Baader Blog

Vote John Kerry on November 2

2004-11-01T23:27:00.000-08:00

I am an American. I take my right to vote very seriously. Tomorrow when I go to my local polling place and register my vote I will be voting for John Kerry for President of the United States. I encourage every American visitor to my website to do the same.

George Bush is demonstrably the worst President of the United States in modern history. To add up the list of ills that have emanated from the Bush White House could run hundreds of pages, but I will just bring up a few of particular importance to me:

President Bush has an appalling record on the environment. His administration has not made a single environmental decision that, on balance, did not leave our environment in worse shape.

President Bush has turned an enormous federal budget surplus into the largest budget deficit in history. He has done this in two ways: one, through enormous tax cuts to America's ultra-rich, and two, by a massive increase in spending, particularly to fund a poorly-conceived war.

President Bush has led us into a terrible war. 100,000 Iraqis dead. 1,000 Americans Dead. 200 billion dollars spent. An Iraq that has become a haven and breeding ground for Islamic terrorists. A world that is infinitely less safe.

I have listened to Senator John Kerry's proposals about each of these areas of importance to me and it is clear that he both shares my concerns and will address them in manner much different than President Bush.

But if you came to my website to learn about terrorism, please consider this: President Bush has made America much more vulnerable to terrorism. He has done a terrible job of waging his "war."

This week Osama bin Laden admitted what we've all known since September 11, 2001: he is responsible for the deaths of 3000 people in New York City, Washington DC, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Seeing his newly released video also served to remind us that he is still alive, still running loose, and still not in the hands of America. If we are fighting a War on Terror, why aren't we spending those 200 billion dollars on capturing Osama bin Laden?

The reason that the war in Iraq is going so poorly is because it is fundamentally illegitimate in origin. We know it, every Western democracy knows it, the Iraqi people know it, and every Islamic fundamentalist knows it. We absolutely cannot "win" this war because our justification for war was so clearly flawed.

Compare the war in Iraq to the war in Afghanistan. Despite having let bin Laden fall through our grasp, America has done a relatively successful job in Afghanistan. Why? Because we went to war against a state that harbored, financed, and supported a terrorist that killed 3000 people. Afghanistan had the blood of September 11 on its hands and Afghanistan paid the price.

Generally the world supported these actions. Had the US stopped after Afghanistan the world would be a different place, and possibly I would be encouraging you to vote for President Bush.
Anti-American terrorists once targeted my father for death. They also came close to killing my mother. I am appalled by ANY action that encourages further terrorist violence against Americans. Yet through his illegitimate war against Iraq, President George Bush has undoubtedly given rise to untold numbers of new terrorists, isolated America to an unprecedented degree, and made the world a much less safe place.

Please vote John Kerry November 2.

For my UK friends

2004-10-30T23:26:00.000-07:00

I put Amazon.co.uk links this week to as many items as possible on my store page. Quick reminder; I really, truly, honestly don't make any money on my efforts. I've spent about 30,000 dollars over the years researching the subject and producing the web site. I've made at most about $1,500 selling a few things in my store. So.... if my site has been helpful for you, consider buying a poster in my store, or buying something from Germany, American, or UK Amazon stores linked on my site. Thanks!

It's been a while...

2004-10-24T20:31:00.000-07:00

Well it's been a while since my last post. That's what getting job does to you...
If you haven't noticed on the "special stuff" link on my home page, I had my millionth visitor this month. I'm not sure if I'm proud or scared of the fact that a million people have sought out info about the Baader-Meinhof era from my site.

We get letters, we get stacks and stacks of letters...

2003-06-06T22:45:00.000-07:00

Got an e-mail today:

I am an intellectual fascist, so I won't attempt to engage you on a violent level, although leftist fools like you deserve such.

You, and all Europeans who are on the extreme left, are total fools. You are instruments of the Zionist and you don't even know it. Everything around me screams murder against our great and noble race and here I see anti-survivalistic fools like you contributing to your own demise. You are like hyenas who have relinquished control to the lions, seemingly lost in the stupid thought, that the lions are you friends.

It would take a year, or two, to deprogram a totally brainwashed instrument like you. I wasn't a Neo Nazi when I was young, but the darkening world around me has shown me that this is not a situation to be neither egalitarian nor weak...this current dilema, we face as a race, calls for total revolution and rebellious sedition. The more I see the enemy act, the more I come to the clear notion that Hitler was right. About everything.

I wish I could write in German to make this more personable. You are a disgrace to your once great country.

Alles Fur Deuscthland. Viva Franco! Viva Mussolini! Viva Hitler!

PSD

Hmmmm. How to respond? How to respond? Should I correct him on the basic factual mistakes that he made? (I'm an American; last time I lived in German Willy Brandt was running the country). Should I get indignant that the guy confuses the subject matter's politics (radical socialist anarchism) with the author's politics (unstated, but basically middle of the road to left-leaning)? Should I get angry at the pathetic racism? (contrary to his comments, I am FULLY aware of my "instrument of the Zionists"-status; I get paid quite handsomely for my critical role in keeping the global Jewish cabal-conspiracy quietly chugging under the surface). Should I assume that it's a satire? (it has all the hallmarks of a classic satirical essay).
I should probably just ignore the whole letter.
Wait; too late.

