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“Destroy what is destroying you!” In the beginning was the word, and then came violence. Germany in autumn, Stammheim Prison, the Schleyer kidnapping – the Red Army Fraction has taken its place in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. And the debate over its significance continues. How to explain this fascination with the RAF? Willi Winkler’s account, The History of the RAF, makes a convincing attempt to answer the question. In just under 500 pages, his articulate, refreshingly written book provides cogent insight into the complex interconnections of “German terrorism,” guiding the reader from the origins of the RAF to its “official” disbanding in 1998.
Where did the violence originate? This is the question Winkler pursues in the first section of his book. He regards the RAF as a “not entirely coincidental product of the disintegrating student movement,” whose idealism and hubris carried over to the RAF. His thesis is that the RAF’s disposition to violence was based on the rhetoric of the 1960s protest movement and only gradually escalated in the particular political climate of the Federal Republic. In the shadow of the Cold War’s atomic mushroom cloud, the students feared that what had been gained under democracy would soon be lost again. Adenauer’s policies were controversial among segments of the young generation: The chancellor was pursuing an unequivocal alliance with the West and appointing some persons to the judicial and military branches who had held office during the Nazi period. There was also a growing awareness among younger people of the crimes of their parents. But with the outbreak of the Vietnam War, their slogan “Never again Auschwitz” seemed to be nothing more than the feeble pronouncement of a small circle of intellectuals. Winkler shows how the sense of powerlessness over the war fostered the emergence of various factions from the apparently disenfranchised left: anarchistic provocateurs, pacifists (later including the anti-nuclear movement), and those prepared to use terror, like the RAF.
But how to explain the enormous reaction it elicited? “People wish for a simplistic evil, wanting to be assured that it’s been driven out.” This, according to Winkler, is what gave rise to the RAF, whose members derived their justification for violent “resistance” from the urgent need to set themselves apart from their parents’ silent generation of perpetrators and accomplices. The founding of the movement was not the result of a plan; rather, the first RAF generation following Andreas Baader’s prison escape in 1970 stumbled, idealistic and overconfident, into illegal terrorist acts, fancying themselves “resistance fighters.” Their desire, says Winkler, was to escape their “German identity,” hoping in some way to be exonerated by history. Yet politically, he claims, the RAF was taken too seriously, considering that its members thought of revolution as “a romantic adventure” and borrowed the techniques of theater and popular culture. “There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.” Ironically for the RAF, this sentiment took on just the opposite meaning: Nothing brought the organization as much media attention or so enabled it to recruit new members as the (self-)portrayal of its suffering and death. Religious pathos surrounding photographs of the corpses at Stammheim is what made the RAF notorious, not only in Germany but on the world stage. Aside from the fact that much remains unclear in the RAF’s history, Winkler sees another reason for the public interest it attracts: It was, cynical as that may sound, an “international media success.”
But what led to the end of the Red Army Fraction? In the 1980s, the diffuse left-wing support for the RAF was in steady decline. The murder of Alfred Herrhausen produced a clear distancing on the moderate left. But the RAF did not declare its own official end until 1998. By then the Eastern Bloc had long since collapsed, and Germany was governed by a coalition of Social Democrats and Greens. And now, with some former ’68ers in the federal government, the RAF’s raison d’être was, in Winkler’s view, finally and thoroughly invalidated.
On closer inspection, certainly none of the participants in “German terrorism” come away with clean hands, as Winkler sees it. For one thing, their sense of moral superiority prevented the idealistic members of the RAF from realizing the absurdly cruel madness of their actions. But their contemporaries are not held blameless either: The intellectual sympathizers who secretly envied the RAF’s radical (terrorist) acts, the government whose own informants encouraged escalation of the conflict, but also the media and the public – all of them had some part in making headlines for German terror. Winkler regards the dangerous tendency to generalize and to think in black-and-white terms as the real problem in studying the RAF.
What distinguishes his book is how well he traces the RAF’s trajectory in relation to that of the Federal Republic, thereby plotting a psychograph of post-1945 German history, immutably shaped as it was by the climate of fear during the Cold War. In that climate, after all, overreactions could lead to radicalization, and German idealism could live on in the RAF. Winkler includes the so-called second and third generations of the RAF in his study, thus offering the reader a broader view of the subject than Stefan Aust’s classic, The Baader-Meinhof Complex. In any event, this book enriches our understanding and is an excellent source for a first impression of the role the RAF played. Winkler tells a nuanced History of the RAF and at the same time makes it refreshingly engaging.
Having read his fascinating study of the connections between word, ideology, and violence, one may agree or disagree with Winkler’s sly concluding remark that the RAF “came back to the place where it all started – with the word.”
Andrea Müller
October 2008
[Translated by Michael Ritterson]
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