Jeremy Varon (47 page)

against Israel and Israeli citizens in what they see as a struggle for national liberation; it is quite another for young German leftists, separated from the Holocaust by only a generation, to rally enthusiastically behind and even participate in such acts. In instances, Germans explicitly presented Israeli Jews as modern-day Nazis. Such rhetoric, which perverts the relationship between German fascism and its Jewish victims, was especially virulent and disturbing when it accompanied acts of violence.

An anonymous flyer issued with the 1969 synagogue bombing followed common criticisms of Israeli treatment of Palestinians with rhetoric denouncing Israel’s “fascist acts of horror against the Palestinian Arabs”

and use of “Gestapo torture methods.” After charging that “the Crystal Night of 1938 is repeated daily by the Zionists,” it concluded, “The Jews who were displaced by fascism have themselves become fascists who want to eradicate the Palestinian people in collaboration with Amerikan capital.”182 Though less extreme, Meinhof’s statement in praise of the Palestinian “Black September” commandos presented the Munich Olympics killings as the cutting edge of anti-imperialism—one whose antifascist character was only
enhanced
by taking place in West Germany (fascist then, fascist now, was her claim).183

Troubling from anyone, such assertions are morally blind when coming from young Germans. Desperate to distinguish themselves from their parents’ generation, New Leftists only narrowed that distance by engaging in or applauding acts that were transparently anti-Semitic. This tragic irony was not lost on some guerrillas. Klein, who left the Red Cells in 1977, characterized his withdrawal from the underground as a “return to humanity.” When he left the group, he publicized, and hence foiled, a plot by Red Cells and Palestinian commandos to assassinate leaders of the resurgent Jewish communities of Frankfurt and Berlin. The abuse of Jews in the 1976 hijacking was decisive in his renunciation of guerrilla violence. For Klein, the action was “Auschwitz” all over again,

“barbarity pure and simple.”184

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Deadly Abstraction

.

.

.

In a world of so much real suffering, why promote

unnecessary suffering?

Silke Maier-Witt

More personalized condemnation of the armed struggle came from Silke Maier-Witt, a former RAF member, who combines political and moral judgment with a psychoanalytic language of repetition and “acting out.”

The anger of many West German New Leftists was directed at the
generation
of their parents, not at their parents as such. This was conspicuously true of RAF’s leaders. Ulrike Meinhof’s foster mother was herself a left-wing activist. Gudrun Ensslin’s parents had opposed the Nazis and supported their daughter’s involvement in the student movement. And Baader’s mother, though rather apolitical, stood by her son while he was in prison. The RAF’s leaders, in short, lacked the
personal
enmity toward their parents so characteristic of the German New Left. Such was not the case with Silke Maier-Witt. When she was twelve years old, she discovered in the attic of her house memorabilia indicating that her father had been a member of the SS—a fact that he had concealed from her. Unaware at the time of the implications of her discovery, she asked him about it only several years later. As if in a parody of the postwar family—plagued by distrust and silence—his answers were evasive, prompting her to refuse to talk to him for two months.

In 1969, Maier-Witt attended the University of Hamburg, where she studied psychology and became immersed in student protest. Like so many others among RAF’s “second generation,” she was drawn to the group through work in support of the prisoners. By 1977, she was part of the RAF’s “second tier,” working in Amsterdam to secure cars, weapons, and safe houses. Called back to West Germany, she helped in the planning of Schleyer’s kidnapping. In 1979, she trained with Palestinians in Yemen, where she observed: “They were willing to fight for their people. For us, it was more like an intellectual effort. It was sheer group dynamic that kept us going. We were like robots.”185 Overwhelmed with stress and fearing that in West Germany she would go to jail “for nothing, for accomplishing nothing,” she was sent by the RAF to East Germany, where with assistance from the East German authorities, she assumed a new identity and tried to live a life of quiet anonymity. Captured in 1990, she was tried for her involvement in the Schleyer kidnapping and sentenced to ten years in prison, of which she served five.