Weather Underground Doc

2003-06-06T09:56:00.000-07:00

Apparently there's a new documentary out about the Weather Underground; who in most ways were the American group most similar to the Baader-Meinhof Group. I haven't seen it, but the slate review linked above makes it sound pretty compelling. Have you seen it? Go to the Baader-Meinhof discussion board and let us know what you thought of it!

Oops

2003-05-30T09:29:00.000-07:00

Man, you take a short vacation and all hell breaks loose.

My domain has now been re-registered and the site is back up. No, it wasn't "the government" who took it down.

Thanks for the patience.

Question of the Day

2003-05-16T17:21:00.000-07:00

Q. Was German foreign minister Joschka Fischer a member of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, as that proud and alway accurate American Rush Limbaugh claims?
A. Uh, no. Rush Limbaugh, however, WAS a moron, and remains one to this day. Admittedly, by writing the words: 'Michael Kelly reported in the Washington Post, [Fischer] "was a member of the evil Baader-Meinhof Gang (or Red Army Faction),"' Rush Limbaugh (or whomever wrote the non-signed article on his site) would lead one to the conclusion that Michael Kelly did, in fact, report of Fischer's BM Gang membership, and, in fact, used the phrase ""was a member of the evil Baader-Meinhof Gang (or Red Army Faction)," somewhere in his article. By these exemplery journalistic standards, I am pleased to point out that Michael Kelly also wrote that "Rush Limbaugh was a member of the the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society, the Confederate Army, and the Greater Springfield Sewing Circle."

Red Army Faction Communiques and other documents

2003-05-12T22:59:00.000-07:00

I found an excellent site devoted to exposing different forms of extremism: www.extremismus.com. The site has a collection of communique's and source documents that is even more complete than my collection (though all are in German). Included is the infamous "Burn, Warehouse (store), Burn" flyer released by Kommune I. This was the document that supposedly influenced Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and two friends to burn two Frankfurt department stores in April 1968. In many ways this could be considered the "true" beginning of the Baader-Meinhof Gang/Red Army Faction.

The Gun Speaks: Introduction version 2.2

2003-05-12T22:48:00.000-07:00

Here's the second revision to my introduction chapter for "The Gun Speaks". It' just keeps getting longer and longer! It's now about 4500 brisk words; if anyone would like to read it and offer suggestions or comments, feel free to e-mail me at richard@richardhuffman.com. I've gone ahead and removed versions 2.0 and 2.1 from the blog.
Thanks!

Introduction
It wasn't just about killing Americans, and killing pigs, at least not at first. It was about attacking the illegitimate state that these pawns served. It was about scraping the bucolic soil and exposing the fascist, Nazi-tainted bedrock that the modern West German state was propped upon. It was about war on the forces of reaction. It was about Revolution.

The Baader-Meinhof Gang certainly didn't expect to win their war by themselves. They assumed an epic proletarian backlash would be the Revolution's true engine. They assumed their wave of terror would force the state to respond with brutal, reflexive anger. They assumed that West German civil liberties and civil rights would be quashed as the state turned the clock back 25 years. They assumed that the proletarian West Germans would react in horror as the true nature of their own government was revealed. They assumed that factory workers, bakers, and miners, would be inspired to smash their own oppressors. They assumed that they would be the vanguard of a movement where millions of Germans brought Revolution home. They assumed a lot.

It wasn't complete conjecture. In July of 1971, Institut Allensbach, a public research firm with a standing and reputation similar to the Gallup organization in the United States, published a remarkable poll. Twenty percent of Germans under the age of thirty expressed "a certain sympathy" for the Baader-Meinhof Gang, a group with the avowed purpose of violently overthrowing the West German government. One in ten young Northern Germans indicated that they would willingly shelter a member of the Baader-Meinhof Gang for the night. For the leaders of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, this was empowering proof that millions of Germans were lining up behind their cause.

In retrospect, what is clear is that these millions of young middle-class Germans, primed by their radicalizing university experiences, were mostly willing to express a theoretical support for a radical group that seemed to embody the realization of their leftists ideals. But save for killing a few policemen in shootouts, the Baader-Meinhof Gang hadn't really begun their Revolution. There were no decapitated GIs yet, no maimed press operators. It was therefore easy to support them; they hadn't yet truly turned their theory into praxis. This would all change one year later.

Few Germans were interested in marching behind the Baader-Meinhof Gang after their weeklong campaign of terror in mid-May of 1972. After the Heidelberg bomb that shredded US Army Captain Clyde Bonner and his friend Ronald Woodward into a confetti which covered the limbs a nearby tree; after that same bomb knocked over a Coca-Cola machine, crushing another soldier, Charles Peck; after the Frankfurt bomb that sent shards of glass into Lt. Colonel Paul Bloomquist's neck and neatly severing his jugular; after the bombs placed in the hated Springer press offices in Hamburg that injured and maimed 17 typesetters and other workers; after the bomb that almost killed five policemen in Augsburg; after the car bomb placed on the same day in the Munich parking lot of the German Federal Police force destroyed 60 cars; after the bomb planted under the seat of Judge Wolfgang Buddenburg's Volkswagen exploded, severely injuring his wife; after all of this terror, the Baader-Meinhof Gang had no support. The millions of ordinary Germans, whom the faction's leadership believed were primed to fight, never materialized.

