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.
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