2 Damaged Lives of the Far Left

Reading the RAF in Reverse

Adorno sketches out a minor ethics for mid-century Europe in his treatise Minima Moralia, published in 1951. “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen,” he writes.¹ A true life cannot be lived within one that is false. As the postwar decades moved on, many aspects of German society were set right, but members of the RAF found themselves torn between two lives. The government conducted dragnet searches, and the militants hid under an array of costumes, including business suits, sunglasses, and wigs. For some radicals, this masquerade took over the most personal aspects of their lives. Both Meinhof and Ensslin, for example, had to abandon their children when they went underground. Later, After the German Autumn, leaders of the RAF’s second generation changed their names, put on disguises, and traveled abroad to the Eastern Bloc and the Middle East. Some wanted to go global with the RAF agenda, linking their skewed conception of “socialist anti-imperialism” to transnational movements such as the PLO. Others simply wanted to take a break from the RAF drama. But to do so, they had to leave their former selves behind.

The morality and duplicity of the German armed struggle have concerned many writers and artists. They have responded to the Far Left’s charges that Germany had not really denazified, and that authoritarian and even fascist tendencies persisted into postwar society. Even if they didn’t endorse the RAF’s tactics, these writers and artists maintained a deep interest in their project of resistance. The novelists Judith Kuckart and Christoph Hein and the filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff have taken up the ethics of the RAF in their work, addressing the group’s traversals of identity and asking if it is ever possible to live rightly as a militant or terrorist. This chapter examines the damaged lives of the Far Left, in both fact and fiction. It sets the work of Kuckart, Hein, and Schlöndorff into comparison with the history of the German armed struggle, comparing the doppelgängers that appear in their writing and cinema to the alter egos that were actually adopted by members of the Far Left. At several junctures, sexual politics play a decisive role. This chapter also takes stock of left-leaning ideological formations on both sides of postwar Germany, from the large-scale socialist experiment that was the German Democratic Republic to the minute cells that composed the RAF, disclosing their links and ruptures.

Records of the RAF’s multiple deceits have begun to surface with increasing frequency. They uncover a past that many would sooner forget. Some records have come from the databanks of the former GDR; others have been located by historians and reporters. Most recently, the release of information about the surviving members has deepened interest in the legacy of the Far Left. Christian Klar, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, and Inge Viett, active in the group’s second and third generations, have come up for parole, and their cases have revealed details about the compromises they struck in their wager for revolution. Archives maintained by the East German Ministry of State Security, or Stasi, now accessible to the public, document extensive travels of a number of militants back and forth through the former GDR. Stasi agents supplied them with false passports and then helped transport them (and their weapons) eastward across the Berlin Wall, the so-called antifascist barrier. From that point they could fly to safe houses in Amman, Baghdad, and Beirut. Historians and journalists have also recently drawn on materials from the late 1960s that expose an anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist undercurrent that informed the Baader-Meinhof program. Given their socialist convictions, the Far Left had long maintained a misguided identification with the victims of U.S. military aggression in Southeast Asia. To their minds, Germany, like Vietnam, was an American-occupied land. With the Six-Day War of 1967, the Far Left began to identify with the opponents of Israeli nationhood as well: Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and especially the Palestinian territories. Pledging this allegiance, radical agitators set out to provoke a revolutionary situation in the Federal Republic, staging numerous strikes on Jewish and U.S. outposts of “imperialism” in West Germany and Berlin.

For the general public, this was the beginning of terror; for future members of the RAF, it was a call to arms. The Far Left used decoys and tricks to advance a purportedly redemptive campaign. But they came dangerously close to the racist violence of the fascist forefathers that the New Left wanted to disavow. The armed struggle was fraught with contradictions, right from the start.

Curiously, a good number of the documents that lay out the inner conflicts of the Far Left have been available for decades, but they were overlooked or underestimated in the first waves of commentary and scholarship on the RAF. Already in the 1970s, insiders’ memoirs were published, and letters and pamphlets describing collaboration between West German militants and terrorist organizations appeared in countercultural and anarchist papers like Agit 883. Carefully preserved in libraries across Western Europe, several of these texts are recalled in this chapter. The historian Wolfgang Kraushaar has asked why those who first chronicled the RAF’s origins didn’t factor these documents into their surveys. What we can see now is that the details of these early accounts unsettle many assumptions about the culture and politics of postwar Germany.

For decades most records of the RAF’s emergence, such as Stefan Aust’s Baader-Meinhof Complex, posited the group as a faction produced, in part, by the breakdown of the SDS and the APO in the late 1960s. Aust’s 1985 edition obliquely suggested that the RAF had ties to the authorities of several governments in the Soviet sphere, as well as terrorist organizations, but the book paid little attention to the historical and political circumstances that shaped the group. It emphasized the biographies of individual figures—Baader, Meinhof, Ensslin—who dominated the headlines during the German Autumn. In 2005, twenty years After the publication of the first edition, the curators of Regarding Terror at the Berlin Kunst-Werke structured their display along a similar time line. Aust’s book and the Kunst-Werke exhibition, two milestones of postmilitancy, were organized by a nearly identical chronology. The survey in Regarding Terror starts with postwar democratic initiatives and moves up through the RAF’s dissolution in 1998; it also discounts the RAF’s connections to the GDR and the PLO.² Through this omission, the Kunst-Werke implied a progressive and even enlightening trajectory of the armed struggle and its Aftermath.

