15
On the Defensive

NEWS OF THE STAMMHEIM DEATHS electrified, astounded, and horrified the European left, provoking an outpouring of rage. Security experts and government officials warned that more “terrorist” attacks would follow, and braced themselves accordingly. City streets were flanked with sandbagged gun emplacements and miles of barbed wire stretched through the capital.⁴

The wave of protest and violence was not long in coming, though in the end it subsided well short of the “100,000 bombings” that one group promised would avenge the events of October 18.

In the week immediately following the deaths, West German and rightwing targets were attacked in over twenty Italian cities. Simultaneous explosions rocked the Siemens, BMW, and Opel auto buildings in Rome,⁵ car showrooms were firebombed in Bologna, Milan, Livorno, and Turin, and West German consulates were attacked in Genoa and Venice.⁶ A police officer in the northern town of Brescia lost his hand while trying to defuse a bomb, and club-wielding demonstrators sent dozens of cops to the hospital in Sicily. In Milan, city councillor Carlo Arienti, a Christian Democrat, miraculously survived being shot eight times in an action claimed by the Red Brigades to “honor our West German comrades.”¹

A telephone caller in Milan threatened, “We are also ready to ‘suicide’ the German Ambassador.”² As a result, the FRG embassy was ringed with riot police and armored personnel carriers. Left-wing students demonstrating on the Rome University campus engaged police in a three-hour gun battle, leaving five police and three students wounded and twenty-five people in custody on charges of possessing weapons and firebombs.³ At the same time, windows were smashed on the upper class Via Veneto and molotov cocktails were thrown at cops, the protesters denouncing “German Nazis for the cold blooded murder of our comrades.”

In Paris and Nice, molotov cocktails were thrown at German tourist buses,⁴ as well as at the Franco-German Bank and a car showroom.⁵ The offices of the progressive Libération newspaper were occupied⁶ in an effort to force its journalists to launch an investigation into the Stammheim deaths, as bombs went off in Toulouse, Versailles,⁷ and Le Havre.⁸

In France, neofascists retaliated against the wave of protest by bombing the offices of the left-wing Syndicat de la Magistrature,⁹ leaving behind papers that simply read “Baader Murderer.”¹⁰ In a public statement, one self-styled “Anti-Terrorist Brigade” claimed to have captured and killed a member of the guerilla; as no body was ever found, this was likely bluster. Nevertheless, police used the spectre of further escalation and counter-escalation as an excuse to ban all protests outside the West German embassy in Paris.¹¹

Violent protests also broke out in Athens, and Greek police engaged in a firefight with reported anarchists who were driving a car full of explosives, presumably to attack a nearby factory owned by a West German corporation.¹² Around the same time, three people were injured when the West German Cultural Center in Istanbul was firebombed during two days of anti-German demonstrations in Turkey.¹³

In Holland, several men abducted real estate tycoon Maurits Caransa, pushing him struggling into an automobile after he left a club where he had been playing bridge. The press reported that a Germanspeaking man had called the newspaper Het Parool: “We are the Red Army Faction,” he apparently said. “We have Caransa. You will hear from us.” Another newspaper claimed to receive a call demanding that Queen Juliana abdicate and that Knut Folkerts, still awaiting extradition, be freed.¹⁴ Despite these reports, when Caransa was released three days later after haggling with his captors over a four million dollar ransom, it was revealed to have been a “normal” kidnapping unrelated to the RAF or any other guerilla group.¹⁵

At the same time, another kidnapping, one which was not reported as being politically motivated, was in fact the work of the guerilla: in a defiant act, on November 9, the anarchist 2nd of June Movement snatched lingerie magnate Walter Palmers in Vienna, dragging him from his car as he arrived home for dinner. He was released unharmed four days later, after his son delivered a ransom of $3.1 million.¹⁶ Nobody was arrested, and the 2JM took the money and divided it three ways, giving badly needed funds to the RAF and an unspecified Palestinian group.

