the final blow. Always: the final blow.

Faced with a justice system that has completely authoritarian judges, like the judge Schwalbe, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves (but one Schwalbe doesn’t make for an authoritarian summer). Faced with a justice system that has judges like the judge in Hamburg, who on August 15 of this year, following a 2½ minute hearing, sentenced a young worker to 4 months with the possibility of parole, beginning at Easter, with the comment that the young worker should be happy —in spite of the brevity of the hearing—that he was given a chance to clarify his political motivations, and then went on to tell this young worker that he should stop worrying about things that don’t concern him; faced with a justice system that is made up of such judges, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Yet again: torch this ramshackle peace.

Faced with a justice system that has judges like those that presided over the Timo Rinnelt trial, once more extending the reach of the German billy club, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

And finally, faced with a justice system that has judges like the judge presiding in the case against Jürgen Bartsch, who was sentenced to life imprisonment on the grounds that if he had wanted to he could have struggled to control his abnormal appetites (whatever that means), with the judge saying in conclusion, “And may God help you to learn to control you appetites”—so God and not society—and for such a judge it would be preferable if he had never been born or had died long ago; faced with such a justice system, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

It has been said that the trial of Jürgen Bartsch was the trial of the century. It was actually a trial against this century, and the sentence spoke for this century, which is to say, it spoke for the morality of the preceding century (it will only get worse), which in this trial was celebrated as a barbaric triumph. When the judgment was read, the spectators, a petit bourgeois gathering, clapped and cheered. Nobody forbid that. The teeth of justice were chattering, but nobody heard that. Child murderers are useful. They eliminate all consciousness that criminals were once themselves children (the authoritarian upbringing). A hundred children of West German families are beaten to death every year. Beaten to death. Child murderers work to ease our conscience about this slaughter. And what of the daily murder of children in Vietnam (with its breathtaking body-count)? What do respectable people pray for? Today we get our daily ration of murder (The Springer papers are the centerpiece of every breakfast).

Furthermore, bourgeois morality is the ruling morality, and bourgeois morality is immoral. Faced with a justice system that has state prosecutors like state prosecutor Griebel, who told me “under four eyes” that he holds Marx’s teachings in the highest regard (but what does he do about it?), that he is as much a prisoner of a labyrinthine bureaucracy as I (but what does he do against it?). He accuses the left here of only wanting to change superficial things, but nothing beyond that (but he bears the mark of Cain of repression on his forehead), and he had the effrontery to bare his broken bourgeois heart to me, saying that on the one hand he is troubled by the rigidity of the ruling conditions, while on the other—how grotesque—he continued to speak of the legitimacy of the laws of 1870/71—speaking deceptively—faced with such a justice system, I can’t be bothered defending myself, and we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Imprison the state prosecutors. Where is the state prosecutor who will indict the state?

Faced with a justice system that is charging us with life-threatening arson, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Faced with a justice system, in the eyes of which, we have every reason to believe, we are politically tainted from the outset, we cannot defend ourselves (all the charged are arsonists and all judges are honest men). Yet again: torch this ramshackle peace.

And furthermore, faced with a justice system that speaks for the ruling class—and speaks deceptively—we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Faced with a justice system with custodial judges as authoritarian as judge Kappel, who gave every impression of being convinced of the guilt (whatever that is) of all of the accused before the trial even started. Amongst other things, his macho aggressiveness is such that he said to me, “Take your hand out of your pocket.” When I put my other hand in my pocket (obviously not the same one), he didn’t say anything, he just laughed, and my laughter caught in my throat at the thought that he and I could ever laugh at the same thing for the same reason—a question of consciousness. Faced with such a justice system, I can’t be bothered defending myself, and we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Faced with such a decadent justice system, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves (a legal right is only what is right legally). Faced with a justice system that grotesquely misuses detention, I can’t be bothered defending myself. If you have a fixed address, the justice system holds on to you until you lose it, which is to say, until you’re tossed out. Then the justice system says, “Ah, you don’t have one. In any event, if you’re released you will no longer have one. That essentially makes you a flight risk.” Faced with a justice system that grotesquely abuses preventive detention, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. In this way they reveal the abyss that is the justice system. If you have a fixed address, the police make sure you lose it, so they can take you into custody. It happened to August Klee, who like me has been held in detention for some months now. While all of this has not been enough to convince me that life is a theatrical drama, I do believe that the remand centre can be. When Klee was detained in this way, the police assured him that it was not the first time they had done this; making the criminal police potential criminals.

Risk of flight always offers the necessary excuse. For instance, August Klee is also classified a flight risk because his closest relatives, first and foremost among them his wife, live outside of Germany. He must divorce her (what’s that about?) if he wants to get out. On the other hand, if you live in Germany, but do not live with your wife (what’s that about?), if you have no family ties (because you’re not chained to that structure), then you’re a flight risk. If you lived outside the country 40 years ago, you’re a flight risk. If you’ve recently come back from a trip (and not from some crappy tourist trip), in that case you’re a flight risk. If you’re a foreigner, then you’re a flight risk. (I can recite all of this by heart). If there is a mix-up of some sort in your arrest, as occurred recently on Hammelsgasse (bourgeois freedom is a Hammelsgasse ), there’s no need for concern, phony paperwork will be prepared. Here the danger is that one will be silenced.

Following conviction, it may be the case that you will be released for good behavior. He, however, has been refused this, because he has behaved so well that he has become institutionalized, and will surely be unable to find his bearings on the outside. He must remain inside until the end. This is an example of the risk of unadorned reconstruction. If you happen to be an arsonist, there is the danger of evidence being suppressed, etc.; faced with such a justice system, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

Faced with a justice system that supports a prison system that attacks and violates the personal freedom and dignity of 365 people every second—first the attack, then the violation—we can’t be bothered defending ourselves.

What is permissible and what is not permissible in remand: prisoners in remand are permitted to do what the justice system—acting as administrators—permits them to do. You are not permitted to be afraid. You are not permitted to lie around in bed, but you can lie under the bed. You are not permitted to play ping-pong with multiple balls; you are only permitted one ball. You are not permitted to refuse dinner; you are not permitted to show any kind of defiance. As a revolutionary socialist, you can never show defiance.

A rate of 1.23 dm per day is designated for meals (what a fantastic amount). You are not permitted to throw your dinner in the guard’s face, or he’s not responsible for what happens next. The guards are prisoners just like you, and most of them know it. The guards are only the little warlords.

You are not permitted to smoke outside of your cell, only in it. You are permitted to experience the hell of it all inside your cell. You are not permitted to light fires, because you can’t use the fire alarm, because you can’t reach it, because you can’t leave your cell, because the door is locked.

You are not permitted to take the opportunity to engage in discussion with the other prisoners, the so-called criminals, whatever might come out of it. Let’s be perfectly clear, they are staple products of the capitalist social order. You need to be clear about this.

Furthermore, you are not permitted to hang anything on the walls, but you are permitted to hang up the memo that tells you that you are not permitted to hang anything on the walls. You are not permitted to loiter. You are not permitted to lean against the wall. You are not permitted to just hang around. You should spend every day formulating a more thorough understanding of the justice system.

If you go to see the minister, don’t forget it’s just a crutch. Don’t go to church; God is dead, but Che lives. Study the rudiments of socialism, and you will have everything you need.

You are only permitted a half-hour a day to walk. You are not permitted to yell out the window. You are not permitted to have as many comrades as you like. You are permitted to spend 35 dm per week. That’s how it goes in Hessen. And don’t forget, Hessen has the most liberal penal system. You are not permitted to drink as much coffee as you wish. You are not permitted to drink any alcohol. You are not permitted to smoke hash. You are not permitted to consume in the way you wish, and you are not permitted to consume what you wish, and all of that in a society based on consumption. Note that in prison consumption becomes a treat.

Correspondence is monitored. Sexual intercourse is not monitored, but then there’s not much of it. Adultery is not permitted (what’s that about?), but it is not permitted to consummate a marriage (what’s that about?). All of those in the hole who still cling onto bourgeois existence (woe be it to those who see no alternative), and that’s most of them, will be driven crazy by the bourgeois social order. That’s how it is. How, for instance, are they to maintain their marriages? They will all fail, and that’s good.

Every citizen should go to prison to gain a real understanding of the situation.

Every socialist should go to prison to gain a real understanding of the situation.

Every citizen should go to prison so that he develops a correct relationship to socialism.

Yet every individual capitalist or socialist has the opportunity to be the first to blow up a prison. Don’t read any of the Springer papers; burn them. Then blow Springer up.

You are not permitted to beat off or masturbate if that’s what you want to do. You can do what you want with your body. The duality of homosexuality exists. If new sexual laws are passed, will you still be permitted to fuck chicks; not to speak of other prisoners. In Butzbach penitentiary there was a flourishing trade in bras. Forced sodomy (what’s that all about?). Rape the guards that torment you.

You aren’t permitted to commit a break-in, but you are permitted to break out. Out of prison I mean. Attempted escape is not an indictable offense. You are not permitted to receive photos 1-3 from the Kommune 1 book, Klau Mich, because their obscene content is a threat to the moral order of the remand centre.

The way Glojne, alias Globne, the Regional Court Judge explained it to me in a letter—who asked?—you are not permitted to hang anything in your cell or hang yourself in the cell. You are not permitted to hide in your cell. Try it some time. You are not permitted to take anything from the library. You are not permitted to lose your mind. You are permitted to buy food and specialty items, as well as other items you require in keeping with a reasonable lifestyle. You are not permitted to violate these conditions. The administrators decide what reasonable means (each individual administrator in this mental asylum).

If for reasons of order they want to reduce the number of newspapers and magazines you receive, you must attempt to have them delivered to you by means of disorder—in the sense of antiauthoritarian order. You must pull them out of the guard’s hands, just as he pulled them out of yours. You have to try. You can’t give up without trying. If the warden addresses you with du, you must also address him with du. You mustn’t work—for 80 pfennig a day. You can’t let yourself be exploited. The justice system practices the most secretive, most efficient and most disgraceful exploitation possible. It fattens itself by using primitive capitalist techniques in a modern capitalist system. Grievances are pointless, particularly as you are not permitted to file common grievances. Grievances are suppressed at will. Grievances are pointless, because you must submit them to the ruling structure. Common dispositions are common dispositions, and solitary dispositions are solitary dispositions. You can’t give in to loneliness. You can’t lose the dialogue. You can’t lose the socialist dialogue. In prison you have nothing to lose and lose nothing. You have everything to win.

Note that the rights and responsibilities of remand prisoners mentioned here are an introduction to inequality and bondage; you’re a first class citizen, you’re a second class citizen, you’re a fourth class citizen, you’re a fifth class citizen, etc., and that’s what you’ll remain. You’re a criminal and that’s what you will remain. Conduct regarding the attendants: the prisoner must immediately disengage himself from the attendants; he must immediately disengage.

Life in the penal institution is one in which work time, free time, and quiet time are carefully divided, and the prisoner is bound to this division. Life in the penal institution is life in barracks. It consists of sitting around. Life in the penal institution is divided into time for oppression, time for bondage, and time of dead silence. The time of unconsciousness is over. The time for realism has begun. Bourgeois life is its own kind of remand. If you didn’t already know that, now you do. You are not permitted to live and you are not permitted to die; you are not permitted to die and you are not permitted to live. Exactly. You are not permitted to run amok in the house. You are not permitted, of your own free will, to leave your assigned place. You are not permitted to break out. You are not permitted to scream, yell, or speak out the window. You aren’t allowed to speak to your cellmates (what’s that about?). You are not permitted to threaten the security of the institution. You are not permitted to withhold, store, or use anything. You are not permitted to retain anything, etc.

You must do everything that you are not permitted to do, and you must not let your guard down. Always think about it. Send every state prosecutor to prison. You are not permitted to defend yourself. Never. Those who defend themselves incriminate themselves. Do forget that. You are not permitted to have unauthorized telephone contact. Your correspondence is monitored. Letters you send from prison cannot be sealed. You are not permitted to seal them yourself. You are not permitted to… You are not permitted to…

You cannot give in to fatigue. You cannot, at risk of retribution, pass parliamentary representative Güde in the street without pushing him around. He brings out the best in you. But beforehand you must paint your hand red. The left one, obviously.

Yet again (in the hole), you cannot give in to fatigue. Concentrate. You’re sitting in bourgeois capitalism’s concentration camp. Beyond that, the prisoner has a cell to keep clean. The most oppressive power in prison is the power of cleanliness. Cleaning is the major form of torture. You are not permitted to get dirty while cleaning things. Only clean up when it suits you. Otherwise you aren’t in prison; prison is in you. Keep in mind: the cleaner the cell, the more complete the hell. Furthermore, the prisoner and his seven suitcases and his cell can be searched at any time. When you are searched, ask them if they’re looking for new people, etc., etc.

I can’t continue talking about this. Faced with a justice system that has such an indescribable prison system, we can’t be bothered defending ourselves. Such a justice system must itself be indicted. Such a justice system must be exposed by the revolutionary process. It is the responsibility of every antiauthoritarian judge to take legal action against this justice system. We encourage the antiauthoritarian segment of the justice system to use its strength to call a general strike. We particularly encourage antiauthoritarian interns to call a general strike.

I declare my solidarity with Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader, although they have chosen to defend themselves here, which was obviously a decision that no one really understood. This solidarity will continue through the next period while they are in prison and the penitentiary. I have, in any event, every reason to do so. I declare my solidarity with Horst Söhnlein. And if I do so, although he chose not to defend himself, it is as much prollidarisch as it is in solidarity. And with that, I stop.

We declare our solidarity with all of the actions that the SDS has undertaken in response to the recent attempts to undermine their public support. We demand the abolition of judicial unaccountability, because they use their power to assure the rule of some people over other people

We demand the abolition of the power of some people over other people.

Workers of the world unite!

Venceremos!

Thorwald Proll

October 1968

Build the Red Army!

Comrades of 883,

It is pointless to explain the right thing to the wrong people. We’ve done enough of that. We don’t want to explain the action to free Baader to babbling intellectuals, to those who are freaked out, to know-it-alls, but rather to the potentially revolutionary section of the people. That is to say, to those who can immediately understand this action, because they are themselves prisoners. Those who want nothing to do with the blather of the “left,” because it remains without meaning or consequence. Those who are fed up!

The action to free Baader must be explained to youth from the Märkisch neighbourhood, to the girls from Eichenhof, Ollenhauer, and Heiligensee, to young people in group homes, in youth centers, in Grünen Haus, and in Kieferngrund.

To large families, to young workers and apprentices, to high school students, to families in neighborhoods that are being gentrified, to the workers at Siemens and AEG-Telefunken, at SEL and Osram, to the married women who, as well as doing the housework and raising the children, must do piecework—damn it.

They are the ones who must understand the action; those who receive no compensation for the exploitation they must suffer. Not in their standard of living, not in their consumption, not in the form of mortgages, not in the form of even limited credit, not in the form of midsize cars. Those who cannot even hope for these baubles, who are not seduced by all of that.

Those who have realized that the future promised to them by their teachers and professors and landlords and social workers and supervisors and foremen and union representatives and city councilors is nothing more than an empty lie, but who nonetheless fear the police. It is only necessary that they—and not the petit bourgeois intellectuals—understand that all of that is over now, that this is a start, that the liberation of Baader is only the beginning! That an end to police domination is in sight! It is to them that we want to say that we are building the red army, and it is their army. It is to them that we say, “It has begun.” They don’t pose stupid questions like, “Why right now precisely?” They have already traveled a thousand roads controlled by the authorities and managers—they’ve done the waiting room waltz; they remember the times when it worked and the times when it didn’t. And in conversations with sympathetic teachers, who are assigned to the remedial schools that don’t change anything, and the kindergartens that lack the necessary spaces—they don’t ask why now—damn it!

They certainly won’t listen to you, if you aren’t even able to distribute your newspaper before it is confiscated. Because you don’t need to shake up the left-wing shit eaters, but rather the objective left, you have to construct a distribution network that is out of the reach of the pigs.

Don’t complain that it’s too hard. The action to free Baader was hardly a walk in the park. If you understand what’s going on (and your comments indicate that you do understand, so it’s opportunism to say that the bullet also hit you in the stomach—you assholes), if you understand anything, you need to find a better way to organize your distribution. And we have no more to say to you about our methods than we do about our plans for action—you shitheads! As long as you allow yourselves to brought in by the cops, you aren’t in a position to be giving anyone else advice about how to avoid being brought in by the cops. What do you mean by adventurism? That one only has oneself to blame for informers. Whatever.

What does it mean to bring conflicts to a head? It means not allowing oneself to be taken out of action.

That’s why we’re building the red army. Behind the parents stand the teachers, the youth authorities, and the police. Behind the supervisor stands the boss, the personnel office, the workers compensation board, the welfare office, and the police. Behind the custodian stands the manager, the landlord, the bailiff, the eviction notice, and the police. With this comes the way that the pigs use censorship, layoffs, dismissals, along with bailiff’s seals and billy clubs. Obviously, they reach for their service revolvers, their teargas, their grenades, and their semi-automatic weapons; obviously, they escalate, if nothing else does the trick. Obviously, the GIs in Vietnam are trained in counterguerilla tactics and the Green Berets receive courses on torture. So what?

It’s clear that prison sentences for political activities have been made heavier. You must be clear that it is social democratic bullshit to act as if imperialism—with all its Neubauers and Westmorelands, with Bonn, the senate, Länder youth offices, borough councils, the whole pig circus—should be allowed to subvert, investigate, ambush, intimidate, and suppress without a fight. Be absolutely clear that the revolution is no Easter March. The pigs will certainly escalate their means as far as possible, but no further than that. To bring the conflict to a head, we are building the red army.

If the red army is not simultaneously built, then all conflict, all the political work carried out in the factories and in Wedding and in the Märkisch neighborhood and at Plötze and in the courtrooms is reduced to reformism; which is to say, you end up with improved discipline, improved intimidation, and improved exploitation. That destroys the people, rather than destroying what destroys the people! If we don’t build the red army, the pigs can do what they want, the pigs can continue to incarcerate, lay off, impound, seize children, intimidate, shoot, and dominate. To bring the conflict to a head means that they are no longer able to do what they want, but rather must do what we want them to do.

