Interview for baader-meinhof.com

Richard Huffman Interview with Rupert Goldsworthy for baader-meinhof.com

September 5th 2009

Richard Huffman: We're talking with Rupert Goldsworthy about his new book “CONSUMING//TERROR: Images of the Baader-Meinhof.”

So tell me how this book came about?

Rupert Goldsworthy: A long process. I came to Berlin in 1994 and I was just curating a show, and I can remember meeting various people, Berlin at that time was kind of a mix, and one of the people I remember meeting at a dinner party was Gudrun Ensslin's brother, Gottfried. And I knew who the RAF were, I knew the whole scenario, but I didn't put those two pieces together. And I remember talking to this guy at dinner about him going to Cambridge and leaving the country at that time. But I really didn't have too much idea who that actually was. So that was one thing that I came to the project through, that was a pointer. But there were various pointers. Maybe like you, Richard, I know that your dad had some intimate connection with the RAF debacle, I can relate because my father was an airline pilot in the early 1970s, so things like terrorism and hijacking planes were things I was pretty aware of.

But in terms of writing a book about this subject, I became very interested when they had the big Gerhard Richter retrospective. They organized the touring museum retrospective and they had these paintings of the RAF, which were originally not going to be sold, they were going to be kept by Richter and just loaned to museums. But in 1996 they were sold to the Museum of Modern Art in New York for supposedly $3 million –which, for fifteen paintings by Gerhard Richter– seems a fair price.

And my initial question was how one might look at the RAF in the same way that Che Guevara has become sort of “Che TM,” trademark Che. The starting point for my book was–behind the back-history of the RAF–why did this subject end up becoming as commercial as it has done, a cultural entity that was originally completely forbidden and now is still, say, chic, and certainly very much part of a market. ..You know, there are bands named after the RAF, you have Joe Strummer of the Clash who was wearing a RAF T-shirt on stage in 1978. I remember that clearly.

Richard Huffman: There's actually several bands named after the RAF. Every once in a while I'll get an email. In fact I just got one from some band that's based in Texas that's named after the Red Army Faction, then there's of course, Baader-Meinhof, Luke Haines' project, and then there's a band named after the Sozialistisches Patientenkollectiv.

Rupert Goldsworthy: There's a way that people somewhere pull that name or often the logo even and put that in a completely different place and context, and take it on. It's funny how something that.. okay, supposedly Andreas Baader was one of the two people that designed that logo, it wasn't copyrighted or anything and it just floats around. ..It's one of those signs that's just out there. With the Che image because it was coming out of Cuba and Cuba didn't respect international trademark laws at that particular time in the Sixties and Seventies, that image managed to flow. Now the Korda estate is much tighter on it, but the RAF never really was one of those things that got copyrighted at the time. So that was one of the questions for me, what happened with the RAF logo and what happens with left-wing logos, or with terror group logos in transit? How they can become chic or they can become part of something..

Living in New York in 2002, I remember walking down St. Marks Place right when Joe Strummer died and they were selling copies of the RAF/Brigate Rosse T-shirt that he once famously wore.

RH: In the film “Rude Boy.”

RG: The shirt was available on St. Marks at that time for $20 and kept thinking, how many people really know what that's actually commemorating. I can remember when he first wore that T-shirt on stage in 1978 and there was a lot of criticism in the British music press about him wearing it and what was he really thinking or what it was supposed to be endorsing. It was very interesting because at that time you had many images of Sid Vicious wearing a swastika T-shirt and then not long after you have Joe wearing this Red Army Faction T-shirt. A provocation of the Vivienne Westwood era filtered into terror imagery too. How does terror imagery become part of a lexicon of outlaw signage, which then through punk and other movements becomes part of a larger marketing campaign, part of a “Ooh, isn't this shocking!” moment?

The first third of my book focuses on the history and status of the RAF logo. The Richter series of paintings is the focus of the last third of the book. The middle part of the book is about the “FX” of terror, the Springer Press, the Symbionese Liberation Army in L.A, and the media hi-jinx of the Situationists or the RAF, groups who go in and make these interventions and the way the media plays them back and forth. That just gives you a brief outline of my book here..