A number scholars and journalists have recently focused attention on the RAF’s place in postwar geopolitics. Wolfgang Kraushaar’s groundbreaking study Die Bombe im Jüdischen Gemeindehaus (The Bomb in the Jewish Community Center, 2005) seeks to dispel the romance of the RAF and expose the criminal, reactionary, and racist underpinnings of the movement.³ Similarly, Julia Hell’s commentary in Telos (2006) describes the German Left’s difficulty in criticizing terrorism, from the beginning of the armed struggle up to the post-9/11 present.⁴ Related works by Hans Kundnani (2009) and Tilman Tarach (2010) look back to the 1960s and 1970s to examine the linked circles of West Germany’s New Left and Far Left, surveying Kommune 1 and other shared collectives and tracing out the intermeshed lives of RAF members and the insurgents who influenced them.⁵ Their profiles of the RAF fellow-travelers Michael “Bommi” Baumann and Dieter Kunzelmann reveal crucial facets of the German Left’s history.

Yet before this critical turn in writing about the history of German protest and resistance, fiction writers and filmmakers were already exploring the false consciousness of the RAF, composing complex portraits of the militants that challenge the one-dimensional figures that register in many documentary and historical accounts of the armed struggle. Judith Kuckart’s novel Wahl der Waffen (Choice of Weapons, 1990) and Volker Schlöndorff’s film Die Stille nach dem Schuss (The Legend of Rita, 2000) track the RAF’s eastward migrations and raise provocative questions about political identity and deception—questions that Aust, for example, has overlooked. Likewise, Christoph Hein’s somewhat later novel In seiner frühen Kindheit ein Garten (In His Early Childhood, a Garden, 2005) asked about truth and reconciliation at a time when German courts were preparing parole and clemency hearings for Klar, Mohnhaupt, Viett, and other RAF convicts.

Interestingly, each of these works reflects on female members of the Baader-Meinhof group. Kuckart, Hein, and Schlöndorff incorporate biographical fragments from the lives of four women who took command of the German armed struggle from the mid-1970s onward: Mohnhaupt and Viett, as well as Birgit Hogefeld and Ina Siepmann. In order to assume leadership of the RAF’s second and third generations, these women acted out split identities. To writers and filmmakers, their intricate lives are fascinating.

It appears that postmilitant literary and visual culture registers the quandaries of the RAF more forcefully than standard historical accounts. Deriving traction from the works of Kuckart, Hein, and Schlöndorff, this chapter juxtaposes fact and fiction, reading RAF history against the grain. To disrupt some of the commonplaces about the Far Left, I trace a rearward arc, beginning with the current fascination with surviving RAF members and moving back through the Cold War flashpoints of the 1970s and 1980s, to plot out the possible origins of leftist militancy in Germany. Engaging historical documents as well as works of art and literature, this chapter counters the forward chronology that has determined the dominant narratives about German political violence. It reads the RAF in reverse, counting down time to the founding event—or takeoff—of the German armed struggle: T minus 3, T minus 2, T minus 1, zero. As it nears the null point of the movement, dark reflections of the RAF and its alter egos come into view, reflections that any contemporary critique of postmilitant culture must take into account.

T minus 3: Postmilitancy After the Wende

In 2008 the Frankfurt Court of Appeal denied parole to Birgit Hogefeld, the last RAF member remaining in prison. This decision concluded a prolonged legal process that had begun in 1992, just After the Wende of German unification, when Klaus Kinkel, then the federal minister of justice, proposed an initiative to grant amnesty to imprisoned militants.⁶ Hogefeld is one of the more prominent members of the RAF’s third generation; she was given a life sentence for several crimes, including her role in the murder in 1985 of a U.S. military officer stationed in the FRG. Evading punishment, Hogefeld lived clandestinely well into the early years of reunified Germany. In 1993 she resurfaced in a shootout with the GSG-9 in a small town in Eastern Germany, not far from Berlin. Hogefeld was arrested and sent to a maximum-security facility, but her accomplice, Wolfgang Grams, another RAF member, died in the barrage. In 2001, when the security and intelligence systems of East and West Germany had fully integrated, it became evident that Grams had assisted in the RAF’s last-known lethal attack: the assassination of Detlef Rohwedder in 1991.⁷ More recently, in June 2011, Hogefeld was granted parole on her third appeal.⁸ For a number of reasons, the reemergence of these cases in the German media has refreshed the question of the RAF’s relationship to institutionalized versions of socialism, particularly the Stasi.

