The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (111 page)

Jailbreak out of History

the re-biography of Harriet Tubman

by Butch Lee

Kersplebedeb 2000
ISBN 0-9731432-0-7

87 pages paperback

$8.75

Firmly re-rooting Harriet Tubman in the context of patriarchy, race, class, and armed struggle. A fascinating, and much needed, examination of the woman and her times. At a time when violence against women of color is at the center of world politics, uncovering the censored story of one Amazon points to answers that have nothing to do with government programs, police, or patriarchal politics.

Kuwasi Balagoon: a soldier’s story

writings by a revolutionary
New Afrikan anarchist

with contributions by Sundiata Acoli, David Gilbert, J. Sakai, Meg Starr, and others

Kersplebedeb 2003
ISBN

125 pages paperback

$15.00

Kuwasi Balagoon was a defendant in the notorious Panther 21 frame-up; after acquittal he joined the underground Black Liberation Army. A guerilla fighter, an anarchist, and a proponent of New Afrikan independence, he died in prison of AIDS related complications in 1986. This is the most complete collection of his writings ever assembled.

We were so terribly consistent…

A Conversation about the History of the RAF

Stefan Wisniewski interviewed by
taz

introduction by André Moncourt and J. Smith

Kersplebedeb 2009
ISBN 1-894946-08-1

44 page pamphlet

$3.00

Stefan Wisniewski joined the Red Army Faction shortly after the death of a RAF prisoner in 1974. By 1977, he was participating in a campaign of assassination and kidnapping that would shake Germany to its core. In this candid interview, conducted in 1997, he looks back on his generation’s revolt and the RAF, while honestly grappling with the errors the guerilla committed during its struggle against imperialism.

GERMANGUERILLA.COM

Many of the texts in this book—as well as supporting documents providing added contextualization—were first published to this website, devoted to archiving documents and analysis about the urban guerilla in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Come by and visit to see as our work proceeds on our second volume.

¹
http://labourhistory.net/raf
/

²
http://www.nadir.org/nadir/archiv/PolitischeStroemungen/Stadtguerilla+RAF/RAF/raf-texte+materialien.PDF

1
Markus Wolf and Anne McElvoy,
Man without a Face: The Autobiography of Communism’s Greatest Spymaster
(New York: Times Books, 1999), xi.

2
Charles Higham,
Trading with the Enemy: An Exposé of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1949
(New York: Delacorte Press, 1983).

3
William D. Graf, “Anti-Communism in the Federal Republic of Germany,”
Socialist Register
(1984): 167.

4
Women Against Imperialist War (Hamburg), “War on Imperialist War,” in Prairie Fire Organizing Committee,
War on the War Makers: Documents and Communiqués from the West German Left
(San Francisco: John Brown Book Club n.d.), 21

1
There has been much written over the past thirty years about the ways in which the non-Jewish German working class benefited from the Third Reich’s policies, enjoying the position of a labor aristocracy. The most noteworthy book on this subject is Götz Aly’s
Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial war, and the Nazi Welfare State;
translated by Jefferson Chase, 1st U.S. ed. (New York: Metropolitan, 2007).

2
“How to Fight Communism,” March 25, 1948, OMGUS in Patrick Major,
The Death of the KPD: Communism and Anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945-1956
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 247.

3
Graf, “Anti-Communism,” 169.

4
Werner Hülsberg,
The German Greens: A Social and Political Profile.
Translated by Gus Fagan. (London: Verso, 1988), 22.

5
Karl Heinz Roth,
L’autre movement ouvrier en Allemagne 1945-78.
Translated by Serge Cosseron. (Paris: Christian Bourgois Editeur, 1979), 50.

6
Hülsberg, 22-3.

7
Ibid., 23.

1
Ibid., 24.

2
Ibid., 22.

3
Roth, 47.

4
Major, 174, 192.

5
Hülsberg, 25.

1
Roth, 121.

2
David Haworth, “Why German Workers Don’t Ask For Raises,”
Winnipeg Free Press,
December 11, 1968.

3
Hülsberg, 25.

4
Graf, “Anti-communism,” 183.

5
William Graf, “Beyond Social Democracy in West Germany?”
Socialist Register
(1985/86): 118.

6
“Die Integration der Bundesrepublik ins westliche Bündnissystem,”
http://www.kssursee.ch/schuelerweb/kalter-krieg/kk/integration.htm
.

7
Women Against Imperialist War, 22.

1
Regarding all these, see
The Neo-colonialism of the West German Federal Republic
(German Democratic Republic: Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee, 1965), 20-35, 39-45, 62-65, 82-85.

2
Madeleine G. Kalb,
The Congo Cables: The Cold War in Africa from Eisenhower
to Kennedy
(New York: Macmillan, 1982), 193.

3
Frieder Sclupp, “Modell Deutschland and the International Division of Labour: The Federal Republic of Germany in the World Political Economy,” in
The Foreign Policy of West Germany: Formation and Contents,
ed. Ekkert Kruippendorf and Volker Rittberger (London: SAGE Publications, 1980).

4
Quoted in
The Neo-colonialism of the West German Federal Republic,
96-7.

5
Daniel Ganser,
NATO’s Secret Army: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe
(London: Frank Cass, 2005), 190-211.

6
Hülsberg, 15.

1
German Bundestag, Administration, Public Relations section,
Law for the Federal Republic of Germany
(Berlin, 2001), 22.