As far away as Seattle, in the United States, the George Jackson Brigade bombed a Mercedes-Benz dealership in solidarity with the RAF. “We chose Mercedes-Benz as a target,” they explained, “because it is a German luxury car which is a favorite item of conspicuous consumption for ruling class bosses, and because of its association with Hans Martin Schleyer.”¹

Meanwhile, newspapers reported that they had received threats that three Lufthansa planes would be blown up on November 15, prompting massive cancellations,² though in the end there were no attacks on the airline.

The flames of protest spread quickly, but by the end of the year, the violence had clearly been contained. The strongest reaction had been from the Italian left, where a tradition of militancy and a keen awareness of the realities of postfascist state repression provided the basis for the fierce fightback, giving rise to 147 documented anti-German attacks between October 18 and December 31 of 1977.³ The massive offensive by the revolutionary movement in Italy, including militant strikes and numerous armed actions, certainly contributed to the impressive show of solidarity.

In the Federal Republic itself, courthouses were bombed in Hannover,⁴ Zweibrucken,⁵ and Hamburg,⁶ but these were isolated acts. This meek reaction, especially when compared to what was happening in other countries, was a measure of the extent to which the visible might of the state and vicious anticommunist hysteria had put the left on the defensive. Rage had been muted by despair, as many people now felt that the level of conflict had exceeded their capacities. They recoiled in shock as the country seemed to be transforming itself into a police state.

The cream of the West German establishment gathered at Schleyer’s state funeral on October 24, surrounded by 750 police, with snipers in place on the surrounding rooftops.

In this paramilitary setting, President Walter Scheel declared:

The fight against terrorism is the fight of civilization against a barbarism trying to destroy all order… They are the enemies of every civilization… The nations of the earth are beginning to realize this. They realize with horror that not this or that order is being attacked, but all order.

Specifically referring to anyone who dared protest following the Stammheim deaths, he remarked that, “They too share the guilt.”⁷

It should be noted that while this lynch mob atmosphere met with broad support from the West German public, for many—including people who had no truck with revolutionary politics—things seemed to be going too far. The new “muscular” social democracy seemed to find appropriate expression on the cover of Stern magazine around this time, where Chancellor Schmidt posed wearing the uniform of the BGS. This government reaction to the events of 1977 demonstrated the degree to which the SPD could act as repressively as the CDU, and has been identified as the starting point of yet another split between the party’s leadership and its more left-wing members, a development that accelerated over the next few years, giving rise to the Green Party.⁸

Police set up special phone numbers in eighteen cities where one could hear taped recordings of the RAF members’ voices; in Bonn, the line was so jammed with calls that a second number had to be set up. Over 100,000 police were mobilized, and alleged terrorist hideouts were raided. In West Berlin, thirty-eight apartments, bookstores, and printing shops were searched and forty people taken into custody, prompting a protest outside of police headquarters, which was met by cops swinging rubber truncheons.⁹ Info-BUG and its printers Firma Agit-Druck were amongst those targeted, and the radical newspaper found itself banned.

At the same time, in France, attorney Klaus Croissant was being publicly referred to as “a central figure in international terrorism.” The lawyer was supported by philosophers Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre,¹ as well a number of professional associations, including the Syndicat de la Magistrature, the Confédération Syndicale des Avocats, the Jeunes Avocats, the Mouvement d’action judicaire, and the Association Francaise des Juristes Democrates.² There was also a Committee for the Immediate Liberation of Klaus Croissant, which made its point by mailing one thousand crescent-shaped pastries to government officials, each one accompanied by a note which read, “If a croissant can circulate freely in the marketplace, why not a lawyer?”³

Croissant’s persecution by an authoritarian state across the Rhine brought back memories that added weight to the entire affair. As one defense lawyer put it:

When I see this hunted lawyer on the one side, and on the other Prosecutor Shuller, a former stormtrooper and member of the old National Socialist party, I know where I stand.⁴