You must understand that those who have nothing to gain from the exploitation of the Third World, of Persian oil, of Bolivian bananas, of South African gold, have no reason to identify with the exploiter. They can grasp that what is beginning to happen here has been going on for a long time in Vietnam, in Palestine, in Guatemala, in Oakland and Watts, in Cuba and China, in Angola and in New York.

They will understand, if you explain it to them, that the action to liberate Baader was not an isolated action, that it never was, but that it is just the first of its kind in the FRG. Damn it.

Stop lounging around on the sofa in your recently-raided apartment counting up your love affairs and other petty details. Build an effective distribution system. Forget about the cowardly shits, the bootlickers, the social workers, those who only attempt to curry favor, they are a lumpen mob. Figure out where the asylums are and the large families and the subproletariat and the women workers, those who are only waiting to give a kick in the teeth to those who deserve it. They will take the lead. And don’t let yourselves get caught. Learn from them how one avoids getting caught—they know more about that than you.

DEVELOP THE CLASS STRUGGLE

ORGANIZE THE PROLETARIAT

START THE ARMED STRUGGLE

BUILD THE RED ARMY

RAF

June 5, 1970

The Urban Guerilla Concept

We must draw a clear line between ourselves and the enemy.

Mao

I hold that it is bad as far as we are concerned if a person, a political party, an army or a school is not attacked by the enemy, for in that case it would definitely mean that we have sunk to the level of the enemy. It is good if we are attacked by the enemy, since it proves that we have drawn a clear dividing line between the enemy and ourselves. It is still better if the enemy attacks us wildly and paints us as utterly black and without a single virtue; it demonstrates that we have not only drawn a clear dividing line between the enemy and ourselves but have achieved spectacular successes in our work.

Mao tse Tung

May 26, 1939

1. Concrete Answers to Concrete Questions

   I still insist that without investigation there cannot possibly be any right to speak. Mao

Some comrades have already made up their minds about us. For them, it is the “demagoguery of the bourgeois press” that links these “anarchist groups” with the socialist movement. In their incorrect and pejorative use of the term anarchism, they are no different than the Springer Press. We don’t want to engage anyone in dialogue on such a shabby basis.

Many comrades want to know what we think we’re doing. The letter to 883, in May 1970, was too vague. The tape Michele Ray had, extracts of which appeared in Spiegel, was not authentic and, in any event, was drawn from a private discussion. Ray wanted to use it as an aide-mémoire for an article she was writing. Either she tricked us or we overestimated her. If our practice was as hasty as she claims, we’d have been caught by now. Spiegel paid Ray an honorarium of $1,000.00 for the interview.

Almost everything the newspapers have written about us—and the way they write it—has clearly been a lie. Plans to kidnap Willy Brandt are meant to make us look like political idiots, and claims that we intend to kidnap children are meant to make us look like unscrupulous criminals. These lies go as far as the “authentic details” in konkret #5, which proved to be nothing more than unreliable details that had been slapped together. That we have “officers and soldiers,” that some of us are slaves of others, that comrades who have left us fear reprisals, that we broke into houses or used violence to take passports, that we exercise “group terror”—all of this is bullshit.

The people who imagine an illegal armed organization to be like the Freikorps or the Feme, are people who hope for a pogrom. The psychological mechanisms that produce such projections, and their relationship to fascism, have been analyzed in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality and Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism. A compulsive revolutionary personality is a contradictio in adjecto— a contradiction in terms. A revolutionary political practice under the present conditions—perhaps under any conditions—presumes the permanent integration of the individual’s personality and political beliefs, that is to say, political identity. Marxist criticism and self-criticism has nothing to do with “self-liberation,” but a lot to do with revolutionary discipline. It is not the members of a “left organization,” writing anonymously or using pen names, who are just interested in “making headlines,” but konkret itself, whose editor is currently promoting himself as a sort of left-wing Eduard Zimmermann, producing jack-off material for his market niche.

Many comrades spread untruths about us too. They brag that we lived with them, that they organized our trip to Jordan, that they know about our contacts, that they are doing something for us, when, in fact, they are doing nothing. Some only want to make it look like they are “in the know.” Günther Voigt had to pay for puffing himself up in a conversation with Dürrenmatt, claiming he was the one who freed Baader, which he regretted when the cops showed up. It’s not easy to clear things up with denials, even when they’re true. Some people want to use these lies to prove that we’re stupid, unreliable, careless, or crazy. By doing so, they encourage people to oppose us. In reality, they are irrelevant to us. They are only consumers. We want nothing to do with these gossipmongers, for whom the anti-imperialist struggle is a coffee klatch. Many are those who don’t gossip, who have some understanding of resistance, who are pissed off enough to wish us luck, who support us because they know that there is no point spending life implicated in and adapted to this crap.

What happened at the Knesebekstr. 89 house (Mahler’s arrest) was not due to carelessness on our part, but to betrayal. The traitor was one of us. There is no guarantee against that for people who do what we do. There is no certainty that comrades will not break under extreme police pressure, or will hold up in the face of the terror that the system uses against us, with which it attacks us. The pigs wouldn’t have the power if they didn’t have these tools.

Our existence makes some people feel pressured to justify themselves. To avoid political discussion with us, to avoid comparing their practice to ours, they distort even the smallest details. For example, the rumor is still circulating that Baader had only three or nine or twelve months to serve, though the correct length of time is easily ascertained: three years for arson, a further six months on probation, and approximately six months for falsifying documents. Of these 48 months, Andreas Baader had served 14 in ten different Hessian prisons—nine times he was transferred because of bad behavior, for example, organizing mutinies and resistance. Reducing the remaining 34 months to three, nine or twelve is intended to reduce the moral justification for the May 14 breakout. In this way, some comrades rationalize their fear of the personal consequences of entering into a political discussion with us.

The question frequently asked, as to whether we would have proceeded with the breakout if we had known that Linke would be shot, can only be answered with a no. The question of what we would have done if… is ambiguous—pacifist, moralistic, platonic, and detached. Anyone who thinks seriously about the breakout would not pose this question, but would think it through for himself. In asking this question, people only want to see if we are as brutal as the Springer Press claims. It’s like an interrogation in catechism class. It is an attempt to trivialize the question of revolutionary violence, by treating revolutionary violence and bourgeois violence as the same thing, which leads nowhere. In anticipating all the possible developments, there was no reason to believe that a civilian would intervene. It is suicidal to think that one can conduct a jailbreak unarmed.

On May 14, the cops fired the first shots. This was the case in Frankfurt as well, where two of us ran for it, because we are not going to just let ourselves be arrested. The cops shot to kill. Sometimes we didn’t shoot at all, and when we did, we didn’t shoot to kill. In Berlin, in Nuremburg, in Frankfurt. It can be proven, because it is true. We do not “use firearms recklessly.” The cop who finds himself in the contradiction of being a “little man” and a capitalist pawn, a low paid employee and monopoly capitalism’s agent, is not obliged to follow orders. We shoot back if someone shoots at us. The cop who lets us go, we let him go as well.

It is clear that the massive hunt for us is really directed against the entire socialist left in the Federal Republic and West Berlin. This circus cannot be justified by the small amount of money or the few cars and documents we are alleged to have stolen, or by the attempted murder they’re trying to pin on us. The ruling class has been scared out of its skin. They thought that they had this state and all of its inhabitants, classes, and contradictions under control, right down to the last detail: the intellectuals reduced to their magazines, the left isolated in its own circles, Marxism-Leninism disarmed, and internationalism demoralized. However fragile it may pretend to be, the power structure is not so easily damaged. One should not be tricked by this hue and cry into contributing to all this noise.

We are not saying that the organization of armed resistance groups can replace the legal proletarian organizations, that isolated actions can replace the class struggle, or that armed struggle can replace political work in the factories or neighborhoods. We are arguing that armed struggle is a necessary precondition for the latter to succeed and progress, that armed struggle is “the highest form of Marxism-Leninism” (Mao), and that it can and must begin now, as without it there can be no anti-imperialist struggle in the metropole. We are not Blanquists nor are we anarchists, though we think Blanqui was a great revolutionary and the personal heroism of many anarchists is certainly above reproach.

We have not even been active for a year yet. It is too soon to draw conclusions. The extensive publicity that Genscher, Zimmermann and Co. have given us opens up a propaganda opportunity which we are using to share a few thoughts.

2. The Metropole: The Federal Republic

The crisis isn’t the result of the stagnation of development, but of development itself. Since the aim is to increase profit, development encourages parasitism and waste, harming whole social sectors, multiplying needs that it cannot satisfy, and accelerating the disintegration of social life. A monstrous apparatus is necessary to control, by means of manipulation and open repression, the tensions and revolts which it itself often provokes. The crisis in American political unity caused by the student rebellion and the Black Movement, the spread of the student struggle in Europe, the vehement renewal and the growth of worker and mass struggles leading to the “May” explosion in France, the tumultuous social crisis in Italy, and the rebirth of dissatisfaction in Germany all indicate the nature of the situation. Il Manifesto: The Necessity of Communism, extract from Thesis 33

The comrades from Il Manifesto rightly place the Federal Republic of Germany last in their analysis, vaguely describing the situation here as dissatisfaction. West Germany, which Barzel described six years ago as an economic giant but a political dwarf, has not lost any of its economic power since, while its external and internal political power has increased. With the formation of the Grand Coalition in 1966, the political danger posed by the coming recession was forestalled. With the Emergency Laws the instrument was created to secure unified ruling class action in the event of future crises—the unity of political reactionaries and all those who cling to legality was established. The Social-Liberal coalition succeeded, neutralizing the “dissatisfaction” that had become evident in the student revolt and the extra-parliamentary movement. Insofar as the SPD’s supporters have not broken with reformism, this section of the intelligentsia has been prevented from embracing a communist alternative; in this way reformism acts as a brake on the anticapitalist struggle. Ostpolitik is opening new markets for capitalism, while at the same time it represents the German contribution to an accommodation and alliance between U.S. imperialism and the Soviet Union, which the U.S.A. requires in order to have a free hand for its wars of aggression in the Third World. This government seems to have managed to separate the New Left from the old antifascists, cutting off the New Left from its own history, the history of the working class movement. The DKP, which can thank the new collusion between U.S. imperialism and Soviet revisionism for its new legal status, has organized demonstrations in favor of this government’s Ostpolitik. Niemöller—a symbol of antifascism—is shilling for the SPD in the upcoming election.

Using the smokescreen of “the common good,” the government has established state control and curbed the union bureaucracy with its wage guidelines and its notion of concerted action. The strikes of September 69 showed that things have been overwhelmingly skewed to the benefit of profit; and the fact that these strikes only addressed economic issues indicates how firmly the government holds the reins.

The system shows its strength in the way that the Federal Republic, with its 2 million foreign workers and unemployment approaching 10%, can make use of the looming recession to develop the terror and the disciplinary measures that unemployment implies for the proletariat, without having to deal with any political radicalization of the masses.

In exchange for development aid and military support for the U.S.A.’s wars of aggression, the Federal Republic profits from the exploitation of the Third World, without having to take responsibility for these wars, and without having to struggle against internal opposition. While it is no less aggressive than U.S. imperialism, the Federal Republic is less vulnerable.

The political options open to imperialism here have not been exhausted in either their reformist or their fascist forms, and imperialism has not exhausted its ability to either integrate or repress the contradictions that it produces.

The RAF’s urban guerilla concept is not based on an optimistic evaluation of the situation in the Federal Republic and West Berlin.

3. The Student Revolt

The conclusion that it is impossible to separate the revolution in the “heartland” from that in “underdeveloped areas” is based on an analysis of the unique character of the capitalist ruling system. Without a revival of revolution in the West, the imperialists, with their logic of violence, will be able to develop their exit strategy through a catastrophic war, and it will be impossible to prevent the world’s superpowers from imposing crushing oppression. Il Manifesto: from Thesis 52

To dismiss the student movement as a petit bourgeois revolt is to reduce it to the grandiose claims that accompanied it, to deny its roots in the contradiction between bourgeois society and bourgeois ideology; it means recognizing its obvious shortcomings while ignoring the theoretical level that this anticapitalist protest managed to achieve.

The pathos with which the student movement became aware of its mental immiseration in the knowledge factories was certainly exaggerated, as was the identification of this with the situation of the exploited peoples of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The comparison between the mass circulation of Bild Zeitung here and the massive bombing of Vietnam was a grotesque oversimplification, just as it was arrogant to compare the ideological critique of the system here and the armed struggle over there. The students’ belief that they were the revolutionary subject, insofar as it was based on the appeal of Marcuse, betrayed their ignorance as to the actual nature of bourgeois society and the mode of production which it has established.

The student revolt in the Federal Republic and West Berlin—with its street fighting, its arsons, its use of counterviolence, its pathos, as well as its exaggerations and ignorance… in short, with its practice—has the merit of having reconstructed Marxism-Leninism, at least in the consciousness of the intelligentsia, as that political theory without which the political, economic, and ideological factors and their outward manifestations cannot be combined into an overall analytical perspective. Without this, internal and external relationships cannot be described.

The student movement was based on the contradiction between the theory of academic freedom and the reality of monopoly capitalism’s control of the universities. Precisely because it was based on this, and not merely on ideology, it didn’t run out of steam before it had established the relationship between the crisis in the universities and the crisis of capitalism, if only in theory. Not before it was clear to the student movement and their public that “liberty, equality, and fraternity” would not be achieved by appeals to human rights or the UN Charter, that what was occurring here was what had always occurred in the colonialist and imperialist exploitation of Latin America, Africa, and Asia: discipline, subordination, and brutality for the oppressed and for those who take up their struggle by protest, those who resist and wage the anti-imperialist struggle.

In its ideological critique, the student movement viewed almost all aspects of state repression as expressions of imperialist exploitation: in the Springer campaign, in the demonstrations against American aggression in Vietnam, in the campaign against class justice, in the Bundeswehr campaign, in the campaign against the Emergency Laws, and in the high school student movement. Expropriate Springer! Smash NATO! Resist Consumer Terror! Resist Education Terror! Resist Rent Terror!—these were all correct political slogans. They aimed to expose the contradiction between new needs which could be satisfied through the development of productive forces, on the one hand, and the pressure of irrational subordination to class society, on the other. Their identity was not based on class struggle here, but rather on the knowledge that they were part of an international movement, that they were dealing with the same class enemy as the Viet Cong, the same paper tigers, the same pigs.

The second merit of the student movement was that it broke through the old left’s parochialism: the old left’s popular front strategy in the form of the Easter Marches, the German Peace Union, the Deutsche Volkszeitung, an irrational hope for a “massive landslide” in some election or another, a parliamentary fixation on Strauß here or Heinemann there, their pro- and anticommunist vacillation about the GDR, their isolation, their resignation, and their moral conflicts: ready for every sacrifice, incapable of any practice. The socialist section of the student movement developed its consciousness, in spite of theoretical errors, from the correct recognition that “the revolutionary initiative in the West can be based on the crisis in the global balance of power, and on the development of new forces in old countries.” (Il Manifesto, Thesis 55) They based their agitation and propaganda on what can be considered the most important aspect of German reality. They opposed the global strategy of imperialism by internationalizing national struggles, by creating a connection between the national and international aspects of the struggle, between traditional forms of struggle and international revolutionary initiatives. They managed to turn their weakness into strength, because they recognized that continuing resignation, parochialism, reformism, and popular front strategies could only lead to a dead-end for socialist politics in the post- and pre-fascist conditions existing in the Federal Republic and West Berlin.

The left knew that it was correct to link the distribution of socialist propaganda in factories with actually preventing the distribution of Bild Zeitung. It was correct to link propaganda against GIs being sent to Vietnam with actual attacks on military planes targeting Vietnam, and the Bundswehr campaign with attacks on NATO airports. It was correct to link the critique of class justice with the blowing up of prison walls, and the critique of the Springer Corporation with the disarming of its private security services. It was correct to set up radio stations, to demoralize the police, to have safehouses for Bundeswehr deserters, to combine agitation amongst foreign workers with the production of false documents, to prevent the production of napalm by sabotaging factories.

It was an error, however, to make their own propaganda dependent on supply and demand: to have no newspaper if the workers could not yet finance it, no car if the “movement” could not afford it, no transmitter because they had no license for it, no sabotage because capitalism wouldn’t collapse immediately as a result.

The student movement fell apart when its typically student and petit bourgeois form of organization, “antiauthoritarianism,” proved itself ill-suited to achieving its goals. Its spontaneity proved ineffective in the factories, nor could it create a functioning urban guerilla movement or a socialist mass organization. Unlike in Italy and France, the spark of the student movement here failed to ignite the prairie fire of class struggle, and it was at that point that it collapsed. It could enumerate the aims and contents of the anti-imperialist struggle, but it could not be the revolutionary subject, could not offer the necessary organizational structure.

Unlike the proletarian organizations of the New Left, the Red Army Faction doesn’t deny its roots in the history of the student movement, a movement that reshaped Marxism-Leninism into a weapon of class struggle and established the international basis for revolutionary struggle in the metropole.

4. The Primacy of Practice

If you want to know a certain thing or a certain class of things directly, you must personally participate in the practical struggle to change reality, to change that thing or class of things, for only thus can you come into contact with them as phenomena; only through personal participation in the practical struggle to change reality can you uncover the essence of that thing or class of things and comprehend them.

Marxism emphasizes the importance of theory precisely and only because it can guide action. If we have a correct theory but merely prate about it, pigeonhole it and do not put it into practice, then that theory, however good, is of no significance.

Mao tse Tung: On Practice

The decision of leftists and socialists, the student movement’s authority figures, to turn to the study of scientific socialism and transform the critique of political economy into a self criticism of the student movement, was at the same time a decision to retreat into the classroom. Considering their paper output, their organizational models, and their bombastic statements, one might think that these revolutionaries were leading a violent class struggle, as if 1967/68 was the 1905 of socialism in Germany. In 1903, Lenin pointed out, in What Is to Be Done, that the Russian workers needed a specific theory, and postulated, in opposition to the anarchists and the Social Revolutionaries, the necessity of class analysis, organization, and all-encompassing propaganda, because a broad-based class struggle was unfolding:

The fact is that the working masses are roused to a high pitch of excitement by the social evils in Russian life, but we are unable to gather, if one may so put it, and concentrate all these drops and streamlets of popular resentment that are brought forth to a far larger extent than we imagine by the conditions of Russian life, and that must be combined into a single gigantic torrent. Lenin: What Is to Be Done?

