The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1

by J. Smith

  Furthermore, although the athletes were noncombatants, they were nonetheless representatives of a colonial state, one which was for all intents and purposes waging war against the Palestinian people. Certainly, far bloodier actions had been carried out in anticolonial campaigns around the world. No less than Carlos Marighella, the Brazilian guerilla leader, had argued in his famous Minimanual that “non-political” celebrities could constitute legitimate targets:

  The kidnapping of personalities who are well-known artists, sports figures or who are outstanding in some other field, but who have evidenced no political interest, can be a useful form of propaganda for the guerrillas, provided it occurs under special circumstances, and is handled so the public understands and sympathizes with it.4

  Whether the operation was understood or enjoyed public sympathy depended very much on who one thought of as constituting the “public.” Certainly, in the Arab world, the action was widely understood, and met with a large measure of sympathy. When the bodies of the slain commando members were brought to Libya, for instance, over 30,000 mourners followed their funeral procession from Tripoli’s Martyr’s Square to the Sidi Munaidess Cemetery.5

  It is equally true that in the imperialist countries, most people neither understood nor sympathized with the aims of the Palestinians. The commando’s public testament, released shortly afterwards, met with simple incomprehension. Thus the outrage, not only at Black September, but also at anyone who dared to speak up in defense of the Palestinian guerilla action.

  If it has been necessary to our study to consider these events in such detail, it is precisely because of this outrage.

  Critics of the RAF have zeroed in on the Black September document, scandalized at this support for the Munich operation. The guerilla’s penchant for purposefully shocking formulations (i.e. “Israel burned their own athletes just as the Nazis had burned the Jews”) did not help matters. Likewise, a strong argument could be made that the RAF, like much of the revolutionary left, did a poor job at acknowledging and analyzing the specifically antisemitic dimensions of German fascism.

  What is important to stress in the context of our study is that this is not why the RAF was criticized. Rather, the fact that the captured combatants dared to stand in solidarity with Black September has been construed as “proof” that they were antisemites, not in the sense of having a weak analysis or oppressive blindspots, but in the sense of “hating Jews.” According to the state, various “terrorism experts,” and some right-wing and liberal pundits, it was in this sense that the RAF was accused of being an antisemitic organization.

  Yet regardless of whether one finds it to have been correct or ill-conceived, justified or egregious, it is plainly evident that the Munich hostage taking had nothing to do with antisemitism. It was simply part of the struggle of the Palestinian people against colonial oppression. There may be plenty of moral and political arguments with which to object to the targeting of the Olympic athletes, but opposition to antisemitism is not one of them. Indeed, while anti-Jewish racism may well have led some bigots to applaud the action, anti-Arab racism seems to have led far more to automatically condemn it, and with it all those who would not turn their backs on the Palestinian people.

  Yet the accusation did not stop there: some liberal and right-wing critics have gone further, accusing Meinhof of making antisemitic comments as the RAF text was being delivered. This story has gained some currency in recent years, especially on the internet, so it is worth extending this already lengthy examination in order to establish the facts of the matter.

  As already mentioned, the Black September document was read out in court by Horst Mahler, taking the form of a “cross examination” of Ulrike Meinhof, who had been called to the witness stand. At one point, Meinhof interrupted the reading with an impromptu observation of her own, specifically regarding the nature of German antisemitism and the Holocaust. The only record of what Meinhof said is in an article from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in which many of her words were paraphrased. Here is what the FAZ reported Meinhof as saying:

  “Auschwitz meant that six million Jews were murdered and carted off to Europe’s garbage heap, dispensed with as money Jews.” Finance capital and banks, “the hard core of the system” of imperialism and capitalism deflected the hate of the people for money and oppression from itself and transferred it to the Jews.1

  The FAZ, like all initial observers, seems to have understood Meinhof as saying that the Nazis took advantage of anticapitalist sentiment, using stereotypes about “rich Jews” to mobilize gentiles behind a program of genocide. That Meinhof saw herself as opposed to this, and therefore opposed to antisemitism, was taken for granted.

  Such an analysis of Nazism may be criticized for being facile, economistic, or simply incorrect. Nevertheless, it has an established place on the left, and is not in and of itself in any way anti-Jewish. Rather, it can trace its lineage directly back to the early 20th century social democrat, August Bebel, who famously described antisemitism as “the socialism of fools.”

  Even so, Meinhof’s words were to be turned against her, especially in the English-speaking world. One of the first translations of the FAZ quote into English appeared in an article by one George Watson in the British literary magazine Encounter, a CIA-funded publication, which had as its aim the winning over of “progressive” intellectuals to the American side in the Cold War.2 This translation had a curious wording, though, one which seemed to give new meaning to what Meinhof had said. According to Watson, the guerilla leader had stated that “Auschwitz means that 6 million Jews were killed, and thrown onto the waste heap of Europe, for what they were: money-Jews.”3 (emphasis added)

  The clear implication here is that Meinhof approved of their murder— that she approved of the Holocaust and Nazism and also Auschwitz. This would flatly contradict everything Meinhof and the RAF had stated both before and after this point, and this fact alone should suffice to cast doubt on Watson’s translation. As should the fact that those who have gone back to the original German FAZ article have disputed Watson’s interpretation with apparent unanimity.4

  However, most people do not return to the original, and this conveniently damning translation has subsequently found its way into all sorts of studies and discussions, not only of the RAF, but of the left in general. Saul Bellow quoted it as he accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976,1 and it has been featured in books “proving” that revolutionary anticapitalism is antisemitic.2 All over the internet it appears as “evidence” that not only the RAF, but indeed the entire German New Left, was anti-Jewish, if not crypto-Nazi.

