Gerd Albartus is dead – Marxism Against Antisemitism

This is a text written by the “Revolutionäre Zellen” (“Revolutionary Cells”, RZ) in 1991. The RZ were a leftist armed revolutionary group. After one of their comrades being murdered they very critically reflect on some of their past actions and assumptions, especially regarding Antisemitism.
The text was mostly translated by Deepl. The original German text can be found here:
http://www.freilassung.de/div/texte/rz/zorn/Zorn04.html

Bad news in a piece of newspaper
Today, as my friends die,
only their names die.
How can one hope, from this violent pit,
to grasp more than the letters, glimmers of tender blackness, arrows into familiar memories?
Only those who live outside the prisons can honor the corpses,
wash away the pain of their dead with hugs, scratch the gravestones with nails and tears.
Not the prisoners: we only whistle so that the echo softens the message.
Roque Dalton [1]

Gerd Albartus is dead.

He was shot back in December 1987 after being tried and sentenced to death by a group that considered itself part of the Palestinian resistance and for which he worked. We only received the news some time later. Until then we had assumed that Gerd had not returned from a trip to the group because he knew about the house searches, searches and arrests in December 1987 [2] and feared that he would also be arrested if he entered West Germany. Attempts to find out about his whereabouts either went unanswered or confirmed our suspicions. Like most of his friends who were worried about him, the longer he stayed away the more we were sure that he had taken the opportunity to escape the increased police surveillance and harassment he had been subjected to since his time in prison. We were convinced that he had absconded, not within our framework, but to a safe place and in a political context to which he was close.

The fact that it took us a while to finally make our knowledge of his death public is down to us. The search for an answer that would have been even somewhat appropriate to the enormity of the occasion, in which the need for revenge would have had its place without it hitting the wrong ones, has come to nothing.

Efforts to find a form that would do justice to our horror and grief beyond the mere news in a newspaper have failed. The path of publication is also a capitulation to more far-reaching demands.

Of course, there was and still is controversy about who is served by publication. There have been accusations that we are merely paying tribute to the spirit of the times and clearing the air at a time when reckoning with left-wing history is almost a matter of good taste. The text would fall on our own feet, because it would only feed the well-known clichés about the spiral of violence within armed groups. Moreover, it warned of a weakening of Palestine solidarity. Such a message, however differentiated it might be presented, would inevitably backfire on the entire Palestinian resistance, because hardly anyone is able to see through the web of Palestinian organizations and factions, and we ourselves could not contribute any detailed information about the concrete connections. But against the background of the Gulf War and a political debate that has come to a head with the stupid alternative: Israel yes or no, this is a signal in the wrong direction. And finally, we must be aware that such a publication would trigger a wave of reactions, the full extent of which we could neither foresee nor be responsible for.

In the end, we overrode all these objections, even if they made us hesitate for a long time. The legitimate concern of working into the hands of the wrong side must not become a convenient license to sweep all dirt under the carpet. It has too often been a mere pretext to legitimize our own silence. Perhaps we need to rethink, to learn that deception and self-deception contribute far more to our failure than open controversy about our internal contradictions, even at the risk of our opponents taking advantage of this. Those who dream of liberation but do not want to know anything about the darker side of the liberation struggle, are following naive ideas of revolution that do not stand up to its reality. We do not want to cling to legends and images that are less the result of our experiences than of naïve projections or tangible repressions. Who do we benefit if we pretend a false unity under the banner of internationalism, while behind the scenes the opposites are clashing? Only if we deal with the real political and ideological contradictions without illusions will we know how to deal with them as soon as we are confronted with them.

Nor are we concerned with exposure or denunciation, even if we cannot prevent the text from being used in a way that already disgusts us. We do not share the fear that we could provide ammunition for the wrong side. This side was not badly armed, especially in recent times, and where it ran out of ammunition, it could help itself to the Stasi [3] archives at will. If they want to get one over on us, they don’t have to wait for us to do it, but decide for themselves when the opportunity is right – regardless of whether it’s true. And if we do in fact reveal new information to the cops, the only consequence will be that a targeted investigation squad can be disbanded.

The purpose of the publication is very simple: we want to prevent a comrade who is important to us from disappearing without a trace. We want to resist the impression that one of our own can be killed without protest, even if we lack the means to retaliate. We want to extinguish any shred of doubt that there is any justification for this decision that is consistent with our own standards. We want to finally, finally put an end to the gruesomely grotesque state of affairs in which his family and friends continue to live in the false certainty that he is safe, albeit gone and untraceable.