Within five days they were all in jail. Within five years they were all dead. In 1974 Holger Meins, 6 foot 4 and rail thin, starved himself to a death-weight of 120 pounds in a bid to gain concessions from his jailers.

Ulrike Meinhof, the popular journalist who had helped free convicted arsonist Andreas Baader from prison custody, hanged herself. Constantly wracked with self-doubt, she tore a towel into thin strips, fashioned a noose and hanged herself from the wire mesh of her cell's window. She left behind twin daughters whom she cared deeply about but hadn't spoken to in three years. It was Mother's Day, 1976.

As for Baader, his girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe, their ends came after the longest, most expensive, and most controversial trial in German history, after several plane hijackings by their compatriots who were still loose terrorizing the German Republic, after dozens more bombings, embassy takeovers, more kidnappings, and ultimately the unsuccessful hijacking of a Lufthansa 737 (which was a last, desperate attempt to secure their freedom).

As Baader listened to reports on his smuggled radio, the German commandos stormed the plane on a deserted Mogadishu runway, killing most of the hijackers and rescuing all of the hostages. Knowing that the hijackers had failed, Baader sent word to Ensslin and Raspe through their secret "telephone" system using the common electrical circuits between their soundproof cells. All hope is lost. It's all over. In cell 716, Raspe removed a 9mm Heckler and Koch pistol from a small section of hollowed wall--smuggled into what had been touted as the most secure prison block in the world-sat on the edge of his bunk, put the gun to his temple, and pulled the trigger.

Across the cell block, in cell 720, Ensslin removed a speaker wire from her record player, fed it through the mesh screen of her window, as her friend Ulrike Meinhof had done the year before, put her head through the makeshift noose, stood on the chair, and then kicked the chair aside.

In cell 719 Baader removed the carefully hidden 7.65 FEG pistol that had been smuggled into his cell, and fired one round into the wall, and another round into a pillow. Then he held the gun to the back of his neck, put his thumb on the trigger, and squeezed, blowing a hole through the top of his forehead. It was later theorized that Baader's machinations that night were an attempt to leave the impression that he had been murdered. For countless angry radical Germans, it was clear that they had been murdered. How could anyone reasonably trust the explanation that the imprisoned terrorists had managed to smuggle two pistols into the most heavily protected security block in the world, how they had managed to coordinate a suicide pact when their cells supposedly prevented communication, how guards stationed 20 feet away managed to not hear three separate gun shots, finding the bodies the next morning; how could anyone trust the pigs selling this lie when they had spent these same pigs had spent the previous three years proclaiming their supremacy over the prison conditions of the jailed terrorists?

To even the most conservative observer, it was clear that the authorities had a lot of questions to answer.

The Baader-Meinhof Gang were the world's first celebrity terrorists. Although they called themselves "The Red Army Faction," They were only known in the public's mind by the last names of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. Coverage of the group was so ubiquitous that the weekly story index of Der Speigel, Germany's equivalent of Time magazine, regularly listed a simple "B-M" alongside "Culture," "Foreign," and other topics. No one needed the letters "B-M" explained to them.

They were the true embodiment of the term "radical chic." They had style; they set trends. When Andreas Baader was eventually captured in a nationally televised siege in a Frankfurt neighborhood, he had the presence of mind to keep his Ray-Bans on as he was being dragged into a police van, a bullet in his thigh. As word spread that the Baader-Meinhof Gang apparently preferred to steal the speedy little BMW 2002 sports cars, people began to joke that BMW was actually an acronym for Baader-Meinhof Wagen. What had been a financially struggling regional automaker known for well-built yet plain cars, became a global brand with true cachet. Such was the perceived connection of the Baader-Meinhof Gang to BMWs that police would set up road blocks and only stop drivers in the little Bavarian cars, often unwittingly allowing the savvy terrorists to slip by in stolen Mercedes, Audis, and Alfa Romeos.

If you were conservative, or middle-of-the-road, you called them "the Baader-Meinhof Gang." Leftist and radical Germans, indignant at the "Gang" appellation, called them "The Baader-Meinhof Group" instead. Inside the faction, however, the issue wasn't whether they were a criminal "gang" or a Revolutionary "group." Frustration came from the media using the names of the supposed leaders of a revolutionary group that eschewed cult-of-personality leadership. Besides, it made it seem to Baader that people assumed Ulrike Meinhof was a co-leader of his group. They quickly adopted the moniker "Red Army Faction," though the name never really took hold until Baader, Meinhof, and the other original leaders were long dead and their succeeding generations continued to maim and kill.

But the public and the media weren't interested in the true dynamics of the membership of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. For most, the group became a prime vehicle for people to project their own assumptions, fears, and ambitions. Nothing reflected this more than in the late summer of 1971, when seemingly overnight every bakery window, U-bahn station, kiosk, and lamp pole became covered with wanted posters, supplied by the BKA, the West German federal criminal police force, featuring rows of the faces of almost two dozen young Germans sheepishly confronting them.

