Antifa in Mainstream Media/Politics 1
Heinrich Böll, Nobel Prize Winner
I have a video series called Antifa in Mainstream Media & Twitter, based on written reports I had on my Wordpress before they shut it down (it is archived here). The videos are still on Bitchute.1 I now launch this new series. I hope the information is useful. Please subscribe & share.
In this installment, we will look at Heinrich Böll, one or Germany’s most famous authors,2 Nobel Prize winner for literature3 and World War II Nazi veteran. Apparently he was drafted and it is claimed that he was an unwilling soldier.4 Perhaps his political stance (which we will get a clue to below) can be explained by a guilty conscious. More specifically, we will look at an article, or propaganda piece Böll wrote for a 1972 issue of Germany’s Der Spiegel.5
Böll accuses the German tabloid paper Bild of having been “crypto-fascist” and “fascistoid” and of engaging in “naked fascism”. Bild is apparently conservative not fascist, secretly or otherwise. Because fascism entails a new dictatorial regime with a catastrophic break from tradition and conservatism entails conserving tradition, fascism and conservatism are opposites.
Böll claims Bild and the police were “accomplices” because Bild uncritically published some figures provided by the police related to damages done by the Baader-Meinhof gang. About this, he writes…
That's no longer crypto-fascist ... no longer fascistoid, this is naked fascism, incitement, lies, dirt.
…and…
I can't understand that any politician would still give an interview to such a newspaper.
The implied threat that anyone giving a platform to fascists will be branded as fascists themselves sounds a bit familiar, doesn’t it? Oh well, perish the thought.
Böll‘s snide and sneering article drips with the sort of insufferable contempt that comes from stupid people who are quite convinced of their intellectual superiority and conceited about it. His piece is pointlessly repetitive and sadistically long-winded. Even after trudging through it all, it is not immediately clear why he applied the terms crypto-fascist and fascistoid to Bild. Upon reflection, however, and with some historical context, it will become clear enough.
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the Baader-Meinhof group or gang is also known as the RAF, the Red Army Faction, a…
West German radical leftist group
…that…
had its origins among the radical elements of the German university protest movement
…and who maintained that the government in West Germany, decades after the defeat of the Axis powers, was fascist holdover from the Nazi regime. Even Mark Bray, the antifa author of Antifa - the Anti-Fascist Handbook (Melville House, 2017), acknowledges in his book on page 53…
Following the war, the West German state was founded as an expressly anti-fascist institution.
This drastic overstretch of terms like fascist and Nazi sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Oh well, perish that thought too.
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the group carried out…
…and they…
kidnapped and assassinated prominent political and business figures.
In Unmasked - Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy (published by Center Street, 2021), Andy Ngo writes on page 104…
Throughout the 1970s, they killed dozens of people in West Germany through assassinations, bombings, robberies, arson attacks, and shootings.
Earlier on that page, Ngo writes that they were funded from the other side of the Iron Curtain by the Stasi. Encyclopedia Britannica states…
After the collapse of the communist government in East Germany in 1989–90, it was discovered that the Red Army Faction had been given training, shelter, and supplies by the Stasi, the secret police of the former communist regime.
The East German Government was behind this West German antifa group. In Antifa - the Anti-Fascist Handbook, on page 53, Bray writes that a…
founder of the Red Army Faction (RAF) proclaimed, “This fascist state means to kill us all . . . Violence is the only way to answer violence. This is the Auschwitz generation, and there’s no arguing with them.”
That sounds a bit familiar. It sounds a lot like the unhinged insanity one heard in the USA not many years ago about a certain someone - that he and his fascist regime are Nazis and that he would put all POC and LBGTQ+ people in death camps, kids in cages drinking from toilets and so on. Oh well, perish the thought.
There is no such thing as an official antifa organization in the sense of a legally established body. Antifa is comprised of groups and individuals who define themselves as being against what they call fascism.6 The Baader-Meinhof Gang/Red Army Faction defined itself as being in opposition to what they call fascism. Hence, they were antifa by definition.