For us, Gerd’s personal integrity is beyond question. We have only vague information about the accusations the group made against him, but even more details could not shake us in the certainty that there is not a single argument to explain his shooting. Whatever the motives of those who killed him may have been – they lie beyond his person.

On the contrary, it is one of the macabre parodies of this story that Gerd, in whose political biography practical support for the Palestinian resistance has always played a central role, fell victim to one of the very groups that sees itself as part of this resistance. Our knowledge of the group and of Gerd’s relationship to it is limited. The connections go back to a period in our history under which we drew a line several years ago for political reasons. We do not know whether and to what extent the connections have changed in the meantime.

The time after the failed prisoner liberation at the end of June 1976 is remembered. At that time, a four-man commando, which included two Palestinians and two members of the RZ, Brigitte Kuhlmann and Wilfried “Bonni” Böse, took control of an Air France Airbus and demanded the release of more than 50 comrades, most of whom were being held in Israeli and West German prisons. On board the plane, which had taken off from Tel Aviv and landed in Athens on its flight to Paris before being diverted from there to Entebbe, were over 250 passengers, including around 100 Israeli citizens or Jews of other nationalities. After the non-Jewish passengers were released within a few days, the command extended its ultimatum to allow further negotiations. The Israeli government used this period of time to prepare a military solution. On the night of July 4, 1976, a special unit raided Entebbe airport and brought the hostage-taking to a bloody end. The commando was killed and not a single one of the prisoners whose release had been demanded was freed.

It took us years to come to terms with this setback. Under the impression of the loss of our friends, we were initially unable to grasp the political dimension of the catastrophe that Entebbe meant for us. Instead of realizing what we were being accused of, namely that we as an organization had taken part in an operation in the course of which Israeli citizens and Jewish passengers of other nationalities had been singled out and taken hostage, we were primarily concerned with the military aspect of the operation and its violent conclusion. The regime’s calculation was not to work out. In order to at least keep the option of freeing other comrades open, we had to act and not allow ourselves to be blocked by the alarming news about the course of the hostage-taking and the role of our comrades in it. We considered the report that the hostages had been segregated to be as much a product of psychological warfare as the claim that the German members of the commando had distinguished themselves in particular. We knew Brigitte and Bonni as anti-fascists and were aware of their motives for taking part in the action. Our concept of solidarity forbade criticism of the comrades; we refused to discuss mistakes, as if solidarity did not in principle include the right thing for individual comrades to make mistakes.

The discussion remained similarly superficial when it came to finding reasons for the failure of the action. We were unable to do more than criticize the manoeuvres. We complained that the original plans and agreements had not been adhered to and that the actual course of events had turned what had actually been planned on its head. We criticized the fact that the operation, which in our view had a purely pragmatic purpose, namely the immediate release, had increasingly taken on the character of a propaganda operation in the course of its duration, which Idi Amin [4] in particular would have known how to exploit. We accused the command of having been deprived of its authority in the course of the operation and that, after landing in Entebbe, the comrades merely had to follow the instructions issued elsewhere and far away from the action. We finally resigned ourselves to the special dynamics of military operations, even if our trust in direct international cooperation as a special quality of practical anti-imperialism had reached its limits.

We did not realize that the limits of this cooperation were not technical or tactical, but political, although the direction and course of the action spoke a clear language. The commando had taken hostages whose only commonality was that they were Jews; social characteristics such as origin or function, the question of social status or personal responsibility, i.e. criteria that we actually based our practice on, played no role in this case. The selection was made along ethnic lines. The fact that the only hostage who did not survive the hijacking was, of all people, a former concentration camp inmate, was not directly to the detriment of the commando, but was no less part of the logic of the operation. What a good year later, in the Mogadishu case [5], was to trigger a wave of criticism even among left-wing radicals, namely that an arbitrary group of German vacationers became a bargaining chip, we ignored in the Entebbe case, although the course of the action had turned the simplest principles of revolutionary politics and morality, which we otherwise claimed for ourselves, upside down. The appalling threat that everyone who enters Israeli territory must know what risk he is taking and that he himself is responsible for it had become bloody seriousness.