RH: My Ur-thesis about the Baader-Meinhof era is that they had a fundamentally symbiotic relationship with the media, especially the Springer Press who they of course hated, but it seems to me that their entire relationship to them propelled them into the public consciousness, and this give-and-take they had with each other, they kind of fed of each other. I've always looked at them, I've always called them the world's first celebrity terrorists because they seem to tap into this cultural Zeitgeist of the era and they seem to understand the mechanics of media. There's many groups of the era but why are they the ones we tend to talk about now? And I think a lot of it had to do with how successful they were at partnering with the media, even unwillingly, and maximizing that partnership.

RG: Yes, Charity Scribner compared them to the Situationists, saying the RAF were the first to use the video of a hostage as a new terror technique. And I thought yes, but no, but...

So in my book I try to trace media intervention further back. My alpha point for the “media tactic” --not terror tactic, but more media intervention tactic-- began with the 1968 Mexico Olympics and the two athletes who gave the Black Power salute, Tommie Smith and John Carlos. That history, how these guys were disgraced and thrown off the team and how it produced a very complicated response. This is a key moment for me in the use of this tactic of media hi-jinx around, not just left-wing, but certainly identity politics. Through this act, sport on TV suddenly becomes a place ripe for politics. At the next Olympic Games in '72, Israeli athletes were kidnapped and killed.
Another strategic media-oriented breakthrough that's significant in terms of the RAF or how they become celebrity terrorists, was the 1974 Symbionese Liberation Army bank robbery by Patty Hearst moment which is for me the paradigm of the “terror intervention” because they used the bank's closed circuit TV cameras to film this Heist starring Patty, daughter of Hearst Publishing who are going to be the people who disseminate the story. The SLA succeeded in hijacking “the Man's” technology and then replaying it in on itself. Also before the Schleyer kidnap in Germany, you have the German group Bewegung 2.Juni hostage siege.

RH: The ones that tried to kidnap my dad.

RG: We could ask why the RAF are the first celebrity terrorists, or why did Springer pick on them particularly? Maybe that's because of Ulrike Meinhof, who was a well-known television journalist. Certainly there is a symbiotic relationship, if we look at the 1976 move Network this seems an open secret.. In the film you've even got an Angela-Davis-type character that they portray as a very cynical figure, saying “I'll give you these ratings for ..” I quote that film at one point in that part of the book. It's almost like that movie King of Comedy where someone literally hijacks somebody famous and then implants themselves in TV instead.

The other thread you pull up that's interesting is that somehow at this point the media gave the terrorists free reign. They said, “Okay, if you want us to show this video, we'll show it.” And later you have this moment where you have Margaret Thatcher's famous quote from 1980 that “Publicity is oxygen for terrorists.” As soon as you allow them to do this, they are going to take it to the max, because they know they'll be able to do it. If we look at 9/11, now it's much more controlled, there are tapes that people are not getting to, that certainly at that point, not within the press, but within the national television networks, all the West German television channels at that time were funded by the government. But at that moment they were not really being controlled, they just said let's show it. Whereas later it was like, we are not showing anything that we don't want or we'll only spin it in a certain way.

The interesting thing they were doing then, right after the first big RAF army base bombings in 1972, this is something I mention in my book, somebody within the government or media immediately sent out a false communiqué. Do you know about that?

RH: Yes, right after that attack, they sent out a communiqué that they were going to start killing civilians.

RG: Exactly, or it doesn't actually say “we are going to kill” but it indicates that more attacks will follow in this particular way, right?

RH: It's funny because I wasn't aware of this and then in an interview this guy was telling me “Oh I remember that this other communiqué came out” and he was describing it, and I was like, honestly, what you're describing sounds like nothing they would have ever said, ever. So this came out and I said, it doesn't sound right and then I looked into it and it did come out and it was proven to be false.

RG: Exactly. And one interesting detail is that when this bogus communiqué was released, it wasn't broken through a Springer newspaper. It was published in Frankfurter Rundfunk, a newspaper that was not Springer-owned. They thought perhaps, whoever these people were, “they” reasoned that it will be disclaimed anyway, if it comes through Springer, everyone will say that Springer just made it up, so they put it through another news channel. And it really did go out there and the communiques by the RAF were not coming out. So the RAF's response communiqué to that, I don't know if you've ever seen that, but it's vituperative, “How could you possibly do this? Somebody in the media has released this...” The book quotes verbatim what they wrote. It's interesting because it's as if to say the media are NOT going to be spinning this. What are you thinking? You think they are just going to be your tools here, huh?

