The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History Read online

  22. Ibid., 105. The state would try for several years to apply the Berufsverbot—a law that banned suspected radicals from working in the public sector—to remove Scheer from his university position. Finally in 1980, by which time the KPD had already been dissolved, he was “merely” fined. (Brian Martin, “Nuclear Suppression,” Science and Public Policy 13, no. 6, December 1986: 312-320.)

  23. WISE, “First Anti-Nuke Activists Seek Political Asylum,” no. 5 (May-June 1979): 7.

  24. Sonja Suder and Christian Gauder, interviewed by Andreas Fanizadeh, “Du schaust immer, ob jemand hinter dir ist,” taz, March 20, 2010; Klaus Viehmann, “Stadtguerilla und Klassenkampf—revised,” in: jour fixe initiative berlin (ed.), Klassen und Kämpfe (Münster: Unrast, 2006), 71-92.

  25. Revolutionäre Zellen, Subversiver Kampf in der Anti- AKW- Bewegung (anonymous: np, 1980).

  26. Robert Reid, Associated Press “Anti-Nuclear Demonstration in West Germany Peaceful,” The Joplin Globe (Joplin, Missouri), September 26, 1977.

  27. Peter Francis, “Tu-wat (Do Something),” Open Road no. 13, Spring 1982.

  28. Reid, “Anti-Nuclear Demonstration in West Germany Peaceful.”

  29. Joppke, 108.

  30. Open Road, “German War Machine Targets Anti-Nukers,” no. 11, Summer 1980: 18.

  31. Geronimo, 71-72.

  32. Sabine Von Dirke, All Power to the Imagination! The West German Counterculture from the Student Movement to the Greens (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 111-112.

  33. Wikipedia, “Tunix Kongress.”

  34. Geronimo, 73.

  35. Ibid., 74.

  36. Von Dirke, 120.

  37. Ibid.

  38. Michael Sontheimer, interviewed by Rainer Berthold Schossig, “25 Jahre taz,” Deutschlandradio [online], April 12, 2004.

  39. Keith Duane Alexander, “From Red to Green in the Island City: The Alternative Liste West Berlin and the Evolution of the West German Left, 1945-1990,” dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, 2003: 147.

  40. Ibid., 145.

  41. Having distanced himself from the guerilla, while on trial with the others from the 2JM Klöpper was actually elected on the AL ticket—which did not stop him from receiving a sentence of over 11 years in prison. “Eine seltsame Würze. Darf ein mutmaßlicher Terrorist ins Parlament?” Die Zeit, May 25, 1981.

  42. Alexander, 150. Schily would return to AL, briefly, in 1981 (ibid., 190).

  43. Isabelle De Pommereau, “How Germany’s Greens rose from radical fringe to ruling power,” Christian Science Monitor, March 28, 2011.

  44. Alexander, 181.

  45. For more on the women’s liberation movement in this period, see Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 444-448.

  46. Untitled document about the West German women’s movement, in the editors’ possession, 1980s.

  47. Wikipedia [website], “International Tribunal on Crimes against Women.”

  48. This was roughly equivalent to the “Take Back the Night” phenomenon in North America, which was itself another result of the Brussels conference.

  49. Georgy Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (Oakland: AK Press, 2006), 75-79.

  50. Rote Zora, “Unsere Anfänge als autonome Frauengruppe.”

  51. Katsiaficas, 77.

  52. Ibid., 78-79.

  53. Rote Zora, “Unsere Anfänge als autonome Frauengruppe.”

  54. Alexandra Michel, Frauen, die kämpfen, sind Frauen, die leben (Zurich: self-published, 1988), 78.

  55. According to some observers, here too the experiences of ‘77 were central. Wolfgang Kraushaar, for instance, has argued that “it appears to be anything but a coincidence that simultaneous with the unquestionable disaster of 1977, the radical left began a process of transformation that resulted in increased parliamentary power for the Green Party.” (Wolfgang Kraushaar, Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus [Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006], 26).

  4

  Kick at the Darkness

  FIGHTERS IN THE FIELD MAY withdraw; things are more complicated for captured combatants. In Western Europe’s high-security isolation cells, the RAF prisoners continued to be targeted for destruction.

