Reveling in Terrorist Chic
Last week Germany announced that the Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorist, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, will be given a parole after completing her minimum required sentence of 24 years in prison. The families of the nine people that she was convicted of murdering are upset because she was sentenced to a maximum of five life terms, but she is being let go at the earliest possible time. Widespread criticism of this generous parole centers on the fact that Mohnhaupt is too proud to show remorse. Through her lawyer she justified her stance by saying, “I think it would be inappropriate to say now, ‘I regret my crimes’. It would come over as rather insulting to the families of the victims.” However, the widow of one of her victims, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, publicly criticized Mohnhaupt for remaining silent on this issue. She stated, “We have not heard a single word of apology from her. She remains unrepentant.”
Lying shouldn’t prevent a criminal from being paroled, but a lack of remorse is a key indicator that such a criminal could be prone to commit more crimes. The last time Mohnhaupt was released from prison she immediately went underground. Less than six months later a banker, Jurgen Ponto, came to his door to find a smiling couple that was there waiting for him with flowers. When he turned to get a vase Brigitte Mohnhaupt and fellow terrorist Christian Klar killed him in a hail of bullets.
It is unsurprising that leftwing activists have been clamoring for the early release of this cold blooded murderer. During the entire existence of the Red Army Faction, the members of the terrorist organization have received much more sympathy from the Left than what was given to their victims (I will address this point later). Antje Vollmer, a prominent member of the German Parliament, justified Mohnhaupt’s parole by stating, “Both (Mohnhaupt and Klar) have been in jail longer than any person who committed Nazi crimes”.
This questionable statement ignores the fact that a substantial number of Nazis were executed for their crimes. Its not as if Mohnhaupt was treated worse than hanged Nazi war criminals like Wilhelm Keitel or Joachim von Ribbentrop (Keitel suffered from a terribly botched hanging which took 27 minutes to strangle him).
Besides, I don’t know how Vollmer could overlook the extremely long incarceration of Rudolph Hess, who was imprisoned for 46 years until he committed suicide at the age of 93.
Such a silly argument should not be unexpected from a politician who is most well known for her accusation that the U.S. Catholic pedophilia scandal from a couple of years ago was really a plot to undermine former Pope John Paul II. This was alleged to be in retaliation for the Polish Pope’s opposition to the liberation of Iraq. She also claimed that the plot was further advanced by giving Poland a prominent role in occupation of Iraq. It’s amazing that rabid activists can directly associate everything from a pedophile scandal to the Katrina hurricane and pin them to the conduct of the Iraq war. While these leftists struggle to connect wildly unrelated circumstances to their pet conspiracies, they simultaneously make as many excuses as possible for unrepentant leftwing and Islamist criminals.
It is particularly disturbing that Vollmer is not just some isolated basket case, but a very prominent German politician who has served as the vice-president of the country’s parliament. This indicates how mainstream extremist ideologies have become over the last 30 years.
My disgust with the widespread sympathy shown for the RAF has led me to name this post in honor of Ingeborg Barz. She is a former member of the Red Army Faction that disappeared shortly after calling her mother to say she was quitting the terrorist group and wanted to come back home. While it will probably never be conclusively proven that Barz was killed by the gang, the murder is widely believed to have occurred. The unwillingness of most RAF members to come clean about their crimes has prevented the truth from being fully disclosed. Thanks to them her family may never recover her body and obtain any sense of closure. The lack of remorse by former RAF terrorists is echoed in their ominous silence about her fate.
When executing missions the RAF liked to name terrorist units after members of the group that were killed, incarcerated or committed suicide.
On April 24th, 1975 the RAF seized the West German embassy in Stockholm, mined it with TNT and held the staff hostage. When the RAF demands were not met, they announced that they would kill a hostage every hour until West Germany capitulated. Dr. Heinz Hillegard was forced to stand in front of a window and was shot. His lifeless body was callously left to hang from the window. All told, there were two innocents and two terrorists killed (one died about two weeks later from his injuries). Most of those in the embassy (including the terrorists) suffered bad burn wounds when the explosives were accidentally set off due to the incompetence of the bomb makers.