RH: It sounds very much like what happened in Iraq in 2003 when the venerable, supposedly liberal New York Times was the one that was pushing all of the stories of the global weapons labs in Iraq. And rather than going to conservative Fox News, they were going to the New York Times which added considerable legitimacy. So they were probably smart by not going to, by avoiding the Springer Press I guess.

RG: I like that you are making connections to other eras and other situations. This is one of the problems of having been around for a certain amount of time. Particular histories get isolated. I know that your father had a certain perspective on it, so you have a connection to certain layer of knowledge that not every person is getting to be able to get to. If we look at the wider context of what's going on, it's interesting to compare the media tactics or propagandist tactics of anti-terrorism, how they spun out in the 1970s, how the “Terror Industry” was birthed as it's been described, suddenly there's a wave of “terror experts” that emerge. For example the book Hitler's Children by Gillian Becker from 1976..

Now perhaps, there is a deliberate mirroring. Stammheim or Guatanamo, Radikalerlass or the Homeland Security Act.. The other thing that's interesting is that in the Seventies it was slightly different because there was a smaller pan of people writing on terror, it's not this huge industry. You've got people like Claire Sterling and Gillian Becker. Becker is the person who wrote the first published book on the RAF, the “Hitler's Children” book, which is pretty amazing if you look at it as an exercise in propaganda, where she claims this is funded by...

RH: ...well, Claire Sterling was clearly funded by the CIA, or at least in a roundabout way and famously so.

RG: You mention that people say “Oh well, Claire Sterling was funded by the CIA,” well by the same token, it's been proven now that konkret magazine was funded by the East...

RH: That's become Ulrike Meinhof's daughter's major focus in life I think, to prove that and to explain to people how much of the Leftist movement was, in her view, a real product of the Communists', particularly the East Germans' efforts to destabilize what was going on in West Germany and what she brings up is absolutely fundamentally true.

RG: It is an image war --on both sides. At the same time they built this television tower in East Berlin, the Fernsehenturm, right at the same time in the mid-sixties you've got Axel Springer building this great office tower next to the wall that's all gold glass...

Another thing I want to throw into my interest in my discussion of the RAF and my interest in propagandist tactics: In the late 1980s I was living in New York and I was involved in a group called ACT-UP, the “Aids Coalition To Unleash Power” and one of the amazing things about that period was this demonstration at St. Patrick's Cathedral when one AIDS activist threw the wafer on the ground and this whole moment. I knew various people who were involved in that whole demo. And I was filming for ACT-UP at the demo outside the church as there was a lot of police provocation, and officers were taking off their badges and beating people, and I was concerned to document this for legal follow-ups.

What was amazing about a group like ACT-UP was that they were immediately infiltrated, at the larger demonstrations and people were pushed by agent provocateurs in the crowd into what appeared to be violent confrontation with the police. Bearing witness to this escalation, or contrived escalation was important to me. Who is really pushing things to the next level of confrontation with the police? Do we really know who these people that came down to the demo were, who pushed everyone into the street and they got clubbed by the police?

RH: So what is your supposition? This was other kinds of the governmental forces.. ? This was the media hyping this?

RG: I wouldn't say the media. But clearly people who are non-violent are often pushed into situations where they seem to be confronting the police or getting into some kind of situation where they appear much more provocative than they were intending to be. This was something John Lennon talked about, the government policy of trying to push the oppositional into military terms because then they know exactly how to deal with that.

A group like ACT-UP is really about releasing medication, breaking the monopoly of Burroughs-Wellcome. --If you look at the 1980s there was only one drug, AZT, that everyone could use and be killed by. AIDS was a medical problem, a medical crisis which people were demonstrating about and it started to get pushed into violent confrontations with the police. So core members of ACT-UP started saying “Look, if you see anyone at a demonstration that looks at all like they are provoking something, just move away.” The group then strategically tried to avoid the possibility of this type of misrepresentation.

But in the Sixties and Seventies, there were people like Peter Urbach, the guy who was providing radical students with guns. You can parallel this with the States at this time where other covert governmental forces were pushing people to various levels of confrontation with the law. And to some people in the Left, they'll say of the RAF “Whose side were they on anyway?” The RAF took a certain movement within the APO and boosted it to a whole other degree of confrontation which was not going to help anyone anywhere. From the anti-Vietnam struggle, it suddenly moved to the struggle to free Andreas Baader. This becomes the big focus at this point, and it becomes more and more, larger, about personal struggles mapped onto public space. Who is really fighting this war? It becomes this kind of cloak and dagger struggle. Who's doing this anyway?