  After a short time in the hospital following the attempt on her life, Irmgard Möller was back in Stammheim. Even before the harrowing events of 1977, she had been diagnosed with serious emotional, intellectual, and nervous disorders, described by court-appointed doctors as the classic symptoms of sensory deprivation.1 Rather than heed recommendations that she be released from isolation, the prison authorities now had the door to her cell replaced with bars, and stationed a guard outside so that she could be kept under constant observation. She was forced to undress completely several times a day. Newspapers she received were censored, with anything even remotely related to the German Autumn cut out. Any visits she received took place through a glass partition.2

  In a fight for her life, Möller went on hunger strike, demanding association with Verena Becker.

  Similarly, on February 1, 1978, Knut Folkerts, Gert Schneider, and Christof Wackernagel, who were in prison in Holland, went on hunger strike demanding an end to isolation and the visitor ban, free access to reading materials, and safe passage to a country of their choosing. The three received support from the Dutch lawyer Pieter Bakker Schut, who had been an important figure in the IVK and other prisoner support efforts since 1974,3 as well as from the Rood Verzetsfront—the RVF, or Red Resistance Front—a Dutch Marxist-Leninist group that despite remaining aboveground shared much of the RAF’s politics. (The RVF’s ranks had recently been replenished by a new generation of activists, many of whom had been radicalized by the events of 1977 and the continental search for Schleyer’s kidnappers.)4 Meanwhile, an autonomous group in Belgium occupied the Dutch embassy in that country to break through the media’s silence and support the prisoners’ demands. While this first prisoners’ strike, and the support it received, succeeded in winning some modest improvements, when a second strike was begun in October 1978, the Dutch state secretary of justice moved to quickly have the three extradited to the FRG.5

  In mid-March 1978, the RAF prisoners began their sixth collective hunger strike, demanding that they receive treatment in accord with the Geneva Convention, association, an end to the psychological warfare against the guerilla, and the release of information regarding the Stammheim deaths. As communication was extremely difficult, not everybody began on the same date, the first starting on March 10, followed by others as the word spread.

  Dozens of prisoners in the FRG would participate in the strike, including some from the aboveground left and Andreas Vogel and Till Meyer of the 2JM’s anti-imperialist wing.6 Still, there was an effective media blackout and their action failed to achieve any substantial support. They called it off on April 20, though over the next months there would be a number of individual strikes, as the prisoners continued to attempt to resist—or at least draw attention to—the conditions of their incarceration.7

  Meanwhile, some prisoners’ situations actually deteriorated, with the cases of Gabriele Rollnik,8 Werner Hoppe, and Karl-Heinz Dellwo causing particular alarm.

  With the exception of one month in Stammheim alongside other RAF prisoners,9 Hoppe had spent the entire seven years since his arrest in isolation. By June 1978, he could not eat without vomiting, suffered from intestinal bleeding, had pain in his right shoulder, and could barely walk; he was finally transferred to Hamburg’s Altona General Hospital in September. There, Professor Wilfried Rasch, director of the Institute for Forensic Psychiatry in Berlin, concluded that a return to prison, even under normal conditions, would endanger Hoppe’s life, as would detention in a prison hospital. Even if released, full recovery was deemed unlikely.10

  As for Dellwo, he would later describe his situation at Cologne-Ossendorf as
follows:

  Between October 1977 and December 1978 I was also one of the prisoners who were mistreated in all sorts of ways as a revenge for the attacks of the guerilla: for months a guard was sitting in front of my cell, looking through the peep-hole every three minutes and writing down what I was doing. Occasionally they would bang at the door or shout insults or scornful remarks at me. For one year the light stayed on also throughout the night and if I made any attempt at darkening it the guards bursted (sic) in and usually carried me off to the “bunker” again. One little sign from the yard towards any other window was enough for the hour outside to be broken off by force.

  Whatever could be removed from my cell they took away. My cell was ransacked every day, everything turned upside down, papers mixed up, messed up with food or just trampled down. There were days on which I was forced to undress completely and change all my clothes 10 times, each time I left my cell or returned to it.11

  Left to right: Gabriele Rollnik, Werner Hoppe, and Karl-Heinz Dellwo: three of the many prisoners from the guerilla who were being subjected to torturous conditions at this time.

