Varieties of terrorist experience

Uwe Backes' Bleierne Jahre: Baader-Meinhof und danach [The Leaden Years: Baader-Meinhof and After] was published in 1991, near the end of the 23-year active career of the Baader-Meinhof Gang of the title (Rote Armee Fraktion, or RAF) and at a time when far-right terrorism was beginning to emerge as a more signficant problem for unifed Germany.

In light of recent polemics over domestic terrorism in the United States, it's useful to see the subject discussed in a different context, from a different time and at a point where both far-right and far-left terrorism were active problems of comparable significance. In a table displaying incidents of left- and rightwing terrorism in the German Federal Republic (BRD; West Germany) from 1968-1989, the left version exceeded the right version for each year in the comparison, with far-right terrorism becoming noticeably more active from 1980 on. Leftwing incidents also increased during that period.

But numerical comparisons can only tell us so much. The year during that period in which terrorism had the most significant political effect in the BRD was 1977, the year in which the RAF kidnapped and eventually "executed" Hanns Martin Schleyer, the head of the BRD's employers' association, which eventually involved the kidnapping of a Lufthansa flight by Palestinian terrorists acting in solidarity with the RAF, and the prison suicides of the RAF's two main leaders, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ennslin. That year was the high-point of the terror that the RAF's actions were designed to inspire and the period in which the German government was under the greatest pressure to step outside its own legal bounds in the fight against the RAF.

So not all acts of terrorism are equal in their political impact. And not all terrorists are equal in terms of their motivations. Backes devotes his longest chapter to biographies of terrorists, including Baader and Ennslin, the other two main RAF founders Horst Mahler and Ulrike Meinhof, Bommi Baumann of a leftwing terrorist group Bewegung 2.Juni, Hans-Joachim Klein of the RAF, and neo-Nazi Odfried Hepp. He then summarizes his research on these and other "terrorist careers".

In the BRD during the period under study, the active terrorists had been most between roughly 20 and 40, with leftwing groups composed more of people near the same age and rightwing ones having a wider spread. Left groups had more female terrorists, right ones were almost exclusively male. Most were from prosperous families. Some kind of serious disruptions in their families' lives was a common factor, e.g., a missing father, divorce.

Among the three leading leftwing terrorist groups in the BRD - RAF, Bewegung 2.Juni and the Revolutionäre Zelle (RZ) - a disproportionate number came from Protestant families. Gudrun Ennslin's father was a Protestant minister. Backes speculates that a Protestant emphasis on the notion that correct belief will make everything right may have played a particular role.

Students composed a large portion of the left terrorists, and liberal arts studies like sociology, education and psychology were especially well represented. Members of far-right terrorist groups tended to have less than the average education compared to other Germans their age. For both groups, a period between completing their education and becoming established in a working career was the most likely period of recruitment.

Backes also describes the evolution of organizational forms of extremist groups involved in violence during the 1980s toward more "autonomous" forms, small groups working together in general but loose coordination with like-minded militants. As violent fringe groups in the US and other countries were discovering around the same time, a decentralized, loosely-knit form of organization is a different kind of challenge to the authorities than a centralized organization. Even in the RAF, the group evolved from a centrally-directed form under the original founding members to a more decentralized mode of operation over time. The "third generation" of the RAF active in the 1980s and 1990s were more successful in evading capture. And even now, their identities are less well known that those of the "first" and "second generations". And developing communications technology allows for even more diffuse methods of operation.

He uses a pyramid diagram of the type that management writers are so fond of employing to illustrate the political environment of the RAF, which could also be applied to other groups, as well. A circle diagram would probably be even more appropriate, particularly for the later, more decentralized forms of organization. There was at any given time a hard core of active, violent militants who were involved in actions against persons (kidnappings, assassinations, bank robberies). There was a larger group around the core who were also involved in violence but concetrated on violence against things, objects like buildings, in actions that were designed to have symbolic value rather than hurt people. These could be seen as two parts of the hard core group. In the first and second RAF "generations", the hard core was particularly isolated because they had given up their identities and had to concentrate most of their energy on securing money, weapons and identities papers of various kinds. The hard core of the "third generation" apparently mostly kept their own identities so they didn't have to rely on high-risk activities like robbery and kidnapping to finance their terrorism.

There was a militant group outside the illegals that would engage in smaller violent actions, like throwing rocks during demonstrations or more minor vandalism. This group weren't necessarily all living in the "underground". Then there was a larger group of active sympathizers who were engaged in agitation and propaganda.

These particular environments are vitally important to understanding not only these groups from 20 or 30 years ago but domestic terrorist groups today, as well. Even when the violent actions take the form of seeming "lone wolf" attacks, they are operating in a particular political and psychological environment. Including those who suffering from actual mental illness, which is the "lone nut" script into which the American press tries to squeeze any and all incidents of far-right terrorism. The path to violent action and the selection of targets operate within that larger framework. A leftwing terrorist is not likely to try to assassinate an abortion provider. A neo-Nazi is more likely to shoot up a crowd in a Holocaust museum than to attack a white racist TV commentator.

Recruitment into the hard core of violent militants also typically takes place from the related political circle of activists. That may seem obvious, but it's an important fact. If the broader context of sympathizers is reduced, then the potential for recruiting new violent activists is decreased. But that also means that neither authorities nor those in civil society concerned to reduce the domestic terrorist potential can simply ignore the terrorists' political goals and environment, any more than they can ignore their personal psychology, their choice of weaponry or their criminal modus operandi.

I'll quote Backes' concluding lines here, which focus on the role of fanaticism and the Good vs. Evil Manichean mindset in the phenomenon of terrorism:

Der Terrorismus belegt anschaulich die Macht extremistischer Ideologien. Marxismus, Anarchismus und Nationalismus heißen die intellektuellen Drogen, die das politische Wahrnehmungsvermögen trüben, scheinbar schlüssige Antworten auf alle Probleme bieten und das Verlangen nach „großen" Zielen befriedigen. Aus dem bedingungslosen Einsatz für die einzig „gerechte" Sache sind in der Vergangenheit die größten Verbrechen gegen die Menschheit begangen worden. Wo der Glaube an die absolute Richtigkeit der eigenen Überzeugungen Raum greift, gelten Toleranz und Liberalität als unverzeihliche Schwächen. Für die Erreichung höchster Ziele erscheint letzlich jedes Mittel geeignet. Hier tritt die totalitäre Wurzel des Terrorismus in demokratischen Verfassungsstaaten zutage.

[Terrorism graphically demonstrates the power of extremist ideologies. Marxism, anarchism and nationalism are the names of the intellectual drugs that dull the political perception, offer seemingly definitive answers to all problems and satisfy the longing for "great" objectives. From the unconditional commitment to the only "just" thing, the greatest crimes against humanity have been committed in the past. Where the belief on the absolute rightness of one's own conviction gains ground, tolerance and liberality are seen as unforgiveable weaknesses. For the achievement of the highest goals, any means appears appropriate. Here outcrop the totalitarian roots of terrorism in constitutional democratic states.]

Tags: deutschland, german politics, germany,
postwar germany, raf, rote armee fraktion, terrorism

Violence and silence

We lift up our prayer against the odds
And fear the silence is the voice of God
Of God. Of God.

- Emmylou Harris, "The Pearl"

Alfred Herrhausen (1930-1989)

Carolyn Emcke's Stumme Gewalt: Nachdenken uber die RAF [Mute Violence: Reflections on the RAF] (2008) is a long essay by the goddaughter of Alfred Herrhausen, the Vorstandssprecher (CEO) of Deutsche Bank. Herrhausen was killed by the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) in late 1989, nearly 20 years ago. His assassination was one of the group's last high-profile actions. The murder has never been solved.

(I started this before the news that Dr. George Tiller had been gunned down in his church by a Christian terrorist gave it an immediately relevance to today's current news.)

Emcke gives us the basic facts of the killing. But her essay is really about her own mourning and her desire to achieve a closure she has not yet been able to achieve. But the story is also about silence, about the burden created by the silence of others that leaves a lasting burden for the survivors of someone who is killed.

She talks about a recurring dream that she had in which she would be sitting down with the terrorists who were planning the act and discussing with them why they wanted to do it and trying to talk them out of it. And she builds on that image throughout the book, imagining what it would be like if she could just talk to those who killed her godfather, with whom she was very close. How it would be if such a conversation could take place without accusation or threat, but completely openly. If she could talk to those who planned and executed the act to just understand what they were thinking, what their reasoning was, what they think about their actions from the perspective of today.

