True tales of terror

When a 20-year-old Stefan Aust joined a small socialist journal named Konkret, a fellow staff member by the name of Ulrike Meinhof was a left-wing darling.

Meinhof wrote about the poor, about those in sweat shops and in prisons and was adored within the liberal movement in which she socialised.

Meinhof, who was 12 years older than Aust, cut an impressive figure.

"She was rather attractive, very intelligent, very well-educated, and she had very strict political positions. She was traditional socialist. What I did not know was at that time she was a member of the Communist Party, which was illegal [then] in West Germany ...

"She travelled to East Germany quite a bit, had contact with the secret service in the East. At that time the East German Socialist Party financed Konkret. She could write very well, was very radical, sometimes very arrogant and depressed at the same time, melancholic. She was not a person you would expect would take part in actions that she did. Her robbing a bank, that was unbelievable!"

Aust, editor-in-chief of influential magazine Der Spiegel until 2008, wrote The Baader Meinhof Complex in 1985 and has co-written two films, made a documentary and produced many articles about the group that called itself Red Army Faction (RAF).

Part of Aust's fascination is exploring how people such as Meinhof went from peace activists seeking a more humane society to brutal terrorists, "from hyper-moral to immoral".

The film, due for release here in September, also attempts to do this by concentrating on the stories of the three main characters (Meinhof, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin) during the decade prior to their suicides in 1976.

The release of the film signals a resurfacing of interest. The book was a bestseller but only now has a movie been based on it. Aust suggests that it has now found its time, that it needed a new generation to grow up and ask questions of their parents.

"What did you do when everybody was in the streets demonstrating against Vietnam? What did you think about Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader going underground? Maybe," says Aust, "it's that simple."

It was too raw for the generation of that time. The terrorism of the bloody autumn of 1977 - which included the murder of the head of a bank, the kidnapping and execution of powerful industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer and the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181 - were for Germans like September 11 was for Americans, says Aust. They had seen nothing like it.

Significantly, the terrorism of the 1970s came from the children of Germany's Nazi generation. The most violent of the protest groups around the world at that time were in countries with fascist pasts Japan, Italy, Germany.

Worldwide, there were protest movements against American imperialism, mainly opposing the Vietnam war. A second factor in Germany was Germany's past. Many involved in the Nazi movement were still around, some in important positions.

The young protesters tried to do what their parents' generation had not - resist Nazi power. They compared the Germany of the late 1960s with Nazi Germany, says Aust. Police attacks on students, secret service scandals, these were seen as evidence of the same behaviour of the pre-war and war era.

That, says Aust, is what made it so very violent in Germany. "The moment you feel that this country is a fascist state or a police state, you give yourself the permission to do almost anything."

But the RAF was deluded. Its plan was to foster revolution by provoking the state to react violently and thereby show what they believed to be its real face as a police state.

Aust says he came to realise through his research that the RAF had "a quasi-religious character rather than a rational political character".

"Believing in revolution became like believing in God. To think that in Germany the masses would overthrow the capitalist system was completely irrational. I cannot believe that they really believed that. Rather, they acted like political or religious martyrs to show the state was as brutal as they thought it was. It was an experiment with their own and others' lives."

The characters of the protagonists helped create the tinderbox. Baader, whom Aust likens to the character Marlon Brando portrayed in The Wild One, was charismatic, narcissistic, lazy, weak, sadistic, aggressive.

Gudrun Ensslin, an attractive daughter of a pastor and a gifted student, returned from a year-long student exchange appalled at the political naivete of the America she saw during the Eisenhower era. Her disillusionment deepened when Germany's Social Democrats formed a grand coalition with the conservatives, their erstwhile political opponents. Change would have to be forced from outside the system, she decided.

Speaking in 1967, after Benno Ohnesorg was fatally shot in the head by a policeman during a protest march against the visit of the Shah of Iran, Ensslin said: "They'll kill us all. This is the Auschwitz generation. You can't argue with the people who made Auschwitz. They have weapons and we haven't. We must arm ourselves."

Baader, Meinhof and Ensslin were, says Aust, "strange characters in a strange situation". Taken alone, they were not particularly significant to the rise of the terrorist group. Rather, like the various ingredients of an explosive, they became potent when put together at a certain place and time.

"You never have a terrorist group anywhere where it is not combined to a huge radical movement. A terrorist group does not fight by itself. You need to have some water where the fish can swim. That was the radical student movement and the radical left in the 60s in Germany."

Al Qaeda exists now because of a global Islamist movement. There are, says Aust, more similarities than we might think between the RAF of the 60s and 70s and al Qaeda.

"The point it all comes from is the near and Middle East conflict.

"You had the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian groups in the 1960s and 1970s. During the Cold War the East gave money and training to Palestinian groups. It was a socialist movement in the near East.

"It is the same now only they don't call themselves socialists because there is no socialist part of the world anymore ... if you look at what Ayman al-Zawahri, Bin Laden's deputy, says and writes, and take out the references to God and Allah and religious phrases, you have a social revolutionary movement like the RAF and other movements of the 70s."

"It's very similar. I think if we knew the language and cultural background better we would realise that there are a lot of similarities."

Terrorists today make use of suicide bombers. Though that wasn't part of the RAF per se, the potential to die through their actions was on their schedule every day. Three key figures killed themselves in prison, a fourth starved himself to death in a blaze of publicity. Martyrdom and communication are central to terrorism.

"If you look at September 11," says Aust, "it was pure communication. Flying with one airplane into one of the towers and then waiting until CNN is there and then flying into the second one. It is communication with real casualties. That was the way [also] with RAF."

The one major difference was September 11 was an attack from another world. "It was not from the children of your own people."

Aust sees no end to terrorism without an end to the Middle East and Near East conflict it arises from. Sometimes major conflicts end through horror fatigue - when there has been enough blood. Younger people, he notes, can hardly believe Germany and France fought a series of wars for much of a century.

Release of the film in Germany caused division. It was accused of using violence gratuitously and of lending "terrorist chic" to the guerilla group.

Aust defends both charges, though he notes the actors may be better looking than the people they play. His objective, he says, was accuracy.

"It would be impossible for a book reader or a film viewer to understand why so many people followed them if they were portrayed only as villains and criminals. It was their charisma that made them so dangerous."

If you have the stomach to count, you will find 119 bullets are pumped into the bodies of a driver and a minder in the scene depicting the kidnapping of Schleyer. In that slaughter, the police indeed counted 119 bullets.

Most books and films about terrorism, says Aust, concentrate on the motives of terrorism.

"Always in whatever I have done - making documentaries, writing books, writing articles - the most important thing is to show what is."

Stefan Aust speaks at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival next Friday.