But to no avail: on November 2, extradition hearings began in Paris, and two weeks later, the court ruled that Croissant could be handed over to the Germans. By November 19, he was sitting in a cell in Stammheim.⁵

The RAF was on the defensive, and initial reports indicated that members had fled the country. Reportedly, one million handbills and posters went out across Europe and as far away as Japan,⁶ identifying the suspects as Susanne Albrecht, Rolf Heissler, Christian Klar, Friederike Krabbe, Silke Maier-Witt, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Adelheid Schulz, Angelika Speitel, Sigrid Sternebeck, Willi-Peter Stoll, Christof Wackernagel, Rolf Clemens Wagner, Elisabeth von Dyck, Juliane Plambeck, Inge Viett, and Jörg Lang. The equivalent of $19,200 was offered for information leading to the arrest of each of these suspects, for a total of over $300,000. (Plambeck and Viett were not actually members of the RAF, but of the 2nd of June Movement, the bulk of whose members would dissolve their organization and join the RAF in 1980.)

One name that did not immediately appear on the wanted posters was that of Peter-Jürgen Boock, the husband of RAF prisoner Waltraud Boock, and yet it was later revealed that this man had in fact been central to the events of 77.

Boock had wanted to join the RAF ever since he was a teenaged runaway, one of the kids Baader and Ensslin had worked with in Frankfurt back in 1970. They had rejected him as a member at the time, not least because of his drug habit, a curse which only worsened as the years went on. Nevertheless, by the mid-seventies, with the original leadership largely removed from the field, Boock became a trusted recruit and was sent to South Yemen for training in 1975.⁷

In the wake of 77, Boock and other RAF fugitives had found shelter in Baghdad, but he remained plagued by his addiction, and when he began going through withdrawal, some of his comrades became desperate. At this point, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, the senior guerilla in the field, made the incredible decision to ask RAF members and supporters still in Europe to buy or steal drugs, which would then presumably be smuggled into the Middle East.⁸

The first RAF members arrested after the Stammheim deaths were on one such mission. Christof Wackernagel and Gerd Schneider were in Amsterdam looking to score for Boock, but unknown to the two men, their safehouse had been identified during the Caransa investigation, and the police had it under constant observation. On November 11, the two men were followed as they left the apartment; when they realized that police were surrounding them, they drew their weapons and began to fire, even throwing a hand grenade. Sharpshooters took them out: one guerilla was hit in the chest and stomach, the other received a bullet in the head.¹

Schneider was being sought in connection with the Schleyer kidnapping, Wackernagel in connection with the recent Zweibrucken courthouse bombing. Both men were extradited to the Federal Republic.

On January 21, 1978, Christine Kuby was arrested following a shootout with police in a Hamburg drugstore; she had been attempting to use a forged prescription to buy narcotics for Boock.²

Shortly afterwards, the Verfassungsschutz tried to carry out an ambitious false flag action, meant to entrap the guerillas. Dynamite was set off in the wall of Celle prison with the goal of allowing Sigurd Debus to escape. Debus, while not a member, was a political prisoner who had participated in hunger strikes with the RAF: the hope was that he would unwittingly lead the Verfassungsschutz to the underground guerillas. (As it turned out, Debus did not escape. When the details of this operation came to light in the mid-eighties it caused some consternation.)³

In March, the prisoners went on an unsuccessful and uneventful sixth collective hunger strike, demanding association, an international inquiry into the Stammheim deaths and that of Ingrid Schubert, and a return of all documents that had been seized from the dead prisoners’ cells. This time, Klaus Croissant was not able to organize support on the outside: his trial on charges of supporting a terrorist organization had just begun on March 9.⁴ Refusing to distance himself from his former clients, he now joined them in their hunger strike.

