4 - Drawing a Line Between the Enemy and Ourselves: The Language Trap

Summary

entweder mensch oder schwein entweder überleben um jeden preis oder kampf bis zum tod entweder problem oder lösung dazwischen gibt es nichts.

[either human being or swine either survival at any cost or fight to the death either the problem or the solution there's nothing in between.]

—Holger Meins, 1974

AFTER THE MAY BOMBS of 1972, the police hunt for the RAF was stepped up, and by July all its core members had been arrested. In late 1974, when Holger Meins issued his “human being or swine” ultimatum (to fellow prisoner Manfred Grashof), the group was on hunger strike. Baader, writing from his cell, described his view of the collective in defensive isolation: “totally surrounded; we have only our consciousness, our history, our understanding of our situation + this heap of bones to develop the struggle … freedom is only possible if we're fighting” (“in der situation totaler einkreisung, in der wir nur unser bewusstsein, unsere geschichte, unser verständnis unserer situation + diesen haufen knochen haben, um den kampf zu entwickeln … freiheit ist nur im kampf möglich”). The implicit quotation from Lenin reveals rather than conceals a problem: instead of fighting for the freedom of others, the group now relies on constant struggle to maintain its own identity — the RAF is only the RAF if it is fighting. A guerilla group ought (to use Mao's metaphor) to have been moving among the people like fish in the sea, but drawing the dividing line between self and other (following another Maoist directive) has left the RAF isolated, or, in Baader's heroic fantasy, back-to-back and isolated in a kind of last stand.

One factor in the group's political isolation was its assumption that everyone and everything existed to serve the RAF. In a note to her fellow prisoners, Meinhof outlines an approach to political theory: “I prefer … going first to praxis, then to the classic writers,” she explained: “it's not that the raf is right because you can already find all that in lenin; it's that lenin is good because he says the same things as the raf — and that's what makes him an authority for us” (“ich bin aber für den umgekehrten weg: von der praxis zu den klassikern… .