The letter, unsigned and eight pages long – concision being seldom a virtue of violent extremists even in dissolution – was authenticated by the police on the basis of its style and the paper it was typed on. (Both had been used in previous communiqués by the group.) It also bore the group’s emblem, a five-pointed star, within which ‘RAF’ is inscribed over a picture of a Heckler & Koch sub-machine gun, a German made weapon used by the military of the very State against which the RAF was fighting – not a Kalashnikov as people think. According to Stefan Aust, their intention was to use the image of a Kalashnikov, the Russian assault rifle and symbol of liberation movements around the world, but they made a mistake that stuck.

During the 60s, Stefan Aust (now 63), was an editor for konkret, the main (extra-parliamentary) left-wing magazine in Germany. It was published by Klaus Rainer Röhl, the husband of Ulrike Meinhof, who was also an editor at the magazine in the same period. Aust, who later became the editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel, had various professional and personal contacts, not always of a friendly nature as we shall see, with several of the RAF’s protagonists. His book, first published in 1985 and now out in an updated version, covers the years from 1967 until 1977. It tells the story of the violent left-wing group that founded the RAF, also known as ‘The Baader-Meinhof Gang’ – from the names of two of its main protagonists, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. The original group formed in 1970. By 1977 several of its members were dead. The two subsequent generations of the RAF that the original Gang spawned are only marginally considered in the book.

When the 1998 letter announcing the group’s dissolution arrived, the RAF’s weapons had already been silent for seven years, since the assassination, on 1 April, 1991, in Dusseldorf, of Detlev Rohwedder, head of the agency overseeing the privatisation process in the former East Germany. An earlier letter, received by Agence France-Presse on 12 April 1992, had announced that the RAF was suspending its campaign – asking in return for the release of its jailed comrades. Its decision, the letter said, was due to a change of strategy following the fall of the Berlin wall and the break up of the Soviet bloc. It was also meant as a response to appeasing moves by the then Justice Minister Klaus Kinkel. Kinkel had indicated that the authorities might consider releasing RAF members.

The state lived up to its promise. Even Irmgard Moeller (49 at the time), a member of the original Gang, was freed in 1994, despite American opposition and the lack of any sign of repentance on her part. She was serving a life sentence for participating in the 1972 bomb attack on the European headquarters of the US armed forces in Heidelberg that left three soldiers dead. She was also a survivor of the infamous night of 17 October 1977, when her companions – Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carle Raspe – died in Stammheim prison in an apparent coordinated suicide. Irmgard was found with several stab wounds in the region of her heart. Contrary to the official version, she still maintains they were not self-inflicted and that there was no suicide pact.

After Rohwedder’s murder in 1991, there were two more violent episodes involving RAF’s members, but neither was planned by them. In 1993 Birgit Hogefeld and Wolfgang Grams were ambushed by special squad officers at the train station in Bad Kleinen. Grams started firing as soon as he detected the police and killed an officer, Michael Newrzella. Hogefeld was arrested. According to police, Grams committed suicide by jumping on the train tracks. Suspicions that he was actually shot by the special squad officers caused a furore that led to the resignation of the German Interior Minister Rudolf Seiters and the sacking of the Chief Federal Prosecutor Alexander von Stahl.

The last episode, once again involving a couple, took place in Vienna in 1999. Horst-Ludwig Meyer was killed by Austrian police. He had been on the run with his companion Andrea Klump for thirteen years, since the murder of Siemens CEO Karl-Heinz Beckurts in Munich in November 1986. From the description of the event we can surmise that Meyer wanted a quick way to go, coherent with his identity as an urban guerrilla (the Observer, 19 September, 1999). There was no reason for him to pull out his 9mm Beretta pistol when a policewoman, alerted by members of the public because of the couple’s strange show-offish behaviour, asked to see their papers. They carried forged copies of Italian passports that had served them well for some time. The special unit was called. ‘After an exchange of about 10 shots’, Meyer was gunned down and Klump was arrested.