As progressive journalist Oliver Tolmein wrote years later, “Klaus Croissant was a lawyer who had a political understanding of justice and, as a result, never drew a firm line between defending his clients and political engagement.”⁵ As a result of such commitment, on February 16, 1979, the tireless advocate was found guilty of supporting a terrorist organization and sentenced to two and a half years in prison, plus four years of Berufsverbot.⁶

On May 11, 1978, Stefan Wisniewski was apprehended at the Paris airport as he disembarked off a flight from Yugoslavia. Not only was Wisniewski carrying drugs, police also found a letter from Karl-Heinz Dellwo that had been smuggled out of prison, in which the RAF prisoner strongly criticized the hijacking that ended in the Mogadishu debacle.⁷

On June 30, four RAF members—Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Sieglinde Hofmann, Peter-Jürgen Boock, and Rolf Clemens Wagner—were arrested in Zagreb. The Yugoslav government entered into negotiations with the FRG, hoping to exchange the RAF combatants for eight members of the Croatian far right being held by West Germany. When this crass attempt at a trade broke down, the RAF prisoners were ferreted out of Yugoslavia to an undisclosed third country.

On September 6, RAF member Willi-Peter Stoll was shot dead by police in a Chinese restaurant in Düsseldorf. A few days later, the cops located his apartment, where they found a coded diary, an arsenal of weapons (including a homemade “Stalin Organ” capable of firing primitive missiles), and fingerprints of six other suspected RAF members.⁸

Later that month, police surprised three people engaged in target practice in the woods outside of Dortmund. Michael Knoll and Angelika Speitel were both shot, police officer Hans-Wilhelm Hansen was killed while another RAF member managed to escape with his submachine gun. Knoll, who was said to have assisted the RAF by traveling back and forth to Italy as a courier,⁹ died of his wounds on November 25.

Also in September, a figure from the earliest days of the guerilla once again made the headlines: Astrid Proll, who had fled from a medical clinic in 1974, was identified and arrested in England. Proll had not been involved in armed struggle since her escape, but had rather found a place for herself in the feminist and squatting communities in London, where the former getaway car driver worked as a mechanic and ran an auto maintenance class for women. It would later be said that Gruppe 47 poet Erich Fried had been one of those who secretly helped her get by while she was in hiding.¹

right: Demonstration organized by the Friends of Astrid Proll campaign in London, England.

Astrid Proll

A campaign took shape, largely at the initiative of radical feminists, to support Proll and attempt—unsuccessfully—to fight against her extradition, for in the fugitive’s own words, “I do not expect to survive if I am returned to Germany.”² Nevertheless, once she was returned, the state quickly agreed to drop the most serious charges: the main evidence against her was that of the discredited Karl-Heinz Ruhland, and the memo from state security that proved her innocence had come to light.

Meanwhile, on November 1, 1978, Rolf Heissler and Adelheid Schulz were identified as they were attempting to cross into Holland. A firefight ensued and border guards Dionysius de Jong and Johannes Goemans were both shot dead.

The guerilla was still regrouping, and yet there would be more casualties before it was operational again.

In the midst of the prisoners’ seventh hunger strike, Elisabeth von Dyck was identified by police while entering a suspected RAF safehouse in Nuremberg on May 4, 1979. She was shot in the back, and died on the spot.³

A month later, Rolf Heissler was captured after he miraculously survived being shot in the head as he entered a Frankfurt apartment.⁴ Heissler’s capture would actually go down in history as one of the first public successes of computer data mining in defense of the state. As an engineering magazine explains:

Much was already known about the terrorists. “The police knew that they rented apartments to conduct their crimes,” recalls Hansjürgen Garstka, the State of Berlin’s commissioner for data protection and freedom of information. “But they used them only a couple days before the event. Also, the police knew these people paid their electricity and rent only in cash.” The terrorists preferred high-rise apartments with underground garages and direct access to the highway, and they were primarily young and German.

