Jeremy Varon (42 page)

Revolutionary internationalism allowed New Leftists to reconceive what popular struggle meant, such that solidarity with the
global
masses—

the world’s majority—could take priority over winning mass appeal at home. But New Leftists in First World societies had very few direct links with liberation movements in the Third World. Those that did exist, such as the relationship between West German and Palestinian guerrillas, were often strategic, revealing perhaps more a mutual interest in tactical alliances than any deep and enduring political kinship. The solidarity New Leftists offered, in sum, was for the most part ideological and moral, predicated on an intuitive but underelaborated sense of being involved in a single, global struggle against imperialism. The internationalism of the West German New Left was particularly attenuated, as it was based largely on a critique of U.S. power and a view of the Federal Republic as a proxy for U.S. interests. Moreover, most New Leftists in West Germany and elsewhere seemed to agree that building a mass socialist movement at home was the key to building socialism internationally. The New Left’s inability to convert its democratic and egalitarian ideals into an unambiguously Deadly Abstraction

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popular domestic revolt could not, in the last instance, be rationalized through appeals to internationalism.

The RAF pursued a decidedly unpopular brand of radicalism, as it came, on occasion, close to acknowledging. Asked in a prison interview to account for its “absolute lack of influence on the masses and connection to a base,” the RAF replied that there remained within West German society at least “the
trace [Spur]
of the politics of the RAF.”91 At other times, RAF inmates tried to work against this isolation by
making
a metaphor of themselves
—by presenting their fate as conjoined with that of the forces with which the RAF insisted it was aligned. In so doing, the RAF sought to compensate for its chief political failure: the absence of a sociopolitical referent beyond itself. Yet, as the RAF’s near-exclusive focus became the freeing of its prisoners, its self-referentiality became all the more apparent.

The RAF’s self-image while in prison reflects the effects of isolation in a more literal sense. For activists, one’s location in a particular environment can dramatically affect one’s perceptions. What might be called the “politics of location” had a profound impact on the New Left. Activists’ more or less total immersion in radical organizations and in highly politicized settings, such as universities and anarchist “scenes,” fed their belief in their own power. But it also led them to overestimate popular dissatisfaction in their own countries and to exaggerate their strength.

Conversely, their segregation in self-enclosed worlds, whose boundaries were reinforced by public and state hostility, fed a sense of isolation and the conviction that desperate measures were required in the face of the overwhelming power of the adversary. The very emergence of the violent underground testifies to both this extreme optimism and fatal pessimism born, in part, of isolation.

Life underground enhanced the distorting effects of location. Members of the underground were estranged from normalcy, cut off from much of the legal left, and radically dependent on one another. As a result, they lacked external checks on their perceptions. Comparing left-wing violence in Germany and Italy, Donatella della Porta spells out the hazards of the underground:

the organizational model of the underground groups evolved towards more centralized . . . forms, thereby increasing the vicious circle of increasing isolation. The risks of being discovered induced members to concentrate decision making in the hands of a small group of clandestine leaders. . . .

When repression increased and support from social movements decreased, the organizations withdrew into themselves. . . . Even in front of several 226

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signs of defeat, the choice of clandestinity remained
imprinted
on these groups [such that] they virtually ensured that their development would be shaped by internal dynamics rather than interaction with a broader environment . . . survival and solidarity rather than political effectiveness.92

Mahler put things more starkly: “In clandestinity . . . you see the world only from within a military model, as a free zone or as a dangerous territory. You do not see human beings so often anymore.”93

Prison was a total, rarefied, and highly constricting environment that further limited the guerrillas’ already narrow worldview. The conditions of extreme hardship and absence of external points of reference reinforced the tendency of the guerrillas to use their own circumstances as a basis for claims about their society as a whole. Herein lies the paradox of the RAF in the mid 1970s. With imprisonment, the boundaries of its world literally and drastically shrank. The group’s isolation became complete with the
Kontaktsperre,
or “contact ban,” initially imposed on seventy-two inmates from the RAF and other groups two days after the kidnapping of Schleyer in September 1977. Under the
Kontaktsperre,
the inmates were placed in solitary confinement, stripped of reading material, and deprived of
all
human contact, including meetings with their attorneys.

This practice, whose constitutionality was not at first certain, drew sharp criticisms from the RAF and others. The Bundestag soon sanctioned the ban by passing the
Kontaktsperregesetz
(Contact Ban Law), which made legal the total isolation of prisoners in response to conditions of “national emergency.” The
Kontaktsperre,
ostensibly put into place out of fear that the inmates were orchestrating violence outside the prison (highly implausible at this point), declared the RAF to be so dangerous that it demanded quarantine.94 With the ban, the state sought literally to excise the RAF from the body politic by totally depriving its members of visibility, publicity, community, and voice.

Yet in the face of isolation, the RAF expanded its own significance by presenting its experience as illustrative of the
essential
reality of West German society. Since its inception, the RAF had practiced a kind of anti-carceral politics, distributing at least its verbal assaults among institutions and settings whose ultimate function, it felt, was to constrain, control, and oppress: prisons, certainly, but also schools, reformatories, factories, bureaucracies, even places of middle-class comfort. Actually, being in prison enhanced RAF members’ sense of the purpose and reach of the system’s power. In their perception, the abuse they suffered in prison epitomized the state’s disdain for radical dissent; the meticulous Deadly Abstraction

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regulation of their lives in prison bespoke the perniciousness of the administered society, which made everyone an object of social control; and the alleged attempt at their destruction laid bare the fascistic nature of the Federal Republic. In short, prison became the dominant metaphor for society as a whole. At the 1974 trial for her involvement in the freeing of Baader four years earlier, Meinhof described the act as “exemplary,” because “anti-imperialist struggle is really about liberation from prison—from the prison that the system always already is for the exploited and oppressed . . . from the prison of total alienation and self-estrangement.”95 Seen in this light, Schiller’s comment that isolation had blurred the distinction between “internal perceptions” and “external reality” is a broad description of the RAF’s politics.

