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By Root 909 0

Protestant attending the first and last demonstration of his life. Albertz blamed the demonstrators for the death, while an investigation treated the shooting as an accident rather than negligent homicide. As he bade the shah farewell the following day, Albertz asked whether his imperial majesty had heard of Ohnesorg’s demise. ‘Yes,’ the emperor replied, ‘it doesn’t perturb me. That happens in Iran every day.’ One of those who carried Ohnesorg’s coffin was Michael ‘Bommi’ Baumann, who would later join the 2 June Movement.27 Horst Mahler, whose ex-Wehrmacht soldier father had gone out into the garden and shot himself in 1949 after the family had relocated to Dessau from Silesia, represented Ohnesorg’s widow. This marked a change from his commercial practice, although he had already become the first German lawyer to avail himself of the European Convention on Human Rights, on behalf of a former SS guard at Mauthausen remanded for an inhuman five years. The SDS was flooded with membership applications as Germany’s students passed from shock to rage. Much of the reaction to Ohnesorg’s death was hysterical and paranoid:

I remember exactly, when I began to study, that the SDS was rampant with fantasies of fear. One man [Franz Josef Strauss] was intent on making himself into the dictator of West Germany, possibly even with the help of the Bundeswehr! Not least because of that, we had to fight desperately hard against passage of the emergency laws: he wanted to have a legal basis for his seizure of power, we were dealing with his ‘Enabling Acts’ and nothing less! And now, exactly as was true then [in 1933] most people had no idea, or closed their eyes willingly to the catastrophe.

At a packed SDS meeting in Berlin a young woman shouted: ‘This Fascist state intends to kill all of us. We must organise resistance. Violence can only be answered with violence. This is the generation of Auschwitz - with them one can’t argue! They have weapons and we haven’t any. We must arm ourselves too.’ The speaker was Gudrun Ensslin.

Born in 1940, Ensslin was the fourth of seven children of a Swabian village Lutheran parson and his wife. They were vaguely left-wing, in a damp clerical sort of way, being especially exercised by the question of West German rearmament. Since 68 per cent of German terrorists came from Protestant backgrounds, some have wondered whether their intense enthusiasm for Marxism or Maoism was some form of surrogate faith. Ensslin was a model pupil at her local Gymnasium, and a leading member of the Protestant organisation for girls. In 1958-9 she spent an exchange year with Methodists in Pennsylvania, before going up to Tubingen to study English, German and pedagogy. There she fell in love with Bernward Vesper, the son of a prominent Nazi poet who had turned against his father. The two became engaged and established a small publishing house producing tracts against atomic weapons. Moving to Berlin, the two campaigned for the Social Democrats, only to be appalled when its leaders went into coalition with the conservatives in 1965. That was the beginning of Ensslin’s slide into radical left politics. Meanwhile, having used her fiance to sire a son called Felix - Rudi Dutschke was godfather - Ensslin promptly left Vesper, who eventually put the child out for adoption. In common with many of her future associates, Ensslin’s concern for orphans did not include those they created themselves.

V ‘THIS JOB THAT WE’RE DOING IS SERIOUS. THERE MUST BE NO FUN’

Ensslin spent the night following the 1967 alphabet protest with a small crowd smoking dope and talking politics in a Berlin apartment. One of those present was Andreas Baader. Born in 1943 in Munich, Baader was the son of a gifted young historian and archivist who as a reluctant soldier had gone missing in 1945 on the disintegrating Eastern Front. Idle but aggressively strong willed, Baader grew up in an atmosphere dominated by struggling women, which probably encouraged his narcissistic traits, a mise en scene he would recreate with Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof. He admired his