The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History Read online

  PRAISE FOR VOLUME 2: DANCING WITH IMPERIALISM

  In this book Moncourt and Smith are offering some “institutional memory” for those of us who are struggling against the horrible situations that unbridled capitalism and imperialism have forced upon us. Such institutional memory is desperately needed.

  They remind us that a generation ago a RAF political prisoner in Germany wrote that the world was facing a “…fascism that no longer requires mass mobilization of ideologically motivated fascists, but only bureaucrats and technocrats in the service of the imperialist state.”

  A political observation that a generation later we still have not adequately mobilized around.

  Here too, Ward Churchill lets us see that not nearly enough has been done to provide a similar institutional memory regarding those who struggled against the same forces in the United States in that same time period. Is it any wonder that the fight against prison isolation in the U.S. is hobbled by a failure to realize that this country’s 80,000 isolated prisoners suffer under hellish conditions originally designed to destroy political prisoners? Knowledge that would force U.S. prisoners to recognize that their struggle requires political and not “legal” solutions.

  Moncourt and Smith also remind us of the crucial strategic roles wimmin played in the struggles centered in Germany. Widespread and courageous roles that even left me stunned as to how little I really knew of that aspect! A realization that if patriarchal conditions can blind one who has been struggling over four decades against these same forces, then we all must step up our efforts to place the destruction of patriarchy and all forms of gender oppression on the same level as the fight to overcome capitalist and imperialist exploitation.

  —Russell “Maroon” Shoatz, U.S. political prisoner

  Dancing with Imperialism, the second volume in the Red Army Faction documentary trilogy, continues to excavate a fascinating history of the German revolutionary left in the 1970s and 1980s. It powerfully situates the RAF within a broader orbit of revolutionary politics and world events. It gives us the inside story of how militants did and might engage with police, prisons, informants, media, and one another in the context of struggle. It is an exciting story, a global story, and very much a story for today’s movements.

  —Dan Berger, editor of The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism

  PRAISE FOR VOLUME 1: PROJECTILES FOR THE PEOPLE

  The editors of this work, J. Smith and André Moncourt, have created an intelligently political work that honestly discusses the politics of the Red Army Faction during its early years. Their commentary explains the theoretical writings of the RAF from a left perspective and puts their politics and actions in the context of the situation present in Germany and the world at the time. It is an extended work that is worth the commitment required to read and digest it. Not only a historical document, the fact that it is history provides us with the ability to comprehend the phenomenon that was the RAF in ways not possible thirty years ago.

  —Ron Jacobs, author of The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground

  This first volume about the RAF is about a part of WWII that did not end when the so-called allies defeated the nazis. The RAF warriors come from a strong socialist history and knew they were fighting for the very life of their country. Many victories and many errors were scored which provide this important look into REAL her/history lessons. A must read for all serious alternative history students who then in turn can use it as a teaching tool towards a better future.

  —b (r.d. brown), former political prisoner, George Jackson Brigade

  This book about the Red Army Faction of American-occupied Germany is one that should be read by any serious student of antiimperialist politics. Volume 1: Projectiles for the People provides a history of the RAF’s development through the words of its letters and communiqués. What makes the book especially important and relevant, however, is the careful research and documentation done by its editors. From this book you will learn the mistakes of a group that was both large and strong, but which (like our own home-grown attempts in this regard) was unable to successfully communicate with the working class of a “democratic” country on a level that met their needs. While the armed struggle can be the seed of something much larger, it is also another means of reaching out and communicating with the people. Students interested in this historic era would do well to study this book and to internalize both the successes and failures of one of the largest organized armed anti-imperialist organizations operating in Western Europe since World War II.

  —Ed Mead, former political prisoner, George Jackson Brigade

  the red army faction: a documentary history

  volume 2: dancing with imperialism

  introductory texts and translations by André Moncourt and J. Smith

  The opening epigraph is from Brigitte Mohnhaupt’s December 4, 1984, trial statement, which appears in this volume on pages 304–315.

  ISBN: 978-1-60486-030-6

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012914067

  © 2013 Kersplebedeb

  This edition © 2013 PM Press and Kersplebedeb

  Many of the translated texts in this book

  are available online at www.germanguerilla.com

  Kersplebedeb Publishing and Distribution

  CP 63560

  CCCP Van Horne

  Montreal, Quebec

  Canada H3W 3H8

  www.kersplebedeb.com

  PM Press

  PO Box 23912

  Oakland, CA 94623

  www.pmpress.org

  Layout and Index by Kersplebedeb

  Cover Design: Josh MacPhee/Justseeds.org

  The photo used on the front cover is of the 1981 bombing of the Ramstein airbase.

  Printed in the United States on recycled paper by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan

  www.thomsonshore.com

  dedicated to the memory of Christa Eckes

  “The RAF’s struggle was always based on both the global balance of power and the conflict in the metropole. The war is not just about escalating things in the most developed sectors; rather it is the reality of the entire imperialist system, and will be until victory.”