The Siegfried Hausner Commando was named to honor a gang member that was killed in the embassy attack. This “retaliatory” mission resulted in the kidnapping of businessman, Hanns-Martin Schleyer. In the process of committing this crime three police officers were killed along with Schleyer’s chauffeur. After a number of setbacks for the RAF, Schleyer’s body was discovered in the trunk of an Audi. He had been shot three times in the head. The terrorist group boasted, “His death is of no significance in our pain and rage at the slaughter of Mogadishu and Stammheim.” The reference to Mogadishu relates to a failed hijacking of a West German plane that Palestinian terrorists planned to exchange for imprisoned Red Army leaders. One hostage was executed before West German commandos stormed the plane killing three of the terrorists and wounding one other. All of the remaining passengers survived and the commandos came home to a hero’s welcome. Stammheim was the prison where the RAF leadership committed suicide because of their lost chance for freedom that resulted from the failure of the Moghdishu hijackers.
By naming their operations after terrorists that met their downfall, the RAF attempted to promote the same propaganda that most terrorist groups strive to disseminate even today. “Martyrs” are created to perpetuate a myth of invulnerability and to cultivate sympathy for their cause. The objective is to cower their victims into believing that such terrorist organizations cannot be stopped because when their members are killed or captured, their comrades will only be inspired to retaliate with even more acts of violence. Ideally this will create the impression of an unbreakable circle of violence that will render its victims too demoralized to fight back against such suicidal maniacs.
Now that the RAF has been defeated for over a decade, we can look back to see how leftwing sympathizers assisted these terrorists to spread their message.
On July 15th, 1971 Petra Schelm became the RAF’s first “martyr”. She was a very young and beautiful woman who was caught in a stolen BMW. As she and her accomplice fled from the car they opened fire on the police who were pursuing them. This led to a running shoot out in which Schelm was killed. The public was so horrified at the death of the young terrorist that a national poll taken shortly after the shooting determined that as much as 20% of the Germans interviewed felt some sympathy for the Red Army.
While pictures of the wholesome looking girl even elicited some of my own sympathy, the ugly truth is that she was caught in the act of committing a crime and tried to murder the police officers attempting to stop her. Schelm was a ticking time bomb who received several months of military training in a PLO terrorist camp. She was very eager to put that training to use.
Police officers often don’t get much respect for the risks that they place on their life because many people take it for granted that it is a part of their job. On the other hand, terrorism was Petra Schelm’s “job” and over the years the RAF went on to kill many police officers who were only performing their duty to protect the public. She doesn’t deserve much sympathy for anything other than the fact that she made too many bad choices in her short life. Her actions were decided by her own free will.
Schelm’s death forged a template for the justification of the Red Army’s violence. In May of 1972 the RAF claimed responsibility for a terrorist bombing on a US army base in Frankfurt. The statement was signed by the “Petra Schelm Commando”. One person was killed and thirteen were wounded. West Germany would be gripped by fear for two decades.
Despite a ruthless campaign of bombings, bank robberies, kidnappings and murders the RAF continued to command sympathy from Europe’s students and leftwing activists.
When the high profile terrorist, Ulrike Meinhof, committed suicide in her prison cell – fellow RAF member, Jan-Carl Raspe, used a courtroom as his soapbox to say, “We believe that Ulrike was executed”. This lie spread like wild fire and massive demonstrations were held throughout West Germany to protest Meinhof’s alleged “execution”. Bombs were set off in Nice, Paris and once again at the American air base in Frankfurt.
There never was any proof that Meinhof was murdered. Red Army propaganda was accepted without question by the thousands of mourners and activists who showed up at her funeral. This was despite the fact that two post-mortem examinations were held and both ruled that all the evidence was consistent with a suicide by strangulation. The second examination was requested by the Meinhof family and the RAF defense team. Medical examiner Dr. Werner Janssen concluded, “To judge by the usable findings of the second post-mortem, Frau Meinhof suffered death by hanging. The findings of the examination so far available give no grounds for suspecting any extraneous factors.” In addition to her imprisonment and alienation from her fellow terrorists, Meinhof was distraught because she had given up her two precious daughters to join the RAF. Facing the possibility of life in prison, she killed herself on Mother’s Day.
