The Baader-Meinhof Gang: first modern terrorists?
In 1971 in Cambridge, I sat in a room listening to people plotting to blow up the Corn Exchange and steal the Rubens from King’s College Chapel. In the latter case, baseball bats were to be used to quell the porters. It was a joke, stupid late-night babble. But why, I later wondered, that particular joke? Why, in 1971, was the babble about violence and not about failed sex, bad parties, loud music and crass politics, the usual student preoccupations?
Because violence was in the air. Because among our contemporaries around the world were people who were prepared to kill, maim and kidnap in the name of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. And, crucially, because in the recesses of even the most pacific student’s imagination was the suspicion that, just maybe, these people had a point. Those were different times, as Lou Reed crooned to us in those late-night rooms, many decorated with Alberto Korda’s hyper-romantic photograph of Che Guevara. Now, the word “terrorist” evokes an Islamist militant, not a western student. Between, say, June 2, 1967 and October 18, 1977, however, it meant a young citizen of a democracy who, for complex and usually opaque reasons, had decided appalling violence was the answer to the condition of society, or perhaps just the conditions in his head.
On the first date, Benno Ohnesorg, a student pacifist, was killed by a police bullet in Berlin during a protest against a visit by the American-backed repressive Shah of Iran (the policeman who shot him was later acquitted of wrongdoing). On the second date, prison guards found the bodies of the terrorists Andreas Baader and his girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin, in their cells at Stammheim prison, in Stuttgart. They had killed themselves, Baader with a gun smuggled in by his lawyers, Ensslin by hanging herself with a length of speaker wire. One more prisoner, Jan-Carl Raspe, was just about alive, but died later in hospital from self-inflicted gunshot wounds. A year earlier, their co-conspirator Ulrike Meinhof had hange