She continues on to propose in all seriousness an amnesty for the remaining RAF activists so that they actually could come forward, voluntarily and without the tradeoff of amnesty for their willingness to speak. While she makes good arguments for the idea, she also realizes that it's likely to remain a fantasy. And she talks about why that is so. The state is understandably reluctant to set aside its laws against murder for specific cases, and Germany has no statute of limitations on murder. Even if a special arrangement were made for the RAF cases to take prosecution off the table, those involved with the killing would still have powerful reasons to avoid speaking about it. They may have spouses and children who they don't want to know about that aspect of their past. Even if an individual wanted to talk themselves, they might have to betray others that were involved in doing so.

Another set of secrets have to do with the the East German (DDR) and West German (BRD) governments. The RAF was not directed by the DDR. But the DDR did provide them significant support from the start, including free passage through the DDR (and other countries of the "socialist bloc"), refuge and new identities during the 1980s for several members who had burned out on the underground terrorist life, and some direct military training. (Palestinian guerrilla groups also provided some training for the RAF.) A lot of the history of the RAF and the DDR is known. Other parts of it would be either "known unknowns" or "unknown unknown", to use Rummy's famous terms. The recent revelation that the policeman was the shooter in the killing of a demonstrator in West Berlin in 1967 - June 2, so today is the 42nd anniversary - is a reminder that there are still DDR secrets to be revealed.

I can't pretend to be able to give Emcke's specific proposal for an RAF amnesty dispassionate consideration because I'm so stunned at the willingness of our media and political establishments - sadly, of both parties - to like torturers from the Cheney-Bush administration skate without enforcing the law on the perpetrators. Torture actually is a distinct category of law from murder. But I find it hard to imagine how it can be a good idea in the end to indemnify people for murder. As a practical matter, this sometimes has to be done in civil war situations. And Emcke does reference "transitional justice" concepts in arguing for the kind of amnesty she proposes. But I'm not convinced, not least because in the case of the RAF, only they and a small handful of supporters through they were in a civil war in 1989, if even they did. And with a massive peaceful revolution under way at that moment in the DDR and other Soviet bloc countries, it's hard to see how the RAF's situation at that moment can be compared those in a civil war.

But she makes a moving statement on the effect of those unknowns, that thick and heavy silence, on the survivors of victims of terrorism.

Another part of Emmy's "The Pearl" seems appropriate for a conclusion:

It is the heart that kills us in the end
Just one more poor broken bone that cannot mend
As it was now and ever shall be, Amen.
Amen. Amen.

And here's a video of her performing the entire song, along with Buddy Miller, Patty Cayamo and Shawn Colvin:

Tags: carolyn emcke, raf, rote armee fraktion, stumme gewalt

Tom Hayden on the Weather Underground's "revolutionary violence"

Mark Rudd in 1968 as a leader of the Columbia University strike

After seeing the German film Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex last year, which tells the story through 1977 of the far-left German terrorist group the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), I've been reading quite a bit about the RAF and related themes from the 1960s and 1970s in Germany. The RAF's story didn't end then. The "third generation" of the RAF were still operating in the early 1990s and formally disbanded in 1998.

The Weather Underground Organization (WUO) was an analogous American group to the RAF, although after an accident during the construction of a bomb killed three of their own members, the WUO gave up any further plans of killing people. Those three were the only known fatalities directly connected to the WUO, though some former members became involved with groups like the Black Liberation Army that did commit homicides. The RAF, on the other hand, was considerably more lethal in its actions. The WUO mainly concentrated on bombing bathrooms in public buildings, including the Pentagon and the US Capitol.

Tom Hayden was written a long review of a recently-released memoir by Mark Rudd, a former WUO member and leader: Tom Hayden on Mark Rudd Truthdig.com 05/08/09. While Hayden was supportive of the concept of violent political action under certain circumstances during the 1960s, his own efforts concentrated on nonviolent forms of protest. As he mentions in this essay, the concepts of protest, resistance and revolutionary action were seen by left radicals in those days as distinct political strategies.

Since Terrorism is now the main marketing tool justifying the US keeping a military budget equal to the rest of the whole world's combined, long after the fall of the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union, I think there's some real value in understanding earlier experiences of Western countries with terrorism.

Hayden's take on Rudd brings his own experiences to bear, as well as his decades-long acquaintance with Rudd, his own experiences in debates over political violence, and his own studies of urban violence, including gang violence, such as Street Wars: Gangs and the Future of Violence (2004) and Rebellion in Newark: Official violence and ghetto response (1967). The text of the latter first appeared in the New York Review of Books under the title The Occupation of Newark, where as of this writing it is publicly accessible.

Hayden seems to agree with Rudd characterization of the WUO as a cult:

But most of what Rudd tells is deeply disturbing, though illuminating, in its unemotional matter-of-factness. In describing the Weather Underground as a cult, Rudd writes: "I knew that the whole thing was nuts but couldn’t intervene to stop it. … I believed as much as anyone else, perhaps more so, in the need to harden ourselves through group criticism." Feeling "addled," he agrees to take a break from the national leadership and accept demotion to its New York collective. He is unable to tell us exactly why, writing only that he was experiencing "the competitive world of the Weatherman hierarchy from the underside now." Yet he "couldn't allow my conscious mind even a tiny doubt as to the direction of the organization." [my emphasis]

"Cult" is a word that is sometimes carelessly tossed around. A group can be violent and fanatical without being a cult. But cults have a strong tendency to become violent and fanatical.

I believe that both the WUO and the German RAF were cults. One characteristic they shared was that by going "underground", which meant changing identities and attempting to drop of the radar of the law, both groups isolated themselves severely from normal social contacts, including political contacts. Without making a judgment on whether they were cults or not, groups like the Irish Republican Army, Hizbollah and Hamas all had military wings that carried out violent actions but also functioned in some real sense as part of a larger organization which had distinct political components not immersed in violent action or isolated in secrecy. In Weimar Germany, the Social Democrats (SPD), the Communists (KPD) and the Nazis (NSDAP) all had both violent groups of some kind or another but also functioned as political parties in election campaigns and in Parliament.

For the WUO as for the RAF, the "armed struggle" itself was their politics. I don't want to give the impression their ideologies were identical, they weren't. But both groups saw themselves as revolutionary vanguards inside imperialist countries acting as allies of Third World revolutionary movements in Vietnam, Latin America and elsewhere. Both groups embraced some form of the interpretation of the Cuban Revolution promoted by Che Guevara and Regis Debray, the French leftist writer who elaborated the Guevarist theory in his book Revolution in the Revolution? (1967). The essential notion was, make armed struggle and supporters will come.

Tom Hayden

The notion was a spectacular misjudgment of the political situation in the United States for the WUO, as it was for the RAF in Germany. Consequently, the ideas of the groups became closed within the group and reinforcing, in conditions encouraging political paranoia. As Hayden points out:

Ironically, the Justice Department dropped federal charges against Rudd and the Weather Underground for fear of revealing their undercover techniques, and in 1978 federal prosecutors actually brought charges against the FBI for their Weathermen probes.

So there was an element of "just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not after you" in the WUO's situation. A number of leading figures among the militant Black Panthers died in extralegal killings by police. And, of course, the 1960s in the US were marked by some very high-profile political assassinations.

Still, this self-imposed isolation doomed the WUO's larger political aims from the start. Sara Robinson of the Orcinus blog and the Campaign for America's Future has done an important post on The Far Right's First 100 Days: Shifting Into Overdrive 04/29/09 analyzing the stages which analysts and law-enforcement need to watch in the radicalization of groups. She is focusing in particular on far-right groups in America, and the particulars of a group's ideology and home country politics are important factors. I don't want to suggest that extremists groups on the far right and the far left are somehow interchangeably, a persistent but potentially bad misleading concept. Still, some basics of group dynamics cross a lot of ideological lines. Or, as she explains it:

We need to look at what long experience has taught us about the past escalation patterns of right-wing rhetoric and violence, and figure out where we currently stand within those patterns.

We actually know quite a bit about this. Most national agencies tasked with keeping tabs on political and religious extremist groups look for specific signs that help them sort out who's just talking the talk, and who's actually getting ready to walk the walk. The criteria vary from agency to agency; and our collective insight into these patterns changes and deepens every year. But there are some generally-accepted principles ...