A West German finance manager, Rohwedder was the first president of the Treuhand Anstalt, the agency established to privatize or, in most cases, decommission the state-owned industries of the GDR. In the first stages of unification, he attempted to advance a kind of “third-way” socialism in the new federal states, but such complex realities didn’t compute with the RAF’s binary program. From the RAF’s reductive standpoint, you were either part of the problem or part of the solution. There was no in-between, no gray area. In a communiqué about the Rohwedder assassination, the RAF claimed it was continuing its fight against the “fascist” Federal Republic, which, through unification, was showing the will of German capital to subjugate the nations of Europe, just as it had in 1918 and 1939.⁹

Christoph Hein draws from the Rohwedder case, especially the covert actions of Grams and Hogefeld, in his novel In His Early Childhood, a Garden. The novel is narrated from the perspective of Richard and Friederike Zurek, a bewildered couple who lose their estranged, militant son, Oliver, in a shoot-out with German security forces.¹⁰ In an attempt to come to terms with Oliver’s activism and death, the Zureks call upon the authorities, asking for documentation of the case. The more they learn about the arrest of their son and his comrade and lover, Katharina Blumenschläger (the couple is modeled on Grams and Hogefeld), the less clear the circumstances of the final showdown become.¹¹ Key documents disappear, witnesses provide contradictory testimonies, and government officials obstruct the parents’ efforts to verify the details of the incident. When unflattering commentary on Oliver and his relatives appears in the national media, discord breaks out within the family, nearly tearing it apart. Over the course of the novel, Richard Zurek, a retired school principal, suffers a moral crisis: he begins to doubt the democratic system and federal laws that he had spent his career teaching about and defending.

Unlike some of Hein’s earlier works—for example, the critically acclaimed novels Der fremde Freund (The Distant Lover, 1992) and Willenbrock (2000)—In His Early Childhood received a great deal of public scrutiny. Critics derided the novel’s sympathetic characterization of left-wing terrorists and contrasted it unfavorably to Andres Veiel’s Black Box BRD (2001), a documentary film that compares the biographies of a RAF perpetrator and a RAF victim: Wolfgang Grams and Alfred Herrhausen, the chairman of the Deutsche Bank who was killed by a RAF car bomb in November 1989, just a few weeks After the opening of the Berlin Wall.¹² Film, for these critics, seemed to address the matter of political violence in Germany more squarely than literary fiction. Black Box BRD reactivated the remembrance of Grams and Herrhausen in a way that Hein’s novel did not. Turning, now, to compare In His Early Childhood to other works of postmilitant culture, we can explore the ways literature and film variously register the shock of political violence and perform the work of memory—for both the victims and the perpetrators of terrorism. To do this, we take one step backward, to the time of two Germanys.

T minus 2: The RAF’s Ostpolitik

The RAF imagined itself to be a revolutionary vanguard. The GDR claimed to be a model of real existing socialism. The militants and the state had two different concepts of socialism, but before the Wende, the RAF maintained a strategic friendship with the Stasi.¹³ Looking back, we see that the RAF-Stasi connection produced a perversion of socialism. As a signatory to the Helsinki Accords of 1975, the GDR recognized the sovereignty of the FRG and did not actively attempt to destabilize its security systems. Although some have argued that the RAF and the Stasi shared common “enemies” in the West German state and its NATO allies, in the 1970s and 1980s, the GDR government had more pressing concerns than taking down its capitalist counterpart. The greatest threats to state socialism at that time were global economic recession, commodity shortages, and internal dissent. Nevertheless, the Stasi did maintain an interest in West German militants; one example of this investment was the Stasi’s underground subsidies to konkret, the magazine Meinhof edited for several years.¹⁴ More significantly, in the 1970s, the East German state welcomed Western militants into its bureaucratic embrace. Besides allowing the militants to pass through the GDR on their trips to the Middle East, officials also granted covert asylum to RAF-Aussteiger: criminal members of the RAF who “dropped out” from the West, either to avoid incarceration in the FRG or because they had grown disillusioned with the armed struggle. The Stasi gave the RAF dropouts false identities—fake names, fake passports, fake life stories—and installed them safely across the GDR, where the ex-militants lived more or less as regular GDR citizens until the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, when the whole charade fell apart.

Judith Kuckart’s novel Choice of Weapons and Volker Schlöndorff’s film The Legend of Rita are two works that address the RAF’s border crossings and traversals of identity.¹⁵ Kuckart takes a feminine focus, weaving her story around the history of RAF women. Her protagonist Jette resembles Ina Siepmann, a member of Kommune 1, whom the notorious radical Dieter Kunzelmann conscripted into his guerrilla offensive in the late 1960s and 1970s. In 1977, when the German Autumn reached its peak, Siepmann broke off from the Berlin militant scene and moved to Lebanon, where she joined forces with a brigade of Palestinian women. She is believed to have died in the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982.

