In 1971 in Cambridge, I sat in a room listening to people plotting to blow up
the Corn Exchange and steal the Rubens from King’s College Chapel. In the
latter case, baseball bats were to be used to quell the porters. It was a
joke, stupid late-night babble. But why, I later wondered, that particular
joke? Why, in 1971, was the babble about violence and not about failed sex,
bad parties, loud music and crass politics, the usual student
preoccupations?
Because violence was in the air. Because among our contemporaries around the
world were people who were prepared to kill, maim and kidnap in the name of
the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. And, crucially, because in the
recesses of even the most pacific student’s imagination was the suspicion
that, just maybe, these people had a point. Those were different times, as
Lou Reed crooned to us in those late-night rooms, many decorated with
Alberto Korda’s hyper-romantic photograph of Che Guevara. Now, the word
“terrorist” evokes an Islamist militant, not a western student. Between,
say, June 2, 1967 and October 18, 1977, however, it meant a young citizen of
a democracy who, for complex and usually opaque reasons, had decided
appalling violence was the answer to the condition of society, or perhaps
just the conditions in his head.
On the first date, Benno Ohnesorg, a student pacifist, was killed by a police
bullet in Berlin during a protest against a visit by the American-backed
repressive Shah of Iran (the policeman who shot him was later acquitted of
wrongdoing). On the second date, prison guards found the bodies of the
terrorists Andreas Baader and his girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin, in their cells
at Stammheim prison, in Stuttgart. They had killed themselves, Baader with a
gun smuggled in by his lawyers, Ensslin by hanging herself with a length of
speaker wire. One more prisoner, Jan-Carl Raspe, was just about alive, but
died later in hospital from self-inflicted gunshot wounds. A year earlier,
their co-conspirator Ulrike Meinhof had hanged herself in her cell in the
same prison.
It was the decade in which the postwar German economic miracle became the
German political nightmare. The death of Ohnesorg was followed a year later
by the attempted assassination of the student leader Rudi Dutschke by a
young man shouting anti-communist slogans. Dutschke was the charismatic
spokesman for a movement that opposed state repression, American-dominated
global capitalism and, above all, the Vietnam war. His shooting sparked a
wave of radicalism that resulted in the creation of what was known first as
the Baader-Meinhof Gang, then as the Red Army Faction (RAF).
Meinhof, Baader, Ensslin and a few new fellow travellers went to Jordan to
train with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Now officially
the RAF, they drew inspiration from the Brazilian Marxist Carlos Marighella,
treating as their bible his Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla, which recast
Che Guevara’s idea of the peasant revolutionary in an urban environment.
They returned to Germany with their new name, a manifesto written by Meinhof
and a symbol: a red star crossed by a Heckler & Koch submachinegun. Over
the next two years, they carried out an “anti-imperialist struggle”, robbing
banks for funds and bombing US military bases, police stations and offices
of the right-wing Springer press empire. Six people died and dozens were
wounded.
The West German police launched their biggest manhunt and, in June 1972, the
ringleaders were captured. They were placed in solitary confinement in the
new maximum-security prison of Stammheim, awaiting trial. During the lengthy
preparations for the trial, a “second generation” grew up on the outside
that, with increasing violence, continued the campaign of kidnappings and
bombings. After repeated attempts to secure the release of the RAF members,
in July 1977 four Arab terrorists hijacked a Lufthansa plane en route to
Germany from Mallorca. It was full of tourists. The hijackers demanded the
release of Palestinian prisoners and the RAF detainees. The plane ended up
in Mogadishu, Somalia, where it was successfully stormed by elite West
German special forces. That same night, after the news had been broadcast on
German radio, the RAF leaders were found dead in their cells.
The RAF terrorised the Bundesrepublik, although with increasingly less effect,
for another 20 years. On April 20, 1998, the group issued a statement saying
the RAF had been disbanded. Lest we be lulled into complacency, the
statement concluded with a quote from Rosa Luxemburg — “The Revolution says:
I was, I am, I will be.” The events spawned a profound cultural myth — that
of the romantic terrorist, the justified and brutal outsider — one that to
this day haunts and provokes the western imagination.