And she emphasizes:

One of the watershed moments in the development of a religious or political radical group is the day they decide to go upcountry, building some sort of secluded retreat or community away from the prying eyes of the authorities. The Aryan Nations, the Fundamentalist Mormons, Jim Jones....the list is long, because this is such a universal moment in the radicalization process. It's also the next place the gears shift.

In the case of the WUO and the RAF, going "upcountry" took the form of cutting themselves off from any normal social and political context and going underground.

This is a dangerous development. Groups that try to separate always claim that they're retreating to "live in peace" - but too often, peace is about the last thing that results from this. Goin' up to the country is an overt declaration that the group believes that the mainstream culture is "out to get us," and is now asserting its right to live outside the law. There's an unquestioned conviction that the outside world means them harm - and that they must organize and arm themselves for the coming showdown.

The isolation also allows high-dominance leaders to concentrate their power over group members, without any pesky social or legal recourse to fairness. Suspicion and dependency flourish. People learn that might makes right, and come to accept violence as a natural and proper way to deal with conflict. This is why law enforcement groups consider the moment of physical retreat as sort of Rubicon beyond which the likelihood of violence increases dramatically. We should be very concerned that the right wing seems determined to go there.

The one caveat to Sara's analysis I would make in the context of the WUO and the RAF is that they didn't claim to be looking to "live in peace", nor did they perceive themselves that way. Their "goin' up to the country" leap into illegality was expressly designed to make armed warfare on their respective states and economic elites. But their version of going upcountry fit the pattern she describes here: it let pathological leadership factors flourish, it put an emphasis on violence, and it often made normal critical judgment or realistic evaluations of their situation impossible. As Hayden says of Mark Rudd in his WUO phase, "Rudd, by his own account, often seems to be under the spell of charismatic, authoritarian leadership, vulnerable to the most fanatic of the fanatics, severed from his realities of only two years before."

Despite Hayden finding Rudd's behavior during this period "deeply disturbing", he also writes:

Yet I know Mark Rudd to be a good man, a useful person despite all this, and one must ask, how can that possibly be? Partly it is because I believe individuals are capable of surprising changes. I have befriended, and worked with, numerous people who have inflicted enormous damage on themselves, their loved ones, and society at some stage in their past lives. They include strung-out returning soldiers, prison inmates, former gang members, addicts, suicidal personalities of all kinds. Some of them have killed people. They have done unspeakable things but are not incorrigible. As the woman character says in Bernard Malamud’s "The Natural," "We have two lives ... the life we learn with and the life we live after that. Suffering is what brings us towards happiness."

I don't know if Mark Rudd will or even should be happy, but he is living a life of amends.

Despite the valid generalizations that can be made about the aspects of groups like the WUO or the RAF or violent far-right groups in terms of their criminal behaviors or the cult dynamics in some of these groups, the political context of their actions is also important to understand what they are doing. In the case of RAF leaders like Andreas Baader or possibly Horst Mahler and religious cult leaders like Jim Jones and David Koresh, their involvement with their particular groups may have been more opportunistic, in the sense of incorrigibly criminal characters hooking up with a group that meets their pathological needs.

But its a mistake to think political terrorist groups as primarily pathological nihilists, though some come closer to that condition than others. That's also true of criminals who expressly give far-right political reasons for their crimes. It matters in terms of understanding how to limit the harm such groups can cause in a democratic society. But it also addresses the phenomenon Hayden highlights with Mark Rudd: someone capable of plotting to commit terrible crimes or even doing so isn't necessarily an incorrigible criminal. Hayden:

As the research and writings of James Gilligan demonstrate, violence is more situational than innate. Violence and shame are closely connected. The acceleration to violent behavior can be breathtaking. The violence of the young signals a dysfunction of the elders, not a nihilist seed. [my emphasis]

He also make a provocative point with this observation:

That may be more books than those devoted to such organizations as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or the Students for a Democratic Society, not to mention community organizing or the farmworkers’ movement of those years, and the genre is likely to grow, revealing an abiding fascination with the question of why it was that some peaceful dissenters turned to violence so suddenly in the late ’60s. The Weather Underground took credit for 24 bombings altogether and, according to federal sources, there were additionally several thousand acts of violence during the same years. In 1969-70 alone, there were more than 550 fraggings by soldiers, according to one authoritative historian of the Vietnam War.

The fascination with such violence is not new. Similar themes can be found in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 19th-century novel about young Russian nihilists, "The Possessed," in Joseph Conrad’s "Under Western Eyes," Henry James’ "The Princess Casamassima," Andre Malraux’s tale of the Shanghai uprising, "Man’s Fate," and, of course, Ernest Hemingway’s stories of the Spanish civil war.

What explains the enduring interest in such radicals? I believe it has something to do with exploring the extremes of personal commitment. To fail heroically, though miserably, is seen by many as attaining a greater glory than the rewards to be had from the mundane life of patient political work. As Karl Marx wrote of the Paris Commune, the French Communards at least had stormed the heavens. And as Rudd quotes Erich Fromm quoting Nietzsche, "There are times when anyone who does not lose his mind has no mind to lose." [my emphasis]

I don't know if his quantitative observation about what has been written on these subjects is correct. But there certainly is an enduring interest in the topic of violent fringe groups that goes beyond the extremely limited political influence they had in any normal sense of the word. The aspect of extreme commitment is surely one part of the interest. After all, their are roles in society in which extreme commitment is not only expected but highly honored: soldiers, police, firefighters, spies.

Part of it is also that the story of the WUO, like that of the RAF, is simultaneously a political story and a crime drama. And there's the aspect I mentioned at the start of this post. Terrorism is a major policy concern right now. It seems perfectly normal and understandable that lots of people would be interested in understanding more about it.

Tags: mark rudd, raf, rote armee fraktion, terrorism, tom hayden,
weather underground

Fanaticism

Peter Conzen's Fanatismus: Psychoanalyse eines unheimlichen Phänomens (2005) [Fanaticism: Psychoanalysis of an Eerie Phenonenon] uses a number of case studies to describe fanaticism from a Freudian psychoanalytic viewpoint. The parts of the clinical sections that stand out most for me are the key role played by fixation on Good vs. Evil in fanaticism and his point that fanaticism can be a normal if not necessarily healthy response to relatively short-term conditions or extreme stress.

In psychoanalytic terms, "Fanatismus in seiner ureigentlichen Ausprägung ist freilich Ausdruck inneren Gespaltenseins, das Absorbiertwerden der Identität von hohen ethischen Idealen und gleichzeitig das Fixiertbleiben an starre Über-Ich-Introjekte." (Fanaticism in its most basic characteristic is a clear expression of inner division, of the identity becoming absorbed by higher ethical ideals and at the same time remaining fixated on inflexible superego introjections.)

Psychoanalysis assumes three distinctions in the mind's "software": the id, the ego and the superego. As Sigmund Freud himself explained in his 1926 Encyclopædia Britannica article, "Psychoanalysis":

Mental Topography.--Topographically, psychoanalysis regards the mental apparatus as a composite instrument, and endeavours to determine at what points in it the various mental processes take place. According to the most recent psychoanalytic views, the mental apparatus is composed of an "id," which is the reservoir of the instinctive impulses, of an "ego," which is the most superficial portion of the id and one which is modified by the influence of the external world, and of a "super-ego," which develops out of the id, dominates the ego and represents the inhibitions of instinct characteristic of man. Further, the property of consciousness has a topographical reference; for processes in the id are entirely unconscious, while consciousness is the function of the ego's outermost layer, which is concerned with the perception of the external world.

The superego, in this schema, is an unconscious part of the mind which is the internalization of parental and other social authority, including the conscience but not synonymous with it. In its healthy functioning, the superego tries to restrain the ego from deciding to do prohibited things as well as pushes the ego to do things that it considers necessary. So it would hold the ego back from indulging instinctual impulses toward violence or cruelty, while pushing the ego to fulfil positive duties and obligations.

In Conzen's view, fanaticism involves a division of the superego, in which the evil actions that have to be restrained are experienced not as internal restraints within oneself but as projections onto others, others who must therefore be restrained, attacked or destroyed. So, in examples he uses, those directing an investigation for the Inquisition or staging political show trials may be unconsciously detecting and combating their own doubts and forbidden impulses by projecting them onto the accused. In such cases, forcing the accused to admit their own guilt often becomes a primary and obsessive goal.