In Choice of Weapons, Jette’s life and death are recalled in fragments remembered and imagined by the narrator Katia, a young woman who was employed to babysit Jette when she was small. Working as a journalist in Paris in the early 1980s, Katia comes across a report of Jette’s actions in Berlin, as well as details about her violent death in Lebanon. As the novel unfolds, it sketches out the prototypical Lebenslauf of a militant German woman: the flight from a small town to the metropolis, the lure of a rogue lover, the wielding of guns in a direct action, and then escape—first into the urban underground, and then to the Middle East, where she dedicates herself to the anti-imperialist cause. Finally she disappears, leaving only a few traces. Katia goes home to Germany to research Jette’s life and finds herself drawn into the militant mindset.

At each turn Katia raises a question that resonates with Adorno’s Minima Moralia: what truth is there within a condition of falseness? Although for the narrator the “right life” is “always elsewhere,” perhaps even in Jette’s Middle Eastern militancy, Katia tries, nonetheless, to fight the good fight at home through different means, namely, through the craft of writing.¹⁶ Her reflections on the relationship between art and politics heighten her sense of commitment. Through Katia’s research, we learn that Jette, as a schoolgirl existentialist, was called “Sartresse”; she would speak of “a void that opened up between her life and reality.”¹⁷ If Jette resorted to violence in order to close this gap, Katia will try to fill it with writing—a project of aesthetic density and resistance. Writing (here, Textarbeit) means “taking the path that refuses you.”¹⁸ Kuckart, as an author, seems to share this project with the characters of Choice of Weapons. But the resistance seems to come less from political struggle or the assumption of a new identity than from the primary elements of literary practice, the task of communicating meaning with marks on a page.

Kuckart’s nonlinear literary strategies in Choice of Weapons differ from the narrative program of Volker Schlöndorff’s films that thematize militancy, of which there are several: Der Rebell (The Rebel, 1969), which is based on Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas (1811); Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, 1975, codirected with Margarethe von Trotta), which is based on Heinrich Böll’s novel from 1974 of the same name; and the Antigone sequence of Germany in Autumn (1978), discussed in chapter 1. In The Legend of Rita Schlöndorff maintains the feminine focus that we find in Kuckart’s novel; the heroine, Rita Vogt, falls tragically in love with an East German woman. Schlöndorff traces the biographical contours that were first imagined in Choice of Weapons, but switches the setting: whereas Jette enters herself into the Middle East conflict, Schlöndorff’s Rita tries to sublimate her violent past in the alternate reality of the GDR.

Rita is modeled After several militants, but she seems to most closely resemble Ina Siepmann and Inge Viett. Both Siepmann and Viett were initiated into the armed struggle through the Berlin-based June 2 Movement. Although only Viett joined the RAF, both women staged direct actions across West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, and both sought asylum abroad. Viett eventually returned to German territory, but instead of staying in the white-hot core of global conflict, in 1982 she accepted the Stasi’s offer to emigrate to the GDR with the other RAF-Aussteiger. Viett moved to Dresden, changed her name to Eva-Maria Sommer, and worked in a photo lab. Within a few years, however, her disguise began to give way, so she moved to the provincial city of Magdeburg to begin her third “life” as Eva Schnell, a counselor at the summer camp for children of workers at the Karl Liebknecht Collective Plant for Heavy Machinery.

In 1990, when the law enforcement bureaus of East and West Germany began to coordinate, Viett was arrested and sentenced to thirteen years in prison for several crimes, including the shooting of a police officer in Paris and assisting in the abduction of Peter Lorenz, a prominent politician in the Christian Democratic Union.¹⁹ From prison, Viett published an autobiography, Nie war ich furchtloser (Never Was I Braver, 1997), which recounts her life as a fugitive, including her brief exile (with Stasi assistance) in Iraq in 1978.²⁰ When she was released early from prison for good conduct, she started a new career as a writer. Viett’s publications—mostly social analyses—make frequent reference to her own lived experience as an activist, an employee of a socialist working collective, and an incarcerated enemy of the state. In them there is no remorse, no apology for her militancy or criminal actions.²¹

Die Stille nach dem Schuss (The Legend of Rita), dir. Volker Schlöndorff, 2000. Film stills.

The Legend of Rita hews very closely to Viett’s own life.²² An early scene is shot in the Berlin prison (Frauenhaftanstalt Lehrter Straße) that Viett escaped from in 1976, before going underground. The Rolling Stones’s “Street Fighting Man” accompanies the title sequence as the camera pans over the desk and bookshelves of a Berlin commune; we see revolutionary handbooks and ashtrays crowd up against a Jimi Hendrix photograph and a poster from Viva Maria. The characters begin with theatrical bank heists, but their pranks soon grow violent, forcing the group underground and constricting the scope of their actions.

When Schlöndorff’s militants decide to leave the FRG, their intention is to use the Stasi’s assistance to move on to Angola or Mozambique, where they hope to contribute to ongoing humanitarian initiatives. Their first stop is an apparatchik retreat on the outskirts of Berlin, a complex that resembles the actual woodland lodge where the RAF-Aussteiger spent their first few days in the GDR.²³ Schlöndorff’s Rita Vogt decides to remain in the East and to become a factory worker; she studies Eastern dialects, vocabulary, and body language. Together with a Stasi agent, Rita rehearses the scripted biography of the East German alter ego she would assume for the rest of her life—or at least what, at that time, when German unification was nowhere in sight, she thought would be the rest of her life.

