During the last days there was a lot of commenting on the 30. year recall of the Schleyer kidnapping and thus generally Germany’s past in relation to terrorist/radical activism in the german newspapers. Signandsight.com has put together quite a collection of the articles, and it is worth to read at least those short synopsis’ to recall the situation back then and what eventually led to this development and the accompanying events.
Frankfurter Rundschau comments under the title “Being high, being free, terror’s gotta be,” the general spread of violence in these years:
… The terrorism of those years was not only a product of politics. It was part and parcel of Western culture of the time. The two influenced each other. It’s impossible to understand the emphasis on the physical in performances by the Living Theatre, it’s impossible to understand why the bodies on stage had to be tormented and afflicted, if you don’t see the torments and afflictions as an attempt to point out oppression in reality. But equally, you underestimate art if you deny its animating force.
… (
read on)
While Documentary film maker Andres Veiel, who has been working on this subject recalls the times more personally and gives some interesting insights – especially also on the biographical line of the involved people – in the Berliner Tagesspiegel under the title: ‘RAF verstehen / Understanding RAF‘.
As signandsight.com writes:
[Veiel] remembers this as a time when he stopped being an onlooker and became a “historical subject”. “For us, Baader, Ensslin und Meinhof were not so much the ‘new people’ of a revolutionary epoch, as individuals who sacrificed their lives. And this myth of martyrdom had my generation on a fishing hook. We were only alibi rebels and going underground was out of the question. The contradictions of the RAF, the cynicism, the hubris involved in selecting names for the death list – all these doubts soon surfaced in me, but I couldn’t discuss them with anyone. Because once again, I didn’t want to be not part of it again.”