In 1985, a German journalist, Stefan Aust, who was to become editor-in-chief
of Der Spiegel, produced the standard work on the RAF. His book, The Baader
Meinhof Complex, has been updated and is republished here next month. It has
also been made into a film of the same title, produced by Bernd Eichinger,
who was also the producer of the 2004 film Downfall, the gruelling
dramatisation of Hitler’s last days. I ask Eichinger if there is a link
between the two movies. “Yes,” he replies at once. “We never could cope with
the immense disaster of Nazism. It was not over just because the war was
over.”
Aust agrees that Nazism hangs over the RAF’s grim decade like a black cloud.
These young people had convinced themselves they were in danger of making
the same mistake as their parents, that conditions in Germany in the late
1960s echoed the conditions of the early 1930s that brought the Nazis to
power. They wished to overthrow the state because the state was becoming
fascist. And he makes a crucial point about the level of violence in Germany
compared to that of radical movements in Britain and elsewhere. “The
Japanese Red Army were very cruel, also the Red Brigades, in Italy — at
least as murderous as the RAF. These radical movements in countries with a
fascist past were a little bit different from the others, because everything
they did against the system they did by comparing the system to the fascist
past.” In the words of Ulrike Meinhof: “I really see no difference left
between the police terrorist methods we have already seen in Berlin and that
threaten us now, and the terrorism of the S\A\ in the 1930s.”
Aust himself knows this all too well. He was a young journalist on the radical
magazine konkret — edited by Meinhof’s husband, Klaus Rainer Röhl, and for
which she was a columnist — when the killings started. But Aust was a fairly
gentle liberal, a posture that later almost cost him his life. When Meinhof
went underground, along with the rest of the group, and travelled to the
terrorist training camp in Jordan, she decided to hand over her two
daughters to a Palestinian orphanage. Appalled, Aust and a friend took the
children from Sicily, where they were staying, and returned them to
Meinhof’s estranged husband. She wanted revenge, she wanted Aust and his
fellow kidnapper killed. Somehow, it never happened.
The story is horrific and significant. Meinhof was a radical, though highly
respectable, journalist, a member of the increasingly comfortable German
middle class. In the film, we see her being hypnotised by the passion of
Baader and Ensslin. She cared for the poor and the oppressed, but
increasingly came to believe that caring was not enough. Finally, she
stepped over the line in May 1970, when she was involved in the “liberation”
of Baader — who, along with Ensslin, had been imprisoned after the fire
bombing of a department store in Frankfurt — an operation that entailed the
shooting of an old man. Meinhof the middle-class professional had become
Meinhof the urban guerrilla, prepared to abandon her children in the name of
the revolution. Soon after she went underground, she wrote The Concept of
the Urban Guerrilla, the bible for young terrorists around the world.
Baader was charismatic, but basically a young thug, an ill-educated car thief
and building worker from Bavaria; his girlfriend, Ensslin, a smart, pretty
philosophy student whose father was a Lutheran pastor, became a cold
psychotic; the rest of the RAF seemed simply dazzled by their certainties.
It is Meinhof’s story that is at the heart of the matter. Indeed, it is a
story that forms a perfect circle. A careful reading of the transcripts of
the trial of the RAF leaders at Stammheim indicates that, in prison, she
cracked, her cold certainties evaporated and her conscience kicked in.
Broken and confused, she asked how it was possible for anybody to show they
had changed in the conditions of the prison. “I was amazed when I read
that,” Aust says. “I realised it was the moment she left the group.”
The question Meinhof leaves behind is: how was it possible for a well-off
citizen of a liberal democracy to sink into the corrupt belief that utopia
could be born of random episodes of appalling brutality?
Part of the answer was “radical chic”, a phrase coined by Tom Wolfe in a 1970
book to describe a party at Leonard Bernstein’s house, at which the composer
entertained the Black Panthers, a sporadically violent Maoist group. The
party was a distillation of the mood of the bien pensants of the time. They
were embracing every cause, from migrant workers to Native American Indians
and, of course, the
Vietcong. Abbie Hoffman’s Yippies had won the hearts of the radically chic by
their brutal disruption of the Chicago Democratic convention in 1968; that
same year, Mick Jagger described the violent demo against the Vietnam war on
Grosvenor Square as a “turn-on”. Violence was cool.