As Schlöndorff has noted, few Easterners would have believed that a West German would willingly emigrate to the GDR in the dark days of the Cold War, so the Aussteiger had to work up “legends” to enable their transfer and acceptance.²⁴ In The Legend of Rita, Rita and the Stasi agent make a telling choice in constructing the false narrative of her life: Rita’s fictional parents will have died in a highway accident. This detail is pitched into the future anterior tense in order to deflect unwanted questions about Rita’s past. It also signals a persistent desire of many German youths in the 1960s—that of breaking with the genealogy of the authoritarian state. Indeed, Rita’s disavowal of her parents mirrors the disposition of many on the Far Left at the time.

Central figures of West German militancy pulled off similar sleights. Two of them—Michael Baumann and Dieter Kunzelmann—stand out. Turning to them, we dial back the clock of the armed struggle to its zero hour, to a primal scene that most postmilitant culture—the works of Hein, Kuckart, and Schlöndorff included—doesn’t engage with. Only recently has this episode been discussed. With this retrospective survey I aim to disclose the conflicts of the radical Nachgeborenen whose strikes against their parents’ generation interrupted the New Left’s critique of fascism. Lacking a coherent analysis, the militants entered into a deadlock of historical repetition. As if condensing the condition that Marx described in the Eighteenth Brumaire, this Far Left history repeated itself as both tragedy and farce in a single stroke.

T minus 1: How It All Began

One of the most remarkable documents of German militancy was discovered with the opening of the Stasi archives: a 125-page report written by Michael “Bommi” Baumann, an army deserter whose path intersected with the Far Left in the 1960s and 1970s. When arrested in 1973 for carrying a falsified passport at the German-Czechoslovak border, Baumann was interrogated by East German intelligence.²⁵ During his detention, he wrote profiles of ninety-four prominent West German militants: Viett and Siepmann count among them, as do Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. The texts are comprehensive. They cover political positions, diagnose sexual orientation, and give detailed information on the type of weapon each subject was known to handle.²⁶ Baumann wrote the profiles by hand and signed every page.

Baumann’s best-known work is his autobiography, Wie alles anfing (How It All Began, 1975), a hardcore chronicle of the German armed struggle. It touches upon the origins of the Tupamaros-West Berlin and the Haschrebellen—two smaller militant groups—and sketches out the counterculture that shaped not only urban guerrillas, but also writers, artists, filmmakers, and even government officials.²⁷ Although Baumann offers a critique of the Far Left here, the FRG government banned the book upon its publication in 1975; federal officials interpreted it as a call for violence.²⁸ Leftist writers and publishers from across Europe protested against this censorship, and the book was quickly reissued and read with even greater interest by many young people. Yet historians and journalists gave it only passing notice. How It All Began provides key information on both the Black September assassination of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 and the bombing of Jewish and Israeli establishments in Berlin in 1969, events that ushered terrorism into postwar Germany. In fact Baumann presaged some of the most violent attacks of the late 1960s and 1970s—attacks that now, in retrospect, we see to have set the stage for the German Autumn of 1977—but his book failed, as Kraushaar argues, to provoke an adequately critical response from the Left.²⁹

Counting back to the late 1960s, we find a series of militant and terrorist events staged in West Berlin. In April 1968 protesters attacked the headquarters of the media conglomerate Axel Springer AG, located at the foot of the Berlin Wall. An LED monitor on the building’s façade, legible in the East, ran headlines and commercial copy espousing the freedoms of liberal democracy. But it was the radicals of the West who acted out their aggressions against the Springer empire. Many leftists were skeptical of the conservative slant of house publications like the B.Z. and Bild. After the near-fatal shooting of Rudi Dutschke, militants blockaded the Springer headquarters to protest the tabloids’ denunciations of their fellow activists.

In the autumn and winter of 1969–70 at least fourteen incidents involving explosive and incendiary devices were reported in Berlin’s western half. Many of them, historians are now arguing, were instigated by Dieter Kunzelmann, a key operator in the Far Left.³⁰ An artist and activist who was expelled first from the Situationist International and then from the SDS, he shuttled among vanguard and avant-garde circles. In Munich in the early 1960s he started a small but influential group called Subversive Aktion. Then, from the subculture of West Berlin, Kunzelmann refunctioned the situationist dérive and shaped it into a blunt object of political violence. His biography is stranger than many of the fictions that have proliferated After the RAF’s demise, such as the works by Kuckart, Hein, and Schlöndorff. In postmilitant novels and cinema, no characters have yet been modeled After Kunzelmann, but his duplicitous story serves as a prime example for investigating the double lives of the Far Left, both real and imagined.

