The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1

by J. Smith

  The RZ would suffer few arrests, and even fewer casualties, all the while carrying out far more attacks than the RAF and 2JM combined. It should, however, be noted that many of these attacks were of a limited nature similar to those carried out by RAF supporters who were likewise living and working in the legal movement. Apart from bombing the Chilean consulate, the offices of El Al, police stations, U.S. army bases, government buildings, and bosses’ cars, for years the RZ also forged transit passes which were widely distributed, and food vouchers which were passed out to homeless families. Starting on May Day 1975, the Cells issued an annual newspaper, Revolutionärer Zorn (Revolutionary Rage), explaining their positions and actions; it was immediately banned under §88a, but broadly distributed and widely read in the scene regardless.

  Eventually, an autonomous women’s guerilla group, Rote Zora (named after a Pippy Longstocking-type character from a children’s book) would emerge from the Cells, bombing the Federal Doctors’ Association in Karlsruhe on April 29, 1977, as payback for the association’s opposition to abortion reform.1 While Rote Zora was independent of the RZ, the two organizations always worked closely together in both theoretical and practical matters.

  Some militants from the founding generation of the RZ felt they would best serve the international anti-imperialist revolution by literally fighting alongside the Third World guerilla in joint commandos. In practical terms, this meant working under the direction of a PFLP splinter faction operating out of South Yemen, lead by Waddi Haddad: the PFLP (External Operations).2 While the RZ tendency concerned is often described as the “international wing,” it actually represented a very small number of militants and only participated in a handful of actions, none of which were particularly succesful, while one constituted a decisive military and political defeat.

  The first of these occurred on December 24, 1975, with Hans-Joachim Klein and former 2JM member Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann participating in a joint German-Palestinian commando under the control of the Venezuelan adventurer Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as “Carlos.” Klein had moved from the Committees Against Torture and the Putz Group to the RZ following Holger Meins’ death.3 Given that Klein was the only RZ member to have participated, and that he subsequently broke from the guerilla, some people do not consider the RZ’s international wing to have been involved. (As for Kröcher-Tiedemann, she was certainly acting independently of 2JM in this operation.)

  The so-called “December 21st Movement of the Arabic Revolution” delivered a bloody nose to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries as it met in Vienna. Sixty oil ministers from around the world were taken hostage, and both an Austrian police officer and a Libyan diplomat were killed in the process. In exchange for the ministers’ release, the guerilla demanded—and received—a $5 million ransom, and all were flown to Algeria from whence they returned to the underground.

  The operation had been meant to punish OPEC for its recent decision to lift its embargo against Israel. Yet, it was not considered a success: the plan had been for the Carlos-led guerilla to execute diplomats from Saudi Arabia and Iran, both of which were important American allies; instead, Carlos negotiated a ransom for their freedom. Many reports claim that he was in fact excluded from Haddad’s organization for this breach.

  Not that this less bloody outcome assuaged the operation’s many critics: officials from the PLO accused Carlos of having orchestrated a “criminal act” designed to “undermine the nature of the Palestinian struggle,” claiming that the raid was such a disaster it could have been an imperialist false flag operation—which it wasn’t.4 Nevertheless, all of the guerillas had survived (though Klein had been seriously wounded), and so it could not be considered an unmitigated failure.

  The same could not be said for the next operation to include members of the RZ’s international wing.

  On June 27, 1976, a joint commando made up of members of the PFLP (EO) and members of the RZ5 hijacked an Air France airliner traveling from Tel Aviv to Paris, diverting it to Entebbe, Uganda. The guerillas demanded the release of 53 political prisoners held by Israel, West Germany, France, Switzerland, and Kenya. The West Germans demanded were RAF members Werner Hoppe, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Ingrid Schubert, and 2JM members Ralf Reinders, Fritz Teufel, and Inge Viett.

  The hostage taking was a drawn out affair, in part because so many governments were involved. After a week of holding all 260 passengers and crew, the guerillas arranged to release the non-Jewish passengers: the Jews were to be held back so that they would be the ones killed if the commando’s demands were not met.

  On July 4, an Israeli commando raided the airport, killing fortyseven Ugandan soldiers who were guarding the area, and all of the guerillas. Over one hundred Jewish hostages were saved and quickly flown out of the country.

  Entebbe was a fiasco, doing so much harm to the Palestinian cause that British diplomats at the time even considered the possibility that it might be a Mossad false flag attack—but it wasn’t.1

  Some observers eventually concluded that the singling out of Jews for execution represented a political defeat far greater than any military failure. Certainly, Entebbe provides a stark example of the inability some leftists had in recognizing or rejecting antisemitism.

