Interview with Stefan Aust: Author of Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F.

The Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader-Mainhof Gang, was postwar Germany’s most violent left-wing terrorist group. Most active in the 1970s, the group has been held responsible for 34 deaths over its nearly 30 years of activity (ca. 1968-1998). German journalist Stefan Aust is author of “Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F.,” an authoritative book on the subject. The film “The Baader Meinhof Complex” (Germany, 2008), based on his book, opens in US theaters August 21.

Foreign Policy Digest sat down with journalist Stefan Aust to discuss the film, its complex subject matter, and the political landscape of Germany today.

(picture of Stefan Aust, courtesy of Spiegel Verlag)

What do you think of the film, having written the book that it was based on?

I like the film very much, mainly because it reflects the idea I had when writing the book, which was to write a protocol of what was really going on, not to explain or try to explain what terrorism means, but more what it is and what happens to people who start down this path.

You showed how the R.A.F. began. You spoke of the movement evolving from indignation to protest to resistance, but then to violence and terrorism. What drove otherwise average, middle class people to such radical acts of violence?

Every kind of terrorism is embedded in some kind of a bigger, radical political and, nowadays, religious movement. And not everyone who is involved in this radical movement is willing to use violence himself.  

In the late 1960s, there was a wave of protest going around the world, mainly against the Vietnam War. A lot of young people identified with liberation movements around the world, in South America, Asia, everywhere. And in a way, those liberation movements were at that time innocent because they hadn’t yet proven that some of them would create the same dictatorships after taking power that they had just toppled. So there was a kind of ‘revolutionary spirit’ going around the world. That was one part.  

The other part was that it was one generation after the end of the war, and young people for the first time began to really ask questions about their parents’ involvement in Nazi Germany. And because Germany after the war was not built on a green field, a lot of people who had been involved in Nazi Germany were still in rather powerful positions, in the judicial system and politics, companies, schools and so on. And whenever anything happened in Germany, like the police brutality you saw in the film against students on June 2, parts of the younger generation – this protesting generation – always identified this with the fascist past in Germany.  

If you then compare the reality of Germany in the late Sixties with the fascist state – which it was not, not at all, but people thought of that way – then suddenly you give yourself the permission to do almost anything to fight it. They tried to reenact the resistance that their parents did not put up and, in the end, there was a process of protest, violence, right into terror. Then they forgot about the holy and humane goals they had. And suddenly they were acting like their parents’ generation.

How was the R.A.F. viewed by the public at the time?

There were waves of sympathy and extreme criticism. At the beginning, there was a lot of sympathy in reaction to the police brutality on June 2. Then, when the group started robbing banks, for some people it was kind of a “Bonnie and Clyde” thing. When the first member of the group, this beautiful little girl, Petra Schelm, was killed by a policeman, sympathies were very high. If you hear about polls showing sympathy to the RAF, it’s always from that time.  

But then it changed. After the group shot the first policeman, public sympathy went down, but when there were big police raids, it went up again. Once the group started to throw bombs, however, it became harder and harder for them to find places to stay. Then they were imprisoned and not treated very nicely, suddenly they were the victims of a police state again.

You spoke earlier about the circumstances that gave rise to the R.A.F. and how de-Nazification wasn’t carried out completely in Germany. You said the country wasn’t built on a green field. I wonder if you could draw any lessons from that for the various examples of nation-building that are taking place today. Or was the German situation unique?

Actually, the way it was done in Germany after the war is the only way you can do it. You cannot put a third or half of the population in prison. I wouldn’t compare Nazi Germany to socialist East Germany, but nevertheless (East Germany) was not a very just state. If you wanted to leave the country, you were shot at the (Berlin) Wall. It was a police state, but it was nothing to be compared with Nazi Germany. After reunification, we didn’t put everybody that was involved in that system in jail simply because you can’t. And I think one of the biggest mistakes the Bush Administration made in Iraq was not cooperating with the power structure of Saddam Hussein after he was gone. That created a never-ending war inside Iraq.  

I think if you liberate a country, you are forced to live with those people who are there. Although it gives you a bad feeling that members of the former dictatorship are still in rather important positions, there’s no other way. You can’t send them all to other countries; who wants to have them? You can’t put them all in jail, so I think there’s only one way to do it. Even if you look at members of Red Army Faction and discussions today about whether to release them from prison after 20-25 years, I think you have to let them out because you can’t keep them in prison all their lives. It doesn’t make sense.

When Brigitte Mohnhaupt was released two years ago, it produced quite a bit of controversy. How is the R.A.F. viewed in contemporary Germany? Are they viewed as terrorists or revolutionaries?

