1 The Heritage
One could regard it as an irony of history: the “Red Army Faction” (RAF) wanted to tear off the “democratic mask” of the Federal German state, weaken it and “bomb out the face of fascism”.
Instead, the murders and kidnappings, the bomb attacks and bank robberies by the left-wing extremist group founded in 1970 are more likely to have led to a strengthening of the German constitutional state and its institutions. Also through politically controversial measures that affected the basic rights of the population and for the most part still exist.
It was 25 years ago on April 20th that the RAF announced its self-dissolution. But the effects of the fight against the terrorist group characterize the actions of the police and judiciary in the Federal Republic to this day.
For example, paragraph 129a (formation of terrorist organizations), introduced in 1976 to fight the RAF, is used today against so-called Reich citizens who want to replace democracy with their own form of government. Militant Islamists were also convicted on the basis of this paragraph.
The dragnet search developed in the 1970s with a view to the RAF, i.e. the storage of personal data and the comparison of databases by the police, is also practiced to this day.
2 the trauma
Probably everyone who experienced the 1970s in the Federal Republic can remember the atmosphere of uncertainty and threat that the actions of the RAF and the state reactions to them created. The group’s actions came at a time when the country was politically polarized like never before.
The group, which was founded by the department store arsonist Andreas Baader, the student Gudrun Ensslin and the journalist Ulrike Meinhof, among others, saw itself as a communist, anti-imperialist urban guerrilla, which initially met with sympathy from parts of the socially critical student movement and radical left-wing groups.
The situation became particularly acute in the “German Autumn” of 1977, when the kidnapping and murder of the employer president Hanns Martin Schleyer, the hijacking of the Lufthansa plane “Landshut” and the suicides of leading founding members of the RAF in prison led to one of the most serious political crises in the country Federal Republic led.
Until the early 1990s, when what was now a third generation of RAF members carried out their last attacks, many parts of the left-wing scene had an ambivalent relationship with the RAF. From the point of view of some contemporary witnesses, the trauma of that time has had an effect long after the official end of the RAF. “The wound hurts as long as the open questions have not been clarified,” says the journalist and terrorism expert Ulf G. Stuberger in the anthology published in 2018 “The RAF – a German trauma?” quoted. He referred both to the acts of the terrorists, which have not yet been fully clarified, and to the state measures that were justified as a result, which were “worthy of an autocratic state and not a democracy”.
3 Unfinished Story
Even though the RAF as an organization announced its official dissolution on April 20, 1998 and has not committed any new terrorist acts since then, its history is not yet over. Several attacks attributed to the group remain unsolved to this day, including nine murders. A search is still ongoing for several former relatives who went into hiding in the 1990s.
Three former RAF members are particularly in the focus of investigators because they are suspected of carrying out a series of robberies of supermarkets and banks between 1999 and 2016 to finance their lives underground. Just a few weeks ago, investigators searched the apartment of a suspect’s sister in Frankfurt and a hotel room in Hamburg used by his brother.
The RAF also lives on in the political debate, at least as a synonym for groups that are accused of extremist views. For example, former Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) and other Union and AfD politicians warned of a “climate RAF” with reference to radical climate activists who are increasingly testing the gray area of violence and propagating acts of sabotage.
In response, the ZDF satirist Jan Böhmermann declared the FDP and several conservative-liberal journalists to be the “new RAF” and showed a 1970s-style wanted poster on his show with the names of those criticized.