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Prison proved cathartic. Reflecting there on her time in RAF, she concluded,

If you refuse to have a good look at who you are, you’ll always repeat your actions, over and over. . . . To come to terms with my past, I’ve asked myself why I neglected my own moral standards even as I was envisioning social change. I learned how easy it is to listen to some ideology and to have an idea that gives you an excuse for anything. In trying not to be like my father, I ended up being even more like him. Terrorism is close to Nazism. I used ideology to legitimize myself, the same as he did. Creating change requires courage, which I didn’t have. That’s why I ended up in the RAF.186

Not all former RAF members report having such intensely negative experiences, nor would most so seamlessly equate their struggle with what they struggled against. Maier-Witt’s commentary is nonetheless poignant as a set of insights into the degradation of her politics. In ethical terms, she attests to the dangers of ideology as a blanket endorsement for action, no matter how extreme. In psychological terms, she affirms how a strategy of disavowal may lead to the compulsive repetition of what one formally disavows. True courage, she concludes, is a function of self-reflection, self-awareness, and restraint—not to be confused with the dilution of one’s commitment to justice. As if to make her bitter experience of some use to others, she returned to the field of psychology and then counseled the traumatized victims of war in Kosovo. In the conflicts of the former Yugoslavia, driven partly by crazed fantasies of conquest and collective redemption, she perceives echoes of the RAF’s failed idealism. Witness again to its wreckage, she pleads, “In a world of so much real suffering, why promote unnecessary suffering?”187

c h a p t e r 6

“Democratic Intolerance”

The Red Army Faction and the West German State

For the government of the Federal Republic, the RAF was an intolerable threat and had to be eliminated at all costs. This entailed laws that made support for terrorist organizations illegal and that prohibited speech thought to encourage violence; mobilization of great numbers of police; surveillance on a vast scale; harsh treatment of those suspected or convicted of violent acts; and restrictions on the RAF’s legal defense. These measures and the fierce antiterrorist rhetoric of politicians and the media created a climate of intense suspicion of dissidents in West Germany in the 1970s. What people remember about the era is typically not only the pervasive fear of terrorist violence but also the tremendous constriction of thought and feeling caused by heightened demands for loyalty to the state, enforced, in part, by repression.

From a practical standpoint, the antiterrorist measures both succeeded and failed. Police captured the RAF’s founders relatively quickly, putting an end to an initial wave of violence. Those remaining in or joining the underground had to devote a large share of their energy simply to avoiding arrest. The state’s antiterrorist campaign, in short, limited the scope of the RAF’s violence. Yet attempts to eliminate terrorism also helped to bring about new rounds of violence. Virtually all the major acts of left-wing violence in the mid 1970s sought the release of prisoners or revenge against judges, prosecutors, and police. Had the state’s reaction been less severe, the RAF’s armed struggle might neither have endured so long nor become so brutal.

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“Democratic Intolerance”

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Criticism of the government was not confined to the far left. German jurists, politicians, intellectuals, and civil libertarians questioned the legitimacy of the antiterrorism laws and denounced the mentality that had produced them. Such laws and the treatment of prisoners also attracted the concern of international human rights organizations, to whom the RAF broadcast allegations of abuse. In 1974, the French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, responding to a request by the RAF, interviewed Andreas Baader in Stammheim prison about conditions there.

International committees investigated the death of Ulrike Meinhof. And for years Amnesty International included a section on the treatment of RAF prisoners in its annual report documenting violations of human rights throughout the world. Though international bodies often absolved the government of explicit wrongdoing, the state’s response to terrorism fed an international image of the
häßlichen Deutschen
(“ugly Germans”), in whom authoritarian tendencies had persisted.

Why did the state react so forcefully and at such great cost, given the RAF’s small size and limited capabilities?1 Perceptions counted for more than whatever “real” danger left-wing violence posed. Like the RAF itself, the government was greatly influenced by Germany’s past. Memories of the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism led the founders of the Federal Republic to believe that if it were to survive, the new democracy had to be aggressively intolerant of those who threatened it. Two decades later, the republic’s leaders regarded the RAF as just such an enemy, reminiscent of the fascist groups that had helped destroy the Weimar Republic. Defeating terrorism was so important because it spoke so powerfully to the raison d’être and self-image of the postwar West German state.

