The Limits of Violence

Through the example of Baader Meinhof, Richard Huffman from Seattle, USA questions violence as a serious means of social protest.

When I marched in the November 30, 1999 anti-WTO rally here in my hometown of Seattle, the brutal tactics and sporadic yet stunning violence by the Seattle Police felt eerily similar to a catastrophic Berlin protest a generation ago. On June 2, 1967 tens of thousands of young Germans, many of them students at Berlin’s Free University, lined up on Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse early in the evening to protest a visit by the Shah of Iran. By the end of that night, however, a young pacifist lay dead, shot by the police.

After the rally, thousands of angry, frustrated students converged at the Berlin offices of the leading student organisation – the Socialist German Student Union. Among those present was a young woman called Gudrun Ensslin who declared “This fascist state means to kill us all! We must organize resistance. Violence is the only way to answer violence. This is the Auschwitz Generation, and there’s no arguing with them!”

This article looks at Gudrun’s exclamation asking whether her experience offers us a warning as to the limits to violence just as there are limits to our consent.

While leader of the Socialist Student Union – “Red” Rudi Dutschke – was sympathetic to Ensslin’s goals he proposed “a long march through the institutions”. For her part, Ensslin went on to form the Red Army Faction – the “Baader-Meinhof Gang”.

During the next decade Ensslin, intent on bringing a form of Socialist Revolution to Germany, and the 50 or so young Germans who joined her and her boyfriend Andreas Baader, embarked on a campaign of bloody terror throughout West Germany. The R.A.F. blew up symbols of capitalism like department stores; killed American soldiers and high-ranking figures on the West German Supreme Court. They kidnapped wealthy and influential German industrialists, blew up the German embassy in Stockholm and high-jacked a Lufthansa jet.

Others meanwhile chose the path of Rudi Dutschke instead.

In time it was these activists who built a new progressive German environmental movement that went on to found the Green Party in 1979 and, twenty years later, sharing Government in coalition with the SPD.

The Baader-Meinhof gang’s adherence to violence made a considerable impact on German society. At first their actions held the support of a new post-war generation. Polls showed an extraordinary number of Germans supported their cause in one way or another: 20 percent of Germans under the age of 30 expressed “a certain sympathy” for the Baader-Meinhof Gang; one in ten young northern Germans indicated they would willingly shelter a member for the night.

But as the violence increased empathy decreased. Before their pursuits West Germany had no national police force as such and it was in response to their terror campaign, the BKA (which later became the German equivalent of the FBI) was created. Instead of progressing social justice their actions lead the German government to pass sweeping laws that restricted the rights of average citizens; instituted loyalty oaths for all civil servants, and random general searches of peoples’ homes was not uncommon. And yet this was exactly what the R.A.F. hoped would happen.

They anticipated German state repression and expected it to be applied with disproportionate violence. Their hope was the proletariat would be shocked from their complacency and would spontaneously rise up in revolution.

Instead the German population, angered and frightened by the violence, applauded their government’s repressive response. Seven million ‘Wanted’ posters were printed.

Within five days of their May 1972 week of terror, all the ring-leaders were in jail. Within five years they were all dead. After an airplane hijacking by Palestinian comrades failed to secure the release of the three imprisoned leaders of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe all committed suicide deep in the night of October 17, 1977.

Activists marched on Berlin in 1967 in anger. Out of that anger came Baader-Meinhof. Their rage sought to change German society but failed. Now their generations’ “long march through the institutions” has borne fruit: in 2003 when much of the West marched to Stop the War on Iraq, Germans marched in support of their Government and their decision not to participate in it.

©2010 Copyright the author. Sourced & edited by C. Spiby; this article first appeared as two articles and in a different form in Satya magazine, March 2004.

The promised land?

‘Journey to Nowhere’ by Eva Figes

Non-fiction/memoir. Review by Ruth Richardson

I had read several novels by Eva Figes, but her latest work seemed a departure from her usual writing, and sounded particularly interesting.

In fact, Journey to Nowhere was not what I expected. The framework is the story of a Jewish woman’s survival in war-torn Berlin and her post-war emigration to Palestine. The woman is Edith, formerly a maid in the household of Eva Figes’ family. The family were well-to-do Jews who managed to get out of Berlin in the nick of time in 1939. Edith was left behind, and it was ten years later when she came to London that Eva Figes caught up with her story.

The first section of the book details the life of the Unger family (Eva’s parents) as she remembered it. She was only six when the family escaped to London, so her memories of that time are inevitably fragmented. But she conveys a sense of happy family life with skiing holidays and weekends in the summer cottage – a life which changed quite quickly. Eva’s parents soon knew that, as a Jewish family, life for them in Berlin would no longer be viable, and were preoccupied with arrangements that would secure their future. Eva was often left in the care of Edith who came to be her friend.

Fortunately the Unger family had money. They paid a considerable sum to leave and their sponsor was a Rothschild.

In 1948 a letter arrived in London from Edith asking for her old job back. So she came, and little by little the young Eva learnt her story. Edith had survived the round-up of the Jews, the bombing of Berlin and the final battle when Russian troops reached the city. Edith’s account of her life in the war-torn city is told in a series of conversations with Eva. When Edith first had to wear her yellow star she was ashamed, but in fact ordinary Berliners often treated her with sympathy, offering her a seat on the tram and giving her small gifts. She was sheltered by a whole succession of people “sometimes just for a couple of nights, sometimes for several weeks.”

TO PALESTINE:
Once the war was over and mere survival was no longer an imperative, Edith took stock of her life. By chance she met an old acquaintance, Elsa, who had trained as a volunteer for Palestine. Now her job was to recruit survivors for what would soon become the new Jewish state of Israel. So with nothing to keep her in Berlin, Edith decided to go. She was sent to a kibbutz and from the outset was deeply unhappy. Eva was amazed. British newsreels were full of “happy camp survivors reaching the Promised Land”. But Edith found herself ostracised because she came from Germany. German Jews were not true Zionists and, even more damning, wanted to establish friendly relations with the Arabs. “Everyone hated everyone else,” said Edith.”

Eva Figes quotes Olivia Manning describing Palestine during the war as “an awful place… all in small communities each one trying to corner everything for themselves, jobs, food, flats, houses.” Edith felt despised and was told she had only herself to blame. She should have left Germany and answered the call of Zion years before.

The young Eva found it hard to come to terms with Edith’s account. But the final section of the book is an analysis of the setting up of the state of Israel, the mistakes made and the parts played by the big powers. Eva Figes is particularly fierce in her attack on US policies. A quota system had been in force for European Jewish immigrants, and even after the war with perhaps 250,000 in displaced persons camps, this was not relaxed.

PARTITION:
Eva Figes describes in some detail the negotiations between Britain with its mandate to govern Palestine and the US who wanted to wash their hands of it. The UN was involved and, partly due to US intervention, a majority came out in favour of partition – in effect giving a mandate for the creation of the state of Israel. Ernest Bevin declared at the time, “I think the Arab feeling in this question has been under-estimated.”

Eva Figes’ final chapter pulls no punches in her condemnation of that decision. “It is difficult to think of any other political decision taken in the 20th Century that has had such long-term and catastrophic consequences,” she writes.

This book, part memoir, part polemic, deserves to be widely read. Although the personal experiences described date from sixty years ago, the insight into the present situation in the Middle East is illuminating, and should concern us all.

Price £14.99, from Granta.