The "German Autumn" Between Mallorca and Mogadishu

Claudia Verhoeven, George Mason University/European University Institute

Concerning 1977, consensus exists on questions of roots, responses, and even
results. The Red Army Faction (RAF) and its successor groups (2nd of June
Movement, Revolutionary Cells) grew out of the student movement--but the
counter culture of the 1960s did not inevitably lead to the terrorism of the
1970s. To grasp the turn towards violence, the circumstances matter more:
exemplary episodes of state repression, Social Democratic Party (SPD)
intolerance of the extra-parliamentary left, the decay of student activism, and
economic crisis. In addition, most observers agree that the state's response
was disproportional to the terrorist threat, and that the media played a part
in escalating the cycle of terror and counter-terror. Still, the results were
unexpectedly happy: despite pervasive fears that the young democracy would
descend into despotism during its war on terror, what emerged from the fallout
of 1977 was a mature republic that could embrace, throughout the 1980s, a
springtime of popular politics (for example, the blossoming of the Green
party).

So what of the deeper significance of the events? It turns out that 1977 teems
with meanings, even if none of them prove stable. No one yet concurs on that
year's significance. Some explain this fact by pointing out that its history
has yet to pass (the participants are still alive--and politicking). Others
suggest that, because the events were overdetermined, they were always already
encoded with the sense of what happened in that other German past. As Rippey's
review of _Deutscher Herbst_ makes plain: for both actors and audience, the
German Autumn comprised a very active effort at _Vergangenheitsbewältigung_. In
this vein, Sperber rightly designates the Nazi filter as an area requiring
further inquiry. There are those who insist that these events will always be
characterized by too much information and too little knowledge: it is an
inescapable side-effect of their having unfolded entirely in the eye of the
media.

Perhaps this is why the more resounding requests for new research focus on
responses (by the state, society, media, etc.). Since these responses in fact
structured both the German Autumn itself and our knowledge thereof, information
about contemporary reactions is a prerequisite for any advanced reading of this
past. Related, and no less popular, is the call for comparative work:
especially given what happened after 9/11, knowing how other regimes responded
to terrorism has begun to matter a great deal. Such studies can be either
synchronic or diachronic: comparative research on reactions to the IRA, ETA
thus vies with the search for links between police conduct in the Wilhelmine,
Weimar, Nazi, and postwar eras or the history of the relations between the SPD
and the extra-parliamentary left (What about cultural connections? Might the
RAF be read as belonging to the long history of German Romanticism, for
example?).

Somehow absent in these discussions, however, are the politics of the RAF. Is
it because they are thought to be self-evident, or wrong, or both? Especially
welcome, therefore, is Sperber's call for rethinking the RAF's "rhetorical
articulation and representation of its self-understanding." Exposing how the
RAF imagined the political sphere and its position within it could facilitate a
critical reading of the limits of this vision and, in turn, of problems in RAF
practice. For example, Sperber suggests that the group's claim to be engaged in
an "anti-imperialist struggle" does not bear scrutiny: the FRG of the 1960s-70s
was simply not imperialist, and to suggest otherwise is delusional. Other
examples that come to mind are the group's race and gender politics: because it
had been but a generation since Auschwitz, the RAF's views on Israel merit
probing, and while one suspects that depictions of Baader's sexuality and
sexism are used to depoliticize the group (see for example the 2002 film
_Baader_), it is also true that RAF gender relations were not exactly
unproblematic.

It is probably worth underlining that studies of the RAF's self-representation
should not linger on the level of verbal rhetoric, but move forward to include
the visual (fashion, photography, etc.). This will also allow scholars to
engage the contributions of artists (which culminated in the 2005 show,
"Regarding Terror: The RAF-Exhibition") and acquire a more sophisticated
understanding of a problem that has bedeviled the study of terrorism from the
very start, namely all that falls under the sign of "the spectacle." Finally,
in combination with research done on responses, these treatments will permit us
to estimate the distance and differences between insider and outsider views of
the RAF.

(Parenthetically, a reconstruction of the "intellectual universe" of these
terrorists and their sometime sympathizers may also provide new insight into
the links between the theory and practice of the New Left. Marx, Mao, Marcuse
were influences, we know, but how really were they read? Reading New Left
theory is part of the history of RAF practice, just as the RAF is an episode in
the reception history of the New Left.)

But a focus on the RAF's rhetoric and representation should not substitute for
an analysis of its politics, nor should these politics be so easily dismissed.
To estimate whether the RAF's anti-imperialist claims were sound or not, for
example, it is not enough to say that West German governments were
democratically well-intended; not enough, in fact, to evaluate West German
politics. At stake was the expansion of transnational capitalism, not to
mention decolonization. Moreover, at this time, everything had long gone
global: Berlin police shot Benno Ohnesorg during a protest against the Iranian
Shah; Baader and Ensslin firebombed department stores in Frankfurt to protest
U.S. intervention in Vietnam; the German terrorists were tactically inspired by
Cuban and Uruguayan guerrillas, then trained in Jordan by the Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP); RAF held hostage an embassy of the FRG in
Stockholm; Lufthansa flight 181, "Landshut," was hijacked from Mallorca to
Mogadishu; and Schleyer's body, finally, was found in France. These events can
hardly even be shelved under the heading "think globally, act locally." What
the RAF needs is not only a comparative, but perhaps above all, a global
approach.

Which brings me to another striking aspect of this terrorism: its transnational
mobility. In their BMWs the RAF raced across Germany, Belgium, Holland, and
France. Then came that plane chase: Mallorca, Rome, Larnaca, Bahrain, Dubai,
Aden, Mogadishu. True, hippies were city-hopping throughout the 1960s, but not
at a speed reserved for power-brokers. From the perspective of the history of
(social) movement, the RAF appears as an avant-garde of what will eventually
become a new nomadic protest politics. This matters in terms of tracking
globalization, and post-industrial political agency. Freedom means the ability
to move, to cross ("challenge") borders, and to do so quickly--which is well
nigh impossible without capital, consumption, a partisan's familiarity with the
global mediascape, and a will to exist forever in ether. Alternatively, it may
just as well be argued that, in fact, the RAF was one of the last incarnations
of an old-fashioned activist model, individualist intelligentsia burning
brightly one last time, but ultimately illuminating nothing so much as the
inertia of revolutionary form. Probably, the RAF's definitive place in
revolutionary history has yet to be determined, but it will be difficult to do
so until the complex knot that binds terrorism and modernity is fully
understood.

So we will end by noting the need for further inquiry into this knot, and
suggesting that 1977 may prove especially instructive in finding ways to undo
it. The RAF's connection to technology and telecommunications was not new (for
most of what was discussed above, the history of nineteenth-century
revolutionary terrorism offers structurally comparable cases), but the German
Autumn does make the bonds between terrorism and modernity exceptionally
palpable. And the study of terrorism will be well-served if research on the RAF
helps us to understand how this form of political violence is conditioned by
the history that links popular culture to globalized economic inequality,
Mallorca to Mogadishu.

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