These wanted posters served as a coming out party for the Bundeskriminalamt; the BKA. Prior to the emergence of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, West Germany had no true national police force. The BKA served as a frontier police force, but were specifically prevented from working within the German lander, or states; a legacy of the heavily decentralized structure imposed after the war in an effort to prevent the rise of another Hitler. It was akin to the American Wild West; terrorists on the run merely had to travel 50 kilometers to the next land to be assured that the there were no local police with the slightest bit of knowledge about them or whether the police from a neighboring land were searching for them. Horst Herold, the newly-selected head of the BKA, had long advocated an increased role for the BKA in the internal security of West Germany. His arguments always fell on deaf ears. But with the Baader-Meinhof Gang on the loose, the various German land had a considerable change of heart, and authorized an extraordinary expansion of the powers of the BKA.

”Baader is the only many who has ever really understood me, and I am the only man who has ever really understood him,” said Herold, the man who eventually would catch Baader and the entire leadership of the Baader-Meinhof gang. Herold knew that the Baader-Meinhof Gang had made the BKA, and he was going to make the most of his agency's newfound powers. Their first project was the wanted poster.

The reach of the Baader-Meinhof wanted poster was enormous and unprecedented; seven million posters were printed and distributed across a country with only 60 million residents. The photos on the poster were relatively benign; many clearly came from school photos or from family albums. But if the photos on the poster were not particularly menacing, the poster itself certainly was; the ever-present nature of the poster left many Germans fearing that terrorists were behind every lamp post and phone box.

What the authorities did not anticipate however, was that their poster would also communicate another equally powerful message - unintended, yet devastating in its allure - to many young German women. Of the nineteen faces, almost half were women.

The top row featured those who it could be assumed to be the group's leaders; Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Holger Meinhof, and Jan-Carl Raspe; woman, man, woman, man, man. Seen through the eyes of a progressive young woman stifled by paternalistic German society--where the tripartite ideal of Kinder, Küche, Kirche (Children, Kitchen, Church) was considered sacrosanct, where it was still technically illegal to cohabitate with a man who was not your husband, where all abortion was outlawed, and where men were legally recognized as the head of the household--this was powerful, empowering stuff.

Intended by the BKA--the German equivalent of the FBI--to turn the German populace against the group, the wanted poster actually touched a deep nerve among many young German women who were excited by this band of outlaws who were clearly disregarding any notions that guns and bombs were the pure domain of men. They weren't seen so much as attacking the state, as they were promoting and practicing equality. In fact, even the BKA seemed to be tacitly accepting the Baader-Meinhof Gang's premise of gender equality by equally spacing the women and men throughout the poster; few would have noticed had the poster lined all the of the men along the top rows and the women along the bottom row, indicating men's traditional dominant role and women's traditional auxiliary role.

Of course this gender-neutral poster offered an equally appealing flip-side to young German men; apparently with Revolutionary Terrorism--what one assumed would be the most male of vocations--there were an almost equal number of women. Any impulse by young German men to have their egos threatened by clearly powerful women was negated cleanly by the assumption that if an outlaw band of young radicals were equally divided between men and women then sex must be rampant. A whole lot of sex.

Many conservatives read the poster the same way, and had exactly the opposite reactions. This depraved, debauched gang of criminal youths were clearly having sex; entirely too much of it. The emotional women driving the group certainly were the central cause for their irrational acts of terror; men would not act with such malice and illogic.

Their resonance with the population went well-beyond issues of gender and sexual equality, however. The scores of Germans who expressed support for the outlaw band during their early days had been primed by years of revolutionary socialist philosophy espoused on the radically-reformed German university campuses. Throughout the 1960s, German universities were awash in what would now seem to be radical Marxist thought, filtered through Fanon, and parsed by Marcuse, Horkheimer, and the other titans of the Frankfurt school. Students learned that German society, like all western society, was in the throws of late Capitalism, eventually to be replaced by true Democratic Socialism. Every worker would control his or her own fate; oppressed no more. The question wasn't if the proletariat was oppressed, but how much longer will they be oppressed, and who will take the mantle of leadership to end the oppression and jumpstart the revolution?

Rudi Dutschke, a brilliant Berlin student leader, advocated a "long march through the institutions." He proposed a decades-long Revolution from within by entering the systems of power, working into positions of leadership, and effecting peaceful, gradual change from within. His arguments held considerable sway, inspiring many young Germans to begin their own long marches. Joschke Fisher, Germany's extraordinarily popular foreign minister, and so instrumental in the German decision to oppose the 2003 American war in Iraq, was the most noted of hundreds of former radicals who deferred their immediate goals and steadily marched into the upper echelons of the German power structure.

But Meinhof, Ensslin, and their cohort were baldly dismissive of this slow methodical approach. Their very first communiqué made this evident: "You have to make clear that it is Social Democratic garbage to assert that imperialism…would allow itself to be infiltrated, to be led around by the nose, to be overpowered, to be intimidated, to be abolished without a struggle. Make it clear that the Revolution will not be an Easter Parade, that the pigs will naturally escalate the means as far as they can go."