Profile in hand, the police contacted electricity companies, to find out which apartments used no or little electricity, and apartment complexes, to find out which people paid in cash; they also combed through household registrations (German citizens are required to register with the state). “The results were all merged, and in the end, they found one flat which fit absolutely absolutely this profile,” Garstka says. Police put the apartment under surveillance and soon nabbed RAF member Rolf Heißler.⁵

While such law enforcement techniques might not raise an eyebrow today, it must be remembered how advanced—as if from science fiction—such levels of surveillance seemed to most people just a generation ago. There was a public outcry when it was learned how the bust had been carried out, and that Horst Herold’s BKA, with its massive computers, was behind it. (Learning a lesson from this, legislation was passed in the mid-eighties allowing such data mining in the FRG.)⁶

While the guerilla were the only ones actually being gunned down, 1977 and the years that followed challenged an entire society, as the state unleashed a wave of repression, and anyone to the left of Helmut Schmidt felt they might be a potential target:

A virtual war atmosphere was created in the country in mid-October: hundreds of thousands of motorists were pulled off the road and searched; constant appeals to the population were issued to encourage their reporting any suspicious types or activities to the police—such as sudden change of address, of hair cut or any other cosmetic changes, unusual mailings or publications.¹

That September and October, as Schleyer was being held in captivity, one hundred and fifty agents were on duty round the clock at the special headquarters set up in Cologne. Every day, over 15,000 phone calls were monitored, as 3,000 other police officers took part in the hunt.²

Conservatives took advantage of the frenzied atmosphere to settle scores with the progressive intelligentsia, the overwhelming majority of whom were firmly opposed to the guerilla and the revolutionary left. The Hessen CDU Chair Alfred Dregger accused the Frankfurt School academics of contributing to terrorism, a sentiment echoed by the CDU Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg, Hans Filbinger.³ At the same time, in September 1977, CSU representative Dietrich Spranger issued a list of public figures whom he held responsible for “terrorism” in the Federal Republic, an unlikely collection which included Willy Brandt, Peter Brückner, Pastor Helmut Gollwitzer, and authors Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll.⁴ The fact that two of those on this list—Böll and Gollwitzer—had recently joined pastor Heinrich Albertz and Bishop Kurt Scharf in a public appeal for the release of Schleyer did not seem to make a difference.⁵

Böll in particular remained tarred by the Springer Press as a “terrorist sympathizer” no matter what he did. This could have dramatic consequences; for instance, an anonymous call was received stating that armed men had been seen entering the home of the famous author’s son. As a result, forty heavily armed cops from the special antiterrorist unit raided the house; of course, there were no guerillas there. When the elder Böll complained of this in an interview the next day, Bavarian radio refused to broadcast it on the grounds that it was “inflammatory.”⁶

Most people stood behind the government, not only in its hunt for the RAF, but also in its general crackdown on the radical left. In one poll, 62% of respondents stated that they were willing to accept restrictions on their personal freedoms through controls and house searches, while only 21% were opposed.⁷ At the same time, politicians and the press became ever more bloodthirsty. Years later, RAF member Christian Klar recounted that:

On September 8, 1977, the Crisis Management Team allowed Die Welt to demand that Rebmann’s plan [that the prisoners be killed] be carried out. On September 10, the Suddeutsche Zeitung published the same thing as reflecting a discussion within the CSU Land group, which wanted a prisoner shot at half-hour intervals until Schleyer was released. A day later, Frühschoppen demanded the introduction of bloody torture, noting that the guerilla groups in Latin America had been defeated in that way. The next day, Spiegel provided a platform for the CSU’s Becher and Zimmermann to express their longing for the deaths of the Stammheim prisoners. On September 13, the same idea was put forward by the SPD through Heinz Kühn, but in a more delicate way: “The terrorists must be made to understand that the death of Hanns Martin Schleyer will have grave consequences for the fate of the violent prisoners they are hoping to free through their disgraceful actions.” ⁸

Indeed, following the Stammheim deaths, even allowing Ensslin, Raspe, and Baader to be buried in a common grave in the Stuttgart cemetery was enough to earn one the sobriquet of being “soft on terrorism.” Stuttgart’s moderate CDU mayor, Manfred Rommel—the son of the famed Field Marshal—refused to forbid such a burial, insisting that “Death must end all animosity.” As a result, he found himself marginalized within the Land party organization, and telephone calls poured in from angry citizens demanding that the RAF dead be cremated and their ashes poured into the city sewers.¹