Wolfe had defined an exotic dance involving high fashion and lethal politics.
His insight was vindicated in 1974, when the American newspaper heiress
Patty Hearst was kidnapped by a group called the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Hearst went native and was photographed wielding a gun in an SLA bank raid.
The line between the liberal democratic good life and revolutionary
slaughter had become desperately fragile.
It may be more robust now, but the radically chic are still dancing. Coverage
of the Baader-Meinhof decade has tended to embrace a romantic view of the
urban guerrilla. Terrorism may be a much more alien phenomenon now, but that
hasn’t stopped fashion designers from experimenting with urban guerrilla
wear. In the early 1990s, “Prada Meinhof” became a cult phrase for those who
treated political causes as fashion accessories. The Prada Meinhof Gang was
a self-proclaimed “all-female Art Terrorist Group”, active from 2002-04. Its
apparently valedictory website bears the slogan: “History repeats itself,
first as tragedy then as fashion.” This, after you have seen the film, will
make you sick; as, I hope, did the spectacle of the curiously brutal model
Naomi Campbell interviewing Hugo Chavez, the revolutionary president of
Venezuela, for GQ magazine earlier this year.
On the whole, however, current radical chic is herbivorous, embracing softer
causes such as the environmentor HIV. And it is noticeable that the protests
against the invasion of Iraq never became as brutal as those against the
Vietnam war, and certainly never fired radical underground movements as
Vietnam did. There remains, though, that reflex anti-Americanism among the
radically chic that can shade all too easily into sympathy for the devil.
There’s a further point to be made about Baader-Meinhof. From Seattle, Richard
Huffman runs a comprehensive website, www.baader-meinhof.com, which details
the group’s history and sells posters of the era, as well as a bumper
sticker displayed by long-haired young Germans of the time who didn’t want
to be pulled over by the police. “I do not belong to the Baader-Meinhof
Group,” it says. Huffman, 40, was drawn into this because his father was the
head of the US army’s bomb-disposal unit in Berlin in the early 1970s, and
involved with defusing RAF bombs. He is writing a book called The
Baader-Meinhof Gang at the Dawn of Terror.
“They were the first modern terrorists,” Huffman says. “They were the first
ones who seemed to see the power of personality, the power of the media, and
to use terrorism as an end in itself, not something to achieve some other
goal. They were the first terrorist group to effectively use mass
communications to become powerful and popular and prominent. They were ahead
of their time.” Perhaps the greatest virtue of the Aust-Eichinger film is
that it dramatises the technological topicality of the RAF’s reign of terror
— we see them using a cine camera to film their hostage, the industrialist
Hanns-Martin Schleyer (whom they later executed), for distribution to the
media, in a chilling presaging of the modern jihadist video — as well as the
grim psychological logic of the gang’s slide into a vacuous orgy of
slaughter for its own sake.
Also ahead of his time was the man who tried, in the end successfully, to
destroy them, Horst Herold, the chief of police (portrayed in the film by
Bruno Ganz, who played Hitler in Downfall). Herold virtually invented modern
counterterrorism measures with his use of computers, publicity and, at one
point, a mighty operation that deployed almost every cop in the
Bundesrepublik to, as he puts it, slap the water and make the fish move. On
both sides, the German decade of terror foreshadowed the world in which we
live.
Is there now a more alarming foreshadowing? Aust and Eichinger both remark on
the amazement of young Germans when they see the film — how could this
happen, they ask, in modern Germany? But the financial meltdown, when it
hits, as it must, the real economy, carries with it high risk of social
disorder; 1970s-style brutalities and polarisations may now lie ahead of us.
The angry young will dream new, violent utopian dreams and the radically
chic will buy their little ceramic busts of Mao and once again pin up that
poster of Che to remind them of their youth.
The bitch that bore Baader-Meinhof is in heat again.
The Baader-Meinhof Complex opens on November 14; Stefan Aust’s book is
published by The Bodley Head on November 6
www.bryanappleyard.com