The main assumption, inherent to their argument, was clear. Everyone knew that German society, like all capitalist societies, would ultimately become a Marxist social democracy. But in those innocent early days of their days on the run, the Baader-Meinhof Gang offered many young leftist Germans an infinitely more exciting vehicle for arriving at utopia; certainly more compelling than a long institutional march.

A common thread among most left-wing terror groups in the 1970s were the communiqués and letters released faithfully after every action, explaining their intentions. And no group was more faithful in releasing voluminous material than the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Typically, much of it was self-critical, albeit in self-serving ways. Communiqués usually mixed high-minded philosophical analyses with liberal dollops of "arselickers" "pants-shitters" and other proletarian vernacular. After each bank robbery, kidnapping, and shoot-out, another communiqué would faithfully appear. Sometimes sent to the underground journal Abit 883, sometimes sent directly to a press agency, the communiqués were typically signed by a different, independent "group" each time. Usually named after a dead comrade, the "groups" signing the letters claimed to be the "Holger Meins Commando," the"Petra Schelm Commando," and so on. It was intended to give the impression that dozens of new, independent factions were springing up across the Federal Republic. But these independent letters all spoke with the same voice, offered the same criticisms.

For a group whose ideology revolved constantly around self-criticism and reflection, they were oddly incapable of asking themselves the most obvious of questions: have we failed? Could we have ever succeeded? Why hasn't the proletariat, inspired by their actions, spontaneously risen up and destroyed those that oppressed them?

Much of what they assumed about the German state proved true. Light armored tanks and machine gun-wielding police became common sights on the streets of Berlin, of Hamburg, of Munich. Police would search entire apartment complexes on the slightest hint of Baader-Meinhof activity. Random police searches of the vehicles of young, long-haired Germans became so common that a new bumper sticker began turning up on seemingly every other car: "Ich gehoere nicht zur Baader-Meinhof Gruppe." Its message couldn't have been more clear: just because I have long hair, "I do not belong to the Baader-Meinhof Group."

It seemed perfectly clear to the members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang that they had brought to the surface the fascism that had plagued Germany since 1933. The fascist power structure had changed little since the Nazi regime. The beast had risen and responded to their challenge with full fury. This was the cue for the proletariat to recognize West German society for what it was, and rise up themselves and overthrow it in a joyous Marxist Revolution.

At least that's how the theory went.

In practice, of course, it didn't happen. Not because they had necessarily misread the nature of the German state, but because they had fundamentally misread the nature of the German people. Rather than rising up and overthrowing the fascist German state, as the Baader-Meinhof Gang expected of the German Volk, they mostly reacted with bemusement at the initial tactical efforts of the faction, and later horror as their May 1972 bombing campaign began. To be sure, the German state did respond with massively retaliatory force against the comparatively modest threat of the idealistic terrorist faction. But the working class German people, for the most part, cheered their government's efforts to restore order at all costs. They were, after all, Germans.

But for the multitudes of young Germans who had supported the nascent Urban Guerrilla faction for the previous two years--the same youngsters who had idealistically told pollsters of their willingness to provide a warm bed for the night if called upon--the terrors of May 1972 proved to eliminate all fence sitters. For truly the first time, they had to rectify their abstract philosophical commitment to aggressive Revolution with the carnage and horror that the very real violent Revolution had created and was being shown nightly on their TV screens. In the coming years, as the German government went to increasingly absurd lengths to isolate, ostracize, and mistreat their imprisoned terrorists, many of these idealist young Germans found a new justification to return to the fold and provide sympathetic support for the conditions that Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe, Holger Meins, and their cohort were suffering under. But that last quiet week before the carnage of mid-May 1972 proved to be the last time a significant portion of a western democratic society was committed to aggressive socialist Revolution amongst their own people.

Late in 2002 it was discovered that Dr. Bernhard Bogerts, a psychiatrist from at the University of Madgeburg, had been keeping Ulrike Meinhof’s brain in a jar in the corner of his office. Bogerts had been studying the brain off and on for five years trying to determine why a young, well-off, successful mother of two would throw away all vestiges of her happy life and sink into a morass of violence. As pressure to return the brain came from Meinhof’s twin daughters, Bogerts announced that he had solved the riddle of Meinhof’s behavior. “Pathological modifications” in her brain, the results of a mildly botched operation to clip off a blood vessel, had led to her down the violent path.

It was such a comforting answer to a population that still feels the mythos of Küche, Kinder, Kirche in their very core. It was a brain abnormality, not the logical progression of a sharp mind who was truly devoted to exposing the fascist underbelly of West Germany and the global imperialism of America. On May 13, 1970, she was a well known political commentator and journalist, with a TV movie based on her original script set to appear the following week; on May 14 she was Germany’s number one fugitive, having helped convicted arsonist Andreas Baader escape from prison custody in a raid that left an elderly man gravely wounded. Anyone who would make such a decisive break from her past must have something wrong with her. A brain abnormality.

But of course the Revolutionary decisions of Ulrike Meinhof, as well as Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and the 100 or so other young Germans who joined them in the next few years, can not be explained away by such simplistic explanations.