2
Ibid., 23.

3
Sebastien Cobler,
Law, Order and Politics in West Germany
(Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1978), 76.

4
Ibid., 74.

5
Wolfgang Abendroth, Helmut Ridder and Otto Schonfeldt, eds.,
KPD Verbot oder mit Kommunisten leben
(Hamburg: Rororo Taschenbuch Verlag, 1968), 38.

6
Graf, “Anti-communism,” 179.

1
Ibid., 180.

2
Cobler, 183-184.

3
Ibid., 80.

4
David Childs,
From Schumacher to Brandt: The Story of German Socialism 1945-1965
(New York: Pergamon Press, 1966), 49.

5
Patrick Major,
The Death of the KPD: Communism and Anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945-1956
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 170.

6
Ibid., 115.

7
Ibid., 116.

1
Ibid., 133.

2
Ibid., 226.

1
Paul Hockenos has noted that for some Protestants, their religion may have made them particularly receptive to the first postwar protest movements, due to feelings of marginalization within the new truncated state: whereas Protestants had outnumbered Catholics by nearly two to one in prewar Germany, there was rough parity between the two religions in the FRG. See Paul Hockenos,
Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic: an Alternative History of Postwar Germany
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22. Despite this fact, the churches remained overwhelmingly anticommunist and hostile to left-wing politics.

2
As one deputy from the neo-nazi Socialist Reich Party put it, “First we were told that guns and ammunition were poison and now this poison has turned to sweets which we should eat. But we are not Negroes or idiots to whom they can do whatever they want. It is either they or us who should be admitted to the insane asylum.” [Martin Lee,
The Beast Reawakens
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997), 65.]

3
For the sake of clarity, it should be remembered that in the years between the Nazi defeat and the establishment of the FRG, there was a large strike movement in favour of nationalization of the country’s largest industries. This movement, which initially seemed to have the wind in its sails, was opposed by the Allied occupiers. Its fate was sealed when the new trade unions obediently redirected it towards token co-management and de-cartelization. As such, it provides a stark example of workers’ political activity sabotaged by their putative left-wing representatives even before the occupation had ended. (Roth, 50-51; Hülsberg, 29-32; Childs, 67-84.)

4
Major, 145.

5
Ibid., Hülsberg, 33.

6
Bernd Langer,
Art as Resistance.
Translated by Anti-Fascist Forum. (Göttingen: Aktiv-Dr. und Verl., 1998), 8.

1
Hülsberg, 34.

2
Hockenos, 42-3.

3
Nick Thomas,
Protest Movements in 1960s West Germany: A Social History of Dissent and Democracy
(New York: Berg, 2003), 33.

4
Cobler, 134.

5
Thomas, 35.

6
Hülsberg, 38.

1
Graf, “Beyond Social Democracy,” 104-5.

2
Hockenos, 31.

1
Ibid., 29.

2
Jean-Paul Bier, “The Holocaust and West Germany: Strategies of Oblivion 1947-1979”
New German Critique
19, Special Issue 1: Germans and Jews Winter (1980): 13.

3
Karin Bauer,
Everybody Talks About the Weather… We Don’t: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof
(New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), 27.

4
Ibid., 30.

5
“My Mother, The Terrorist”,
Deutsche Welle
[online], March 14, 2006.

6
Hockenos, 34-35. See also Dagmar Herzog, “‘Pleasure, Sex, and Politics Belong Together’: Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution in West Germany,”
Critical Inquiry
24, 2: Intimacy, (Winter 1988): 402-403.

7
Eberhard Knodler-Bunte, in Herzog, 416.

8
Hülsberg, 39.

1
Thomas, 94. See also Gretchen Dutschke,
Wir hatten ein barbarisches, schönes Leben
(Köln: K&W, 1996), 60-61.

2
Jutta Ditfurth,
Ulrike Meinhof: Die Biographie
(Berlin: Ullstein, 2007), 180-181.

3
David Kramer, “Ulrike Meinhof: An Emancipated Terrorist?” in
European Women on the Left: Socialism, Feminism, and the Problems Faced by Political Women, 1880 to the Present.
Jane Slaughter and Robert Kern, eds. Contributions in Women’s Studies. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press 1981), 201.

4
Roth, 101.

5
Ibid., 100.

6
There was one autobahn through the GDR connecting the city to the Federal Republic, which the East Germans were obligated by international agreements to keep open. The highway ran through desolate countryside, and was flanked by East German armed forces at all times.

1
For many examples of just how careful the Federal Republic had to be in imposing itself in West Berlin, see Avril Pittman,
From Ostpolitik to reunification: West German-Soviet political relations since 1974
(Cambridge, England & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 32-62.

2
Hilke Schlaeger and Nancy Vedder-Shults, “West German Women’s Movement,”
New German Critique
13 (Winter 1978): 61.

3
Hockenos, 80.

4
Eckhard Siepmann in Herzog, 427.

5
Kommune 1 in German.

6
G. Conradt and H. Jahn,
Starbuck Holger Meins,
directed by G. Conradt. (Germany: Hartmut Jahn Filmproduktion, 2002).

1
“Women in the SDS; or, Or Our Own Behalf, (1968)” in
German Feminist Writing,
eds. Patricia A. Herminghouse and Magda Mueller (New York: Continuum, 2001), p. 160.