There are flowers everywhere - bunches of red roses, white lilies, carnations.
They look crisp, as if they were placed on the grave just this morning.
Someone has lit red candles and raked the sand in careful patterns. The grey
tomb slab on the Dornhaldenfriedhof in Stuttgart says, in purple letters:
“Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe”.
This is the last resting place of the terrorists of the Red Army Faction
(RAF), who committed suicide on October 18, 1977, in Stammheim prison. An
old lady walks past, carrying a watering can. She looks at the flowers,
shakes her head disapprovingly, and moves on.
Three decades after their bloody heyday, when they terrorised Germany with
assassinations, bombings and kidnappings, the left-wing terrorists of the
RAF - popularly known as the Baader-Meinhof gang - still haunt the nation.
The secret worship, and overt scorn, evident at the cemetery are echoes of
the trauma that accompanied the darkest chapter in West German history.
While we Germans can at last talk about the Nazi era, the so-called “leaden
time” of the RAF is still a painfully unresolved subject. That rawness has
been brought to the fore this year by The Baader Meinhof Complex, a feature
film (pictured below) based on the group's founders. It opens in Britain on
Friday, and has provoked fierce criticism from the victims' families,
historians and the daughter of the terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, Bettina Röhl,
who long ago decried her mother's violence. “It glorifies brutal killers as
good-looking idealists. It trivialises their terror,” she says.
The film's director, Uli Edel, disagrees vehemently: “It does not take sides
at all; it is just historically accurate.” The widow of Jürgen Ponto, a
banker who was murdered by the RAF, was so enraged about the film - which
was co-financed with state funding - that she has returned her Order of the
Federal Republic of Germany.
The RAF emerged out of the student rebellion of the 1960s. When a student
demonstrator, Benno Ohnesorg, was killed by police during a visit to West
Germany by the American-backed Shah of Iran in 1967, so the RAF legend runs,
the young activists were inspired to rise against the “fascist” Government -
just as their parents had failed to against the Nazis. Bettina Röhl
disagrees with that: “This is one of the myths that sympathisers go on and
on about. The communist RAF did not care about the Nazi past at all.”
The as-yet unnamed terrorist group began its campaign in 1968 by fire-bombing
department stores. Baader and Ensslin were arrested, together with other
terrorists. Meinhof, at that time a respected journalist from a bourgeois
background and married with twins, took part in the “liberation” of Baader
in May 1970 (when one man was severely injured). They fled with associates
to a training camp of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in
Jordan, although the Palestinians, aghast at the loose morals of these
promiscuous Europeans, kicked them out soon enough. Shortly afterwards they
devised their RAF moniker, manifesto and machinegun logo.
The terrorists saw themselves as urban guerrillas. Their intellectual
figurehead, Meinhof, wrote long pamphlets justifying their war on Western
imperialism. Together with Ensslin, a pastor's daughter with an interest in
philosophy, she did the thinking, whereas Baader, in contrast, longed for
action. He was one of Munich's wild Schickeria - trendies - with a penchant
for stealing Porsches and BMWs.
Meinhof declared portentously that the group's aim was to “throw bombs into
the people's minds”. That translated into a wave of bombings and murders in
which 35 people were killed, many of them prominent judges, bankers and
industrialists.
In time, the West German security forces managed to capture the gang's
founders. In 1974, Baader, Meinhof, Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe were brought
together again in Stammheim prison, near Stuttgart, where, disastrously, the
authorities allowed the gang members to fraternise. Naturally, they carried
on plotting. Their lawyers smuggled out letters containing orders to other
gang members. They were planning action against the German State while it
held them prisoner.
Their story reached a climax in the autumn of 1977, in a chain of events that
involved the hijacking of a Lufthansa jet to Mogadishu, the group suicide in
prison of three of the group's leaders - Meinhof killed herself the year
before - and the killing of Hanns Martin Schleyer, an industrialist who had
been abducted in an effort to get the RAF leaders “sprung” from prison.
A “second generation” of RAF members fought on for two decades. On April 20,
1998, a press release announcing the dissolution of the Red Army Faction
appeared: “The urban guerrilla in the form of the RAF is now history.”
Journalist Stefan Aust was a close friend of Meinhof and used to work with
her for the left-wing magazine konkret. A professional RAF-watcher,
he wrote The Baader Meinhof Complex, the book on which the divisive
new film is based. To coincide with the film's opening in Germany in
September, he suggested, provocatively, that the authorities might have
known of the RAF leaders' suicide plans - because their cells were bugged -
and done nothing to prevent them.