The focus in fanaticism becomes not so much the positive goal of the Good itself but on the obsessive hatred of the Evil that stands in the way of that goal. Reflective thinking around the hated object is suppressed by the fanatic. As a process based on fanaticism proceeds, the fanatics come to see more and more people as part of the enemy and become more isolated from reality. Or, to put it a slightly different way, their opportunities and skills in reality-testing can become drastically reduced, producing a fatal cycle of escalation.

In situations of stress produced by traumatic physical experiences, humiliations, sudden disruptions of personal relationships, "people not infrequently react passionately and explosively", writes Conzen. Such short-term moments in which strong feelings of hatred are direct in a concentrated way are instance of the kind of attitudes that become longer and more chronic in fanaticism.

Conzen points out that fanaticism can be and often is a part of a transitional period in a person's life, especially in adolescence and late adolescence. This kind of fanaticism, people usually grow out of it in some form or another. Other people develop personalities that have strong fanatical tendencies. And in cult-like groups or well-organized, "totalistic" mass movements, people can experience a type of induced fanaticism to which they might not be inclined if they were in more normal circumstances.

Conzen discusses several cases in which personal and group fanaticism played a major role: Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement; the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang; Al Qa'ida; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and, the Bush administration's "war on terror". While he is generally careful with his evidence and reasonably sparing in his conclusions, such discussions are an intellectual minefield because of the difficulties of "psychohistory" and of drawing conclusions from individual psychology for group phenomena.

For instance, in his discussion of Hitler's biography, Conzen draws some significant speculative conclusions from an episode in Hitler's childhood to which Conzen refers as the "Rienzi experience" in reference to a Wagner opera. This information comes from a story told by Hitler's boyhood pal August Kubizek in his book Adolf Hitler, Mein Jugendfreund, published in 1953, decades after the event. Brigitte Hamann, a Vienna historian who has researched Hitler's childhood and adolescence in great detail, also credits Kubizek's account of the "Rienzi experience". But it's a reminder that speculating about the psychological condition of even a figure like Hitler of whom we have detailed knowledge nevertheless involves a great deal of judgment on sources which, even if accurate, are not sufficient for a real clinical diagnosis.

Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ennslin, 1968

Conzen discusses in the case of the RAF members the role their images of the Third Reich and their elders' attitudes towards it may have played in their own actions and their understanding of the world. But he seems unaware that in the case of three of the four main founding figures of the RAF - Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ennslin and Horst Mahler - that either they or close family members had some significant direct contact with the "brown" (Nazi) scene. Meinhof's husband Klaus Rainer Röhl was an underground Communist Party member in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as was she. But he remembered fondly at least some aspects of his time in the Hitler Youth organization as a young person. And starting from the mid-1970s he moved to being a hardline rightwinger.

Mahler had also had a more "brown" political orientation in his youth, and he later swung even further to the right than Röhl. After serving prison time for crimes committed as part of the far-left RAF, he later wound up active in the far-right Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) and just this year was sentenced to six years jail time for Holocaust denial (Sechs Jahre Haft für Horst Mahler wegen Volksverhetzung AFP/Google Nachrichten 25.02.2009).

Ennslin's fiancee and the father of her child, Bernward Vesper, was the son of a famous pro-Nazi "blood-and-soil" poet, Will Vesper. She and Bernward actively marketed a book of his father's poetry to the far-right scene in the 1960s, though Ennslin was more generally drawn toward the left.

Conzen finds personal fanatical tendencies in those three as well as the fourth leading founder, Andreas Baader. The ideology of the RAF was a variety of Marxism-Leninism. But it was more directly influenced by the concept that Régis Debray developed as an interpretation of Ché Guevara's approach to guerrilla warfare, which Debray applied more generally to Latin America. In the view adopted by the RAF, revolutionaries in the Third World were at war against world imperialism headed by the US in a system of which NATO and the West German Federal Republic was a part. They saw their role as allies of that revolution in the imperialist world, who would hinder imperialism's operations in the underdeveloped world by striking at them physically in Germany. The also held a variety of Debray's "foco" theory, in which they saw an immediate revolutionary potential in West Germany which they would tap into by starting an armed struggle there. This would force the Federal Republic to drop the civilized and democratic mask hiding what they saw as its true fascist nature, thus polarizing the political situation and drawing more supporters to the armed struggle.

This was a reality-challenged understanding of the situation in both Germany and the world. But, as Conzen and others have observed, the RAF didn't spend a lot of time elaborating political theory. Their focus was very much on the hated enemy, which they saw incarnated in US forces in Germany and in the Federal Republic itself. In the case of Andreas Baader, although he had been hanging around the leftwing scene in Berlin since the mid-1960s, he never gave much evidence of having any well-developed political ideas. He was a narcissistic character who had a remarkable ability to attract intense loyalty from those who came under his personal influence. He and his girlfriend Ennslin were the real core of the RAF leadership until their suicides in 1977.

Conzen also notes that, once the main early leaders had been apprehended in 1972 after a couple of years underground, the RAF, including what became known as the "second" and "third" generations, largely became focused on freeing the imprisoned members of their own organization.

Conzen sees many others in the RAF as being drawn in to a state of induced fanaticism in the cultish hothouse of the underground RAF. He points to the intense pressure, for example, that it took to persuade Susanne Albrecht of the "second" generation to set up the intended kidnapping of her own godfather, an attempt that ended in his death instead. It's also a notable fact that a number of RAF members, after they left the organization, were able to live seemingly normal lives without the fanatical drive with which they operated in the organization. This was true of several "second generation" members, including Albrecht, who were taken in by the East German regime (DDR) and set up in normal lives with new identities there. And it was true of some others who served prison time in West Germany and went on to lead lives seemingly free of the previous fanaticism.

Tags: fanaticism, raf, rote armee fraktion

Die Familie Röhl (4): Klaus Rainer Röhl

Klaus Rainer Röhl, now a conservative nationalist (in American terms), "national-liberal" in German terms

This is the fourth of four posts on Bettina Röhl's book, So macht Kommunismus Spass! Ulrike Meinhof, Klaus Rainer Röhl und die Akte KONKRET. The book is a combination of family memoir and original historical research that reads something like a spy novel. The previous post can be found here.

Klaus almost inevitably becomes a secondary character in Bettina's book about her parents, given the drama and infamy of her mother's later career as a terrorist with the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF). I've touched on some of the most significant parts of his role in the book in the previous posts. He comes off in Bettina's account - in which he is heavily quoted from interviews she did for the book - as an entreprenuerial type of guy. Even though it's more than a bit unorthodox of him to have take "venture capital" for his Konkret magazine from Communist East Germany (DDR, after the German initials).

But after he and Ulrike broke from the underground Communist Party directed from the DDR and they cut off funds for the magazine, he made it work in good entrepreneurial fashion, selling advertisements, getting donations for the magazine, and coming up with marketing techniques to boost circulation. He seems to have been especially good with the networking/smoozing/social-climbing aspects of the publishing business in Hamburg.

His (and Ulrike's) accomplishments with Konkret are illustrated by this brief (and not entirely flattering) description from 1968: Die Revolte (2007), Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Rüdiger Dammann, eds.:

Die Zeitschrift "Konkret" erscheint bis heute und bezeichnet sich selbst als einzige linke Publikums-zeitschrift Deutschlands. 1955 von Klaus Rainer Röhl aus dem Vorläufer "Studentenkurier" gegründet, wurde die Zeitschrift zunachst vom Zentralkomitee der FDJ und von der verbotenen KPD finanziert. Zeitweilige Chefredakteurin und Star-Autorin war Ulrike Meinhof, bis diese sich, nach ihrer Beteiligung an der Befreiung Andreas Baaders, zum Untergrundkampf entschloss. Röhl musste sich von seinem Nachfolger Hermann Gremliza (ab 1974) den Vorwurf gefallen lassen, "Konkret" danach zu einer "Yellow Press der APO" gemacht zu haben, da die Inhalte mit der Zeit immer populärer und auch sexistischer wurden. Gremliza hatte den Anspruch, "Konkret" wieder zur "Speerspitze eines seriösen linken Journalismus zu machen. Und zumindest hat von Theodor W. Adorno über Heinrich Bö11 bis Jean Paul Sartre die Speerspitze der europäischen Linken mindestens einmal in den letzten Jahrzehnten in "konkret" geschrieben.