In making a metaphor of itself, the RAF developed an oddly imma-terial cast, even as its imprisoned members experienced the most material operation of power—the infliction of physical suffering, holding the body in a constant state of pain—and even as its active commandos murdered and injured to win the prisoners’ release. The operation of the metaphor depended on the RAF’s prisoners successfully representing their situation as one of true abuse. But this is precisely what was so difficult, given that the prisoners were concealed behind the veil of the prison walls.

The state, by virtue of this circumstance, held a distinct advantage in its war of representation with the RAF. Chiefly, the prisoners could never confirm forensically that their alleged suffering—always described as mental as much as physical—was real. Skepticism could parry every public charge. Did the state do with the prisoners what they claimed, and were the effects of their “special handling” really so dire? When the inmates’ suffering was undeniable, as from the hunger strikes, just who was to blame remained unclear. Did the inmates, as the government and its defenders asserted, willfully misrepresent prison conditions in order to justify the hunger strikes and ultimately coerce the prisoners’ release?

Against this wall of doubt, the prisoners’ rhetoric pulsed with the desperation of their being subject to some grotesque, private horror that the world was largely unable or unwilling to see.

The concealment of the prisoners’ experience did not, however, guarantee the state’s victory in the battle over the public’s perceptions. If the RAF’s allegations could not be proved, neither could they be definitively
dis
proved. Some among the public greeted the state’s defense of its conduct—often expressed in the bureaucratic language of the official denial—with skepticism of their own. The more the prisoners claimed to suffer and the more the state denied their charges, the greater that skep-228

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ticism grew. “The facts,” themselves indeterminate and intensely politicized, hardly seemed capable of settling the matter. One’s judgment hinged, it seemed, on how one was inclined to view the state and with whom one identified.

Elaborating for
Der Spiegel
what it meant by the “trace” of its politics, the RAF stated:

It isn’t a matter of supporters, fellow travelers and allied organizations; the issue is the RAF and the impact of its politics—in the sense that the measures the government has taken against us are changing many people’s perception of the state and pushing them to recognize it for what it is: the imperialist bourgeoisie’s apparatus for oppressing the people—in the sense that many people identify with our struggle and change the way they think about, feel about, and ultimately act toward the power of the system, which they once perceived as absolute—in the sense that people have the power to act, that a feeling of impotence does not conform to objective reality—

in the sense of proletarian internationalism, the awareness of the connection between liberation struggles in the Third World and those here, the awareness of the possibility and the necessity of joint action, joint work, legal and illegal. On the level of praxis, that it is not enough to debate but that it is possible, necessary, and feasible to act.96

This pronouncement appears, most obviously, emblematic of the RAF’s heavy-handed, highly projective, and even wishful thinking in the mid 1970s. The RAF plainly failed to instigate the kind of broad-based revelation of capitalism’s oppressiveness and of the glories of class solidarity; its example hardly empowered its sympathizers to engage, en masse, in “revolutionary” action. But the RAF
did become
the occasion for some indeterminate number of West Germans to question more rigorously the identity of their state and to strengthen at least their attitude of resistance to it. Understood in these terms, the trace the RAF left cut deeply into the psyche of Germans, especially of the young, giving substance to the RAF’s conspicuously symbolic and even ethereal politics.

In essence, the RAF redefined its “place” in German politics by asserting that despite its apparent marginalization, it was at the nerve center of state power. It in fact proved irrepressible while in prison. The more intensely the state tried to isolate the group, the more the RAF became a matter of public concern and controversy—a symbolically dense object of national fixation. Tellingly, the RAF’s apparent self-annihilation—

the alleged suicide of its leaders in Stammheim—was in ways the group’s most provocative, public, and visible act. As the media, investigators, and West German citizens endlessly debated whether the ambiguous deaths Deadly Abstraction

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were suicides or murders, the RAF continued to haunt and even dominate public dialogue.

The close relationship between experience and perception helps to account for what critics of the RAF have described as the group’s
Realitätsverlust
—its distancing from or loss of reality. That distance widened greatly in the mid 1970s, when the RAF’s leaders were literally cut off from the conventional world. Most disturbingly, the prisoners seemed incapable of seeing past their pain and remotely acknowledging that they had themselves caused immense suffering through violence that killed and maimed.

Their isolation also helps to explain the tremendous defiance they displayed in prison. Behind that defiance lay both a political and, one can assume, personal sense of despair. With their impending convictions, they faced lifetimes of confinement in miserably lifeless institutions such as Stammheim. Their desolation also powerfully affected the RAF’s internal dynamics. Whatever the image of unity, RAF prisoners were beset by schisms and recriminations, especially during the hunger strikes. Through the Info-system, RAF practiced a crude and at times vicious form of

“criticism-self-criticism,” in which its leaders, above all Baader, accused the others of being “traitors, collaborators, bulls, and swine.”97 Those wavering in their commitment to the strikes risked being denounced; those abandoning the strikes risked being formally shunned by the others, deepening the misery of their isolation. One exasperated participant in the prison dialogue pleaded, “The purpose of our questions is not to conduct an Inquisition.”98

In light of these grim circumstances and crushing prospects, the deaths of RAF inmates, whether by starvation or apparent suicide, can be seen as acts of self-sacrifice or martyrdom. In an analysis of the role of suicide in religious terrorism, Juergensmeyer describes martyrdom as a “rite of destruction” designed to ennoble death and make the dying holy.99 It accomplishes this by integrating death into a vision of “cosmic war,” a conflict conceived as a “great encounter between cosmic forces—