Under the existing conditions in the Federal Republic and West Berlin, we doubt it will be possible to create a strategy to unify the working class or to create an organization that could simultaneously express and initiate the necessary unifying process. We doubt that the unity of the socialist intelligentsia and the proletariat can be “molded out of” the political programs or the declarations coming from the proletarian organizations. The drops and streamlets based on the horrors have long been collected by the Springer Corporation, to which they then add new horrors.

We believe that without a revolutionary initiative, without the practical revolutionary intervention of the vanguard, the socialist workers and intellectuals, and without concrete anti-imperialist struggle, there will be no unifying process. Unity can only be created through the common struggle of the conscious section of the working class and the intellectuals, one which they do not stage-manage, but which they model, or else it will not happen at all.

The paper output of these organizations shows their practice to be mainly a contest between intellectuals for the best Marx review before of an imaginary jury, which couldn’t possibly be the working class, as the language used excludes their participation. They are more embarrassed when they are caught misquoting Marx than when they are caught lying in their practice. Talking is their practice. The page numbers in their footnotes are almost always correct, the membership numbers they give for their organizations seldom are. They fear the accusation of revolutionary impatience more than corruption by bourgeois careers. It’s more important to them to spend years pursuing a degree with Lukacs than to allow themselves to be spontaneously inspired by Blanqui. They express internationalism in the form of censorship by favoring one Palestinian guerilla organization over another. White masters who claim to be the true guardians of Marxism, they express themselves through patronage, begging their rich friends for alms in the name of the Black Panther Party—not with a view to “victory in the people’s war,” but to soothe their consciences. That’s not a revolutionary method of intervention.

Mao, in his Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society (1926), contrasted the revolution and the counterrevolution in this way:

Each has hoisted a huge banner: one is the red banner of revolution held aloft by the Third International as the rallying point for all the oppressed classes of the world, the other is the white banner of counterrevolution held aloft by the League of Nations as the rallying point for all the counterrevolutionaries of the world.

Mao differentiated between classes in Chinese society based on the positions they took towards the red and white banners. It wasn’t enough for him to analyze the economic situation of different classes in Chinese society. Part of his class analysis involved the relationship of different classes to the revolution.

There will be no leadership role for Marxist-Leninists in future class struggles if the vanguard doesn’t hold up the red banner of proletarian internationalism, if the vanguard can’t answer the question of how to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, of how to develop the power of the proletariat, of how to break the power of the bourgeoisie, if it isn’t prepared to do anything to answer these questions. The class analysis we require cannot be developed without revolutionary practice or revolutionary initiative.

The “provisional revolutionary demands” put forward by the proletarian organizations throughout the country—such as the struggle against the intensification of exploitation, for a shorter work week, against the squandering of social wealth, for wage parity for men, women, and foreigners, against production quotas, etc.—are nothing but trade union economism as long as they don’t address the question of how to break the political, military, and propaganda power that always stands firmly in the way of these demands when they are put forward in mass class struggles. If these demands stay the same, one can only call them economistic shit, because they are not worth the revolutionary energy wasted in fighting for them, and they won’t lead to victory if “victory means to accept the principle that life is not the most precious thing for a revolutionary” (Debray). Trade unions intervene with demands like these—but “the trade union politics of the working class are bourgeois working class politics” (Lenin). That’s not a revolutionary method of intervention.

The proletarian organizations failed to pose the question of armed struggle as a response to the Emergency Laws, the army, the BGS, the police, or the Springer Press. This shows that the proletarian organizations differ in their opportunism from the DKP only in that they are even less rooted in the masses, even if they are more verbally radical and theoretically advanced. In practice, they function at the level of civil rights and are concerned with gaining popularity at any price. They support the lies of the bourgeoisie by supporting the idea that with this state it is still possible to correct social problems by parliamentary means. They encourage the proletariat to engage in struggles that have no chance of success, given the state’s capacity for violence and its barbaric ways. “These Marxist-Leninist factions or parties,” Debray writes of the communists in Latin America, “move within the political environment as if they were controlled by the bourgeoisie. Rather than challenging the political status quo, they reinforce it….”

These organizations don’t offer any alternatives to the thousands of apprentices and young people who, as a result of being politicized by the student movement, became determined to put an end to exploitation in their workplaces. They simply advise them to adapt to capitalist exploitation. Concerning youth crime, when it comes down to it they share the position of prison wardens. Regarding the comrades in prison, they share the point of view of the judges. And regarding the underground, they share the point of view of social workers.

Without political practice, reading Capital is nothing more than bourgeois study. Without political practice, political programs are just so much twaddle. Without political practice, proletarian internationalism is only hot air. Adopting a proletarian position in theory implies putting it into practice.

The Red Army Faction asserts the primacy of practice. Whether it is right to organize armed resistance now, depends on whether it is possible, and whether it is possible can only be determined in practice.

5. The Urban Guerilla

Hence, imperialism and all reactionaries, looked at in essence, from a long-term point of view, from a strategic point of view, must be seen for what they are—paper tigers. On this we should build our strategic thinking. On the other hand, they are also living tigers, iron tigers, real tigers which can devour people. On this we should build our tactical thinking. Mao tse Tung, January 12, 1958

If it is true that American imperialism is a paper tiger, this means it can, in the final analysis, be defeated. And if the thesis of the Chinese communists is correct, then victory over American imperialism is possible, because struggles against it have erupted all over the world, and as a result imperialism’s power is divided. It is this division that renders its defeat possible. If this is true, then there is no reason to exclude or leave out any country or any region from the anti-imperialist struggle simply because the forces of revolution are especially weak, and the forces of reaction are especially strong.

If it is incorrect to demoralize the revolutionary forces by underestimating them, it’s equally incorrect to push them into confrontations that can only lead to defeat. In the conflicts between the honest comrades in the proletarian organizations—let’s leave the big talkers out of it—and the Red Army Faction, we accuse them of demoralizing the revolutionary forces, whereas they feel we are leading the revolutionary forces down a blind alley. There is an attempt to bridge this divide between the comrades in the factories and the neighborhoods and the Red Army Faction, and if we succeed in doing so, we will arrive at the truth. Dogmatism and adventurism are typical deviations in any country during periods in which the revolutionary movement is weak. Since the anarchists have always been the strongest critics of opportunism, everyone who criticizes opportunism is called an anarchist—this is nothing more than fashionable nonsense.

The concept of the urban guerilla comes from Latin America. There, like here, it is the method of revolutionary intervention by generally weak revolutionary forces.

The urban guerilla struggle is based on an understanding that there will be no Prussian-style marching orders, which so many so-called revolutionaries are waiting for to lead the people into revolutionary struggle. It is based on the analysis that by the time the conditions are right for armed struggle, it will be too late to prepare for it. It is based on the recognition that without revolutionary initiatives in a country with as much potential for violence as the Federal Republic, there will be no revolutionary orientation when the conditions for revolutionary struggle are more favorable, as they soon will be given the political and economic developments of late capitalism.

The urban guerilla is the consequence of the long since complete negation of parliamentary democracy by the elected representatives themselves. It is the inevitable response to the Emergency Laws and the Hand Grenade Law. It is the willingness to struggle with the very means that the system appropriates for itself to neutralize its enemies. The urban guerilla is based on facing facts, not making excuses for them.

The student movement already had a partial understanding of what the urban guerilla could achieve. It can give concrete form to the agitation and propaganda work to which the left has been reduced. For instance, in the Springer campaign, in the Carbora Bassa campaign of the Heidelberg students, in the squatting movement in Frankfurt, in the context of the military aid that the Federal Republic gives the comprador regimes in Africa, and in the security measures and the inhouse justice in the factories. The urban guerilla can make verbal internationalism concrete by providing weapons and money. It can blunt the system’s weapons and the banning of communists by organizing an underground that can elude the police. The urban guerilla is a weapon of class struggle.

The urban guerilla struggle is armed struggle in a situation in which the police use their weapons recklessly and in which class justice finds Kurras not guilty and buries comrades alive. The urban guerilla struggle means not being demoralized by the violence of the system.

The urban guerilla aims to destroy certain aspects of the state structure, and to destroy the myth of state omnipotence and invulnerability.

The urban guerilla requires the organization of an illegal structure, including safehouses, weapons, cars, and documents. What one needs to know about this, Marighella describes in his Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla. What needs to be known beyond that, we are always ready to tell anyone who wants to participate in the guerilla struggle. We don’t know that much yet, but we know a little bit.

Before deciding to take up the armed struggle, it is important that one first experience the legal struggle. When one’s connection to the revolutionary left is based on just wanting to follow the latest fad, then it is better not to start anything you will not be able to get out of later on.

The Red Army Faction and the urban guerilla represent the only faction and practice which draws a clear line between ourselves and the enemy, and is therefore subject to the sharpest attack. This requires that one have a political identity, and it presumes that a learning process has already occurred.

Our original organizational concept implied a connection between the urban guerilla and the work at the base. We wanted everyone to work in the neighborhoods, the factories, and the existing socialist groups, to be influenced by the discussions taking place, to have some experience, to learn. It has become clear that that doesn’t work. The degree to which the political police can monitor these groups, their meetings, their appointments, and the contents of their discussions is already so extensive that one has to stay away if one wants to escape this surveillance.

The urban guerilla struggle requires that one be totally clear about one’s motivations, that one not be put off by the attacks from Bild Zeitung, the antisemitic-criminal-subhuman-murderer-arsonist label that they apply to revolutionaries. All that shit they spit out and are willing to say, and which still influences what many comrades think about us, must have no effect.

Naturally, the system doesn’t give any ground, and there is nothing they will not do and no slander they will not use against us.

There are no publications that have any goals that can be distinguished from those that serve the interests of capital. There is still no socialist publication that reaches beyond itself, its circle, the people handed copies, and its subscribers, and which does not exist primarily in an incidental, private, personal, bourgeois context. All forms of media are controlled by capital, through advertising sales, as a result of the ambitions of the writers, who want to write their way into the establishment, through the radio stations’ boards of directors, and through the market control of the press corporations. The leading publications are the publications of the ruling class. They divide the market opportunities between themselves, developing ideologies for specific milieus, and what they publish serves to assure their market domination. Journalism is about one thing: sales. News is a commodity; information is a consumer product. Whatever isn’t suitable for consumption is vomited back out. The need to retain the readership for advertisement-heavy publications, and point system ratings for television, prevent antagonistic contradictions from developing between these media and the public; no antagonism, nothing of consequence. Whoever wants a place in the market must maintain connections with these extremely powerful opinion shapers. This means that dependence on the Springer Corporation grows in step with the Springer Corporation itself, which has also started to buy up local papers. The urban guerilla can expect nothing but bitter hostility from this public. It has to orient itself around Marxist criticism and self-criticism, and nothing else. As Mao said, “Whoever is not afraid of being drawn and quartered, can dare to pull the emperor from his horse.”

Long-term, meticulous work is crucial for the urban guerilla, insofar as we want to go beyond discussion to action. If the option of retreating to a bourgeois profession is not kept open, if the option of leaving behind the revolution for a townhouse is not maintained, if none of this is even desirable, then, with the full pathos of Blanqui’s statement, “The duty of the revolutionary is to always struggle, in spite of everything to struggle, to struggle until death.” There is no revolutionary struggle, and there has been no revolutionary struggle, in which this hasn’t shown itself to be true: Russia, China, Cuba, Algeria, Palestine, Vietnam.

Some say that the political possibilities of organization, agitation, and propaganda are far from being exhausted, and only when they have been exhausted should one consider armed struggle. We say that the political possibilities will not be fully utilized until armed struggle is recognized as the political goal, as long as the strategic conclusion that all reactionaries are paper tigers is not grasped despite the tactical conclusion that they are criminals, murderers, and exploiters.

We will not talk about “armed propaganda”: we will do it. The prison breakout didn’t take place for reasons of propaganda, but to get the guy out. The bank robberies they try to lay at our doorstep, we’d only do that to grab the money. The “spectacular successes” that Mao tells us we must have scored if “the enemy paints us as utterly black” are not our successes alone. The big clamour that has been made about us is due more to the Latin American comrades—given the clear line they have already drawn between themselves and the enemy—which has led the ruling class here, suspecting us of some bank robberies, to “energetically oppose” us, because of what we have begun to build here: the urban guerilla in the form of the Red Army Faction.

6. Legality and Illegality

Revolution in the West, the challenge to capitalist power in its strongholds, is the order of the day. It is of decisive importance. The current world situation offers no place and no power that is in a position to guarantee peaceful development and democratic stability. The crisis is intensifying. Parochialism or the decision to postpone the struggle would mean being sucked into the abyss of complete collapse. Il Manifesto, extract from Thesis 55

The anarchists’ slogan, “Destroy what destroys you,” is aimed at mobilizing the base, young people in prisons and reformatories, in high schools and training centres. It reaches out to all of those in the shittiest situations. It is meant to be spontaneously understood, and is a call for direct resistance. Stokely Carmichael’s Black Power slogan, “Trust your own experience!” means just that. And the slogan is based on the insight that in capitalism there is absolutely nothing that oppresses, tortures, constrains, and burdens that does not have its origin in the capitalist mode of production, and that each oppressor, in whatever form he may appear, is a representative of the class interests of capital, which makes him the class enemy.

To this extent the anarchists’ slogan is correct, proletarian, and in line with the class struggle. It is incorrect insofar as it leads to false consciousness. One goes on the offensive simply to give them a kick in the teeth, and organization then takes second place, discipline becomes bourgeois, and class analysis superfluous. If you don’t work out the dialectic of legality and illegality in terms of organization, you will be defenseless against the heavy repression that will follow your actions, and you will be legally arrested.

The statement of some organizations, “Communists are not so stupid as to get themselves banned,” renders them a mouthpiece for class justice, that is to say, for no one. The statement is correct insofar as it means that the legal possibilities for communist agitation, propaganda, and organizing for a political and economic struggle must be fully utilized and cannot be carelessly jeopardized—but that is not what they mean. They mean that there is no way of getting around the limits that the class state and its justice system establish for the socialist project, that one must stop at these limits, that one must retreat from the state’s illegal encroachments as these encroachments are legalized—legality at any price. Illegal imprisonment, terroristic sentences, police harassment, blackmail and coercion on the part of the BAW—eat shit or die— Communists are not that stupid….

This statement is opportunist. It shows a lack of solidarity. It abandons the comrades in prison. It excludes the organization and politicization in a socialist context of anyone who, as a result of their social background and situation, has no choice but to survive through crime: the underground, the subproletariat, innumerable proletarian youth, and guest workers. It facilitates the theoretical criminalization of all those who are not members of these organizations. It expresses complicity with class justice. It is stupid.

Legality is a question of power. The relationship between legality and illegality has to be determined by examining the contradiction between reformist and fascist domination, whose representatives in Bonn are, on the one hand, the Social-Liberal coalition, and on the other, Barzel and Strauß. Their media representatives are, for the former: the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Stern, the WDR Third Program, SFB, and the Frankfurter Rundschau. And, for the latter: the Springer Corporation, the Sender Freies Berlin, the Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, and the Bayernkurier. The Munich police line here, and the Berlin model there. Here the justice of the Federal Administrative Court and there that of the Federal Supreme Court.

The reformist line attempts to avoid conflicts by using institutional options (co-management) and promises of improvements (in prison conditions, for example), by addressing obsolete sources of conflict (the Chancellor’s genuflection in Poland, for example), by avoiding provocation (the soft line of the Munich police and the Federal Administrative Court in Berlin, for example), and by airing grievances (regarding public education in Hessen and Berlin, for example). As part of this reformist line of avoiding conflict, they move a bit further inside and a bit less outside of legality. They do this to look legitimate. With the Constitution in hand, they intend to neutralize contradictions and leave left-wing criticism dead in the water and empty of content, thereby keeping the Jusos within the SPD.

There is no doubt that, in the long run, the reformist line is the more effective way of stabilizing capitalist domination, but it relies on certain conditions being met. It requires economic prosperity, because the soft line of the Munich police, for example, is much more expensive than the hard line of Berlin—as the Munich police chief pointed out: “Two officers with machineguns can hold a thousand people in check. 100 officers with truncheons can control a thousand people. Without weapons of this sort, 300 or 400 police officers are necessary.” The reformist line requires a situation in which no organized anticapitalist opposition exists, as one can see by the Munich example.

Camouflaged by political reformism, the concentration of state and economic power accelerates. What Schiller has achieved with his financial policy and Strauß has pushed through with his financial reforms is an increase in exploitation through the intensification of work and heightened division of labor in the productive sector, and through long-term rationalization in the administrative sector and the service industries.

The concentration of violent power in the hands of the few can occur unopposed if it is done quietly, if unnecessary provocation, which can set a process of solidarity in motion, is avoided—that is something that was learned as a result of the student movement and the Paris May. Therefore, the Red Cells are not yet banned. Therefore the KP can exist as the DKP without the ban on the KP being lifted. Therefore there are still some liberal television programs. And, therefore, some organizations can get away with thinking that they are not as stupid as they really are.

The margin of legality that reformism affords is capital’s response to the attacks of the student movement and the APO—the reformist response is the more effective one, so long as they can manage it. To rely on this legality, to count on it, to perpetuate it metaphysically, to base statistical projections on it, to want to defend it, means repeating the errors of the Latin American self-defense zones. It means you haven’t learned anything and have provided the reactionaries with time to regroup and reorganize, creating a situation in which they won’t ban the left, they’ll smash it.

Willy Weyer doesn’t play at tolerance. When the liberal press complains that his highway breathalyzers treat all drivers like potential criminals, he maneuvers and audaciously responds, “We will carry on!”—and in so doing he demonstrates the irrelevance of the liberal public. Eduard Zimmerman creates a whole nation of police agents, and the Springer Corporation has taken on the role of leading the Berlin police—Bild Zeitung columnist Reer recommends arrest warrants to the custodial judges. The mass mobilization in favor of fascism, of crackdowns, of the death penalty, and for more and better-armed police carries on unabated—the New Look of the Brandt-Heinemann-Scheel administration is a facade for Bonn’s policies.

