Remembering the Armed Struggle: My Time with the Red Army Faction

by Margrit Schiller, Ann Hansen (Foreword)

Margrit Schiller was an early member of the Red Army Faction, the West German urban guerrilla group. In 1971 she was captured and charged with a murder she did not commit, and upon her release she returned to the underground, being captured again in early 1974. She would spend most of the 1970s in prison, enduring isolation conditions meant to break the human spirit, and participating hunger strikes and other acts of resistance along with other political prisoners from the RAF. In Remembering the Armed Struggle, Schiller recounts the process through which she joined her generation’s revolt in the 1960s, going from work with drug users to joining the antipsychiatry political organization the Socialist Patients’ Collective and then the RAF. She tells of how she met and worked alongside the group’s founding members, Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, Jan-Carl Raspe, Irmgard Möller, and Holger Meins; how she learned the details of the May Offensive and other actions while in her prison cell; about the struggles to defend human dignity in the most degraded of environments, and the relationships she forged with other women in prison. Also included are a foreword by Ann Hansen, who situates the draconian prison conditions inflicted on the RAF within the context of a global counterinsurgency program that would help spawn the plague of mass incarceration we still face today, an afterword by the late Osvaldo Bayer, and an appendix by J. Smith and André Moncourt summarizing the politics and history of the RAF in the 1970s. “Margrit Schiller’s life story Remembering the Armed Struggle, is not meant to mark a hard break with the Red Army Faction, but is more of a critical reflection in the spirit of solidarity. Even those who do not share Schiller’s perspective well find it interesting to join her as she looks back on her years underground and in prison.” diesseits “Schiller’s recollections are profoundly honest and to the point. She neither glorifies the Red Army Faction nor does she repent or distance herself from her past.” taz “I am moved by the honesty of this story, showing the limits, doubts, and uncertainties. Margrit is far from pretending to be a hero or providing a heroic tale. May Margrit’s experiences and those of her comrades help us to continue the battle for the freedom of political prisoners in any corner of the world. May they also allow us to radically question the prison system, which is used as a space to discard the excluded and to criminalize poverty. . . . Memory, freedom, and desire are part of the experience of resistance of our bodies, of our lives. And Margrit, stripping away her own history in this book, with pain but with courage, helps us to continue spinning colors, flavors, sounds and aromas in this mild time of attempts.” Claudia Korol, author of Las Revoluciones de Berta (2019) from the Prologue to the Spanish edition “The book challenges prejudices and dares to address subjects that are taboo, especially in these latitudes so plagued by silences about the human aspects that mark the reality of the struggle to free ourselves. This story is the story of hundreds of antisystem militants . . . [It] contains that old but not perished left-wing argument from the 1960s about how words should have some connection to actions . . .” Grupo de ex presas Memoria v testimonios

Genres: History, Germany, Nonfiction

179 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 20, 2021

Reviews

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I watched a movie about the Red Army Faction a bunch of years ago and remember appreciating their existence but thinking that the leaders are a bunch of megalomaniacal (communist) assholes who would duplicate the system they were trying to take down. Schiller's book confirms this, seemingly without trying. She respects the leaders, but also portrays them as mean, arrogant, and super condescending. I guess some people get so focused on the ends that they stop giving a damn about the effects of their means.

I love me a good people's history and this book was no different. The only thing I didn't love was that the author didn't go very deep into her beliefs and seemed to go back and forth between wanting to be a radical participating in an armed struggle and a normal person leading a normal life. That doesn't really matter though, and I learned a lot from the book.

[Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

a gripping historical autobiography

I learned so much from this first hand account of the Red Army Faction. This story (which mainly focused on her life in prison) was a tale of both sophisticated political action and immense naivety. I was impressed with how driven the author was to change society but astounded at the idea that some of the actions taken (eg the perpetual hunger strikes) would ever meet their desired ends. the narrative was much more subtle than the mainstream narrative of this group. I felt that the culture of the RAF was quite bullying and the author tended to blame herself unfairly for being human at times. It was a great autobiography.

[Jools King · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absorbing account of life in the Red Army Fraction by one of its former members. Life in the RAF seemed to involve a lot of prep underground, punctuated by a sudden violent skirmish with the police, followed by - for the survivors - years of solitary confinement in some austere concrete prison facility, with the hunger strike the only means to protest against state repression.

[Ondra Soukup · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting account on RAF from far-left position. For obvious reason it rather fragmentary.