In 1967 Kunzelmann helped to found Kommune 1 (K1), the communal living group, or Wohngemeinschaft, that broke away from the more strictly political vector of the SDS and put lifestyle at the top of the oppositional agenda. Located in West Berlin, first in the home of the writer and critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger and then the apartment of fellow author Uwe Johnson, K1 attracted a small group of young men and women who were interested in Kunzelmann’s critique of middle-class sensibility. The commune’s influence extended across Berlin subculture, connecting Kunzelmann to Baader and Ensslin. Group discussions explored “the problem of the individual” (Privatperson) and criticized the ways that the bourgeois family unit had made fascism all but inevitable. The only way to start real revolution within capitalist society, they understood, was through the subversion of communal living. Thus, sex was a major concern of K1. Kunzelmann drew a clear line between “free sexuality” and political practice. As the historian Aribert Reimann explains in his recent biography, Kunzelmann imagined that sexual revolution could not be realized in the given social circumstances. Sexuality, as such, was only a “utopian reference point.”³¹ To instill this logic in the commune, Kunzelmann led long sessions of “self-criticism” (or Psycho-Amoks). K1 residents took a mandatory pledge of polygamy, and when one of the group discovered she was pregnant (by Kunzelmann), a meeting was called in which the commune demanded, against her personal choice, that she have an abortion. Reimann’s book on Kunzelmann includes recent interviews with several members of the Far Left who recall the masculine, cliquish (or männerbündisch) character of K1 and the “misogynist sadism” of the “subversive” scene that surrounded and informed it.³² Kunzelmann’s authoritarian machismo was hidden from most people, but it was a key determinant of early militant developments in West Germany.

Despite his intimidating tactics, Kunzelmann called himself a Spaßguerilla, or “fun-guerrilla”; he liked street happenings and masquerades. He formed a commando and instructed the members to disguise themselves for the militant and terrorist provocations he directed across Germany. Kunzelmann seemed to take personal pleasure from every aspect of these undertakings. In a long series of photos he made to forge identity cards, published in his memoir in 1998, we see Kunzelmann styled in a range of looks, but always with a wry expression on his face. The function of these disguises went beyond the surface image. His commando usually placed women—ostensibly more deceptive—at the front lines of its operations. In a sense, Kunzelmann used these women as camouflage, much as the Far Left would later use feminine figures and feminized objects as cover for their machinations, as we saw previously with Dierk Hoff’s baby bomb.³³

Some of the Kunzelmann commando’s actions targeted U.S. and Israeli military imperialism, for example, an attempted bombing of the Amerikahaus and the El Al offices in Berlin; others, such as Ina Siepmann’s bomb-planting at the KaDeWe, a department store, were launched against the Konsumterror (consumption-terrorism, a term introduced by Meinhof) that the Far Left thought was a threat to authentic freedom. As the violence escalated, so did the alarm of the city administration. Authorities ramped up public surveillance, and so amplified the sense of urgency within the German underground, prompting the most radical elements to take ever greater risks.

The Zero Hour

On November 9, 1969, an explosive device was planted at the Jewish Community Center (Jüdisches Gemeindehaus) in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin. The bomb—a wad of semtex taped to an alarm clock—was set to go off during a ceremony marking the anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938. The device failed to ignite, but its discovery provoked widespread anxiety nonetheless. This was a founding moment for the Far Left—a terrorist act that summoned forth the violent ghosts of xenophobia and fascism.

The perpetrators of this crime, like many others involved in the armed struggle, have never been officially identified and charged, but Kraushaar lays the blame on Kunzelmann. Kunzelmann probably didn’t place the bomb directly in the Gemeindehaus, but he is thought to have conceived the mission and assigned it to two people: Peter Urbach, the one who made the bomb, and Albert Fichter, an architecture student who smuggled it inside under his trenchcoat.³⁴ Kunzelmann laid out his rationale for the attack in a statement he wrote about his training with Fatah in Jordan, which was published in the November 27 issue of the magazine Agit 833 as the “Letter from Amman.” While in Jordan, Kunzelmann reported, he and the other militants studied guerrilla tactics, practiced building time bombs and other weapons, and were briefly introduced to Yasser Arafat.³⁵ Exposure to the harsh conditions of Middle Eastern life, particularly the camps that held war refugees, deepened their understanding of Jordan’s historical situation and inclined them toward a “revolutionary” consciousness, as Kunzelmann’s statement suggests.