  Brigitte Mohnhaupt

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS AND SOURCES

  PREFACE

  ACRONYM KEY

  GERMAN TERMS

  ON THE NECESSITY OF ARMED STRUGGLE: REFLECTIONS ON THE RAF AND THE QUESTION OF MOVING FORWARD BY WARD CHURCHILL

  1 PREVIOUSLY ON RED ARMY FACTION

  what is a rear base area?

  the raf and the gdr: benign neglect no more

  2 TWILIGHT OF THE SEVENTIES GUERILLA

  anti-imperialism defined

  3 THE ANTINUCLEAR MOVEMENT: OLD MEETS NEW

  4 KICK AT THE DARKNESS 93

  the verfassungsschutz

  christian klar regarding zurich

  Sixth Hunger Strike (March 14, 1978)

  Seventh Hunger Strike (April 20, 1979)

  Attack on Alexander Haig (June 25, 1979)

  Statement Calling Off the Seventh Hunger Strike (June 26, 1979)

  5 SHAKE THE DUST FROM YOUR FEET

  Statement Dissolving the 2nd of June Movement (June 2, 1980)

  Regarding the Alleged Dissolution of the 2nd of June Movement (June 1980)

  The Deaths of Wolfgang Beer and Juliane Plambeck (July 26, 1980)

  6 THE ’81 OFFENSIVE

  sigurd debus, 1942-1981

  rz vs. raf?

  the nato coup in turkey

  unsafe waters

  Eighth Hunger Strike Statement
(February 6, 1981)

  Statement Calling Off the Eighth Hunger Strike (April 16, 1981)

  Attack Against USAFE Ramstein (August 31, 1981)

  Attack Against General Frederick Kroesen (September 15, 1981)

  Letter Addressing Police Fabrications (November 7, 1981)

  out and in: viett, beer, and eckes

  7 PLANTING SEEDS IN MAY

  what kind of peace?

  verena becker and the verfassungsschutz

  The Guerilla, the Resistance, and the Anti-Imperialist Front (May 1982)

  8 USING HONEY TO CATCH FLIES

  wheels within wheels

  hans-joachim klein: a german guerilla

  on the question of collective responsibility

  9 KNOCKOUT PUNCH?

  a process comes to fruition

  10 TUBTHUMPING

  A Statement Regarding ‘77 (Christian Klar, December 4, 1984)

  Strategic Thoughts (Brigitte Mohnhaupt, December 4, 1984)

  APPENDICES

  APPENDIX I: CONCLUSIONS OF THE THIRD RUSSELL TRIBUNAL

  APPENDIX II: BOOCK’S LIES

  APPENDIX III: FOR US IT WAS A QUESTION OF LEARNING EXPLOSIVES AND SHOOTING TECHNIQUES

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  ARMED STRUGGLE IN W. GERMANY: A CHRONOLOGY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Numerous graphics in this volume come from the book and CD Vorwärts bis zum nieder mit, compiled by Sebastian Haunss, Markus Mohr, and Klaus Viehmann from a variety of archives and published by Verlag Assoziation A. The interested reader can view the entire contents of this CD online at http://plakat.nadir.org/. All those involved in producing this artwork, and the book and website in question, have our thanks.

  Many people, both in Europe, Germany in particular, and in North America, have contributed to this book by sharing their thoughts about and their experience of the historical events addressed herein. For a variety of reasons, they prefer not to be acknowledged by name, but without their input, insights, and support, the documents they provided, and situations and debates they described, we would have been unable to piece together the history we present here in anywhere near as much detail.

  One person, however, particularly deserves our thanks. Ron Augustin maintains the most extensive online archive of RAF and RAF-related documents, housed at the International Institute of Social History in the Netherlands (http://labourhistory.net/raf/), without which this book, as it is, would have been impossible. Ron also proved ever ready to respond to our many, often arcane, questions and to provide us with valuable documents, including some of the photos used in this book. Besides the authors, only Ron and one other person read the historical portions of this book as it was being written. Both pointed out errors and incorrect interpretations on our part, allowing us, we hope, to produce a narrative that reflects the events we are addressing as accurately as is possible. Any errors that remain reflect shortcomings in our own research.

  To all those who contributed in any way, our heartfelt thanks, and you can anticipate hearing from us again as we begin to tackle the task of producing the third and final volume in this series.

  NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS AND SOURCES

  In preparing these texts, we consulted the German-language originals available on various websites, of which the Labour History website is undoubtedly both the most complete and reliable.1 For some texts, the ID-Verlag collection entitled Rote Armee Fraktion: Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF served as our source.2 On rare occasions other sources were used. We have done our best to ensure that the German original we were using was in fact a faithful reproduction of the document originally released, but the existence, in some cases, of two or more different German-language versions complicated matters. Should any differences exist between our translations, particularly in terms of missing passages or additional passages, and versions found on the Labour History website, the error lies with us.