  In order to try and secure his transfer to another prison and integration into general population, Dellwo commenced a hunger and thirst strike on September 21, 1978.12

  The crisis around Dellwo and Hoppe’s condition is what pushed some comrades to engage in the most militant aboveground prisoner-support action in years.

  On November 6, 1978, eleven masked individuals forced their way into the offices of the deutsche presse-agentur (dpa) news agency in Frankfurt. Cutting the telephone wires and tying up the staff, the “Willy Peter Stoll and Michael Knoll Commando” intended to send out a statement about Dellwo and Hoppe on the dpa’s newswire. It might have worked, except that an editor managed to trigger a panic button, setting off the alarm at a nearby police station. The cops quickly descended on the premises, arresting the eleven—who despite carrying out the occupation as a “commando” had only been armed with clubs.13

  As the occupiers explained in a subsequent interview:

  We named our action after Willy Peter Stoll and Michael Knoll. For us, these two names exemplify the nature of the overall situation in which we acted. Some of us knew the two personally, but independent of that, the fact that the pigs could insidiously and openly liquidate them, with the left’s reaction ranging from bewilderment to disinterest or completely cynical indifference, while the media celebrated these murders with bloodthirsty outbursts—that was a slap in the face for us. The murders of Willy and Michael expose our lack of resolve in the face of a development that is deadly in nature and turns resistance into an existential issue. The dpa occupation was a step toward breaking through this, nothing more, nothing less.14

  One of the occupiers was Wolfgang Beer, a former RAF member who had recently been released after spending four years in prison. (He was one of those who had been arrested on February 2, 1974; his younger brother Henning had subsequently become a fixture in the support scene.) Simone Borgstedde and Rosemarie Prieß were also among the occupiers: the two knew Dellwo and other RAF members from their days squatting in Hamburg in the early 1970s, and had more recently lived with Susanne Albrecht before she went under in 1977. Prieß had been arrested along with Volker Speitel in October 1977, charged with support for a terrorist organization, but had been released shortly thereafter. It would come out that the Verfassungsschutz—West Germany’s internal political spy agency, the “Guardians of the Constitution” (see sidebar on next page)—had been bugging the two women’s flat since October, raising questions about how much it had known about the occupation beforehand.15

  The eleven would be charged with—and convicted of—supporting a terrorist organization, each receiving a one-year prison sentence under §129a. For some, this was not their first such prison sentence, for others, it would not be their last.16

  One month later, over the objections of all three major political parties, the Altona General Hospital had Hoppe transferred to a semi-open unit, in order to provide him with more intensive care.17 Despite the “antiterrorist” grandstanding being indulged in by the politicians, the medical evidence was incontrovertible, with one doctor after another finding that Hoppe was not fit for incarceration. Bloodthirst notwithstanding, the state had nothing to gain from having a prisoner die like this, especially once the risk had been so clearly established in the public record. So it was, that on February 8, 1979, the decision was made to release him on grounds of ill health.18

  The dpa occupation represented an attempt by RAF supporters to get back on their feet, part of the process of recovering from the defeat of ‘77 and the political isolation that had ensued. However, the militant nature of the action (not to mention the fact that nothing actually got sent out over the newswire), meant that its appeal was limited to those already sympathetic to the prisoners’ struggle.

  In terms of broader outreach, a more important exercise came in the second phase of the Third International Russell Tribunal on Civil Liberties in West Germany. The first such Tribunal had been held in 1967, as a public body examining and ultimately condemning U.S. war crimes in Indochina. This was followed by a Second Russell Tribunal, investigating political repression in Latin America, provoked in large part by the 1973 Pinochet coup in Chile. The idea of holding a Third Tribunal, on human rights in the FRG, had first been broached at an Anti-Repression Conference held in Frankfurt following Meinhof’s death in 1976. With encouragement from Klaus Croissant, different committees were formed in the FRG and abroad to bring the Russell Tribunal to the Federal Republic; its initial hearings would be held in Frankfurt in March 1978.

