by J. Smith
We must certainly thank Maspero, the French publisher, several of whose books were of great use to us, as well as Nadir, Extremismus, Zeitgesichte, and the Marxist Internet Archive, all of which maintain excellent websites.
Anthony Murphy translated the RAF’s The Urban Guerilla Concept in 2003; while we did not end up using his version, we are nevertheless grateful for his work and assistance.
This project would have been impossible in its present form if not for the excellent Rote Armee Fraktion Collection of the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, maintained online as an archive by former RAF member Ronald Augustin. We are grateful to both the IISH and to Augustin in particular.
Many of the graphics in this book come from the book and CD Vorwärts bis zum nieder mit, compiled by Sebastian Haunss, Markus Mohr, and Klaus Viehmann from a variety of archives and published by Verlag Assoziation A. The interested reader can view the entire contents of this CD online at http://plakat.nadir.org/. All those involved in producing this artwork, and the book and website in question, have our thanks.
Dan Berger and Matthew Lyons provided very useful feedback to earlier drafts of our text. Henning Böke, Jutta Ditfurth, comrades from the Parti Communiste Marxiste-Léniniste-Maoïste, members of the Leftist Trainspotters and Marxmail email lists, all provided very useful answers to questions regarding the West German radical left and the guerilla. Muhammad Abu Nasr provided helpful insight into the Palestinian resistance, specifically around the Black September action in Munich. Romy Ruukel provided much needed help and advice, proof reading the text and teaching us how to compile a bibliography. Many others provided great assistance to us in this project, yet would rather not be named here. They too have our thanks.
It should go without saying that none of these individuals or groups are likely to agree with everything we have stated in this book, nor do they necessarily approve of the conclusions we have drawn. It goes without saying that they have no responsibility for any errors contained herein.
Finally, and with our tongues planted firmly in our cheeks, we would like to thank the U.S. military for creating the internet, without which this project might not have been possible.
TRANSLATORS’ NOTE
In preparing these texts, we consulted the many existent versions in both French and English. However, in each case these translations were found to have serious shortcomings. Not surprisingly, many of them, the work of committed activists whose grasp of German was limited, were marred by erroneous translation—usually these errors were predictable given the complexity of the German language. In no few cases, segments of the original text were found to be missing from the available translations. It was also not uncommon to encounter what might best be called transliteration—the translator “adjusted” concepts to suit the milieu for which he or she was translating the document. The end result of this latter phenomenon was often, however unintentional, the ideological distortion of the original document—usually only slight in nature, but occasionally egregious. Perhaps the oddest thing we encountered on more than a few occasions was the existence of accretions in the translated documents we referred to; usually only a phrase or a sentence or two, but occasionally entire paragraphs.
After several months of poring over the existing translations, hoping to tweak them into publishable shape (about two thirds of the documents in this book existed in some form of translation in the two languages accessible to us), we were obliged to accept the inevitable: all of the documents we hoped to use would have to be checked against the originals before going to publication. Then began the task of hunting down the originals, a process greatly facilitated by the existence of several online sources, including an indispensible website maintained by former RAF prisoner Ronald Augustin.1 Of no less importance was the discovery, in pdf form, of the entire 1997 ID-Verlag book, Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF on the Nadir website.2 With these two resources in hand, we had all the documents we needed to complete this book save a small handful that we tracked down elsewhere.
The process of translation we used was to some degree unique. Only one of the two “translators” was actually conversant in German, and so it fell to him to prepare the translations. Once a document was translated, he would forward it to the other “translator” who would meticulously examine it and make suggestions for improving (de-Germanizing) the English used. These suggested changes—always numerous—would then be checked against the original to assure that the intent was not being skewed. This process would usually involve two or three rounds of the document going back and forth between the translators, before a finalized version acceptable to both of us was arrived at. On three occasions, each involving a single sentence, neither of us was happy with the other’s proposal and so a compromise had to be arrived at—this would affect in total approximately a half a page of the book you are holding. The end result was that no document in this book was examined fewer than three times and most of the major ones were examined at least five or six times.
Are we saying that these translations are perfect? Undoubtedly not. In a project of this grandeur, involving the translation of between four and five hundred pages, disagreements about decisions we made and interpretations we arrived at are de facto inevitable, as are errors—hopefully none of them significant.
That said, we are confident that the documents in this book accurately represent the history and the ideology of the Red Army Faction and provide the reader with a resource unparalleled elsewhere in English.