To some extent, the “Letter from Amman” aligned with the New Left’s critique of international imperialism and structures of domination. It also demonstrated a degree of anti-Semitism that exceeded the anti-Israel stance assumed by many leftists at the time.³⁶ As the journalist Hans Kundnani has noted, Kunzelmann’s concept of the armed struggle was fetishistically linked to the Nazi campaign (bewaffneter Kampf: Mein Kampf).³⁷ Kunzelmann also compared the conflicts in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. “Palestine is for the FRG and Europe what Vietnam is for the Americans[.] Why hasn’t the Left ‘gotten it’ yet?” he asked. Because of its “Jewish Problem” (Judenknax), a paroxysm “triggered by guilt” for the “gassing” of “six million Jews.”³⁸ Based on a false equivalence between the international struggle against fascism and the defense of the Israeli state, this complex, Kunzelmann argued, blinded Germans to the realities of postwar politics. It turned the New Left into a group of “pansies” (Schwuchteln).³⁹ The imperative of the moment, for Kunzelmann, was to cancel out the Left’s unexamined “philosemitism” and replace it with an unequivocal solidarity with Fatah. Research on Kunzelmann’s life and writings makes it evident that he was one of the first to establish an association between the German Far Left, the PLO, and other foreign liberation movements. Kundnani, Gerd Koenen, and other scholars have gone further, positing direct links between Kunzelmann and the RAF.⁴⁰

Kunzelmann was ready to stake everything to connect national and international militancy, and he saw Berlin as the ideal screen upon which to enact a shift in the political unconscious of his generation. The divided city, in his words, was a veritable “paradise for provocation.”⁴¹ If Fatah was resisting “the Third Reich of yesterday and today” in the Middle East, then German radicals had to wage the armed struggle against neofascists in Berlin.⁴² But whom, exactly, did Kunzelmann mean? He urged the readers to survey every level of Berlin life—media, architecture, policy—and to look for evidence of state violence. The task, for him, was to “to make the enemy visible again” on the homefront.⁴³ Following the argument of the Haschrebellen, his fellow militants, Berlin had to burn so that the radicals could live.

Fortunately the bomb that was planted in the Jewish Community Center never ignited. A custodian heard the clock ticking in the cloakroom and uncovered the device; local authorities carried it away and the Holocaust memorial ceremony continued as planned. Many from both inside and outside the Berlin militant scene have asked if the bomb could actually have exploded or whether it was just a fake, an inert decoy set to cause panic. But whatever the intention, the bomb did have a profound effect. On November 11, Innensenator Kurt Neubauer and Heinz Galinski, the official head of the Berlin Jewish Community, held an emergency press conference.⁴⁴ The Berlin Bureau of Criminal Investigations began a series of shakedowns in suspect sites in the city: not only the communes and clubs of the New Left and Far Left, but also enclaves of guest workers—Turks, Yugoslavs, and others. Editors and producers granted broad coverage to the event, setting the tone for the negative portrayals of leftists that would persist for decades. Already in these early days of armed resistance, a cynical lesson was being taught: guerrilla tactics provoked a federal backlash that compromised the rights of millions across the nation and controverted the larger goals of the Left, both at home and abroad.

Soon After intelligence agents confiscated the bomb, they modeled a duplicate upon the original, took it out to Grunewald (the vast, forested district of southwestern Berlin), and detonated it. The velocity of the exploded matter was measured at 3.5 kilometers per second; the circle of debris surrounding its point of ignition extended to fifty meters. Had the original device gone off as scheduled, many in the Gemeindehaus would have been harmed, some probably fatally. The press was invited to the test, and a few hours later, images of the detonation were broadcast across the country. In a recent interview, Albert Fichter, one of Kunzelmann’s hit men, remarked that the officials seemed to want “to stage a spectacle.”⁴⁵ This, of course, was precisely the kind of repercussion that Kunzelmann wanted to produce. His “psycho-bomb,” as Fichter has called it, didn’t need to actually explode in order to convey its message. With this intervention, art and politics were set on a collision course of destruction.

Playing Dead: The Armed Struggle and Real Existing Socialism

Later in Kunzelmann’s career, another incident stands out. In April 1998, just before the RAF pronounced its dissolution, an obituary appeared in the Berliner Zeitung. It read: “He chose freely, not only for his life, but also for his death—Dieter Kunzelmann—1939–1998.”⁴⁶ Shortly thereafter reporters and activists determined that the announcement was a prank—Kunzelmann was actually alive and well and living in Berlin—but his feigned death, or Scheintod, shaped postmilitant culture.

Like the RAF dropouts who, with the help of the Stasi, sought to erase their violent pasts so that they could be reborn as GDR citizens, Kunzelmann took the liberty of staging his own death in an attempt to remaster his legacy. These would-be deaths are symptoms of the difficulty many still have in coming to terms with German terrorism, the difficulty that the Left, in particular, still has in dealing with the crimes that the RAF perpetrated in their demands for immediate socialist revolution. Why did early chroniclers of the Far Left disregard the RAF’s complicity with the anti-Semitic agendas of Kunzelmann and the PLO? Tilman Fichter, the journalist and brother of Albert Fichter, has recently commented on this blind spot, claiming that Kunzelmann’s provocations were so shocking that the oppositional writers of the time couldn’t “take them seriously.”⁴⁷ In many regards, the armed struggle created a crisis that the German Left still contends with. It resonates together with another, larger loss, that of the ideals of state socialism.

