Today, looking for links between RAF and Individual Eleven.

Live event: Brigitte Mohnhaupt, a former RAF terrorist, was released from the prison after serving 24 years out of her five life sentences.

Many of her comrades are already dead, some of them through collective suicide in the prison. The group included and was even named after (Baader-Meinhof Group) Ulrike Meinhof (on the left), who was earlier a journalist with leftist magazine konkret. Even before, according to Wikipedia, she studied philosophy, sociology, Pädagogik (roughly pedagogy) and Germanistik.

In 1970 she became a wanted terrorist after assisting escape of RAF’s leader.

Can’t help but be interested in this kind of people (women).

In her essay “The Concept of the Urban Guerrilla” she wrote:

The urban guerrilla can concretize verbal internationalism as the requisition of guns and money. He can blunt the state’s weapon of a ban on communists by organizing an underground beyond the reach of the police. The urban guerrilla is the weapon in the class war.

The “urban guerrilla” signifies armed struggle, necessary to the extent that it is the police which makes the indiscriminate use of firearms, exonerating class justice from guilt and burying our comrades alive unless we prevent them. To be an “urban guerrilla” means not to let oneself be demoralized by the violence of the system.

The urban guerrilla’s aim is to attack the states apparatus of control at certain points and put them out of action, to destroy the myth of the system’s omnipresence and invulnerability.

I spent some time trying to figure out what RAF was in fact supposed to achieve. The answers by Richard Huffman (recommended reading):

I don’t really think that Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof, and the rest really did much thinking about the “Utopia” that they were trying to usher in. It was all very vague. Mostly, they were concerned with attacking the Capitalist state, and the supposed injustices inherent within it.

The whole problem with most of the European Revolutionary terrorist movements is that for their movement to succeed they had to ultimately generate mass support of the proletariat. For obvious reasons, this never happened. Essentially Baader, Meinhof and the rest adopted an elite attitude as discussed by Debray. They felt that the proletariat was enslaved in the temporary comforts of a a crippling Capitalist society, and they needed to be educated by an enlightened elite; they clearly felt that this was their role. The way to educate the people was to attack the state, provoke a massive “fascist” response, and have the proletariat “learn” the true nature of the German beast. Unfortunately for them, because they were so caught up in the intellectual, internal Marxist debates of the time, the terrorists never really understood that the people — the “proletariat” — would never find their actions appealing.

And last on Ulrike:

Here’s a small bit of “pop” psychology that I have developed about Meinhof: She was a woman plagued by self-doubt. Essentially she had very low self-esteem and spent much of her life attempting to alleviate her self-doubt. Though she was possibly the most famous female journalist in Germany in 1970, she didn’t feel worthy of her success. She told herself that she was a hypocrite for earning large sums of money as a journalist while using her column to espouse radical Marxist and Socialist views. She joined up with Baader, she felt, to “put her money where her mouth was” (–an American expression meaning putting into action the views that a person espouses). As for myself, I believe that it was a more fundamental desire that motivated Meinhof — the desire the alleviate her self-doubt. It was less a political act and more an emotional act.

Of course it didn’t work. Quickly after joining the RAF she was pushed to the sidelines by Baader and Ensslin. She was still very important within the group — she wrote their manifesto “The Concept of the Urban Guerrilla” — but she was not one of the top two leaders.

During her time in Stammheim prison, the other defendants ostracized her. It was clearly this ostrazation that pushed her to commit suicide. Having thrown her lot with Baader, Ensslin, Raspe, etc., she found that she was still plagued by self doubt. But stuck in prison, having turned her back on her old friends, her family, her children, and now her only companions were turning their back on her, Meinhof felt she only had one option left: suicide.