The comrades who only deal with the question of legality and illegality superficially have obviously misunderstood the amnesty with which the student movement was to be tamed. In lifting the criminalization of hundreds of students, they sent them away with just a fright, preventing further radicalization and impressing upon them the value of the privileges that come with being a bourgeois student—that in spite of the nature of the knowledge-factory, the universities are helpful to social climbers. This deepens the class divide between students and the proletariat, between their privileged everyday life and the everyday life of those who do the shit work and who were not offered the same amnesty by the same class enemy. So once again the division between theory and practice is maintained. The equation: amnesty equals pacification.

The social democratic voter initiative involving some respected writers—not only that fuck-up, Grass—is an attempt at a positive, democratic mobilization, and is a form of resistance against fascism, and therefore should not be dismissed lightly. It is having some effect on the reality presented by certain publishers and some radio and television editorial departments, those that have not yet capitulated to the logic of the monopolies and have not yet been absorbed into the superstructure, with its overarching political reality. The areas of increasing repression are not those with which writers are normally concerned: prison, class justice, intensified work, work-related accidents, installment plans, schools, Bild and the Berliner Zeitung, barrack-style housing in the suburbs, and ghettos for foreigners—all of this troubles these writers aesthetically, not politically.

Legality is the ideology of parliamentarianism, of social partnership, and of a pluralistic society. Legality becomes a fetish when those who insist upon it ignore the fact that phones are legally tapped, mail is legally monitored, neighbors are legally interrogated, and informants are legally paid. The organization of political work, if it is not to be under constant observation by the political police, must be simultaneously conducted both legally and illegally.

We don’t count on terror and fascism provoking a spontaneous antifascist mobilization, nor do we think that legality is always corrupt. We understand that our work offers pretexts, just as alcohol does for Willy Weyer, just as the increase in crime does for Strauß, just as Ostpolitik does for Barzel, just as a Yugoslav running a red light does for a Frankfurt taxi driver, just as a tool in the pocket does for the murderers of car thieves in Berlin. Regarding other pretexts that result from the fact that we are communists, whether communists organize and struggle will depend on whether terror and repression produce only fear and resignation, or whether they produce resistance, class hatred, and solidarity, and whether or not everything goes smoothly for imperialism. It depends on whether communists are so stupid as to tolerate everything that is done to them, or whether they will use legality, as well as other methods, to organize illegality, instead of fetishizing one over the other.

The fate of both the Black Panther Party and Gauche Prolétarienne resulted from an incorrect understanding of the contradiction between the constitution and legal reality and the increased intensity of this contradiction when organized resistance occurs. And this incorrect understanding prevents people from seeing that the conditions of legality are changed by active resistance, and that it is therefore necessary to use legality simultaneously for political struggle and for the organization of illegality, and that it is an error to wait to be banned, as if it were a stroke of fate coming from the system, because then the banning will constitute a death blow, and the issue will be resolved.

The Red Army Faction organizes illegality as an offensive position for revolutionary intervention.

Building the urban guerilla means conducting the anti-imperialist struggle offensively. The Red Army Faction creates the connection between legal and illegal struggle, between national struggle and international struggle, between political struggle and armed struggle, and between the strategic and tactical aspects of the international communist movement. The urban guerilla means intervening in a revolutionary way here, in spite of the weakness of the revolutionary forces in the Federal Republic and West Berlin!

Cleaver said, “Either you’re part of the problem or your part of the solution. There is nothing in between. This shit has been examined and analyzed for decades and generations from every angle. My opinion is that most of what happens in this country does not need to be analyzed any further.”

Flier denouncing the murder of Petra Schelm, who was shot in the head by police. Hamburg Red Aid 1971.

SUPPORT THE ARMED STRUGGLE!

VICTORY TO THE PEOPLE'S WAR

Red Army Faction

April 1971

4 - Building a Base and "Serving the People"

With safehouses and supporters in several cities, and dozens of guerillas living underground, the RAF patiently built up its organization over two years, a period during which there occurred several clashes with police, leaving two members dead and many more in prison.

The state’s first serious attempt to eradicate the RAF had begun shortly after the publication of The Urban Guerilla Concept in 1971. Named Aktion Kobra (“Operation Cobra”), it involved three thousand heavily armed officers patrolling cities and setting up checkpoints throughout northern Germany.

On July 15, 1971, a new line was crossed when RAF members Petra Schelm and Werner Hoppe were identified by police in the port city of Hamburg. A firefight ensued, and while Hoppe managed to surrender, Schelm was shot dead. A working class woman who had entered the guerilla though the commune scene, moving on from the Roaming Hash Rebels to the RAF, she was nineteen at the time.

There was widespread outrage at this killing, and in an opinion poll conducted shortly thereafter by the respected Allensbach Institute, “40 percent of respondents described the RAF’s violence as political, not criminal, in motive; 20 percent indicated that they could understand efforts to protect fugitives from capture; and 6 percent confessed that they were themselves willing to conceal a fugitive.”

In the wake of the APO, the RAF began to take on the aura of folk heroes for many young people who were glad to see someone taking things to the next level. As one woman who joined the group in this period put it, “For the first time, I found a theoretical foundation for something that, until then, I had only felt.”

Or in the words of Helmut Pohl, who stole cars for the guerilla at this time:

What was clear was the drive, the resolve, quite simply, the search for something new—something different from the shit here. That was what made it attractive and created the base of support. This existed from the beginning, and there is no way it could have been otherwise.

Thousands of students secretly carried photographs of RAF members in their wallets, and time and time again, as the police stepped up their search, members of the young guerilla group would find doors open to them, as they were welcomed into people’s homes, including not a few middle class supporters—academics, doctors, even a clergyman. Newspapers at the time carried stories under headlines like “Celebrities Protect Baader Gang” and “Sympathizers Hamper Hunt for Baader Group.”

The guerilla continued to attract new members, including several former members of the Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK), a radical therapy group that had carried out some armed actions before its leading members were arrested in July 1971 (see sidebar on next page).

The Socialist Patients' Collective

While the RAF was forming, other groups in the Federal Republic were also experimenting with armed politics. One of these, the Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK), started as a radical therapy group based at Heidelberg University in southwest Germany. Under the leadership of psychiatrist Wolfgang Huber, the group adopted the slogan, “The system has made us sick: let us strike the death blow to the sick system!” In tying together political radicalism and psychotherapy, the SPK were not as odd as they might be considered today. As already mentioned, the student left was deeply indebted to the Frankfurt School’s brand of Marxism, and the Frankfurt School in turn was deeply influenced by psychoanalysis, as were philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and revolutionary theorists like Frantz Fanon, all of whom greatly influenced sixties radicals. As such, there was much enthusiasm about psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy within the New Left, and this was nowhere more true than in West Germany. According to government officials, the SPK held that only the maladjusted can survive in modern society, and the insane are actually too sane to live under present social conditions. The SPK members began carrying out armed attacks after Huber was fired from his post at the university in February 1970, burning down the State Psychiatric Clinic, robbing banks, and even trying (unsuccessfully) to plant a bomb on a train in which the president of the Federal Republic was traveling. In July of 1971, Huber, his wife, and seven SPK members were arrested on charges of having formed a criminal association and illegally procuring arms and explosives. Many of the SPK members who remained at large would go on to join the RAF.

On October 22, there was another shooting in Hamburg, but this time a police officer was killed. Margrit Schiller, a former SPK member who had joined the RAF, was being pursued by two policemen when Gerhard Müller (also formerly of the SPL) and a female RAF member came to her defense: in the ensuing melee, officer Norbert Schmid was shot dead.

Schiller was nevertheless captured, and a macabre scene played out as police called a press conference to display their trophy. Millions of television viewers watched, amazed, as the young woman—clearly unwilling to play the part assigned to her—was carried in front of the cameras by a pack of cops, her head pulled back by her hair so that all could see her face as she struggled to break free.

Georg von Rauch, murdered by police in West Berlin.

Police searches and checkpoints increased as the hunt for the guerilla continued. On December 4, police in West Berlin stopped a car carrying Bommi Baumann and Georg von Rauch, leading figures in the nascent 2nd of June Movement anarchist guerilla. Von Rauch was immediately shot and killed, which many people took as proof that the cops had adopted a policy to “shoot first, ask questions later.” Thousands participated in demonstrations protesting this killing, and an abandoned nurses’ residence at the Bethanien Hospital was occupied and renamed the Georg von Rauch House.

(Subsequent to leaving the guerilla, Baumann told an interviewer from Spiegel that von Rauch had fired his weapon first, though he later backtracked, claiming instead, “I no longer know who first pulled the trigger.” All of this was viewed with some suspicion, many observers feeling that Baumann’s move to an anti-guerilla position rendered it tantamount to counterinsurgency propaganda.)

“The Police- Genscher’s Killer Elite or the New Stormtroopers?” - from Red Army Faction - A Documentary History.png

The “shoot first” hypothesis would be given further credence on March 1, 1972, when Richard Epple, a seventeen-year-old apprentice, was mowed down by police submachine gun fire after a car chase through Tübingen. Epple had run a police checkpoint because he was driving without a license—he had no connections to the RAF or any other guerilla group. Later that year, in Stuttgart, a Scottish businessman, Ian McLeod, was similarly killed by police fire as he stood naked behind a bedroom door. Depending on who one believes, Macleod was either completely unconnected to the RAF, or else was himself a British intelligence agent intent on infiltrating the group—in either case it was clear the police shot without cause or provocation. Hundreds of people took to the streets to protest this police murder.

The next bust occurred as 1971 came to a close: on December 17, Rolf Pohle was arrested in a gun shop in Neu-Ulm attempting to buy thirty-two firearms which the police claimed were meant for the RAF. Pohle had been a young law student in Munich in the days of the APO. He had organized legal aid during the 1968 Easter riots, and had been subjected to heavy police harassment ever since, eventually pushing him to join the underground.

On December 22, exactly two months after officer Schmid’s demise, another cop was killed. Several RAF members were robbing a bank in the small military city of Kaiserslautern—the nearest police station had literally been blocked from interfering, guerilla helpers barricading its entrance with cars. By plain bad luck for all concerned, police officer Herbert Schoner spotted the parked getaway van as he passed by the bank, just as it was being relieved of its funds. When Schoner knocked on the van’s window, he was shot twice—he managed to draw his gun before he was finished off by a third bullet.

In the immediate aftermath of December 22, there was no publicly available evidence to tie the robbery or Schoner’s death to any political organization. To all appearances, this was simply a “normal” crime. Nevertheless, the very next morning, the Bild Zeitung led the charge: “Baader-Meinhof Gang Strikes Again. Bank Raid: Policeman Shot,” screamed the headline.

The Springer Press was merely doing what was by now a tradition, tarring the radical left with any and all crimes and misdemeanors. (Except, of course, that in this case they were right.)

The progressive Gruppe 47 intellectual Heinrich Böll, perhaps the most important author in postwar Germany, was flabbergasted, and publicly accused the anti-RAF smear campaign of bearing all the hallmarks of fascism. While condemning their violence, he tried to put the RAF into perspective, famously describing their struggle as a “war of six against sixty million.”

Böll’s words may have been appreciated by the RAF, but he was certainly no supporter. Of course, this was not the way the right saw things, and he became the target of a hate campaign, branded an apologist for murder and a terrorist sympathizer, to which he replied that those accused of sympathizing were simply “people who have committed the criminal sin of making distinctions.” He and his family would experience unusual levels of police harassment for years to come. At one point, for instance, as he was entertaining guests from out of town, police with submachine guns raided his home, claiming they suspected Ulrike Meinhof of being on the premises. (To the cop in charge, Böll declared that if Meinhof ever did show up he would shelter her, but only on condition that she not bring any guns into his house. In his words, it would be the Christian thing to do.)

It wasn’t only the streets that were being policed, but also the cultural and political parameters of debate, and the RAF was being placed clearly beyond the pale.

A second, and at least initially less successful move to solidify public opinion against the RAF was the trial of Karl-Heinz Ruhland, which came to a close in March 1972.

Ruhland had been peripheral to the RAF when he was captured in December 1970. Soon after his arrest, he started providing the police with information, the location of safehouses and the names of those who had sheltered the guerilla. When brought to trial on charges relating to a raf bank robbery, much was made of his class status as a manual worker who was never fully accepted by the other members of the group, all in a fairly transparent ploy to show the guerilla up as hypocritical middle class revolutionaries with no real affinity for the proletariat.

Ruhland provided the police with their first real break, however slight, into the world of the RAF, a service for which he received a relatively lenient sentence of four and a half years. Although even the corporate press had to admit that he did not make a very convincing witness, often changing his testimony to fit the latest police theory, he would remain a fixture in future RAF trials until someone more convincing could be turned. In retrospect, his significance appears to be as a template for future state witnesses to come.

In the meantime, guns continued to blaze as the police and guerilla played an increasingly deadly game of hide and seek. Following a narrow escape, Andreas Baader even sent off a letter to the non-Springer press that he authenticated with his thumbprint, essentially to thumb his nose at the cops, and to prove that he was still alive.

Tommy Weissbecker, murdered by Augsburg police on March 2, 1972.

Then, on March 2, police in the Bavarian city of Augsburg killed Tommy Weissbecker and captured Carmen Roll (a former SPK member). Weissbecker was the son of a Jewish concentration camp survivor, and had cut his teeth in the Hash Rebels scene before gravitating to the RAF. Twenty-three years old, he was never given a chance to surrender.

The killing took place as the two left Weissbecker’s apartment. It was later revealed that the police had had him under surveillance since February, renting an apartment above his, and had been listening in on him just before he went out. This would suggest to many not a chance identity check, but a carefully staged murder. In retaliation, the 2nd of June Movement bombed the police headquarters in West Berlin and, as in the case of Georg von Rauch, an empty building in Berlin was occupied and renamed the Tommy Weissbecker House.

While in custody Roll was drugged, apparently in the hope that she would provide police with information; as part of this chemically assisted interrogation, on March 16 the prison doctor gave her such a large dose of ether that she almost died.

News of Weissbecker’s murder spead quickly. In Hamburg, RAF members Manfred Grashof and Wolfgang Grundmann feared this meant the safehouse they were staying at—which had been rented by Weissbecker—might also be compromised. RAF policy in such situations was to simply leave the house and never return, but Grashof, whose speciality was producing false documents, decide to risk one trip back to gather some items he needed. When he and Grundmann returned, three cops were sitting inside in the dark. As soon as the guerillas opened the door, even before they turned on the lights on, a cop panicked and started shooting. Grashof was shot three times. He returned fire, aiming blindly in the dark, and hit police commissioner Hans Eckardt, fatally wounding him.

Grundmann had come to the RAF from Schwarze Hilfe, or Black Aid, a support group for anarchist political prisoners in West Berlin.

As for Grashof, he had come to West Berlin in 1968 as an army deserter, and had joined with Horst Mahler in the Republican Club arguing that the semi-city be turned into an official refuge for others fleeing military service. He had been with the guerilla from the beginning, being particularly close to Petra Schelm and especially upset by her death.

Despite his injuries, Grashof was moved from the hospital to a regular prison cell by Federal Supreme Court Judge Wolfgang Buddenberg, who had been put in charge of all RAF arrests. After two months, he was moved into isolation, only allowed to exercise for a half hour each day, and even then only with his wrists handcuffed behind his back. As a result of this treatment, his wounds opened up again, but he did not die.

All of this unfolded within a context of increasing and increasingly visible police control and new repressive legislation. After having offered the carrot of amnesty and limited reforms, Brandt’s SD{-FDP coalition was now showing that it also knew how to wield the stick.

In September 1971, a new Chief Commissioner was appointed to the BKA (Federal Criminal Bureau): Horst Herold, former Chief of the Nuremberg police, and an expert on the new methods of using computerized data processing as a law enforcement tool. Under Herold’s leadership, the BKA was transformed from a relatively unimportant body into the West German equivalent of the FBI. Over the next decade, he would oversee a six-fold increase in the BKA budget, and a tripling of its staff as he personally pushed West Germany to the worldwide forefront of computerized repression.

By 1979, Herold’s computers contained files on 4.7 million names and 3,100 organizations, including the photos of 1.9 million people and 2.1 million sets of fingerprints. While today it is routine for such data to be available at the touch of a police keyboard, in the 1970s this represented a simply unheard of level of surveillance and technical sophistication.

One of Herold’s first moves was to set up a “Baader-Meinhof Special Commission,” and hunting for the RAF remained his utmost priority throughout his tenure.

The significance of these changes in the BKA was overshadowed, though, by a new clampdown on the legal left, arguably the greatest since the ban on the KPD, as the Interior Ministers Conference passed the Radikalenerlass (Anti-Radical Act) on January 28, 1972. The new legislation was supported by all three major political parties, as well as all the major trade unions. Known as the Berufsverbot (Professional Ban) by its opponents, its intention was to bar leftists from working in the public sector. The potential targets of this ban included some 14% of the workforce, not only government bureaucrats, but also anyone employed by the post office, the railways, public hospitals—and most importantly university professors and school teachers.

The decree also dramatically increased the visibility of the Verfassungsschutz political police—the so-called “Guardians of the Constitution”—as the names of all applicants for public sector jobs were now sent to this agency, which determined on the basis of its own files whether a special hearing was necessary to gauge the applicant’s loyalty to the state. Not only did the Verfassungsschutz comb open sources—speeches, pamphlets, doctoral theses, etc.—for names, but it also engaged in covert surveillance, telephone taps, and a network of informers which was said to include students hired to note who among their classmates held radical views. (Little surprise that the agency’s president until 1972 was Hubert Schrübbers, who had spent the early forties as a Nazi prosecutor notorious for seeking harsh sentences against antifascists, which would certainly have meant confinement in a concentration camp.)

As Georgy Katsifiacis has noted, “the decree resulted in loyalty checks on 3.5 million persons and the rejection of 2,250 civil service applicants. Although only 256 civil servants were dismissed, the decree had a chilling effect.” So much so that according to one survey carried out in the city of Mannheim, “84 percent of university students there refrained from regularly checking leftist materials out of public libraries for fear of being blacklisted.”