Twenty years ago, when I first published the book, the R.A.F. still existed and there were a lot of people who saw them more as revolutionaries than as terrorists. That has changed a lot. It has now been 20 to 30 years since it all happened, and it’s become history now. Even people from the extreme left see them more as terrorists than revolutionaries. They’re not romanticized anymore.

What is the legacy of the RAF? What did Germany’s experience with the R.A.F. mean for the next generation of Germans, and how they viewed their country’s past?

You need 20 to 30 years for the next generation to ask their parents, “Where were you? What did you do? Were you engaged in the anti-war movement? Were you sympathetic to the Red Army Faction?”, and things like that.  

A lot of people who saw the film in Germany are very young people. It’s not just the members of the ‘68 generation only that saw the film. Everybody’s interested in his own generation and how his generation thinks, even if this generation is only on the screen. Many young people went to the film and asked their parents, like we asked our parents, “What did you do? Were you involved?”.

And do you see a shift in psychology as generations become further removed from the war?

Yes. What we did, our generation did, was always to compare the state of Germany in the 1960s with what had happened during the war, during the Third Reich. Which actually was not bad, because it gave us a baseline of how to behave in a civilized state.  

Today there are no people left in official positions who played a role in Nazi Germany, and there is consensus in Germany that what happened during the Third Reich and during the war is to be condemned.

Would you say that the legacies of the country’s complicated past have influenced how the country behaves on the world stage, for example with regard to Afghanistan?

Oh, definitely. And in a way it makes politics difficult for the German government, but on the other hand, it’s not a bad thing to know the direction you don’t want to go. And if you go back to the terrorist time in the 1970s, when you think about the trials and what you saw in the film, how the judges behaved, they were all trying not to deviate from the democratic and constitutional path.  

Real terrorism was a real threat for the German government, for politicians, and people leading companies and organizations. Nevertheless, nobody had the idea of opening up Guantanamo or anything like that, so there were big discussions about how to deal with people who committed very serious crimes, how to treat them in prison and give them their fair trial. Because we never wanted to go back to what happened during Nazi Germany. And if you look at Afghanistan, it’s the same. Germans are very reluctant to send their sons into wars.

Federal elections are due in Germany this September. What do you believe is the most likely outcome?

I think it’s, though it’s not sure, that there will be a small conservative majority with the Christian Democrats and the Liberals forming a coalition government. The Social Democrats are in big trouble because the former socialist party of East Germany, now the Left Party, takes a lot of votes from them. The Left Party is very strong in East Germany, has a very smart chairman, and has another influential leader who helps them win votes in the West. Social Democrats won’t get much more than 22-23% of the vote, which means they will have to govern together with others in a coalition. So if you vote for the Social Democrats, you don’t really know what kind of a government you will get.

It’s been reported recently that the smaller parties are expected to capture a larger share of the vote than they have previously and relative to the two large parties. Do you view this as a positive, negative development? Or neither?

If it leads to unstable majorities, it’s negative. I think stability is very important. You have to know who is governing the country. And if you have too many parties in the government, then you are talking about compromising all the time. For the last four years, Germany has had a grand coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats. People holding different positions sit in the same Cabinet and in the end nothing really happens. I would be happier to have a stable government that, if necessary, takes unpopular measures, and if it was wrong we send them into the wilderness and get a new one in the next elections. It may be (German Chancellor) Angela Merkel will not be elected again and she would leave office after four years. I don’t really know when you look back is there a lot to remember.

Although she is popular now?

Oh, she is very, very popular, but that doesn’t mean that she’ll win elections. If people would only vote for her, instead of Steinmeier (Editor’s Note: Frank-Walter Steinmeier is Foreign Minister in Chancellor Merkel’s governing coalition, as well as the SPD's candidate for chancellor in the upcoming German election), she would get a big majority. But people vote mainly for the parties, not for people.

Finally, this November 9 marks the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Given Left Party’s support in the former East as well as West Germany, do you believe the promise of German reunification has been fulfilled, particularly in socioeconomic terms?

Yes. We poured so much money into East Germany that some areas of former East Germany look much better than the West. And as far as unemployment, there are parts of former East Germany where the employment rates are much higher than in the West, but where nevertheless people who were raised in socialist society or were members of the socialist party still vote for the Left Party. They sometimes forget that the Wall is gone and that twenty years ago they were not able to travel. The East German government took care of everything, but on a very low level of course. They all had work, but the wages were very low and they couldn’t buy anything, and they were governed from early morning to late at night. So I think sometimes they neglect their freedom and look back on a perceived security of that time. But security you even have in prisons – you always have heating and a hot meal, but you can’t leave. So I think in a certain way a lot of people are neglecting the freedom they have now.  

I think altogether it’s a big success story. And I think there are not many countries in the world that could afford an economic process like that in East Germany. The people in West Germany really paid a lot of money for getting East Germany ahead.

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