  We are not claiming that there are no legitimate criticisms to be made of how the West German left dealt with—or failed to deal with—the question of antisemitism. It has been noted that many radicals’ fierce antifascism rested on an analysis which saw the persecution of Jews as merely incidental to Nazism. Some radicals, including the RAF, often did seem to view the Third Reich as nothing more than a case of hyper-capitalism, the solution to which could be as simple as hyperanticapitalism.

  Combined with a persisting lack of clarity regarding the status of Germany—imperialist? or colonized?3—and a keen awareness of Israel’s role in world imperialism, these weaknesses pushed sections of the left to occasionally espouse positions which belied a certain antisemitism. This was a serious error at times in the 1970s, and coming to grips with it would eventually acquire some importance for some individuals within both the K-groups and the undogmatic left.

  Despite these facts, being a left-wing German anti-Zionist was in no way tantamount to being an antisemite. Far from it. In the precise case of the RAF, those who would accuse the group of antisemitism have yet to make their case.

  As to Ulrike Meinhof’s words in question, Watson’s translation is simply wrong. Whether this was an “honest mistake,” or whether it had something to do with the CIA funding the magazine for which he wrote is a question readers had best ponder for themselves. Certainl
y, the timing is suspect: his article appeared in November 1976. As detailed in Section 10, Meinhof had been found dead—with convincing evidence pointing to murder—in her prison cell earlier that year, and this had elicited much sympathy for the RAF within the left. In this context, discrediting the guerilla leader took on great importance for the state and counterinsurgency forces.

  (For more on the original FAZ article, Watson’s loose translation style, and our own translation, see Appendix I—Excerpts from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, pages 544-47.)

  As has already been mentioned, the RAF did not limit itself to dealing with the Munich events in its Black September document. For the RAF, these merely provided a starting point from which to launch into a discussion of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the Arab world, including the possible use of petroleum as a weapon. This was a year before the OPEC nations carried out their partial oil embargo as retaliation against western support for Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur war.

  From the question of oil, the RAF went on to consider the problem of opportunism within the imperialist countries, the “metropole.” This discussion focused on Oskar Negt, a former assistant of Jürgen Habermas and a professor of sociology at the Technical University in Hannover, who following the May Offensive had publicly called on socialists to deny the RAF any solidarity or support.

  In the early seventies, Negt was considered a leading left-wing intellectual. In 1973, for instance, in the first issue of New German Critique, he would be described as “the most innovative theorist in Germany today.”4 He was particularly prominent in the West German campaign to provide solidarity for the Black Liberation Movement militant Angela Davis. Accused of complicity in a failed hostage taking which had been meant to free imprisoned Black revolutionaries (the Soledad Brothers), Davis was incarcerated in the United States for eighteen months between 1970 and 1972. For Negt, the connection was both political and personal, as he had gotten to know Davis when she had spent time studying in Frankfurt in the 1960s.5 It was only natural for him to now support her as a political prisoner.

  Davis’ trial wound up in San Jose, California, in the late spring of 1972, and the jury began its deliberations on Friday, June 2. That same weekend, as a show of solidarity, an Angela Davis Congress had been organized in Frankfurt by the Sozialistisches Büro, a loose network that had emerged out of the APO in 1969, and had since established itself as an important force within the undogmatic left.1 Keynote speakers included Frankfurt School personalities Herbert Marcuse and Wolfgang Abendroth, and, of course, Oskar Negt. Close to ten thousand people attended, and one can only imagine what the scene must have been when news arrived on the Sunday that Davis had been found not guilty.2

  While the conference was scheduled perfectly to coincide with this victory across the Atlantic, it also occurred at a very particular moment in the FRG. As we have seen, the entire month of May had been filled with bombings carried out by the RAF. Just days before the Congress opened, also in Frankfurt, Red Aid had held a Teach-In Against Repression at which a tape-recorded statement from Ulrike Meinhof had been played. The very next day, the first of the arrests came: Andreas Baader, Holger Meins, and Jan-Carl Raspe were captured in Munich.

  At this critical juncture, at what should have been an ideal occasion to make the connection between revolutionary movements in West Germany and the United States, Negt dropped his own bombshell. His address at the Congress took aim not at imperialism or racism or state repression, but at the RAF, and at those who supported its strategy of armed struggle in the FRG.

  According to Negt, the RAF’s politics were disconnected from the experiences of most citizens of the FRG, and for that reason could only be self-defeating. Whereas he believed the Black Liberation Movement was justified in using political violence in the United States, and he fully supported the Black Panther Party and similar groups, he argued that people were not particularly oppressed in the FRG, and, as such, the guerilla could only alienate the working class there. Armed politics in such a context were vanguardist, counterproductive, and doomed to fail, as anyone who robbed banks or planted bombs would only cut themselves off from the very people whose support they should be seeking.