Obviously, those students who had refused the SPD’s amnesty in 1971 found themselves among the first to be targeted. While most of these people would no doubt have rejected the RAF’s politics, fears about the guerilla were exploited to help push through the legislation. As Heinz Kühn, spd President of North Rhine-Westphalia, put it, “We could hardly have Ulrike Meinhof employed as a teacher, or Andreas Baader in the police force.”

In the wake of the sixties student movement, the state was establishing the conditions under which erstwhile rebels would be allowed to join the establishment. As its corollary, this rollback included ongoing attacks on the universities themselves. For instance, in early 1972, the Free University hired the Trotskyist Ernest Mandel as professor of economics: the Berlin Senate responded by vetoing this appointment, and despite student strikes, Mandel was barred from entering the FRG. (This ban was only lifted in 1978.)

In this context, in April 1972, the RAF released its second theoretical statement, Serve the People: The Urban Guerilla and Class Struggle. As with The Urban Guerilla Concept, this text was distributed in magazine form at the May Day demonstrations that year.

In a text almost twice as long as the previous one, the RAF was trying to provide an analysis of the previous year’s events, both within the left and within the Federal Republic as a whole. Considerable energy was spent analyzing the unsuccessful workers’ struggles in the chemical sector in 1971 and the failure of the legal left to respond to class oppression within the FRG. These weaknesses were pointed to as so many factors underscoring the necessity for armed politics.

A real attempt to find a strategic connection between class oppression, working class struggle (outside of the unions, of course) and the guerilla is apparent in all the RAF’s theoretical documents in this period.

This will not always be the case. In contradistinction to its anti-imperialism, this class orientation at times approximated left-communism in its focus on working class self-activity and alienation. Partly, the explanation for this can be found in the political experiences and trajectories of the core members of the RAF at this point: the sixties revolt and the APO, with their grounding in not only Marxism-Leninism and anti-imperialism, but also Frankfurt School Marxism, the “apprentices collectives,” and, via the SPK, radical therapy.

At the same time, the period between 1969 and 1973 was one of heightened class conflict in the FRG, beyond and at times against the trade union leadership, with wildcat strikes often being led by women, youth, and immigrant workers. Combined with the sudden turn of many former APO comrades to the new “proletarian” K-groups, this created a context in which it would have been difficult to elaborate a revolutionary strategy without dealing with the question of the working class.

As we shall see later on, some of the ideas in this document were soon qualified, if not rejected, while others were sharpened, finding their place in the centre of the RAF’s worldview.

Finally, Serve the People provides the RAF’s response to Karl-Heinz Ruhland, who had been turned into an instrument of police propaganda. Similarly, two drop-outs from the guerilla, Beate Sturm and Peter Homann, were also excoriated as traitors.

Unlike Ruhland, Sturm’s main crime seems to have been that, subsequent to leaving the RAF, she contacted the media, providing Spiegel with a highly unflattering portrait of the group.

Homann’s story, on the other hand, was more complex; some controversy about his falling out with the group remains even today. While there are radically different versions of the circumstances, it is clear that he was on very bad terms with his erstwhile comrades upon his return from the Jordan training trip in 1970. Immediately after this, he and his friend Stefan Aust traveled to Sicily where Meinhof’s seven-year-old twin daughters were being cared for by comrades. Pretending to be members of the RAF, the two men took Meinhof’s girls with them, delivering them to their father, konkret editor Klaus Rainer Röhl.

It seems likely that this direct intervention to thwart Meinhof’s plans for her children played some part in provoking his denunciation as a traitor in Serve the People. There are contradictory versions of why Homann did what he did, but regardless of the facts surrounding this initial “treason,” he would fully earn the sobriquet later that year, going so far as to provide the police with information, and to testify against the guerilla in court.

In retrospect, Serve the People is significant not so much in its contents, but in its timing, by which it serves as the end of a chapter. With its explanations of the bank robberies and the painstaking preparations undertaken, it allowed the guerilla to deal with some preliminary questions before moving on to grander schemes.

It would be the last theoretical document produced by the RAF outside of prison for almost ten years.

Andreas Baader: Letter to the Press

The cops will continue to fumble about in the dark, until circumstances oblige them to see that the political situation has become a military situation. Marighella

The truth of the matter is that no further information has come out about the group since the first twenty were trained in Jordan. The RAF’s work is clandestine. The “security forces,” the security agencies, the police, the BND, the Verfassungsschutz, the BAW, Spiegel, and the Springer Press know nothing.

They know nothing about the size, the number of members, the organization, the firepower, or the tactics of the group. Everything written about us by the police state for public consumption over the past year and a half is false, is speculation, or is counterpropaganda with the objective of discrediting the theory and practice of the urban guerilla and driving a wedge between us and our base.

I haven’t considered turning myself in. No RAF members have considered turning themselves in. So far no RAF prisoner has provided testimony. Announcements of successes against us have only been about arrests or killings. The guerilla’s strength lies in the determination of each of us. We are not on the run. We are here organizing armed resistance against the regime of the propertied classes and the ongoing exploitation of the people.

The RAF’s current activities are directed towards the formation of politico-military cadre, acquiring better arms and training for revolutionaries, and the anchoring of the group in a sympathetic scene that is ready to support armed resistance. The tactical line that we are currently following is to develop the propaganda of the urban guerilla through the revolutionary organizations that are still legal and to develop broad-based logistical support amongst all layers of the population.

None of us see any subjective or objective basis for betraying the struggle to which we have committed ourselves; not Genscher’s dirty amnesty deal, not Ruhland, the Social Democrats’ van der Lubbe, not the extensive militarization of the police, not prison, not torture, and not the police terror against the population. “The stones they have thrown will fall at their own feet.”

If the price for our lives or our freedom is to be the betrayal of the anticapitalist struggle, there is only one response: we won’t pay it.

The armed struggle does not develop from one headline to the next. The politico-military strategy of the urban guerilla is based in the resistance to parliamentary democracy’s fascist drift and the organization of the first regular units of the Red Army in the people’s war. The battle has just begun.

Andreas Baader

January 24, 1972

Serve the People: The Urban Guerilla and the Class Struggle

Everyone dies, but death can vary in its significance. The ancient Chinese writer Szuma Chien said, “Though death befalls all men alike, it may be heavier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather.” To die for the people is heavier than Mount Tai, but to work for the fascist and die for the exploiters and oppressors is lighter than a feather. Mao tse Tung

“The armed struggle is a technical issue and therefore requires technical knowledge: training, morale and last of all practice. In this area, improvisation has cost many lives and led to failed attacks. The ‘spontaneity’ that some people romanticize, speaking vaguely about the people’s revolution and ‘the masses,’ is either simply a dodge or it indicates that they have decided to rely upon improvisation during a critical phase of the class struggle. Every vanguard movement must, if they want to remain true to themselves at the decisive moment in the class struggle, analyze and understand the violence of the people, so as to correctly direct it against oppression, thereby achieving the goal with the least sacrifice possible.”

ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

20,000 die every year because the stockholders of the automobile industry only care about profit and, therefore, don’t stop to consider technical safety issues for automobiles or road construction. 5,000 people die every year at their workplace or on their way to or from it, because the owners of the means of production only consider their profits and don’t care about an increase or a decline in the number of accidental deaths. 12,000 commit suicide every year, because they don’t want to die in the service of capital; they’d rather just get it over with themselves. 1,000 children are murdered every year, as a result of living in low quality housing, the only purpose of which is to allow the landlord to pocket a large sum.

People treat death in the service of the exploiter as normal. The refusal to die in the service of the exploiter leads to what people think of as “unnatural deaths.” The desperate actions of people, coping with the working and living conditions that capital has created, are perceived as crimes. People feel there’s nothing to be done about the situation. To ensure that the incorrect perspective of the people is not replaced with a correct perspective, the Federal Minister of the Interior, the Länder Ministers of the Interior and the BAW have set up police death squads. Without this incorrect perspective about crime and death, the ruling class could not maintain its rule.

Petra, Georg, and Thomas died in the struggle against death at the hands of the exploiters. They were murdered so that capital could continue killing undisturbed, and so that people would continue to think that nothing can be done about the situation. But the struggle has begun!

“Murdered—The Struggle Continues”: poster protesting the police killings of Petra Schelm, Thomas Weissbecker, and Georg von Rauch.

1. PERSIA AND THE CONTRADICTIONS WITHIN THE NEW LEFT

Brandt has flown to Tehran to visit the Shah and calm his remaining distress about the greeting he received from West German and West Berlin students during the summer of 67; to inform him that the left in the Federal Republic and in West Berlin is dead, that what remains will soon be liquidated, that the Confederation of Iranian Students is effectively isolated, and about the Foreigners Act that is in the works and that will allow for their legal liquidation.

In this way Brandt has revealed the true nature of his foreign and domestic policies; they are the foreign and domestic policies of the corporations meant to control foreign and external markets and to determine who holds political power.

In Tehran Brandt said, “The foreign policy of the Federal Republic must be based on its own interests and must remain free of ideological bias.” The interests of the Federal Republic in Persia are the interests of the German enclave in Tehran, which is to say Siemens, AEG-Telefunken, Bayer, BASF, Hoechst, Daimler-Benz, Deutsche Bank, Mannesmann, Hochtief, Klöckner-Humboldt-Deutz, Merck, Schering, Robert Bosch, the Bayerische Vereinsbank, Thyssen, Degussa, and others. They are the ones that had the greetings to the Chancellor published in Tehran’s newspapers.

The Shah also contributed a statement to the daily press celebrating the Chancellor as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, because the Shah also has no ideological biases; concerning cheap labor in Iran, concerning stable political conditions in Iran, not to mention raw materials and certain nearby markets.

Under “ideological biases,” the Chancellor and the Shah subsume the interests of the German and Persian peoples regarding the relationship between their two countries. Three days before Brandt’s arrival, four comrades were murdered in Tehran and Thomas Weissbecker was murdered in Augsburg. A week after Brandt’s return, nine death penalties were carried out against comrades in Tehran. Meanwhile, Attorney General Martin praised the police officers for so impressively proving their worth in the manhunts in Augsburg and Hamburg.

German capital in Persia is taxed at a lower rate than other capital in Persia. German development aid credit finances German projects in Persia; and the imperial arsenal in Persia is to be modernized with the help of the German military. A 22 million dm investment in the Persian arms industry in 1969 meant 250 million dm in follow-up orders for the German arms industry. The Shah’s regime plans to use g-3s and mg-3s in the struggle against “crime” in Persia, so that in the future wages will remain low, political conditions will remain stable and the conditions of exploitation will remain favorable for German capital. Meaning that pressure for increased wages at home can be handled with threats to move production out of the country. Pressure will also be applied to the public at home, because antifascist protest against the Shah threatens the foreign policy interests of the Federal Republic of Germany.

After prostrating himself in Poland, the Chancellor now prostrates himself before the murderous Shah. The repression of the Polish, Russian, Czech, and Hungarian peoples by German fascism is no longer going on. The repression of the Persian people under German imperialism is what is going on now. The Nuremberg Conventions are no longer in effect, but laws against Iranian students, against Greek, Turkish, and Spanish workers, who all come from countries with fascist regimes, are a current reality. German corporations profit from the fascism in these countries, controlling foreign workers here with the threat of what the fascism at home means for them. They are safe from the death penalty, which imprisoned comrades here are spared, but which is enforced in Persia, Turkey, Greece, and Spain.

The West German left met Brandt’s Persian trip with silence. They left him free to babble twaddle. They let Howeida babble twaddle about how the death penalty is only used against common criminals. Given that the Shah is sensitive, given that the 2nd of June disturbed the relationship between Germany and Iran, given that the Shah’s reputation is hardly stellar, as would have to be the case, given that, as everyone knows, enemies of the people dread being called enemies of the people, given that one can presume that even Brandt wasn’t all that comfortable with the hypocrisy, given that German capital is predisposed to fascism, and given that it’s relatively easy to demonstrate the connection between fascism in Iran and German capital in Iran… given all these things, nobody can defend the relationship without presenting themselves in a poor light.

The intellectual left came to the conclusion that only the proletarian masses can change the current situation, that only the West German masses can expropriate the profits that the corporations make from the Shah’s fascism—a situation from which the Shah’s fascism also profits. With this realization, the left stopped criticizing the Shah’s fascism and the domination imposed by West German capitalism in the Third World. With the realization that the resistance of the West German masses against the rule of capital would not be sparked by the problems of the Third World, but only by the problems developing here, they stopped posing the problems of the Third World as a factor in politics here.

This shows both the dogmatism and the parochialism of a section of the left. The fact that the working class in West Germany and West Berlin can only think and act in the national context, while capital thinks and acts in a multinational context, is first and foremost an example of the splitting of the working class, as well as of the weakness of a left that only focuses on capital’s domestic policies in its critique and ignores capital’s foreign policy, thus internalizing the split in the working class. They tell the working class only half of the truth about the system, about what capitalist policy means for the working class on a daily basis and what it means for wage demands in the foreseeable future.

The contradiction facing the New Left is that their basic economic analysis and political assessment is more radical and incisive than anything produced by the West German left prior to the 66/67 recession. This left experienced the end of the postwar reconstruction phase and the strengthening of West German imperialism and understood that they had to base themselves on the extraordinary class struggle, which led to them restricting their propaganda and organizational efforts to the national context. As a result, they have an unimaginative and narrow view of what revolutionary methods of intervention are possible.

In their efforts to give a scientific orientation to the anticapitalist protest—which reaches into the schools, the unions and the SPD— to maintain and develop their position in the high schools, they used Marxism to make the history of the working class more accessible to teachers and students. They hoped in this way to gain a foothold in the factories and schools.

Through these activities they show a willingness to act and to intervene that stands in contradiction to their actual methods of intervention, which remain those that were appropriate for the working class during the phase of competitive capitalism and parliamentarianism. They were appropriate in the period when Rosa Luxemburg, looking at the mass strikes in Russia in 1905, recognized the immense importance of strikes in the political struggle and Lenin recognized the importance of union struggles. It is the contradiction between their use of the German working class as their historical reference point, and the increasing tendency today of West German capitalism to organize itself in the form of West German imperialism.

A section of the left still sees the RAF as Baader and Meinhof’s personal thing and—like Howeida, the Bild and the BZ—discusses armed struggle as if it were a form of criminal activity. In a similar vein, they also attribute our activity to faulty reasoning and misrepresent our positions. As a result, they will fail to resolve the contradiction between what they know to be the state of the class struggle, and what they perceive to be the revolutionary methods of intervention. They transform the objective problem that we all face into our subjective problem alone. They conduct themselves as if they fear the difficult task ahead of them—they bury their heads in the sand and refuse to think about it. The denunciation of the concept of the urban guerilla within a section of the left succeeds far too easily and without much thought, thereby allowing us to see the growing distance between their theory and their practice, a distance that we do not believe can be closed by our efforts alone. Their claim that they are actually involved in this debate proves, we think, that we and they have different self-perceptions.

A year ago, we said that the urban guerilla unites the national and international class struggle. The urban guerilla makes it possible for the people to become aware of the interconnectedness of imperialist rule. The urban guerilla is the revolutionary form of intervention suited to an overall position of weakness. An advance in the class struggle only occurs if legal and illegal work are connected, if political propaganda has a perspective that includes armed struggle and if political organization includes the possibility of the urban guerilla. This was made clear through the concrete example of the chemical workers strike in 1971, which showed the objective reality of the social question, the subjective reality of the question of capitalist ownership and the militarization of the class struggle in West Germany and West Berlin.

In the current phase of history no one can any longer deny that an armed group, however small it may be, has more of a chance of becoming a people’s army than a group that has been reduced to spouting revolutionary rhetoric. 30 Questions to a Tupamaro

2. THE CHEMICAL WORKERS STRIKE OF 1971

The widespread strikes in the chemical and metal industries in 1971— among the most developed industries in West Europe—made it clear what the problems facing the working class will be in the coming years. They exhibited a widespread readiness to struggle on the part of the workforce, while simultaneously showing the economic and political advantages the chemical and metal industries have vis-à-vis the working class; they showed the complicity of the union bureaucracies with the Social-Liberal government and the role of the government as the executive organ of this “corporate state.”

The workers lost the strikes. They struck for 11 and 12 percent, and the unions settled with the employers for 7.8 and 7.5 percent. The situation that socialists in the Federal Republic and West Berlin will face in coming years was certainly clarified by this strike: subjectively, an increase in readiness to struggle on the part of the working class and, objectively, the reduced capacity to struggle; objectively, a decrease in wages and the loss of “vested social rights,” subjectively, increased class antagonism and class hatred.

Economically speaking, the strength of the chemical industry was the result of the trends towards concentration and the export of capital which have been forced upon the entire West European economy by North American competition. Politically, it was the result of the lessons that West German industry drew from May 68 in France and the wildcat strikes of September 69. Their counteroffensive against the September strikes here certainly increased class consciousness.

Concentration

Due to their size and technological advantages, the large American industrialists can achieve lower production costs despite paying higher wages. Hugh Stephenson of Time magazine:

the problem of size is not essentially one of the size of factory installations, rather the key is understanding the grandeur of the financial and economic factors that stand behind this. A large volume of business means almost nothing. However, it does have advantageous implications regarding dominant market position. And that is an advantage that can’t be achieved without substantial investment in modern industry, even if it is not in the area of developing technologies. The type of competition between industrialists in developing branches of industry, such as the automobile, chemical and oil industries, has completely changed. The cost of new investments is so high for the enterprises involved that as stable a future market as the intense competition allows for must be guaranteed. Under these circumstances, it is inevitable that European industry must in the future enter a phase of concentration into fewer and larger groups.

Die Welt, February 23, 1972

Public Funds Concentration is the first reality. The influx of public funds to cover the costs of research and development is the second. North American industries have access to greater funds of this variety as a result of their size and the U.S.A.’s permanent war economy. In 1963-64, the U.S.A. used 3.3 percent of its gross national product for research purposes—compared to an average of 1.5 percent in West Europe. Hugh Stephenson:

In the area of developing technologies, Europe will never be able to deal with the immense and ever-growing research and development costs if a constant flow of public funds is not guaranteed.

