• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 783 0

on assignment elsewhere. To solve these problems in one fell swoop, she moved into a shared apartment, with the student Jan-Carl Raspe and the radio reporter Marianne Herzog. When she conceived of the idea of moving to a bigger house so that her co-occupants could take over her childcare, there was a small mutiny and the idea was dropped. Exhausted, and perpetually on the verge of tears, she moved with the twins into an apartment on Kufsteinerstrasse. That was where Baader and Ensslin turned up. Mutual admiration was instant, because in an unpublished column Meinhof had already declared that firebombing department stores was ‘a progressive moment’, a leap of logic typical of those times. The drifting delinquent Baader and his eternal student comrade Ensslin were in awe of a big-time professional journalist, with her spacious apartment and flights to this or that crucial assignment. She and Ensslin, the two formerly pious little schoolgirls, were tantalised in turn by the crude, leather-jacketed thug in their midst. LSD trips cemented the relationships, accelerating the wild revolutionary scenarios bruited each night in the flat. While under the influence of this ‘Sunshine’ pill, Ensslin rewrote the Ten Commandments, including ‘Thou must kill’.34

One night they invited between ten and fourteen guests, including Baader’s lawyer Horst Mahler. Baader spoke of ‘the project’. There was to be no more ‘playacting as guerrillas’, but rather, for this was still Germany, ‘perfect organisation’, bank robberies and blowing up the Springer headquarters. They had to move fast as already the incipient Baader-Meinhof group had competition. During the winter of 1969 a series of arson and bomb attacks had occurred in Berlin, mainly against lawyers, judges and prison officials. Mahler had taken part in one such attack, although the Molotov cocktail he threw inevitably missed. A journalist had written a rather sensational article about these attacks, which were largely carried out by the Blues Movement, a sort of organisational way-station, roughly between a crowd of pot-smokers and the terrorist 2 June Movement, led by Michael ‘Bommi’ Baumann. Four of these men burst into the journalist’s apartment, trashed it, beat the fellow unconscious and hung a placard reading ‘I am a journalist and I write shit’ around his neck. The police arrived to the sounds of the Rolling Stones ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ booming from the wrecked flat.

On 2 April 1970, Horst Mahler used his offices for a meeting between Baader and ‘S-Bahn Peter’, the purpose being to acquire guns, the collusive involvement of left-liberal lawyers with terrorists being an important part of this story. Back at Meinhof’s apartment - Baader was suspicious about electronic bugs - Peter Urbach volunteered that wartime guns were buried in a cemetery. Baader, Mahler and he set off for their moonlit dig. To their disappointment there were no weapons. Urbach claimed he had got the cemetery wrong, giving him leeway for the secret service to plant deactivated pistols in the right place. The following night at a quarter to three the group set off in two cars, with Mahler wearing a large hat and sunglasses as a disguise. The Mercedes with Baader at the wheel was stopped by uniformed policemen, as an unmarked car pulled up behind. Mahler and Urbach drove off in the second car. The police asked Baader for his papers. He produced an identity card which said he was Peter Chotjewitz, born on 16 April 1934. Baader got that right. Problems began when the policeman asked for the names and dates of birth of his two children which were also recorded on the card. He was arrested. Ulrike Meinhof displayed her talent for the conspiratorial life when she shortly appeared at the police station, claiming that the Mercedes belonged to her friend Astrid Proll who had lent it to her, this being her attempt to limit the incident to a motoring violation. She could not explain how she knew that the men had been arrested. Growing angry at police questions she blurted out that neither Astrid Proll nor ‘the lawyer Horst