Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [145]
A catastrophic fire in a Brussels department store, which had killed over 250 shoppers, provided the inspiration for their next attacks. For the first time revealing his capacity for leadership, Baader dominated the lengthy discussions in Commune 1. In Munich he, Ensslin and Proll were joined by a radical actor called Horst Söhnlein, who had also just parted from his wife, with whom he ran an alternative theatre with the future film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Before the attacks, Baader tried to borrow a 16 mm camera from a Munich acquaintance, suggesting that he was partly directing his own film. For the cinematic qualities of what he was orchestrating are its most striking features. Since we know exactly what movies he saw, it is possible to recreate his own highly cinematic fantasy world. Baader was the star, a Brando, Belmondo or Delon figure from any contemporary gangster movie. The endless, mindless speeding up and down Germany’s extensive Autobahn network - an abiding impression of their activities - was an attempt to replicate the rebel motorbike odyssey in Easy Rider, with the odd lapse into drugged surreality as Ensslin and the others had physically to stop Baader from drowning a feral cat on the Starnberger See. Finally, Baader seems to have taken what terror tactics he knew from Pontecorvo’s La battaglia di Algeri - notably the use of simultaneous attacks - while identifying himself with the boxer, pimp, and FLN terrorist Ali La Pointe. The problem was, this was comfortable West Germany rather than the crowded slums of colonial Algiers.28
On the evening of 2 April 1968, shortly before closing, Baader and Ensslin took the elevator to the first floor of the Kaufhaus Schneider, where they left a firebomb in women’s coats, and another in a wardrobe in household furnishings. Others deposited similar bombs in the Kaufhof store near by. At midnight an alert taxi driver noticed that both buildings were ablaze, even as a woman telephoned a news agency with the intelligence that this was ‘an act of political revenge’. Both fires caused about 800,000 DM worth of damage before they were brought under control. It took the police less than two days to arrest the perpetrators. A reward of 50,000 DM was sufficient to induce the boyfriend of the person whose flat they had stayed in the night before to identify the culprits. Ensslin claimed to be visiting a cousin; Baader to be talent scouting actors for a film. The Frankfurt police discovered a screw in Ensslin’s handbag that matched one used in one of the firebombs, while a search of the car used by the foursome revealed watch parts, a battery-operated detonator, rolls of tape like those employed in binding the materials together, and miniature film rolls showing the entrances to department stores around the country. Meanwhile the Berlin police discovered combustible materials identical with those used in the Frankfurt stores when they searched Ensslin’s flat.
The firebombings were temporarily overshadowed in the radical imagination when on 11 April a young right-wing house painter, Josef Bachmann, walked up to Rudi Dutschke as he set off from his Berlin apartment and shot him three times, once in the head. Bachmann later killed himself in jail; in 1979 the brain-damaged victim drowned after having an epileptic fit in his bath. Dutschke was not simply a theorist of violence. That February 1968 he and Bahman Nirumand had taken a plane from Berlin to Frankfurt. They had a bomb in their luggage intended for the American Forces Radio mast in Saarbrücken. Stopped by police at Frankfurt airport, Dutschke had the nerve to put the case in a left-luggage locker before the officers took him away. He explained it was too heavy to carry, and they concurred. His widow also recalled that in the same month Giangiacomo Feltrinelli appeared at their flat, with a car trunk full of dynamite.