The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History (2 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________

1
.
http://labourhistory.net/raf/
.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This volume examines seven difficult years. Our narrative begins in the moments following the guerilla's greatest defeat to date, the failed attempt to win its prisoners' freedom in 1977. This was only the most dramatic in a series of challenges then facing all of the movements and tendencies that had emerged from the 1960s radical left. Everything was open to question, and insofar as the guerilla was concerned, these questions were all the more urgent as the consequences of pursuing failed strategies could be all the more dire.

Reappraisal, coming to grips with mistakes and addressing weaknesses in one's own ranks, trying to find a new footing under adverse conditions, navigating the tensions between different strategies—these are the themes of this volume. It is not always a cheery story. Our hope, however, is that it will prove a useful one.

The present volume is intended to stand alone. While we imagine readers will want to learn all they can of the RAF's formative ideas and experiences, and how their ideas developed in their first seven years, one need not have read
Projectiles for the People
in order to appreciate the tale told in
Dancing with Imperialism.
Where necessary, we have quoted from our first volume to provide the context necessary to understand a particular question or issue, so that the story from 1977 to 1984 should be comprehensible from the book currently in your hands.

Those who have read volume 1, and for whom it remains fresh in their minds, may choose to skip over our first chapter, which largely amounts to a summary of what came before. That said, we have purposefully tried to include observations and perspectives in that chapter which we had not included previously, to make the effort worthwhile for those who do opt to start their reading at page one.

We hope that our third volume, which should appear sometime in the next few years, will bring this story to its close. The formulation “we hope” is not used casually, for in recent years the German state has proven itself eager to keep the RAF's story alive and developing into the second decade of the twenty-first century. A new trial for former RAF member Verena Becker was held in 2012, in connection with the 1977 murder of Attorney General Siegfried Buback. This was preceded by legal threats against other former RAF members, in an attempt to coerce them into providing details about their past activities. Besides sheer vindictiveness, there are political—and historiographical, in the sense of creating a historical narrative palatable to the state—motives behind all this. As some former RAF members explained in a statement in 2010:

The RAF was dissolved in 1998, based on its assessment of the changed political situation globally. The fact that it was its own decision and that it has not been defeated by the state, obviously remains a thorn in the flesh. Hence the eternal lament of the “myth” yet to be destroyed. Hence the political and moral capitulation demanded from us. Hence the attempts to finalize the criminalization of our history, up to the mendacious proposal of a “Truth Commission”. Whereas the search for those who are still underground, the smear campaigns in the media and the legal procedures against former prisoners continue, we are expected to kowtow publicly. As, in all these years, it didn't work by “renunciation”, we are now to denounce each other. Save yourself if you can.
³

The present volume is dedicated to the memory of Christa Eckes, one of those who was called upon to testify in Becker's trial, and who refused. This despite the fact that she was at the time battling a particularly virulent cancer, and had been threatened with coercive detention in a prison cell if she did not comply. Eckes stood her ground, and in the end the state was forced to back down. This refusal to snitch, this example of refusing to betray one's principles, was a final gift that Eckes gave to us all. She died of cancer on May 23, 2012.