This brings us back to the RAF-Stasi connection. Volker Schlöndorff has called The Legend of Rita “a requiem to the millions who died for the idea of socialism.”⁴⁸ But Schlöndorff’s historical fiction glosses over the contradictions between the Far Left and the final, desperate years of GDR socialism. As the film ends, the Berlin Wall falls. Schlöndorff goes beyond the strategic liaisons between the RAF and East German functionaries; he suggests a deeper, more constitutive bond than the one that most likely existed. The narrative collapses the two separate projects of militancy and real existing socialism into a single campaign of rogue/ state terror. This shuts out the question of how the radically different scales and goals of each project advanced unique and sometimes robust critiques of late capitalism, even if both the armed struggle and the GDR were doomed to fail.

Schlöndorff’s last sequences lose the mordant edge of some earlier scenes—such as the Stasi director’s concession, in the ministry’s ravaged archives in the late autumn of 1989, that Helmut Schmidt and Erich Honecker had made a secret pact to hide the RAF-Aussteiger in the GDR—and wend toward a melancholy conclusion. Fleeing on a stolen motorbike, Rita tries to blow through a border crossing between the two Germanys, but is shot down. The “Internationale” is intoned, played tempo larghetto on a toy piano. Schlöndorff ends his main character’s amnesiac cycle of reincarnation, but he also cuts off the chance for her—or the audience—to really come to terms with her militant past. Any further inquiry into the RAF phenomenon is preempted by the roll of the final credits.

The “real life” inspiration for Rita, Inge Viett, hasn’t expressed remorse for the crimes she committed, nor has she attempted to distance herself from RAF violence. Speaking at the International Rosa Luxemburg Conference in Berlin in 2011, she called for the creation of “a covertly structured, revolutionary, communist organization.”⁴⁹ To counter Germany’s current military program, she identified a range of “legitimate” tactics: sabotage on weapons manufacturers, organized strikes, and occupations, as well as “militant, antifascist actions,” including self-defense against police forces.⁵⁰ In 2007 Viett voiced a similar response to the riots around the summit of the Group of Eight in Heiligendamm, the East German port that still struggles with postcommunist transition. She remarked “how great” it was to witness “strong resistance against state repression” and to see the police, “for once, running for cover.” To her, the GDR was destroyed by “imperialism,” despite the fact that it was always “on the side of the people.”⁵¹ Schlöndorff’s Rita, likewise, never appears to rethink her own violence or to grasp the failures of the GDR.

This lack of reflection in The Legend of Rita sets it apart from In His Early Childhood and Choice of Weapons. The novels of both Hein and Kuckart can be seen as real works of mourning; the stories follow the Zureks’ and Katia’s attempts to make sense of the lives and deaths of RAF militants, as well as those of their victims. A pall falls over both of these somber texts. In Hein’s novel, the setting of Bad Kleinen infuses the RAF landscape with an Eastern tint; in Choice of Weapons, Katia is first visited by Jette’s ghost at Christmas in 1989, just After the wall falls and just before German unification was initiated. Rita Vogt, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to mourn—either for her fallen comrades or for the victims of leftist militancy. Her apparent need to repress these deaths thus counters Schlöndorff’s proposal that The Legend of Rita could play like a requiem in film. Whereas Hein and Kuckart use literary experiment—such as shifts in narrative voice and temporal sequence—to describe and process moments of pain and misunderstanding, Schlöndorff lets the momentum of narrative cinema obscure and even obliterate tasks central to mourning work. As Thomas Elsaesser has argued, cinema is structurally similar to trauma.⁵² Applying this insight to the works discussed in this chapter, it appears that The Legend of Rita, unlike the novels of Hein and Kuckart, transmits the shock of RAF violence; it delivers a blow that interrupts the processes of collective mourning. Whether the medium of film inherently forecloses the signification of mourning work is a question that points beyond the frame of my study, but Schlöndorff’s title itself—Die Stille nach dem Schuss, literally, “the silence” or “stillness” After the shot—connotes a caesura akin to the voids of grief.

The Legend of Rita doesn’t work through, in a Freudian sense, the difficulties and deceits of RAF memory: this charge is more carefully elaborated in the writing of Kuckart and Hein. Schlöndorff’s smooth narrative dampens the blast of political violence that many felt when Kunzelmann and other militants first launched their attacks. It is recent accounts of the lived history of the Far Left, more than the postmilitant fictions examined here, which really make the traumas of past seem present again. Instead, what Kuckart, Hein, and Schlöndorff suggest, and what a number of artists and writers examined in the second part of this book show us still more clearly, is something the Far Left couldn’t see: the revolutionary moment of German militancy lay not in the performance of terror, but rather in the unprecedented priority of women within its ranks.

Reading the armed struggle in reverse—from the contemporary debates on punishment and rehabilitation, through various cinematic and literary representations of the RAF, and back to the primal scenes of anti-Semitic terror—we get a new angle on postwar Germany. The premise that the Cold War completely barricaded East from West loses hold. So does the conviction that self-proclaimed leftists were all fighting for tolerance and transparency. This backward glance catches sight of the damaged lives of the Far Left, an aspect of German history that many remain blind to. And these lives, we will see in the chapters that follow, mark out the difference between the aesthetic and political registers of the German Autumn.