The Baader-Meinhof Complex

2,497 words

We should not talk to ordinary people. They are not people. It’s okay to shoot them.
-Gudrun Ensslin, founder member of Baader-Meinhof

I am the world’s forgotten boy.
The one who searches and destroys.
-Iggy Pop, Search and Destroy

It is a thing devoutly to be wished that the incoming Trump administration will immediately halt the Biden cabal’s program of inventing a far right that doesn’t really exist. Exactly the same thing has been happening in Britain for some time, and I wrote about the Pepper’s Ghost of the British “far right” here at The Occidental Observer in April 2022, noting that: “The British deep state needs white, right-wing domestic terrorists. And if they don’t exist, they will invent them.”

What the Western left wouldn’t give for a real, live, racist, white gang of terrorist murderers. They have to make do with social media and people who put stickers on lamp-posts. It may become a self-fulfilling prophecy, if they are not too technocratically careful. Of course, the left wouldn’t consider the possibility that such a far left gang would ever, could ever, exist. But there was just such a gang in Germany in the 1970s. As we have no far right terrorist gangs to study, let’s see what the left had to offer.

In 1967, at the height of anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in Berlin, as well as protests against a state visit by the Shah of Iran, a young student was shot and killed. Later that year, a fashionable couple of young Berliners visited a department store. Two stores, as a matter of fact. But they weren’t going shopping. When the two stores were burnt out later that day, it was as a result of incendiary devices put in place by the couple, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin. Baader was an angry student, “full of hate”, according to an ex-girlfriend, and Ensslin claimed to be a direct descendant of Hegel. There was a whiff of philosophy to go with the brimstone, and the Rote Armee Fraktion, or Red Army Faction (RAF) was born. When journalist Ulrike Meinhof joined the group in 1970, the German press took to calling the RAF “the Baader-Meinhof Gang”.

This piece refers to the film of a book, The Baader-Meinhof Complex by Stefan Aust. I read the book ten years ago, but no longer own it. I do remember the film being a faithful reproduction of the text. The book came out in 1985, the film in 2008, and this piece can be taken as referring to both.

The group was born in the midst of student unrest across Europe, most famously in Paris in 1968, when student rioting was so severe it came close to bringing down the government of Charles de Gaulle. Baader-Meinhof, however, took this protest to the next level during a decade-long campaign of bombings, bank robberies, and executions of public figures, culminating in the hijacking of a Lufthansa airliner in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1977. These were no student rioters in flared trousers and long hair. Baader dressed and behaved like a rock star and, for a while, the German press gave him as much attention as one.

Between the fire-bombing of the department stores, (for which Baader and Ensslin served paroled jail time, and during their trial, they smoked smuggled Cuban cigars) and later, more sophisticated and deadly attacks, the RAF took to robbing bookstores, arguing that intellectual property belongs to everyone. And so it does, but it belongs foremost only to those who can pay for it because without that payment – the result of labor – there will be no livelihood for those who produce that intellectual property. You know that capitalism you are trying to bomb out of existence? Well, that’s how it works. It’s a system of rewards for endeavor, not a coffee-table ideology you fill in like a crossword puzzle.

But born as they were in the chaos of dysfunctional student politics, Baader-Meinhof’s political philosophy was a garbled mass of T-shirt slogans and student sneers. It was sheer placardism, more suitable for spraying on walls than putting into action in anything like the real world. That is not to say that Baader-Meinhof did not have an impact on that world. They very much did.

Baader, Meinhof and Ensslin had a manifesto of sorts. The word “PIGS!” crops up a lot more than “Jews” does in Mein Kampf, or even the Koran (7% and 11% respectively, for you structuralists.) Intellectually, the RAF’s guiding principles are on a par with those of Charles Manson, and Baader-Meinhof’s credo was the political equivalent of a small child eating paint straight from the paintbox. It is an amusing irony that when Baader was shot through the thigh by a police marksman before his final arrest, he was reported by a police officer to have screamed “Wie ein schwein”. Like a pig.

Baader-Meinhof were anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist, but most consumingly anti-police. And that’s really about it. Their slogans are inane and inchoate. In England in 1968, at George Harrison’s home in Esher, Surrey, The Beatles were recording John Lennon’s take on the student riots. The lyric to Revolution runs:

You say you want a revolution.
Well, you know.
We’d all love to see the plan.

For once, Lennon had something to say worth listening to. That, of course, was before he publicly regretted criticizing Chairman Mao in the same lyric.