[The magazine Konkret still appears today and syles itself as the only German magazine for the popular left audience. Founded in 1955 by Klaus Rainer Röhlfrom its predecessor Studentenkurier, the magazine was first financed by the Central Committee of the FDJ [DDR-directed Communist Youth organization] and by the outlawed KPD [DDR-directed West German Communist Party]. It's sometime chief editor and star author was Ulrike Meinhof, until she decided for the underground strugge after her participation in the freeing of Andreas Baader [from police custody]. Röhl found himself accused by his successor Hermann Gremlize (beginning 1974) that he had made Konkret into the "Yellow Press of the APO" [extra-parliamentary opposition], because the contents over time became more and more popular [i.e., less intellectual] and also more and more sexist. Gremliza had the ambition to make Konkret again into the "spearhead of a serious leftist journalism". And at the least, the spearheads of the European left from Theodor W. Adorno to Heinrich Bö11 to Jean Paul Sartre have written at least once in recent decades for Konkret.]

That last sentence leaves the impression that it was only under Gremliza's ownership and editorial direction that his occurred, but that was not the case. Röhl also published such high-profile writers in the magazine.

In Bettina's book, Klaus appears most sympathetic during the time immediately following Ulrike's going underground. The stress of having your ex-wife become a fugitive from justice on attempted murder charges would have been bad enough. But as I described in the first post, Ulrike also sent their twin daughters to Sicily and almost sent them to a Palesinitan orphans' camp in Jordan. They were missing for four months before Stefan Aust, a former Konkret staffer, retrieved the kids from Sicily thanks to a tip from someone who had left the RAF group.

In the weeks following, Klaus had to contend with the constant threat that the girls would be kidnapped again and sent to a Palestinian camp. Working his connections, he got a commitment from the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) which ran the orphans' camps that they would protect the children and refuse to let the RAF put them into a camp. Soon the RAF turned their immediate attention more exclusively to bank robberies and burglaries of government offices to steal documents like passports to facilitate their illegal activities.

One can easily imagine that going through such an experience would make a person rethink certain aspects of his life. Whatever the motivation, Klaus changed his public persona. In a book published in 1974, Fünf Finger und keine Faust, he described his years as a secret Communist acting on the behalf of the DDR in publishing Konkret. Bettina's books adds documentation to those activities through interviews and through documents from the archives of the Stasi, the DDR's secret police.

As Bettina recounts it in her Epilogue, Klaus joined the SPD (Social Democratic Party), which had been considered little more than fascists with clean shaves by the APO, not to speak of how the terrorist groups saw them. He did some more publishing ventures, none of them notably successful. As Bettina rather delicately puts it, his later magazines, all of them short-lived, were "increasingly filled with naked girls".

In 1992, he began studying with Ernst Nolte, an historian who had by then become notorious for some seriously revisionist history, such as the argument that the Holocaust was the fault of the Russians. Klaus became a member of the liberal FDP (Free Democratic Party) - liberal in the European sense, not the American - and became a conservative nationalist, which is called "national liberal" in Germany. (Again, "liberal" means something different in most of the world than it does in the US.)

In his articles and in books like Verbotene Trauer: Ende der deutschen Tabus (2002) [Forbidden Mourning: End of the German Taboos] Deutsche Tabus: Ungefragte Antworten (2004) [German Taboos: Answers to Questions Not Asked], he has expounded the dreary liturgies of German nationalist types in undistinguished prose. In Verbotene Trauer, he begins by defending Hitler against accusations that he had lost faith in the greatness of the German Volk by the end. The rest is a long recitation of rightwing whining about how bad the Germans had it during the Second World War, with no meaningful political context other than whiny nationalism, and how the tyranny of leftist political corrections and the guity-tripping about the Jews has prevented the German people from properly understanding it all.

In the history of the real world, the "de-Nazification" program after the war was little more than a joke. But Klaus argues that it was instead horrendously effective and continues to this day, thanks in particular to those Jews of the "Frankfurt School", in the form of "collective guilt". In particular, collective guilt for the Holocaust. Again, in the real world, German leaders and intellectuals have pretty much always rejected any notion of "collective guilt". The formula used by German officials is that there is no such things as collective guilt, but there is collective responsibility. (A formula that American politicians could usefully import.)

You get the drift. And there's no lack of complaining about how the Germans paid Israel and other Jews a lot of money and yadda, yadda. You could describe both the books I mentioned in the terms Stefan Reinecke uses in reference to Horst Mahler, a founder of the RAF who later became a flaming rightwinger, as "germanische Donnergrollen." Mahler went even further to the right than Klaus did, but that's another story.

The sad state to which Klaus has come in his rightwing politics is illustrated by an essay called "Götterdämmerung: Was wird bleiben von 1968?" (Twilight of the gods: What will remain of 1968 ["the Sixties"]?) from Deutsche Tabus:

Was hat die Generation '68 geschaffen, und was war positiv an 1968? Nichts. Das Land ist vernachlässigt wie seine Städte und seine zersiedelten Dörfer. Der Beton der nach dern Krieg wieder aufgebauten Hauser brockelt, die Fassaden und Wände der einstmals vorbildlich modernen Schwimmbäder und Bibliotheken werden rissig und verrosten, die Farbe blättert ab. Die fabelhaft künstlichen, autofreien Stadtkerne sind von jener gesetzlich vorgeschriebenen "Kunst am Bau" befallen, den die ideenlosen Nachfahren von Joseph Beuys und Fritz Wotruba für viele zehntausend gute D-Mark aus Stahl und Beton verfertigt haben. Manchmal hat eine Stadt auch eine der wie ein Hefeteig unförmig auseinanderlaufenden Plastiken von Henry Moore erworben, fast jede Stadt im Ruhrgebiet hat er für würdig befunden, eines seiner Kunstwerke an einem öffentlichen Ort aufzustellen. Der Rest der verbleibenden Mauern und Wände ist wie von einem Pilzbefall befleckt mit Grafitti und alltaglichem Schmutz. Unwohnlich und unbewohnt, fremd und unheimlich erscheinen die Städte. Sie sind einander bis zur völligen Gleichheit ähnlich, gleich öde und trostlos am regnerischen Alltag wie in sommerlicher Hitze, und die sogenannten Stadtteilfeste mit Flohmarkt und Glühwein genormt und langweilig von Flensburg bis Pforzheim. Tags werden diese Städte von Arbeitslosen und Jugendlichen auf der Suche nach Ausbildungsplatzen und Arbeit, rat- und hilf esuchenden Alten und Schlüsselkindern glücklos bewohnt, nachts atem- und ratlos durchstreift von Jugendlichen auf der Suche nach dem letzten Kick, nach der schrillsten Disko, nach der neuesten Aufputschpille, die das seit ihrer frühen Schulzeit schon zur Gewohnheit gewordene Haschisch übertreffen soll.

[What did the "Sixties" generation achieve, and what was positive about 1968 {i.e., "the Sixties"}? Nothing. The country is as neglected as its cities and its depopulated villages. The concrete of the house rebuilt after the war are crumbling, the facades and walls of the once model modern swimming pools and libraries are cracked and rusted, the color fading. The fabulous artistic, auto-free city centers have smitten by that legally imposed "art on buildings", which for many thousands of Deutschmarks {which hadn't been the German currency for years when that book was published} the idea-less successors of Joseph Beuys and Fritz Wotruba have been prefabricated out of steel and concrete. Sometimes a city also will have acquired one of those vaguely-shaped plastic sculpture by Henry Moore like piece of dough spread all around; almost every city in the Ruhr District has found one of his artworks worthy to be displayed in a public place. The rest of the remaining walls is dirtied with graffiti and everyday dirt. The cities look unlivable and empty, strange and eerie. They are like one another to the point of complete sameness, equally deserted and bleak on a normal rainy day in the summer heat, and the so-called city district festivals with a flea market and hot spicy cider standardized and boring from Flensburg to Pforzheim. Some days these cities are inhabited by the unemployed and young people looking for training spots and work, old people looking for counsel and help and latchkey kids, in the nights tramped through breathlessly and cluelessly by youth looking for the next kick, for the newest disco, for the newest stimulant pill, which will outdo the hashish to which they have become accustomed since their earliest school years.]

And all of it the fault of dirty hippie leftwingers like these:






Now, the guy on the right in the second photo is Fritz Teufel, who eventually became an RAF terrorist. But what did even that have to do with sculptures in the pedestrian zones in German cities that Klaus doesn't like?

