Red Army Faction Volume 1

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion) plunged Germany into a state of insecurity and mass hysteria with a series of bloody attacks.

The far-left terrorist group was formed in the early 1970s around the fight against American imperialism, German police repression, capitalism, and bourgeois society, dubbed the ‘new fascism’. Born in the midst of a closed-off Germany trying to bury its Nazi past, the RAF preferred action to rhetoric, urban guerrilla warfare to grand speeches. Its ultimate goal: to build, with the masses, a Red Army capable of challenging the state army.

Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Jan Carl Raspe, and Gudrun Ensslin and Holger Meins. These names and faces still haunt the German collective memory today. They are demonised on one side, considered communist murderers, and idolised on the other, erected as martyrs. How and why did a small group of intellectuals, students, and artists become a faction of fighters ready to kill?

Red Army Faction Volume 1: The Baader-Meinhof Gang Era, 1967–1977 draws on rich documentation, recollections of participants, and scholarly work, traces this organisation whose journey intertwined the Cold War, revolutionary internationalism, and conflict in the Middle East.

Illustrated with over 80 photographs and colour profiles, it describes, in a unique study, a bloody and controversial aspect of contemporary history that continues to haunt German memory today.