Before closing one other issue cries out to be addressed. We refer to this work as the complete texts of the Red Army Faction. The meaning of that statement seems indisputable, but that is not the case, and so we must explain what we mean by “complete.” To the best of our knowledge, we have included every document issued by the RAF in its close to thirty-year history in either this volume (1968-1977) or the forthcoming second volume (1978-1998). By this, we mean every theoretical manifesto, every communiqué accompanying an action, and every letter sent by the organization to the media.
After some discussion we decided not to include Über den bewaffneten Kampf in Westeuropa (Regarding the Armed Struggle in West Europe) penned by Horst Mahler. This 1971 document, a sprawling theoretical text, was rejected by the other members of the RAF and played no small role in the decision to expel Mahler from the group—making him the only member ever publicly expelled. (The interested reader proficient in German will have no difficulty finding this document online, including in the aforementioned ID-Verlag book.)
We also did not include, with several exceptions, letters written by imprisoned RAF members. There are literally thousands of them, a significant selection of which have been published in German in a book entitled Das Info, edited by former lawyer to RAF prisoners Pieter Bakker Schut. This book can be found in its entirety on the site maintained by Augustin, as can Bakker Schut’s invaluable historical analysis of the Stammheim trial, simply entitled Stammheim. Nor did we publish, with the exception of a handful, any of the hundreds of court statements, often of epic length, made by RAF defendants over the years. In the cases where we did choose to publish a letter or a court statement, it was because the document in question filled out some theoretical or historical aspect of the RAF’s history that we felt was not adequately addressed elsewhere. This is also true of the open letter from the RZ to the RAF that we publish in this volume—a number of similar documents from other German and European guerilla groups will appear in the second volume of this work.
PREFACE
The book you hold in your hands, along with its companion volume, constitute the most complete works and history of the Red Army Faction ever published in the English language.
The Red Army Faction was formed in 1970 when a small group of West German revolutionaries decided to go underground and carry out armed actions against U.S. imperialism. Within a few years, almost all of the original members were either dead or captured, yet the harsh treatment the latter rece
ived as prisoners garnered them a degree of sympathy, and their own unflagging resistance earned them the respect of many.
Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that they captured the imagination of a generation of West German youth. Certainly, before they fell, they had already succeeded in inspiring others to pick up their banner.
In fact, the RAF was to remain a factor in German politics for almost thirty years as successive waves of radicals extended the struggle, carrying out increasingly sophisticated and daring campaigns of assassination and bombings against key members of the West German ruling class and American armed forces stationed in the Federal Republic. On more than one occasion, they shook their society to its core, baiting its ruling class into dictatorial reactions that shocked the consciences of even their own supporters. Eventually, the RAF became emblematic of the “euro-terrorism” of the 1970s and 80s, yet like so many things that are emblematic, it was never typical of that which it represented.
In its halcyon days, many people considered the guerilla a legitimate political force, and one can read reports of soccer fans wearing RAF insignia and of young people secretly keeping photos clipped from wanted posters in their wallets. As this naïve and romantic honeymoon period faded, the group became the object of mass hatred and hysteria, the most egregious example of things going “too far,” of people “losing their moral compass.”
As with any powerful symbol, for much of its history what seemed most important about the RAF was what people thought about it. For many, fascination with the group grew out of a fascination with its founding members. In the 1960s, Ulrike Meinhof was already a well known journalist who seemed able to combine radical politics with an increasingly successful career. At the same time, Andreas Baader had a reputation for being the charming rogue of the Berlin hipster scene, his panache enhanced as he and a group of his friends were brought to trial for firebombing a Frankfurt department store.
People may not have agreed with what they did next, or with why they did it, but if nothing else, the misnamed “Baader-Meinhof Gang” had style, and as the media played up every detail and the old fogies in power got more and more freaked out, they were briefly loved for simply being the most hardcore urban guerillas around.
Much could be written about this bizarre fascination, this production of guerilla cachet, but to do so would be to write a cultural history, and we intend something else altogether.
Except in passing, these books will not deal with the private lives or personalities of the RAF combatants. How the guerillas got along with their parents, friends, or each other is not really our concern. We will not concentrate on the kind of cars they liked or their taste in music or what kind of childhood they had. We will not guess at who was “nice” and who was a “prick,” or go over who slept with whom, or catalog the names people called each other when they were arguing.
To have to provide such a disclaimer may seem absurd, for most political histories pass over such details as a matter of course. Yet, a brief survey of the few books available about the RAF will show that these questions have been the major preoccupation of almost anyone who has approached this subject. Nor are we unaware of the point that the RAF prisoners themselves would make on more than one occasion: that efforts to explain their actions in psychological terms were part of a conscious state strategy of pathologizing them and their politics, or at least shifting people’s attention onto trivial and often fabricated personal details. While there are things we consider mistaken in the RAF’s broader analysis, on this question they appear to have been 100% correct.
