Katia was smart, sexy and decidedly bourgeoisie. She'd read a lot of Marcuse, but not enough Lenin.
Our paths crossed in 1991 when she was studying at the London School Of Economics. In reality, she was hiding out from the Verfassungsschutz (Germany's MI5). A house in Frankfurt she shared with other Baader-Meinhof group sympathisers had been raided by state security. She fled to the UK; others made their way to East Germany to be wined and dined by the Stasi.
Katia's father was one of Frankfurt's leading bankers. The assassination in 1989 by the group of another banker, a close family friend, began a slow disenchantment with them. The smashing-down of her front door by the police certainly hastened that.
I hadn't thought about my dalliance with Katia for some time, but the release of the terrific film The Baader-Meinhof Complex and the hoopla surrounding it, in particular criticism that romanticising the violence of the Baader-Meinhof group at the onset of a economic slump could encourage a new generation of Germans to follow the same radical path, made it worthy of reflection.
The Baader-Meinhof group, sometimes know as the Red Army Faction, operated from the late 1960s until 1998. Its roots lay in the revolutionary student movement that swept Europe and the USA in the late 1960s. In 30 years of "armed resistance" against what they saw as the "fascist" West German state, the group killed over 30 people, mainly bankers, government officials, their bodyguards and chauffeurs, and a few American soldiers.
In July of 1971, the Allensbach Institute, a public research firm, published a remarkable opinion poll. A surprising 20% of Germans under the age of 30 expressed "sympathy" for the Baader-Meinhof.
One-in-10 young northern Germans indicated that they would willingly shelter a member of the Baader-Meinhof, a group with the avowed intent of violently overthrowing the West German state.
These findings and the involvement of good-looking, middle-class youth in terrorist violence shocked and fascinated German society. In the security clampdown that followed the BKA, which had been little more than a border police force became a beefed-up German FBI with a vast array of anti-terrorist powers. Laws were also passed banning radicals from public service, such as teaching. This and the proliferation of wanted posters – 7m were printed for a population of 60m, effectively turned the Baader-Meinhof group into the world's first celebrity terrorists.
They may have become the embodiment of radical chic, but they were no threat to the German state or anything to romance. One of the truths that the film reveals is that outside of their proclivity for guns and bombs, the group shared many of the prejudices of mainstream left-liberal opinion, then and now.
There was actual contempt within the Baader-Meinhof for the working class they were supposed to be liberating. They blamed them for voting for the SPD, who they saw as class traitors. The SPD not only participated in a federal coalition government with the Christian Democratic Union (led by a former member of Hitler's Nazi party) but were also responsible for the activities of the Berlin police, who had battered student protesters from pillar to post.
Basing themselves on the theories of the Frankfurt School, and in particular Herbert Marcuse, they regarded the working class as a reactionary mass, that consumerism and the postwar German boom had bought off. Sound familiar?
Remember the British left's explanation for why Margaret Thatcher was able to persuade large sections of the working class to vote her into office? They had, so we were told, been duped into believing that they could become homeowners, car-owners and members of the "new affluent society'" it sounds like a Baader-Meinhof communiqué.
The left believed that newspapers, such as the pro-Thatcher Sun had duped dim-witted voters into electing Thatcher. The Baader-Meinhof believed that it was that the Springer-Press that "done it", so they blew up the newspapers' offices.
The Baader-Meinhof group targeted bankers as the disciples of a rotten system. They shot those they could get their hands on. Today, bankers' greed is also simplistically blamed for causing the current financial turmoil. We sack them and not shoot them.
One of the little-known stories surrounding the Baader-Meinhof Gang was that of the Socialist Patients' Collective (SPK). A psychiatrist in Heidelberg believed that the excesses of capitalism caused mental illnesses; the cure was socialism. To this end his group involved themselves in numerous political actions to ease their illnesses. Many former members of the SPK formed the nucleus of the next generation of the Baader-Meinhof group, replacing those in prison or dead. Mental patients as terrorists!
But are these ideas so removed from that of psychologist Oliver James, who claims in his latest book to have uncovered a new virus, "Affluenza", which he says, is brought on by the rampant materialism and cult of capitalist consumerism? Such banal anti-capitalism that echoes the Baader-Menihof is mainstream opinion these days.
Whatever form emancipatory politics takes in the future, we should leave the Baader-Meinhof and Marcuse to the movies, and Oliver James to the therapist couch.
