Terrorist Chic - the Romance and Erotic Fascination of the Baader-Meinhof Gang

The Baader-Meinhof Gang, also known as the first generation of the Rote Armee Fraktion, spread terror through West Germany from 1967 to 1977, growing to a number of 60 members, causing havoc through kidnapping, assassinations, plane hijackings, bank robbery, and bombings. The Baader-Meinhof Gang rationalized their violence by considering it war against the Federal Republic of Germany's oppressive social system. Eventually, they expanded their targets against what they viewed as "international imperialism" and the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War. Though the main members of the Gang met their demise by 1977, the madness continued in their name in various forms of terror with extended generations of terrorists. Along the trail of tears and blood there was, as author Jillian Becker put it, "a romantic, aesthetic, and even erotic fascination . . ." by the German public for the Baader-Meinhof Gang.

The Baader-Meinhof Gang became involved in three objectives: to destroy Western capitalism, to fragment West German solidarity, and to force the release of imprisoned comrades. "We wanted to be radical, brave pioneers: we considered ourselves to be a vanguard," wrote member Astrid Proll in a book that documented the most notorious members of the group in picture form, Baader-Meinhof - Pictures on the Run, 66-67. For many of the world's youth the sixties were a decade that questioned bourgeois culture and status quo government. In many countries young people embraced alternative life styles and the ultra-idealist anthem "all you need is love," but for some Germans there was a different beat. Ulrike Meinhof, a chief orator for the group, claimed that " . . . love for human beings is possible today only in the death-dealing, hate-filled attack on imperialism-fascism."[i]

In the summer of 1962, a riot occurred in Munich's Leopoldstrasse when young people clashed with a hundred policemen. Thousands of rioters took to the streets for four days in what became known as the Schwabing riots. The riot started over two guitarists who were arrested for making noise and disturbing the peace. One of the rioters was a teenager named Andreas Baader, who would later become part of a group that would cause far more damage to Germany and shake the world with its cruelty. The starting point for the Baader-Meinhof Gang - the first West German group to organize itself into an underground band of terrorists - came from an unlikely source: the 1967 visit of the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlevi, to Berlin, which resulted in a violent demonstration and the death of a demonstrator, Benno Ohnesorg.

On April 2, 1968 Andres Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and their new compatriots Thorwald Proll and Horst Sohnlein, placed fire bombs in a Frankfurt department store. Stoned on hashish, the arsonists stumbled around the department store before they planted the bombs. They were easily identified later. Ensslin had notes on how to create incendiary bombs in her purse, which were later found by authorities and used against at trial. The radicals awaited the ignition of the bombs from the Club Voltaire, which was frequented by numerous disaffected revolutionaries such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit (aka Danny the Red) and America's most famous Marxist and Marcuse protégé, Angela Davis. Ensslin had called a police station stating that the bombing was revenge for Ohnesorg's death, a man none of the four new personally. Around midnight the bombs exploded in the furniture and women's fashion departments of the Kaufhof department store. Eventually, all four would stand trial for the bombing, which would cast the four in some people's eyes -- and other members of the BM Gang -- as hip urban guerillas fighting social injustice.

Revolution as Avant-Garde - Guerilla Warrior as Artist

In Paris, during May and June of 1968, student demonstrations rocked the streets followed by worker strikes throughout France. Student unrest in Paris was fuelled by numerous factors. The baby boom of post-World War II created a population of students in the 1960s that was ten times larger than the eve of World War II. American and European protests against the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War coupled with a romantic interest in Latin American revolutionaries, like Castro and Guevara, created an explosive atmosphere at the Sorbonne in Paris. A meeting on May 3, 1968 to protest the closure of Nanterre University started a riot that had national repercussions. Nanterre, a four-year college with 11,000 students situated on the edge of Paris, had been rocked with various demonstrations from the beginning of 1968. One set of demonstrations focused on sex: student dissatisfaction with the lack of co-ed dorms.[ii] America's involvement in Vietnam was another issue students brought into the city, which helped start the unrest at the Sorbonne. The Rector of the Sorbonne feared confrontations between left-wing and right-wing students but the students only confronted the authorities. After suspending classes the police were called to preserve order but the presence of authority turned the students against the police, which was called at that time a revival of anarchism. The violence and concern wasn't limited to students; ten million workers went on strike throughout France. The unrest led to the closing of the Sorbonne, the first such occurrence in the 700-year history of the university.

The Paris riots also led to the rise of the artistic-political movement known as the Situationists. A group of avant-garde artists and intellectuals influenced by Dadaists, Surrealists, and Lettrists[iii] began to preach a non-violent revolution based on using the imagination to seize power and change everyday life through the imagination. This idyllic philosophy sought the transformation of the world through a constant state of revolution and newness created by individuals freely creating products based on his or her own creativity, philosophy that ironically sounds like free-market capitalism. The Situationists condemned the conveyor-belt life style of the capitalist worker and proposed "a communistic society bereft of money, commodity production, wage labor, classes, private property and the State," where the capitalistic-produced needs of man would be reinstated with real desires and the capitalist economy of profit would be replaced by one of pleasure. The Situationists rejected revolution and proclaimed their want for everyday life to change through vandalism, strikes, and sabotage, actions that were curiously claimed as a creative way to destroy "the manufactured spectacle and commodity economy." The brief life of the Situationists allegedly inspired contemporary anarchists, feminism, and punk rock. Though the Situationists' philosophy was closer to anarchism, their ideology was similar to the communist-based ideas that would eventually spring from the Baader-Meinhof Gang, who would think of themselves as avant-garde artists similar to the off-beat philosophies of artistic groups like the Situationists. Ulrike Meinhof would eventually forge a philosophy that aimed to change society by action and not useless intellectual inactivity. However, where the Situationists died out in 1972 after bitter disagreements over tactics, the Baader-Meinhof Gang would use violence instead of the imagination to profess the need for a non-capitalist Germany.[iv]

