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By Root 1056 0

uncle, Michael Kroecher, a gay ballet dancer who went on to have a modest career in art films. After being expelled from successive schools, Baader essayed various careers in advertising and journalism, none of which came to anything. His real vocation was stealing cars (he perfected the break-in time to ten seconds) and driving them recklessly fast, albeit never having acquired a (legal) licence to drive. Being good-looking in a brooding sub-Marlon Brando or Alain Delon sort of way, in the trousers he himself sewed especially tight, he was like fresh meat for the barflies in Munich’s gay pubs, even though he was strenuously heterosexual. Poncing off older gay men gave him a few minor breaks; the fashion photographer who discovered Christa Paeffgen (subsequently the gaunt Nico with the nicotine-tarred voice in The Velvet Underground) photographed Baader for a gay porn magazine. Baader was never averse to violence, deliberately starting fights in pubs in order to trigger mass brawls, or mugging other customers in the men’s lavatories.

Avoiding the ever closer attentions of the Munich police, in 1963 Baader moved to West Berlin, and lodged with Elly-Leonore ‘Ello’ Henkel-Michel and her husband Manfred Henkel, two painters of indifferent talent, with a young son called Robert. What started as a sexless ménage á trois graduated to Andreas Baader and Ello having a daughter, Suse, successfully conceived despite the mother’s prodigious ingestion of whisky, Captogen and LSD. Manfred and Ello divorced, but Manfred continued to share an apartment with Ello, Baader and the two young children. Eventually, Manfred gained custody of both children from his drink - and drug-saturated former wife. Apart from the time spent brawling in pubs or taking drugs while pretending to write a book, Baader moved into the orbit of Commune 1, the radical squat that took the 1871 Paris Commune as its model. Sexual liberation was a major preoccupation. ‘The Vietnam War is not what interests me, but difficulties with my orgasm do,’ as one communard put it. In the summer of 1967 Baader joined members of Commune 1 in a mock funeral intended to offend mourners at the burial of former Reichstag president Paul Lobe. Holding up a fake coffin along with Baader was Peter Urbach, a former worker on the city’s S-Bahn, known as ‘S-Bahn Peter’, who had become the Commune’s handyman, and eager supplier of drugs and weapons. He was also an agent for the West German secret service, the Bundes Verfassungsschutz (Office for the Protection of the Constitution), insinuated into the city’s left-wing underground to provoke mayhem.

Baader missed the 2 June 1967 demonstrations as he was serving a brief sentence in young-adult detention for motoring offences. Returned to Berlin as an authenticated item of rough trade, he exercised inordinate suasion over left-wing middle-class students who laboured under the false consciousness that their own druggy discussions had anything to do with revolution. He had a credibility they lacked as the spoilt offspring of the bourgeoisie. Men were intimidated by his ready resort to violence and by a temper that brought foam to his lips. Women, whom feminism had taught only how to intimidate men, seem to have especially appreciated Baader calling them ‘Fotzen’ (cunts). He deftly transferred his attentions from Ello to Gudrun Ensslin, with whom he shared a common desire for deeds rather than talk. Dope cemented their affections and they became lovers. In the meantime, Ensslin had fully sloughed off being the vicar’s daughter, having starred in a short Dadaist sex movie, involving her slowly stripping off and writhing around with a man beneath some sheets while letters and papers dropped unread through the front door. Their first deed was to unfurl an ‘Expropriate Springer’ banner from the steeple of the Kaiser Gedächtnis Kirche while letting off smoke bombs that they had made. Next they took composer Pierre Boulez at his word, when in an interview he said he’d like to see Maoist Red Guards make short work of an opera performance. Baader, Ensslin