Entebbe was not an isolated incident, but the culmination of a development in the course of which we had moved further and further away from what we had once stood for. The sentences that Ulrike Meinhof [6] had written almost ten years earlier on the occasion of the Six-Day War [7] were forgotten: “There is no reason for the European left to give up its solidarity with the persecuted; it extends into the present and includes the state of Israel.” The Palestinians’ Black September [8], the Israeli air raids on the refugee camps, the mass misery in the occupied territories, the regime of terror exercised there by the occupying power, the reports from Israeli prisons were reason enough and at the same time a pretext for us to push our knowledge of Auschwitz into the background. We adopted the slogans of the Palestinian liberation struggle and ignored the fact that our history precluded unconditional partisanship. We interpreted the conflict with the categories of an anti-imperialism schooled in Vietnam [9], with which it could not be measured. We no longer saw Israel from the perspective of the Nazi extermination program, but only from the perspective of its settlement history: Israel was seen by us as an agent and outpost of Western imperialism in the middle of the Arab world, but not as a place of refuge for the survivors and those who got away, which is a necessity as long as renewed mass extermination cannot be ruled out as a possibility by anyone, that is, as long as anti-Semitism lives on as a historical and social fact. The dramatic fact that the Jews’ need for security can apparently only be realized against the Palestinians did not plunge us into an insoluble dilemma; rather, we took it as an opportunity to unconditionally side with those who, in our eyes, were the weaker ones. Whereas in other circumstances we insisted on the distinction between above and below, in the Middle East we saw above all good and bad peoples. We also criticized the patriotism of the Palestinians for this burial of Ida Borochovich-Pathos, although the history of Israel should have been a warning example to us that the realization of the Palestinian maximum demands would not mean the end of exploitation and oppression, but merely their perpetuation under different auspices. Suffering and persecution offer no protection against people becoming monsters as soon as they come together as a state people. Where two ethnic communities lay claim to the same piece of land, there are no revolutionary solutions. As understandable as the conclusions drawn by the Palestinians from their experiences of expulsion and persecution were, we could not share them in consequence without coming into an indissoluble contradiction with our history and our political self-image. The legitimate and necessary criticism of Israeli occupation policy and the self-evident solidarity with the resistance of the Palestinians had turned into a willingness to hold Jewish passengers, regardless of their nationality, responsible for the terror and atrocities of the Israeli regime, thereby exchanging social revolutionary standards for those of clan detention. The degree of historical amnesia [10] and moral disintegration expressed in this willingness is the heaviest burden on our history.

There are a number of reasons that explain this fatal development. Factors such as mistrust and doubt towards ourselves, who came from the rich North, or opportunism in view of the opportunities offered by cooperation with Palestinian organizations, certainly play a role here, as does the pressure to act under which we found ourselves due to the isolation conditions in the West German prisons, or the fact that with our concept of anti-Zionism we were only part of the historical current that had encompassed almost all factions of the Left at the time. But as plausible as all these reasons may be, they do not excuse the fact that we made enormous mistakes at that time, mistakes that should not have happened.

We cannot claim that we saw all this as such back then, in the first months after Entebbe. Instead of subjecting the logic, course and result of the action to a ruthless analysis in a fundamental debate and drawing conclusions for our future practice, we were satisfied with half-hearted criticism. Only some drew the obvious conclusion of returning to what our politics in the FRG stood for, namely the orientation towards the social and political movements in the country.

Nevertheless, it is also true that the experience of Entebbe has left deep scars. The pithy phrase about the caravan moving on while the dogs bark was more a slogan than a description of our reality. The knowledge of the catastrophe continued to act like a permanently smouldering driving force that repeatedly demanded self-critical discussions in which we could not avoid the truth. The debate, which was more subliminal than open, not only resulted in ruptures in personal friendships, it also touched the foundations of our political concept. Even if we cannot distinguish in detail where the experience played a causal role or where it merely provided the background for completely different discussions and decisions, there is no question that it was of central importance in determining the positions that shaped our policy in the following years. As justified as it is to accuse us of a lack of awareness, it would be wrong to deny that Entebbe – even if only in the form of the insidious poison of a life lie – has had a lasting impact on our political self-image.

