Read The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 Online
Authors: J. Smith
The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 (40 page)
Katharina Hammerschmidt
Many observers considered Hammerschmidt’s death to be a case of “judicial murder.” Independent physicians who examined her upon her
release declared that the prison doctors’ findings had been “medically incomprehensible,” evidence of “incredible medical shortcomings.”
3
A court would eventually award her family the measly sum of 5,000
DM
, admitting that the prison administration bore some responsibility for her death.
4
The RAF and its supporters would lay Katharina Hammerschmidt’s death at the door of the West German prison authorities. Yet, by the time she had died, hers was not the first such case of “judicial murder.”
On September 13, 1974, forty prisoners led by the RAF had begun their third collective hunger strike against prison conditions.
5
The Committees Against Torture sprang into action, and Amnesty International had its Hamburg offices occupied in an attempt to pressure the liberal organization to take a stand in support of the prisoners. (Notably, several of those involved in this occupation would join the guerilla within a few years.)
6
Not only had the previous hunger strikes failed to achieve integration of all RAF prisoners into the general population, in situations where they had been able to have contact with social prisoners, the latter often found themselves harassed or transferred. The prisoners had come to the conclusion that the demand for integration, while it had undeniable appeal given the high esteem in which the New Left held marginalized groups like social prisoners, was simply not going to work. As a result, integration
was dropped, and the struggle was now defined as one against isolation and for the association of political prisoners with each other.
As Karl-Heinz Dellwo, who was active in the Committees Against Torture at the time, explains:
Up until then the hunger strikes were carried out with the goal of achieving “equality” with the other prisoners. I had long been critical of this. I thought it absolutely could not work. Either one would be placed somewhere where the prisoners changed every day, or with prisoners with whom one could not, for various reasons, talk. I was pleased when the RAF prisoners changed their line and chose the demand for association. That created some conflicts on the outside, for instance with the Frankfurt Committee,
1
which had a social revolutionary line: they were of the opinion that all prisoners were frustrated social rebels. I seriously doubted that.
2
This new demand for association became a rallying point for the prisoners and their supporters for the next two decades. Years later, 2nd of June Movement prisoner Till Meyer, writing from the dead wing, would express the goal this way:
Our demand—association of all prisoners—is the opposite of what the pigs offer us. Association means, above all, survival, collective political imprisonment, political identity, self-organization—while the dead wing means annihilation.
3
In practical terms, association meant bringing together political prisoners in groups large enough to be socially viable, fifteen being the minimum number normally suggested. Political prisoners in some other European countries, such as Italy and Northern Ireland, had already won such conditions for themselves, and so it was hoped that this might prove a realistic goal.
As a brief aside, it should be noted that this reorientation, along with the third hunger strike, provided the occasion for a very public split amongst the prisoners, as Horst Mahler not only refused to participate,
but also took the opportunity to publicly repudiate armed struggle and break with the RAF. It has been suggested that one reason for this was his refusal to abandon the demand for integration, though clearly he had had other disagreements with the rest of the guerilla for some time now.
4
Rote Hilfe e.v. poster demanding freedom for Horst Mahler
In point of fact, Mahler had joined Red Aid e.v., the network that had been set up by the KPD/AO in 1970. He would explain that this was intended as an attempt to “close ranks and organize a criticism of the RAF’s sectarian line in the spirit of solidarity.”
5
Mahler’s move into orthodox Maoism would win him some support: that October, Red Aid e.v. organized a demonstration, during which, according to the
Verfassungsschutz
, 5,000 people rallied to demand his freedom.
6
Nevertheless, it failed to do any good in court, where Mahler was now facing his third RAF-related trial, the second time he would face charges relating to Baader’s 1970 jailbreak. Despite his break with the guerilla, he would eventually be sentenced to fourteen years in prison; Ulrike Meinhof, who also stood accused in these proceedings, would receive an eight-year sentence, while Hans-Jürgen Bäcker, who had testified against the guerilla, would be acquitted.
7
The other prisoners considered Mahler’s public split to be serious enough to warrant a public reply, and on September 27 Monika Berberich delivered a statement at the Mahler-Meinhof-Bäcker trial formally expelling her former comrade, accusing him of being a “filthy, bourgeois chauvinist” who had attempted to “transfer his ruling class arrogance… into the proletarian movement.”