Furthermore, those who propagandize for antifa are engaging in what they call “anti-fascist” action, which makes them antifa by definition. Heinrich Böll was, therefore, antifa.
In his book, Andy Ngo writes on pages 104-105…
The rhetoric used by Baader-Meinhof Gang members is nearly indistinguishable from language used by antifa extremists today. The same goes for their violent tactics, although contemporary antifa groups currently lack the high-level support needed to carry out mass deadly attacks (but that doesn’t stop them from trying).
German historian Bettina Röhl, daughter of the Meinhof of the Baader-Meinhof Gang7 wrote in 2020 in Die RAF ist tot. Es lebe die Antifa? (“The RAF is dead. Long live Antifa?”) that the Baader-Meinhof Gang/RAF and Antifa are basically the same, though unlike the RAF, Antifa are too cowardly to be public with their names and faces.8
At the time of Böll‘s article for Der Spiegel in 1972, the Baader-Meinhof Gang/RAF was suspected in a recent deadly crime. Böll begins his article by saying that by printing the headline, “Baader-Meinhof group continues to murder,” Bilt was trying to incite violence against this group that he repeatedly tells us barely even exists anyway. That headline by Bilt is a Nazi a dog-whistle, you see.
That sounds familiar. If you report that a far-left radical group does bad stuff you’re trying to incite violence against them so support them or shup. Oh well, perish the thought.
You might be thinking, yes this sounds familiar, but where’s that idiotic self-owning hypocrisy we are used to seeing from these people? This article is riddled with it. For example, Böll’s argues that the radical left group is innocent of this crime unless the police accuses them and that because Bild accuses them of this murder before the police accuse them, it is…
no longer crypto-fascist ... no longer fascistoid, this is naked fascism, incitement, lies, dirt.
It seems more like Bilt may have been guilty of bad reporting or at least premature reporting and Böll reacted like the antifa he was. In The RAF is dead. Long live Antifa?, Röhl wrote that along with others…
Böll, very quickly became at best semi-critical propagators of the 1968 RAF ideology.
Böll complains in his article that Bilt published “The victims of the Baader-Meinhof gang” and included victims that Böll claims had not yet been confirmed. He then compares these alleged victims to the famous Nazi Hermann Goering in saying that Bilt would count him as a victim of fascism because he killed himself.
So, upon reflection, and with historical context, it is now clear enough why he applied the terms crypto-fascist and fascistoid to Bild; he was antifa, that’s why.
Thanks for reading ~ Justin Trouble Please see my other reports on other antifa in mainstream media, politics and in social media companies. See footnote 1 below and subscribe to see future reports here. Please see my other reports, my videos, and consider donating. Also, please subscribe and share!
Liberty my right ∴ Truth my sword
Laughter my shield ∴ Knowledge my steed
Love my solace ∴ Honor my rewardAntifa in Mainstream Media & Twitter (written)
Antifa in Mainstream Media & Twitter 1 (video)
Antifa in Mainstream Media & Twitter 2 (video)
Antifa in Mainstream Media & Twitter 3 (video)
Antifa in Mainstream Media & Twitter 4 (video)
Antifa in Mainstream Media & Twitter 5 (video)
Antifa in Mainstream Media & Twitter 6 (video)
Antifa in Mainstream Media & Twitter 7 (video)
Heinrich Böll: A Brief Biography by/for Heinrich Böll Stiftung, December 1, 2017
Heinrich Böll German author by the editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica, last updated July 12. 2022
See…
A Timeline of Heinrich Böll's Life by/for Heinrich Böll Stiftung, December 1, 2017
Heinrich Boll by/for Penguin Random House, 2022
Böll, Heinrich. Will Ulrike Gnade oder freies Geleit? Schriftsteller Heinrich Böll über die Baader-Meinhof-Gruppe und "Bild" (“Does Ulrike want mercy or safe conduct? Writer Heinrich Böll on the Baader-Meinhof Group and "Bild"“). Der Spiegel, October 1, 1972.
Here is the complete text (poorly) translated from German using Google translate…
Where the police authorities investigate, suspect, combine, "Bild" is already much further: "Bild" knows. Bold headline on the front page of the (Cologne) issue of December 23, 1971: "Baader-Meinhof group continues to murder".