The fact that we have done nothing since then to target Israeli institutions only came to our attention much later. Where the issue was on the agenda, we looked for West German institutions that benefited from Israel’s policies. We followed the treatment of Palestinian refugees by the West German asylum authorities more closely than the drama of counterinsurgency in the occupied territories. Instead of misunderstood actions, we did not take any actions at all if we had concerns about whether they were anti-Jewish or at least could have been interpreted as such. We had every reason to be cautious when dealing with the motives and political content of anti-Zionism. The certainty that even we on the left are not immune to anti-Semitic resentment, which can be concealed in a makeshift manner with national-revolutionary definitions, has practically blocked us. The dilemma of political abstinence that resulted from this seemed to some of us more likely to be resolved by taking the concept of Nazi continuity and our lives in this country as an opportunity to search for and refer to the traces of Jewish resistance to the National Socialist new order than by drawing politically fatal analogies in order to legitimize and satisfy our own need for action, as happens in some documents of left-wing anti-Zionism.

Another consequence was the gradual withdrawal from international contacts. Gradually, because there were old, also emotional connections and because we ourselves found it difficult to break with the concepts and ideological constructions that had made action in Entebbe possible in the first place. In this process, an understanding of politics was articulated and formed that differed fundamentally from that of the group we had been working with until then.

Differences that we had long ignored or attributed to the differences in conditions or our metropolitan status now turned out to be stark contradictions for which we could no longer find a common denominator. The claim to act in solidarity from different positions reached its limits.

Cooperation with this group was based on a concept of anti-imperialism that linked social liberation directly to the attainment of state sovereignty. The end of foreign rule, we thought, was tantamount to the beginning of the social revolution. Since the liberation organizations represented the people fighting for their independence, they were the direct addressees of international solidarity. That the seizure of power destroyed rather than developed the social content of the revolution in almost all cases, that the leaders of the liberation movements, no sooner had they occupied the command posts in the young nation states, turned out to be the protagonists of brutal developmental dictatorships, that it was above all the old cadres who profited from the newly won independence, while the continuing mass misery required a new explanation, that – in short – the whole dialectic of national and social liberation was above all profitable for the new rulers and that this was not a question of betrayal or corrupt morality, but corresponded to the nature of the founding of the state – all this did not fit into our picture of a homogeneous liberation process and was therefore ignored. Only when new struggles broke out after nation-building had been completed, when the most diverse forms of social counter-power articulated themselves, whose antagonistic opponent was the complex of violence and exploitation embodied by that state, were we able to relativize the myth of national independence and its inherent concept of the people, which homogenized all differences. We had to recognize that the spectrum of social needs and interests was not absorbed into the liberation organizations and that the dimension of gender and class struggle had not for a moment lost its significance even in the process of anti-imperialist liberation.

We could not be satisfied with the ethnic-racial slogans on which the inarticulate coexistence of fighters and commanders was based, since it was precisely those who, as cadres, created the instances and forms of future exploitation and subordination under the conditions of war. We could no longer ignore the fact that it was again the men who, in the form of the liberated nation-state, occupied the control points of exploitation and thus at the same time made a renewed attempt to regain control over women and reproduction. We had to scrutinize the myth of the people’s war for its revolutionary qualities and reconceive it in its duality as a moment of liberation and as a form of destructive rationalization – a rationalization whose first victims included the refugees as well as the women and children in the reception camps on the borders to the contested territories. In short, we had to break with all facets of the Leninist-Stalinist understanding of national liberation, which had determined the policy of the Comintern [11] from the beginning and which we had acquired in the course of the reception of Marxism-Leninism at the beginning of the 1970s.

This is not an accusation or a denunciation of those with whom we fought at that time, but the – certainly very generalized – summary of an experience. It is a criticism of the false ideas of harmony that we have had for a long time and that are still being nurtured here, especially by anti-imperialist groups. The self-evidence with which every revolutionary group or movement inscribes international solidarity on its banners is at odds with the difficulties of realizing it. The existence and violence of the common enemy are not enough to contain the antagonisms and conflicts within their own ranks. Again and again, antagonisms break out that are caused by differences in interests and objectives or by self-imposed ideological barriers. There is always a moment when what one group considers to be absolutely right and necessary is harmful and wrong in the eyes of the other. Despite the claim to commonality in action and unity in the face of the opponent, this results in the sharpest disputes, which can go as far as self-destruction. However, the outcome of such controversies within the revolutionary camp is not decided by good will and better intentions, but – as elsewhere – by the balance of power.

