Jeremy Varon (45 page)

participated in Stalin’s legacy, as well as in the inhumanity that defined the far right.

To Jochen Reiche, writing in the left-wing
Jahrbuch Politik,
the RAF’s extreme violence was less the product of any ideological position than a consequence of the group’s highly abstract and dualistic thinking. According to Reiche, the RAF’s worldview had from the start been reductive, dogmatic, and pseudo-theoretical. Its main premises were that things are simple, not complex; that imperialism was the chief enemy of humanity, responsible for virtually all of the world’s ills; and that the Federal Republic, despite its apparent “reformism,” was in fact fascist. By virtue of these crude theses, the RAF “fought against an opponent who—

as the RAF imagines him—does not in fact exist.”142

The RAF’s premises drove the group’s violence in two main ways. First, the RAF declared that all the crucial political imperatives concerned prac-Deadly Abstraction

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tice, not theory. To close its founding manifesto, the RAF quoted Eldridge Cleaver saying: “Either you’re part of the problem or part of the solution. There is nothing between. . . . My opinion is that most of what happens in this country does not need to be analyzed any longer.”143 Reiche saw the guerrilla as a “despairing attempt to realize in the individual the unity of theory and practice” insofar as he or she was to put into practice a revolutionary ideology whose main components RAF considered settled.144 Second, the RAF viewed resistance as a life-and-death struggle against an enemy that was absolute evil. Meins’s judgment that one is “either a pig or a man” with “nothing in between” conveyed the RAF’s inability to acknowledge anything other than extreme alternatives, resulting in an attitude of kill or be killed. To Reiche, the group’s demonization of the Federal Republic as fascist ultimately served to “eliminate the psychic resistance to the murder of human beings.”145 Mahler saw political murder as an extension of the RAF’s uncompromising

“morality,” which he defined the following way: “The world is terrible, unending suffering, murder, death blows. That can be changed only through violence, which also demands victims, but fewer than if the status quo persisted.”146 The RAF’s “morality,” in this rendering, contained a sacrificial logic that
virtually required
murder. RAF members, that is, participated as killers in what they saw as a continuum of death and suffering. Baader had in fact described “hatred” and the “willingness to sacrifice”
(Opferwillen)
as vital attributes of the revolutionary.147

For the left-wing scholar Wolfgang Kraushaar, the RAF’s killing of Schleyer’s driver and his guards crystallized the group’s bankruptcy. These murders, which the RAF did not even acknowledge in its communiqués, served the purely practical goal of carrying out the kidnapping. Worse, the RAF implicitly asserted that by virtue of Schleyer’s status as a high-ranking economic official, his life was worth more than those of his subordinates. The RAF thus reproduced the class hierarchy that it meant to destroy. In addition, the RAF made Schleyer’s life equivalent to the freedom of eleven prisoners and so constructed a crude logic of exchange between human beings—a logic in which the lives of the drivers and guards did not count. In Kraushaar’s judgment, with its proposed exchange of Schleyer for the hostages, the RAF exceeded the purported inhumanity of the West German state. By treating the murders as “an a priori breach of any possible exchange,” the state categorically refused to buy into the RAF’s system of equivalencies.148

The left-wing poet Erich Fried criticized the RAF’s killings with greater 242

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nuance and some ambivalence. Following the murder of Prosecutor Buback, he asked:

What should I say / about a dead man / who lay in the street? . . . This piece of flesh / was once a father / full of love / This piece of flesh / believed he was doing right / and did wrong / This piece of flesh was a man / who likely would have been a better man / in a better world. . . . What he had done in life /

would make my heart grow cold / Should my heart now be warmed / by his death? . . . It would have been better / if such a man / had not died the way he did / It would have been better / if such a man / had not lived the way he did.149

With its description of the slain Buback as a “piece of flesh,” the poem may appear to participate in the RAF’s baleful reduction of human beings to things. But Fried invokes the image only to qualify it in richly human terms: Buback is also a loving father, who set out to do right. The core complaint is not against the man and his sins, but against the world and its sins, by which good men do evil. For Fried, both Buback’s death
and
his life are tragic. To disdain the man does not mean to desire or celebrate his death; it means, rather, to disdain the world and to seek to change it.