In the significantly smaller printed report on the Kaiserslautern bank robbery, one then reads of four masked gangsters, among whom "probably" was a woman; the suspicion, one reads further, is "among others" the group around Ulrike Meinhof. Evidence: Information from the police about the whereabouts of the group, a red Alfa Romeo, used in the robbery, stolen days before in Stuttgart, already seen once during a manhunt for the group; Further indications: the "brutal nature" of the attack and the "planning by the general staff".
Now bank robberies are mostly brutal, even if the suspects don't belong to the group around Ulrike Meinhof. And it is precisely through military-style planning of a raid that victims are mostly avoided.
After all, then Mr. Rauber. the chief of the Kaiserslautern criminal police. quoted: "We don't yet have any concrete indications that the Baader-Meinhof gang is responsible for the robbery. But of course we're investigating in this direction." That sounds different; sober, factual, plausible given the evidence, legitimate, if you consider it legitimate that police officers risk their lives for 1,373 marks a month, among other things to protect bank vaults. A risky, badly paid job.
The group's manifesto, which was only hectographed after going into hiding and has since appeared in Wagenbach Rotbuch 26 (Alex Schubert: Stadtguerillas), reads about this problem: "On May 14 (1970" when Baader was liberated in Berlin) as well as in Frankfurt , where two of us ran away because we didn't want to be easily arrested -- the cops shot first. The cops fired well-aimed shots every time. We have e.g. T. not shot at all. and if so, then not specifically: in Berlin, in Nuremberg, in Frankfurt. It's verifiable because it's true."
"We don't use firearms recklessly. The cop who finds himself in the contradiction between himself as a 'little man' and the capitalist's servant, as the small wage earner and law enforcement officer of monopoly capital, is not in an emergency situation. We shoot when we are shot at. The cop who lets us go , let's go too."
One lifts the insult. contained in the designation "bull" against the word "gang", if one subtracts from the numerous suspected deeds the previously proven deeds and compares this passage with the wild end of the manifesto THE ARMED STRUGGLE SUPPORT. VICTORY IN THE PEOPLE'S WAR, that doesn't sound quite as crazy wild and trigger-happy as the group has been portrayed so far. If one supplements the passage quoted above with another, which deals with the life-threatening injury of the employee Georg Linke, the impression of an unrestricted shooting ideology does not exactly arise: "The question of whether the prisoners would have been freed even if we had known that a leftist is shot in the process -- we've been asked this often enough -- can only be answered with no."
The declaration of war contained in the manifesto is clearly directed against the system, not against its executive organs. It would be good if Herr Kuhlmann, the chairman of the police union, made sure that his colleagues, who work in such a dangerous and badly paid profession, read this manifesto.
It is a declaration of war by desperate theorists, by the now persecuted and denounced, who have cornered, been cornered and whose theories sound far more violent than their practice is. To be sure, Baader's liberation was not the all-convincing leap from theory to action (neither for observers nor for participants). Among other things, the manifesto contains something akin to a confession: "Neither the small amount of money that we are said to have stolen, nor the few car and document thefts that are being investigated against us. Nor the attempted murder that they are trying to pin on us, justify the dance for themselves."
There can be no doubt: Ulrike Meinhof has declared war on this society, she knows what she is doing and has done, but who could tell her what to do now? Should she really turn herself in, with the prospect of being caught in the cauldron of demagoguery as the classic Red Witch?
"Bild", completely in the mood for Christmas, already knows: "The Baader-Meinhof group continues to kill." "Bild" sacrifices half of its valuable first page and half of its equally valuable last page to the Kaiserslautern bank robbery.
On the last page of "Bild" (December 23, 1971) there is little information about police investigations. Instead, two special columns: "The victims of the Baader-Meinhof gang", "The booty of the Baader-Meinhof gang". Among the victims, "Bild" not only counts the proven (and admitted) victim Georg Linke, it also includes all those who have not yet been completely clarified who shot them: Helmut Ruf and Norbert Schmid, and there "Bild " is already making sacrifices, the police superintendent Herbert Schoner from Kaiserslautern is also included for the sake of simplicity.