It sounds to me like the short version of Klaus' rant just quoted would be: I'm old and grumpy and resent anyone and everyone who still wants to get out of their house on the weekends.

It calls to mind Tom Tommorrow's memorable portrayal of Rush Limbaugh as the Presidency of Barack Obama began:


The four posts on this book:

Die Familie Röhl (1), an unusual family memoir - Ulrike Meinhof
Die Familie Röhl (2): Ulrike Meinhof
Die Familie Röhl (3): Radical failings
Die Familie Röhl (4): Klaus Rainer Röhl

bettina röhl, klaus rainer röhl, raf, rote armee fraktion, so macht kommunismus spass, ulrike meinhof

Die Familie Röhl (3): Radical failings

Author Bettina Röhl

This is the third of four posts on Bettina Röhl's book, So macht Kommunismus Spass! Ulrike Meinhof, Klaus Rainer Röhl und die Akte KONKRET (2006). The book is a combination of family memoir and original historical research that reads something like a spy novel. The previous post can be found here.

Bettina's criticisms of the German left scene in the 50s and 60s have quite a bit of what I would call a "neoconservative" tone to them. By which I mean great familiarity with the scene but a not only critical-minded but somewhat moralistic, scolding tone. However, the history of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) has been far more intensely discussed in Germany than in the US, where they are scarcely known. So there are a lot of nuances to navigate for anyone deep into the discussions and polemics in Germany over the facts and meanings of political events connected to the RAF.

Although I'm focusing here on what I see as weaknesses of her historical analysis, I think she does an exceptionally good job of providing a balanced and dispassionate analysis of her parents' particular political positions in the events she relates. And of their strengths and weaknesses.

And her criticisms of the left scene more generally don't read like the "repentant leftist" tone her father Klaus Rainer Röhl has long used. The criticisms she makes are serious-minded. But they suffer from the substantive problem that often affects political discussions of a vague concepts like "the 60s". In Germany, like in America and many other countries, the "left" activists of the 60s fit the description of Jackson Browne's old song, "Before the Deluge":

Some of them were dreamers and some of them were fools
And for some them it was only the moment that mattered

Her comments are more relevant to especially political-minded activists on the ideological left, like her parents at the time, and stars of the student left like Rudi Dutschke. She seems particularly annoyed at those who made a hero out of Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-Tung in the standard English spelling at the time which is still used in German). But her criticisms sometimes have an all-or-nothing air to them. She gives no indication that what a political figure symbolizes for someone can be quite different that what the symbol-figure himself actually thought or did.

Juan Perón of Argentina in the last years of his political career managed to appeal to a broad public, from pretty much fascist types to "mainstream" liberals and conservatives to social-democratic minded labor activists to Maoist guerrillas. Ché Guevara to this day is a popular symbol of rebelliousness, though most of the young and even not-so-young people who have a Ché t-shirt or other Ché kitsch probably know next to nothing about his actual career.

She actually explains that very point (S. 533):

Fakt ist, die dicken Bucher mit Mao-Zitaten, die man im Fischer Verlag bald uberall in Deutschland kaufen konnte, wurden zu Bestsellern, die Spruche Maos zierten bald jedes studentische Plakat an der Universitat oder wurden in Zeitschriften, wie beispielsweise auch in KONKRET, in dicken Lettern unter einem Mao-Portrat abgedruckt. Grund fur diesen Schwung von Ideen aus China war natürlich die chinesische Kulturrevolution, die ihre Wellen mit Beginn ihres Wirkens in China nach Europa und in den gesamten Westen aussandte und die von Rudi Dutschke und vielen anderen aufgesaugt wurde, als sei Mao der neue Gott und seine Spruche und Buchlein Bibelworte. Scharenweise werden die Linken in Westdeutschland in diesen Jahren der guten alten Sowjetunion untreu und schliessen sich euphorisch der chinesischen Kulturrevolution an, die sie mit der eigentlich im Westen stattfindenden "Kulturrevolution", der Popkultur in Amerika, verwechseln und zu einem eigenen Modegemisch verarbeiten, das ein echter Mix aus Cola, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, den Rolling Stones und dem Revolutions- und Weltkriegsgetöse Mao Tse-tungs wird. Anders als Mao Tse-tung, der jeden Drogenkonsum brutal bestrafte, oftmals mit dem Tode, gesellten sich sehr schnell bei den Westlinken zur Popmusik die Drogen und wurden eine Art essentieller Bestandteil ihrer Ideologic, Bewufitseinserweiterung usw.

[The fact is that the thick books of Mao quotes in Fischer Publishers editions that one could suddenly buy all over Germany became bestsellers. Quickly the sayings of Mao decorated every student placard in the university. Or they were printed in magazine, as for example in Konkret, in thick letters under a Mao portrait. The basis for this fad for ideas from China was, of course, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which with the beginning of its workings in China sent its waves to Europa and the entire West. And they were sucked up by Rudi Dutschke and many others as thought Mao were a new god and his sayings and pamphlets words from the Bible. The leftists in West Germany in these years were untrue in droves to the good old Soviet Union [she means that ironically] and fastened themselves euphorically to the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Which they confused with the "cultural revolution" that was actually taking place, the pop culture in America, and with their own fashionably constructed mixture that became a real mix of cola, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones and Mao Zedong's revolution-and-world-war racket. Differently than Mao Zedong, who the consumption of [illegal] drugs brutally punished, often by death, the Western leftists joined themselves to pop music and drugs and those became a kind of essential element of their ideology, consciousness expansion, etc.]

But she uses that as part of her criticism of the moral/intellectual failings of young Germans who read Mao pamphlets, and doesn't seem to register that the very mixture of contradictions she describes means that to be an "admirer of Mao" in West Germany in the 1960s didn't mean that someone was an enthusiast for every page of his ideology or every act he took as China's leader. And in fact, however incongruously, Mao symbolism often went together with libertarian and radical-democratic ideas in that scene.

And, as her quote above alludes to, embracing "Maoism" was also a way in which people so inclined could advocate a revolutionary Marxist ideology that also rejected, radically rejected, the brand of Soviet-style Communism practiced in the DDR.

She seems to forget that anyone who hasn't believed something stupid at one time or another was either never young or has been missing a brain. So, for instance, when she claims that Rudi Dutschke, of whom she had fond personal memories as a child, had as a goal (S. 530) "nicht etwa, um die dritte Welt an das Niveau der ersten [Welt] heranzuheben, sondern um die erste Welt auf das Niveau der dritten Welt abzusenken" (not for instance to raise the Third World to the level of the First, but rather to sink the First World to the level of the Third World), and includes him among the group that "versuchten ... die vietnamesischen Kriegs-Verhältnisse auf deutsches Terrain zu übertragen" (attempted to bring the Vietnamese war conditions over onto Germany terrain), and:

Mit Vietcongschen Untergrundmethoden und Gewaltaktionen sollte die Bundesrepublik von innen angegriffen werden und gemäss den Idolen von Mao Tse-tung und Ho Tschi-minh zur Revolution aufgerufen werden.

[The Federal Republic should be attacked with Vietcong-like underground methods and violent actions, and, following their idols Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, should be aroused to revolution.]

... she produces a stereotypical hostile "culture war" type image that doesn't tell us much more than that she didn't like that particular group's politics. And while that's understandable, Dutschke himself was a former East German - and therefore had some direct experience of left in a dictatorship - who viewed himself as a Christian and whose revolutionary ideology was a hodge-podge. (Bettina does say explicitly that he was a "Christian and neo-Marxist".) His actual influence came through his eloquence, activism and good publicity sense. Although he is credited with the famous phrase, "the Long March through the institutions", his actual intellectual influence as such on the German left was minimal.

Dutschke did talk quite a bit about the need for violent revolution, although he did decline to lend his support to the creation of the RAF. On the other hand, he attended the funeral of RAF member Holger Meins, who starved himself to death in a hunger strike in jail, and famously said, "Holger, the struggle continues." Yet he later said that was an emotional response and sent a political message he hadn't intended to send. And Dutschke was consistently opposed in public and private of the brand of terrorism that the RAF practiced, despite the inconsistencies he undoubtedly displayed in his public and private discussions of revolutionary violence.