Helmut Schmidt, then the German Chancellor, said that Baader and Meinhof saw themselves as “the Messiahs of the revolution”, and the Beatles song could have been written for the Baader-Meinhof Gang, as the German press had begun to call them. Perhaps “RAF” was too confusing, under the circumstances. They drove around in a BMW they christened Baader-Meinhof Wagen, but it was about the only thing they loved about der Vaterland. In one of the many diatribes she spat out, Esslin declared that “you can’t argue with the people that built Auschwitz”.

Actually, there was a grain of truth in Ensslin’s comment, and the post-war German state had not been as successful with its de-Nazification program as it was expected to have been. The government were acutely aware of this problem of ex-Nazis in the ranks of the ruling class, and the danger of this presence lending legitimacy to Baader-Meinhof. The politician who takes on the gang is played in the film by the excellent German actor Bruno Ganz. He is a sort of German Anthony Hopkins, the two men even move in the same way, and his performance here is as convincing as it always is. If you are familiar with the Hitler parodies from a movie called Downfall, the actor playing der Führer is Bruno Ganz.

Both Baader and Meinhof wanted to contact and work with other international terrorist groups, envisaging some Internationale of death, but training with the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) in Jordan was an embarrassing failure. The Arabs were far from impressed with decadent Western ways such as nude sunbathing and men sleeping in the same quarters as women, while Baader became sick of the type of training they were receiving as he writhed through barbed-wire trenches while someone fired live rounds at him. “We’re not fighting Jews in the desert!”, he yells in the movie. “We’re fighting bankers!”. Same thing, some might say. Later, Baader would say he found the explosives training “useful”, although obviously the three BM operatives who blew themselves up in Stockholm while taking a bank hostage were not on the Jordan course. The PLO sent the Baader-Meinhof gang packing. Terrorism doesn’t seem terribly multicultural.

In 1977, the RAF hijacked a Lufthansa plane in Mogadishu. After a successful raid by security forces, all three terrorists were killed. They had already shot the pilot – great idea, because you won’t need to escape or anything if it all goes wrong – but all the passengers and crew were unharmed, save psychologically. Baader-Meinhof just weren’t very good terrorists. One of their drivers wondered why one would use a sporty little Alfa Romeo as a getaway car, as they did.

On the same day, Baader and two others were found dead in their cells at Stannheim prison, apparently all having committed suicide. Later still that day, the head of German industry – held hostage by Baader-Meinhof for some time – was taken out into a forest and shot in the head. It was the end of the Red Army Faction, the end of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and the end of a reign of far left terror Germany is far less able to discuss today than it is the Holocaust.

The last arrests came after the “May offensive”, in which Baader-Meinhof bombed US military bases, German police stations, and newspaper offices. One of the bombs contained 2,000 pounds of TNT. These were not mouse-trap bombs in envelopes. Baader, Meinhof, and other gang members died in their cells. The German government recorded a verdict of suicide in every case. In their final days, the gang used their lawyers to ferry notes to one another in prison, putting these legal advisers at risk and the notes being used primarily to insult one another and to shift the blame. How very left-wing of them.

In a BBC documentary on Baader-Meinhof entitled In Love With Terror, the British state broadcaster called the gang’s attempt at a Communist revolution in one of the world’s richest democracies “a unique project”. Only the BBC is capable of this kind of staggering heartlessness, and one wonders if the relatives of the dead were consoled to know their slain relatives were part of a project of such uniqueness. But, in a way, they are right, despite their rather autistic summing-up. Why are Baader-Meinhof unique? And why should their malevolent work not be recreated in an increasingly violent Western world, one under the dangerous influence of unstable ideologies?

Margrit Schiller was a member of Baader-Meinhof. She sums up their aims brilliantly: “Our idea was to destroy the system, to strike at its heart”.

Well, you might at least have waited for globalism. All you and your fellow travellers ever really achieved was to terrorize ordinary people for whom you felt a bored, intensely bourgeois distaste. Baader-Meinhof is essentially what happens when you let students use scissors, and put into effect what Chancellor Schmidt called their public statements; a “rhetoric of over-excited pseudo-Marxism.”

Baader-Meinhoff must be the only such group to have given their name to a psychological effect (not a condition; it is not listed in DSM V), known as the “Baader–Meinhoff Effect”, better known as the “Frequency Illusion”, whereby a strange word or phrase will come to the attention of an individual, who will then notice that word or phrase cropping up everywhere. It began with a journalist hearing the phrase “Baader-Meinhof” and noticing and naming this phenomenon. The thing is, at one time in Germany, one would have read or heard the phrase “Baader-Meinhof” everywhere one looked. How long before they have heirs, and Baader-Meinhof once again means something more than a familiar phrase?