If not, then it would be better to just sign deals with American firms right away. That is the pressure that today’s economy places on the state. Concentration and state subsidies have become a question of survival for capitalist West Europe.

The Export of Capital

The third thing is the export of capital. This entails cooperation with foreign industries and building factories in foreign countries, with the aim of profiting from the cheaper raw materials and lower wages available in these countries, and of reducing transportation costs by buying from foreign markets.

Because the chemical industry stands at the forefront of this development, the chemical workers strike of 1971 had a central significance. It serves as an example of an entire trend, from the chemical companies’ strike preparations in December 1970, through the purge of teachers who are members of the DKP from the public service and the incorporation of the BGS into the federal police force, from the first signs of fascism in the Federal Republic to the CSU seizing control of Bayerischen Rundfunk, from the refusal to allow Mandel to teach at the Free University to the application of the death penalty to the Red Army Faction.

As a result of this, in the coming years increasing numbers of people from all levels of society, with the exception of the owners of capital, will find themselves dissatisfied with the structure of ownership. It therefore follows that it is tactically and strategically incorrect not to treat the question of ownership, which is now addressed with trivial and wishy washy arguments about co-management and “protecting what we’ve begun,” as the general and ongoing central issue. The situation has also led to a development whereby anyone who profits from these circumstances can conceal that fact.

Bayer – BASF– Farbwerke Hoechst

The chemical industry is among the industries with the highest levels of concentration in West Germany. The market share of just three, IG Farben-Nachfolger Bayer, Farbwerke Hoechst, and BASF, makes up 50 percent of the industrial sector. These three chemical corporations are among the four largest companies incorporated in the Federal Republic.

Of the 597,000 employed in the sector, 200,000 work for the big three. They control over 50 percent of the funds for research and development in the chemical industry. In the years 1965-70 alone, BASF gained control of business and corporate concerns that conducted 4 billion dm worth of business, which was more than it had itself been conducting in 1965.

Regarding the cooperation between the state and the chemical corporations, the 1969 Federal Research Report states:

In the chemical industry one can speak of a genuine division of labor between state-funded basic research and industrial research. The chemical industry can only continue their recent rate of growth and retain their international importance if a high level of (state-supported) basic research continues.

What export of capital means in the chemical industry is that while in 1970 West German industry did 19.3 percent of their business outside of Germany, for Farbwerke Hoechst it was 44 percent, for BASF 50 percent, for Bayer 56 percent. South Africa, Portugal, Turkey, Iran, and Brazil are some the places where they have production facilities.

The Federal Republic also provides military aid to Portugal, Turkey and Iran. Obviously, this military aid serves to ensure conditions of exploitation beneficial to West German capital in these countries, which is to say, holding wages down and gunning down workers who resist. It is also clear that since the mid-60s this military aid has also served to build up “security forces,” which is to say the police, who conduct the anti-guerilla war under the guise of fighting crime, saying whatever is necessary to support that position: there is no resistance, the masses are completely satisfied, it’s only a question of criminals and crime.

American military aid to Iran was given to support the campaign against drug dealing and smuggling, and Brandt has no “ideological biases” if the execution of revolutionaries is disguised as sentences carried out against criminals. Scheel spoke recently—in the context of the signing of a contract, in which the Federal Republic secured future Brazilian uranium discoveries—of the common interest of the Federal Republic and the Brazilian military junta in resisting “terrorism and subversive activities,” which is in reaction to the Latin American guerillas who laid bombs at the BASF installation.

Together with American corporations, the West German chemical corporations control almost the entire chemical and pharmaceutical market in Iran. Iran is the site of the greatest rate of expansion of western interests; South Africa offers the highest rate of profit—Volkswagen for example averaged dividends of 30 percent last year, and in 1968 they were as high as 45 percent. Between what they produce and what they sell, the West German chemical and pharmaceutical industry controls 10 to 12 percent of the South American market.

Pressure on wages and the reduction of the wage-cost ratio in production was achieved through the exploitation of lower wage standards in foreign countries, through guest workers, and through investments at home, all of which the chemical industry has used in recent years to achieve a 75 percent increase in capacity, as well as rationalization and redundancy in the labor force.

The figures: between 1950 and 1970, the number of people employed in the chemical industry increased by only 100 percent, compared to an increase in sales of 636 percent. In general, the tendency is for the number of people to decrease. The closing of Phrixwerke made the headlines. Hüls announced this February that in 1972 the number of people it employs will decrease by 3 to 4 percent. The chemical industry speaks of the “the increasing importance of labor costs.” This indicates that they intend lay-offs and wage rollbacks. They entered the 1971 round of negotiations with the aim of asserting their concept of “labor costs,” which is to say, with the hope of putting the working class on the defensive through a massive attack.

The Strength of the Capitalist Class

Concentration as the precondition for a strong negotiating position for capital requires nothing more than a unified position on the part of the employers, in a situation where the Employers Association is controlled by the corporations that control the market: Bayer, BASF and Hoechst. Export of capital is a source of strength for the chemical industry, given that it creates a situation in which the working class that confronts it is not the industry’s only source of profit. In the workers’ struggle, the elimination of competition between wage workers always finds its practical limits within national borders, and so a strike only stops a part of capital’s profitable production. While the workers gamble everything, capital only gambles part of what it has.

Just because the chemical industry ruthlessly uses its strengths to gain the upper hand politically is absolutely no reason for whining. It is an error to see the chemical companies as especially evil because they make use of slave labor in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to put pressure on wages, because they use investments to get the labor force off their backs, and because they use concentration to secure economic and political mobility and flexibility. The brutality of their exploitative behavior—in the form of political repression and pressure to reduce the costs of social reproduction—indicates the effect of North American competition on West Europe’s economy, as well as the rationalization of the sector, its products, and the market. It is an integral part of the inhumanity and criminality of the system and will only be eliminated when the system is eliminated, or it will not be eliminated at all.

The chemical industry prepared meticulously for the strike; it was they and not the unions that wanted the strike, and they and not the unions that won the strike. The workers suffered a setback. Everybody played different roles against them: capital, the government and the union bureaucracy.

Preparing for the Strike

In February 71, the unions called for a wage increase beginning March 31 in Hessen, North Rhine and Rhineland Palatinate, demanding 11 to 12 percent, and for Hessen a flat 120 marks, which for Hessen meant the same wage increase for all wage levels, the freezing of wage cuts and a step forward in the unity of the working class. The chemical industry refused to make any deal.

In December 70, the chemical industry had already created “mutual support systems” between their companies in case of a strike. This took the form of transferring money related to wage payments to the development and conversion of raw materials, to the production of primary and intermediate products, and to the setting aside of capital for production facilities and transportation. They also provided their customers with an 8-week stock of their products, including the smaller clients such as drugstores and universities—the rector of Düsseldorf University, for example, called upon the institutes and seminars to stock up as a precautionary measure.

Operating measures were worked out in detail: instruction manuals for strike breakers, secure plant telephone systems, a list of the names of union representatives, facilities to print leaflets, contacts with the local press and opinion-makers such as teachers, ministers and associations. Lists were drawn up of supposed members of an “underground political force” to be forwarded to the Verfassungsschutz and the police. Contacts with the police, government departments, and Interior Ministers. A line of argument was also developed about the “danger to the workplace posed by the strike,” etc.

In December 70, the union representatives at Farbwerke Hoechst polled their members regarding the proposed wage demands. The Wage Commission—made up of representatives from the IG Chemie trade union and the larger companies—refused the demands. The vote with which the demands were rejected wasn’t even close: 4 to 1. The union representatives from Merck in Darmstadt demanded 160 marks or 12 percent. They also had little luck with the Wage Commission.

State Support for the Capitalist Class

The Employers Association received state support. The basic 9 percent wage increase projected in the government’s wage guidelines was reduced to 7.5 percent at the beginning of the year. Brandt, on May 11 in parliament: “In the current phase, wage costs that are too high risk causing underemployment.” The experts in their opinions supported the chemical industry, stating that “a very slow reduction in the rate of wage increases” is not enough, but that “extreme measures are necessary.” (May 71)

In May, the chemical industry made an offer of 5 percent, and IG Chemie issued a press release stating that they wouldn’t insist upon 11 or 12 percent, but would accept 8 or 9 percent

The Betrayal of Rhineland Palatinate

On May 24, however, Rhineland Palatinate—to great public surprise— signed a wage contract for 7.8 percent over ten months, which on the basis of a real duration of twelve months is 6.5 percent, less than that suggested in Schiller’s reference data. Rhineland Palatinate is controlled by BASF. BASF won’t accept strikes.

Bayer and Hoechst also later avoided strikes. The employees of the large companies don’t want the humiliation of a setback during a strike; they have been disciplined by a broad and diverse system of pacification: company housing, purported profit sharing, training grants, a body of company representatives alongside the unions, the organization of the workplace whereby the employees are split into hundreds of separate factory units, a wage system split into different wage levels, separate low wage groups for men and women.

The chemical industry in Hessen circulated to its own employees the leaflet that the IG Chemie trade union had prepared for its members regarding this outcome. The Wage Commission in North Rhine and Hessen bristled at the outcome in Rhineland Palatinate. They talked about options for struggle, but didn’t prepare them. IG Chemie simply demanded that their members get their dues in order and recruit new members.

The Strike

In the face of the chemical industry’s resistance, federal government arbitration eventually failed in North Rhine and Hessen, and later in Westphalia and Hamburg. Following the failure of federal government arbitration, the strike began. From the beginning of June until the beginning of July, a total of 50,000 workers in these four areas were on strike and 150,000 were involved in support actions. In North Rhine they struck for 9 percent, in Hessen for a flat increase of at least 120 marks, or 11 percent, and in the other areas for 11 or 12 percent. It was the first strike in the chemical industry in 40 years, since the wage struggles at the beginning and end of the 1920s.

The organizational initiative didn’t come from the unions; it came from the workers. At Glanzstoff in Oberbruch, it started with 120 skilled workers, who spontaneously walked out on June 3. Later, when the union called for a work stoppage in the key sectors, other workers spontaneously joined the strike. At Dynamit Nobel in Troisdorf, the action began with a spontaneous walkout on the part of skilled workers in the explosives factories. At Clouth-Gummiwerken in Cologne, where the strike lasted 4 weeks, it began with the mill workers. At Degussa in Wolfgang, small groups of skilled workers walked out of the various production centres, calling for a demonstration against the factory committee and the union representatives. At Braun in Melsungen, it began with workers in the engineering building. In Glanzstoff in Kelsterbach, the action began with a sit-down strike by some Spanish workers. In Merck, at Farbwerken Hoechst, the action began with different small groups. In some factories the strike lasted for the entire month of June.

On June 8, 10,000 workers took part in a mass IG Chemie trade union demonstration at the Cologne Arena. On June 14, there was a day of action in North Rhine; 19,000 workers from 38 factories joined the strike. On June 16, 10,000 workers again participated in a second mass IG Chemie demonstration in Cologne. Simultaneously, 16,000 took part in actions in Hessen—4,000 workers from Farbwerke Hoechst participated in a union demonstration; it was the first time in 50 years that there was a strike at Hoechst—even if it only lasted a few hours. At the end of June, 38,000 workers were on strike in Hessen, North Rhine, Hamburg and Westphalia. If one considers the dubious behavior of the union bureaucracy, and the fact that the strike initiative came from small groups, these are impressive numbers.

At Merck, the employees were pressured by the chairman of the factory committee to back the union’s demands. The strike motion put forward by strike leaders at Bayer in Leverkusen wasn’t accepted by the regional strike headquarters. Many didn’t want to strike, because they felt not enough was being demanded. Many didn’t want to strike, because they feared it would end in a rotten compromise. That activities were restricted to isolated actions at Farbwerken Hoechst and at Bayer in Leverkusen—the largest factories in Hessen and North Rhine— demoralized many people. The corporations’ system of pacification paid off.

During the strike, the chemical industry took every possible step to remain on the offensive—and to keep the unions on the defensive. Pressure was kept on the workers by claims that the strike was illegal because no strike vote had been held—at IG Chemie, a strike vote is not required, as is also the case at IG Metall. At Hoechst, the argument that there could be “no strike without a strike vote” prevented the strike. The strike leadership at Merck treated the issue of rights as an issue of power in the class struggle: “In the workers’ struggle, and everything is in the wording, we are governed first and foremost by the opinion of the majority, or more specifically the strikers.” IG Chemie can only conceive of things in terms of their own bylaws.

The chemical industry made equal use of legal and illegal methods; Merck spread rumors about injuries; they claimed that stones had been placed on the tracks of the factories’ rail system, that “anticorporate elements” had engaged in sabotage and that strike centres were defended with bicycle chains and brass knuckles. At Glanzstoff in Oberbruch, rumors were spread about shootings. Police units ensured that strike breakers could gain access to the factories at Merck and Glanzstoff. The Kripo photographed and attacked strike centres. Buses carrying strike breakers drove into strike centres (Glanzstoff). Company management at Merck disrupted radio communication between strike centres and increased plant security. Riot police stood at the ready. Outside workers were brought in as strike breakers. An encampment was forced off the factory premises. At Glanzstoff, the police units were so vicious that young police officers were crying and older ones had to be replaced before the police could clear a path for the strike breakers.

Class Justice

An injunction issued by the Labor Court ensured strike breakers access to the factories, sanctioned the use of police units, and criminalized strike actions. In Merck, following this injunction, IG Chemie accepted a settlement, the contents of which did not respect the work stoppage— the entry for strike breakers—and held that if anything the injunction sanctioned the unions. As a result, union strike leaders of Merck in Rükken said regarding the injunction, “The eyes of the law look out from the face of the ruling class.” (Ernst Bloch) “We accuse society’s leaders of violence; the violence begins and ends with society’s leaders.” Regarding the injunction, they said, “The injunction makes a mockery of the right to work, using it to permit strike breakers. But the employers refuse to protect the real right to work. Where was the right to work during the crisis of 1966-67?”

The mayor of Darmstadt followed a declaration of state and police neutrality with the threat that surely no one wanted a vacation in the hospital.

The workers at Merck, resisting the police, sometimes with the support of students, continued to block the entry of strike breakers. The fact that they conducted their strike aggressively indicates that the workers had no doubts about the legitimacy of their actions. In response to this, 17 apprentices and young workers from Merck were illegally terminated after the strike ended.

As the unions gradually scaled back their demands, and while the workers were still striking, the chemical industry announced without further ado that, as of June 1, wages would be increased by 6.5 percent. Corruption proceedings launched by the workers were an overall failure. The workers were no match for the machinations of the union leadership. The latter released a Communiqué on Concerted Action in what amounted to a call for the workers to accept defeat and end the strike: “The language of the Common Concerted Action was completely the work of the employers and the unions, to make sure that not everyone will benefit from the anticipated rise in prices and incomes being created by the boom, but rather that everyone will be subjected to the dictates of a phase of macroeconomic consolidation.”

At the beginning of July, the Board of Directors of IG Chemie reached an agreement with the chemical industry: 7.8 percent = wage guidelines = the outcome at Rhineland Palitinate. The Merck strike leadership sent a protest telegram to the board requesting that the decision be rescinded. At Clouth-Gummiwerken, the union traitors were shouted down when the outcome was announced. The strike was over.

The chemical industry had achieved its goal. They wanted the first strike in the chemical industry, the first strike by chemical workers of this generation, to end in defeat, because “given the increasing importance of labor costs, they must consider the possibility that in future wage negotiations in the chemical industry, serious confrontations, possibly even labor disputes, may prove unavoidable” [from: Hilfeleistung im Arbeitskampf ]—because for the chemical industry this strike was not an isolated incident, but rather one step in a long term strategy of struggle against the working class. In the words of the Deutsche Bank’s spokesman, Ulrich, “It requires many steps, each of which must be large enough to reach the goal—rates of increase of only two or three percent.” (February 72)

The workers didn’t achieve what they hoped for: more unity—that was the objective of the 120 mark demand in Hessen; wage increases that do not lag behind price increases—that was the objective of the entire strike movement; close relations—unity and not separation between the workers from Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst; success.

This wage agreement is an expression of the actual power relations between the classes. One could say that capital has almost all of it and the workers almost none: capital has closed ranks and “concentrated,” while the working class suffers from numerous divisions; capital has powerful organizations that are firmly in control, while the workers have unions that are out of their control, with a bureaucracy and a leadership that, like the current government, advance anti-worker policies; capital has the state, and the state is against the working class; capital is organized internationally, while the working class is still only able to organize in the national context; capital has a clear, long term strategy and uses propaganda to promote it at every opportunity, with the goal of attacking the working class; the workers can counter this only with their rage—that is all they have.

The Militarization of the Class Struggle

In spite of capital’s strength and the weakness of the working class, the state is arming itself and preparing for the militarization of the class struggle. The political means correspond with the economic facts: capital’s aggression. The political facts signal the extent and the strength of the attack.

The less the common good—which is to say general affluence, increasing income, and improved living conditions for all—is addressed by capitalist policy, the more it must be promoted, so as to reduce possibilities for criticizing the methods employed by capital. Therefore, critical journalists have been fired everywhere; therefore the schools have been cleared of leftists; therefore, the CSU has seized control of the Bayerischen Rundfunk, which can only signal the beginning of the acquisition of ARD stations by the ZDF—even if the process can’t proceed as quickly in other Länder.

To the extent that the system can no longer purchase the loyalty of the masses, they must be coerced. As it will no longer be given willingly, it will be gained through threats of violence; the BGS will be transformed into a federal police force and increased from a force of 23,000 to a force of 30,000; the police will be armed with submachine guns, and the citizenry should become as accustomed to seeing submachine gun-armed police on street corners as they are of paying taxes; penal law will be stiffened; emergency exercises will be conducted using sharpshooters; comrades will be taken into preventive custody; RAF suspects will be subject to the death penalty.

To the extent that people have no further reason, once capitalism is finally enforced in West Germany, to continue being anticommunist, communists must be forcibly separated from the people. Therefore, the left is being pushed out of the factories. Therefore the price the DKP must pay to remain legal will get higher and higher (and it is apparent that they’ll pay any price). Therefore, the chemical industry threatens the Free University; they will not hire Free University graduates if peace and order are not re-established at the Free University.