RH: Peter Urbach, you mentioned him. He was of course the double agent, undercover guy working for the Berlin, not Federal, but the Berlin police, who was secretly providing guns, munitions, some that worked, some that didn't, to the Underground radical scene in the late Sixties. And I've heard that he's quietly living a life undercover in the United States. Boy, if there's one person I'd like to talk to it's him.

RG: ..he's probably in Florida, wouldn't you think?

RH: He almost certainly is, and you could argue that so much about what happened in the Sixties in West Germany directly flowed from him, probably unintentionally, but so much happened that he is so much a part of that you cannot do anything other than find him culpable in some major ways.

RG: Urbach?

RH: ..because a lot of this stuff wouldn't have happened if the government hadn't been actively doing this stuff.

RG: Yes, encouraging or grooming in some sense. It's hard to say isn't it. Because for me it's also really about Rudi Dutschke being shot really.. If Rudi had not been shot, that would have been a different moment. Again, Dutschke is shot by somebody who supposedly read the Springer Verlag papers that said “Stop Rudi Dutschke.” I always think that Rudi would have changed things in a certain kind of way if he'd still been more around. I mean, he was around for a few years afterwards but he had seemed a strong voice for the Left that would be more rational, that would have made things less black and white. He was pretty critical of the RAF.

My concern with equating all this with the States is that so much gets swept under the carpet when that happens.. because it's such a different context. I very much admire Jeremy Varon's book comparing the RAF and the USA groups, and he was very helpful and invited me to present at conferences he was involved in. But I have a problem with equating the RAF with the Weather Underground. If you look at what was going on, the draft in the States, and then Germany all this hidden Nazi history. At the same time you've got the Kurras case, you've got all these former Nazis (such as SS officer Hans-Martin Schleyer) hiding out in West Germany who come back into the system through the back door . So there is a very different context between the Civil Rights struggle and the anti-Vietnam movement and the matrix of West Germany. It's much more Oedipal, wouldn't you say? I don't know if you'd agree with that. The European struggle is much more of a generational struggle.

Even today, that difference exists. Doing research for the book, people I ran across, Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn, and I ran across Astrid Proll, I wouldn't include Gottfried here, but certainly Astrid who was pretty close to the original core of the RAF. If you meet Bernadine and Bill as people and you actually hear them talk, what they have to say is extremely insightful. I think former RAF member Inge Viett has very interesting things to say still about the commercialization of the RAF. I quote Viett a little bit in the book. But I think they're different types of people. The people around the Weather Underground were much more idealistic, much less embittered.

I found the people from the RAF were very hard to deal with. I just felt like they were immediately much more confrontational, before you've even opened your mouth. And this is somehow for me one of the differences, the people that came into the Weather Underground were coming out of Columbia, university kids coming from a very different situation from these people were coming from who joined the RAF. Bewegung 2.Juni was supposedly a much more working class group. Ulrike Meinhof was a college kid, Baader's father was an art historian. With the RAF you've got a different group of people and they seem much more embittered. I don't know if its to do with World War Two but it's a different type of personality.

Bruce LaBruce's film on the RAF has this sexual element and there is this whole ..

RH: ...he sees a real strong connection, he sees that as a primal element to the whole phenomenon.

RG: Kommune 1 and this whole “make love not war,” or “drop acid, make love not war.” That whole thing. And I guess that “free love” element does link the RAF and the Weather Underground. It's this commune situation where everyone is doing acid and going nuts or doing whatever they're doing but then there's also..

RH: But practically the Weathermen made a break at one point, it was probably when that town house exploded and they just decided that they were not interested in killing people. And prior to that, and they were planning on blowing up an army base where officers..

RG: ...in Jersey, right.

RH: ...and somehow they decided not to do that, and the Red Army Faction had the exact opposite conclusion.

I talked to a guy just a couple of weeks ago who was a witness to the 1972 Frankfurt bombing, he was actually a military policeman and Gudrun Ensslin walked right up to him and this was seconds after she'd left a bomb that was going to injure dozens of people, and we are talking about civilians who were clearly civilians right around her and he walked up to her and she didn't bat an eye, she didn't seem nervous or upset about it. It wasn't an accident that civilians got hurt, she knew they would get hurt.