On one level, these criticisms disclose in the guerrillas a penchant for abstraction that permitted or even encouraged acts of victimization. Despite its professed fidelity to Marxism, the RAF failed to apprehend its society concretely or to develop a credible assessment of either the culpability of its victims or the efficacy of its violence. Instead, the RAF used blunt analytic categories to vilify the state and dehumanize its representatives. On another level, the criticisms stress the guerrillas’ tendency to reproduce in themselves the negative qualities they imputed to their enemies and to the structure of their society. According to Marcuse, the RAF failed to embody the vision of new human beings, indulging instead in its own senseless violence. Detecting a parallel between the RAF and a historical variant of fascism, Fetscher charged that the RAF’s “attempt to attack capitalism by killing and kidnapping representatives of the economy or political life recalls in a fatal way the pseudo-concreteness of the so-called ‘left Nazis.’”150 To Reiche, the RAF’s struggle amounted to the fight of a “terrorist elite against the power elite of the state apparatus,”

both of which were cut off from “the masses.”151 Kraushaar described the RAF as ultimately another secretive organization that operated in the Federal Republic, like the Federal Police, the CIA, and the KGB.152

The central irony that haunted the West German armed struggle groups was that, at times, they mirrored precisely what they claimed to oppose.

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In that sense, their ostensibly radical resistance was self-defeating, beyond its failure as a strategy for political change. Taken together, the RAF

and the Weathermen reveal the hazards of New Left radicalism, if not of radical resistance in general. The Weathermen partly succumbed to, but mostly guarded against, the danger of “mirroring” qualities they saw in or projected onto their opponents. The experiences of both groups show that the aspiration to resistance provides no guarantee that one represents a genuine alternative to what one opposes. Furthermore, the very aspiration to total resistance—the presumption of the utter difference between oneself and the oppressive other and the desire to destroy that other—may actually obscure the affinities one shares with one’s political enemy.

The charge that the guerrillas mirrored their adversaries was not only made by those outside of the armed struggle. In 1978, Mahler and the former RAF member Jürgen Bäcker asserted that just as the left had responded with outrage to the massacre of civilians in Vietnam, so too should it condemn the RAF’s killing of hostages and innocent bystanders. Those who perpetrate such acts, they charged, “betray our ideals and themselves.”153 Baumann described his renunciation of violence in the mid 1970s as the choice of “love” over “terror.” He concluded from his years in the underground: “For me, the whole time it was a question of creating human values, which didn’t exist in capitalism. . . . And you’ll be better doing that than bombing society and creating the same rigid figures of hatred at the end.”154

In the mid 1980s, additional guerrillas in and out of prison broke with the RAF and issued stunning public criticisms of the armed struggle. These so-called
Aussteiger
(“drop-outs,” roughly translated) confirmed much of what the RAF’s critics had been saying for years. Siegfried Haag was captured in 1976, convicted of conspiracy to commit murder, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. In 1986, an interviewer asked if he now recognized that terrorism could cause “unending suffering, because the victims also have families, lovers, friends?” Haag replied: “My current thoughts run in that direction. That is: the experience that a violent act can always kill a human being, but that his death lies beyond the mere function that he performs.”155 Baptist Ralf Friedrich went underground in 1977 and was for three years among the RAF’s new “hard core.” He left the group in 1980 and then lived in East Germany working in a paper factory with his partner and fellow RAF member Sigrid Sternebeck.