To the degree that the ideas of the communist alternative win ground as a result of the system’s own contradictions, the liberated spaces from which such ideas can be propagated must be closed; therefore Mandel should not be permitted to teach at the Free University; therefore the president of the university in Frankfurt calls in the police to make sure that exams supported by industry are written; therefore Löwenthal rants about the Spartacus Youth, and Löwenthal’s cameramen attack students to get photos of as many violent scenes that can be used to incite the people as possible.

After ten years of employing foreigners in the Federal Republic— since the wall in 1961—the accident rate of foreigners has reached a level double that of German workers, which is already high enough, and they still live in ghettos and discrimination is still prevalent in the factories and neighborhoods. As foreign workers have now begun to organize to better protect themselves, the Basic Law is to be changed to make it easier to monitor foreigners’ organizations, so as to make it easier to dismantle them, something that is already possible with the fascist laws governing foreigners and the anticommunist law governing association.

Capitalist propagandists use the narrow opportunity that the Red Army Faction affords them to argue that their core problem, the escalation of the class struggle, is caused by us, and that the rise of right wing radicalism is a response to us. This is objectively the argument of the class enemy and subjectively an entirely shallow approach based on nothing more than the superficial assessment of the issues found in the bourgeois press.

The Legal Left and Public Enemy No. 1

In the face of capital’s offensive, the legal left is not just on the defensive, it is objectively helpless. They respond with their leaflets and their newspapers and their agitation among the workers, in which they say all the blame lies with capital, which is true, that the workers must organize themselves, that the social democratic line must be overcome in the factories, that the workers must learn to conduct economic struggles so as to regain their class consciousness—all of which is important work. But proposing it as the only form of political work it is shortsighted.

They see semi-automatic pistols and say, “Organize the economic struggle.” They see the emergency exercises and say, “Class consciousness.” They see fascism and say, “Don’t bring the class struggle to a head.” They see war preparations and say, “Develop a policy of unity with the middle class.” They see Labor Court and Federal Labor Court decisions that will ban future strikes and say, “Legality.”

The counterrevolution believes that it is possible to get rid of all of the problems that it itself produces, and no means is too dirty in achieving that goal. But they can’t wait until fascism has really been established and the masses have been mobilized in their service. They need the security offered by a monopoly of weapons and armed violence—so that the rage of the working class, which they did so much to provoke, does not lead the working class to the idea, and with the idea, the means: the idea of the revolutionary guerilla’s armed struggle, striking from the shadows and not easily caught, imposing accountability, demoralizing the police, and resisting their violence with counterviolence.

Genscher would not be the Minister of the Interior of the ruling class if he were not prepared to use unimaginable measures to take us “out of circulation,” if he hadn’t declared us Public Enemy No. 1 even before we did anything, if he hadn’t indicated that he was prepared to do anything, to engage in any action, to isolate us from the left, the labor force and the people, if he wasn’t prepared to murder us. This situation will surely get worse.

But they can no longer continue their war preparations covertly, and they cannot continue to act within their own legal parameters. They are obliged to violate their own system, and in so doing they show their true colors as enemies of the people—and the left creates accurate propaganda at a high dialectical level, as ought to be the case, when they say: this terror is not directed against the RAF, but rather against the working class. Obviously its target isn’t the RAF, but rather the development of the coming class struggle. This is why the idea of armed struggle is met with all the violence the system is currently capable of, in order to prevent the working class from embracing it.

We’re not feeling edgy; the system is feeling nervous.

Capital can’t wait until it has established fascism because American competition won’t wait. The hysteria of the system doesn’t make our strategy or tactics incorrect. And the system is not incorrect in making it incredibly difficult for us to anchor the guerilla in the masses. Knowing this, it is not incorrect to develop resistance, given that the war will be a protracted war.

What could comrades be waiting for in a country that allowed Auschwitz to occur without resistance? Doesn’t the current workers’ movement bring with it the history of the German workers’ movement and this police force the history of the SS?

Communists struggle for the satisfaction of the goals and interests of the working class immediately at hand, but they also show the way forward for the movement as well as its future. Communist Manifesto

That is what we mean by SERVE THE PEOPLE.

3. THE QUESTION OF OWNERSHIP AND THE MILITARIZATION OF THE CONFLICT

The argument that the Federal Republic is not Latin America obscures local conditions more than it clarifies them. This is indicated by (and the debate is liberally seasoned with these): “The same horrifying poverty doesn’t exist here as does there”; “Here the enemy is not a foreign power”; “Here the state is not so hated by the people”; “We are not ruled by a military dictatorship here as is the case in many Latin American countries.”

Meaning: conditions there are so intolerable that violence is the only option—here things are still good enough that the conditions are not ripe for violence.

In the Rowohlt volume Zerschlagt die Wohlstandsinseln der iii. Welt, which includes Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla, it says in the preface that the decision to publish his text is a protest against arrests and torture in Brazil, not a guide for action here, “however weak parliamentary democracy may be and whatever threat is posed by its own economic system.”—“To use counterviolence (the Latin American urban guerilla model) which is meant to be used against a terrorist capitalist ruling class, in a country where one can discuss workers’ participation, is to make a mockery of the wretched of the earth.”

Following this logic, to bomb BASF in Ludwigshafen would be to mock the people who bombed BASF in Brazil. The Latin American comrades feel differently. BASF does as well.

The argument that the Federal Republic is not Latin America is advanced by people who speak about current affairs from a perspective in which their monthly income is secure, and who speak in a way which keeps it secure; it is an example of human coldness and intellectual arrogance in the face of the problems of people here. Reality in the Federal Republic is in this way factually and analytically removed from the table. An analysis of questions here must be based on the objective relevance of social questions, on the subjective relevance of the question of ownership, and on the militarization of the class struggle.

Poverty in the Federal Republic

The objective relevance of social questions means the reality of poverty in the Federal Republic. The fact that this poverty is largely hidden doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. The fact that there is no chance that this poverty will lead to social revolution is no reason to act as if it doesn’t exist.

Jürgen Roth, in his book Armut in der Bundesrepublik has assembled almost everything that needs to be said on this topic. 14 million people in the Federal Republic and West Berlin are living in poverty today. 1.1 million people living in rural areas must get by on 100 to 400 marks per month; these are the families of small farmers and people retired from sharecropping. 4.66 million households with an average of three members must get by on a monthly net income of less than 600 marks; that is 21 percent of all households. Over 5 million pensioners have a monthly pension of around 350 marks. To this add 600,000 people in low-income housing projects, 450,000 in homeless shelters, 100,000 institutionalized children, 100,000 in mental asylums, 50,000 adults in prison and 50,000 youth in reform schools. Those are the official figures. Everyone knows that official figures in this area are always underestimates. In Bremen, 11,000 people receive heating subsidies because they can’t afford to buy coal. The Munich Housing Bureau calculates that the number of homeless will increase from 7,300 to 25,000. In Cologne, in 1963, 17,000 lived in low-income housing projects.

In the Nordweststadt neighborhood in Frankfurt one pays 460 marks rent for two rooms totaling about 60 square metres. In Nordweststadt the electricity metres are found in the basement. In almost every highrise at least one electricity metre is turned off, regardless of whether there are small children in the apartment and regardless of whether it is winter. The city of Frankfurt turns off the electricity to 50 homes every day; approximately 800 families a month have their electricity cut.

Approximately 5,000 vagrants live in Frankfurt. At night, water is used to drive them from the area where they sleep on the B level of the Hauptwache pedestrian mall. When the police leave, they come back, lie newspapers on the wet ground, and go back to sleep.

7 million homes in the Federal Republic have neither a bath nor a toilet. 800,000 families live in barracks. In Frankfurt, 20,000 people are searching for homes. In Düsseldorf, it’s 30,000.

600,000 people in the Federal Republic suffer from schizophrenia. If schizophrenia is not treated it is debilitating. 3 percent of the population is unable to work or pursue a career. 5 to 6 million people require some form of psychological support. Some psychiatric institutions have only 0.75 square metres of space per patient.

High school teachers estimate that 80 percent of working class children do not attend classes.

Poverty in the Federal Republic is not decreasing; it is increasing. Demand for housing is increasing. The need for schools is increasing. Child abuse is increasing. At the end of 1970, 7,000 cases were reported; it is estimated that in reality there were 100,000. It is also estimated that 1,000 children are beaten to death each year.

“To describe the school system in the Federal Republic is to describe poverty in a rich country,” says Luc Jochimsen in her book Hinterhöfe der Nation, which provides the necessary details:

The public education system is a slum with the characteristics of any slum: deprivation, budget shortfalls, shortages, obsolescence, crowding, disrepair, discontent, resignation, indifference, and ruthlessness. What occurs today with six- and seven-year-olds in the primary schools of the Federal Republic reflects a conscious plan to use compulsory education to later deny these children the right to education and training. It is a crime against education. A crime for which no punishment exists. A crime that will never face prosecution.

In 1970, 35,000 people lived in the Märkisch neighborhood in Berlin. It is projected to reach 140,000 by 1980. The people are saying, “It’s brutal here, totally squalid; in any event, it destroys the will to live— but inside the houses are well laid out.” Everything is available in the Märkisch neighborhood: playgrounds, a transportation system, schools, cheap shopping, doctors and lawyers; and they are cesspools for poverty, child abuse, suicide, criminal gangs, bitterness and need. The Märkisch neighborhood shows the future of social conditions.

(Bourgeois authors, faced with the conclusions we are drawing here, make no effort to place their observations within a context which recognizes that poverty is caused by the mobility of capital and the concentration of capital by banks, insurance companies, and home and property owners. They come to terms with the research data through verbal protests.)

The reality of poverty is not the same thing as revolutionary reality. The poor are not spontaneously and of their own accord revolutionary. They generally direct their aggression against themselves rather than against their oppressors. The objects of their aggression are usually other poor people, not those who benefit from their poverty. Not the real estate companies, the banks, the insurance companies, the corporations and the city planners, but rather other victims. Inactive, truly depressed, a discouraging example providing material for the fascism of Bild and ZDF.

The ZDF showed the following scene: in the slums of Wiesbaden, ZDF had children play in the dirt, beating on each other and screaming. The adults had to scream at them to let each other be. The television voice-over says, “The Federal Republic is not Latin America”; the poor in the Federal Republic have only themselves to blame; they are criminals; there are very few poor people—this is the concrete evidence. The Springer Press prints stuff like this. The material of fascism.

The Reality of Ownership Conditions

But the objective reality of poverty has in no small way clarified the subjective fact that capitalist ownership since the early postwar years— the CDU’s Ahlener Program—has provided nothing. No gains came spontaneously, all were won through negotiations. Little was developed for the poor, but in the rest of society Citizens Initiatives with their platitudes became more widespread, albeit very poorly organized and vague, not worth repressing.

The 20,000 sacrificed in car accidents to the automobile industry’s lust for profit has not led to any consideration of the future of the highway system; the insurance aristocracy that represents capital guarantees illness, the downside of which being miserable hospital stays; the contradiction between community debt and the dividends enjoyed by the corporations that engage in production on their territory; between the exploitation of guest workers and the accommodations provided to guest workers; between the misery of children and the profits of toy companies; between profit made by landlords and miserable housing conditions—all of this is common knowledge. It is covered at length in Spiegel every week, and daily in Bild, in most cases as isolated incidents. But this state of affairs has been worsening so quickly that it can no longer be covered up. Deutsche Bank spokesman Ulrich babbles about “the demonization of profit,” “the attack against our economic system,” and the “criticism of profit”: “We are insufficiently committed to broadly clarifying the nature of employers’ profits, without which development and progress are impossible in a free market system”—that a part of this should also be for the common good is rejected by almost all owners of capital.

Eppler hopes to secure support for the unpopular sales tax increase by using the taxation of higher income brackets for propaganda purposes. The CDU is afraid that the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties could lead to an ideological softening within the Federal Republic—Schröder’s key argument is that the demonization of communism could lose credibility, because communism has come to represent expropriation and collectivization of the means of production. The CDU does not attack the contents of the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties, they struggle against ideological tolerance of the thinking of sworn enemies of capitalism.

The initiatives of the left after 1968, when they had a broad base everywhere, addressed the question of ownership and created a consensus behind their criticism. They did this in a way that constituted an attack against capitalist ownership and acted as a brake on capitalist profiteering. This took place in the squats in cities throughout the Federal Republic, in the Citizens Initiatives opposed to gentrification, in the initiatives for non-profit development in the suburbs—the Märkisch neighborhood, Nordweststadt in Frankfurt—and in the Citizens Initiatives opposed to the development of industrial sites in residential neighborhoods.

The Heidelberg SPK, through collective study and action, developed such a persuasive critique of the connection between illness and capitalism that SPK cadre have been detained in prison under §129 since July 71. The struggle of the students against the standardized testing which capital has imposed, and the campaign of the Jusos against private property development on public lands in the countryside, both have capitalist ownership as their target.

The most important strikes occurred in September 69, and were sparked by the year’s high profits. The most powerful campaign of the student movement was that against the Springer Corporation: “Expropriate Springer.” The most brutal police action was against the Belgian community’s squats in Kassel, where women and children were beaten with clubs, and against the squats in Hannover, which were destroyed through trials for damages. After Georg’s murder, a sticker appeared in Berlin that read: “Killer cops murdered our brother Georg because they were worried about their loot.”

Social Democracy and Reformism

Promise of reform has become the ersatz religion, the opium of the people. Promises of a better future have only one function, to provide a motivation for patience, endurance, and passivity. With all the efforts that are required to push reforms through, one could have a revolution. The people who say otherwise—like the Jusos, and like those who believe that the Jusos have the power to push through meaningful reforms— misunderstand the system’s ability to resist change. They misunderstand its determination to adapt society to the exploitative conditions of capitalism and not the other way around. They do not understand that the system no longer feels constrained to act “within the bounds of the constitutional state.” Above all, they fail to understand that the Jusos are the cream of the younger generation of social democrats

There is, however, a difference between the SPD and the CDU. They despise the working class and the people in different ways. The SPD believes in the carrot and the stick. The CDU is only interested in the stick. The SPD is more experienced at leading the working class around by the nose. Wehner is more experienced in deceiving and purging the left. Brandt is more experienced in the way to take over the leadership of a movement so as to neutralize it (e.g., the antinuclear movement in Berlin in 1958). They are more imaginative than the CDU in their tactics against the people.

The SPD pushed the amnesty through to defuse the solidarity that was developing around the trials of students, to disrupt the criticisms of the justice system, to break the solidarity the left was receiving against the justice system and the administration, thereby eliminating the rebellion without involving state security.

With their Ostpolitik, they beat back the criticism that their reform policies were in disarray. The Berlin Senate didn’t send in the police in response to the occupation at the Bethanien Hospital and the establishment of the Georg von Rauch House, instead they chose to shut off the water and take over administration of the building. Because of the protests against his Persian trip, Heinemann is still gun-shy about diplomacy. Under Brandt’s leadership, the ban on foreigners’ organizations was already in the works. It is the SPD that has influence with the unions and the workers, while the CDU distrusts the unions and their method of functioning: accumulation of capital through voluntary membership donations instead of through the extraction of profits. And Posser in many ways avoids lying: Mahler is a “fellow human being,” and in his impact report he says Brigitte Asdonk had been mistreated.

The difference between the SPD and the CDU has been defined by some comrades as the difference between the plague and cholera. That’s the choice the West German people face when they vote.

The system is taking the steps necessary to preserve the social status quo. Preserving the status quo requires: the concentration of European businesses to resist American competition; tax funded basic research to maintain high rates of profit; supplying weapons to the Third World through capital export markets so as to keep the liberation movements in check and using foreign production to keep wages down at home; keeping Siemens Annual General Assembly free from criticisms about Carbora Bassa investments; protecting the Shah from criticism about the death penalty in Persia.

Preserving the status quo requires: keeping anyone who is poor away from people who are addressing the issue of ownership; keeping the working class divided; using the accumulation of wealth and promises of reform to rein in the working class; keeping up a steady flow of propaganda: consumer ownership is the same as ownership of the means of production; all attacks against private property are the same; all attacks against private property are criminal; capitalist production is the natural state of affairs; capitalism is the best option available and the best that humans have come up with; criticisms of capitalism serve particular, selfish agendas of individuals and groups; wages are responsible for inflation; employers’ profits serve the common good; whoever has a different perspective is making problems and stands alone and is, in the final analysis, a criminal.

It is a status quo of relations of ownership and ideas that cannot be preserved without the militarization of the class struggle and the criminalization of the left.

The Springer Press

The role of the Springer Press in the militarization of the class struggle was well described in 1968 during the “Expropriate Springer” campaign:

One can see the way in which the Springer Press’ public is produced following a simple formula: The Springer Press treats every attempt by people to free themselves from the constraints of late capitalism as a crime. Political revolutionaries are assigned the attributes of violent criminals. Political struggle is presented as individual, abstract terror, and the campaign against imperialism as pointless destruction.

The Springer Corporation represents the propaganda vanguard of aggressive anticommunism. The Springer Press is the enemy of the working class. They undermine its ability to act freely and in solidarity. They transform the reader’s desire for equality into a lynching instinct and the longing for a free society into hatred against everybody who wants to build a free society. The Springer Press serves the interests of war preparations. Their construct of the enemy is a way of saying, “If you’re ever disruptive, if you don’t leave your divorce to the divorce lawyers, the question of wage increases for contract negotiations, the issue of housing in the hands of the Housing Office, injustice in the hands of the judges, your security with the police, and your destiny to the vicissitudes of late capitalism, the response will be murder, torture, rape, and criminal attacks.”

from: Destroy Bild

The situation has gotten increasingly critical since the Molotov Cocktail Meeting in February 68. Bild has launched the column “Bild Fights for You!” and reports daily successes in the struggle against exorbitant rents, against the criminalization of foreigners, against denunciations of large families, against forced retirement and the impoverishment of retirees. Before the oppressed masses turn their backs on the institutions of the constitutional state, Bild turns them against themselves; before their dissatisfaction with the institutions of the class state can become class consciousness, Bild takes the lead in expressing this dissatisfaction, and just as was the case with the Nazis in 1933, Bild speaks for capital, not for the proletariat.