And for some reason, the Weather Underground decided not to do that. I'm not sure why. Maybe it was because that bomb went off and it caused them to question themselves, but the Red Army Faction clearly didn't do that for some reason. And it speaks to how much different they were to the Weather Underground in that sense.

RG: Did you see that film Starbuck: Holger Meins?

RH: Yup, great movie.

RG: You mentioned SPK, that film clearly brought home to me the realization that certain people around the RAF were pretty “out there,” such as Meins, although obviously very high functioning in terms of actually pulling this stuff off..

Doing interviews for this book, I sensed the RAF attracted a very different type of people. Bill, Bernadine and Mark Rudd are all now educators, they're back in the system, and they really paid their dues in a lot of ways --although I wouldn't say that bombing is something that one can just pay one's dues and walk away from.. but they have attempted to live different lives and they are a different age now.

Whereas there was always an embitteredness about the RAF that.. It's strange. One of the things that Bernadine talked about was the Truth and Reconciliation Committees, and Greensboro, North Carolina and right-wing shootings.

One thing that seems to me with the RAF is that there has never ever been a Truth and Reconciliation Committee. It's still all sitting there... in the fall-out, basically people never.. there is this endless, endless bitterness. Let's just close the subject. And what happens then is the subject ends up in film. Over years we've still got all these waves of RAF cultural production, you've got all these people buying these out-of-print rare books and paintings about the RAF for hundreds of dollars or whatever it is.. and the cultifying, the fetishization of this group seems a way of clinging onto a subject that never really got worked out, you know what I mean?

RH: I do.

RG: The last person the RAF target and kill is Detlev Rohwedder, head of Treuhandanstalt in 1991, the government agency responsible for privatizing the assets of the DDR after the Wall. Supposedly an RAF killing, there was a communiqué sent after it at least. And that's sort of the final gesture, “Screw the new, reunited Germany.” It's a strange time because there are so many people coming out of the DDR that are former RAF members, who are being discovered at this time. It's almost like the fall of the Wall kills them, ends the group, it's not the end of the Vietnam war, it's the Wall.

RH: And when the Wall came down they found that East Germany had housed eleven members of the RAF, had trained some of them and sent them back into the West.

RG: And I think there was also a whole gun-for-hire aspect there, such as the links to Carlos the Jackal. There's a mercenary moment where everyone's a floating double agent. Carlos is for me the great model of it. As all these communist countries start coming down, he's being shunted from one to the next, he's in Hungary, then he ends up in Sudan. Did you track his movements?

RH: There's a fantastic movie about the lawyer for Carlos the Jackal. ...directed by a famous French director, sorry I'm drawing a total blank. And there's another movie, a really bizarre movie called “Protagonist.” It's a documentary where they interview four different people that had epiphanies in their lives. One was a kick-boxer, and one was Hans-Joachim Klein, the former Revolutionary Cells terrorist who was with Carlos the Jackal. He was the one who was shot in the OPEC take-over and he talks about how he was about to participate in the Entebbe hijacking in '76 with Carlos the Jackal and he's planning this out and then he realized that Carlos was just organizing this as a way to target Jews and Jewish people. And Klein started going “Wait a second, I'm Jewish and my mother was in Auschwitz and died shortly after Auschwitz. Maybe I need to consider what I'd doing here, maybe I need to question what I'm doing here.” So he dropped out and went into hiding for twenty years.

RG: There's this whole strain of anti-semitism thoughout this scene that is surprising. The first radical/terror group in Berlin, not the Blues, or the Hasch Rebellen but the Tupamaros Berlin, before the RAF, one of those groups related to Kommune 1, originally planned to blow up the synagogue.

Another thing I talk about in this book, maybe it ties into this discussion related to Carlos, is all the girls involved, Silke Maier-Witt in her fur coat taking OPEC ministers hostage, and how that's kind of similar to Patty Hearst, --all these girls in fur coats from good backgrounds who start holding up Daddy at the bank. All of that, which is a really interesting thread.

Another detail, but a thing I really enjoyed about the growth of your website, as I've tracked it since the late Nineties, was that you started to put up stuff about Gerhard Richter's paintings of the RAF and stuff related to that.

