The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (10 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

In March 1970, following a chaotic congress at the Frankfurt Student Association Building, the SDS was dissolved by acclamation. In a brilliant ploy, two months later the government decreed an amnesty for protesters serving short sentences, thereby winning many of these middle class students back to the establishment. The student movement in West Germany was particularly vulnerable to this kind of recuperation, being overwhelmingly comprised of young people for whom there was a place in the more comfortable classes; in 1967, for instance, only 7% of West German students were from working class families (by comparison, in England the figure was almost one in three).
¹

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

Among the consequences were the reform of education; a new Ostpolitik;
²
the deconstruction of the authoritarian patriarchal relations in the family, school, factory and public service; the development of state planning in the economy; a greater integration of women into professional life and a reform in sexual legislation… the APO also provided the impetus to a socio-cultural break with the past. There was a very rapid change in social outlook and behavior patterns. The old ascetic behavior based on the notion of duty came to an end. Along with a different conception of social roles came a new set of sexual mores and a dissolution of the old respectful and subservient attitude towards the state and all forms of authority. There developed, in other words, a new culture which was to pave the way for the new social movements of the 1970s and 1980s.
³

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

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

Mao provided our theoretical basis: “On the Mentality of Roaming Bands of Rebels.” From the so-called robber-bands, he and Chu-Teh had created the first cadre of the Red Army. We took our direction from that. We directed our agitation to make the dopers, who were still partly unpolitical, conscious of their situation. What we did was mass work.
⁴

The Hash Rebels carried out actions under a number of different names, but became best known as the Tupamaros-West Berlin, after the urban guerillas in Uruguay.
¹
Initially, this antiauthoritarian, pre-guerilla tendency suffered from anti-intellectualism, unquestioned male chauvinism, and a lack of any coherent strategy. It has also been criticized for tolerating and engaging in antisemitism under cover of anti-Zionism, one of its first actions being to firebomb a cultural centre housed in a synagogue on the anniversary of a Nazi pogrom.
²

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

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

The second guerilla tendency, with which we are more directly concerned, brought together individuals who were peripheral to the countercultural milieu of the Hash Rebels, and of a somewhat more serious bent. As Bommi Baumann would later explain, they “formed at about the same time as we did, because they considered us totally crazy.”
³
This second tendency was much more theoretically rigorous (or pretentious, to its critics), and heavily influenced not only by Marx, Lenin, and Mao, but also by New Left philosophers ranging from Nicos Poulantzas to the Frankfurt School.

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

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

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

The four had taken few precautions to protect their identities and avoid arrest. They had issued no communiqué, and in retrospect, the action appears almost flippant in its execution. Indeed, some of those arrested initially denied their participation, and later tried to minimize it all, Baader claiming, “We had no intention of endangering human life or even starting a real fire.”
¹

In court, the four had no united strategy; apparently without bitterness or recrimination, Baader and Ensslin at first tried to present a legal defense, and then switched to accepting full responsibility while insisting that Proll and Söhnlein were both completely innocent.
²
For their part, these two did not deny their involvement, yet chose not to defend themselves, though Proll did offer an eloquent denunciation of the court and judicial system (see pages 66-78).

In the end, there was no denying that this was a political action, albeit an ill-defined one. In court, Ensslin explained that that the arson was “in protest against people’s indifference to the murder of the Vietnamese,” adding that “We have found that words are useless without action.”
³

Then, in a statement that could only be appreciated in retrospect, she told a television reporter, “We have said clearly enough that we did thewrong thing. But there’s no reason for us to discuss it with the law or the state. We must discuss it with people who think as we do.”
⁴

While the four were repudiated by the SDS, they were embraced by others for whom the step into illegality seemed both appropriate and timely. “They were like little media stars for the radical left,” Thorwald’s younger sister Astrid Proll would recall years later.
⁵

One of these admirers was Ulrike Meinhof, who had divorced
konkret
publisher Klaus Rainer Röhl and moved to West Berlin with their twin daughters in 1967. Meinhof visited Ensslin in prison, and would approvingly write about the case in her magazine column. “[T]he progressive
moment of arson in a department store does not lie in the destruction of goods,” she opined, “but in the criminality of the act, the breaking of the law…”
⁶

Publicly, the arsonists’ friends from the K.1 commune declared their solidarity, Fritz Teufel paraphrasing Bertolt Brecht to the effect that “It’s always better to torch a department store than to run one.”
⁷
Privately, however, they wondered at how clumsily the whole thing had been carried out, some even supposing that the four might suffer from some “psychic failure,” a subconscious desire to go to jail.
⁸

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

As the judge read out the verdict a familiar figure stood up: “This trial belongs before a student court,” Daniel Cohn-Bendit
⁹
shouted, at which point the gallery erupted into pandemonium, spectators swarming the guards as two of the accused attempted to make a break for it. Three people, including Cohn-Bendit, were arrested as a result of this melee, and all four young arsonists remained in custody.
¹⁰

The next day, persons unknown lobbed three molotov cocktails into the Frankfurt courthouse.
¹¹
Again, no one was hurt.

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