After all, the pensioner Helmut Langenkamper from Kiel is only described as someone who "stands in the way of bank robbers". Which bank robbers? Sponge over it, we don't take that too seriously, the pre-Christmas sacrificial litany shouldn't be too short. And that's probably why "Bild" includes Petra Schelm and Georg von Rauch (who becomes a breath here). This is supposed to be a joke.
I hope that Herr Springer and his accomplices get stuck in their throats with the bones of their Christmas carp. You can get fed up, and I've fed up.
"Bild" will probably soon be ready for such a poor devil as Hermann Goering. who unfortunately had to kill himself to be counted among the victims of fascism.
In the second column of the litany -- "Beute der Baader-Meinhof Gang" -- the damage caused by the Frankfurt department store arson is simply listed: 2.2 million. Baader's liberation and an exchange of fire on December 24, 1970 in Nuremberg are also classified as "loot". Of course, the sums stolen from bank robberies, which the police only suspect. "Image" but white, slammed the booty. Logically, the 134,000 marks from Kaiserslautern are included, but no longer counted, since police chief Schoner has already been counted among the victims. Something is wrong with the calculator that "Bild" uses for such additions. because the 2.2 million from Frankfurt are missing, booty column remains booty column, isn't it? Surely you can ask questions. I can't assume that police authorities and responsible ministers can be happy about accomplices like "Bild" -- or should they be? I can't understand that any politician would still give an interview to such a newspaper. That's no longer crypto-fascist ... no longer fascistoid, this is naked fascism, incitement, lies, dirt.
This form of demagogy would not even be justified if the suspicions of the Kaiserslautern police were to turn out to be correct. In every manifestation of the constitutional state, every suspect has the right, if one is allowed to publish a mere suspicion, to emphasize that he is only suspected.
The headline "Baader-Meinhof group continues to murder" is a call for lynching. Millions. for which "image" is the only source of information are supplied with falsified information in this way. One has probably heard enough about the suspects or only suspicious-looking Mr. XY Zimmermann.
The term rule of law becomes questionable when you include the entire public with their at least uncontrollable instincts in the executive; sacrificing the quality of the law for the quantity of success and popularity. The feature film reconstructions, dramatized according to circumstantial evidence, which Mr. Zimmermann shows as illustrations, are nothing more than lousy Grusicals for the philistine who sits there in slippers, drinks beer and thinks he is becoming an eyewitness, when he is only hearing an opaque mixture of fact and fiction watches, occasionally ones in which body parts play the leading role. How about if Mr. XY Zimmermann had one of the Nazi criminals still wanted searched for in the holy crime hour? Only as a test to test how the German crime scene would react to it?
The Federal Republic of Germany has 60,000,000 inhabitants. The group around Ulrike Meinhof may have had 30 members at the time of its greatest expansion. That was a ratio of 1:2,000,000. Given that the group has since shrunk to 6 members, the ratio becomes an even more spooky 1:10,000,000.
This is actually an extremely threatening situation for the Federal Republic of Germany. It's time to declare a national emergency. The state of emergency of public awareness, which is constantly being increased by publications such as "Bild".
What does a headline like the one quoted do? Who holds "image" accountable. if the assumptions of the police turn out to be incorrect? Will "Bild" deny it, correct itself, or will Herr Springer console himself with the image column on page 5, which bears the heading: "So much love at once." The Christmas donations are published there. God bless the honorable craft. I hope the bones in the Christmas carp weren't too soft and actually crooked.
I repeat: No doubt -- Ulrike Meinhof lives in a state of war with this society. Anyone could read their editorials. everyone can now read the manifesto in Rotbuch 26 from Wagenbach Verlag, which was written after the group went into hiding. It is now a war of 6 against 60,000,000. A senseless war, not only in my opinion, not only in general, also in terms of the published concept.