  At the time, however, it is unclear how this racist selection was actually viewed. Many German gentiles failed to understand why the separation of Jews was antisemitic, and Spiegel went so far as to describe it as a sophisticated tactic.2 Detlev Claussen, a member of the Sozialistisches Büro, was one of the few to tackle the question head on, arguing that the Entebbe represented the “continuity of German antisemitism.”3

  Within the radical scene, the issue was hardly debated. With very few exceptions, the revolutionary left would only repudiate the operation years later, looking back on it with some shame. Finally, in a 1992 self-criticism that very much marked the end of the organization, the RZ explained how they had experienced and failed to react to the facts around the antisemitic selection:

  It took years for us to absorb this setback. As a result of the impact of the loss of our friends, we were initially unable to assess the political dimensions of the catastrophe that Entebbe was for us. Instead of appreciating what confronted us, specifically that we as an organization had taken part in an operation in which Israeli citizens and Jewish passengers of other nationalities were singled out and taken hostage, we occupied ourselves above all with the military aspects of the action and its violent conclusion… Our understanding of solidarity prevented criticism of the comrades; we rejected a discussion about the mistakes, as if solidarity did not in principle include the truth that some comrades make mistakes.4

  Horrible as it was, in 1976, Entebbe was just another disaster hitting the already shell-shocked sponti scene.

  The “Mass Militancy vs. the Guerilla” debate had taken on a sense of urgency with the May 10, 1976, Frankfurt protests, the day after Meinhof’s death in prison. During the Frankfurt riots, a cop was nearly killed when persons unknown lobbed several molotov cocktails at his car. One bounced in through the window exploding on top of him: the twenty-three-year-old police officer, Jürgen Weber, sustained burns over 60% of his body. His survival remained uncertain for several days.5

  A $20,000 reward was posted for information leading to Weber’s assailants. Then, on May 14, police raided a dozen collective houses, arresting fourteen people on suspicion of attempted murder, first-degree assault, and membership in a criminal organization under §129.6

  The fourteen were all released the next day, but the night in jail had momentous ramifications. Whether out of fear or introspection, one of the arrestees—Joschka Fischer, the alpha male of the sponti scene—decided that night that militant protest had gone too far. Upon his release, he broached the subject with his friend Cohn-Bendit, who agreed, and the two men set upon planning how to win over the rest of the scene.

  The first opportunity to present their new position was an Anti-Repression Conference organized by the Soz
ialistisches Büro over the weekend of June 5-7. There, Fischer addressed a rally of over 10,000 people, many of them militants and street fighters like himself. Arguing that political violence had hit a brick wall, he warned that the sponti scene risked falling into the same trap as the guerilla, which he describe as “lashing out blindly” due to its own “hopelessness.” Directing his comments at the guerilla itself, he beseeched them:

  For the very reason that our solidarity belongs with our comrades in the underground and because we feel so closely linked with them, we call upon them to end this death trip at once, to return from their “armed self-isolation.” We call upon them to put down the bombs and to pick up stones again.1

  According to several contemporaries, only Fischer, who had credibility as a seasoned activist and a Putz Group leader, could have gotten a hearing for such views. As it happens, he reportedly received wild applause.

  Why Fischer adopted a hard line against the guerilla is not clear. In later years, he pointed to the horror of Entebbe—like many Frankfurt militants, he had known the RZ fighters who died there—and also to the fear he had seen in a policeman’s eyes as he beat him up a year previously.

  Obviously, the Meinhof demonstration, and the realization that continued militancy might lead to prison, played a very large part in the equation. Years later, Cohn-Bendit would explain:

  The Meinhof demonstration was a decisive experience. One was faced with the fact that a dynamic could lead to a fatal outcome. That was the beginning of the radical dissociation of the entire scene from the terrorists and of a new discussion about the state and our resistance to it.2

  Despite this reference to “resistance,” and Fischer’s words at the Anti-Repression Conference about “picking up stones,” what was soon being put forth was that militancy altogether should be toned down, if not cut out. The Putz Group was disbanded, Pflasterstrand began pushing the anti-violence line, and by 1977 Fischer had repudiated revolution as a goal. As former sponti Wolfgang Kraushaar has suggested:

  When confronted with a crisis, which [Fischer] had until then understood as revolutionary violence, he began to question the whole notion of proletarian revolution. The fact that his existential experience with violence resulted in his reassessment of the entire revolutionary process being in a state of crisis was probably due to his own lack of political self-understanding.3

  While not everyone followed Fischer in this retreat, many did, and the sponti scene’s inability to cope with escalation as it occurred indicated that it had indeed reached its limits. A long period of decline ensued.

  By the winter of 1977-78, as the postwar generation lay besieged by the worst repression they had ever experienced, Pflasterstrand would be focusing on male anxieties about non-penetrative sex,4 and, by the early 1980s, Fischer and Cohn-Bendit were leading former spontis and other leftists into the Green Party, where they coalesced in a “realo” faction opposing the Greens’ more radical grassroots wing.5 By 1998, the former street fighter had become Germany’s Green Foreign Minister, who was instrumental in formulating the country’s decision to take part in NATO’s war against Serbia in 1999.6

  As a somewhat Shakespearian postscript to Fischer’s colorful career, in 2001, Ulrike Meinhof’s daughter Bettina Röhl came into possession of photographs of the Foreign Minister in his Putz Group days beating up a cop. Clearly marked by her mother’s larger than life experiences, Röhl is a woman with an axe to grind against anyone and everyone connected to the seventies radical left. She published the photos on her website, provoking a furor in Germany, but failing to really damage Fischer’s reputation in any way, though greatly raising his profile internationally.