Little wonder that, commenting on the political climate that autumn, Heinrich Böll would remark:

I am gradually beginning to wonder whether it’s even necessary to—to put it bluntly—do away with democracy. People are intimidated to such an extent—the media have become so cautious—that laws would hardly need to be changed. The whole thing occurs on a “fantastic” plane… Even the liberal newspapers are becoming extremely conformist and cautious—they hardly need to lift a finger.²

While this reactionary atmosphere reached its crescendo in the days of autumn, the state clampdown had begun well before the Schleyer kidnapping.

On April 25, 1977, just a few weeks after the RAF had killed Siegfried Buback, a student newspaper in the picturesque university town of GÖttingen published an article entitled Buback: In Memoriam, in which the anonymous author admitted his “secret joy” at the Attorney General’s assassination, while nevertheless condemning such armed attacks as counterproductive. Within the context of the split occurring in the sponti scene at the time, the article actually represented a move away from political violence:

Our force cannot be Al Capone’s force, a copy of street terror, and constant terror; not authoritarian, but rather antiauthoritarian and therefore more effective. Leftists shouldn’t be killers, shouldn’t be ruthlessly brutal people, shouldn’t be rapists, but also not saints or innocent lambs. Our daily objective is to formulate a concept and modus operandi of force and militancy which are fun and have the blessings of the masses, so that the left doesn’t acquire the same face as the Bubacks.³

Obviously the writer was hostile to the RAF’s politics, but such subtleties were lost on the state, and police seized upon the opportunity to clamp down on the undogmatic left and sympathetic academics. Buback: In Memoriam was banned under §88a and raids were carried out against student and alternative publishers suspected of knowing the author’s identity.⁴

The women’s movement, which had no organic ties at all to the RAF, similarly found itself the target of the same antiterrorist hype. The Women’s Center in Frankfurt was raided by police, and members were charged under §129a—the antiterrorist subsection of §129—for having provided women with the names of doctors willing to perform abortions.⁵

Male politicians and clergymen lost no time in sharing their opinions of the RAF’s female combatants. As an article in New German Critique explained:

The fact that 60% of the terrorists sought by the police are women has not gone unnoticed by those conducting what has been referred to in the European press as the “witch-hunt” against dissenters. Blame for the predominance of women terrorists has been placed at the feet of the nascent German women’s movement. Former Director of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution⁶ GÜnther Nollau sees in female terrorists “an excess in the liberation of women.” Conservative academic sectors speak of the “dark side of the movement for total equality.” The Christian Socialist newspaper Bayern Kurier claims, “Observers of the scene view the newly established feminism, which is preached by the left, as an essential reason for the recent change in sex roles on the terror front.” Women’s publishing houses have been invaded by police, assuming that the owners were aiding and abetting terrorism, and the Women’s Vacation House in Gaiganz was subject to such constant surveillance and so many raids by police looking for hidden persons, that the lease was revoked by intimidated landlords.⁷

This was all the more galling, for in the years since the APO, the West German women’s movement had moved away from its socialist roots, to such a point that at the time it could be said that many women “would prefer no politics at all to leftist politics.”¹ As Georgy Katsiaficas has written about feminism in the FRG in the late seventies:

As many women turned further inward, limiting themselves to their private spheres of lovers and close friends, radicals felt that the slogan “The personal is political” had been turned on its head—to the point where the political was irrelevant.²

On the other side of the equation, nothing but silence had ever emanated from the RAF and its support organizations on questions of feminism and women’s liberation. This was all the more remarkable given the large proportion of RAF members who were women, and the hackneyed sexist terms in which counterinsurgency writers often attacked their politics.

This silence was certainly a consequence of the RAF’s particular brand of anti-imperialism, which zeroed in on this one contradiction as being primary to the exclusion of all others. One comrade who was active doing prisoner support work during this period remembers visiting a female political prisoner and asking her about this, only to be informed that, “If you carry a gun, it does not matter if you are a man or a woman.”