I consider it psychologically hopeless, petty bourgeois, workers. employees. Civil servants (including police officers) who are frightened by the experience of two total inflations want to talk their relative wealth out of it. if you don't first explain them in detail and in a politically precise way. how terribly "equal" the odds were with currency reform. And has one ever informed the younger police officers about the background to which police history they are actually doing their difficult job. or are the young lawyers all informed about the legal history against which they practice their profession? Once upon a time there was a federal minister in a CDU cabinet who was immediately, almost overnight, withdrawn and then resigned when it turned out that he had once been a judge in Schneidemühl.
For such a vile satrap as Baldur von Schirach, who drove some millions of young Germans to various forms of death and encouraged various forms of murder, even for him there was mercy. Ulrike Meinhof must expect to see herself at the mercy of total mercilessness. Baldur von Schirach didn't sit that long. how Ulrike Meinhof should sit. Do the police officers, lawyers. Publicists ever considered that all members of the group around Ulrike Meinhof, all of them, did practical social work and gained insight into the circumstances that may have led to this declaration of war? Finally, there is the Red Book 24 by Wagenbach Verlag. Title: "Bambule", author: Ulrike Marie Meinhof. Worth reading, insightful -- still not broadcast as a film.
How many young police officers and lawyers still know which war criminals, rightfully convicted, were secretly released from prison on the advice of Konrad Adenauer and were never ordered back? This, too, is part of our legal history and makes expressions such as class justice appear as justified as a theory of the penal system of political expediency.
Ulrike Meinhof and the rest of her group have no chance of appearing politically opportune to anyone. Far left, far right, center left and center right, conservatives and progressives of all shades. they all no longer know any parties, they are then only Germans and agree, agree, when they finally fall back into their German gossip, when they can surrender to their factional Chinese undisturbed, if it should happen. what must not happen; if one were to read one day that Ulrike Meinhof, later Grashof, then Baader and Gudrun Ensslin are also to be regarded as "done. Done like Petra Schelm, Georg von Rauch and the police officer Norbert Schmid. Done, off the table, how pretty says, and from the German mind, no matter how left-wing it may seem.
You'll hear the ancient drool. It had to happen that way. Too bad. But I always said it. All that cursed belated dogmatism, the way parents pray after bad children. And then you can keep turning your various prayer wheels. You were right, you always knew it, and it had to be come like this. Little Paul was at home alone.
Does it have to be like this? Does Ulrike Meinhof want it to happen like this? Does she want mercy or at least safe conduct? Even if she doesn't want either of them, someone has to offer it to her. This trial must take place, it must be brought to the living Ulrike Meinhof, in the presence of the world public. Otherwise, not only will she and the rest of her group be lost, German journalism will continue to stink, German legal history will continue to stink.
Have all those who have been persecuted, some of whom sit in Parliament, one or two in government, have all forgotten what it means to be persecuted and persecuted. Who of you knows what it means to be hounded by "Bild" in a constitutional state, which has a much higher circulation than "Stürmer" had?
Weren't they, the formerly persecuted, once declared opponents of a system, and have they forgotten what was hidden behind the charming term "shot while trying to escape"? In this overwrought situation, in this mutual incitement, do they want the decision entirely left alone to the police officers, who are distraught, overworked and -- it may be appropriate here -- frustrated in a psychologically dangerous way?
Nobody knows anymore what it means. facing a merciless society? Do the formerly persecuted want to play off the various qualities of being persecuted against each other and seriously separate the terms "criminal" and "political" with absolute purity, in relation to a group that has collected its experiences among antisocials and criminals, and against the background of a legal history, where stealing a carrot was considered criminal if a Pole, Russian or Fude stole it? That would be far below the level of thinking that should be common among responsible politicians.
Ulrike Meinhof may not want mercy, she probably doesn't expect justice from this society. Nevertheless, they should be offered safe conduct, a public trial, and Herr Springer should also be tried publicly for incitement to hatred.
The pragmatic gentlemen who are no longer so young. who hold important advisory functions everywhere, some of them in the midst of political responsibility; they who occasionally grossly confuse platitude and pragmatism; who have so effortlessly and painlessly changed over from fascism to the free democratic basic order; until 1945 they were too religious or too stupid to think, in 1945 they were too young to be found guilty. They were "disillusioned," a little remorseful, converted very quickly, and their pain was little more than a little Hitler Youth pain.