Astrid Proll, also among the original Baader-Meinhof Gang who served time in a German prison for attempted murder, now works as a picture editor (she also published a book of pictures of the Baader-Meinhof)[1]. She told the Observer that Meyer and Klump may not have been planning anything:

My guess is that they were living as a couple and were still armed because they were on the run. They were hounded people who did not want to go to prison for fifteen years. Once they got into trouble they just behaved as terrorists, and now he is dead. I very much doubt they were into something. Everything is over. This kind of terrorism is something from the past. (The Observer, 19 September, 1999).

The campaign was well and truly over, even though the final letter recanted neither the RAF’s past actions nor the use of violence for political goals: it ends in bombast with Rosa Luxemburg’s dictum, ‘The revolution says: I was, I am, I will be’.

In the group’s pre-history, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin firebombed two department stores in 1968. From then to 1991, the RAF robbed banks, bombed police stations, army barracks and embassies, took hostages, and killed people. Some of its victims were mistakes or ‘collateral damage’, others were unplanned results of shoot-outs with police. Many of its attacks were ‘endogenously’ generated – that is, aimed at freeing jailed comrades. But there were also a number of purely politically motivated attacks and, most shocking of all, of targeted assassinations of industrialists, administrators and judges.

According to Aust, over a quarter of a century of activity, the RAF killed 38 individuals. By any standard, their lethality was miniscule – the same death toll is produced on average every three hours on Europe’s roads by car crashes.[2] Yet, judging merely by the size of the political and institutional storm the RAF was able to unleash, which shook the establishment and brought tanks to the streets of West Germany, it proved supremely cost-effective. The tiny size of RAF’s membership – 75 are known to the police – makes their efficiency all the more striking.

At the time of writing only three of the RAF members are on the run, while 64 have been caught and sentenced to jail over the years. The remaining six died in some violent episode before being arrested. Among those jailed, six died of natural causes and seven committed suicide. 51 of them have now been released. Only Andrea Klump and Birgit Hogefeld remain behind bars. A total of nineteen members are now dead, a rate of mortality that, considering their line of business, does not seem particularly high.[3]

Most of those freed now live quiet lives, seldom coming to media attention. Not Horst Mahler, though, whose claim to infamy has taken a surrealist turn. A lawyer and member of the original Baader-Meinhof Gang, he later recanted terrorism, and was released from jail early, in 1980. He went on to join the NDP, a neo Nazi party. In February 2009 – exactly 60 years after his father, ‘a fanatical Nazi and anti-Semite [dentist], shot himself’ – Mahler, who is now 73, was sentenced to six years in jail for posting videos on the Internet denying the Holocaust and distributing CDs promoting anti-Semitic hatred.

* * * *

In 1972, I was a twenty-year-old philosophy student. I lived in Turin, a hot bed of student-worker protest. In that year the Red Brigades started to kidnap people, mostly uncooperative foremen and factory managers. Over the following three years, their repertoire extended to kneecapping and eventually to assassinations. My reaction at the time was disbelief. The means did not match any viable revolutionary end and were at odds with the ideological make up of real comrades, who do not wage war against individuals, whether judges, industrialists, trade unionists or journalists. They may use violence, but as part of a revolutionary or resistance war, not like mafia hit-men or loony anarchists. It must be – I and several of my friends thought – a fascist conspiracy, a series of false flags operations.

By 1975 we knew that we were wrong. Four carabinieri surrounded an isolated farmhouse near Acqui Terme in which the Red Brigades were keeping Vallarino Gancia, owner of the homonymous wine company, whom they had kidnapped for ransom. Margherita ‘Mara’ Cagol and a companion, who has never been identified, refused to surrender. They burst out, throwing hand grenades that wounded two carabinieri, one seriously. In the shootout that ensued, as the brigatisti were trying to escape, a carabiniere was killed. The unidentified man managed to vanish through the woods. Mara was shot dead. Together with her husband, Renato Curcio, who was then already in jail, she had founded the Red Brigades. Gancia was freed unharmed.

