For over two decades, Brigitte Mohnhaupt has been known as the
most dangerous woman in Germany. The distinction is well deserved.
A onetime commando in the Red Army Faction, the Marxist-Leninist
guerrilla movement that terrorized democratic West Germany in the
'70s and '80s, she was sentenced in 1985 to five life terms and an
additional 15 years for her role in a spate of high-profile
kidnappings and murders. Prison life has prompted her neither to
repudiate her radical convictions nor to betray the faintest
glimmer of remorse. It would be difficult, in short, to conceive of
a less qualified candidate for early release.
So it is a harsh verdict on the present state of German justice
that Mohnhaupt was pronounced free this week. “Life
term” being one of those hoary anachronisms the country’s legal
establishment is disinclined to take seriously, Mohnhaupt had been
allowed to file for parole and German authorities last
month convened a hearing on her case. On Monday, a federal court
ordered her release on five years probation, which will
become official on March 27. Having freed the most menacing member
of the RAF’s living leadership, authorities have little grounds for
denying the three RAF veterans who remain incarcerated — Christian
Klar, Birgit Hogefeld and Eva Haule — the same privilege.
To describe this week’s ruling as outrageous is to traffic in
understatement. To begin with, nothing in Mohnhaupt’s record
suggests that she merited a pardon (German authorities contest the term but, legalisms aside, it is
exactly that) and there is at least one good reason for thinking
she did not: As the architect of several RAF terror campaigns —
most notoriously in the so-called “German
autumn” of 1977, which saw the kidnapping and cold-blooded
execution of Hanns Martin Schleyer, then-head of the German
employers’ federation, and the hijacking of a Frankfurt-bound
Lufthansa airliner, the Landshut, in a failed bid to win the release of
jailed RAF members — Mohnhaupt unquestionably has blood on her
hands.
Nor is she burdened by regrets. Just the opposite: In a 1993
letter to RAF colleagues on the outside, she urged a continued
commitment to the fight against the evils of capitalism. The “sense
and contents of our politics” remained an “inseparable” and
“existential” part of her life, she wrote. Not so for her comrades.
Embarrassingly for Mohnhaupt, they severed ties with the jailed RAF
leadership that same year. Shortly thereafter, in 1998, the RAF was
officially disbanded. If there is any evidence that Mohnhaupt is
similarly ready to rejoin civil society, it is a well-guarded
secret.
How is it that she has nevertheless won her freedom? Any
plausible answer to that question must plumb the cultural fissure
that has formed between much of the country and the political,
journalistic and judicial elites who, for assorted reasons, have
dispensed with such quaint notions as justice to embrace a coldly
procedural view of criminal punishment.
For politicians, particularly the formidable Green Party and the
grassroots Left, Mohnhaupt is much more than a graying radical.
Reading the appeals for her release these past few weeks, one could
detect a desire to erase the unsavory fact, of which the RAF is a
throbbing reminder, that the hard Left took its stand with the
wrong side during the Cold War. It was hardly a coincidence that
Volker Beck, a Green Party parliamentarian from Cologne and a
veteran of the “non-aligned peace movement” — a spectacularly
dishonest handle for what was effectively an organized cheering
section for Soviet expansionism — had called for Mohnhaupt’s
release because it would be “a signal of reconciliation.” In this
instance, of course, coming together would mean leaving behind a
dark past.
If many in the political world were eager to move forward,
something akin to nostalgia prevailed among the media and
intellectual set. That’s not surprising. For much of its history
the RAF, an offshoot of the Baader-Meinhof terror gang, could count
on the support and sympathy of a credulous cognoscenti. Jean-Paul
Sartre, even as he (meaninglessly) distanced himself from their
violent tactics, saluted the RAF as a “real revolutionary
movement.” In a show of solidarity, Sartre even visited RAF leaders
in prison. Heinrich Boll, winner of the 1972 Nobel Prize in
literature, romanticized the RAF as a valiant David doing battle
against the Goliath of the German state. Boldly braving the odds,
the RAF, Boll declared, were “six to six million.”
Perverse as this plotline was — recall that this was a far-left
terrorist group working to sabotage a liberal-democratic state
while savagely gunning down business leaders, diplomats, judges and
unfortunates caught in the crossfire — it found a receptive
audience. Page through academic histories of the Cold War and you
are bound to find RAF members described as “underdog outlaws
persecuted by an overbearing state,” in the unfortunate words of Drew University professor Jeremy Varon.
Inconveniently, RAF faithful were, almost to the man, children of
middle-class privilege, while the group’s insignia, a submachine gun superimposed on a Communist
star, spoke volumes about its destructive intentions. But why let
anything so banal as the facts get in the way of a good propaganda
parable?
In the end, the RAF’s call for communist revolution failed to
“detonate in the consciousness of the masses,” as early RAF
propaganda announced with characteristic militancy. But it
triggered lasting affection among some of the West’s opinion
leaders.
Such enthusiasm as exists for the release of the Mohnhaupt and
the remaining RAF members also has its source in Europe’s
distinctive definition of justice. No longer is repentance or even
the admission of guilt regarded as a precondition for parole. In
the new, ostensibly more enlightened understanding, the mere fact
that someone is eligible for parole makes them entitled to it.
Giving voice to this fashionable legal wisdom, Wolfgang Kraushaar,
a scholar at the Institute for Social Research in Hamburg, recently
assured Berlin’s left-leaning Tagesspiegel newspaper that
it was absurd to expect prisoners to evince remorse. “This would be
an inadmissible mixture of a moral-political attitudes with a legal
procedure,” he explained. “It is a question of justice, and remorse
should play no role.” The paper enthusiastically agreed,
editorializing that demands to keep Mohnhaupt in prison showed only
that a “portion of society is always vindictive.”
Which brings us to these “vindictive” elements. Or, as they are
otherwise known, the families of RAF’s 34 victims. Backed by more
than half of the German public, at least if newspaper polls are any
indication, they had petitioned the federal government to deny an
early release to Mohnhaupt and her RAF comrades. Short of that,
they had hoped to get them to acknowledge their responsibility for
the murders of their loved ones. Michael Buback, the son of
Siegfried Buback, a West German attorney general murdered in 1977,
reputedly on Mohnhaupt’s orders, spoke for many when he told an
interviewer that “it would be important to learn, finally, who shot
my father.” Even this small consolation now appears unlikely.
Mohnhaupt’s release heralds a dismal end to the RAF saga. In the
blood-soaked aftermath of the autumn of 1977, German authorities
decided, wisely, that they would no longer negotiate with
terrorists. And so they haven’t. How much more impressive their
resolution would have been had they also applied it to keeping
convicted terrorists behind bars.
