The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History (41 page)
Read The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History Online
Authors: J Smith
Naturally, that is intolerable for state security. So now their starting point is the criminalization of comrades who have nothing to do with our actionsâby connecting them to the actions if they disappear for a few weeks, cut their hair, shake off surveillanceâin short, if they engage in “conspiratorial behavior.” But if they criminalize these things, then they are in the process of laying the political groundwork for a police state: it is meant to become normal in this state for everyone to be under control and registered at all times and to accept itâand to be criminalized if they try to avoid it.
Red Army Faction
November 7, 1981
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1
.
Kaufhof
is a department store chain in Germany.
Over the winter of 1981-1982, two final guerillas went East, taking advantage of the MfS retirement plan.
That summer, just before the Ramstein bombing, Inge Viett had been trekking around Paris, where she was in the process of consolidating the 2JM's supplies with those of the RAF.
1
It was a hot summer day, and she did not know that it was against the law to ride a scooter without a helmet. She took off when a cop tried to pull her over, but failed to lose him. Ducking into a parking garage, when the cop followed she surprised him with her gun drawn. He reportedly looked at her with a puzzled expression on his face before going for his own weapon: she put a bullet in him, and officer Francis Violleau would never walk again.
2
For Viett, who had already been wrestling with doubt, this close call proved to be the final straw: she left for South Yemen, where she spent several months before finally deciding that she had spent enough time in the guerilla. She contacted Harry Dahl, who arranged for her to receive a new identity in the GDR.
The other RAF member who went East during this period was Henning Beer, who had never recovered from the shock of seeing his older brother die in a car crash in 1980. He had practically been raised by Wolfgang, and following the latter's arrest in 1974 had been essentially adopted by Wolfgang's friends in the Hamburg squatting sceneâa number of whom subsequently passed over into the guerilla.
3
It was while the RAF was preparing to
assassinate Kroesen that the younger Beer had had a breakdown; he was taken to a safehouse in Leuven until arrangements could be made for him to cross over.
4
Viett and Beer were to be the last RAF members to take this path.
These two losses were compensated by one last reinforcement from prison: Christa Eckes had first made news as a teenager in 1970, when she was expelled from high school for starting a political action group that handed out questionnaires about students' sexuality and protested the transfer of a popular teacher. Her mother had hired Kurt Groenewold, the left-wing lawyer, to force the school to readmit her daughter: a fateful decision, as Groenewold would soon be known as one of the RAF's leading attorneys. Eckes was involved in the 1973 defense of the EkhofstraÃe squat in Hamburg, and then in 1974 was arrested along with other RAF members on February 4 in that same city.
5
She was the last of these “2.4” defendants to be released, in 1981, after the prisoners' eighth hunger strike.
Upon her release she briefly made contact with supporters in the scene before returning underground.
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Inge Viett (opposite page) and Christa Eckes
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1
Peters, 564.
2
Viett, 239-241. Violleau would spend two years in the hospital, and after his release remained essentially bedridden. His wife Yolaine had to turn him every two hours to avoid bedsores, and she in turn had to be hospitalized after three months for exhaustion. Their two children spent two years in a police orphanage. Peters, 565.
3
Wunschik, 225-226. Peters, 563.
4
Wunschik, 329.
5
“Ihr gerader Weg in den Untergrund,”
Hamburger Abendblatt,
February 5, 1974
6
Alexander StraÃner,
Die dritte Generation der “Roten Armee Fraktion”: Entstehung, Struktur, Funktionslogik und Zerfall einer terroristischen Organisation
(Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2003) 106-107.
Planting Seeds in May
O
NCE AGAIN, THE
RAF
HAD
asserted its place on the radical left, and yet nothing more would be heard from the organization throughout the winter of 1981-1982. As such, it was the aboveground movement that ran with the momentum created by the year's events.
As we have seen, no matter what the issueâStartbahn West, the squats, the antinuclear or the antimissile campaignsâthe radical edge was defined by the
Autonomen,
alongside and in uneasy alliance with the anti-imps, who by this time consistently formed a much smaller and more hardline faction.