Gerd had spent time in prison after Entebbe. He had been observed by a surveillance group while trying to set fire to a movie theater where the film about the plane hijacking was being shown at the time and was arrested one day later – in January 1977. He was sentenced to five years in prison before the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court for attempted arson and membership of the RZ. [12] When he got out again at the end of 1981, he encountered a completely different situation with us. He never accepted the break we had made with this part of our history.

He shared the criticism of other comrades, with whom there were heated disputes that went as far as separation due to our decision to break away from the international links. He saw the reduction to our own context as a weakening, the emphasis on political difference as a split. The price we would pay for emphasizing our autonomy would be disappearing into insignificance. Voluntarily renouncing the implementation of concrete anti-imperialism not only would make a mockery of our revolutionary claim, it also would amount to a capitulation to very practical demands such as maintaining the option of prisoner liberation, securing opportunities for retreat or preserving a certain level of action. It would be a fiction to believe that the RZs could fulfill the tasks we have set ourselves on their own. Moreover, the break would result in a loss of subjective radicalism; it would already be due more to our pusillanimity than to any real necessity. For the deceptive advantage of a “clean slate”, we would have brought the RZ down to the level of left-wing small group militancy and thrown the guerrilla claim overboard. Our “self-criticism” in the matter of Entebbe and afterwards would be a document of mendacious double morality, which would only be tenable because we’d completely block out other realities from our perception. It’d be a perverse wishful thinking and at the same time cynical towards actual suffering if we are revolutionary and want to keep our fingers clean. Politics would not function according to the standards of interpersonal morality. The break, he predicted, would usher in the rapid end of the RZ.

In contrast to our decision, Gerd stuck to the idea of a direct reference to the Palestinian resistance, not least because he felt attracted by the solidarity and subjective radicalism experienced there. He was aware of the fact that this determination was interspersed with deeply macho forms of communication, in all their contradictoriness, and prevented him from making a definitive decision in favor of a life within these structures. He tried to do justice to the diversity of objectives and requirements in his person. Despite the contradictions that arose between him and us, we also saw it as a strength that he was able to think in contradictions and endure tensions that arise not least from the ambivalence and brokenness of metropolitan subjectivity. Where we had retreated to the seemingly safe terrain of a political practice that we considered manageable, he sought more comprehensive solutions. Where doubts, questions and uncertainties held us back, he fought his way through according to the motto: “Who gives a shit, it has to work.” He kept the old contacts because he wanted to and because he knew he had a responsibility to his comrades there, but perhaps also in the unspoken expectation that one day we would think better of it and he would be able to re-establish the broken contacts. When we tried to pin him down to a definite decision, he evaded it. He insisted on his own path – against totalitarian group claims, against all attempts at appropriation, from whatever side. He refused where the fine line between commitment and regimentation was crossed. We had our difficulties with this and yet we loved him for it. We were always fascinated by the way he lived his convictions, precisely because they were alien to us in this form.

He never allowed himself to be forced into anything, no matter how right it seemed to him. Anyone who knew him knows about the thousands of different stories he got involved in without allowing himself to be reduced to just one. He deeply mistrusted the puritanism and rigorism of some leftists, who at some point lamented the fact that they had sacrificed part of their lives to the revolution. What may have given the impression of discontinuity at first glance was the desire to live in contradictions, born of the certainty that the straight path may be the shortest mathematical connection between two points, but politically it is certainly not the quickest and best way to success. What falls down to the left and right could later prove to be indispensable and irreplaceable. His answer to the question of how a life in antagonism to the prevailing conditions is possible at all under metropolitan conditions was the reconciliation of apparent opposites and self-assertion against everything that excludes others and everything else.

It is easy to imagine that this view, which he did not propagate but lived, offended people everywhere when you consider the whole range of activities that made up his life after prison. He worked as an employee of the Green Party in the European Parliament and wrote reports for the WDR [West German broadcast], in which he dealt with issues of preventive detention [13] as well as illegal gambling and triathlon. He was involved in the prison group, wrote and visited imprisoned comrades, helped to found the newspaper “Bruchstücke” and cultivated his contacts with former fellow prisoners who were now at large. He lived openly as a gay man, organized events on the subject of Aids and enjoyed the gay scene in Ibiza. He published texts about Israeli politics [14] and took on tasks that arose from his international contacts. He lived in the middle of the Düsseldorf political scene and withdrew from it when the legal framework for action became too narrow for him. He criticized the half-heartedness of the RZ and helped us unreservedly wherever he could. He raised the expectations of many and inevitably only fulfilled some of them. Those who wanted him completely were always disappointed.