Böll called this fascist, by which he meant, so there is no misunderstanding, the “agitation, lies, dirt.” In this he, analytically and politically, hit the nail on the head. The reaction showed how sensitive the system really is, how unstable the status quo, how fascistic Bild, and how agitated the climate at the Springer Corporation.

The Dialectic of Revolution and Counterrevolution

It isn’t a question of whether we want the reactionary militarization or not; it is a question of whether we have the conditions necessary to transform the fascist militarization into a revolutionary mobilization, whether we can transform the reactionary militarization into a revolutionary one, whether it is better to lay down and die or to stand up and resist. Kim Il Sung

Most people say, “It’s unacceptable.” Most people say, “The masses do not want this.” Many people say, “Fighting now will provoke fascism.” Böll says, “Six against 60,000,000—capital has everything, we have nothing.”

They see only the status quo. They see in the system’s violence only the violence, not the fear. They see in the militarization only the weapons, not the crumbling mass base. They see in Bild’s hatred only the hatred, not the dissatisfaction of Bild readers. They see cops with semiautomatic pistols and see only cops with semi-automatic pistols, not the lack of mass support for fascism. They see the terror against us and see only the terror, not the fear about the social explosiveness of the RAF, which must be “nipped in the bud.” They see in the political apathy of the proletariat only the apathy, not the protest against a system that has nothing to offer them. They see in the high level of suicide amongst the proletariat only the act of desperation, not the protest. They see in the proletariat’s disinterest in economic struggle only a disinterest in struggle, not the refusal to struggle for a paltry percentage and the right to idiotic consumption. They see in the proletariat’s lack of union organization only the lack of organization, not the mistrust of union bureaucrats as accomplices of capital. They see in the population’s hostility towards the left only the hostility towards the left, not the hatred against those who are socially privileged. They see in our isolation from the masses only our isolation from the masses, not the insane lengths to which the system will go to isolate us from the masses. They see in the long periods comrades spend in preventive custody only the long periods in preventive custody, not the system’s fear about the free members of the RAF. They see in the exclusion of DKP teachers only the end of the march through the institutions, not the beginning of the adoption of revolutionary politics by children and their parents, which must be choked off. They see everything in terms of the existing movement, not the future one, only the bad, not the good: the dialectic of revolution and counterrevolution.

We’re not saying it will be easy to build the guerilla, or that the masses are just waiting for the opportunity to join the guerilla. However, we do, above all, believe that the situation will not change by itself. We don’t believe that the guerilla will spontaneously spring forth from the mass struggle. Such illusions are unrealistic. A guerilla that developed spontaneously out of the mass struggle would be a bloodbath, not a guerilla group. We do not believe that the guerilla can be formed as the “illegal wing” of a legal organization. Such an illegal wing would lead to the illegalization of the organization, i.e., its liquidation, and nothing else. We don’t believe that the concept of the guerilla will develop by itself from political work. Therefore, we believe that the options and the specific role of the guerilla in the class struggle can only be collectively perceived and understood, that the guerilla stands in opposition to the consciousness industry.

We have said that any talk of their defeating us can only mean our arrests or deaths. We believe that the guerilla will develop, will gain a foothold, that the development of the class struggle will itself establish the idea of armed struggle only if there is already an organization in existence conducting guerilla warfare, an organization that is not easily demoralized, that does not simply lie down and give up.

We believe that the idea of the guerilla developed by Mao, Fidel, Che, Giáp, and Marighella is a good idea that cannot be removed from the table. If one underestimates the difficulties in establishing the guerilla, if one is scared off by the difficulties against which we must struggle, this also shows that one underestimates the difficulties which the guerilla had to face even in those places where it has made a good deal of progress and is now anchored in the masses. We believe that these reservations are an indication of how far capital is prepared to go when it’s a question of securing exploitative conditions, an area where they have never hesitated: not with the Paris Commune, not in Germany in 1918, not in 1933, not in Algeria, Vietnam, the Congo, Cuba, Latin America, or Mozambique, not at Attica, not in Los Angeles, Kent State, Augsburg or Hamburg.

MAKE THE QUESTION OF OWNERSHIP THE KEY QUESTION FOR ALL MOVEMENTS!

ADVANCE THE REVOLUTIONARY GUERILLA AGAINST THE REACTIONARY MILITARIZATION!

No party can call itself revolutionary if it fails to prepare for armed struggle, and that is true at all levels of the party. That is the way to most effectively confront the reactionaries at every step of the revolutionary process. Any disregard for this factor can only lead to missed revolutionary opportunities.

That's what we mean by SERVE THE PEOPLE!

4. On Current Issues

The Ruhland Trial

There is still a liberal press in the Federal Republic for whom the trial was a scandal. Ruhland was never as close to the Red Army Faction as he claims. His fawning, his reliance on evidence from the investigation rather than his own memory, the fact that Mahler’s lawyer Schily was prevented from attending his trial, the fact that from the beginning of the trial it was established that there would be a verdict based on negotiations that neither the federal prosecutor nor the defense attorney would challenge (the FAZ reported this). As the Frankfurter Rundschau describes it, “like a nice teacher delivering a worn out speech to a sympathetic student” —proving very clearly that discovering the truth and due process have nothing to do with anything anymore.

The assurance that Ruhland is certainly telling the truth, the fulminations that those he has incriminated are not telling the truth, the assumption that anyone who doesn’t cooperate with the justice system is guilty… that is exactly what class justice means, show trials, making them an—effectively ornamental—component of capital’s general offensive against the left as the vanguard of the working class in the Federal Republic and West Berlin.

One cannot offer up Verfassungsschutz informants, as in earlier communist trials or as with Urbach, to a public increasingly polarized by the growing class contradictions. They expect the left-wing public to be dazzled by state witnesses presented by the Bonn Security Group, and it’ll probably work. The person who’s really screwed in this situation is Ruhland himself, since he no longer knows his friends from his enemies, up from down, the revolution from the counterrevolution. The poor pig doesn’t understand how they’re using him.

Urban guerilla struggle requires that one not be demoralized by the system’s violence. One certainly should not be demoralized by a trial that shows us to be morally and politically in the right. Demoralization is in fact their goal. The Ruhland trial is only a very superficial event in the unfolding of history, the development of class struggle and the question of whether the urban guerilla is legitimate.

On Traitors

There are people who believe there might be some truth in the things Homann and the like are spreading around. At least, they say, Homann is no idiot. They take him to be what he presented himself as in Spiegel, a “political scholar”; from a vocabulary that encompasses both hunter and prey. These terms have nothing to do with class antagonism. The assertion that you are a scholar doesn’t make you one when you deal in the techniques used by Spiegel journalists. The substance of Marxism, the dialectic of being and consciousness, excludes the possibility that police statements can contribute to the revolutionary strategy. Marxism can only be taught by Marxists, as Margharita von Brentano told Spiegel. What Mandel has to say, Schwan couldn’t spell.

Anybody who shares the interests of the status quo cannot possibly have anything to say about social change. But it is the nature of traitors to share the interests of the status quo, to want to return to their hereditary place in class society, to not feel right in unfamiliar circumstances, to only have a sense of identity in their own milieu, and to remain the object of their own development.

Ruhland only really feels comfortable in his old role as a criminal proletariat, handcuffed and oppressed, and Homann in the role of the lost son of the lumpen proletariat, ever at the beck and call of the bourgeoisie—in Spiegel and konkret—in his heart of hearts he has no interest in matters of the market. Sturm had an adventure and then fled back home to the bosom of her family.

Ruhland remains a victim and Homann a consumer, the overpaid illiterate and the profiteering academic—the class balance is re-established, legality is obviously the natural state of affairs. Regarding Homann, FAZ wrote: “…a journalist and visual artist, with a politically untrained but sensitive intelligence”; about Ruhland: “…he doesn’t want to be a villain, he is perhaps an honest man with a guileless mind. Facing his guards in the court room, two young security police officers, he exhibits a completely natural and comradely bearing.”

The psychological makeup of traitors is venal and conservative. The conservative FAZ sympathizes with these sons and servants.

We suffered from a false fascination and have underestimated illegality. We’ve overestimated the unity of some groups. That is to say that we have not taken into account all of the implications of the student movement being a relatively privileged movement, that we have failed to observe that for many people much of the politics of 67/68 is no longer relevant, as it offers them no way of increasing their own privilege. It can be pleasant to know a little Marxism, to have some clarity about the conditions of the ruling class’ economic domination and their psychological techniques, to shed the self-imposed pressure to perform of a bourgeois overachiever, to embrace an alienated form of Marxism, acquired by privilege, as an item for one’s intellectual wellbeing and benefit and not directed towards serving the people.

A preference for certain actions because they are illegal is an expression of bourgeois self-indulgence. The student movement, given its suppositions, could not be free of blind followers and people with a mercenary mentality. The tedious, long-term drudgery that must first of all be undertaken to lay the basis for the urban guerilla must seem to these people, who are so falsely programmed, like a scene from a horror show. Anyone who arrives with criminal fantasies, anyone who only wants to improve their personal situation, will certainly and inevitably improve their situation through treason.

We believed if someone said he had worked in this or that organization for such and such a period of time, then he must know what political work entails, what organization means, or else they would already have tossed him. We now know that we should ourselves have established the political organization necessary for the urban guerilla, that we made a mistake when we relied so readily upon others.

Above all, we think that on our own it would have been very difficult for us to have avoided this error and prevented the treason. We think that a false understanding of the police and the justice system, a false understanding of what SERVE THE PEOPLE means, and a false approach to contradictions within the New Left made the treason inevitable.

As long as traitors still find a place with comrades, not even receiving a single punch in the face, but rather finding understanding as to why they must quickly resume their bourgeois existence and do away with their other existence—because they can’t tolerate another day in prison, they send others inside for years or deliver them up to the police death squads—as long as political cooperation with the armed power of capital continues to be tolerated as a political difference of opinion, as long as something that has long been politically condemned is treated as a private matter, treason will continue to exist. Without criticizing liberalism within the left, we cannot eliminate treason.

Traitors must be excluded from the ranks of the revolution. Tolerance in the face of traitors produces more treason. Traitors in the ranks of the revolution cause more harm than the police can without traitors. We believe that is a general rule. It is impossible to know how much they will betray if they are threatened. Given that they are little pigs, one cannot permit them to be in a situation where they can be blackmailed. Capital will continue to turn people into little pigs until we overthrow its rule. We are not responsible for capital’s crimes.

On Bank Robberies

Some people say robbing banks is not political. Since when is the question of financing a political organization not a political question? The urban guerilla in Latin America calls bank robberies “expropriation actions.” Nobody is claiming that robbing banks will be all it takes to change the oppressive social order. For revolutionary organizations, it mainly represents the solution to their financial problems. It makes logical sense, because there is no other solution to the financial problem. It makes political sense, because it is an expropriation action. It makes tactical sense, because it is a proletarian action. It makes strategic sense, because it finances the guerilla.

A political concept that bases itself on parliamentary democracy, the political concept of competitive capitalism, a concept that understands class antagonism to be nothing more than a power struggle, that perceives the institutions of the class state to be institutions of a constitutional state, thereby definitely turning its back on progress and humanity… such a political concept cannot condone bank robbery. In the imperialist metropole, where the organization of the anti-imperialist struggle must have both legal and illegal components, the political struggle and the armed struggle, bank robbery cannot be dispensed with. It is, in practice, expropriation. And it points to the necessary method for establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat against the enemy: armed struggle.

On Logistics and Continuity

Many comrades are impressed by the Tupamaros’ actions. They don’t understand why, instead of carrying out popular actions, we’re preoccupied with logistics. They can’t be bothered with going to the trouble to consider what the urban guerilla is and how it functions.

It is most likely maliciously intended when comrades recite the position of the Düsseldorf judge in Ruhland’s trial: Ruhland was a handyman and the gang’s mascot. The concept of the capitalist division of labor has proven to be an abstraction for them. In practice, they still conceive of proletarian comrades as jack-of-all-trades prefiguring some Silesian idyll. That the technical means can only be developed by working and learning collectively, that the urban guerilla must abolish the division of labor so that the arrest of one individual is not a disaster for us all—these comrades’ imagination can’t get that far. Not having the logistical problems at least partially resolved, not having oneself learned how to resolve logistical problems, not engaging in a collective learning and working process, would mean leaving the outcome of actions to chance technically, psychologically, and politically.

Resolving logistical problems assures the ongoing security of a revolutionary organization. We place great importance in the tactical requirements necessary to secure the continuity of the Red Army Faction. It is in the interest of capital to divide, to destroy, to break down solidarity, to isolate people, and to deny the historical context—in the area of production as well as that of housing, of commerce, of opinion making, of education—so as to guarantee ongoing profits. It is in the interest of capital to guarantee that conditions remain the opposite of those necessary for proletarian revolution: unity, continuity, historical consciousness, class consciousness. Without organizational continuity, without guaranteeing the organizational permanence of the revolutionary process, the revolutionary process is left to the anarchy of the system, to chance, to historical spontaneity.

We consider disregard for the question of organizational continuity to be a manifestation of opportunism.

On Solidarity

The revolutionary process is revolutionary because it makes objects out of the laws of capitalist commodity production and exchange, rather than being their object. It cannot be measured by market criteria. It can only be measured by criteria that simultaneously destroy the power of market criteria for success.

Solidarity, insofar as it is not based on market criteria, destroys the power of those criteria. Solidarity is political, not so much because solidarity is based on politics, but because it is a refusal to be subservient to the law of value and a refusal to be treated like a mere aspect of exchange value. Solidarity is the essence of free action ungoverned by the ruling class; as such it always means resistance against the influence of the ruling class over relationships between people, and as resistance against the ruling class, it is always correct.

In the view of the system, people whose behavior is not guided by the system’s criteria for success are lunatics, halfwits, or losers. In the view of the revolution, all those who conduct themselves with solidarity, whoever they may be, are comrades.

Solidarity becomes a weapon if it is organized and is acted upon in a consistent way against the courts, the police, the authorities, the bosses, the infiltrators, and the traitors. They must be denied any cooperation, afforded no attention, denied access to evidence, offered no information, and afforded absolutely no time and energy. Solidarity includes struggling against liberalism within the left and addressing contradictions within the left as one addresses contradictions amongst the people, and not as if they were a class contradiction.

All political work is based on solidarity. Without solidarity, it will crumble in the face of repression.

“We must prevent the possibility of unnecessary victims. Everybody in the ranks of the revolution must take care of each other, must relate to each other lovingly, must help each other.”

SERVE THE PEOPLE!

MAKE THE QUESTION OF OWNERSHIP THE KEY QUESTION EVERYWHERE!

SUPPORT THE ARMED STRUGGLE!

BUILD THE REVOLUTIONARY GUERILLA!

VICTORY IN THE PEOPLE'S WAR!

RAF

April 1972

On the Treatment of Traitors

There have been insinuations, always vague on details or proof, that the RAF was an intensely authoritarian organization, particularly in regards to people not being allowed to leave. Claims have been made that Baader murdered Ingeborg Barz, a young woman who had joined the RAF from the anarchist Black Aid, simply because she wanted to quit the underground. These claims have been contradicted by other witnesses. Some have pointed to Serve the People as evidence that the RAF endorsed the assassination of drop-outs, one passage in particular being mentioned in this regard: Traitors must be excluded from the ranks of the revolution. Tolerance in the face of traitors produces more treason. Traitors in the ranks of the revolution cause more harm than the police can without traitors. We believe that is a general rule. It is impossible to know how much they will betray if they are threatened. Given that they are little pigs, one cannot permit them to be in a situation where they can be blackmailed. Capital will continue to turn people into little pigs until we overthrow its rule. We are not responsible for capital’s crimes. This position should be evaluated in light of the RAF’s documented practice, and the realities of armed struggle. No clandestine organization can tolerate informants, nor should any revolutionary movement do so, regardless of its legal or illegal status. Yet many observers are wary, and rightly so, of such calls to “exclude” traitors; the reason for this unease is the strong tendency for factions or entire organizations to end up using such a line as cover to attack any and all dissidents, drop-outs, critics or even rivals, accusing them all of “treason.” Examples abound of revolutionary movements gutting themselves and doing inestimable damage to their cause and their political integrity through this error. Despite allegations to the contrary, there is no substantive evidence of the RAF ever going down that road. The RAF was criticized throughout its existence, yet none of the critics were ever targeted. What is striking about the cases of Sturm, Homann, and Ruhland is not that they were insulted or berated, but that no harm befell them even after they all took public stands against the guerilla. Another guerilla member, Hans-Jürgen Bäcker, suspected of being an informant, was not targeted by any attack even after testifying in court against the RAF. Stefan Aust and Jillian Becker have both claimed that members of the guerilla made what can only be described as half-hearted attempts to exact vengeance, but their stories are difficult to gauge. Both authors claim that Baader and Mahler were trying to find Homann and Aust to kill them, but if so, they evidently gave up the search quickly. This is just one aspect of the story that casts doubt on its veracity. Becker furthermore claims that Astrid Proll shot at Bäcker but missed; the way in which she phrases the allegation, however, indicates the source may be Karl-Heinz Ruhland, himself far from reliable. No charges were ever laid against Proll for this. There is one, and only one, documented case of the RAF doing violence to an informant. In 1971, a friend of Katharina Hammerschmidt’s, Edelgard Graefer, was arrested on bogus charges and threatened with having her five-year-old son permanently taken away from her. Under pressure, Graefer gave information to the police. In early 1972, she was abducted by the RAF and had a bucket of tar poured over her. Following this attack on her person, she stopped working with the police. While unpleasant, such a violent warning is not on the order of a death sentence. Indeed, as Brigitte Mohnhaupt later argued in Stammheim, the fact that a known informant was assaulted and not killed should suffice to discredit claims that other members were executed merely for dropping out. Certainly, given the guerilla’s ability to carry out attacks against even heavily guarded targets, the fact that all of those who testified against them remained unscathed should tell us something. As for the many others who left over the years, if they did not cooperate with the police or run with tall tales to the media, there is no indication that the guerilla bore them any ill will.