A similar sentiment was expressed by Inge Viett, who would move from the 2nd of June Movement to the RAF in 1980:

None of us came out of the feminist movement… We had no conscious need to live through that kind of process of women’s liberationæ We simply made a decision, and then we struggled, doing all the same things as the men. For us, there was no Man-Woman question. For us living in the underground, that old concept of roles didn’t exist.³

Feminists might have objected that for most people—even some who do carry guns, and even some who do live in the underground—being a man or a woman does matter, both in terms of one’s relationship to imperialism and one’s perspectives for resisting it. During the 1970s, it seems not to have occurred to the women or men in the RAF that gender made a difference as to how imperialism was experienced by its victims, or that anti-imperialism might benefit from an explicit connection to women’s liberation.

Despite this unpromising background, the Stammheim trauma sparked a process of change, both within the support scene and amongst a minority of feminists, too. The consensus against violence that existed in the women’s movement was by no means complete, and despite the loud protestations of those who insisted that all violence was “male,” others felt that nonviolence in a sexist society was of limited value. Referring specifically to the Stammheim deaths, French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne pointedly suggested that there was something positive to be learned from the women of the RAF, even when their choices had tragic consequences. Writing in 1978, in a text which was discussed both in France and in the Federal Republic, she asked:

Is it not better for a woman to be beaten to death by a prison guard at Stammheim than to be humiliated by the blows of a husband’s fists? Is it not better to endure insults before a court of law which one can denounce as ‘Nazi pigs!’ than to endure in silence the insults of an employer? And is it not better, ultimately, to meet death having fought back than to die in resignation and defeat? If we must die, then better with weapon in hand.⁴

Women Against Imperialist War: in the early eighties, as sections of the women’s movement attempted to bridge the distance that had separated them from the RAF support scene, this became one of the most important anti-imperialist groups in the FRG.

The lurch to the right, the Stammheim deaths, the rampant police repression, and the terrorist-baiting of the women’s movement all worked to push certain women to explore the possibilities of renewed solidarity. A conference on women and repression was organized in Frankfurt in 1978 and a women’s solidarity committee was formed to support Irmgard MÖller. Slowly but surely, small groups took the first steps out of their isolation, and the reaction provoked by the anti-RAF repression would once again cause some to rally to the anti-imperialist camp.

At the same time, the antiterrorist hysteria provided the state with an opportunity to move against the K-groups that had been reinforcing the increasingly militant antinuclear movement ever since 1976. After Schleyer was seized, the opposition CDU called for a ban against the three largest Maoist parties, the KBW, the KPD,¹ and the KPD/ML, with ludicrous claims that they had some connection to “terrorism.” In response, all three organizations called for a joint demonstration in Bonn on October 8, 1977, under the slogan “Marxism-Leninism Cannot Be Outlawed!” Twenty thousand people marched under red flags in one of the very few common activities these three organizations would mount during the decade.

Just as most of these Maoist K-groups imploded over the next few years, hemorrhaging members to the new Green Party, 1977 would also exacerbate divisions on the undogmatic left. The anti-guerilla positions that Joschka Fischer, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and others had been pushing since 1976 now appeared to carry even more weight, and several important intellectuals, including Rudi Dutschke and Herbert Marcuse, made public declarations in the popular press denouncing the RAF’s struggle against the Federal Republic.²

While much of the undogmatic left was retreating from militancy, this was by no means a homogenous phenomenon. In a very different vein, in January 1978, other radicals drew on the strengths of the counterculture to break through the crisis. The idea for a mass gathering originated with a dozen Berlin spontis who knew each other from playing soccer and from the bar scene.³ “Tunix”—a play on words meaning “Do Nothing”—created a rallying point for those who wished neither to return to the system nor to simply retreat into themselves.