When Gerd went to a meeting with the group in November 1987, he did so at his own insistence. The fact that he was put on trial immediately after his arrival must have caught him completely unprepared. He could not have been aware of any mistake or omission. Otherwise he would have embarked on the journey with greater misgivings, because he had no illusions about the code and the rules in the group and accepted them.

We do not want to speculate about the motives of those responsible for his death. The only thing that is obvious is that this is a clash of standards from two different worlds. Under conditions dictated by the logic of war, unconditional allegiance and willingness to subordinate count, whereas views and behavior that do not conform to the usual patterns are met with mistrust and rejection. Where everyday life is determined by military attacks, a permanent state of emergency, curfews, arrests and torture, the fronts are clear. There is little room for ambivalence due to the metropolitan origins, where the question of one’s own person must sound almost ridiculous. What is not only justified but absolutely necessary here as a search, a trial and error, a struggle for new impulses, is quickly suspected of indecision, hesitation and deviation there. But it is only a small step from doubting loyalty to being accused of betrayal, along with the murderous consequences that this entails.

And yet we find such an explanation wrong; it is superficial and short-sighted. It legitimizes a conscious decision with the compulsion of circumstances and declares those who committed it to be victims of their actions. The experience of the cruelty of the enemy does not relieve anyone of the obligation to be able to provide information at any moment about the means and methods that he himself employs. The frivolous slogan about the devaluation of life under the conditions of war, with which we seek explanations for events that are incomprehensible to us, is a cynicism that is belied by the images of the victims. Moreover, in this specific case, it suggests that what is the responsibility of a single group applies to the Palestinian resistance as a whole. However, we have no reason whatsoever to make any generalizations; we consider it wrong to draw conclusions about the constitution of an entire movement from the rules and methods of one group.

No: the willingness to murder a comrade cannot be excused by the harshness of the conditions; it is the expression of a political program whose sole content is the attainment of power and whose language is that of future despots. History is full of examples of revolutionary organizations or movements that have had to fight under comparably brutal conditions without adopting the methods of their opponents, citing their infamy. The fact that this is the lesser part, that the majority of Bolshevik parties and national liberation organizations proceeded according to the motto that the end justifies the means and that everything is permitted against the enemy if it only serves the cause, is not a counter-argument. This is a political debate that has its historical points of reference in the Paris Commune as well as in the October Revolution or the Spanish Civil War. Where victory becomes the measure of all things, not only the best but also the worst forces are released.

Whoever wants to gain power, whatever the cost, and defend it at all costs, undermines it at the same moment. The perversion of the revolution, wrote Rosa Luxemburg [15] to the Bolsheviks, is worse than its defeat. The argument of success, on which the orthodox communists have insisted for decades against the “romantic losers” from the libertarian groups, is now proving its inadequacy. We can and will no longer ignore the fact that a man’s world is also running riot here, that it is always a question of shielding obsolete bastions of power and spheres of influence against each other and against the claims from below, and that in such a world a gay identity per se meets with suspicion. Because we have learned this and because we prefer to see ourselves in the tradition of the Spanish anarchists rather than that of the Comintern, we reject all euphemistic speeches that invoke the laws of war. Certain rules may be explainable elsewhere, but they gain validity because they are preceded by a conscious political decision. Not only can we not make them our own because we are fighting under different conditions, but because they are diametrically opposed to our own aspirations and utopias. Gerd’s death makes it clear once again that there are worlds between this thinking and ours, between which no mediation is possible.

The fact that we have so far made violence in our own ranks taboo and are only now horrified by it when it happens to us is a criticism that we must accept. We have no excuse for it. Only Gerd’s death has made us sensitive to the extent of the tragedy that it means that even within revolutionary organizations political questions are answered by military means. It prompted us to remember all the thousands of comrades, known and nameless, who have lost their lives or suffered because they were accused of treason or simply caught between the millstones of an internal organizational power struggle.