In a 1990 interview, he conceded that although he had supported the Schleyer action, “Today it is naturally clear to me that one cannot so eas-244

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ily kill a man, even if he is one’s political archenemy.” Although he and Sternebeck “totally rejected” the killing of Schleyer’s guards, he confessed feeling that “Our souls still suffer the consequences”; while not legally culpable in the murders, he acknowledged a “moral responsibility . . .

for which I’d like to ask forgiveness from those directly affected.”156 In 1985, Klaus Jünschke, convicted of murder in 1977, led several prisoners in announcing their total separation from the armed struggle. Reflecting on the path of violence, he declared, “Today it is clear that this entire history is destructive, debilitating, that it destroys not only the lives of those who are engaged in the struggle, but also of those without guilt, that it deforms society, which should be changed to create more freedom and less suffering.”157

.

.

.

They wanted parents without guilt so that they could

be children without shame.

Jörg Bopp, “Die ungekonnte Aggresion”

(“The Unacknowledged Aggression”)

West Germany was hardly unique among Western societies in having an insurgent youth movement develop in the 1960s. Nor was it unique in having an armed struggle movement emerge from the student and youth protests; in addition to those in Italy and Spain, where violence raged, small guerrilla groups formed in France, England, Belgium, and the Netherlands.158 The West German conflict did, however, have a special intensity, owing both to the peculiarities of German history and to the ways in which various groups represented and responded to those peculiarities.

The RAF radicalized the tendency of the West German New Left to see in its society signs of the persistence of fascism. Although it was far from being a unified and rigorously argued thesis, the
Fascismusvorwurf,
or “charge of fascism,” could express everything from Frankfurt School–

inflected descriptions of late capitalism as a repressive totality to the view, revived from communist doctrine of the prewar years, of social democracy as a form of “social fascism”; to the denunciation of the Vietnam War as “genocidal”; to complaints that police violence was “neofascist.”

Young Germans even described the conservative sexual morality of their parents’ generation as “fascist.” Believing that sexual repression was a chief cause of the Nazis’ aggression, they promoted sexual liberation as intrinsically antifascist.159

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Like other groups in the New Left, the RAF used the charge of fascism as a highly emotional language of condemnation announcing the need for greater militancy. References to fascism abounded in its statements. A communiqué from the 1972 “May Offensive” denounced the

“SS-praxis”
of the West German police.160 That issued with the bombing of the U.S. military base in Heidelberg claimed that the German people supported the action “because they have not forgotten Auschwitz, Dres-den, and Hamburg.”161 The RAF likened the failure to clear the Springer building before its bomb went off to the burning of the Reichstag in 1933, thereby suggesting that both were designed to promote social chaos conducive to an assertion of power by the far right.162 At times, the RAF explicitly equated imperialism with fascism. In a 1972 statement, Meinhof insisted that “National Socialism was only the political and military pre-cursor to the imperialist system of multinational corporations.”163

In the mid 1970s, the RAF sharpened its comparisons of the West German state to the Nazi regime. Most provocatively, the RAF likened the treatment of its prisoners to the Nazis’ extermination policies. In 1973, Meinhof commented that “the political conception of the dead section at Cologne [prison] . . . is the gas chamber. . . . My ideas of Auschwitz became very clear in there.”164 Baader went so far as to charge that the treatment of RAF prisoners was more brutal than the tactics used by the Gestapo.165 Finally, guerrillas made reference to fascism in describing their victims, for instance, seeing von Drenkmann and Schleyer—both of whom had served under the Nazis and then rose to positions of prominence in the new Germany—as personifications of fascist continuity.

In its mind, the RAF was fighting a new behemoth that bore traces of the old. Its expansive understanding of fascism linked the crimes of the German past with the conduct of the current government of the Federal Republic and the imperialism of the United States in a chain of more or less equivalent evils. To attack any of these was simultaneously to attack all of them. Much as the RAF thought it could attack capitalism by killing capitalism’s representatives, it felt that it could sever the perceived continuity with the Nazi past by killing what it saw as the symbols of that continuity. When conceived of as a form of antifascism, RAF’s killings were not only just, but heroic.

In equating the current state with the Nazi Reich, the RAF simultaneously did battle with the present and the past. Behind this conflation of contexts lay a psychological motive stemming from the burden of the past experienced by Germany’s postwar generation. Illuminating the psycho-historical dimension of the RAF’s violence requires probing more deeply 246