  The decision to hold such a Third Tribunal, now focusing on the internal affairs of a West European country, was a scandal in the eyes of conservative critics, who complained that conditions in the GDR were not going to be similarly examined. As such, the Tribunal’s first session, on the Berufsverbot—the law that banned “subversives” from employment in the public sector19—received a great deal of publicity, much of it negative.20 Right-wing politicians derided the exercise as the “slaughtering of a democracy,”21 while several intellectuals close to the SPD organized a “Congress for the Defense of the Republic,” held in Hannover in April 1978, to counter its findings.22

  The Verfassungsschutz

  Founded in 1950, the Verfassungsschutz is West Germany’s internal political intelligence service. There is a federal Verfassungsschutz and eleven Länder Verfassungsschutzen, all of which are charged with collecting information about “enemies of the Constitution” and political extremism, considered security threats regardless of whether or not criminal activity is involved.

  In 1972, as a reaction to the appearance of the RAF on the political scene, the SPD passed legislation expanding the powers of the Verfassungsschutz, legalizing the use of “undercover informants, clandestine observation, electronic listening devices, hidden video cameras, false documentation, and automobile registration.”1 (Wiretaps and mail interception were previously unconstitutional.) At the same time, the office’s purview was expanded to include both foreign espionage (especially that conducted by the GDR), as well as “foreign residents whose activities endanger or harm the Federal Republic’s external interests or security.”2 Nevertheless, in theory, the Verfassungsschutz are “not permitted to stop, question, search, detain, arrest, or interrogate suspects, nor to search private residences, nor to seize personal materials.”3 Nor is the Verfassungsschutz supposed to be able to take any direct action, other than alerting police, against criminal activity. Unlike political police forces such as the FBI, the Verfassungsschutz is not empowered to make arrests. This has repeatedly led to murky situations in which undercover Verfassungsschutz agents and informants were present during, and participated in, criminal activities.

  At the same time, the agency is not obliged to divulge information to either the courts or the police if this would reveal either its sources or methods of collecting information.

  (F
or more on the Verfassungsschutz, see Appendix I: Conclusions of the Third Russell Tribunal, pages 324–325, 327.)

  _____________

  1 Michaela W. Richter, German Issues 20: The Verfassungsschutz (Washington DC: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, 1998), 20.

  2 Ibid., 23.

  3 Ibid., 18.

  For the much smaller number of people who made up the radical left, however, the problem was not that the Tribunal was focusing on West Germany, but that it was prioritizing the issue of the “career ban” over more life-and-death concerns. RAF supporters had been active in organizing the Tribunal from the very start, and yet their standing in the exercise had suffered in the course of the state’s crackdown, especially in ‘77. Police would single out anti-imperialists working on the Tribunal, and as they were thereby tied up dealing with their legal situation more liberal forces were able to gain the upper hand. As one anti-imperialist recalls, over forty years later:

  In the end it was impossible to resist the attacks both internal from within the ranks of the Russell Tribunal and external by state forces. Our work in 1977 was smashed in the best meaning of the word. My home in Düsseldorf (like others in other cities) was raided four times by the cops and they confiscated boxes upon boxes of work materials about the prison conditions of political prisoners. I was not arrested for more than two days during those events, but it was not before the end of 1978 that all those materials were given back to me “without comment.” It was quite clear that they just wanted to make it impossible for us to do our work and make the prisoners an important part of the Tribunal.23

  This troublesome situation was made all the more galling as the Tribunal’s first hearings occurred in the midst of the RAF prisoners’ sixth hunger strike, and ended just a week before the Drenkmann-Lorenz trial was scheduled to begin in West Berlin. Rumors were spread in the right-wing press that RAF supporters might even disrupt the hearings—a transparent attempt to deepen the rifts that already existed between liberals and radicals. Nothing came of this, of course, but on the opening day of the Berufsverbot hearings thirty protesters did occupy a Lutheran church in Hamburg, decorating it inside and out with posters calling attention to the prisoners’ conditions. Among their number was Sybille Haag, whose husband Siegfried was a RAF prisoner, and one of those on hunger strike at the time.24