Everybody in Germany had a firm opinion on The Baader Meinhof Complex months
before you could even catch a glimpse of it. There were hours of late-night
discussions involving outraged relatives of the victims and former
terrorists renouncing their allegiance live on television in front of the
nation.
The film-makers said that they wanted to debunk the myth of the RAF and be
historically accurate in doing so. Fact-wise they are - right up to the
number of bullets that hit each victim. However, in casting such popular and
attractive actors as Moritz Bleibtreu (as Andreas Baader) and Martina Gedeck
(as Ulrike Meinhof), they simultaneously revive the nostalgia of “radical
chic” with which the RAF has long been surrounded, and that led years ago to
German boutiques offering shirts by “Prada Meinhof” and bags featuring the
RAF logo with the machinegun.
As the credits rolled and the lights went up at a screening I attended in
Munich, one member of the audience raised his fist in a gesture of sympathy.
He was barely 20 years old, munching popcorn and wearing a hooded jumper. The
assiduously factual debunking of the “Baader-Meinhof myth” obviously did not
work for everyone in the audience.
Claudia Fromme is a journalist for Süddeutsche Zeitung
The terrorist
Astrid Proll, 61, was a founder member of the RAF. She studied photography
in West Berlin, where she met Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin in the late
Sixties. She was sentenced to five and a half years in prison for bank
robbery. Today she works as a photojournalist and writer.
Doubts about the cause were not allowed. You were either with them or not.
After long discussions with Gudrun and Andreas about politics and tactics, I
decided: their way is my way. That there would be casualties on both sides
was never mentioned - it was obvious and it terrified me. We idealised the
resistance of the Vietcong and the liberation movement in Latin America and
Palestine; we wanted to act like them so we got hold of guns. As we didn't
know how to use them we went to a training camp of El Fatah [the Palestinian
organisation] in Jordan, where we crawled in the sand and climbed over
barbed wire fences - which was pretty useless as we were urban guerrillas.
We'd only gone there to learn how to shoot a gun. The gun was a “member's
card” for the RAF.
Everything in the RAF centred around Baader. With him in prison it was more
like a “free Baader” movement.
I was arrested in 1971 and kept in solitary in Ossendorf prison in Cologne. I
got very ill at that time and was released on health grounds in 1974. I fled
to England. I lived as Anna Puttick in London. I worked at the Matchbox toy
factory in Hackney, East London, and in public parks. I also trained
underprivileged youths to be mechanics at a garage in West Hampstead. I met
many left-wing people in England, but they were not so hysterical and
morally rigorous as the ones I knew in Germany. There was no space for an
armed left-wing group anyway - the IRA took it. What followed was far more
brutal than anything Germany has seen.
I was always on my guard and stayed away from the Germans in London. Some
people in the toy factory even called me “Baader-Meinhof”, not knowing that
they were dead-on.
I read about the suicides at Stammheim in the papers. I was really shocked.
Baader always wanted to live rather than shoot himself. Finally in 1978 the
police found me in the garage; everybody was very confused when I left. I
was extradited to Germany to face another trial in 1980 and served four
years in prison.
I hate the fact that we are all under pressure to repent. I have long
dissociated myself from the RAF, as early as when when I was in England.
However, we are stigmatised for our lives. For many people it is just black
or white - there is nothing in between. Those who died in Stammheim were
people who committed inhuman acts not because they were criminals, evil or
monstrous, but because they could not endure the unfairness and oppression
of this world.
The judge
Eberhard Foth, 77, was judge at the Stammheim trial against Andreas Baader,
Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe, which began in 1975.
After a trial lasting 192 days, the defendants were found guilty of murder
and attempted murder and given life sentences. They were not in court to
hear the sentences delivered: Meinhof had hanged herself during the trial;
the others did not bother to attend.
The Stammheim trial was the most outrageous court case over which I have
presided. The convicts refused to take part; they said that they were
political prisoners and did not accept the legitimacy of the court. The
atmosphere was very heated. The defendents shouted; we shouted back. They
called us fascist assholes, “rat pack” and pigs. At one point an RAF
terrorist who had to testify even grabbed my predecessor, Theodor Prinzing,
by the throat - sympathisers cheered in the courtroom.
