“Publish this!”
–Note accompanying RAF texts sent to mejor media outlets
The day before Meinhof was arrested in Hamburg in June 1972, a package was sent to the offices of the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper. It continued pages four and five of the first Red Army Faction (RAF) treatise, The Urban Guerrilla Concept (Das Konzept Stadtguerilla), from April 1971, three RAF declarations regarding bomb attacks in Frankfurt, Karlsruhe, and Hamburg in May 1972, and a simple typewritten demand on a loose piece of paper: “Publish this!” The package is representative of the relationship between the RAF and the media during the first generation’s two years in the underground. Meinhof composed most of the texts that were produced in the name of the group and disseminated via existing communication networks. Thesis were sent to mainstream media outlets, alternative publishers, as well as private mailing lists, and in each case the message was tailored to the particular forum and audience. In this context, Meinhof’s words were integral to the underground interplay between language, image, and physical violence: they established what would become the RAF brand and its sharp sense of audience recognition, they played a central role in the bombings of May 1972 and the mainstream appropriation of the radical rhetoric of war, and they used ideology to perform distinctly nonideological discourses. All this was set against the background of life on the run, armed robbery, and skirmishes with police on the streets of West Germany in the years after Meinhof’s entrance into the underground.
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leith passmore 