In her heart, and despite all of her self-professed Revolutionary ardor, Ulrike never felt that anything less than anguish over her own perceived weaknesses. Like an anorexic schoolgirl looking in a mirror and seeing a bloated reflection, Ulrike rarely felt anything less than a failure. Her whole life she had longed to be part of a committed movement, and as her own leftist views began to contrast sharply with her rich bourgeois life-style, she tortured herself as a hypocrite. Her jump with Baader from that window in Berlin’s Dahlem district was a leap of faith into the committed movement she had been searching for all of her life. But as Meinhof found herself quickly shunted aside within the group by the abrasive Baader and his powerful girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin, the truth behind Meinhof's choice became painfully clear; it was the constant desire to be part of a dedicated movement that defined her life, not actually being part of a movement. But like many who vacillate on life-altering decisions, Ulrike had put into place severe internal repercussions should she choose to change her mind at a later date. After the freeing of Baader (and especially after the shooting of the elderly librarian Georg Linke), Meinhof knew that she would certainly never be able to see most of her friends again, her children would probably have to be raised by her hated ex-husband, she would certainly face prison time, she would be a pariah.

Meinhof was correct in her assumption that these certainties would prevent her from any desire-or ability-to return to her old life, but she was wrong when she thought that they would help to finally exorcize her perpetual self-doubt. In her bid to rid herself of her psychic demons, Ulrike Meinhof eliminated her entire support system that had always helped her to cope in the past.

Andreas Baader's motivations to become a Revolutionary terrorist were as complicated as Meinhof's. Baader always wanted to be a leader, but seldom could he inspire others to follow him. When he was a young teen, he was sent to a new boarding school near Munich. In a attempt to draw interest toward “the new kid,” Baader began periodically coughing into a handkerchief, while dropping hints that he had some incurable lung ailment. “He coughed a lot, but his kerchief never showed blood,” remembered one of his fellow students. Most students saw his sad attempts to generate interest exactly for what they were, and they ignored him.
Later Baader would adopt a swaggering style. In new situations he often talked aggressively, trying to establish early that he was the toughest in the room. His act never really worked with some of the crowds he mixed with, like the Rockers--who saw through Baader immediately. But within the burgeoning student movement he found that his tough-man routine was accepted unquestioningly.

Compared against the coming actions of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the radical German student movement of 1968 was “radical” in name only. Students would talk themselves in circles discussing Revolutionary theory-Revolution was a given, but which would be the better model to follow? Marxist-Leninist, pure Marxist, early Mao, late Mao, Marcusian?. But they rarely expressed any desire to turn their theory into praxis, and actually bring about the revolution. Baader, at least initially, didn't much understand the various theories. But he knew that they all seemed to require some form of violence to bring them about, and he quickly surmised that the timid students naturally respected anyone who seemed willing to move beyond mere theory.

It wasn't until Baader met the fiercely intelligent Gudrun Ensslin that the realization began to set in that he would soon have to actually put his own violent theory into action. Ensslin taught Baader all about the evils of Capitalism, the lies of the German Wirtshaftwunder (“Economic Miracle”), and the necessity for Revolution. He took in enough of the rhetoric to be able to hold his own in short arguments, but that was about it. After Baader, Ensslin, and two others burned down a couple of Frankfurt department stores in 1968, Baader basked in the infamy of his act, and the legions of young radicals that approached him, wanting to be led, by him.
Thus Baader's life as a terrorist would prove to be less the story of a dedicated Marxist Revolutionary, than the story of a dedicated violent hedonist with a strong desire to have others follow him.

During their trial in the mid-70s, many members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang testified about the internal operating structure of the group. All took great pains to describe the egalitarian nature of the faction; all decision-making, all actions, everything was done with equal participation. It was all so utopian Marxist.

But it was a delusion. Though it may have been important for the outside world to find in the Baader-Meinhof Gang the perfect realization of a socialist Revolutionary faction, this was not reflected in reality. With a charismatic leader like Baader leading by fiat, and intelligent yet self-doubting followers like Meinhof failing to find any absolution in Revolutionary terrorism, the Baader-Meinhof Gang would prove to be entirely reflective of the bourgeois society that the were so dedicated to overthrowing.

BBC TV News of the RAF: 1970s as it happened

2003-05-11T00:13:00.000-07:00

The BBC is posting historical news broadcasts of significant events of the last few decades or so. They have recently posted short broadcasts of several Baader-Meinhof related reports. The first one deals with the Red Army Faction's failed takeover of the German Embassy in Stockholm. The second one is a 1978 report of the day that RAF fugitive Astrid Proll was arrested in Great Britian . Like most reports, they refer to the "Baader-Meinhof Gang" and never use the term Red Army Faction (actually they call them the "Baader-Meinhof Anarchist Gang"). They also make the assumption that Baader and Meinhof were co-leaders of the group. They're also classic in that 70s-news report kind of way where you get extremely long takes with no voice-over or any explanation of what the image we are viewing means (this was all done when news reports were laboriously shot on film and cut on a film editor). The audio report on the Stockholm Embassy takeover is particularly chilling; folks who have been lulled into a hip, ironic, trés amusement view of the whole Baader-Meinhof era are especially encouraged to listen in.
It's also comforting to note that "the BBC is not responsible for the content" of This is Baader-Meinhof.