That was stimulating to me. Another starting point was the sale of Richter's work to the New York MOMA. And the drift, in the same way that terror groups have an echo effect, that one group starts doing something and then somebody else starts doing something else.. “Hey wait a second.. after the success at OPEC, hey lets try this..” or then the whole movement starts getting anti-semitic or something else starts becoming the agenda, --it starts off as ideological and then it starts being a homeland movement. The Richter series becomes the master signifier that many, many other people start making work around over the Eighties and the Nineties, ending up with the Kunst-Werke art show in Berlin. Do you remember that big art show in Berlin of work about the RAF in 2005?

RH: Was that the one that was curated by Gudrun Ensslin's son?

RG: Exactly, by Felix Ensslin, along with two other curators.

What was interesting to me about that time, in fact before that time, before the Kunst-Werke show, was that I'd go to art fairs all over Europe and the U.S, and note how artists weren't making paintings of Che any more, they were no longer using photographs of Patty Hearst, instead there were all these endless images appropriating shots of Hans-Martin Schleyer or Carlo Ponti, or the Brigate Rosse or the RAF and how in the Nineties this whole subject became tres chic. After the Wall, a funnel down, a drop-down from the Richter, when suddenly artists and dealers were thinking, well Richter's paintings have been accepted, we can make and show this ironic work about the subject now. This was another connection for me while doing a gallery --People who are industrialists, who have made a lot of money and have great art collections often want to own work that's very edgy...

RH: ...something directly opposed to them.

RG: ..and by buying the work of artists, not artists who were terrorists, but by people who made work on this subject, art becomes a conduit --between the shock-chic identity of the RAF and the industrialist who then buys a painting relating to the identity of the RAF. And then public perception of the Richter painting starts getting infected by this. “Oh, well how does terrorism become commerce?”

RH: The thing that interests me about the Richter series October 18th 1977 is that I look at it as a guy who probably knows more about the Baader-Meinhof than most people and so I recognize the imagery inherently and my take on it was always that this appears in Germany in the late Eighties and this is the equivalent of, I don't know, a plane flying into the World Trade Center or Patty Hearst holding a gun -to an American. These are incredibly recognizable images. So my sense was in Germany these paintings would have a very specific sort of effect and a very provocative effect on people viewing them.

RG: Following on from what you're saying about Richter's choices, the thing that always interested me was that he didn't paint one of the victims. And he doesn't use the logo. And he doesn't do any bombing scenes. In that cycle, there's none of those images. So it's curated in a certain way, his choice which has now become the masternarrative on the subject. What was the counternarrative to the press then later becomes the masternarrative, and that masternarrative now is: No victims, no logo, and no bombing sites. So you have the cult of Andreas lying there in blood. No context. When he made those paintings originally they were made in the context of Springer media still cycling those other pictures out the whole time, every time when they caught somebody in the Eighties. In 1989, the year those paintings were first shown, the RAF assassinated banker Alfred Herrhausen, and three years before they'd killed another high-profile figure, Karl-Heinz Beckurts, head of Siemens. So the RAF were still active and those images were still being sold around in the press, the bombing shots, and all the other stuff, these logos, and what he chose to paint at that moment was very provocative. But what's weird is, over time, twenty years later, those are the only images you know and there's not one victim.

RH: Honestly, I never thought about that before.

RG: I was like, hold on, at the time I was writing the book I was talking to a friend of mine and I was saying “So is he pro- or anti- here?” I know at the time he made those paintings he was married to the artist Isa Genzken. She knew Horst Mahler back in the Sixties before he turned right-wing..

RH: ..before he went totally off the other deep-end.

RG: Supposedly Genzken knew people in the Frankfurt scene and she said to Richter we need to make a painting about this, we need to make a work about this. And Isa was the kind of person who might not do it, Gerhard was the kind of person who would say, I'll try and make a painting about this. And it took him a while to paint them but.. There is a connection. You're totally right, and he would know much more about it than many other people. And history has played those paintings in such a different way, and part of that is because the paintings became famous and partly it's because of how it all ended.

RH: You know I could sit here and stare at these paintings forever. They're really amazing to me and I'm not totally sure why. I'm thinking I'm looking at right now his image called “Funeral” which is the giant painting of the funeral of Baader, Ensslin and Raspe in 1977.

RG: What was interesting at around that time, 1978, you have Joe Strummer wearing the RAF T-shirt at the biggest Rock-against-Racism Festival in London in 1978, and it's interesting he's wearing this T-shirt with the RAF on it at this anti-racism festival and at the same time you've got the RAF and the Mogadishu hijacking and the terrorists are going round the plane demanding “Who's got an Israeli passport? Who's Jewish?” So there's all these weird little kind of connections there, all these weird little juxtapositions and inconsistencies, between all of this..