German student leader Rudi Dutschke: he envisioned an "urban guerrilla" movement in West Germany

Rudi Dutschke was not a pacifist. And he did at times advocate a German version of the "urban guerrilla" that he derived from the "Foco" concept of Regis Debray, who was then and still now thought to represent Che Guevara's theories of revolution. Few if any today would defend the idea that Debray's theories of that time were any kind of meaningful guide to political activity in the developed world. And Dutschke's own ideas on the subject were eclectic and not particularly well-thought-out.

The extent to which Dutschke's influence promoted violence and/or the kind of terrorism practiced by the RAF is a hot topic of dispute among historians of that particular time. Bettina's account of that issue is more vague and polemical than analytical.

But the balance she manages to maintain in her approach is illustrated by the fond personal memories she expresses toward, Dutschke, who was a friend of her parents. In this German-language video, she reads a passage from the book about meeting him when she was a young girl:

Still, outside a few idealizers of poverty here and there - or revolutionaries with ascetic tendencies like Gudrun Ennslin - it wasn't really the case that Dutschke and his admirers wanted to pull the "First World" down to the level of the "Third World". They actually did have something like the opposite in mind. You can say they were unrealistic or misguided or whatever. And you can say that the actual effect of their actions taken to some practical extreme would have resulted in destroying the wealth and prosperity of the rich countries. But it's misleading to present that as the goal of their ideology, even if we're focusing on the highly politicized, activist left like Dutschke and the SDS. But Bettina seems more than a little frustrated that "68ers" like former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and Rudi Dutschke's widow Gretchen are unwilling to renounce - engage in "self-criticism"? - a "Maoism" they claim they never embraced in the first place. Bahman Nirumand, who became a close friend of her mother Ulrike in the years before she went underground, gives a better historical generalization in "Sehnsuchsräume: Warum die Revolution ausblieb" (Areas of longing: Why the revolution didn't happen) (from 1968: Die Revolte (2007), Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Rüdiger Dammann, eds.:

Diese Solidarität, die allgemein den Angehörigen der Länder der sogenannten Dritten Welt schwärmerisch entgegengebracht wurde, entsprang nur bei weningen aus politischer Einsicht und Überzeugung, sie speiste sich vielmehr aus einem sehnsuchtsvollen Romantizismus, sie spiegelte die exotischen Sehnsüchte einer zorningen, rebellierenden Jugend, die dem eigenen Dasein entfliehen wollte und nach Weggefährten Ausschau hielt. Die Jugendlichen waren entschlossen, sich um jeden Preis von dem erstickenden Muff der Nachkriegszeit zu befreien, mit der Vergangenheit, mit der Geschichte ihrer Eltern zu brechen, der Wohlstandsgesellschaft, der Konsumgeilheit eine Alternative entgegenzusetzen, die verkrustete Ordnung, die irrationale Autorität des Staates, der Univeristät, der Schule zu zerschlagen, sie wollten vor dieser Gesellschaft fliehen und suchten - unter anderem - Zuflucht in einer ferngelegenen, fremden Welt, bei den Befreiungsbewegungen der sogenannten Dritten Welt und später bei religiösen Sekten. Es war ein Streich der Geschichte, dass sich die Modernisierung Deutschlands teilweise über die Entwicklungsländer vollzog. [This solidarity that was generally enthusiastically provided to those connected to the countries of the so-called Third World, originated only with few from political insight and conviction; it nourished itself much more on a wistful romanticism. It reflected the exotic longings of an angry, rebellious youth who wanted to flee from their own being and looked for fellow travelers. The young were determined to liberate themselves at all costs from the suffocating mustiness of the postwar era; to break with the past, with the history of their parents;, to set up an alternative to the affluent society and its rank consumerism; to smash the encrusted order, the irrational authority of the state, the university, the school. They wanted to flee from this society and sought - among other things - flight into a faraway, alien world, in the liberation movements of the so-called Third World, and later in religious cults. It was a trick of history that the modernization of Germany played partly on the developing countries.]

Not that Nirumand was unaware of the potentially very destructive side of such romanticism. On the contrary, in the same essay he describes trying to talk Ulrike out of her desire to go underground and take up a violent struggle. Bettina interviewed him for her book, also, and recounts part of a story about Ulrike that Nirumand relates in the essay just quoted. Nirumand himself became a huge influence on the APO (extra-parliamentary opposition) in West Germany through his 1967 book Persien, Model eines Entwicklungslandes (Persia [Iran]: Model of Development). According to his account in the essay quoted above, the Iranian exile community in West Germany was also influential on the student activists because the politicized members of that community were well-organized and could set up demonstrations and political events quickly. They also provided a kind of community feeling and sense of solidarity which were goals that the alternative movements among Germans also hoped to achieve for themselves. And specifically on the subject of "Maoism" (which was not the same as Debrayism), it's also the case that an interest in Mao Zedong's theories of political warfare was scarcely limited in developed countries to those who wished to emulate them. Anyone interested in understanding wars like that in Vietnam in the 1960s is likely to have paid some attention to Mao's ideas. Certainly, the US military and counterinsurgency experts outside the military were doing so. The Great Helmsman Mao Zedong: he wasn't German In fact, I just read an essay by Sebastian Haffner, a leftist writer who was published in Konkret, about Mao Zedong's theories. It originally appeared as the introduction to a 1966 German collection of Mao's writing, Theorie des Guerillakriegs oder Strategie der Dritten Welt. A large part of the essay is devoted to describing the particular situation in China in the 1920s, 30s and 40s which Mao was addressing in those works, conditions of which his original audience would have been intensely aware and therefore would need little background explanation. But, as Haffner wrote, that was not the case for most Europeans in the 1960s. He even includes a section explaining the reason why Mao's theories of warfare were not appropriate to any situation in Europe. But, again, these ideas were influential among the "68ers", however eccentric or derivative their West German versions of understanding them were. Bettina in her book mentions that in his first article for Konkret, Rudi Dutscke, one of the key leaders of the radical student movement, recommended Nirumand's book, Mao's "Little Red Book" and a book called Vietnam - Genesis eines Konfliktes by Jürgen Horlemann and Peter Gäng. And she notes that even today, those three books are recommended for those who want to understand the radical APO movement in Germany at the time. She adds that she would also include Edgar Snow's book Red Star Over China in that list. None of those books are about Germany. But they were influential in forming the romantic Third Worldism of the APO at that time, which found its most extreme form in terrorist groups like the RAF. The four posts on this book: Die Familie Röhl (1), an unusual family memoir - Ulrike Meinhof Die Familie Röhl (2): Ulrike Meinhof Die Familie Röhl (3): Radical failings Die Familie Röhl (4): Klaus Rainer Röhl bettina röhl, raf, renate riemeck, rote armee fraktion, so macht kommunismus spass, rudi+dutschke, ulrike meinhof

Die Familie Röhl (2): Ulrike Meinhof

Ulrike Meinhof, 1964, around the time of her break with the underground Communist Party in West Germany (Source: Wikimedia Commons

This is the second of four posts on Bettina Röhl's book, So macht Kommunismus Spass! Ulrike Meinhof, Klaus Rainer Röhl und die Akte KONKRET (2006). The book is a combination of family memoir and original historical research that reads something like a spy novel. The previous post can be found here.

This post deals with the adult career of Ulrike Meinhof, mainly known as one of the leaders of the German terrorist group, the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF).

The Wikimedia Commons photo above is sourced, "Private picture, supplied by Ulrike Meinhofs daughter, Bettina Röhl". And the copyright information states, "The copyright holder of this work allows anyone to use it for any purpose including unrestricted redistribution, commercial use, and modification", with the emphasis in the original. This suggests that Bettina sees this photo as a particularly appropriate representation of her mother.

Ulrike as successful journalist and secret Communist

Klaus Röhl became a member of the KPD (German Communist Party) on the day in 1956 when it was outlawed in the Federal Republic (West Germany). Ulrike later joined his as a Party member.

Not only were they members of an illegal party. The SED (ruling party of Communist East Germany) was funding their magazine, Konkret. Bettina gives a long account of their dealings with their Party handlers from the DDR and their trips to the DDR to meet with them over issues with the magazine. She did extensive research in the DDR archives that provides contemporary documentation on events described to her by her father and others she interviewed.

An American edition of this book would probably require some special introduction to describe the contorted relationships among the two German states in the 1950s, especially. The Soviets and the DDR (East Germany) continued to hold out the theoretical prospect of national unification on the basis of a neutral Germany along the lines of Austria's neutral status. There were extensive personal and political contacts between East and West Germany. And the border was not sealed until the Berlin Wall went up in late 1961.