After the suicides of the remaining RAF leadership, the Left went berserk. Of course they claimed that the government killed the terrorists again. This pretext was used to justify even more “commando” missions. According to Time Magazine things got a little crazy in the aftermath of these suicides.
“The terrorists presumably hoped that in death they would become instant martyrs for their radical cause. Outside Germany, news of their suicides sparked scattered but ugly protests. In the Italian cities of Turin, Bologna and Leghorn, bombs were tossed into showrooms displaying German cars. Two unoccupied German tourist buses were set aflame in Paris. In Rome, police used tear gas to disburse some 800 youths, armed with Molotov cocktails, who were marching toward the German embassy and the Lufthansa ticket office. Leftists also demonstrated in Athens and Vienna; in London, protesters chanted Murder! Murder! outside the German embassy.”
Throughout the RAF terror campaign of over twenty years there were many public demonstrations held in support of the gang. Yet these leftwing activists showed little public support for the victims of the RAF. All of the Journalists, chauffeurs, librarians, bank tellers, diplomats, businessmen, policemen, attorneys, judges and their families who suffered from Red Army terrorism didn’t warrant as much sympathy as their tormentors did. Meanwhile government buildings were surrounded by barbwire and sandbagged gun emplacements. West Germany was living in a state of fear that was not created by the government, it was the offspring of the RAF.
The Birth of Terrorist Chic
That fear is now just a faded memory and Germans are starting to look back at the Red Army Faction with nostalgia. Two years ago an art exhibit at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin featured the RAF as its theme. The families of RAF victims created such an uproar that it delayed the opening of the show for over a year. An application for substantial federal funds was abandoned due to these protests so the organizers held an eBay auction to raise capital.
When the exhibit finally opened there was a panel discussion that caught my eye. It was called, “Political Modernity in Germany – Susceptible to the Lure of Totalitarianism?”
“Has the lure of totalitarianism been present throughout the era of political modernity in Germany? Social scientists have repeatedly pointed out the existence of a connection between the society and culture of modernity on the one hand and the formation of a specific type of ‘bourgeois coldness’ (Adorno) on the other.”
The guiding doctrine of the Red Army Faction was based on such a scenario. Theodor Adorno was a Marxist philosopher whose theories helped to give birth to the radical student movement that the RAF sprang from. However, Adorno condemned his Frankenstein creation and became ridiculed by his students. In reality many of the exhibitors and staff at the KW Institute strove to revive the Marxist ideals that motivated the RAF and used the notoriety of the terrorist group to generate publicity at the expense of the victims’ families.
The exhibition scored a rather questionable victory by securing the services of Felix Ensslin as a curator. He was the abandoned son of Red Army terrorist leader, Gudrun Ensslin, who jumped on the opportunity to cash in on his mother’s name. SF Gate related that Ensslin believes that the media’s coverage of the RAF was somehow wrong. He said, “The art on view allows viewers to think about the painful events of the past with something of a sense of distance from the mass-media ‘reality’ that has shaped the public’s understanding of the RAF years.” What exactly did the media get wrong about the serial murdering terrorist group?
Bruce LaBruce, a columnist at Eye Weekly, gave us some insight about the true motives of the exhibition when he related the following;
“I suppose the reason I’m waxing nostalgic about terrorist organizations is that I’m here in Germany working on a project that revolves around the Baader-Meinhof, aka the Red Army Faction, the extreme left-wing terrorist group from ‘70s Germany. Considering the resurgence of anti-American sentiment here as a reaction against the new imperialist policies of the Bush administration, it’s not surprising that art and culture have picked up on the subject of the RAF. In fact, my friend Klaus Biesenbach, the director of Kunst-Werke, the Berlin Institute of Contemporary Art, is curating with his colleagues an exhibition of work related to the RAF in November, to which I will be contributing. To this end, Klaus recently arranged a dinner at which I was seated beside Felix Ensslin, the son of Gudrun Ensslin, one of the four main members of the RAF who committed suicide in prison (some still claim they were murdered by the authorities) in 1977. As Felix is also involved in curating the exhibition, it was my delicate task to explain my project to him, a quasi-porn movie that features a woman who names and patterns herself after Gudrun Ensslin and forces her male acolytes to have sex with each other in order to free themselves from the shackles of heterosexual bourgeois normalcy.