While the personal may be political, we believe that the RAF’s greatest significance is not to be found in the part it played in the individual lives of its members or supporters. Rather, to appreciate what it was and what it meant, and as a first step towards being able to evaluate its praxis, the RAF must be placed within the context of left-wing revolutionary struggle in the First World at a very particular point in time. As such, we are most interested in the group’s ideas, its line as established in its communiqués and other documents, how it put this line into practice through its actions and campaigns, and the relationship the group enjoyed with its supporters and other leftists.
Some may accuse us of being uncritical, or of even supporting the RAF’s politics and their practice. We would answer that in order to be critical one must first be in possession of the facts. While we consider questions of morality and means and ends to be very important, given that this is the first time most of this material has been made available to English-readers, we prefer not to muddy the waters by condemning or praising the guerilla every step of the way.
Certainly we will offer no blanket denunciation—nor will we indulge in cheap praise. What has been written so far is replete with judgment, and often contains very little factual content or political analysis. We hope with these books to do our small part in correcting this imbalance.
In order for the guerilla’s actions and statements to be at all comprehensible, they need to be placed in the context of their times and of the wider left-wing movement in West Germany. Even as these events were unfolding, this context was not well understood by many of us in North America; now, decades later, it is even harder to grasp. For that reason, we have provided two background chapters providing an overview of postwar West Germany, as well as a series of introductory texts to the different documents from the guerilla. These are overviews and as will be clear, they have been written from a particular perspective. It is here that our analysis most obviously departs from that of the RAF, our sympathy for many of its aims notwithstanding.
We offer these documents to the comrades of today—and to the comrades of tomorrow—both as a testament to those who struggled before and as an explanation as to how they saw the world, why they made the choices they made, and the price they were made to pay for having done so.
ACRONYM KEY
2JM
Bewegung 2. Juni (2nd of June Movement); Berlinbased anarchist guerilla group formed in early 1972, its name comes from the date of the police shooting of protester Benno Ohnesorg in 1967.
APO
Außerparlemtarische Opposition (Extra-Parliamentary Opposition); the name given to the broad-based militant opposition with its roots in the student movement that encompassed the left-wing anti-imperialist and social revolutionary movements of the late sixties and early seventies.
ARD
Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Syndicate for Publicly Regulated Radio Stations in the Federal Republic of Germany); state-funded radio.
BAW
Bundesanwaltschaft (Federal Prosecutors Office); noted for its aggressive prosecution of cases against the guerilla and the left.
BGS
Bundesgrenzschutz (Federal Border Patrol); border security police.
BKA
Bundeskriminalamt (Federal Criminal Bureau); the German equivalent of the FBI, particularly active in police activities against the guerilla and the left.
BND
Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service); the FRG’s foreign intelligence service.
CDU
Christlich Demokratisches Union Deutschlands (Christian Democratic Union of Germany); Germany’s mainstream conservative party.
CSU
Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern (Bavarian Christian-Social Union); Bavaria’s mainstream conservative party, the Bavarian partner to the CDU.
DGB
Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (German Union Federation); the largest union federation in the FRG.
DKP
Deutsche Kommunistische Partei (German Communist Party); the pro-Soviet communist party founded in 1968, in effect the rebranding of the KPD (Communist Party of Germany), which was banned in 1956.
FAZ
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; a high-quality, national, moderate conservative, German daily newspaper.
FDP
Freie De
mokratische Partei (Free Democratic Party); Germany’s mainstream liberal party.
GIM
Groupe Internationale Marxisten (International Marxist Group); West German section of the Trotskyist Fourth International active in the FRG in the seventies and eighties, fused with the KPD/ML to form the VSP in 1986.
GSG-9
Grenzschutzgruppe 9 (Border Patrol Group 9); officially part of the BGS, in practice Germany’s antiterrorist special operations unit.
KB
Kommunistischer Bund (Communist League); a small Maoist group active in the seventies.
KBW
Kommunistischer Bund Westdeutschland (West German Communist League); founded in Bremen in 1973. A Maoist organization originally associated with China, subsequently shifted their support to Albania and Pol Pot’s Cambodian regime. Dissolved in 1985.
KPD
Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Communist Party of Germany); pro-Soviet communist party founded in 1919, banned under Hitler in 1933 and under Adenauer in 1956, rebranded as DKP (German Communist Party) in 1968. Also a Maoist party founded by the KPD/AO in 1971 and dissolved in 1980.
KPD/AO
Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands/Aufbauorganisation (Communist Party of Germany/Pre-Party Formation); a Maoist organization founded in 1970, became the KPD in 1971.