
Bettina Rohlâs âThe RAF (Red Army Fraction) Loves You â The German Federal Republic in the Intoxication of 68 â A Family at the Centre of the Movementâ is several books for the price of one.
Rohlâs mother, Ulrike Meinhof, was one of the leaders of the early 1970s urban-terrorist RAF, otherwise known as the Baader-Meinhof Group (which Rohl insists on calling the Baader-Meinhof Gang, to underline what she sees as its essentially apolitical and criminal character).
One of the books within the book provides an insight into the relationship between Rohl and her mother. Clearly, there was no love lost between them. Only rarely throughout the bookâs 600 pages does Rohl refer to âmy motherâ. Otherwise, it is just plain Meinhof.
The bookâs title (âThe RAF Loves Youâ) is a quote from a letter sent to Rohl by Meinhof after her imprisonment. Rohl was distinctly unimpressed. She was too busy looking forward to Christmas, which, with her mother safely behind bars, she was now allowed to celebrate.
âWas Meinhof a Lying Piece of Shit?â asks the title of one of the bookâs chapters. Rohl needs only three pages to answer in the affirmative.
Not for Rohl the portrayal of Meinhof as a victim of manipulation by other RAF members. For Rohl, Meinhof opted for terrorism as a form of escapism. Although portrayed by her admirers as âthe Mother Theresa of Terrorismâ, she was really âthe original desperate housewifeâ.
Meinhof wanted Bettina (and her twin sister) to have a proper revolutionary upbringing. This culminated in Meinhofâs decision, after she had gone underground, to send her daughters to be brought up in a Jordanian camp for orphaned Palestinian refugees.
This proved too much for some of Meinhofâs allies. They helped the childrenâs father bring them back from Sicily, where they had been en route to Jordan.
But Rohlâs father â owner, publisher and editor of the magazine Konkret, a mixture of left politics and soft porn, heavily subsidised in its earlier years by the East German government â does not come out of the book much better.
As Meinhof became an international media sensation, Rohlâs father âjumped on the Meinhof trainâ and âbegan to travel on a Meinhof ticket.â Who better to conjure up âfairy talesâ about the too-sensitive-for-this-cruel-world Ulrike Meinhof than her former husband?
Adding family-life touches to the portrayal of Meinhof as âan immaculate Virgin Mary figureâ, he ended up as a character from the medieval epic Die Nibelungen: wielding âthe sword of justiceâ in a vain attempt to free âthe prisoner Meinhofâ from the RAFâs âevil influencesâ.
The second book within the book is Rohlâs sweeping dismissal of the West German Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (APO) of the late 1960s, with many of whose leading figures she had a childhood acquaintance.
The APO had nothing to rebel against. West Germany was âthe best republic which had ever existed on German soil.â It was a country in which âlabour was worth more than capitalâ. The major problem in the late 1960s was that âthere was no problemâ.
The APO was âintellectually and emotionally beyond complete madness.â Led by guru-in-chief Rudi Dutschke (âa student who had no time to study but who dreamed of world revolution insteadâ), it combined an âideological Nirvanaâ with fashion-accoutrement street protests.
Book number three is Rohlâs settling of accounts: Anyone who has pandered or contributed to the beatification of Saint Ulrike of the Kalashnikov over the past 50 years is savaged in a staccato of denunciation
The writer Heinrich Boll, the singer Giovanna Marini, the dramatist Johan Kresnik, the poet Erich Fried, the former German President Johannes Rau, the former Minister of the Interior Otto Schily, the Meinhof biographer Alois Prinz, the historian Gerd Koenen, the painter Gerhard Richter, etc., etc., etc.
And Alfred Klaus as well â the police chief who headed the âSpecial Terrorism Commissionâ set up to defeat the RAF. According to Rohl, he spent too much time on âkitchen psychologyâ and ended up providing a left-liberal cover for bank robberies, bombings and murders.
Rohlâs settling of accounts is only one facet of her broader political analysis of the past 50 years of German history. According to Rohl, the APO won: âThe state lost. Since then the state has been an object of suspicion, and that is already defeat.â
The mad Maoists who got high on death and destruction (Rohl: âThe revolution is written in blood.â) became doyens of academia, the media and politics. They now hegemonise German politics and society, âstifling the western idea of freedom of the individualâ.
This delirium reaches a climax in Rohlâs claim that German Chancellor Angela Merkel âagitates on the 68 wavelengthâ and is now âthe head of the 68 snakeâ. In (supposedly) anti-fascist politics, âMeinhof was the great grandmother, but Merkel is todayâs queen of anti-fa.â
âThe RAF Loves Youâ is one of a number of books published in Germany this year which âcommemorateâ 1968. It contains some previously unpublished materials and personal recollections. But that does not compensate for its wildly right-wing political slant.