“that’s the question: w h o will use the publicity that Stammheim has for their own ends: them or us, the federal prosecutors for the implementation of their strategy of extermination against the urban guerrilla on the terrain of the judiciary or us.”
–Entry in the info from 1975 or 1976
A RAF lawyer wrote in the info that he would respond to a summons for prisoners to appear in a Berlin trial by demanding an end to isolation and an end to the “show trials”. Berlin was a show trip, as was Zweibrücken before it and Frankfurt after it, just not in the sense intended by the lawyer. The trial in Stammheim, however, was the biggest show in town. The stuttgart suburb of Stammheim has become synonymous with the RAF. It is shorthand for the debate over prison conditions, it will forever be linked with the deaths of the leading RAF figures, and from May 21, 1975, to April 28, 1977, it was the site of themes expensive trial in the history of the Federal Republic. This trial, in particular, provided a stage for both the West German judiciary and the RAF prisoners to communicate with their respective audiences beyond the courtroom. It offered the state a chance to perform due process and reframe the terrorist threat as mere criminality, while for Meinhof and the RAF it offered an opportunity to again repackage the group’s terrorism, this time in terms of human rights and international law. Having reshaped its message for the prison context via self-starvation, the group developed two main performative strategies for the courtroom: the constructions of the “political prisoners” and the “prisoner of war” (POW). Both sets of strategies must, however, be seen in the context of the numerous proceedings that came before Stammheim, during which both sides honed their tactics through a process of trial and error.
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leith passmore 