Those occasionally smooth-tongued mechanics who know everything so well and most things better, and now, full of their establishment, now and then with mild melancholy yearn for ideology (like a perfume they lack in their utter odorlessness), it is have not become and been made a little too easy for them. Don't they remember a little too little ideology, world view, metaphysics to be able to understand what they never experienced: what it means: to be persecuted and hunted, constantly on the run? As a politician, as a criminal, and as a "criminal"?
Do they want their free, democratic basic order to be more ruthless than any historical feudalism, in which at least there were sanctuaries, even for murderers, and especially for robbers? Should their free democratic basic order present itself as so infallible that no one is allowed to question it? More infallible than all the popes together ever were? I know that's a lot of questions, but you'll still be allowed to ask.
The Federal Republic has more than 60,000,000 inhabitants, the group around Ulrike Meinhof probably now has six members. The circulation of "Bild" is probably around 4,000,000. The number of readers is probably around 10,000,000. Mr. Springer's Christmas message read: "Baader Meinhof group continues to murder." murders Continue. To have had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. hard bones. tough carp. So much love at once like Herr Springer offers us is hard to take, especially in a constitutional state.
DER SPIEGEL 3/1972
Trouble, Justin - Is Antifa Just an Idea? - June 16, 2022
Waller, Michael J. - Antifa is heir to Germany’s Red Army Faction, daughter of terrorist Ulrike Meinhof says - Center for Security Policy, June 3, 2020
Röhl, Bettina - Die RAF ist tot. Es lebe die Antifa? (“The RAF is dead. Long live Antifa?”) - Neue Zürcher Zeitung, February 6, 2020. The following was translated into English by Google Translate…
The Red Army Faction (RAF) was founded when Andreas Baader was liberated from prison fifty years ago. What began as a romantic revolution terrorized the FRG for three decades. Left-wing terror still exists today.
Who was running a fever back in the '70s? The RAF? Was it the federal German authorities and politicians? Was the media overheated? Was it society, the establishment, that went after the terrorists? Or was it the students who woke up from the events of 1968 – and the hordes of schoolchildren in the 1970s who kept rolling out the red carpet for the RAF in the published room?
At that time there was a large, silent majority in the Federal Republic that was not on the side of the 1968 movement or even on the side of the RAF, the armed struggle in the Federal Republic. The overwhelming majority of citizens, above all the working population, felt little attraction to terror and violence, urban guerrilla warfare and revolution and looked at the fashionable phenomenon of “terrorism” with irritation and a little paralyzed: “Be high, be free, a little bit Terror must be there." The silent majority, in the eyes of the young pop-communist movement, who oriented themselves to Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and especially Mao Zedong as a revolutionary revolutionist, were the "bourgeois" who had to be fought.
In particular, the so-called left-wing intellectuals, subculturalists and established artists, from the writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger to the lawyer and singer Franz Josef Degenhardt, from the theater director Claus Peymann to the Nobel Prize winner for literature Heinrich Böll, very quickly became at best semi-critical propagators of the 1968 RAF ideology. At the time, they were omnipresent with their opinions, especially in the boom media with a circulation of millions such as “Spiegel”, “Stern” and “Zeit”, but also in the then powerful public television stations. Many journalists also became greedy, aloof reporters for the RAF. At the same time, reports about the RAF functioned almost like a true crime series, presenting the deeds, perpetrators and dead to the public almost in real time.
The Revolutionary Fantasy
The RAF sympathizers claimed a stimulus function - the awakening of the people - for their heroes. It was from these that the impetus for the overdue revolution against capitalism and against the exploitation of the Third World should come. There was a revolutionary zeitgeist in the air, there was a revolutionary phantasm that whole sections of society around the world were chasing after.
