"Baader-Meinhof": Bombing their way to utopia

"Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F."

by Stefan Aust

Oxford University Press, 461 pp., $29.95

As a high-school exchange student to West Germany in 1978, what struck me most upon arriving at Frankfurt were the heavily armed security forces patrolling the airport. This was unlike anything I had ever seen in the United States, but then we Americans were not facing a terrorist organization quite like the Baader-Meinhof group.

The previous year had witnessed the so-called "German Autumn," when a prominent German businessman had been kidnapped and murdered and a Lufthansa airliner had been hijacked and flown to Somalia, its pilot shot and dumped on the runway. The events shook the country, producing what Stefan Aust calls "the greatest challenge yet to postwar German society."

The individuals behind these acts were young German radicals in the Baader-Meinhof group, or, as they dubbed themselves, the Red Army Faction. An outgrowth of the student movement of the 1960s, they shared an anger over the Vietnam War and had been galvanized into action by the bloody suppression of a protest against the Shah of Iran's 1967 visit to Berlin.

Raised a spoiled mama's boy with an instinctive hatred of authority, Andreas Baader was a misogynistic street fighter and convicted arsonist with a taste for eye shadow and fur coats when in 1968, he met Ulrike Meinhof, a journalist with a comfortable bourgeois background and budding extremist views. Meinhof quit her career and dumped her husband and young children to join Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, a pastor's daughter-turned-rebel, forming the basis of what would become Germany's most notorious terrorist organization.

From throwing eggs and plotting to slime visiting U.S. Vice President Hubert Humphrey with pudding, the group quickly moved on to more violent action. They set fires, robbed banks, planted bombs and unleashed an underground urban guerrilla war that left 47 dead. Eventually captured, in 1977 Baader, Ensslin and other leaders of the group committed suicide in prison under circumstances that remain murky and have prompted their sympathizers to talk of murder at the hands of the authorities.

Whatever the shortcomings of West German society at the time, the organization's goals, which Aust shows were never terribly clear to the group's members themselves, and the tactics adopted to achieve them strike one today as utopian if not simply delusional.

Stefan Aust, a prominent German journalist who knew members of the group and has studied it more thoroughly than anyone else, is too well-informed to see in the R.A.F. noble revolutionaries martyred for their cause. Aust writes about his subject with admirable dispassion and clarity and in exacting detail, tracking the cat-and-mouse movements between the group and the German police and its political leaders not just over several years, but down to the hour.

As its subtitle suggests, Aust concentrates more on the inner workings of the R.A.F. than the larger historical context in which it operated. At times, this approach leaves one wanting him to pull back from this narrow focus and situate his subject against a broader social-political background. Still, one could not ask for a better guide to this story, and baring some significant new revelations, "Baader-Meinhof" is certain to be the final word on the subject.