This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds: radical post-Freudian psychoanalytic thinkers such as Reich and Marcuse likely would have supported such a notion. Felix, who is well versed in revolutionary theory and who has stayed true to his mother’s leftist ideals by working for the Green Party in German parliament, was charmed by the idea, much to my relief.”
There really isn’t much room for doubt in LaBruce’s statement.
On the subject of Green Party politicians; Antje Vollmer, who passionately supported Mohnhaupt’s release from prison, recently became a member of the Board of Directors for the KW Institute. Such unsavory characters tend to gravitate towards one another and love nothing more than to be funded by taxpayers (if possible). Wunderbar!
…And then there is Astrid Proll. She is a former RAF terrorist who freely admits to be profiting from her sordid past. In an interview in the British newspaper The Observer she stated, “I earn my money from the RAF, so why not keep it up?” Now … I recognize that everyone is in one way or another a hypocrite because the vast complexities of life do not allow us to maintain complete consistency to our ideals, but this woman is a real piece of work.
After serving a lenient prison sentence Proll edited a book of photographs about the RAF called “Baader-Meinhof: Pictures on the Run 67 – 77”. Only a few of the photos in the book highlight the brutality of the gang and most portray the RAF in a sympathetic light (especially as victims). To advance her “career” Proll makes appearances to speak about the RAF and was even invited to the exhibition at the KW Institute. Yet she addressed her popularity among modern day radicals in this light, “I haven’t put it behind me, it will keep coming up - but it’s not me who finds it difficult to forget, its other people.” …Nothing is ever Proll’s fault. The government was to blame for overreacting to RAF terrorism and her fans made her cash in on her notoriety. Only an indulgent culture of leftwing radicalism could cushion her so that she doesn’t have to fully apologize for her past and her exploitation of it.
I also find it unsettling that Proll used her ill-gotten popularity to somehow forge links with the German Green Party. She has at least enough influence to give Felix Ensslin a job with them. He sought her out to learn more about his mother, the terrorist who abandoned him as a child. Proll has befriended other children of RAF terrorists as well and has spread the message of the group to another generation.
To further illustrate how she has become a cause celebre for terrorist sympathizers, there is even a popular Puerto Rican band that named themselves “Astrid Proll” in her honor. I’ll let them describe their feelings about the Red Army.
“The band takes its name from one of the survivors of the Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, a German student protest movement of the 1970’s that declared war on a fascist government with ex-Nazi Party members in Parliament. This movement took radical action against social conformity and state-sponsored oppression. Astrid Proll, the band, shares that revolutionary ideal regarding individual action, channeled through music and multimedia art.”
Although the RAF was inspired by the student movement, most of them were not students. Besides not even knowing the history of the terrorist group that they revere, I am appalled by their reference to “radical action”. Do they honestly believe that kidnapping, murder, bank robbery and terrorist bombings are radical actions that they should glorify?
Such terrorist chic is exemplified by the exploitation fashion trend, “Prada-Meinhof”. It is mainly a European phenomenon. Shirts glorifying the RAF began to appear all over the continent, much like Che Guevara shirts have done worldwide over the last decade. Two events spurred this wave of nostalgia. October of 1997 marked the 20th anniversary of the “German Autumn”, which was the peak of RAF notoriety, –and– the 1998 announcement of the formal dissolution of the terrorist group. This meant that Revisionists could now remake the image of the terrorist group with much less opposition.
UrbanDictionary.com has seen fit to include the term in its online slang dictionary.
1. Prada Meinhof
Descriptive of those participating in political causes or campaigns who see marches or demonstrations as an alternative fashion show with themself as the main model.
Example: I see one of those globalization campaigners is wearing Jimmy Choo shoes. How very Prada Meinhof.
These days the art scene consists of nothing but intellectually lazy, upper middle class, parasitic Marxist “artisans” seeking to redistribute the wealth that is produced by the working class so they can get a piece of it.
