by J. Smith
And if it is the case that your capacity to act is based on socialization through fear and despair, then struggle on the basis of that.
Eventually you may understand—I can’t say for sure—that we can only achieve something with words if they lead to a correct understanding of the situation in which each of us finds ourselves under imperialism, that it is senseless to want to fight with words, when one can only fight with clarity and truth.
Given the environment in which we are struggling—the postfascist state, consumer culture, metropolitan chauvinism, media manipulation of the masses, psychological warfare, and social democracy—and faced with the repression that confronts us here, indignation is not a weapon. It is pointless and empty. Whoever is truly indignant, that is to say, is concerned and engaged, does not scream, but instead reflects on what can be done.
That’s the SPK—replacing the struggle with screams. It is not simply distasteful: in isolation it will destroy you, because it means opposing brutal, material repression with nothing more than ideology, instead of opposing it with a psychological effort, which also implies a physical effort.
Arm the masses—even now, capital is doing this much more quickly: the cops, the army, and the radical right. So before you give up on the West German masses, or “the masses” in general, think about what it’s really like here. Ho1 wrote in l’Humanité,2 in 1922, “The masses are fundamentally ready for rebellion, but completely ignorant. They want to liberate themselves, but they don’t know how to begin.”
That is not our situation.
In our situation here and now, the most pressing issue we must address is how to explain the at times gruesome experiences we have had in isolation—which are intended to foster betrayal, capitulation, selfdestruction, and de-politicization—so that you will not have to experience them any more. For if it is true that in the guerilla each individual can learn from every other individual, then it must be possible to communicate our experiences—the condition for which is understanding the collective as a process—a process for which the institutionalization of people in authoritarian boxes is anathema.
Understanding the collective as a process means struggling together against the system, which is very real and not at all imaginary.
Ulrike Meinhof
March 19, 1976
SECOND LETTER (MARCH 23, 1976)
It’s bullshit: the “psychiatric” section.
The objective at Ossendorf, like everywhere else, is extermination, and the psychiatrists participate, developing the methods which are applied by state security—psychiatry as a thoroughly imperialist science is a means, not an end.
Psychiatric treatment is a front in the psychological war; it is intended to persuade broken fighters of the absurdity of revolutionary politics, to deprive the fighters of their convictions. It is also a police tactic for destruction through “forced liberation,” as Buback calls it, and its military interest is in recruitment—establishing control.
What Bücker3 does isn’t psychiatric treatment—it’s terror. He wants to wear you down. Using terms like therapy, brainwashing leaves you absolutely twisted. You must raise a shield against this frontal assault.
The Ossendorf method is the typical prison method, but at Ossendorf its design and application have been perfected, and are epitomized by Bücker and Lodt.4 It is aseptic and total. They deprive the prisoner of air until he finally loses his dignity, all sense of self, and all perception of what terror is. The goal is extermination. Psychiatric treatment is only one aspect, only one instrument among others. If you allow yourself to be paralyzed by it, like a deer in the headlights, if you fail to resist it, what else can be expected.
“No windows”—obviously. But there are even more unimaginable things about isolation—the sadism with which it is developed, the perfection of its application, the totality of the extermination pursued by the Security Group, and the shock we experience when we realize the intensity of the antagonism within which we have chosen to struggle, and when we recognize the nature of the fascism that rules here. This is not simply rhetoric that we are using, but is in fact an accurate description of the repression one encounters if one starts to engage in revolutionary politics in this country.
They cannot use psychiatry against someone who doesn’t accept or want it. Your shrieks about psychiatry mystify the realities of isolation. It is effective—it must be struggled against, and, naturally, you must engage in war against Bücker’s bullying.
So demand an end to acoustic surveillance; accept only visual surveillance, like in Stammheim. Naturally, it was also a struggle here to get rid of the cop who came to listen to us, to be allowed to sit on the floor, etc. For you, only repression exists. That’s perfectly clear.
Also, you are a pig. You pull the demand for association and the line on “prisoners of war” out of your bag of tricks, as if they are a threat—against Müller.1 That is nonsense. We must have association and the application of the Geneva Convention, but what do you expect from Müller?
We struggle against them and the struggle never ends, and they won’t make the struggle any easier for us. Obviously, if you only think in terms of bourgeois morality, you will soon run out of ammunition. It’s idiotic. So, take care of yourself, because nobody else can do it for you in isolation.
Not even Bernd.2
Ulrike Meinhof
March 23, 1976
Letter to the Hamburg Prisoners
This letter was written to RAF prisoner Werner Hoppe, who came to the RAF out of communist section of the student movement. (M. & S.)
We are beginning to find you truly insufferable—the class perspective with which you puff yourselves up. And it’s not because of a question of definition, but because the struggle, meaning what is essential, doesn’t exist in it. There is nothing there. It is a showpiece that has very little in common with what we want. What we want is revolution. That is to say, there is a goal, and, with regards to the goal, there isn’t a position, but only the movement, the struggle, the relationship to being, which, as you say, means struggling.