The diffuse model was the communist dictatorships in China, North Korea, North Vietnam and Cuba, which the New Left glorified as better countries on the right path to the best communism. Just think of Luise Rinser's anthem about North Korea. Or the jubilee books of many writers, such as Alberto Moravia, who visited China in the early 1970s. They raved about the millions of youths, the Red Guards, who, all dressed in the same blue suit, would be waving a little red booklet by Mao.
The Soviet Union, which was seen as bureaucratic and “revisionist”, was less and less important to these revolutionary romantics. This did not mean that the RAF and many other West German leftists were not happy to use the GDR and the Eastern Bloc as logistical suppliers. Not to forget the army of Stasi agents in West Germany and the fact that the RAF members could use the GDR as a hinterland at any time from the start, including the East Berlin airport.
The personified principle of the RAF
Ever since it was founded, which can essentially be attributed to Horst Mahler (my guess is that he may have acted on behalf of the GDR), the RAF has relied on a principle of the experienced journalist Ulrike Meinhof: one terrorist, one face, one person acting person who immediately gets into the press in image, sound, writing with his biography and with his deeds that he commits. So a kind of public terrorism with letters of confession.
Structurally, then, the Baader-Meinhof combo alluded to the goal avoided by other terrorist groups of becoming a personal factor in people's living rooms and in the news broadcasts. And that was true from the start with their first action, when on May 14, 1970, the Baader-Meinhof troupe preparing for terror organized Andreas Baader's prison break, who was incarcerated for arsoning a department store. A shootout broke out in which a pistolero hired by the group fatally shot an employee, and two police officers were also injured. Almost everyone involved in this notoriously called “Baader liberation” was present; almost all members of the now forming RAF had been armed.
The first wanted poster after this action, which was hung on the advertising pillars throughout Berlin, showed the likeness of "Ulrike Meinhof divorced Röhl" with the words: "10,000 mark reward. attempted murder." Meinhof had not fired at all. However, she was the most prominent of the group.
The media coup
So Baader's prison break was a success. Nevertheless, the revolutionary element was still missing, a "meaningful" explanation. And then Ulrike Meinhof pulled off the coup, the media breakthrough: She persuaded the French activist Michèle Ray to come to one of the planned conspiratorial apartments in Berlin and gave her a tape recording of a statement spoken by Meinhof himself about the Baader action. Ray then personally handed the document over to Rudolf Augstein, and the "Spiegel" editor was crazy enough to print this cryptic product from the "underground" word for word in millions of copies - almost as if Meinhof and the RAF had issued a kind of government statement.
Under the title "Of course you can shoot", Ulrike Meinhof declared the Baader action a revolutionary act and called on the left-wing "intellectuals" and other "comrades" to join the revolution that had now begun.
With this media breakthrough, a measly Baader action had indeed become a revolutionary act that was carried into the mainstream of society by the “Spiegel”. From then on, the level of awareness of the Baader-Meinhof-Ensslin-Mahler troop increased exponentially until things only became quieter about the RAF in the 2010s.
Some kind of official RAF?
From the very beginning, the RAF was a subject that has provided the material for thousands of articles, books, documentaries and feature films, dissertations, novels and plays over the past five decades. Nothing seems as dead today as the RAF. In fact, the flourishing left-wing radicalism in the West, which brutally strikes at the opening of the ECB headquarters in Frankfurt, at every G-20 summit or every May 1 in Berlin, has made it to the highest level in the state, not least thanks to the support by quite a few MPs from some political parties, by journalists and relevant experts.
Compared to the RAF, the militant Antifa only lacks prominent faces. They practice covering their faces and keeping their names secret out of cowardice. What is often called Antifa constantly threatens violence and attacks, for example against politicians or police officers, it stands for senseless property damage at an enormous rate. Nevertheless, former Federal Minister Renate Künast (Greens) recently complained in the Bundestag that Antifa had not been sufficiently funded by the state in recent decades. She is tired of fighting for decades "so that NGOs and Antifa groups that get involved don't always have to fight for their money and can only sign fixed-term employment contracts for one year". There was applause for this from Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen, from the left and from members of the SPD. One may ask whether Antifa is something like a civil servant RAF, a terrorist group with money from the state under cover.