Author Interviews

2003-05-10T21:08:00.000-07:00

There are a few interviews with me floating around there on the web. This first one is about 5 years old, back when my book was "just a year or so away." It's from the now defunct EYE magazine, and fortunately the dead link is mirrored on the extraordinary wayback machine at www.archive.org. Reading it now, I realize that I was unneccesarily smug about many things; and I seem to come across as somewhat dismissive of the RAF in ways that weren't necessary. Oh well, I was young. The second interview is from about six months ago for an online publication based in the UK. Unfortunately the site automatically resizes your browser window when you open it (how annoying is that?). But it's a good read. I found both the interviewers to be pretty knowledgeable, and interestingly, both were quite intrigued by the Baader-Meinhof BMW connection.

SPK links

2003-05-07T23:22:00.000-07:00

Here's some great SPK links (read below for a glimpse into their story).

SPK official site (with some english info)
SPK bibliography (German sources)

Ulrike's Brain

2003-05-07T12:07:00.000-07:00

The ghosts of Berlin's terror-filled 1970s keep reappearing. In November, it was discovered that Ulrike Meinhof's brain was being studied by Bernhard Bogerts, a psychiatrist for the University of Madgeburg. Family members had assumed that her brain lay along with the rest of her body in a quiet Berlin cemetery.
Bogerts indicated that her brain showed "pathological modifications" that may have led to her terrorist life-style, and knowledge of this condition may have helped her defense during her criminal trials in the mid 1970s.
Bettine Roehl, one of Ulrike Meinhof's twin daughters and a strong advocate for the memory of her mother, filed a lawsuit to secure her mother's brain, cremate it, and lay it to rest with the rest of her body (ultimately the remains of Meinhof's brain were laid to rest on December 20).
So what is one to make of this affair? For Roehl and her sister, this must have been a particular painful episode. When Meinhof was pregnant with the twins, she began suffering intensely painful headaches, caused by what was assumed to be a brain tumor. Doctors wanted to operate immediately, yet Meinhof knew that anaesthesia and operation would almost certainly kill the daughters living inside of her. She refused the operation and refused the pain medication prescribed to ease the searing pain in her head. She began to lose control of her eye movements and part of her face was affected by a palsy. Her condition prevented her from driving safely. She endured this pain for months, until the births of her daughters. She was immediately operated upon and it was discovered that the suspected tumor was actually an engorged blood vessel. The doctor put a metal clip on the vessel and sewed her back up. It was the damage that this operation did to parts of her brain that led Bogerts to conclude that Meinhof might have been less culpable for her later crimes. He said that Meinhof was ""significantly influenced by abnormal alterations to the brain" and this led to her increased tendency towards violence 8 years later.
Interestingly, this operation served to help prove Meinhof's identity after her capture in 1972. A magazine had published an X-ray of Meinhof's brain, taken after her operation, and showing the tell-tale clip. Police sedated their suspect and X-rayed her brain. The X-ray proved it; this was Ulrike Meinhof. (go to my 1972 timeline page to see a photo of Ulrike Meinhof's X-ray).
Bogerts hypothesis might in fact be entirely correct. Meinhof's slide toward violent radicalism may be explained by the defects introduced in that operation. But something about this explanation seems to be too pat and paternalistic. For three decades now Germans have struggled with the question of why a successful journalist, a mother of two, would throw her lot with radical terrorists. If she could do that, what was stopping other woman in similar circumstances from doing the same thing? It was a truly terrifying thought in paternalistic West Germany that an independent woman would systematically and logically come to the decision that violent struggle for revolution was an appropriate avenue.
So Bogerts' conclusions, while they may be all or partially correct, are troubling because they seem oh so comforting to a population enveloped by notions of Küche, Kinder, Kirche, and not wanting to believe that a young German mother would make such an obscene choice. Bogerts conclusions serve to undermine the idea that an educated logical process could lead many down the path to violence.
BBC: Meinhof brain study yields clues
CNN: German terrorist's brain buried

Turning Illness into a Weapon

2003-05-06T21:13:00.000-07:00

Of all of the intriguing elements of the grand opera that is the Baader-Meinhof era is the role that the Sozialististisches Patienten Kollektiv (Socialist Patients' Collective, or SPK) played. Essentially the SPK was a group of psychiatric patients that were led by Dr. Wolfgang Huber at Heidelberg University, that most great of all German universities. Huber merged Marxism and psychiatry into a worldview that said mental illnesses are essentially the product of a corrupt capitalist state. The cure comes from attacking that state and helping foment some form of socialist revolution.
After the capture of the original leadership of the Baader-Meinhof Gang/Red Army Faction in 1972, several members of the SPK joined up with the Red Army Faction, carrying out deadly attacks across Europe. Of course conservative writers went into apoplexy over the notion that the crazy terrorists really were crazy terrorists.
A few times over the years I have been sent material from the SPK, or someone who represents the institutional memory of the SPK, clearly stating that the SPK had nothing to do with the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Which is correct; members of the SPK joined up with the Red Army Faction; but the SPK has been somewhat unfairly maligned by the connections. That said, it seems that some of the SPK material sent to me is an effort to rewrite some history to put them in a more favorable light as well. I hope to talk to folks from the SPK--then and now--on my next trip to Germany and get a full and accurate picture of the SPK's role in the era.
Recently I found that the radical AK Press has now offered their entire catalog online. Included on-line is "Televisionaries" which is a great history of the Red Army Faction, which fuses facts from Jillian Becker's "Hitler's Children" and Stefan Aust's "The Baader-Meinhof Complex" into a great timeline-based narrative.
I also noticed that they are offering Wolfgang Huber's history/manifesto of the SPK "Turn Illness Into a Weapon" and another book about the SPK called "SPK: Krankheit im Recht" (which basically translates as "Illness in the Right"). Apparently it's in English. I'm ordering my copies soon...
You can order Televisionaries from my site through Amazon.com and thus give me about 50 cents of your hard earned money, or you can order directly from the worker's cooperative that is AK Press and keep your 50 cents circulating in the hands of the people. I will let your personal politics guide you.

