A Charcuterie Board of Mixed Links
I’ve been working on a post about the Masters of the Universe reveals at the 2025 San Diego Comic Con, which started off with links to all the other places where I’ve been lately. But that post got too long, so the links are getting their own separate post.
So here is where else you could find my work of late:
At Galactic Journey, I wrote about the breaking out of Andreas Baader from prison, an event which will eventually be considered the birth of the far left terrorist group Red Army Fraction. This article wasn’t easy to write, even though the history of the Red Army Fraction is pretty well documented. However, it’s still a touchy subject in Germany, especially if you have a mildly more sympathetic view than “These people are evil, evil, evil.” I tried to be fair to all parties involved, because fairness is the one thing that the members of the future Red Army Fraction were rarely granted.
And even though I thought I knew a lot about the 1968 movement and how some of its members drifted off into terrorism and murder, it turns out that there is so much I didn’t know. There are also many things that no one knows, e.g. there’s one key member of the prison break plot about whom we know next to nothing except her name. For another member of the plot, we don’t even have that – all we know is that it was a man. We also know very little about the first victim of the future Red Army Fraction – a janitor who got caught in the crossfire – beyond his name and age.
The whole thing is also so much weirder and more pathetic than I thought. I mean, parts of this story – due to a typo, security was increased for the wrong prisoner, some of the fugitives forgot their passports when trying to flee to a different country, Horst Mahler accidentally gave away the location of the fugitives, because he rang the wrong embassy – are straight up comedic.
For those of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, the Red Army Fraction were the ultimate bogeyman. Their faces were on every post office wall, yet no one had seen them in years. Occasionally, they would murder a banker, a CEO, a judge or a prosecutor – never a politician – and send rambling letters to the media, which never explained anything. The truth is that these bogeymen were actually quite pathetic, though no less deadly for it. As for a plan, they obviously never had one in the beginning beyond “break Baader out of prison” – indeed, quite a few people said that the Red Army Fraction was formed by accident – and most likely there never was any plan at all.
BTW, two weeks ago we got word that Horst Mahler, one of only two protagonists of the Red Army Fraction article who was still alive, died aged 89, very much unlamented, because he was scum, going from leftwing lawyer to far left terrorist to Neo-Nazi and raging Anti-Semite. At the time of his death, he was on trial for Holocaust denial – not for the first time.
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Both topics had a personal impact on me. Because my Dad worked at Hapag-Lloyd in Bremen from 1973 to 1982 and I remember going to visit him in his office as a little kid, remember the doorman who knew me and my Mom (because he actually was a distant relative, as I later learned), remember the carpeted floors and the model ships all over the place.
When Hapag-Lloyd closed its Bremen office and relocated most departments to the Hamburg office, my Dad left and instead went to work in Singapore. I was an adult until I realised that taking a job on the other side of the world, because you don’t want to relocate to an office 125 kilometers away makes no sense at all. I suspect there was something else to it – a promotion Dad expected, but didn’t get – but I never got around to asking him about this. Though, “My Dad hated Hamburg so much that he’s rather work in Singapore” is kind of funny. That said, he did eventually wind up working in Hamburg, though at a different company, from 1992 until 2008 or so.
Though Dad really did hate Hamburg or rather the terrible traffic. He even once paid for a more expensive plane ticket, so I could fly from Bremen rather than Hamburg. I don’t hate Hamburg and never have. But after Dad died and I decided to take the car and visit Hamburg, I quickly realised why Dad disliked driving to Hamburg so much, cause the traffic really is terrible. And public transport is an alternative, though it still takes forever, because Hamburg’s main problem is that there aren’t enough Elbe crossings and that almost all inner city traffic has to squeeze across a couple of bridges dating from the 19th century.
As for the horror “Heftromane”, when I was a kid, these horror dime novels were considered very, very bad stuff, which would inevitably turn you into an axe murderer or something. So of course they were also irresistable. When I finally got my courage up to buy one, I was actually disappointed that the contents were not nearly as bloody as I expected based on the moral panic these dime novels engendered.
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At the Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Blog of the Seattle Worldcon, I wrote about the remarkable 100 year history of the body-hopping supervillain Dr. Mabuse, who experienced his second flourishing in the early 1960s. There have been many issues with the Seattle Worldcon, but the Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Blog was a consistently bright spot and I’m glad to have contributed several articles about the science fiction and fantasy of the early 1960s.
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I also was at the Hugo-nominated podcast Hugos There twice to discuss the 2025 Hugo finalists for Best Short Story and Best Novella with a panel of fans and reviewers.
Stay tuned for my thoughts on the Masters of the Universe reveals from San Diego Comic Con. The final two parts of my epic “He-Man goes Ruhrpott” a.k.a. “the industrial history tour featuring He-Man” adventure are coming as well.
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