The government’s more extreme antiterrorist measures nonetheless violated democratic rights beyond what could be justified in the name of defending democracy. Some critics charged that it used the need for security and the example of the past to legitimize assertions of power un-connected to democratic ends; at its worst, they charged, the state itself became an agent of terror.

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Without you, the assassins would be helpless.

Willy Brandt

With the first wave of armed actions in the early 1970s, the West German authorities determined that simply punishing individuals after the 256

“Democratic Intolerance”

fact for specific acts of violence was an inadequate approach to combating terrorism. Terrorists, they reasoned, operate conspiratorially and rely for their existence on layers of tactical, material, and ideological support.

To contain and eliminate terrorism, each layer had to be criminalized and incapacitated. Sections 129 and 129a of the Criminal Code—the strongest weapons in the legal arsenal against the RAF—provided mechanisms for doing so.

Section 129 outlawed forming
(gründen),
being a member of
(als Mitglied beteiligen),
promoting
(werben),
or supporting
(unterstützen)
a

“criminal association.” Section 129a, which went into effect in October 1976, superseded section 129 by punishing the same actions with respect to “terrorist associations,” distinguished by the serious nature of their alleged crimes, such as murder and attempted murder. Under sections 129 and 129a, not only individuals who allegedly committed or conspired to commit acts of violence were prosecutable. Alleged supporters could also be punished,
irrespective of their actual knowledge
of or involvement in acts of violence.
In one scholar’s characterization, section 129a “permits the police to arrest individuals in the absence of any suspicion of any criminal activity.”2 Going beyond guilt by association, sections 129 and 129a established mere support for an association as the standard for culpability. Punishments could be severe. Sentences under section 129 ranged from six months’ to five years’

imprisonment; section 129a increased the maximum penalty for “ringleaders”
(Rädelsführern)
and “chief instigators”
(Hintermännern)
to ten years.3 By the end of 1974, some 200 people had been arrested on suspicion of having aided the RAF.4

What constituted “support” for and “promotion” of a criminal or terrorist group was hotly debated. Prosecutors and judges interpreted the laws broadly. A 1978 ruling that codified applications of the law up to that point held that “promotion” meant not only the recruitment of new members but also the “strengthening of the association . . . by means of propaganda.”5 The RAF’s lawyers were indicted under sections 129 and 129a for facilitating a communication system for their imprisoned clients and for supporting the RAF’s hunger strikes. Prosecutors charged book-sellers with supporting the terrorist groups whose texts they sold. People were even charged under the law for acts seemingly as harmless as writing pro-RAF graffiti on subway cars or distributing leaflets.6 In one case, a demonstrator had passed out a flyer with the demand to “Unite All RAF Prisoners,” dispersed at the time in prisons throughout Germany.

The defendant claimed that he was merely advocating a change in state

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257

policy toward the prisoners. The judge held, however, that because the flyer used a well-known RAF slogan, it was a
criminal
expression of support for the group.7

The importance of sections 129 and 129a went far beyond the laws’

actual use in the battle against left-wing violence. In addition to actual members of the underground, the laws targeted an archetypal, commonly denounced, and nearly mythic figure in West German antiterrorist rhetoric: the
Sympathisant,
or “sympathizer.” The “sympathizers” were an imprecise category of alleged helpers and fellow travelers whom security forces, politicians, and the media considered an integral part of the terrorist threat. More an ideological construct than a description of an actual group, the notion of the sympathizer went to the heart of German anxieties about violence. Sympathizers were blamed for making terrorism possible by aiding those underground. That assistance could be tactical, in the form of safe houses, money, and weapons. Shortly after the arrest of Baader in June 1972, Interior Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher insisted that RAF “cannot exist without sympathizers, as the group itself says: the sympathizers are the water in which the guerrillas swim.