However, his death is not an objection to revolutionary practice in general. The knowledge of violence in our own ranks is a reason for us to stop, to mourn, to despair, but not a welcome opportunity to throw in the towel and make peace with the situation. Anyone who understands us in this way and thinks that now that one of our own has been hit, we are blowing the horn of those for whom terror has always been a normal means of political business, is on the wrong track. We are merely repelled by the complacency and hypocrisy of those citizens who are now gleefully digging into the wounds of revolutionary movements and outdoing themselves in finding traces of their moral decay, while deliberately overlooking the mountains of corpses on which the Western prosperity they cherish and the system of democracy that has become a new rallying cry have been built.

The debate triggered by Gerd’s murder is taking place on this side of the barricade. It will have to deal with the connection between politics and morality, the contrast between national sovereignty and social liberation and the difference between revolutionary violence and terror. At stake is the Leninist legacy that has become ingrained in our minds and determines our political thinking more than we often realize. Recourse to history can solve the difficulties we face here just as little as emphatic [16] reference to global struggles. Precisely because revolutionary politics is so isolated in a country like the BRD [West Germany], it must constantly reassure itself of a social location if it wants to be more than the mere expression of the subjective state of mind of its actors or the faint reflection of ideological constructs. How quickly all the fine words and the best intentions become mere waste as soon as we no longer refer to a concrete reality, but are oriented towards demands that have their origins in other conditions, is demonstrated not least by this chapter of our history.

In 1973, RZ comrades said in an interview [17]: “But there is also a part of our policy which […] many comrades do not understand and do not accept, and which the masses do not understand either and which will not interest them for the time being. Nevertheless, we consider it to be correct. This part of the struggle relates to internationalism, which is primarily about solidarity with the comrades of foreign guerrilla movements and solidarity with the struggling peoples of other countries.” What was formulated there as an attempt to find an answer to the global non-simultaneity of revolutionary developments was in fact at the same time a decoupling from the local social process. It was a carte blanche for a practice that does not even need to make an effort at political mediation. The fact that we remained silent on Entebbe for years was only the logic of the argument. At the same time, however, this silence was also an eloquent admission that we had maneuvered ourselves into a dead end: What we were doing at the international level was not the anti-imperialist dimension of what we were fighting for in the BRD, but stood in stark contrast to it. We had to make a decision. Anyone who followed our practice in the 1980s knows how this decision turned out.

Notes:

1. Roque Dalton

Writer and activist of the Salvadoran ERP (Revolutionary People’s Army); after nine years of exile and two years of illegality in El Salvador, he was denounced as a CIA agent and conspirator by the ERP and murdered in 1975. Dalton was the victim of a power struggle within the ERP over different military conceptions of the revolutionary process. Dalton, like the majority of the ERP, advocated the expansion and anchoring of the party in the people (“mass line”), while the other position propagated a “rapid popular uprising”. After two more murders, the majority withdrew from the organization and founded the FARN (Armed Forces of National Resistance).
The ERP, discredited by its actions, initially sank into insignificance. These and other murders within the revolutionary left (Jovel 1980/Montes 1983) had a traumatizing and paralysing effect.
Literature: Roque Dalton: Y otros Lugares/and other places. Poems German-Spanish Basel/Frankfurt/M.: Verlag Roter Stern/Stroemfeld, 1981
For developments in El Salvador see, among others:
Literature: Ralf Syring: War in El Salvador. Resistance against the further development of underdevelopment. Berlin: Verlag Schwarze Risse, 1989

2. 18.12.1987

Nationwide raid with 33 searches and arrest of Ingrid Strobl and Ulla Penselin; as a result of the raids etc., several people went illegal. The BKA defines the “topics relevant to the attack” as genetic engineering, refugee policy and population policy.
Literature: Brochure group for Ulla and Ingrid (ed.): Anschlag auf die Schere am Gen und die Schere im Kopf. Hamburg: Konkret Verlag, 1988
Literature: Deep Insights. Documentation and background to the house searches (18.12.87) and the arrests. Bochum: Self-published, 1988
Literature: Prozeßbüro Ingrid Strobl (ed.): Nicht zu fassen. Cologne: Self-published, 1988/89

3. Stasi

Ministry for State Security; former GDR secret service
Literature: David Gill, Ulrich Schröder: Ministry for State Security. Berlin: Rowohlt- Berlin, 1991

4. Idi Amin

After a military coup in 1971, Idi Amin took dictatorial power in Uganda; repression and terror cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. A border war with Tanzania and the ensuing civil war put an end to Amin’s regime, who fled first to Libya and then to France in 1979.

