Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [146]
This assassination attempt against Dutschke triggered massive demonstrations against the Axel Springer Press headquarters, for radicals held conservative newspapers such as Bild Zeitung responsible for inciting the attack. These demonstrations took a violent turn, partly because secret agent Peter Urbach appeared with a basket of Molotov cocktails, which were used to destroy Springer delivery vans. During parallel disturbances in Munich, a student and a press photographer were inadvertently killed in a hail of stones. One of the Berlin demonstrators, who received a ten-month suspended sentence for taking part in public disorder, was Horst Mahler, the radical SDS-supporting lawyer currently acting on Baader’s behalf. While the brother of the publisher of Der Spiegel - the left-wing glossy weekly originally founded by the British - endeavoured to defend Mahler, outside the streets were rocked by the most violent demonstrations Berlin had seen. One hundred and thirty policemen and twenty-two demonstrators were seriously injured. One of the reasons for this disparity in casualty rates was that the demonstrators included the West Berlin Tupamaros who were fully prepared to use physical violence. For men like Michael ‘Bommi’ Baumann or Dieter Kunzelmann, the communard bothered about his orgasms, this was their route towards terrorism. They did not need fancy ideological justifications. Baumann himself could never understand Dutschke’s learnedly abstract talks about revolution. Men like him enjoyed fighting, whether at a Rolling Stones concert or a political demonstration. It was a matter of power, seeing the police scuttle away, and getting the coppery scent of blood. He was surprisingly eloquent about how carrying a gun physically altered the central point of one’s being to where hand and gun joined, creating an almost foolhardy sense of security through the element of surprise. A third of the members of the 2 June Movement, to which Baumann belonged, had criminal convictions for violent behaviour at demonstrations. As he put it: ‘For me violence is a perfectly satisfactory means. I have never had inhibitions about it.’30 Reverting to her severe Protestant roots, Ensslin once reminded Baumann: ‘What are you doing, running around apartments, fucking little girls, smoking dope. Having fun. That mustn’t be. This job that we’re doing is serious. There must be no fun.’31
The trial of the Frankfurt arsonists commenced on 14 October 1968; immediately the accused tried to theatricalise the proceedings, when Proll claimed to be Baader, giving 1789 as his date of birth. Matters turned to farce when Ello, invited by Baader as a character witness to ‘paint a picture’ of him, turned up with a selection of her naive canvases spilling from her arms. The judges felt they could dispense with her testimony. Despite the efforts of their radical defence lawyers, including Otto Schily and Horst Mahler (the latter had formed his own Collective of Socialist Lawyers), the four accused each received three years’ imprisonment. After fourteen months, they were released in June 1969, pending the outcome of their lawyers’ appeals to have the initial sentences reduced.
Baader and Ensslin moved into a large flat provided rent free by the Frankfurt university branch of the SDS. To celebrate their freedom, the two injected themselves with liquefied opium, managing to contract hepatitis. At the time their SDS admirers were animated by a campaign they had been running to politicise and radicalise the problem juveniles these students encountered during visits to children’s homes as the practical part of their studies. There were about half a million such young people in the Federal Republic, and the conditions they lived in were miserable, exploited as cheap labour and sometimes abused.
Baader and Ensslin took part in SDS efforts to liberate these children, disrupting the homes and providing inmates with casual refuges when they managed