Last week Germany announced that the Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorist, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, will be given a parole after completing her minimum required sentence of 24 years in prison. The families of the nine people that she was convicted of murdering are upset because she was sentenced to a maximum of five life terms, but she is being let go at the earliest possible time. Widespread criticism of this generous parole centers on the fact that Mohnhaupt is too proud to show remorse. Through her lawyer she justified her stance by saying, “I think it would be inappropriate to say now, ‘I regret my crimes’. It would come over as rather insulting to the families of the victims.” However, the widow of one of her victims, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, publicly criticized Mohnhaupt for remaining silent on this issue. She stated, “We have not heard a single word of apology from her. She remains unrepentant.”
Lying shouldn’t prevent a criminal from being paroled, but a lack of remorse is a key indicator that such a criminal could be prone to commit more crimes. The last time Mohnhaupt was released from prison she immediately went underground. Less than six months later a banker, Jurgen Ponto, came to his door to find a smiling couple that was there waiting for him with flowers. When he turned to get a vase Brigitte Mohnhaupt and fellow terrorist Christian Klar killed him in a hail of bullets.
It is unsurprising that leftwing activists have been clamoring for the early release of this cold blooded murderer. During the entire existence of the Red Army Faction, the members of the terrorist organization have received much more sympathy from the Left than what was given to their victims (I will address this point later). Antje Vollmer, a prominent member of the German Parliament, justified Mohnhaupt’s parole by stating, “Both (Mohnhaupt and Klar) have been in jail longer than any person who committed Nazi crimes”.
This questionable statement ignores the fact that a substantial number of Nazis were executed for their crimes. Its not as if Mohnhaupt was treated worse than hanged Nazi war criminals like Wilhelm Keitel or Joachim von Ribbentrop (Keitel suffered from a terribly botched hanging which took 27 minutes to strangle him).
Besides, I don’t know how Vollmer could overlook the extremely long incarceration of Rudolph Hess, who was imprisoned for 46 years until he committed suicide at the age of 93.
Such a silly argument should not be unexpected from a politician who is most well known for her accusation that the U.S. Catholic pedophilia scandal from a couple of years ago was really a plot to undermine former Pope John Paul II. This was alleged to be in retaliation for the Polish Pope’s opposition to the liberation of Iraq. She also claimed that the plot was further advanced by giving Poland a prominent role in occupation of Iraq. It’s amazing that rabid activists can directly associate everything from a pedophile scandal to the Katrina hurricane and pin them to the conduct of the Iraq war. While these leftists struggle to connect wildly unrelated circumstances to their pet conspiracies, they simultaneously make as many excuses as possible for unrepentant leftwing and Islamist criminals.
It is particularly disturbing that Vollmer is not just some isolated basket case, but a very prominent German politician who has served as the vice-president of the country’s parliament. This indicates how mainstream extremist ideologies have become over the last 30 years.
My disgust with the widespread sympathy shown for the RAF has led me to name this post in honor of Ingeborg Barz. She is a former member of the Red Army Faction that disappeared shortly after calling her mother to say she was quitting the terrorist group and wanted to come back home. While it will probably never be conclusively proven that Barz was killed by the gang, the murder is widely believed to have occurred. The unwillingness of most RAF members to come clean about their crimes has prevented the truth from being fully disclosed. Thanks to them her family may never recover her body and obtain any sense of closure. The lack of remorse by former RAF terrorists is echoed in their ominous silence about her fate.
When executing missions the RAF liked to name terrorist units after members of the group that were killed, incarcerated or committed suicide.
On April 24th, 1975 the RAF seized the West German embassy in Stockholm, mined it with TNT and held the staff hostage. When the RAF demands were not met, they announced that they would kill a hostage every hour until West Germany capitulated. Dr. Heinz Hillegard was forced to stand in front of a window and was shot. His lifeless body was callously left to hang from the window. All told, there were two innocents and two terrorists killed (one died about two weeks later from his injuries). Most of those in the embassy (including the terrorists) suffered bad burn wounds when the explosives were accidentally set off due to the incompetence of the bomb makers.