The defence lawyers handed in claim after claim to interrupt the trial, and I
think that in doing this they neglected their very job, which was to defend
the culprits. After 88 attempts they succeeded in removing Prinzing as
presiding judge. As the eldest of the four associate judges, I succeeded
him. I tried to calm things down a bit. I did not volunteer for the job, as
all anger in court and from the public was then focused on me. My family was
under police protection; my children were accompanied to school; our house
was supplied with bulletproof glass. I even got a watchdog for the garden. I
felt safe but, then, you never know. Our whole society was suffering from a
collective madness.
I had my doubts that the US action in Vietnam was morally justified, but it
didn't make picking up a gun acceptable. They asked for Nixon to be brought
to the court as a witness - of course we had to decline that. They were
criminals, nothing else.
One day during the trial, Gudrun Ensslin's father visited me in my Stammheim
office. I had the feeling that he saw in her a spirit of resistance that he
had not dared to show during the Third Reich. He was no Nazi but he did not
protest, either - like so many Germans at that time. For him, Gudrun lead a
proxy war. Obviously he did not realise that things in Germany had moved on.
The jailer
Horst Bubeck, 75, was a prison officer in Stammheim, Stuttgart. From 1974
to 1977 he was in charge of the seventh floor of the maximum security wing,
which was reserved for Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and
Jan-Carl Raspe, founders of the RAF.
My first encounter with Ulrike Meinhof was painful: she kicked me in the
privates when I collected her from the prison yard. She arrived in 1974 from
Ossendorf prison in Cologne, where she had spent eight months in solitary
confinement, and as she was the first RAF terrorist in Stammheim, the
authorities made a great fuss.
On rare occasions she and the others talked to me in a civilised way, but
mostly they called me asshole or pig. I didn't care too much, as Baader
insulted the women as well: he called Ensslin a silly bitch, Meinhof a fat
cow. They always showed their intellectual superiority and made it clear
that they considered me a thug.
I am sick of the myth that the gang suffered isolation torture at Stammheim.
Their PR was brilliant. The authorities wanted to avoid international
criticism and ended up giving them privileges, including keeping them as a
group - this meant that they spent eight hours a day together, with no one
allowed to listen; they had TV sets, record players, newspapers, cooking
facilities, a gym cell. We had to cope with disturbances from other
prisoners who were offended by all these privileges. They were terrorists
being cared for by the state that they wanted to attack. Their lawyers
smuggled letters with orders to gang members outside. The RAF was never so
powerful as it was in Stammheim.
One day Jean-Paul Sartre came to visit Baader. I sat with them in a visitor's
cell and Baader said weird things about politics, which irritated Sartre.
Nevertheless, Sartre held a press conference later in which he said that
Baader had told him all about the unbearable situation in Stammheim. I was
shocked. I was with them all the time and there was no talk of that. At the
time I didn't dare to tell the truth. I should have done.
Ensslin and Meinhof were the intellectuals, Raspe was the technician, Baader
the womaniser - he even fathered a child in prison with one of his lawyers.
He pretended to be a macho but really he was a coward. I recollect him
weeping at the dentist's.
Night after night Meinhof wrote political communiqués in her cell, only for
Baader to tear them to pieces unread. Ensslin detested her, Raspe ignored
her. Finally she hanged herself in May 1976.
The others committed suicide on October 18, 1977. I was shocked at how they
died - Baader and Raspe shot themelves. We later learnt that their lawyers
had smuggled in the pistols. Our job was to ensure that prisoners wouldn't
come to any harm. We failed.
The hostage
Gabriele von Lutzau, 54, was a stewardess on a Lufthansa jet when, on
October 13, 1977, four members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine hijacked the plane after take-off in Majorca. They demanded
freedom for members of the RAF held in German prisons. After five days a
German special forces team stormed the plane, by then in Mogadishu, Somalia,
freeing the 87 hostages and shooting three of the hijackers.
When the Palestinians started waving their guns, I knew what they wanted and
what their link with the RAF was. Their speaker, Captain Mahmud, was a
sadist. He wanted to see others suffer. Everybody on board followed his
commands, but still he shot Captain Schumann and later kicked his corpse out
of the plane door, simply for the fun of it. Mahmud slapped me in the face
and told me to get on my knees. I stared at him with resolve. Suddenly he
laughed and said: “It's OK, get up.” He really was a psychopath.