  These are, however, translations, and we have done our best to present faithful but readable texts that retained the sense of the originals. Other translators would doubtless have made different decisions, perhaps choosing other words or hewing more closely to the original sentence structure. Our primary preoccupation, however, was to create translations that were as elegant as possible, while retaining as closely as possible the meaning of the original. We trust that errors on our part will prove minor and in no significant way misrepresent the original intent of the texts translated here.

  We refer to this work as the complete texts of the Red Army Faction. The meaning of that statement seems indisputable, but that is not the case, and so we must explain what we mean by “complete.” To the best of our knowledge, we will have included every document issued by the RAF in its close to thirty-year history in the first volume (1968-1977), this second volume (1978-1984), and the upcoming third volume (1984-1998). By this, we mean every theoretical manifesto, every communiqué accompanying an action, and every letter sent by the organization to the media. We have also included a number of pertinent interviews.

  We did not include, with several exceptions, letters written by imprisoned RAF members. There are literally thousands of these, a significant selection of which have been published in German in a book entitled Das Info, edited by a former lawyer for prisoners from the RAF, Pieter Bakker Schut. This book can be found in its entirety on the Labour History website, as can Bakker Schut’s invaluable historical analysis of the Stammheim trial, simply entitled Stammheim. Nor have we published, with the exception of a handful, any of the hundreds of court statements, often of epic length, made by RAF defendants over the years. When we did choose to publish a letter or a court statement, it was because the document in question filled out some theoretical or historical aspect of the RAF’s history that we felt was not adequately addressed elsewhere.

  Furthermore, as explained in our first volume, we decided not to include the 1971 text Über den bewaffneten Kampf in Westeuropa (Regarding the Armed Struggle in West Europe) penned by Horst Mahler. This document, a sprawling theoretical text, was rejected by the other members of the RAF and played no small role in the decision to expel Mahler from the group—making him the only member ever publicly expelled. (The interested reader proficient in German will have no difficulty finding this document online, and in the aforementioned ID-Verlag book.)

  _____________

  1. http://labourhistory.net/raf/.

  2. http://www.nadir.org/nadir/archiv/PolitischeStroemungen/Stadtguerilla+RAF/RAF/raf-texte+materialien.PDF.

  PREFACE

  The book you hold in your hands, along with its companion volumes, constitutes the most complete collection of texts and history of the Red Army Faction ever published in the English language.

  Our first volume, Projectiles for the People, which came out in 2009, attempted to provide a history of the RAF that was both interesting and useful for people involved in movements for radical social change today. In this, we felt our work was unique, as English-language studies of the RAF were almost uniformly written from a counterinsurgency perspective, the goal being to discredit the guerilla and to deny it any recognition as a legitimate political force; in short, to deprive us of its history. The favored means to this end was to pathologize the individuals concerned, to reduce the 1970s experience of guerilla struggle in the Federal Republic of Germany to the work of a few mentally unbalanced characters, “spoiled children,” perhaps even Hitler’s progeny. Even those studies not devoted to counterinsurgency objectives as such suffered from this context, which was easily able to infect the wider discourse thanks to the dearth of accurate information about the RAF, and the fact that almost none of the guerilla’s writings were available in English.

  Our first volume was an attempt to remedy this situation, and our hope is that what we produced was at least somewhat effective in this regard. Far from being a mere relic of history, the RAF’s experience, and the lengths to which the state went in its at
tempt to annihilate them, are of great relevance today. This is most obviously the case in the way an endless “war against terror” provides a fig leaf behind which one U.S. administration after another is able to invade and destabilize countries around the world. But there is another way that the RAF’s history remains eerily salient today, in that the methods developed by West German penal authorities to try and break revolutionaries have metastasized into a monster devouring the lives of people who may have never even heard of a place like Stammheim. We refer to the widespread use of solitary confinement, or “isolation torture,” in prisons around the world, but especially in the United States, where as many as one hundred thousand people may be subjected to such inhumane conditions on any given day. Some prisoners are held in this way for a few days or weeks; others have spent decades in isolation. As prisoners from the RAF pointed out when these conditions were first used against them, this is a program of social extermination. It is a form of psychological murder.

  It is not a complete surprise that some of our most enthusiastic readers have been prisoners held in these conditions in the dungeons of the United States. They have no difficulty grasping the reality of prison conditions purposefully designed to inflict “clean” torture, destroying people while leaving no physical scars.

  When we began this series, we intended to produce two books about the RAF, the obvious breaking point in the narrative being 1977. (Most authors and cinematic propagandists simply pretend that the group ceased to exist at that point.) It became clear soon after we began work on our second volume, however, that we had made a mistake; given numerous written documents produced by the RAF in the course of its own coming to grips with its history in the 1990s, there was simply too much to fit into two books. The project would require a third volume.

  If the question of where to split the RAF’s narrative in two was obvious, where to divide it in three was far less so. A strong argument could be made for 1986, when the “front” definitively came to an end and the era of assassinations began, or even 1992, when the group would decide to unilaterally de-escalate. However, we chose 1984, allowing us to devote this, the shortest of the three volumes, to a very specific phase of reorientation, on the level of theory and of practice, for the RAF and for the rest of the left.