The Siegfried Hausner Commando was named to honor a gang member that was killed in the embassy attack. This “retaliatory” mission resulted in the kidnapping of businessman, Hanns-Martin Schleyer. In the process of committing this crime three police officers were killed along with Schleyer’s chauffeur. After a number of setbacks for the RAF, Schleyer’s body was discovered in the trunk of an Audi. He had been shot three times in the head. The terrorist group boasted, “His death is of no significance in our pain and rage at the slaughter of Mogadishu and Stammheim.” The reference to Mogadishu relates to a failed hijacking of a West German plane that Palestinian terrorists planned to exchange for imprisoned Red Army leaders. One hostage was executed before West German commandos stormed the plane killing three of the terrorists and wounding one other. All of the remaining passengers survived and the commandos came home to a hero’s welcome. Stammheim was the prison where the RAF leadership committed suicide because of their lost chance for freedom that resulted from the failure of the Moghdishu hijackers.
By naming their operations after terrorists that met their downfall, the RAF attempted to promote the same propaganda that most terrorist groups strive to disseminate even today. “Martyrs” are created to perpetuate a myth of invulnerability and to cultivate sympathy for their cause. The objective is to cower their victims into believing that such terrorist organizations cannot be stopped because when their members are killed or captured, their comrades will only be inspired to retaliate with even more acts of violence. Ideally this will create the impression of an unbreakable circle of violence that will render its victims too demoralized to fight back against such suicidal maniacs.
Now that the RAF has been defeated for over a decade, we can look back to see how leftwing sympathizers assisted these terrorists to spread their message.
On July 15th, 1971 Petra Schelm became the RAF’s first “martyr”. She was a very young and beautiful woman who was caught in a stolen BMW. As she and her accomplice fled from the car they opened fire on the police who were pursuing them. This led to a running shoot out in which Schelm was killed. The public was so horrified at the death of the young terrorist that a national poll taken shortly after the shooting determined that as much as 20% of the Germans interviewed felt some sympathy for the Red Army.
While pictures of the wholesome looking girl even elicited some of my own sympathy, the ugly truth is that she was caught in the act of committing a crime and tried to murder the police officers attempting to stop her. Schelm was a ticking time bomb who received several months of military training in a PLO terrorist camp. She was very eager to put that training to use.
Police officers often don’t get much respect for the risks that they place on their life because many people take it for granted that it is a part of their job. On the other hand, terrorism was Petra Schelm’s “job” and over the years the RAF went on to kill many police officers who were only performing their duty to protect the public. She doesn’t deserve much sympathy for anything other than the fact that she made too many bad choices in her short life. Her actions were decided by her own free will.
Schelm’s death forged a template for the justification of the Red Army’s violence. In May of 1972 the RAF claimed responsibility for a terrorist bombing on a US army base in Frankfurt. The statement was signed by the “Petra Schelm Commando”. One person was killed and thirteen were wounded. West Germany would be gripped by fear for two decades.
Despite a ruthless campaign of bombings, bank robberies, kidnappings and murders the RAF continued to command sympathy from Europe’s students and leftwing activists.
When the high profile terrorist, Ulrike Meinhof, committed suicide in her prison cell – fellow RAF member, Jan-Carl Raspe, used a courtroom as his soapbox to say, “We believe that Ulrike was executed”. This lie spread like wild fire and massive demonstrations were held throughout West Germany to protest Meinhof’s alleged “execution”. Bombs were set off in Nice, Paris and once again at the American air base in Frankfurt.
There never was any proof that Meinhof was murdered. Red Army propaganda was accepted without question by the thousands of mourners and activists who showed up at her funeral. This was despite the fact that two post-mortem examinations were held and both ruled that all the evidence was consistent with a suicide by strangulation. The second examination was requested by the Meinhof family and the RAF defense team. Medical examiner Dr. Werner Janssen concluded, “To judge by the usable findings of the second post-mortem, Frau Meinhof suffered death by hanging. The findings of the examination so far available give no grounds for suspecting any extraneous factors.” In addition to her imprisonment and alienation from her fellow terrorists, Meinhof was distraught because she had given up her two precious daughters to join the RAF. Facing the possibility of life in prison, she killed herself on Mother’s Day.
