Jeremy Varon (14 page)

Though the United States was the focal point of its outrage, the RAF

also targeted West Germany by virtue of its alliance with America. “By participating in development and military aid for the wars of aggression of the USA, West Germany profits from the exploitation of the Third World, but without having to take responsibility for these wars,” it insisted. “No less aggressive than the USA, West Germany is less vulnerable to attack.”164

Striking in such rhetoric is the RAF’s hyperbole and seeming inability to make qualitative distinctions. As if describing the Nazis’ nihilistic murders, which ultimately defied any instrumental purpose, the RAF asserted that modern imperialism systematically sought to kill those it could no longer exploit. The RAF thus translated its anger at U.S. conduct in Vietnam and elsewhere in the Third World into an untenable thesis about the nature of American power. Furthermore, the RAF extrapolated bizarrely that the West German state was
as dangerous
as the United States because

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its imperial designs and destructive powers were less obvious. The “new fascism, consumerism, and media domination” were “most developed”

in the two countries, the RAF explained. Ensslin apparently wanted to visit the United States to meet with the Weathermen, whose “outlook and praxis” she felt were “identical” to those of the RAF.165

The RAF’s militant support of the Palestinian cause was another expression of its anti-imperialism. The student left in Germany, like the Federal Republic as a whole, had for much of the 1960s consistently supported Israel, reflecting both its view of Middle Eastern politics and the sense that Germans had a moral obligation to support Israel’s Jews. The left’s attitude changed dramatically with the Six-Day War of 1967, during which Israel defeated Arab armies and occupied additional Palestinian territory.

Exposed to media images of the Palestinians as underdogs and the Israelis as the chief aggressors, young German leftists became increasingly sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle. The PLO, founded in 1964, soon emerged as the leading force for the “national liberation” of Palestinians; like the Viet Cong, it fought what it described as an imperialist oppressor and had as its official goal the creation of a (secular) socialist state. For leftists worldwide, Arab nationalism was a vanguard force in the global anti-imperialist struggle.166 This was certainly true of the German left; according to one historian, by 1968, “Radical anti-Zionism and solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle became in the eyes of SDS a revolutionary duty, equally as much as support for the Viet Cong.”167

Even so, the affinity of young German leftists for the Palestinian cause was conspicuously strong. Geography in part explains the bond. The United States, not the nations of Europe, fought the Vietnam War, and Latin America, another great arena of anti-imperialist rebellion, was an ocean away. The Middle East was comparatively close to Europe, where the PLO had established a strong political presence and worked to build an active following. There was another, largely existential source of affinity between young Germans and the Palestinian cause. West German New Leftists, one may speculate, felt politically and spiritually homeless in their own country, causing them to empathize with the Palestinians’ literal homelessness; the “stateless Palestinian,” in short, emerged as an icon through which Germans expressed their alienation. The Nazi past, finally, drove the more extreme—and often disturbing—attitudes of German radicals toward the conflict in the Middle East. At times, their rhetoric seemed an echo of the anti-Semitism of the past. In 1970, the Frankfurt SDS chapter protested the visit to Germany of Israel’s foreign minister, declaring its opposition in a flyer to “the Zionist, economically and politically par-70

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asitic state of Israel.”168 Interpreting such virulence, commentators have pointed to a range of possible impulses in the New Left: a thinly veiled anti-Semitism, essentially inherited from the Nazi generation; a largely unconscious desire to paint Israel as an arch-oppressor, and thus diminish the guilt of Germany for its historic mistreatment of Jews; and the self-serving sense that they, as the post-Nazi generation, were utterly free of anti-Semitism and therefore had license to condemn Israel without qualification or apology.169

German support for the Palestinians did not immediately spawn a working alliance between German and Palestinian militants. RAF members who went to Jordan were promptly kicked out of the guerrilla camp—their hosts found their commitment to armed struggle superficial, and their libertine ways were anathema to Arab mores. Yet within a few years, by which time the RAF had demonstrated its skill and staying power, German and Palestinian guerrillas collaborated in building their networks and engaging in joint actions.

