The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History, Volume 1 Read Free Page B

or catalog the names people called each other when they were arguing.
    To have to provide such a disclaimer may seem absurd, for most political histories pass over such details as a matter of course. Yet, a brief survey of the few books available about the RAF will show that these questions have been the major preoccupation of almost anyone who has approached this subject. Nor are we unaware of the point that the RAF prisoners themselves would make on more than one occasion: that efforts to explain their actions in psychological terms were part of a conscious state strategy of pathologizing them and their politics, or at least shifting people’s attention onto trivial and often fabricated personal details. While there are things we consider mistaken in the RAF’s broader analysis, on this question they appear to have been 100% correct.
    While the personal may be political, we believe that the RAF’s greatest significance is not to be found in the part it played in the individual lives of its members or supporters. Rather, to appreciate what it was and what it meant, and as a first step towards being able to evaluate its praxis, the RAF must be placed within the context of left-wing revolutionary struggle in the First World at a very particular point in time. As such, we are most interested in the group’s ideas, its line as established in its communiqués and other documents, how it put this line into practice through its actions and campaigns, and the relationship the group enjoyed with its supporters and other leftists.
    Some may accuse us of being uncritical, or of even supporting the RAF’s politics and their practice. We would answer that in order to be critical one must first be in possession of the facts. While we consider questions of morality and means and ends to be very important, given that this is the first time most of this material has been made available to English-readers, we prefer not to muddy the waters by condemning or praising the guerilla every step of the way.
    Certainly we will offer no blanket denunciation—nor will we indulge in cheap praise. What has been written so far is replete with judgment, and often contains very little factual content or political analysis. We hope with these books to do our small part in correcting this imbalance.
    In order for the guerilla’s actions and statements to be at all comprehensible, they need to be placed in the context of their times and of the wider left-wing movement in West Germany. Even as these events were unfolding, this context was not well understood by many of us in North America; now, decades later, it is even harder to grasp. For that reason, we have provided two background chapters providing an overview of postwar West Germany, as well as a series of introductory texts to the different documents from the guerilla. These are overviews and as will be clear, they have been written from a particular perspective. It is here that our analysis most obviously departs from that of the RAF, our sympathy for many of its aims notwithstanding.
    We offer these documents to the comrades of today—and to the comrades of tomorrow—both as a testament to those who struggled before and as an explanation as to how they saw the world, why they made the choices they made, and the price they were made to pay for having done so.

ACRONYM KEY
2JM
Bewegung 2. Juni
(2nd of June Movement); Berlinbased anarchist guerilla group formed in early 1972, its name comes from the date of the police shooting of protester Benno Ohnesorg in 1967.
APO
Außerparlemtarische Opposition
(Extra-Parliamentary Opposition); the name given to the broad-based militant opposition with its roots in the student movement that encompassed the left-wing anti-imperialist and social revolutionary movements of the late sixties and early seventies.
ARD
Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland
(Syndicate for Publicly Regulated Radio Stations in