As three of the organizers (“Quinn the Eskimo,” “Frankie Lee,” and “Judas Priest”) explained in their call out:

When our identity is under attack, like during the situation in the fall of 77, then we need to take the initiative and state openly what it is we want. Political taboos and appeals to the constitution won’t save us.⁴

With thousands of people attending, the Tunix gathering marked the dawn of a new era for the antiauthoritarian left.⁵ Participants took to the streets in Berlin, throwing bricks and paint filled eggs at the courthouse, the America House, and the Women’s Prison, carrying banners which read “Free the prisoners!”, “Out With the Filth,” and “Stammheim is Everywhere.”⁶

This renewed antiauthoritarian left expressed itself in diverse ways, including the birth of an autonomist scene which drew direct inspiration from the Italian Marxist current of the same name, remaining committed to radical politics. Another product of this period was the newspaper tageszeitung (Daily News), a national radical left daily. Radical weekly newspapers had existed in almost every city previously, but Info-BUG had been the only one with a truly national circulation. Even then, it had been focused on West Berlin, and had been banned the day of the Stammheim deaths. taz became the voice of the Tunix generation, establishing a national circulation dwarfing Info-BUG or any other publication in the scene.⁷ (However, like much of this “alternative” effervescence, taz accompanied the Greens back into the system over the next ten years.)⁸

The first issue of tageszeitung appeared September 27, 1978.

Basing itself both in the Tunix scene and in the Citizens Initiatives—ever more swollen by disaffected Social Democrats unhappy with Schmidt’s continuing march to the right—the Green Party was founded in 1980. In the same way that Willy Brandt’s “Let’s Dare More Democracy!” had spelled the end to the APO, the Greens eventually came to represent the end for many seventies radicals, and the avenue that more than one former militant would follow right into the establishment. As one snide Spiegel writer put it on their 25th anniversary, “It was not the 68ers and their Green offshoots who civilized Germany, but Germany which civilized them.”¹ (But this is a story best left for our next volume.)

The undogmatic left had been polarized by the RAF’s struggle, splitting to the left and to the right. This is unremarkable in itself, as is the fact that those who veered rightwards into the Greens were also those who found the RAF’s politics uninspirational, to say the least. What is noteworthy is that those who veered to the left, the autonomists, were often similarly unimpressed with the RAF and its legacy. Certainly, nobody would be inspired by 1977 to set up an armed group, in the way that the RAF’s early actions had inspired the RZ and others.

Indeed, it is striking how much the RAF’s legacy and credibility were damaged by 1977; it took years to recover, even while most of the guerillas remained uncaptured. Most popular and even scholarly works about the group act as if it disbanded afterwards, while in fact it remained active until the 1990s.

Compare this to 1972, when practically the entire guerilla had been wiped out by arrests, and yet the actions of the May Offensive inspired renewed resistance throughout the spectrum of the revolutionary left.

One part of the equation was the distance that had grown between the RAF and the rest of the left, both as a result of its own paradoxes and of the vicious state repression and psychological operations. The other factor, in its own way an expression of the first, was the level of confrontation in which the 1977 commandos had chosen to engage, well beyond the capacity of any other segment of the left to imitate or even support.

While the RAF was in crisis, the Revolutionary Cells and Rote Zora continued to score successes, and carried out approximately eighty actions over the next decade, suffering hardly any arrests. There were also many low-level attacks carried out by one-off groups, most of which have left no record, yet which nevertheless contributed to an overall armed orientation remarkably different from that which existed in North America at the time.

In a significant way, these developments indicate the degree to which the RAF’s armed strategy had marked revolutionary politics in West Germany, even while its ideology was rarely accepted.

Not that the RAF itself had been removed from the battlefield.

Though it looked broken by defeat and repression, the RAF would once again manage to regroup and draw in new members, establishing the basis for renewed campaigns of revolutionary violence in the 1980s.

In a few years, events revealed that the tradition of armed resistance, and the legacy of the first guerillas to emerge from the APO, had beaten the odds and survived the devastating blows of the seventies.