Prison conditions remained a priority, all the more so as militants were now finding themselves threatened with arrest and imprisonment under §129a on charges of being “aboveground RAF members.” Along with the new focus on NATO, repression would remain an important radicalizing factor, as increasing numbers of people became personally acquainted with prison conditions in the FRG.
It was not only in the cells, but also on the streets, that the state's violence polarized the situation. One of the most brutal examples in this period occurred just after the RAF's summer attacks, Tuwat, and the Haig demonstrations, at a time when the movement had the wind in its sails. On September 22, 1981, the West Berlin police and the new CDU city government took their revenge; at the behest of Senator Heinrich Lummer, several squats were cleared in a series of perfectly synchronized raids. In the process a squatter was chased into the street by a police baton charge, where he was struck by a bus and dragged for two blocks.
Klaus-Jürgen Rattay, eighteen years of age, died on the spot.
1
That evening there were demonstrations and attacks against banks, police stations, and real estate developers across the FRG. Not surprisingly, the largest took place in West Berlin. As one observer recorded:
Slowly, what began as a chant became a deafening roar: “Lummer is a murderer! Lummer is a murderer!” Passers-by and the few tourists watched the never-ending stream of demonstrators. As they passed a Berlin flag on the Kurfürstendamm the demonstrators lowered it to half-mast. As it approached the Potsdamer StraÃe, the front of the demonstration passed the first of the evicted houses. From its windows the police began shooting volleys of teargas into the crowd. It had started.
In the following eight hours, some of the most intense street fighting that West Berlin had ever seen since the war took place. Again and again the columns of police troop carriers were attacked with paving stones and petrol bombs and were forced to retreat. When they attempted to counter attack they were foiled by the rows of barricades that crisscrossed the streets. At the height of the fighting it was hard not to believe that a civil war was going onâburning barricades, ambulances rushing to and fro from the area, burnt out cars and looted shops in tear gas and smoke filled streets. At around three o'clock, when a lot of the demonstrators had left the area, the tide began to turn, and police felt confident enough to leave the safety of their troop carriers and to start taking possession of the streets again. But it was only at dawn the next day that they could announce that they had the situation in control.
2
The following day, the Senate issued a statement that no more houses would be cleared that year. Yet this did little to cheer the West Berlin scene, shocked by what they saw as the police murder of one of their own. For a minority, the September events seemed to indicate that more drastic methods were required, but for most a period of despair set in.
Over the next few years, the government would employ a combination of negotiations and repression to isolate the more radical squats, stymieing the movement's forward march, and yet it would take most of the decade to truly neutralize the threat. Throughout the 1980s, buildings and even entire city blocks remained occupied, providing a
material base for different ways of life and action against the system, islands of resistance that could loom as large as continents in the movement's psychic geography.
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West Berlin, 1981. (Photo: Peter Homann)
While West Berlin had been the movement's epicenter, the two most important and well-known squats were in the FRG proper. In Hamburg, several city blocks of apartment buildings had been taken over on HafenstraÃe (“Harbor Street”), which as its name indicates runs alongside the city's historic waterfront. The complex would grow to eventually include a café, a movement info-center, a library, a soup kitchen, two pubs, and an occasional pirate radio station, all of which served to turn the HafenstraÃe squats into an important center for
Autonomen
politics, known around the world.
4
Less famous perhaps, the KiefernstraÃe squats in Düsseldorf were almost as large, and would serve as an organizing hub for anti-imps. (In typical fashion, the militant women's movement penetrated these categories without negating them, radical women living throughout both squats, each of which would also eventually have a women- or lesbian-only building.) Both HafenstraÃe and KiefernstraÃe were founded in 1981, and both would soon be stigmatized as “RAF nests,” squatters who lived there all considered potential “aboveground RAF members” by the forces of law and order.
Meanwhile, on the armed terrain, the Revolutionary Cells continued to take the lead, fully exploiting the breakthrough their
clandestine-aboveground and movementist strategy afforded them. The RZ would carry out attacks every month: against gentrification in January, Startbahn West in February, gentrification, anti-worker initiatives, and the sterilization of Third World women in March, and so on. The actions only increased in number, as the entire movement was successfully brought to a new level of confrontation.