But accepting funding from the DDR for their newspaper could have gotten the Röhls charged with high treason. Bettina's description of their dealings at this time reads something like a spy novel. They seemed to have enjoyed the intrigue at some level. But it also had to be nerve-wracking at times. Not only did they have to worry about discovery by West German intelligence. But they could also have been blackmailed by the DDR over their illegal operations.

Ulrike was more a "true believer" than Klaus, who seemed to have little interest in Communist theories, though at the time he supported their politics. There was constant tension with their handlers over their need to write articles critical of the DDR to maintain credibility with their western readers. Eventually, the tensions came to a head in 1964. Klaus and Ulrike resigned from the Party and the SED cut off funds to Konkret, probably expecting they would soon return and agree to the SED's demands. But instead, they sexed the magazine up, i.e., they ran more stories about sex though it remained primarily a political magazine. And they were able to make it work financially through advertising and financial support from well-wishers.

Bettina says that the SED/KPD was happy to accept Klaus' resignation. But they never removed Ulrike's name from the Party rolls, even after she became an RAF terrorist.

During this time, Ulrike built a strong reputation for herself as a journalist and political commentator. As the alternative movements of the 1960s developed - the sexual revolution, the "extra-parliamentary opposition" (APO in the German initials), the hippie movement and so on - konkret became the magazine for the movement.

Bettina doesn't give intensive treatment to Ulrike's articles, many of which are still in print in book form. But she does say that part of her reason for writing the book is to evaluate the pre-RAF aspects of her life including her career as a journalist, which she thinks historical accounts have given insufficient attention.

Bettina describes her parents' activities at the time matter-of-factly. She quotes a letter from Ulrike written in 1959 accusing a rival faction in the Anti-Atomic-Weapons movement of being a group that "zahlenmässig relativ klein ist, aber durch ihr Geld die Macht hat", (relatively small in numbers but has power through their money) referring to the rival faction's support from the SPD. Bettina writes:

Dass sie selber inzwischen zu einer kleinen Gruppe gehört, die Macht und auch Geld hat, verschweigt sie. Es muss als Propaganda gewertet werden, dass ausgerechnet diese subversiv für eine Diktatur arbeitenden illegalen Mitglieder der KPD von Anfang an die Legende vom "Verleumdet- und Verfolgt-sein" nährten und ihr Image pflegten, zu Unrecht verdächtigt zu werden. (S. 284)

[That she herself at the same time belonged to a small group, that had power and also money, she was silent about. It must be regarded as propaganda that precisely this member of the KPD, who worked subversively for a dictatorship, from the beginning on noursihed herself on the legends of "being smeared and persecuted" and worked on her image of being unjustly held in suspicion.]

One article in particular, which Ulrike wrote in late 1958 for an antiwar publication called argument called "Entspannung - trotz Berlin?" (Detente - despite Berlin) and which Bettina reproduces in full, provides an early example of what Bettina's sees as Ulrike's strengths and weaknesses as a journalist. This is the time when the Soviet Union was threatening again to cut off Western access to West Berlin. This was a protracted crisis which really only ended when Moscow changed their approach and ordered the DDR to build the Berlin Wall.

In the article, Ulrike takes a clearly friendly stance toward the official Soviet position on the Berlin crisis of the time. But at the same time, she makes some sensible, pragmatic arguments on the possibilities for reducing tensions between the two Germanys, arguments that foreshadowed the later Ostpolitik of Willy Brandt.

Bettina analyzes another article that Ulrike wrote for Konkret at the time her marriage to Klaus was coming to an end, from the January 1968 issue. The article was about a young man named Jürgen Bartsch, who sexually molested and murdered four boys and almost murdered a fifth, and was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Her article is an extended argument that various social failings of West German society had made him into the murdered that he became, such as the poor quality of the foster care system. As Bettina puts it, the article holds the murderer himself innocent of any personal responsibility for his crimes.

There's certainly nothing wrong about looking at social factors that increase the liklihood that individuals will become criminals. But what's striking about Ulrike's treatment of the case is her seeming indifference - even extreme indifference - to the suffering of the children who were innocent victims of the killer.

Bettina believes that the article reflects her mother's own attempts to grapple with the personal problems that were besetting her at the time. And also the it is a "key document in this break in the life of Ulrike Meinhof". Bettina observes that the article is still often seen as an example of cool, analytical work that examined the facts without regard to the moral judgments her analysis might produce. But, she writes, the factual basis of the article was thin; she didn't research the trial records themselves. Ulrike did interview the killer himself - who ironically was housed in the same jail where she herself would later be imprisoned.

Instead, she portrayed the convicted murderer as the victim in disregard to his own very real victims. "The four boys who were gruesomely abused and then murdered, were not discussed by her with a single feeling or thought, not a single word," writes Bettina. Her suggestion that this article reflects how the death of innocents was becoming an abstraction in Ulrike's mind. And an abstraction not worth worrying about.

Ulrike became deeply involved with the leftwing activist movement in Berlin, where she now lived, and elsewhere in Germany. She became good friends with Bahman Nirumand, one of the leading figures of the movement. She retained full custody of the twins and experienced the stresses of being a single mother with a professional career.

This video clip in German with English text translations shows her in (apparently) 1969 (even though the label on the clip says 1970), the year before she went underground, evidently depressed and talking wearily about the strains of raising children and pursuing a career.



Ulrike in the RAF

This is the best-known part of Ulrike's life and career, and has been described in great detail in a variety of places. The RAF's beginning is normally dated to May 14, 1970, when Ulrike and several others sprang Andreas Baader from police custody. The went into hiding for formed a formal organization. In the fall of 1970, they trained in an Al Fatah camp in Jordan. Before she was arrested in June 1972, she participated in a number of illegal and violent RAF actions: bank robberies, burglaries of passport offices, and six bombings, [including attacks on American military bases]. According to Bettina's account, five people were killed in those attacks and many wounded.

Ulrike Meinhof's image from wanted poster

She writes, "Ulrike Meinhof was concretely resposible involved in the organization of the Springer attack [a bombing of the Springer publishing offices] in Hamburg, where 34 people were wounded, some of them seriously, by two bombs." She also became the official spokesperson for the group. The German authorities considered her to be the chief author of several RAF manifestoes, with names like "Stadtguerrilla und Klasskampf" (Urban Guerrillas and Class Struggle).

The RAF was supported to some degree at various times by the DDR, though promoting that brand of terrorism was not the main thrust of East German intelligence and subversive activity. The DDR offered sanctuary to some RAF members, a situation memorably dramatized in the film Die Stille nach dem Schuß (2000), English title The Legend of Rita. But while the RAF might not have been able to operate exactly as they did with East German help, they were very much a homegrown West German terrorist group.

As I mentioned before, Bettina relates that the East Germans never formally kicked her out of the Communist Party, for reasons that are not entirely clear from her account. She relates that some of Ulrike's friends tried while she was underground to arrange for her to received sanctuary in the DDR, but she was arrested before such a plan could be pulled off.

Having become all-too-familiar with torture practices committed by Americans under the Cheney-Bush torture program, I would have to say that the extreme isolation in which Ulrike was kept for a large part of her confinement sure sounds like torture to me. At the very least, it must have contributed to the mental state which eventually led to her suicide.

Bettina and Regine were able to visit Ulrike three times during 1973. She writes that Ulrike permanently broke off her contacts to the twins at the start of 1974, even returning their letters to her unopened. Bettina relates the break to the arrival of Gudrun Ennslin in the Köln-Ossendorf prison. The RAF members were able to meet together to discuss their joint defense strategy and Ulrike became more fanatically committed to the group. Although Ulrike herself was a leader of the group, this is one indication that she was powerfully influenced psychologically by Ennslin, and probably also by Baader, who seemed to have exercised strong charisma on the group members.

Ulrike did send a request to Klaus through her attorney in 1976 to bring the kids to see her once more on the following weekend at the Stuttgart-Stammheim prison where she and her fellow RAF defendents were being held during their trial. The twins declined that particular invitation, intending to visit her sometime within the following weeks. But Ulrike committed suicide in her cell days later, on May 9, 1976. She left no suicide note.

The four posts on this book:

Die Familie Röhl (1), an unusual family memoir - Ulrike Meinhof
Die Familie Röhl (2): Ulrike Meinhof
Die Familie Röhl (3): Radical failings
Die Familie Röhl (4): Klaus Rainer Röhl

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