Red Army Faction, A Documentary History

Description

The first in a two-volume series, this is by far the most in-depth political history of the Red Army Faction ever made available in English.

Projectiles for the People starts its story in the days following World War II, showing how American imperialism worked hand in glove with the old pro-Nazi ruling class, shaping West Germany into an authoritarian anti-communist bulwark and launching pad for its aggression against Third World nations. The volume also recounts the opposition that emerged from intellectuals, communists, independent leftists, and then—explosively—the radical student movement and countercultural revolt of the 1960s.

It was from this revolt that the Red Army Faction emerged, an underground organization devoted to carrying out armed attacks within the Federal Republic of Germany, in the view of establishing a tradition of illegal, guerilla resistance to imperialism and state repression. Through its bombs and manifestos the RAF confronted the state with opposition at a level many activists today might find difficult to imagine.

For the first time ever in English, this volume presents all of the manifestos and communiqués issued by the RAF between 1970 and 1977, from Andreas Baader’s prison break, through the 1972 May Offensive and the 1975 hostage-taking in Stockholm, to the desperate, and tragic, events of the “German Autumn” of 1977. The RAF’s three main manifestos—The Urban Guerilla Concept, Serve the People, and Black September—are included, as are important interviews with Spiegel and le Monde Diplomatique, and a number of communiqués and court statements explaining their actions.

Providing the background information that readers will require to understand the context in which these events occurred, separate thematic sections deal with the 1976 murder of Ulrike Meinhof in prison, the 1977 Stammheim murders, the extensive use of psychological operations and false-flag attacks to discredit the guerilla, the state’s use of sensory deprivation torture and isolation wings, and the prisoners’ resistance to this, through which they inspired their own supporters and others on the left to take the plunge into revolutionary action.

Drawing on both mainstream and movement sources, this book is intended as a contribution to the comrades of today—and to the comrades of tomorrow—both as testimony to those who struggled before and as an explanation as to how they saw the world, why they made the choices they made, and the price they were made to pay for having done so.

Sujets

• Student activism
• Cold War
• Imperialism
• Guerrilla warfare
• Colonialism
• Révolution
• Guérilla

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604861792
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