After the suicides of the remaining RAF leadership, the Left went berserk. Of course they claimed that the government killed the terrorists again. This pretext was used to justify even more “commando” missions. According to Time Magazine things got a little crazy in the aftermath of these suicides.
“The terrorists presumably hoped that in death they would become instant martyrs for their radical cause. Outside Germany, news of their suicides sparked scattered but ugly protests. In the Italian cities of Turin, Bologna and Leghorn, bombs were tossed into showrooms displaying German cars. Two unoccupied German tourist buses were set aflame in Paris. In Rome, police used tear gas to disburse some 800 youths, armed with Molotov cocktails, who were marching toward the German embassy and the Lufthansa ticket office. Leftists also demonstrated in Athens and Vienna; in London, protesters chanted Murder! Murder! outside the German embassy.”
Throughout the RAF terror campaign of over twenty years there were many public demonstrations held in support of the gang. Yet these leftwing activists showed little public support for the victims of the RAF. All of the Journalists, chauffeurs, librarians, bank tellers, diplomats, businessmen, policemen, attorneys, judges and their families who suffered from Red Army terrorism didn’t warrant as much sympathy as their tormentors did. Meanwhile government buildings were surrounded by barbwire and sandbagged gun emplacements. West Germany was living in a state of fear that was not created by the government, it was the offspring of the RAF.
The Birth of Terrorist Chic
That fear is now just a faded memory and Germans are starting to look back at the Red Army Faction with nostalgia. Two years ago an art exhibit at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin featured the RAF as its theme. The families of RAF victims created such an uproar that it delayed the opening of the show for over a year. An application for substantial federal funds was abandoned due to these protests so the organizers held an eBay auction to raise capital.
When the exhibit finally opened there was a panel discussion that caught my eye. It was called, “Political Modernity in Germany – Susceptible to the Lure of Totalitarianism?”
“Has the lure of totalitarianism been present throughout the era of political modernity in Germany? Social scientists have repeatedly pointed out the existence of a connection between the society and culture of modernity on the one hand and the formation of a specific type of ‘bourgeois coldness’ (Adorno) on the other.”
The guiding doctrine of the Red Army Faction was based on such a scenario. Theodor Adorno was a Marxist philosopher whose theories helped to give birth to the radical student movement that the RAF sprang from. However, Adorno condemned his Frankenstein creation and became ridiculed by his students. In reality many of the exhibitors and staff at the KW Institute strove to revive the Marxist ideals that motivated the RAF and used the notoriety of the terrorist group to generate publicity at the expense of the victims’ families.
The exhibition scored a rather questionable victory by securing the services of Felix Ensslin as a curator. He was the abandoned son of Red Army terrorist leader, Gudrun Ensslin, who jumped on the opportunity to cash in on his mother’s name. SF Gate related that Ensslin believes that the media’s coverage of the RAF was somehow wrong. He said, “The art on view allows viewers to think about the painful events of the past with something of a sense of distance from the mass-media ‘reality’ that has shaped the public’s understanding of the RAF years.” What exactly did the media get wrong about the serial murdering terrorist group?
Bruce LaBruce, a columnist at Eye Weekly, gave us some insight about the true motives of the exhibition when he related the following;
“I suppose the reason I’m waxing nostalgic about terrorist organizations is that I’m here in Germany working on a project that revolves around the Baader-Meinhof, aka the Red Army Faction, the extreme left-wing terrorist group from ‘70s Germany. Considering the resurgence of anti-American sentiment here as a reaction against the new imperialist policies of the Bush administration, it’s not surprising that art and culture have picked up on the subject of the RAF. In fact, my friend Klaus Biesenbach, the director of Kunst-Werke, the Berlin Institute of Contemporary Art, is curating with his colleagues an exhibition of work related to the RAF in November, to which I will be contributing. To this end, Klaus recently arranged a dinner at which I was seated beside Felix Ensslin, the son of Gudrun Ensslin, one of the four main members of the RAF who committed suicide in prison (some still claim they were murdered by the authorities) in 1977. As Felix is also involved in curating the exhibition, it was my delicate task to explain my project to him, a quasi-porn movie that features a woman who names and patterns herself after Gudrun Ensslin and forces her male acolytes to have sex with each other in order to free themselves from the shackles of heterosexual bourgeois normalcy.