RH: I didn't see the anti-Jewish angle to start with. I spoke with a professor last year, a really kind of conservative guy and his whole thesis was that everything about these groups, and the Red Army faction in particular, was overtly and directly in this German anti-Jewish vein and he very much convinced me of what you were saying.. Not just those early efforts to blow up that synagogue but also he was saying that basically what it boiled down to was that the Red Army Faction would parse things, they would say “We are totally not anti-Jewish, in fact, we are opposing the legacy of our parents,” but then they would go about doing stuff that was practically anti-Jewish, they would say it was anti-Zionist, these were the people killing the Palestinians, and this professor's argument was “It's six of one hand, half a dozen of the other. If it walks like a duck, if it talks like a duck, it's a duck.”

RG: After the 1972 Munich Olympics attack, Ulrike Meinhof comes out in sympathy, saying it was a good thing, and you're really like “Oh boy, you didn't need to say that. You could have stepped away from that one.” But then at the same time, you have Bernadine Dohrn right after Charlie Manson was indicted in December 1969, and supposedly Bernadine was at one of the last SDS meetings at that time and she hears that news and states from the podium “Oh, Charlie's great, it was good that they did this.” Hello? Oh my God.. ..in a smarter world..

You have to realize the context all those people are in, or did they really say that or was it attributed to them? But it's weird how the anti-Zionism thing.. My question to you is where does the original connection to the Palestinian movement come in. Does it begin around the whole original Benno Ohnesorg and the anti-Shah demonstration time?

RH: I guess you could say in terms of the physical, direct connections, in the Berlin underground, it wasn't just people like Peter Urbach who were providing weapons, it was often Palestinian groups supplying Checkmate Firebirds and other weapons, they too were selling them..

RG: In Berlin?

RH: Yes. In West Berlin and they'd go into the East, so this was a definite connection and they utilized those connections when they went to the PLO camp in May 1970, and it's important to note that at those PLO camps, they would offer almost like a tourist version of their training, people would go there and spend a few days there and shoot guns and then the hope was that they'd go back to Berlin or France or wherever and then persuade their other leftist people to send money for the Palestinians.

RG: Oh, so this is the pay-off here, that it was all for the struggle. And the other weird thing here that always gets really written out of history at that time, the way everything was conceived, it wasn't only a homeland struggle, it was really seen as a socialist movement worldwide.

RH: Exactly right. People think of, they tend to forget that the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization was a conglomeration of dozens of groups, so for instance you have the PFLPGC, People's front for the Liberation of Palestine general Command which was an overtly socialist group, and when we say socialist we mean they considered themselves part of a bigger struggle for revolution, and they looked at the war in Vietnam as a struggle for revolution, as being part of that, and that the PFLPGC were one of the most prominent terrorists, and as they went by the wayside, the nationalist kind of Palestinian took the forefront.. but early on there was very much the connection, the IRA were very socialist, and you'll see letters between the IRA and imprisoned Baader-Meinhof members, and members talking about the struggle, they had nothing in common but they would find a connection, at least a little bit, in the supposed social struggle.

RG: This ties back into the whole thing you were talking about with Hans-Joachim Klein, all these links, and then the connection to the Basques, and then you've got the Japanese Red Army, leaving Japan coming to do this Lodz massacre in Israel, how these people move across huge areas to do a particular job and then things change, or what they had agreed to do is different to what actually happens. People are shipped in and end up doing all this other stuff.

One of the first things I'd heard, and I've never had it corroborated, is that with the RAF, the whole idea that they are called the Red Army Faction is somewhat based on the name Japanese Red Army. It obviously comes from China as well but there is a connection to that group for the RAF.

RH: My understanding was that that was exactly the case. My understanding is that Andreas Baader for the most part named the group and it was named in response to that, not directly but they said they called themselves the JRA, meaning there's some global red army that we will say we're a fraction of that, a portion of that.


Rupert Goldsworthy's book “CONSUMING//TERROR: Images of the Baader-Meinhof,” published by VDM, is currently available on Amazon.de in Germany at
http://www.amazon.de/CONSUMING-TERROR-Baader-Meinhof-Rupert-Goldsworthy/dp/3639184572/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books-intl-de&qid=1253134187&sr=8-1

It will be available on Amazon in the US and UK in November 2009.