The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History Read Online Free PDF Page B

if the May Paper was intended to woo the
Autonomen,
it would have mixed results at best. While the idea of the guerilla and the militantleft working in tandem was appealing, it was noted that even in this “self-critical” document, the May Paper’s authors continued to place themselves at the center of the struggle, taking it for granted that the left should orient itself around the RAF. Furthermore, many people felt that the entire front strategy echoed that of the Revolutionary Cells, and yet the RZ was never directly referred to at any point in the document.
    As one
Autonomen
critique, published in
radikal,
put it,
    The so-called new, positive orientation is woolly and ill-defined. The new movements are not named nor are their motivations analyzed. They are only referred to in the context of the conflict between the state and the guerilla. The authors see the guerilla in the traditional vanguardist manner in which it is coterminous with the RAF. The armed struggle of the RZ and the independent cells, which played an important role in spreading armed and militant struggle within the left, is never mentioned. For the first time, the political significance of militant struggles alongside the guerilla is recognized. It is suggested that all three milieus must form a common front. The paper says little about what the nature of this front will be. The RAF is seen as the force around which other movements are arrayed, without the nature of the connection between them being clarified. The “strategy” as expressed in the paper is formal and empty, presenting little more than an “everyone together against the system” line. 8
    Twenty-five years after the fact, Karl-Heinz Dellwo (who had been transferred to Celle prison, where he would remain until his release in 1995) remembered his own reaction to the May Paper in very similar terms:
    I was rather appalled by the paper. I felt as if I had been cheated out of a reappraisal of 1977. It was the same old thing: what lay behind us was glossed over with something new. Those of us in prison had withheld our criticisms for years in order to allow those on the outside the space to assess things.
    In 1980, it appeared to me that, with the resistance against the Bremen swearing-in exercise, the years of defensiveness and paralysis had been overcome. My view at the time was that this radical left resistance had developed in spite of the RAF’s politics, that there existed independent radical positions in society. The “Front Paper” presented it as if these events occurred suddenly as a result of the dialectic created by the ‘77 offensive! If one saw things
that way, reflection was no longer necessary. I felt that was wishful thinking, so as to avoid a necessary self-criticism. In addition, the paper contained platitudes like “our strategy is the strategy against their strategy,” about which those of us in Celle could only shake our heads. 9
    Regardless, at the time, Dellwo and the others at Celle continued to hold their tongues, and their criticisms remained unknown.
    While they could not have seemed more different at the time, in retrospect the May Paper might be compared to the RZ’s
Revolutionärer Zorn
no. 5, released in 1978, which (with far more practical advice, and much less theoretical fanfare) had similarly called for members of the aboveground left to form their own cells and carry out low-level actions. That move by the RZ had been a striking success, but it was an open question whether it could be replicated, especially by a group which had a much heavier reputation and continued to engage in a much more intense conflict with the state. (Of course, another critical difference was that the RZ’s strategy consisted of taking its lead from the aboveground left and encouraging attacks on multiple fronts, whereas the RAF remained wedded to the idea of the guerilla and its aboveground supporters concentrating their fire