"68er Generation"

2003-05-06T01:23:00.000-07:00

Found a great essay online about the 68er generation and the German student movement. It's translated by the author from Germany, and his grasp of German is better than his grasp of English; but it's a good, fairly insightful read nonetheless. The author grew up in postwar Germany and encapsulates the 68er generation as well as anything else on the subject that I've ever read. He talks about the tremendous upheaval that Germany endured, as well as the issues that weighed so heavily on the youth of Germany in the sixties.

Am I a capitalist whore?

2003-05-04T17:38:00.000-07:00

A visitor to my site recently asked me a question that I've recieved in various forms many times. He was wondering... well read for yourself:

Visitor:
Hi there,
Great site you have! Where do you think I could get a Baader-Meinhof t-shirt?

Richard Huffman:
Hi there,
You'll probably have to make one yourself; I'm not aware of any out there. I won't make them; it doesn't seem appropriate. You can find a sort of T-shirt at www.printedmatter.org (search "baader"). A net friend has written a sort of spoof romance novel called "the Baader-Meinhof Affair" and they sell t-shirts for the book.
You call also check out my store where I sell two posters that might interest you.

Visitor:
Thanks for the tip!
Just curious, but do you think it's inappropriate for you to profit off the B-M image or to just simply display the image on t-shirt?

Richard Huffman:
It's mostly a personal decision that has a moral and practical basis; I've talked to several members of victims families and have developed a pretty good sense of the continued pain that the murders of their loved ones caused. From a practical sense, it is MUCH more difficult to interview, say, a victim's family, if they knew that you were selling T-shirts featuring the murder of their father. Imagine trying to talk to Sharon Tate's parents while them knowing that you sell T-shirts with Charlie Manson on them.
But I still do sell two reproduction wanted posters and a reproduction bumper sticker on the site. The reason that I justify to myself my selling of them is that they are simply reproductions of actual historical items, rather than pop culture items. It's a fine line between interest and exploitation, and that's where I drew it!
All that said, I pretty fascinated how B-M culture has crept into the popular culture, and how others use and subvert B-M culture for their works (case in point, my friend who wrote the fake romance novel). Now I personally wouldn't utilize Baader-Meinhof imagery or iconography in anything other than a straight, respectful way, but I definitely find it interesting how others have done it. And I would almost certainly be the first to actually buy a B-M T-shirt were I to find one. I just won't manufacture them or sell them (and probably wouldn't wear it either)...
Here's an interview with me from a british magazine where you can see that I explore the subject with a little bit more depth...

http://www.3ammagazine.com/politica/2002_dec/interview_richard_huffman.html

Latest Freakishly High Site Stats

2003-05-04T16:18:00.000-07:00

I just compiled the numbers for site visitors for April. As of the last day of April the site has seen 601,734 different visitors, and generated 3,349,589 page impressions. It's interesting to note that the majority of visitors come from Europe; even though the site is in English. The numbers aren't particularly big when you consider google's 10 million page impressions a day, but I'm surprised and pleased nonetheless. Here's my complete site stats since the site began more than three years ago.
I worked at the Progressive Animal Welfare Society for almost five years, and supervising the operation of our web site was part of my job. In 2000 we spent more than 100,000 bucks to revamp the site, and worked pretty hard to make sure that the site was a great place to visit (it still is; though I've been laid off... which might have something to do with that 100,000 spent on the web site; there probably wasn't enough left over for salaries). We put the address on every single thing that we did and we had constantly updated content (specifically new dogs and cats available for adoption). We also were fortunate to register the domain name paws.org before all of the other groups known as PAWS got a chance. In our community of about 4 million (in the Puget Sound area around Seattle), we had a 95% name recognition.
So how did all of this money and exposure translate onto our web site? About 75% of the visitors and page impressions that I get at www.baader-meinhof.com. This isn't to say that paws.org's count is low; it's just that my site's count is freakishly high. I suppose. I've never advertised or promoted the site; so I'm not really sure what's drawing folks to the site.
Why did you visit www.baader-meinhof.com? E-me and let me know.

Welcome to the Baader Blog

2003-05-04T15:40:00.000-07:00

First Question: why a Baader blog?
First Answer: because updating my web site KILLS me. Not the content, just the coding. Also, I get tons of interesting links, questions, and queries from visitors but don't really have a good place to put them. So there ya go.