There is the class reality: proletariat, proletarianization, declassing, humiliation, abuse, expropriation, servitude, poverty.
Under imperialism, the complete penetration of all relationships by the market and the nationalization of society by repressive and ideological state structures leave no place and no time about which you can say: this is my starting point. There is only illegality and liberated territory. Furthermore, you will not achieve illegality as an offensive position for revolutionary intervention until you yourself are on the offensive; without that it is nothing.
The class position is Soviet foreign policy presented as the class position of the international proletariat, and the U.S.S.R.’s accumulation model presented as socialism.
It is the line—the apology—for socialism in one country. Meaning, it is an ideology that aims to secure the domination of a dictatorship that does not proceed offensively against imperialism, but which instead responds defensively to the encirclement it now faces.
You can say that Soviet domestic and foreign policy was historically necessary, but you can’t claim that makes it absolute as the class position. The class position—that is to say, class interests, class needs, the class obligation to struggle for communism so as to be able to live—is curbed through such politics. I would actually say it is abolished, which is nonsense. Position and movement are mutually exclusive. It is a construct geared towards creating a safety net and self-justification—a facade.
It is a reframing of class politics as economic interests, which is incorrect. Class politics are the result of the confrontation with the politics of capital, and the politics of capital are a function of its economy. I think Poulantzas1 correctly addressed this when he said that the economic activities of the state are part of its repressive and ideological activities—they are part of the class struggle.
Class politics are a struggle against the politics of capital and no
t against the economy, which, directly or by way of the state, proletarianizes the class. The class position of the proletariat is war. It is a contradictio in adjecto—it is nonsense. It is nonsense from a class point of view, because the Soviet Union attempts to promote its state policy under the cover of class struggle. What I am saying is that it is the expression of Soviet foreign policy.
Which is to say, they can be allies in the process of liberation, but not protagonists. The protagonist has no position—the protagonist has a goal. The “class position” is always a cudgel. It is always the claim to possess and bestow, by way of the party apparatus, a conception of reality different from reality as it is perceived and experienced. Specifically, it is a claim to a class position without class struggle. As you say, it is “on this basis” that we should act, rather than on the basis of how we have been acting up to now.
In 1969, it was the MLs, the KSV, and the AO groups who, with the “class position,” depoliticized the movement in the universities by supporting policies that no student could relate to emotionally. It is a position for the liquidation of the anti-imperialist protest movement. And I think that that is the horrible thing about this concept and what it represents, the fact that it rules out any emotional identification with proletarian politics—it is a kind of catechism.
We do not act on the basis of a class position, no matter what its class perspective may be, but on the basis of class struggle, which is the principle of all history, and on the basis of class war as the reality within which proletarian politics are realized—and, as we have discovered, only in and by war.
The class position can only be the class movement within the class war, the world proletariat engaged in armed struggle, the true vanguard, the liberation movements.
Or, as Jackson2 said, “connections, connections, connections.” As such: movement, interaction, communication, coordination, common struggle—strategy.
All of this is paralyzed by the concept of “class position”—and that is how you used it when you attempted to win over Ing.3 You must know by now that there is not much worse than being fed complete nonsense
Which is all to say, the class position is a triumphalist position.
Certainly, there is also something heroic about it. However, we’re not concerned with that. We are, instead, concerned with its consequences.
But that’s enough. I have the impression that I’m talking to a wall, and that is not the point of all of this. The goal is to have you climb down from your pedestal.
So, come on down. You’re boasting.
Ulrike Meinhof
April 13, 1976
Interview with Le Monde Diplomatique
This interview originated from questions presented to the lawyers by Le Monde Diplomatique. The political parts of the questions were answered by the prisoners. While we are not aware of the interview ever being published by the liberal French newspaper, copies were distributed by the prisoners’ supporters. The date normally given for this document is June 10, 1976.
A somewhat expanded version of the interview addressing supplementary questions exists. However, the only version of that text available to us was an extremely poorly translated and badly organized English-language version. Faced with this problem, we decided to base our translation on the Germanlanguage version available on a website maintained by former RAF member Ronald Augustin. The English-language translation of the longer version available to us indicates that little of substance was added to what is presented here. (M. & S.)
Q.: The alleged suicide of Ulrike Meinhof is seen overwhelmingly by the left and critical observers as an institutional murder, the culmination of 4 years of soul-destroying solitary confinement.