When addressing the question of just who would make the revolution in West Germany, the RAF again provided shifting answers. In one view, the “revolutionary subject” was decidedly
not
the proletariat, but rather “anyone who locates his political identity in the liberation struggles of the peoples of the Third World.”170 Mahler, in another of the RAF’s manifestoes, asserted that “the revolutionary portion of the student movement . . . is today the bearer of revolutionary consciousness.”171 Elsewhere, the RAF claimed that “anyone who starts to fight”

was by definition a revolutionary.172 The RAF condemned the K-groups most strongly for their indulgent theorizing and caution in warning against “adventurist” violence. “If you want to know what communists think look at their hands and not at their mouths,” it chided.173 Believing that “when the conditions are right for armed struggle, it will be too late to prepare for it,” the RAF insisted:

It is correct, possible, and justified to wage urban guerrilla warfare here and now. . . . If it is correct that American imperialism is a paper tiger, which means it can be defeated . . . because struggles against it have risen up all over the world . . . there is no reason to exclude any country or any region from the anti-imperialist struggle on the grounds that either the forces are too weak or the forces of reaction are too strong.174

Consistent with this assessment, the RAF declared “decisiveness” and the “will to act” to be the essential qualities of the guerrilla.175

Like Weatherman, the RAF upset conventional Marxist assumptions

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by asserting that one’s social class no longer dictated one’s political role.

In light of the RAF’s priorities and ethos, it is fitting that Baader was considered both within and outside the group to be its natural leader, even though he was no great student of the ideas from which the RAF

drew inspiration.176 Baader assumed chief responsibility for the practical and highly risky aspects of clandestine struggle, such as stealing cars and procuring weapons. (He also seemed something of a roguish dandy, preferring to steal BMWs, which some in the press dubbed “Baader-Meinhof Wagens” [cars]).177 Within the broader culture, as the RAF’s exploits multiplied, Baader and the others attained a kind of celebrity as renegade antiheroes, dangerous and likely doomed, but determined.

Rounding out the RAF’s early leadership was Mahler, who vied with Meinhof for the role of ideological leader in the early 1970s. Bald, be-speckled, and over thirty, Mahler was the quintessential egghead radical. Having defended young militants in court, his great challenge now was to convert his dissident beliefs into militant action. With the coaxing of Baader, he made that transition. In the RAF, he fancied himself something of a modern-day Lenin, authoring punishingly long treatises on the task for the left as he saw it. His key text was “Über den bewaffneten Kampf in Westeuropa” (“On Armed Struggle in Western Europe”), an openly seditious seventy-page tract that he drafted in prison in 1971 on behalf of the RAF, which originally appeared under the deceptive title

“The Old Traffic Regulations.” It promised to “determine correctly . . .

whether a ‘peaceful transition to socialism’ . . . is possible under current concrete social conditions.”178 It was not, Mahler answered confidently, declaring that the notion that violence had to be deferred until the capitalist state was weakened by political means was “the perspective of endless errors and bloody defeats.”179 “[I]t is not the certain expectation of failure, but rather the vision of victory,” such as the RAF offered, he said,

“that stirs the masses to revolutionary consciousness.”180 Mahler concluded by calling for the building of “commando groups” to broaden the insurrection that the RAF had begun.181

As a model for its armed struggle, the RAF adopted the strategy spelled out by Brazil’s Carlos Marighela in his
Minimanual do guerrilheiro urbano
(Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla), which was meant to instruct Latin American guerrillas like Uruguay’s Tupamaros in methods of clandestine warfare.182 Avidly read in translation by the RAF, the Weathermen, and other First World radicals, the
Minimanual
recommended assaults on military, police, and corporate targets as a way to undermine confidence in the state’s authority. It also offered a romantic conception 72

