Stefan Aust

It was one of those moments that make you feel you are getting a little closer to the truth when, twenty years or so ago, I came upon a document in one of the files on the Baader-Meinhof group that cover sixty metres of shelf-space in my apartment; it was a secret letter in which Gudrun Ensslin gave her fellow prisoners cover names out of Moby Dick.
Only then did I read that novel in the original - and I gleaned some idea of the exaggerated importance imputed by the prisoners to their struggle against reality. They compared their fight against the 'system' to Captain Ahab's insane pursuit of the Great White Whale, the leviathan that, in Herman Melville's classic novel, also stands for the system of the state. They constructed an image of themselves as icons, and they did indeed become icons in all the severity and brutality with which they turned on those whom they considered their adversaries, those who were not involved, their own comrades, and in the end themselves.

Besides Moby Dick, another work was also required reading for the prisoners in Stammheim and other jails. This was Bertolt Brecht's drama of revolution, The Measures Taken (Die Maßnahme). I came upon that too in looking through the circulars that passed between the cells. Ulrike Meinhof had quoted a passage from the play:

It is a terrible thing to kill.
But we will kill not only others, we will kill ourselves too if necessary,
For this murdering world can be changed by force alone, as
Every living person knows.

This slogan determined the actions of the Baader-Meinhof Group - or, as they called themselves, the Red Army Faction (RAF) - as with almost all the terrorists in the world, whether their motivation is predominantly political or religious. They share a form of violence that is both murderous and suicidal.

Terrorists regard themselves as martyrs. They hope that with the example they set, their experimenting on a living subject, they will go down in history, or at least enter Paradise with its seventy virgins.
To that extend the Attas and the Baaders of this world have much in common - each in his own time, but always embedded in a revolutionary mainstream whether of a socialist or, as at present, an Islamist nature. Both Mohammed Atta and Andreas Baader came very close to their aim of gaining immortality through their deaths.

The history of the RAF is part of the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. Above all, the 'German Autumn' of 1977, which saw the abduction and later the murder of Hanns Martin Schleyer, president of the German Employers' Association, and the hijacking of the Lufthansa aircraft Landshut, ending in Mogadishu, was the greatest challenge yet to post-war German society. At least so far as their effects on internal German politics were concerned, these dramatic events are comparable with the significance for the USA of 11 September 2001.