5. Mogadishu

Capital of Somalia. In Mogadishu on October 17/18, 1977, the Lufthansa plane hijacked by a Palestinian commando and parked at the airport is stormed by the GSG 9 of the Federal Border Guard; the hostages are freed and three hijackers are killed.

6. Meinhof, Ulrike

1934- 1976; spokeswoman for the movement against nuclear death; editor and columnist for the magazine Konkret from 1959 to 1968. Ulrike Meinhof was involved in the Baader liberation on 4.5.1970; RAF from 1970; arrested on 15.6.1972; prisoner in the ‘Toten Trakt’; sentenced to eight years in prison on 29.11.1974; found hanged in her cell on 9.5.1976.
Literature: Ulrike Marie Meinhof: The dignity of man can be violated. Essays and polemics. Berlin: Wagenbach Verlag, 1980
Literature: Statement by Ulrike Meinhof, concerning the Berlin-Moabit trial for the liberation of Andreas Baader, in: Der Kampf gegen die Vernichtungshaft.
Literature: last texts by ulrike. Ed.: international committee for the defense of political prisoners in western europe. o.O.: self-published, 1976
Texts by Ulrike Meinhof also in:
Literature: das info. Letters from prisoners of the RAF 1973- 1977. ed. by Pieter H. Bakker Schut. Kiel: Neuer Malik Verlag, 1987
Literature: texts: the RAF. Malmö: Bo Cavefors Publishing House, 1977
Literature: The death of Ulrike Meinhof. Report of the international commission of inquiry. Tübingen: iva- Verlag, 1979
Literature: Peter Brückner: Ulrike Meinhof and the German situation. Berlin: Wagenbach Verlag, 1976

7. Six-Day War

June 1967; Israel occupies the Sinai Peninsula, parts of Jordan, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as well as the Golan Heights.

8. Black September

Black September refers to the massacre of Palestinians living in Jordan by the Jordanian army in 1970.

9. Vietnam

National liberation struggle until 1975 against various occupying powers (France, Japan, USA); from 1945/46 Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) under Ho Chi Minh, but only won against the French after their defeat at Dien Bien Phu under the leadership of General Vo Nguyen Giap.
From 1955 onwards, there was increasing US intervention; by 1966, 400,000 US soldiers had been deployed to South Vietnam, supporting the corrupt South Vietnamese government and in some cases committing major war atrocities. The popular resistance of the FNL/Vietcong, the US anti-war movement and the increasing costs of the war lead to the withdrawal of US troops in 1973. With the fall of Saigon in April 1975, the attempt to build a united Vietnam begins.
Literature: SDS West Berlin (ed.): Internationaler Vietnamkongreß 1968. Der Kampf des vietnamesischen Volkes und die Globalstrategie des US- Imperialismus. West Berlin: Edition Voltaire, 1968; Hamburg: Libertarian Association, 1987

10. amnesia

Loss of memory

11. Comintern

Communist International (1919-1943); originally conceived as a coordinating body for international revolutionary movements based in Berlin. However, it evolved into a control center for Soviet power politics based in Moscow. Leading members of European communist parties were disempowered and the orientation towards the Soviet Union was enforced. Stalin’s later thesis of building “socialism in one country” was the central guiding principle. In the Executive Committee (ECCI) of the CI, the social fascism theory/united front, but also the popular front theory, was developed and implemented.
Literature: Pierre Frank: History of the Communist International. Frankfurt/M.: ISP Verlag

12. Entebbe Film Trial

Literature: the legalization of lawlessness. Brochure on the trial against Gerd Albartus and Enno Schwall. o.O.: Selbstverlag, 1977

13. security detention

The continued detention of a prisoner after the official term of imprisonment has expired.
Literature: Autonomie Neue Folge: Special issue “Sicherungsverwahrung”. Hamburg: Self-published, 1980

14. texts on the politics of Israel

Gerd Albartus translated the book, among others:
Literature: Livia Rokach: Israels heiliger Terror. A study based on Moshe Sharett’s personal diary and other documents of his time. Pfungstadt: Minotaurus Project, 1982

15. Rosa Luxemburg