Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. (review)

Translated into eight languages and recently made into a $20-million film, this revised reissue by a leading journalist has now, more than any other work, determined the public memory of the Red Army Faction (RAF), the left-wing terrorist organization that convulsed Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. A popular account, it starts off with the personalities: Andreas Baader, the hotheaded ringleader who fleeced drunks in bathroom bars as a young man and later goaded his coconspirators to be more violent; Gudrun Enslin, the cool daughter of a minister, former U.S. high school exchange student, and Baader's lover; and Ulrike Meinhof, the nervous, chain-smoking journalist who wrote the gang's muddled manifestos. The book then traces the sensationalist narrative: the arson of the department stores, the subsequent arrests, and the flippant antics in the dock while on trial.

In May 1970, Meinhof and Enslin rescued Baader from prison, and the group hightailed to Jordan for training in urban guerilla warfare by Palestinian terrorists. After returning to Germany via East Berlin, life as fugitives involved disguises, countless bank robberies, almost weekly apartment changes, recruitment of new members, and shoot-outs that were oft en fatal for the police. In May 1972, the RAF conducted bomb attacks on police stations and U.S. Army headquarters, killing four. Baader, Enslin, Meinhof, and most of the first-generation of RAF leaders were arrested shortly thereafter, and to demand their release, the rump members firebombed the German Embassy in Stockholm and assassinated a prominent banker. Most of the book details the numerous hunger strikes of the prisoners and the "1977 Autumn," when the second-generation of RAF hijacked a Luft hansa plane with the aid of Palestinian terrorists and kidnapped and murdered Martin Schleyer, the president of the German Employers Association. The book ends with the collective suicides of Baader, Enslin, and Meinhof in 1977, even though the RAF continued to function into the early 1990s.

Aust argues that RAF terror spun out of control because life as fugitives radicalized the gang. He also shows how, aft er 1972, the RAF focused their protest on the imprisonment and social isolation of the first gang members. His interpretation emphasizes that the ideology of the RAF was an incoherent anti-imperialism that conflated Auschwitz with the U.S. bombings of Dresden and the Viet Cong, among other things. In Aust's portrayal, Baader comes off as a psychopath, Meinhof as a major depressive. Because the book offers little from the perspective of German society at large, the reader gets the impression that the longevity of the gang resulted from the police who bungled arrests and the nonplussed trial judges who adhered to procedure, even when facing the defendants' harangues and theatrics.

Most scholars reject this portrayal of the justice system. Furthermore, the book mentions but does not explore the key reason why the RAF evaded the police for so many years: at least until the fall of 1977, the RAF had support from a small but sizable minority of left -wing Germans—by one survey, 6 percent of the population was willing to aid the fugitives. Though the first chapters trace the New Left movements that protested the Vietnam War, the book does not follow through on how the RAF won sympathy from the New Left as the government used heavy-handed tactics against protesters and passed laws that criminalized expressions of dissent that were legitimate in every other democracy. This draconian reaction led the New Left to believe that the government was reverting to a Nazi-era police state. Furthermore, many found it hard to sympathize with RAF targets like Schleyer, who managed to become rich and powerful despite being a former SS officer and deputy of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the masterminds of the Final Solution. Though Aust discusses Margrit Schiller, he leaves out that she joined the...