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of the urban guerrilla as a master of alertness and self-discipline. True to Marighela’s prescriptions, the RAF established small cells in cities throughout West Germany and even performed the rituals of conditioning the
Minimanual
recommended. Early on, part of the RAF’s regimen consisted of swimming together every week in reservoirs. Beate Sturm, a founding member who soon left, described the tight-knit group as “so spontaneous and naïve and romantic, unbelievably romantic.”183

For some joining the RAF, the group’s illegal status and conspiratorial air were part of the attraction. Margrit Schiller attended the University of Heidelberg, where she became increasingly drawn to the Socialist Patients Collective (Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv, or SPK)—a group of psychiatric patients whose charismatic leader, Dr. Wolfgang Huber, had encouraged them to see society as the source of their illness and to “turn their illness into a weapon” by building armed cells.184 In February 1971, with the police hunt for the RAF raging, a friend of Schiller’s asked her if she would take in some people experiencing “trouble with the law.” Schiller quickly became aware of her guests’ true identity but confessed: “My fear was far smaller than my interest in getting to know these people, who had lived their lives far differently than anyone I had known, and learn about their fight.”185 In the weeks following, she joined the group, and she describes a “typical” RAF safe house circa 1971 as a scene of alluring danger. All of the RAF’s principals—Meinhof, Ensslin, Baader, Holger Meins, Irmgard Möller—gathered there, arguing about politics, laughing, and resting, surrounded by the tools of their hazardous trade: one radio for listening to the news, another for listening to police frequencies, pistols—which they put down beside them, for everyone to see, after they came in—and explosives.186

Under the banner of “revolutionary anti-imperialism,” Weatherman and the RAF assumed militant roles in an international movement opposing U.S. power and capitalism generally. Ironically, the very strength and reach of capitalism was the condition of possibility for the emergence of this international protest culture. New communications technologies and patterns of economic interdependence and domination served to link the globe, allowing for the rapid circulation of books, films, music, ideas, images, and icons urging resistence to the newly emerging world order. With these, leftists everwhere developed a shared vocabulary and a sense of being involved in a single struggle, whose paramount value was solidarity. “Armed struggle” was an idea and a tactic that circulated freely, taking hold in unlikely places.

But if anti-imperialism sent the hearts and hopes of radicals soaring,

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it could also be dizzying and even distorting, especially as it blurred distinctions between disparate contexts and challenges. Jürgen Habermas, the leading voice of the Frankfurt School’s new generation, had warned the West German New Left in 1967 of the possible emergence of a “left fascism.”187 In a conference the day of Benno Ohnesorg’s burial, Habermas declared the apparent efforts of demonstrators to elicit state violence to be “masochistic” and criticized Dutschke for espousing a “vol-untarist ideology” reminiscent of the “utopian socialists” of 1848 and the German reactionaries of the 1930s.188 The following year, Habermas issued an equally urgent, if less hyperbolic and vituperative, warning: To be sure, moral outrage at the barbarity—in the name of freedom—of the Americans in Vietnam . . . is warranted. But the emotional identification with the role of the Viet Cong, the blacks in urban slums, the Brazilian guerrillas, the Chinese cultural revolutionaries, or the heroes of the Cuban revolution has no political basis. The situations here and there are as incomparable as the problems that each poses and the tactics each demands.189

Heedless of such pleas, the RAF and Weatherman insisted that the ethic of solidarity demanded sacrifice equal to that of the Vietnamese and the need for a single struggle, to be fought everywhere by the same means.

c h a p t e r 2

The Importance

of Being Militant

The Days of Rage and Their Critics

Until the Days of Rage, Weatherman existed primarily as an analysis, an impulse, a promise, and a threat. The group proclaimed action to be the great catalyst—the agony of the New Left and the riddle of imperialism solved. Violent confrontation in Chicago would overcome demoralization within the movement, greatly expand its base of support, and, most ambitiously, spark a second American revolution. With this exhortation to militancy, conveyed with a mix of heartfelt conviction and thuggish righteousness, Weatherman had aroused the curiosity, suspicion, and fear of the left and of those few within the mainstream conscious of its voice.

The group had provided little basis, though, for judging the substance of its gospel of action.