On Militancy, Sort Of

This is how the story of Baader-Meinhof, the Red Army Faction (RAF, Rote Armee Fraktion), terrorism made-in-West Germany, begins. Gudrun Ensslin, future "sphinx-like icon of the RAF,"¹ is no longer satisfied in her relationship with writer Bernward Vesper, son of Nazi poet Will Vesper. In 1967 she leaves him for petty criminal and con artist Andreas Baader, a man not of the word but of the deed. In the meantime, star journalist Ulrike Meinhof, after an acrimonious divorce from husband and publisher Klaus Rainer Röhl, moves with her six-year-old twin daughters from Hamburg to Berlin where—inevitably—she meets Ensslin and Baader. Not accustomed to her new environment, and without relatives and friends, Meinhof feels lonely, and the couple swiftly moves in with her. (After all, they need a place to live and Meinhof has rented an enormous villa in the city's posh section Berlin-Dahlem.) It is apparently here that the RAF finds its supposed origin. Only too bad, then, that after a few weeks Andreas Baader, in one unproductive attempt to acquire arms, is caught with a fake driver's license in a traffic control and subsequently arrested and detained in Berlin-Tegel prison. Together with a few political friends, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof decide to free Baader. In the course of this "freedom action" (Befreiungsaktion), a shot is fired that seriously injures one person.² The next day, a poster, "wanted" style, is found in most public places in Berlin, including lampposts, advertising pillars, and announcement boards. The face of Ulrike Meinhof becomes the public face of the RAF. The emerging RAF moves into hiding; the emerging RAF goes underground.

In such or similar terms the supposed origin of the RAF is often told. This is a story of particular individualities, persons who would move on to become celebrities (at least in certain quarters of the West German left), names known across Germany and beyond. Within the genre-inflected perimeters of the love story, the freeing of Andreas Baader is rendered as much a politically idiosyncratic act as it is an attempt to relieve the passionate yearnings of a female lover who, more than anything else, longs to be united with the man she desires.³ The telling of the beginning of the RAF as a history of individual biographies and love must and does, of course, like all tragic love stories, end in death. There may be a lot of carnage along the way, but in the end it is the lovers' loss of life that elevates the story of the RAF into the realm of legend and myth.⁴ Within the story of the RAF as a story of love, violence is no longer a political act but a thrill, a death trip, a private decision for the "armed struggle" and the "guerilla." The story of love, then, tells the story of the RAF as a story of historical confiscation, of not cultural but political forgetting, of perhaps habitual literary production. In this article I want to move away from the genre of love to give one of its supposed anathemas—violence, and a radical form at that—more room. I am especially interested in the genealogies and forms of militancy that both preceded and coincided with the emergence of the RAF.

In refusing the historical and political obfuscations that have accompanied the memory of the RAF—not in the sense of simply inserting memory into the mnemonic fabric of '68 political culture but in the sense of unearthing some historic sedimentations—I look at three important moments that constitute the RAF not as a left-wing "terrorist" group in isolation but as an integral part of '68 radical student culture. The massive mobilization of West German middle-class youth at the end of the 1960s took place by way of direct confrontations with the police, but also by way of a set of polemical and impossible identifications with one figure now conspicuously absent from the historical picture: the colonial militant. Here the events that have become known under the temporal marker "June 2" and...