  It was not that the man was untouchable; rather, his own life arc was simply a more vivid version of that of countless men and women of his generation.

  WOMEN’S LIBERATION

  Dwarfing the spontis and the K-groups, the strongest movements in the 1970s in West Germany were clearly the women’s liberation movement and the Bürgerinitiativen (Citizens Initiatives). At the same time, these movements remained far more interesting than the SPD or its left-wing, the Jusos. Of course, the comparison is not really fair, for both these were broad movements which could, and did, overlap with each other, with the various strains of the radical left, and with sections of the mainstream political spectrum.

  While both of these movements drew on the legacy of the APO, neither one fit comfortably within the categories of the left, New or Old, nor were they preoccupied with doing so. This provided the basis for very different reactions from the different guerilla groups.

  While the significance of the “women’s question” had obviously been recognized in Germany since well before the time of the Federal Republic, the 1960s saw the emergence of a new feminism there, as in many other countries. This new wave was born of the insights and rebellious spirit of the anticolonial revolutions and the students’ movement, but even more so as a result of the frustration radical women experienced when the left failed to live up to its promise, proving itself as mired in sexism as the rest of society.

  Famous leaflet produced by the “Broad’s Council” of the SDS in 1968: “Liberate the Socialist Men from their Bourgeois Dicks.” The men whose six penises were mounted on the wall above the axe-wielding woman had their names listed below: Helmut Schauer, Peter Gäng, Dieter Kunzelmann, Hans-Jürgen Krahl, Bernd Rabehl, and Reimut Reiche were all leading men in the APO. A space for a seventh name was left blank.

  As the APO declined, the women’s liberation movement entered a period of rapid advance. While many feminists continued to work within the male-dominated left, others separated themselves from its campaigns and organizations to a degree greater than what occurred in most other countries at that time.1 These women had no lack of areas in which to put their energies, areas which had often been neglected by their male “comrades”: opposing violence against women, organizing collective childcare, struggling for reproductive rights, and much more. This work was often based in autonomous women’s centers, the first ones being established in Frankfurt and West Berlin in 1972, but others soon appearing in cities across the country.

  If the contours of the West German women’s movement were similar to those in other imperialist countries in the seventies, they were not identical. Most observers agree, for instance, that the West German experience was marked by the lack of an official national organization, such as the American National Organization of Women, and also by less contact with professional political women’s organizations in the main parties. These differences allowed the West German movement to develop a far greater emphasis on autonomy, not only from men, but also from the political establishment and the political left.2

  A variety of issues, ranging from sexism in the media to wages for housework, attracted political action, which in turn ranged from petitions to demonstrations to disruptive “go-ins.” However, by far the most important and unifying struggle was the campaign to repeal §218 of the Basic Law, the paragraph of the constitution banning abortion under any circumstances. Under §218, a woman who had an abortion was liable to a five-year prison term; anyone who performed such a procedure was liable to a ten-year term.3 It was estimated that 1,000,000 abortions were nevertheless performed every year, either in often perilous conditions or else necessitating travel to Holland or England where the procedure was not illegal.4

  The movement against §218 stormed its way onto the public stage on June 2, 1971, when feminist journalist Alice Schwarzer arranged to have 374 women publicly “confess” to having had abortions in the pages of the mainstream magazine Stern. Two months later, Schwarzer had collected thousands more “confessions” and tens of thousands of solidarity signatures.1

  Within a year, the sensation had become a movement, putting its feet on the ground in Frankfurt in March 1972 at the first National Women’s Conference of the postwar period. It was here that an “Aktion 218” working group established plans for a renewed campaign to decriminalize abortion
, the beginning of what one German feminist would call “a children’s crusade against the patriarchy.”2

  The movement grew by leaps and bounds, bringing together women from a variety of political perspectives, including many radicals. A national day of action was called by the Berlin Women’s Center, and on March 16, 1974, thousands of women took to the streets against §218, while 329 doctors gambled their professional licenses by declaring in Spiegel that they had helped women to obtain illegal abortions. At the same time, a current affairs television program prepared a show in which thirteen doctors were all to assist in an illegal abortion. Following protests from the Churches and the CDU (“[the telecast would be] an unheard of offense to the moral sense of millions of citizens and an acme of tastelessness”3), the show was banned, and all that appeared during the prime time slot was a blank screen.4

  Poster for demonstration against the antiabortion §218.

  The campaign seemed to have made a breakthrough, and the Bundestag passed an SPD bill in April permitting abortion in the first trimester, which most considered to be a real victory. When the bill became law in July of that year, though, the CDU and CSU immediately appealed to the Federal Constitutional Court, which voted six to two in February 1975 that the legislation violated the Constitution.5 The movement had been dealt a major blow.6