A: The concept of institutional murder is not precise enough. It is more accurate to say that, in a military conflict, imprisoned revolutionaries will be executed. We are certain that, as with Holger Meins and Siegfried Hausner, it was murder—a premeditated execution following the years of psychological warfare. We are trying to find out the details of how this murder was committed. It is clear that the state has done everything possible to hide the facts, while state security and the state security journalism organized by the BAW attempt to exploit the situation for propaganda purposes. Nothing indicates suicide, but there are many facts that suggest murder:
The prisoners were not allowed to see their dead comrade. Her corpse was rushed out of the prison as the first lawyer arrived to visit Gudrun Ensslin. The corpse underwent an autopsy by order of the BAW, without the lawyers or relatives having an opportunity to see her, in spite of their demands to do so. Her sister was denied the right to bring in a pathologist of her choosing. The corpse was so mangled after the autopsy that the second pathologist could not deliver any precise findings—for example, a 25 cm long caesarean scar from the birth of her children could not be located.
Her brain and internal organs were removed.
Nevertheless, the effects of numerous injuries from blunt objects were visible on her legs.
And the injuries to the organs in her throat (a broken hyoid bone and the damage to the thyroid cartilage) virtually rule out “death by hanging.”
The request to have the cell inspected by her lawyer, her executor, or a relative was denied. The cell was “renovated,” totally repainted, two days after her death, even though the wing in which she died is not occupied. So far, neither the lawyers nor the relatives have received any answers from the authorities, besides the terse assertion that it was “suicide by hanging.”
In the press statements from the political judiciary, there are five contradictory versions regarding how the rope was secured. The one that ultimately became the official version and which was published was that she had rolled a hand towel into a 5 cm thick rope and fastened it tightly around her neck. Then she climbed onto a chair and threaded and fastened this 5 cm thick rope through the mesh of a screen, through which not even the small finger of a child would fit (for this an instrument would be needed, and none was found). Then she is supposed to have turned herself around and jumped.
Before this version was decided upon, the prison warden, who was one of the first in the cell, stated that there was no chair near the corpse, and the prison doctor who examined her first declared that her feet were 20 cm from the floor.
In the statements from the political judiciary, one finds only contradictions. Nonetheless, there has been no inspection of the files, and they have adamantly refused to share information with the relatives, the lawyers or neutral authorities. Regarding the possibility of an international committee of inquiry, which has been demanded throughout Europe, the Ministry of Justice declared, “There is neither the grounds nor the scope for any international body.”
Q: Against which background is deliberate murder to be seen?
A: The story behind this murder is documented in the files. On the government’s behalf, and using all available political and moral means, the Attorney General has tried for six years to “exterminate” the RAF prisoners, especially Ulrike and Andreas, and to “wipe out” the example they set in resisting the new fascism’s institutional strategy, as formulated by Schmidt in government statements and programs.
For as long as the RAF has existed, the Attorney General’s plan for Ulrike was to use her to personalize and pathologize revolutionary politics. Therefore, after her arrest, she was to be broken in the dead wing and psychiatrically restructured before her trial. After her arrest, she was imprisoned, by order of the BAW, from June 16, 1972, until February 9, 1973—that is 237 days—in a dead wing, which means total acoustic isolation. That is the prison in which state security houses prisoners during the phase of interrogation and “preparation for trial.” It is an extreme form of torture. No human can endure a lengthy period in an acoustic and social vacuum. One’s sense of time and one’s physical equilibrium are destroyed. One aspect of white torture is that the prisoner’s agony is magnified, not reduced, as the torture continues. The ultimate result is irreversibl
e brainwashing, which, to begin with, dissolves the control the tortured person has over what he says, over his speech; he babbles.
And his ability to grasp even a single thought is destroyed. What is left is a body, which on the outside shows hardly any sign of injury.
The program was at all times under the control of the BAW and the state security psychiatrist, Götte. But Ulrike endured the 237 days, because she fought. All of us could see that her mind and her will remained unbroken.
Another RAF prisoner, Astrid,1 who had previously spent three months in the dead wing, never recovered—not even after her release three years ago. Even today she is seriously ill.
The BAW assumed that Ulrike would be broken by the dead wing. On January 4, 1973, Buback—the Attorney General—wrote that Ulrike was to be committed “to a public sanitarium—or a nursing home—so that a report on her mental health could be prepared.” The public, which the defense lawyers were able to mobilize, just barely managed to prevent this. But the BAW tenaciously pursued their goal of having Ulrike declared mentally ill. On April 18, 1973, Buback directed the justice system psychiatrist Witter to deliver an opinion on Ulrike’s sanity. In his letter, he said:
On the basis of Frau Meinhof’s conduct to date, it seems doubtful she would cooperate regarding particular examinations or consent to surgical treatment. If professional opinion suggests that certain interventions are necessary, I would ask you to report to me with detailed information on the examination considered necessary, so that, under §81 of the Criminal Code, the pertinent court order can be obtained. Should it be necessary to involve a neurologist, I would suggest making arrangements to obtain the cooperation of the Director of the University Neurological Clinic in Homburg, Professor Dr. Loew.