When they finally put TNT on the plane walls to blow us up, I asked Mahmud to
hand over the microphone he was using to talk to the German negotiator. I
grabbed it and made a desperate appeal. I was angry, as I thought that the
German Government had decided to sacrifice us for the RAF prisoners. So I
said: “This is the end and perhaps it is better to die now than to live in a
world where human lives do not count at all.” I told the negotiator to tell
Rüdiger von Lutzau that I loved him. He was a pilot and we had been going
out for five months. I didn't know that he was sitting next to the
negotiator in Mogadishu airport, writing down everything I said. After the
kidnapping we married. I never again worked as a stewardess.
Art is my therapy and my sculptures now stand in quite a few private
collections. I work with a chainsaw to transform trees into sentinels,
hearts and birds.
What makes me angry is that the Government never seemed to care what happened
to the hostages of Mogadishu. They offered no psychological help, and never
gave most of us a chance to thank the commandos who freed us. All the
hostages still suffer, some became alcoholics, some killed themselves. We
will never get rid of this burden. So I am angry when I see RAF terrorists
being glorified in this new film. They were no revolutionaries; they were
criminals. People discuss granting them a reprieve. I am strictly against
that. All survivors and the relatives of victims suffer their whole lives,
so why should the culprits have it any better? Those who do brutal murders
should stay in jail for life.
Radical chic: why we lionised Ulrike and friends
There was a whiff of revolution about studying in the 1970s: the smell of
cordite rather than the Brie-like pong of unwashed socks that so
characterised the sit-ins of the anaemic British student rebellion. True, I
was at German universities in 1972 and 1973, when it was easier to sign up
for the romantic Bonnie-and-Clyde myth-making of Andreas, Ulrike and all
those interesting-looking girls on the wanted posters. The shooting of
bankers and businessmen came later. We were white, middle class and spent a
lot of time talking drunkenly about the imminent collapse of monopoly
capitalism. Out there, somewhere, the Baader-Meinhof gang was making it
happen: robbing banks in carnival masks, stealing BMWs (they preferred
Beamers), jumping out of windows and eluding the slow-thinking cops.
For a while, they became our heroes. And not just those of us with lank hair
and acne. Heinrich Böll (who went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature)
lashed out at the conservative Bild Zeitung for its coverage of the gang's
adventures: “It's not Fascist any more, not fascistoid, but naked fascism,
agitation, lies, dirt.” We nodded approvingly in our Frankfurt commune.
Just round the corner there was Joschka Fischer - taxi driver, book-stealing
anarchist, later Foreign Minister - whose car was used (unwittingly) by one
of the gang. Fischer was in a flat-share with Danny “The Red” Cohn-Bendit
(later in the European Parliament) who used to go to the kiosk in his
dressing gown to buy the papers and check on world affairs. That's how cool
we were.
The thing about this platonic love of the gun is that it went on too long. It
survived for a year or so because we shared common ground with the
desperados: we all hated what America was doing in Vietnam; we didn't like
SS veterans taking up important jobs in the West German establishment; we
disapproved of our parents. Then it started to get nasty - pipe bombs,
policemen killed - but the State seemed to get even more vicious. When
Ulrike was detained they forced her to have a brain scan; in jail they were
held for months in solitary confinement; 1973 was a year of hunger strikes
and forced feeding. Our heroes became victims and that seems to have misted
up our spectacles.
We grew up, of course. They didn't. By the time the Baader-Meinhof people were
shooting bankers on their doorsteps, I was working for the Financial Times,
my hair shorter, and distinctly out of sympathy. They no longer seemed
charming buccaneers but out-of-touch dogmatists. The suicides in jail - at a
time when there were other things to worry about in the world - came over as
pure narcissism.
The Germans threw away their prison keys rather than hold a public discussion
about how so many things had gone so badly wrong. The B-M gang grew out of a
protest movement that wanted to shatter the silence of its elders about the
war, about Nazism. But when the State eventually succeeded in locking them
up, it replaced the silence about the Holocaust with a silence about the
gang - about the hidden violence in society. And guess what? Those student
rebels who once treated Andreas and Ulrike as lifestyle gurus have long
since mutated into right-wing, neo-liberal commentators. I met one the other
day, at an Obama party, and we talked about old times.
“They were insane,” she said, “and we were off our rockers, too. How could we
have thought that robbing a bank was sexy?” Her daughter is training to be a
policewoman.
Roger Boyes
