The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History

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See Appendix III: For Us It Was a Question of Learning Explosives and Shooting Techniques, page 339 .
    36 .
Spiegel,
“Die alte RAF ist zu Ende gegangen.”
    37 . Ibid.
    38 .
Spiegel
, “Knarren im Wald,” November 15, 1982.
    39 . United Press International, “West Germans Nab Terrorist,”
Tyrone Daily Herald,
November 17, 1982. Twenty years after the fact, Klar remembered the media speculation that he was “glad” to be captured, and addressed it thus: “It was meant to mock someone they had long sought and had finally gotten. When one is arrested and there is no room for negotiation, it gets nasty. That’s the case, and one must deal with it. I saw it this way at the time: more retaliation against someone who has been taken prisoner. It is perhaps also a projection, one that I often experienced afterwards in this general context from the
taz
milieu, which always pontificates about the extreme pressure of being underground and all that sort of thing.” (Christian Klar, interviewed by Günter Gaus.)
    40 .
Verwandtentreffen am
13.
November 1982 in Frankfurt.
    41 . Dellwo (2007), 173.
The Guerilla, the Resistance, and the Anti-Imperialist Front
    We are going to discuss what we have learned in recent years, and what we want to do as a result. What we have to say will, of course, be general in nature.
    We believe that it is now possible and necessary for the revolutionary strategy to enter a new stage in the imperialist centers.
    First, we will outline some discussions, initiatives, and actual steps taken over the past two or three years to prepare the terrain from which to act.
    An idea and a concept have taken form from which we can proceed. The first concrete steps indicate possibilities that would be effective: THE GUERILLA AND THE RESISTANCE UNITED IN A SINGLE FRONT.
    Our vision is to bring together the options already explored in different areas and different scenes, often in a diffuse fashion and with only a vague underlying plan, so as to bring them to a new level of struggle, that is to say, to make them effective and strategic. If this is not done now, then all the new, productive, and open developments—the unprecedented developments—risk losing their clarity and degenerating.
    WE SEE ‘77 AS A POINT OF TRANSITION FOR THE GUERILLA FROM THE FIRST STAGE TO THE NEXT.
    The conflict between the guerilla and the state in ‘77 was the catalyst for a new political situation here. Within the dialectic of attack and reaction, the conditions of struggle were transformed. And just as the conditions have changed, so can and must the form of struggle change. After ‘77, nothing was as it had been before: not the state, not the left, not the role of the FRG in international politics, not the role of armed struggle in the center within the international class struggle. We made errors in ‘77, and the offensive was turned into our most serious defeat. We have some things to say about this.
    The situation today—which developed as a result of the confrontation, and which can be seen more clearly now than was previously the case—shows that neither the errors nor the defeat were decisive.
    In a fundamental way, the ‘77 offensive marked the end of the struggle we had been waging since ‘70 and forced us to make some decisions.
    During the entire period of struggles that gave birth to the RAF and allowed it to grow, we concentrated on one question of power: whether the prisoners, whom the state had used both to represent the RAF andas a pretext for its own policies, would be freed. In the same way, more generally, the struggle to implement the urban guerilla concept, the question of whether the armed struggle could actually take root in the FRG, thereby opening up a revolutionary perspective, is fundamentally a question of power. This question has been at the heart of all the actions, skirmishes, manhunts, and media campaigns over the past years. That is

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