Jeremy Varon Read Online Free PDF Page B

has been the object of persistent reflection in Germany. Works on German violence include a 1985 bestseller, several biographies, and other popular histories, memoirs by former members, voluminous studies by government agencies and security experts, and all manner of scholarly treatments from the disciplines of political science, history, sociology, and psychology. The RAF has also made a strong mark on popular culture, inspiring movies, plays, paintings, museum exhibits, musical compositions, photo-essays, and countless TV and print retrospectives on the anniversaries of key events in its history. For much of the RAF’s early existence, the group’s leaders were household names in West Germany, where their fate approached a national obsession. Every 16

Introduction
    West German who lived through the peak years of the terrorist drama seems to have some vivid “RAF memory,” whether seeing a wanted poster in a public place, hearing rumors that a fugitive was nearby, being stopped at a security checkpoint, or following harrowing moments in the conflict in the media.
    The very different standing of Weatherman and the RAF in their nations’ consciousnesses demands different approaches to their presentation. I provide separate sections on them that complement, rather than mirror, each other. In the case of the Weathermen, I furnish a textured account of the group’s experience, drawing extensively on interviews with former members. In these, I have sought less a record of “the facts” of Weatherman’s history than the reflections of former members on the political meaning of their experiences, as well as what they thought and how they felt when they entered, engaged in, and withdrew from the armed struggle. I appeal to oral history, then, for representations of the past generated through the subjective work of memory—with its exclusions, contingent connections, and spontaneous eloquence—and not for the “objective” reconstruction of the past. Given Weatherman’s efforts to define itself through action, my analysis consists mostly of the close reading of events—of actions themselves as complex texts. I concentrate on the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Weatherman’s importance was at its peak.
    In the case of the RAF, I provide condensed narratives of key episodes in the group’s existence until 1977, when the first era in its history came to an end. I am unable to use the methods of oral history with the RAF, many of whose members died in the 1970s; nonetheless, they achieved great notoriety, and ample material exists for conveying their experiences.
    I favor juxtaposition over direct comparison of the two groups. Chapter 1, which explores the similarities in their origins, moves between discussions of the American and German settings. Thereafter, I treat Weatherman and the RAF more or less separately. This permits flexi-bility in stressing those issues and experiences most important to each group. All historical comparisons seek to have each “case” illuminate the other, and I hope to guide, but not rigidly control, that process of mutual illumination.
    Some continuities of approach exist throughout. One is my effort to present both Weatherman and the RAF in competing and even contradictory ways. Analysts have commonly portrayed the groups in essentially pathological terms by describing their members as zealots, whose activism, beyond a certain point, had little to do with politics as such.

Introduction
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    The groups’ “ideology,” within this framework, amounted to a delusional belief system built on an irrational contempt for their societies and the sense of themselves as a revolutionary elect, “chosen” to fulfill a world-historical mission. An observer of the American New Left who saw Weatherman as a “passionate aberration” concluded, “in a burst of almost religious enthusiasm, the Weathermen plunged beyond politics, which measures things in the here and now, to a higher realm where