In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus
  • David Crawford
Wolfgang Kraushaar , ed.,Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus,2 vols.Hamburg: Hamburg Edition HIS Verlages mbH, 2006, 1,415 pp. €78.00

This huge book, comprising 64 essays of roughly 25 pages each, will be essential reading for students of postwar Germany's opposition movement and for anyone interested in the history of terrorism. The contributors to the book, under the editorship of Wolfgang Kraushaar, discuss the key factors that gave birth to and sustained the Red Army Faction (RAF) and other terrorist groups both in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and abroad.

The two-volume set is structured in eleven sections covering the sociological dimensions of terrorism, the ideology of urban guerrillas, the RAF's founders and successors, other terrorist groups in Germany, the factors influencing these groups, international parallels, the West German government's reactions, terrorism and the media, phantoms of terrorism, hypotheses, and final thoughts. The essays are supplemented [End Page 160] with a 50-page introduction that will help readers find the essays of greatest interest for a particular line of study. Unfortunately, the biographical information about the contributors to both volumse is buried at the back of volume two. Readers will be frustrated by the lack of an index to help track scattered references in the two volumes and 1,415 pages of text.

Readers may recognize many of the 47 contributors—49 if you include interviews. One of the two interviews features Horst Herold, the legendary former head of the West German police investigative agency, Bundeskriminalamt (BKA). Some authors played important roles in shaping public perceptions of the RAF in the 1970s and 1980s, including Jürgen Seifert, the former chairman of the human rights organization Humanistische Union (who writes about one of the RAF founders, Ulrike Meinhof), and Uwe Wesel, a law professor at Berlin's Free University (who discusses the RAF trials). Many of the essays are condensed versions of similar works the authors have published elsewhere.

In an interview about the book, Kraushaar said his intention was to stake out the topology of discussion about the RAF. It is a difficult assignment because competing concepts of political correctness from the left and right of German society clash over what must be said and what should never be mentioned about the RAF. I experienced this pressure myself in 1983. In a West German newspaper story, I quoted a peace demonstrator who said "We are not terrorists." Afterward some leftists snubbed me because they believed I had indirectly contributed to the criminalization of the peace movement. "Terrorism is the establishment's word," one leftist said. "We don't use it."

Like much of the discussion about the RAF, this book almost died before it was begun. Kraushaar had spent more than a year preparing a planned exhibit on "Art and the History of the RAF," but divergent views arose among the exhibit organizers, and Kraushaar pulled out of the project. The book concept was inspired by the exhibit preparations, Kraushaar said.

The RAF and the accompanying security clampdown affected many young adults living in postwar Germany, including in a small way, me. During the "German Autumn" of 1977, two West Berlin policemen searched my pockets for weapons or propaganda because they suspected that I might be heading to a demonstration—I was actually going to a library. Later, as a journalist writing extensively about East Germany and intelligence, I developed an interest in the RAF as a puzzle that needed to be solved.

Kraushaar allows readers to wait before delving into the mysteries. Section one, consisting of four essays, offers definitions of terrorism and traces the development of terrorism from the French Revolution to al Qaeda. The authors present the key theories shaping the terrorism debate. The result in this section is a predictable discussion of the sociological dimensions of terrorism. The ideas are not new, and the footnotes cite familiar literature and news stories.

Section two provides eight views of the urban guerrilla, focusing on anti-authoritarian movements and the tenets of anti-imperialism. Individual essays interpret the views of Mao Zedong, Rudi Dutschke, and Walter Benjamin. Another essay discusses...

pdf

Share