BAADER MEINHOF - Hardcover

AUST

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195372751 ISBN 13: 9780195372755

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2009

Synopsis

The Baader-Meinhof Group--later known as the Red Army Faction (RAF)--was a violent urban guerilla group which terrorized Germany in the 1970s and '80s, killing 47 people, wounding 93, taking 162 hostages, and robbing 35 banks--all in an attempt to bring revolution to the Federal Republic.

Stefan Aust's masterful history of the Group presents the definitive account, capturing a highly complex story both accurately and colorfully. Much new information has surfaced since the mass suicide of the Groups' leaders in the 1980s. Some RAF members have come forward to testify in new investigations and formerly classified Stasi documents have been made public since the fall of the Berlin Wall, all contributing to a fuller picture of the RAF and the events surrounding their demise. Aust presents the complete history of the RAF, from the creation in 1970 to the breakup in 1998, incorporating all of the new information. For instance, there is growing evidence that the German secret service eavesdropped on Baader, Meinhof, and the other RAF members imprisoned in Stammheim and that they knew that the terrorists planned a mass suicide, but did nothing to prevent it. Also, there is new information about the role of the RAF lawyers (among them Otto Schily who later was Minister of the Interior in Gerhard Schröder's cabinet), and the roles of the different RAF members and the rivalry between them. The volume will also contain numerous photos.

Terrorism today is never far from most people's thoughts. Baader-Meinhof offers a gripping account of one of the most violent terrorist groups of the late twentieth century, in a compelling look at what they did, why they did it, and how they were brought to justice.

About this title

About the Author

Stefan Aust is a journalist and editor living in Germany. He has been chief editor of Spiegel TV, and was chief editor of Der Spiegel in Hamburg from 1994-2008. Aust is co-writer of the film script for the German movie Der Baader Meinhof Komplex, which released in Germany in Fall 2008 and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Reviews

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Marc Fisher Before 9/11, before terrorism took on a foreign face, there was terrorism chic: the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Black Panthers, the Baader-Meinhof Gang. This was intellectualized, secular terrorism of the sort that college radicals could embrace as others of their generation found thrills in music or fast cars. In West Germany in the 1960s and '70s, memories of the Nazi years were fresh enough that the rebellious children of academics, clerics and artists could win considerable sympathy by accusing their elders of being too authoritarian, too (gulp) Nazi-like. The Baader-Meinhof gang, also known as the Red Army Faction, was a bunch of young people enraptured with violence, eager to upset a society that longed for quiet stability and profiting from a system in which politicians were afraid of taking forceful actions that might recall the Nazi past. German journalist Stefan Aust reflects that uneasy relationship with his country's traumatic past in his new history of the terrorist movement launched by Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin. Aust, for many years the editor of Der Spiegel, the German newsweekly, has a long history with the RAF. He even played a bit part in one of the gang's exploits, helping to retrieve Meinhof's young twins from a Palestinian orphans' camp after she had abandoned the girls there. But the writer, who calls himself a "participating observer" in the leftist movement, never details his relationship with the gang members and gives only a few clues to his own take on the RAF's years of bank robberies, kidnappings, murders and bombings. The RAF killed 28 people during seven years of intense activity in the '70s; even after the prison suicides of its founding members in 1977, remnants of the group kept up the bombings sporadically until 1991. In 1998, the gang's last communique declared its era "history," adding that "the end of this project shows that we cannot succeed." But the RAF's early actions -- as well as a 44-day ordeal in the autumn of 1977 that included the kidnapping of a prominent industrialist and the hijacking of a Lufthansa jet full of German tourists -- still loom larger in Germany today than the Weather Underground bombings of the early 1970s do in the United States. This is essentially the third time in three decades that Aust has written this book; each time, he updates with new reporting, focusing to a startling degree on whether and how German authorities bugged the gang's prison cells. Somehow, Aust and a still-ambivalent German populace continue to struggle with questions of purity: He seems shocked that his own government might have listened in on confidential conversations between the convicted terrorists and their lawyers, even though those lawyers were smuggling weapons, other contraband and information in and out of the prison. As appalled as many Germans were by the gang's violence, they found the terrorists fascinating, a weakness the terrorists exploited. After a dramatic escape from state custody in 1970, Baader and his comrades contacted a French journalist and put on a show for her over tea and strawberries before fleeing to a Palestinian terrorist training camp. The West German government coddled the gang for years; early on, a court found two members not guilty of arson, ruling that their leaflets calling for the burning of department stores were merely "satire." "If you throw a stone, it's a crime," Meinhof wrote in 1968. "If a thousand stones are thrown, that's political." She knew her audience. The gang's incoherent blend of liberation, rebellion, nihilism and suicide had some appeal in a country desperate to break with its past. In prison, the gang members gave each other code names taken from "Moby-Dick," fancying themselves part of Ahab's pursuit of the Leviathan -- in this case, the evil state. Aust seems to buy into that sense of romance, especially in a riveting, hour-by-hour account of the RAF's most dramatic crimes that takes up most of the book's second half. He acknowledges only briefly that what the gang really achieved was exactly what it claimed to oppose: a huge expansion of state power in the form of surveillance tactics, computerized policing, fortified courtrooms, high-security prisons and much tougher anti-terrorism laws. The truth is not at the heart of this telling of the gang's story, but it emerges nonetheless: Strip away the soap opera and the high school intellectualism, and what remains is a simple tale of thugs in love with violence.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195372751
• ISBN 13: 9780195372755
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 488