This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds: radical post-Freudian psychoanalytic thinkers such as Reich and Marcuse likely would have supported such a notion. Felix, who is well versed in revolutionary theory and who has stayed true to his mother’s leftist ideals by working for the Green Party in German parliament, was charmed by the idea, much to my relief.”
There really isn’t much room for doubt in LaBruce’s statement.
On the subject of Green Party politicians; Antje Vollmer, who passionately supported Mohnhaupt’s release from prison, recently became a member of the Board of Directors for the KW Institute. Such unsavory characters tend to gravitate towards one another and love nothing more than to be funded by taxpayers (if possible). Wunderbar!
…And then there is Astrid Proll. She is a former RAF terrorist who freely admits to be profiting from her sordid past. In an interview in the British newspaper The Observer she stated, “I earn my money from the RAF, so why not keep it up?” Now … I recognize that everyone is in one way or another a hypocrite because the vast complexities of life do not allow us to maintain complete consistency to our ideals, but this woman is a real piece of work.
After serving a lenient prison sentence Proll edited a book of photographs about the RAF called “Baader-Meinhof: Pictures on the Run 67 – 77”. Only a few of the photos in the book highlight the brutality of the gang and most portray the RAF in a sympathetic light (especially as victims). To advance her “career” Proll makes appearances to speak about the RAF and was even invited to the exhibition at the KW Institute. Yet she addressed her popularity among modern day radicals in this light, “I haven’t put it behind me, it will keep coming up - but it’s not me who finds it difficult to forget, its other people.” …Nothing is ever Proll’s fault. The government was to blame for overreacting to RAF terrorism and her fans made her cash in on her notoriety. Only an indulgent culture of leftwing radicalism could cushion her so that she doesn’t have to fully apologize for her past and her exploitation of it.
I also find it unsettling that Proll used her ill-gotten popularity to somehow forge links with the German Green Party. She has at least enough influence to give Felix Ensslin a job with them. He sought her out to learn more about his mother, the terrorist who abandoned him as a child. Proll has befriended other children of RAF terrorists as well and has spread the message of the group to another generation.
To further illustrate how she has become a cause celebre for terrorist sympathizers, there is even a popular Puerto Rican band that named themselves “Astrid Proll” in her honor. I’ll let them describe their feelings about the Red Army.
“The band takes its name from one of the survivors of the Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, a German student protest movement of the 1970’s that declared war on a fascist government with ex-Nazi Party members in Parliament. This movement took radical action against social conformity and state-sponsored oppression. Astrid Proll, the band, shares that revolutionary ideal regarding individual action, channeled through music and multimedia art.”
Although the RAF was inspired by the student movement, most of them were not students. Besides not even knowing the history of the terrorist group that they revere, I am appalled by their reference to “radical action”. Do they honestly believe that kidnapping, murder, bank robbery and terrorist bombings are radical actions that they should glorify?
Such terrorist chic is exemplified by the exploitation fashion trend, “Prada-Meinhof”. It is mainly a European phenomenon. Shirts glorifying the RAF began to appear all over the continent, much like Che Guevara shirts have done worldwide over the last decade. Two events spurred this wave of nostalgia. October of 1997 marked the 20th anniversary of the “German Autumn”, which was the peak of RAF notoriety, –and– the 1998 announcement of the formal dissolution of the terrorist group. This meant that Revisionists could now remake the image of the terrorist group with much less opposition.
UrbanDictionary.com has seen fit to include the term in its online slang dictionary.
1. Prada Meinhof
Descriptive of those participating in political causes or campaigns who see marches or demonstrations as an alternative fashion show with themself as the main model.
Example: I see one of those globalization campaigners is wearing Jimmy Choo shoes. How very Prada Meinhof.
These days the art scene consists of nothing but intellectually lazy, upper middle class, parasitic Marxist “artisans” seeking to redistribute the wealth that is produced by the working class so they can get a piece of it.
If you’re a blogger please name your next post;
The Dr. Heinz Hillegard Commando
– or –
The Jurgen Ponto Commando.
Show sympathy to someone who really deserves it.
