In Europe

The allusion to the Royal Air Force (RAF) was no accident: just as the British had bombed Germany from above, they now planned to raze the ‘new fascism’ from within. In 1970, Baader and Ensslin were helped to escape from prison by a group of friends led by Ulrike Meinhof. According to those involved, it was a purely impulsive action: there was no well-organised network of safe houses or hiding places, no longer-term ‘urban guerrilla’ action had been prepared, the group was almost completely unarmed. Very soon, however, they began receiving support from the Middle East and the DDR – even though theintensely conventional East German communists had little use for the RAF's tactics. After Baader and Ensslin's escape, the group robbed a number of banks. Bombings of the American army headquarters in Frankfurt, the head offices of the Springer publishing concern (whose newspapers included
Bild-Zeitung
and
Die Welt
) and government buildings in Munich and Karlsruhe followed. Then began a chaotic game of cat and mouse with the authorities. When the presence of Ulrike Meinhof's twin seven-year-old daughters began forming a hindrance to this ‘people's war’, the group decided they should be sent to a camp for Palestinian orphans. ‘Ulrike clung to her children, more than a mother, more like a mother hen,’ her ex-husband wrote. That, in fact, was precisely why Baader and Ensslin demanded that she free herself of this ‘remnant of her bourgeois past’. But El Fatah refused to cooperate: even their Palestinian contact person felt that this was taking things too far. In the end, probably at the insistence of Meinhof herself, the children were handed over to their father.
    In early June 1972, Baader and Ensslin were reapprehended. This time, Meinhof was arrested as well. Their followers fought on, increasingly obsessed with the idea of freeing the three ringleaders. On one occasion they met with limited success: in 1975, Peter Lorenz, chairman of the Berlin branch of the CDU, was abducted and exchanged for three RAF prisoners.
    In 1976 Meinhof died in her cell, probably – although opinions differ on this score – having committed suicide. Violent demonstrations broke out again; in Frankfurt, Joschka Fischer – at the time a fervent street-fighter – was arrested for ‘attempting to take the life’ of a policeman. Within the next year the group's sympathisers singled out and attacked more than 150 targets, killed German Attorney General Siegfried Buback and bank director Jürgen Ponto, and, in September, kidnapped the foreman of the German employers’ collective, Hanns Martin Schleyer.
    That autumn, all of West Germany lived in a shifting state of fear, rage, bitterness and paranoia. The RAF, which had gradually come to represent only itself, demanded the release of Baader, Ensslin and nine other prisoners. Despite desperate pleas from Schleyer himself, the German government refused to budge. To further underscore the demands, three Palestinian RAF supporters then hijacked a Lufthansa Boeing; a lightningraid by German commandos at Mogadishu airport on 18 October, however, put a speedy end to the hijack. Schleyer's body was recovered the same day, and that night Baader, Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe were found dead in their cells. For years any number of theories circulated concerning the cause of death, but nowadays most historians tend to agree with the official reading: suicide.
    The films made later about the autumn months of 1977 bear titles like
Die bleierne Zeit
(The Days of Lead) and
Deutschland im Herbst
(Germany in Autumn). The young German democracy did, indeed, seem on the verge of backsliding to a situation very like that of the 1920s and 1930s; precisely what the left-wing radicals hoped to ‘prove’. Roadblocks were set up everywhere, police helicopters patrolled above the roads, ‘conspiratorial locations’ were permanently wiretapped and watched, emergency measures were tightened and all outspoken support for ‘terrorists’ was made punishable. On the basis of the Radicals Law, dissidents were faced with a vocational ban: they were excluded from all public functions, including teaching. RAF prisoners were put into isolation and submitted to a special regime. Their lawyers, including future minister of home affairs Otto Schily, received constant threats.
    The Baader-Meinhof Gang's supporters remained active for another fifteen years. In total, the RAF carried out almost 250 attacks, robbed