This book about the Red Army Faction of American-occupied Germany is one that should be read by any serious student of anti-imperialist politics. “Volume 1: Projectiles for the People” provides a history of the RAF’s development through the words of its letters and communiqués. What makes the book especially important and relevant, however, is the careful research and documentation done by its editors. From this book you will learn the mistakes of a group that was both large and strong, but which (like our own home-grown attempts in this regard) was unable to successfully communicate with the working class of a “democratic” country on a level that met their needs. While the armed struggle can be the seed of something much larger, it is also another means of reaching out and communicating with the people. Students interested in this historic era would do well to study this book and to internalize both the successes and failures of one of the largest organized armed anti-imperialist organizations operating in Western Europe since World War II.
— Ed Mead, former political prisoner, George Jackson Brigade
Clear-headed and meticulously researched, this book deftly avoids many of the problems that plagued earlier attempts to tell the brief but enduring history of the RAF. It offers a remarkable wealth of source material in the form of statements and letters from the combatants, yet the authors manage to present it in a way that is both coherent and engaging. Evidence of brutal—and ultimately ineffective—attempts by the state to silence the voices of political prisoners serve as a timely and powerful reminder of the continued need for anti-imperialist prisoners as leaders in our movements today. At once informative and inspirational, this is a much-needed contribution to the analysis of armed struggle and the cycles of repression and resistance in Europe and around the world.
— Sara Falconer, Toronto Anarchist Black Cross Federation
This first volume about the RAF is about a part of WWII that did not end when the so called allies defeated the nazis. The RAF warriors come from a strong socialist history and knew they were fighting for the very life of their country. Many victories and many errors were scored which provide this important look into REAL her/history lessons. A must read for all serious alternative history students who then in turn can use it as a teaching tool towards a better future.
— b (r.d. brown), former political prisoner, George Jackson Brigade
Starting in the Sixties, a new revolutionary strategy began to plague the capitalist metropolis—the urban guerilla. Warfare once waged by peasant armies in the countryside of a Cuba, a China, or a Guinea-Bissau, was suddenly transferred to small cells of ex-students in the imperialist centers of Berlin, Rome, and New York. No urban guerrillas became more famed or more demonized than West Germany’s Red Army Faction (RAF). We knew their signature bold actions in the headlines: from the damaging bombing of the u.s. army V Corps headquarters in Frankfurt in 1972, in response to Washington’s mining of Hanoi’s harbor in an escalation of the Vietnam War, to the kidnapping and later execution of the head of the West German industrialists’ association, in an effort to negotiate for the release of revolutionary prisoners. But we never heard their political voices . Since the RAF’s political statements, debates, and communiqués were untranslated and unavailable in English even within the left.
Now, at last, a significant documentary history of the RAF has come into the spotlight, complete with a readable account of the postwar German New Left from which it emerged. Even better, this work was done by editors/translators who reject the obedient capitalist media’s trivializing of the RAF as “pathological” death-wishing celebrities. In their hands, the words of the RAF are revealed as serious responses to the failure of parliamentary reformism, trade-unionism, and pacifism, to stop the solidification of Germany’s own form of a neofascist capitalism (lightly cosmeticized with a layer of that numbing “consumer democracy”). The young RAF fighters hoped for liberation in their dangerous experiment but were willing to accept tragic consequences, and their story is emotionally difficult to read with eyes open. Controversial as the RAF was, their systematic torture in special “anti-terrorist” facilities stirred worldwide unease and even protest. In fact, those special prisons were the eagerly studied forerunners for the u.s. empire’s own latest human rights abuses, from Guantanamo to the domestic “maxi-maxi” prisons. We all and the RAF are much closer than the capitalist public wants to believe. It is all here, in this first volume of the Red Army Faction documentary histories, and we should thank all those who worked on this book.
— J. Sakai, author of Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat
THE RED ARMY FACTION: A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY
VOLUME I P ROJECTILES for the P EOPLE
THE RED ARMY FACTION: A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY
VOLUME I P ROJECTILES for the P EOPLE
forewords by Bill Dunne and Russell “Maroon” Shoats
introductory texts and translations by André Moncourt and J. Smith
the red army faction: a documentary history volume 1: projectiles for the people
introductory texts and translations by André Moncourt and J. Smith
The opening epigram on page v is from Karl-Heinz Dellwo “Kein Ankommen, kein Zurück” in Nach dem bewaffneten Kampf , Angelika Holderberg ed. (Gießen: Psychsozial-Verlag, 2007).
ISBN: 978-1-60486-029-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2008929110
Copyright 2009 Kersplebedeb This edition copyright 2009 PM Press and Kersplebedeb
Many of the translated texts in this book are available online at www.germanguerilla.com
Kersplebedeb Publishing and Distribution CP 63560 CCCP Van Horne Montreal, Quebec Canada H3W 3H8 www.kersplebedeb.com
PM Press PO Box 23912 Oakland, CA 94623 www.pmpress.org
Layout and Index by Kersplebedeb
Cover Design: Josh MacPhee/Justseeds.org The photo used on the front cover is of the funeral of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe in 1977.
Printed in the United States on recycled paper
dedicated to the memory of Jim Campbell
“We are a projectile,” Andreas Baader wrote to the group, thereby articulating an ethical point of view in which the subject and his objective became a single thing. It also meant that if no further separation existed between the “subject” and “object” it was obvious how it would end: in death.
Karl-Heinz Dellwo
CONTENTS
FOREWORD BY BILL DUNNE
A WORD FROM RUSSELL “MAROON” SHOATS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
TRANSLATORS’ NOTE
PREFACE
ACRONYM KEY
GERMAN TERMS
1 “DEMOCRACY” COMES TO DEUTSCHLAND: POSTFASCIST GERMANY AND THE CONTINUING APPEAL OF IMPERIALISM
not wanted in the model: the kpd
2 THE RE-EMERGENCE OF REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS IN WEST GERMANY
the old left and the new reality
3 TAKING UP THE GUN
Faced With This Justice System, We Can’t Be Bothered Defending Ourselves (Thorwald Proll, October 1968)
Build the Red Army! (June 5, 1970)
The Urban Guerilla Concept (April 1971)
4 BUILDING A BASE AND “SERVING THE PEOPLE”
the socialist patients’ collective
Andreas Baader: Letter to the Press (January 24, 1972)
Serve the People: The Urban Guerilla and Class Struggle (April 1972)
on the treatment of traitors
This is Edelgard Graefer… (March 27, 1972)
5 THE MAY OFFENSIVE: BRINGING THE WAR HOME
For the Victory of the People of Vietnam (May 14, 1972)
Attacks in Augsburg and Munich (May 16, 1972)
Attack on Judge Buddenberg (May 20, 1972)
Attack on the Springer Building (May 20, 1972)
Attack on the Heidelberg Headquarters of the U.S. Army in Europe (May 25, 1972)
To the News Editors of the West German Press (May 28, 1972)
Regarding the Fascist Bomb Threats Against Stuttgart (May 29, 1972)
Statement to the Red Aid Teach-In (May 31, 1972)
6 BLACK SEPTEMBER: A STATEMENT FROM BEHIND BARS
the appeal of the fedayeen: to all the free people of the world
The Black September Action in Munich: Regarding the Strategy for Anti-Imperialist Struggle (November 1972)
7 STAYING ALIVE: SENSORY DEPRIVATION, TORTURE, AND THE STRUGGLE BEHIND BARS
the lawyers
horst mahler after the raf
Ulrike Meinhof on the Dead Wing (1972–3, 1973–4)
Second Hunger Strike (May 8, 1973)
Provisional Program of Struggle for the Political Rights of Imprisoned Workers (September 1974)
Third Hunger Strike (September 13, 1974)
The Expulsion of Horst Mahler (Monika Berberich, September 27, 1974)
Holger Meins’ Report on Force-Feeding (October 11, 1974)
Holger Meins’ Last Letter (November 1, 1974)
Interview with Spiegel Magazine (January 1975)
Andreas Baader Regarding Torture (June 18, 1975)
8 A DESPERATE BID TO FREE THE PRISONERS: THE STOCKHOLM ACTION
Letter from the RAF to the RAF Prisoners (February 2, 1975)
Occupation of the West German Embassy in Stockholm (April 24, 1975)
Defense Attorney Siegfried Haag Goes Underground (May 11, 1975)
9 SHADOW BOXING: COUNTERING PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE
“We know why he’s saying it” (Brigitte Mohnhaupt, July 22, 1976)
On the Liberation of Andreas Baader (Ulrike Meinhof, September 13, 1974)
The Bombing of the Bremen Train Station (December 9, 1974)
The Nature of the Stammheim Trial: The Prisoners Testify (August 19, 1975)
No Bomb in Munich Central Station (September 14, 1975)
The Bombing of the Hamburg Train Station (September 23, 1975)
The Bombing of the