Terror as a Fashionable Statement

The Red Army Faction left a legacy of horror, stupidity, and cruelty that has been fodder for a remarkable amount of film, music, and fiction. Novels (Rosenfest, SpielEnde, Hoffman, A Disturbance in Paris),[v] photo paintings (Gerhard Richter series of paintings entitled "18 Oktober 1977"), and films and television dramas (Black Box BRD,[vi]Stammheim, Deutschland im Herbst, and Die stille nach dem schuss - The Legends of Rita, Death Game --Todesspiel, Baader)[vii]Polygram Music produced an album called Baader Meinhof that featured songs written by Luke Haines with titles like "Meet Me At The Airport," "There's Gonna Be An Accident," and "Mogadishu."

The 2001 premier issue of the German magazine Tussi-Deluxe featured a fashion layout with a RAF motif, a handsomely dressed terrorist was pictured lying in a pool of blood modeling the kind of slippers Andreas Baader wore. This photo was only one among several equally bizarre and heinous scenes where models presented the latest fashion revolving around what journalists have quaintly labeled "terrorist chic."[ix]A 1960s German wanted poster for several members of the Gang became, and still is considered, a collector's item. spotlight activities and characters of the RAF, especially the first generation. In 1990, a dance production called "Ulrike Meinhof," funded by the German government, was received by the public and critics with more praise for the production than mockery.[viii]

Baader-Meinhof/RAF in its prime has been described as a distinctive cultural statement engaged in a "style war disguised as 'international Marxism' " unknowingly creating a "German version of pop" and a "particular literary avant garde." Their politics was anti-establishment, anti-democracy, anti-status quo, and their exploits were often detailed in tabloid German press that painted them as chic outlaws in their BMW (occasionally called Baader-Meinhof-Wagen) get-away cars engaged in a sick, violent street theater of break-outs, shootings, bombings, and bank robberies.[x] This "street theater" has been called a "narcissistic staging rather than a protest against injustice, against the oppressed, which is what they claimed."[xi]

As essayist Thomas Elsaesser wrote, their sudden appearance as a "Bonnie-and-Clyde gang in the stodgy West of petit bourgeois Germany lent the events a surreal improbability." The hashish-smoking, department-store bombers that triggered the many years of deadly RAF violence are noticeably related to the unlikely murderous syncophants of Hassan ibn Sabah's eleventh century assassins -- the paradise-seeking, hashish lovers who were lethal human tools of Islamic justice and politics. Numerous radicals of the 1960's embraced the euphoria created by dope and any action - violent or peaceful - taken against state governments, a trend that continues with the heavy-beated, anti-law, anti-establishment "gangsta" rap. [xii]

With the advent of the Internet, terrorist messages - messages that would otherwise find no venue in mainsteam media - can be broadcast to worldwide audiences. An English-language rap song urging war against "Crusaders and apostate Arab rulers," and praising the violence of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, was broadcast via the Internet in 2004.[xiii] In December of 2008, Fox News reported that there was 5 million terrorist sites found on the Internet.

September 25, 2008 saw the release of the film Der Baader Meinhof Komplex, an effort to dramatize the complicated story of the BM Gang (directed by Uli Edel and based on the literary efforts of Stephen Aust).

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[i]Der Spiegel, June 2, 1975, p. 2.

[ii] Kulansky, Mark. 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, Ballantine, New York, 2004, p. 218.

[iii] The Lettrists were a post-WWII group of mainly French artists and intellectuals that professed a change in the urban lifestyle by means of fusing poetry and music together. Like the Situationists they were against work.

[iv] Marshall, Peter. Demanding the Impossible - A History of Anarchism, Fontana Press, London, 1992, pp.551-53.

[v] For a review of the "New German Fiction" that includes SpielEnde, Rosenfest, Hoffman see Reschke, Karin. "Guns 'n' Roses; German Fiction; New German Fiction," The Economist, (US), June 16, 2001, p. 5.

[vi] Hobley, Annabel. "Red Army Fashion Is The Height of Terrorist Chic: The Baader-Meinhof gang has become a cult in Germany." The Financial Times, July 21, 2001, p. 3.

[vii] Copjec, Joan and Sorkin, Michael, editors. Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity, Verso, London 1999, p. 268. The film Baader is a 2002 release of a 72 Film Production, reviewed in Variety, March 18, 2002, v. 386.

[viii] "The Power to Shock," Time, July 9, 1990, p. 84.

[ix] Hobley, Annabel. "Red Army Fashion Is The Height of Terrorist Chic: The Baader-Meinhof gang has become a cult in Germany." The Financial Times, July 21, 2001, p. 3.

[x] Copjec, Joan and Sorkin, Michael, editors. Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity, Verso, London 1999, p. 290.

[xi] Oliverio, Annamarie. The State of Terror, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1998, p. 104.

[xii] Ibid. , pp. 186-87.

[xiii] "Qaeda Sympathizers Turn to Rap to Battle 'Infidels'," February 9, 2004, Yahoo! News. Reported through Reuters, the song was entitled "Dirty Infidels."