  Perhaps worst of all, Negt accused the RAF of being simple “desperadoes” trying to put a political veneer on apolitical crimes. Arguing that “uncritical solidarity” ran contrary to socialist organizing principles, Negt called on leftists to refuse the RAF any support—be it safehouses or IDs or whatnot—smugly adding that if this was done, the guerilla would simply not be able to survive.3

  It has been reported that his words did not go over so well with everyone at the Congress, and he was vigorously denounced by many in attendance, notably members of Frankfurt’s sponti scene.4

  It might have been enough that he speak out against the guerilla in order for the RAF to take him to task, but Negt would be accused of doing far more than that.

  Apparently the Hannover sociology professor was friends with Fritz Rodewald—the same Fritz Rodewald who set Ulrike Meinhof and Gerhard Müller up to be captured within a few weeks of the Frankfurt conference. According to Meinhof’s biographer Jutta Ditfurth, Rodewald, uneasy about his prior decision to aid the fugitives, had turned to Negt for advice. Negt repeated his position that nobody owed anyone “mechanical” or “automatic” solidarity, and as a result, the police were contacted.5

  In Negt’s hard line, one can discern the first clear rejection of the guerilla by a section of the undogmatic left. While this position can’t have done the guerilla any good, the evidence seems to indicate that in 1972, and for several years thereafter, it failed to achieve hegemony. Which is not to say that the undogmatic left was pro-guerilla, but rather that different people held different opinions, and it would have taken more than the ravings of one left-wing intellectual to cause a definite repudiation. When such a move away from political violence did eventually occur, it would be as a result of former street fighters, guerillas, and semi-legal activists re-examining the question. It would take militants like Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Joschka Fischer, and former combatants like Bommi Baumann and Hans-Joachim Klein, to do what Negt could not.

  If the RAF saw a thread connecting its negative evaluation of Negt to its glowing appraisal of Black September, it was the question of the labor aristocracy. It is surely no accident that the Black September document provides the guerilla’s most detailed examination of this concept.

  Specifically, the “labor aristocracy” refers to those more well-to-do layers of the working class, people who no longer have any material incentive to engage in the dangerous, grueling task of carrying out a revolution against capitalism. Lenin had argued that the labor aristocracy was a product of imperialism, as the profits earned from exploitation in the developing countries were used to pay for the elevated position of certain sections of the working class in the metropole. This concept has been accepted by almost all strains of the Marxist-Leninist tradition, though often accorded little actual importance in practice.

  To the first wave of the RAF, however, the question of the labor aristocracy had by this point become central. The labor aristocracy was not seen simply as a section of the West German working class, but as the dominant section, almost to the exclusion of any classical proletariat. As such, the idea of using popular support in the FRG as a barometer of political legitimacy—which is what Negt seemed to propose—was not simply wrong, it reeked of opportunism.

  This analysis was hinted at in Serve the People earlier in 1972, but Black September spelled it out clearly, while also exploring what this might imply.

  In the RAF’s view, in 1972, there was no material basis for revolution in the FRG: the crumbs from the imperialist table were enough to win most people’s loyalty for the system. Yet the RAF did not see this as a reason to give up on revolutionary politics, or to abandon armed struggle; instead, they argued that “the situation is ‘ripe’ to take up the anti-imperialist struggle in the metropole—not ‘ripe’ for revolu
tion, but ‘ripe’ for the anti-imperialist offensive.”

  The RAF emphasized the alienation which persisted even in an affluent consumer society, zeroing in on people’s individual dissatisfaction and misery in the midst of plenty. Much was made of the way in which consumerism distorted and manipulated people’s desires, “the exploitation of their feelings and thoughts, wishes, and utopian dreams.”

  This psychological misery—insufficient, perhaps to carry out a revolution, but enough to establish a revolutionary tradition—was seen as providing a subjective basis for armed resistance to imperialism within the metropole. As the capitalist system would find itself increasingly besieged by the liberation struggles in the Third World—or so the theory went—this base could grow, and then, “the masses here will eventually find their political identity on the side of the liberation struggles, and will eventually free themselves from the grip of the system, with its lies, its glitziness, its election promises, and its lotteries.”

  Black September provides the RAF’s most explicit attempt to link the concepts of imperialism, the labor aristocracy, and the subjective basis for revolt in the metropole. In hindsight, it is clear that the optimistic notion that the West German masses might rally to an anti-imperialist position has not been borne out. Nevertheless, this should not detract from the fact that the RAF was at least trying to deal with questions that most leftists in imperialist societies preferred—and still prefer—to ignore.

  As we have seen, Black September was a document firmly embedded in the context of its time. Perhaps for this reason, it did not “age” well, and would be increasingly ignored by those sympathetic to the guerilla in years to come. Yet it was an important document, and the relationship to the national liberation struggles in the Third World and to the working class in Germany as elaborated here would not be revisited by subsequent waves of guerilla fighters for years to come.