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

by Margrit Schiller, Ann Hansen (Foreword), Osvaldo Bayer (Afterword)

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.

Genres: History, Germany, Politics, Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

Published June 29, 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.