1
Horst Mahler After the RAF Horst Mahler left the RAF for the KPD (previously the KPD/AO) in 1974, but remained a Maoist for only a few years: in 1977 he publicly announced that he was now “internally freed from the dogmatic revolutionary theory of Marxism-Leninism.” With time off for good behavior, Mahler was released from prison in 1980, at which point his only real political activity was to cooperate with government propaganda programs and appear before young people to condemn political violence. In the 1990s, however, a new Horst Mahler emerged as the former guerilla-lawyer publicly repositioned himself on the far right of the German political spectrum. Mahler had crossed the Rubicon, and has since earned international renown as a “third position” fascist, and legal defender of Holocaust Deniers and neo-nazis, racists whose opinions the former communist now shares. His expulsion in 1974 does not stop journalists from routinely describing Mahler as a founding member of the RAF, implying a connection between his previous views and those he holds today. Indeed, Mahler the neo-nazi has attempted to exploit this smear himself, arguing dishonestly that were Meinhof alive today, she, too, would have crossed over to the neofascist camp. While several leading lights from the sixties APO generation have indeed moved to the far right, these represent only a small minority. In the case of the RAF itself, despite its degeneration and decline in the late eighties and early nineties, |
This split, and tensions around the new demand for association, may explain the RAF’s “Provisional Program of Struggle for the Political Rights of Imprisoned Workers,” which was also released that September. An attempt to explain how the struggle against isolation could relate to a wider radical prisoners’ movement, the Provisional Program left the door open to the possibility of struggle alongside other prisoners. While this strategy seems to have borne no fruit, it may have assuaged the dissatisfaction felt by some of those who were unhappy at the new orientation away from integration.
“Solidarity with the RAF Comrades’ Hunger Strike”: poster for a public meeting organized by the sponti left, with Rudi Dutschke, Johannes Agnoli, and Peter Brückner. September 1974.
Despite this rocky beginning, the RAF’s third hunger strike was a momentous event, rallying support in a way no previous hunger strike had and serving as a major radicalizing experience for various tendencies of the left.
At first, however, little attention was paid to the striking prisoners, especially in the media, which barely mentioned the strike. The main solidarity activity remained public outreach. Students at the West Berlin Technical University staged a solidarity hunger strike,
2
and supporters in that city occupied a Lutheran Church demanding an end to isolation, extermination imprisonment, and “clean torture”—they were greeted with support by the Church’s superintendent and several clergymen.
3
Notable among the prisoners’ Lutheran supporters were Undine Zühlke, a clergyman’s wife, and Vicar Cornelius Burghardt. Both Zühlke and Burghardt organized a public assembly at their church on November 4, where they spoke alongside a number of the prisoners’ lawyers, and where resolutions were passed against isolation torture. Burghardt also publicly admitted having sheltered Meinhof in 1971, explaining that he did so in “the Christian tradition.”
1
(Zühlke and Burghardt were soon sentenced under §129—he for sheltering Meinhof and she for smuggling a letter out from Meinhof in early November.
2
Later that month, the Lutheran Church Council attempted to clamp down on radical church members, issuing a “Statement Against Terrorism” and calling on unnamed clergymen to “reorient themselves” accordingly.
3
)
At the same time, another noteworthy source of support was the KPD/ML, which had successfully taken over the main Red Aid network in April of that year. The KPD/ML remained hostile to the RAF’s politics, especially to what it viewed as their soft line on the East German and Soviet revisionists. Yet, on the basis of opposing state repression, it and the Red Aid network would provide substantial support, issuing leaflets and organizing demonstrations throughout the hunger strike.
During the strike’s first month, two prisoners—Ronald Augustin and Ali Jansen—were both deprived of water for days at a time.
4
Jansen had been sentenced in 1973 to ten years in prison on two counts of attempted murder for having shot at cops when they caught him and other RAF members stealing a car in 1970. Augustin was a graphic artist from Amsterdam, who had joined the RAF after meeting members in that city in 1971; he was arrested on July 24, 1973, attempting to enter the FRG, and charged under §129, as well as for resisting arrest and possession of false documents.
5
While these two applications of the “dry cell” alarmed the prisoners and their supporters, the strike did not falter, and, in the end, this tactic was not repeated.
6
Rather, the state sought to keep things defused; as part of this strategy, in early October, the president of the Federal Supreme Court, Theodor Prinzing, ruled in favor of force-feeding Holger Meins, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Andreas Baader. The purview of this ruling was soon extended to the other prisoners.
Force-feeding has been used since at least the early twentieth century by governments and penal authorities wishing to break hunger strikes: not only does this countermeasure seem to diminish what is at stake, as it suggests hunger strikers may no longer die from their protests, but the entire ordeal is designed to be excruciatingly painful, in large part to discourage strikers from continuing. Holger Meins described the procedure:
