The Red Army Faction was launched in 1970 with the robbery of three West Berlin banks. Dark clouds began to descend as the government turned to extreme responses. Years later, Kristina Berster’s trial in Vermont revealed the long-term impacts — disinformation and guilt by association.
By Greg Guma
Chapter Five
The Therapeutic State
When Kristina Berster moved to Heidelberg in 1970 to study, Germany’s younger generation was restless and angry. The rhetoric had turned revolutionary since the days of “Ban the Bomb.” It paralleled the trajectory of American dissent. The American “New Left” had also passed a tipping point, sparked by the Chicago police riots and “days of rage” that launched the Weather Underground.
In West Germany, protests turned violent during demonstrations in Berlin and the 1968 bombing of two empty department stores in Frankfurt by Andreas Baader and Gudrin Ensslin. The purpose of the destruction, announced Baader, was “to light a beacon” against the consumer society. “We set fires in department stores so you will stop buying,” added Ensslin. “The compulsion to buy terrorizes you.” A radical anti-capitalist analysis, it struck at the core of German complacency in a time of intense economic development.
The couple and their accomplices were caught and convicted. But not before they found support from one of Germany’s leading leftist journalists, Ulrike Meinhof. Released in 1969 during the appeal of their cases, Baader and Ensslin went underground — with Meinhof’s help. On September 29, 1970, with the robbing of three West Berlin banks, the Red Army Faction was born. Attempting to justify the crimes, Baader explained that the first problem of the revolution was financial support.
Dark clouds began to descend. West German police turned to automatic weapons and extreme tactics. Anyone who looked like a “nonconformist” risked spontaneous interrogation. Roadblocks became common on the autobahn; new search, arrest and gun laws were passed. The excuse for such a broad extension of police powers was the nationwide search for the Baader-Meinhof group. It didn’t matter that the fugitives were responsible for only five of the 1,000 robberies committed during their heyday.
Witnessing the isolation of prisoners and the alienation around her, Berster couldn’t accept it and do nothing. She was already steeped in political ideology and radical therapy. One US thinker who exerted a strong influence was Thomas Szasz, who wrote about the “myth of mental illness” and emergence of a therapeutic state. Szasz also inspired William Pierce, a Vermont mathematician who shared his story of covert harassment and involuntary commitment, years after blowing the whistle about security procedures and high-tech repression in the 1950s. That story is chronicled in Unwitting: The Secret War on William Pierce.
 |
Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin in October 1968,
caught in a light moment by the Associated Press.
In Law, Liberty and Psychiatry Thomas Szasz proposed, “The parallel between political and moral fascism is close. Each offers a kind of protection. And upon those unwilling to heed peaceful persuasion, the values of the state will be imposed by force: in political fascism by the military and the police; in moral fascism by therapists, especially psychiatrists.”
Berster was fascinated by the emerging critique of institutional psychiatry, and repelled by German psychiatric units where patients had no rights and anything could be interpreted as crazy. A new criminal psychiatric unit was under construction in Heidelberg, geared toward mind control and the use of complete isolation. During the dispute over it, someone tried to set fire to the site.
The violence escalated with the shooting of several police officers. In response, the German government widened its dragnet to root out the conspiracy. Help came from an informer, Hans Bacchus, who had read books on guerrilla warfare before leaving the student scene. He subsequently supplied the police with a list of people he accused of radical activity or terrorist sympathies. One of the names was Kristina Berster.
Arrested again, she was charged with having “built up a criminal association.” The maximum sentence was five years. Even pre-trial detention meant serious time. Some suspects were being detained in solitary for long periods. It was exactly the type of treatment she had been protesting.
Berster spent the next six months in detention, watching the erosion of her right to legal counsel. Her lawyer’s office was raided. Police alleged that Eberhard Becker had photographic files of the Heidelberg police department’s employees. Although the evidence was never produced, he was barred from participating in her trial. Obstruction of justice charges were later leveled at two other attorneys representing defendants in the case.
A pattern of harassment aimed at defense lawyers was emerging. The pressure intensified with laws that permitted their exclusion from certain cases and holding trials without the presence of defendants. In reaction, more young people joined the Red Army Faction.
In early May 1971, the Red Army decided to strike at political targets in retaliation for the bomb blockade of North Vietnam. They hit an officer’s club in Frankfurt, the Augsburg Police Department, the parking lot of the State Criminal Investigation Office, and finally, on May 24, the US Army’s European Supreme Headquarters in Heidelberg.
A month later they were caught. At first, many people thought the country would finally return to normal, the end of the state of emergency and attacks on civil liberties. Instead, the “emergency” was institutionalized.
Red Army leaders were locked in “wipe-out detention,” a luminous white world of total sterility in which fluorescent lights were always on and every window was covered. Their soundproof cells, filled with nothing but white noise, were in a section of Köln-Ossendorf prison called the Dead Wing, a place off limits to all visitors except lawyers and relatives. Reading material was heavily censored, and other prisoners were never seen or heard.
When Jean-Paul Sartre saw Baader after two years in the Dead Wing, he said, “This is not torture like the Nazis. It is torture meant to bring on psychic disturbances.” As it turned out, West Germany was merely ahead of the curve in developing extreme prison wards. Since then the same tactics have been introduced both in the US and Russia.
Such confinement is “the most effective way to destroy personality irreversibly,” Kristina told me during our jailhouse interview. “Humans are social. When you cut that off, when people are not able to talk or relate to others, an internal destruction begins. You become catatonic, and somatic problems begin.”
 |
RAF leaders ended up in the notorious Stammheim Prison. Ulrike Meinhoff hanged herself there in 1976; Andreas Baader allegedly shot himself on October 18, 1977, known as the “Stammheim night of death.” The photograph was part of a project by Andreas Magdanz. |
No comments:
Post a Comment