Faced with the evidence, the troubling question of what made these people embark on an armed struggle became unavoidable. Hobbes’s advice for understanding other people’s actions through introspection – ‘for a similitude of the thoughts and passions of one man, to the thoughts and passions of another, whosoever looketh into himself, and considereth what he doth when he does think, opine, reason, hope fears & C, and upon what grounds: he shall thereby read and know, what the thoughts and passions of all other men, upon the like occasions’ – did not work for me this time.

What on earth did they think they could achieve by picking such an asymmetric fight? Where is the rationality of having ‘six against 60 millions’, as Heinrich Böll described the Baader-Meinhof Gang? These unanswered questions were all the more existentially displacing considering that, albeit as a participant observer rather than a front-line rabble-rouser, I had inhaled the same Zeitgeist as these people, ‘upon the like occasions’. I had marched in the same demonstrations, sat through the same endless assemblies, loitered around the same factory and school gates. The difference was that, despite the bellicosity of some of our slogans, it never occurred to me that the situation was ripe for an armed struggle.

The RAF seems even more incomprehensible than the Red Brigades. The Red Brigades had a membership more than twice the RAF’s size. It was a proper organisation, with a cell structure and a reasonably clear hierarchy. Its members were not always fugitives as the Baader-Meinhof were. Many remained unknown to the police for years and were able to keep up a front as ordinary citizens. In Germany there were other groups variously linked with the RAF – the June 2 Movement, Red Aid, the Socialist Patients Collective (SPK, ‘patients’ of the mental variety) – but the constellation of sympathisers and kindred spirits on which the RAF could count, though it oscillated over time, peaking after the deaths of RAF members, was far less populous than that of the Red Brigades.

At the same time, the revulsion of large sections of German public opinion of all social strata were strong. By contrast, significant portions of the Italian working class were on the students’ side: the Red Brigades could rely on a wider network of sympathisers. Disgruntled old members of the Resistance, who felt the civil war against Nazi-fascism had never been properly carried to its due end, supplied the brigatisti with arms they had stashed away in 1945. The Red Brigades were also ideologically different from the RAF, less interested in the anti-imperialist, internationalist struggle, and parochially focused on Italian workers’ conditions. Mario Moretti, one of the leaders, says that, because of this difference, the two groups never managed to do any operations together.

The Red Brigades’ fantasy of unleashing a revolution was marginally less far-fetched than the RAF’s. Renate Riemeck, Ulrike Meinhof’s foster mother and a talented historian and peace activist, wrote an affectionate open letter to Ulrike, which was published in konkret in November 1971 when Ulrike was on the run: ‘The Federal Republic is not the place for an urban guerrilla movement in the Latin American style. The country offers, at most, suitable conditions for a gangster drama.’ Paying no heed to Riemeck’s entreaties to desist, Ulrike, who had been close to her foster mother, issued a dismissive, haughty reply, cast in a slightly demented Brechtian tone, which was found in a garbage bin three weeks later in a Berlin park.

Aust’s book does not offer the explanation of the RAF’s emergence and actions. It modestly refrains from pushing a particular narrative, wisely accepting that there may not be just a single one. It offers instead a rich smorgasbord of food for thought. The book’s strength lies in the large number of (often first-hand) interviews and in the numerous and varied sources it draws from, as well as in the immediate, fast-paced style with which it presents the story. The book is very readable, at times gripping. But it is organised in many short and discontinuous sections and follows a jumpy time-line, which makes it often hard to know when something happened or was said. Still, it is rewarding to struggle through these hurdles, because one can extract, if not perhaps the whole picture, at least many meaningful fragments.

One discovers, for instance, that Ulrike Meinhof, by far the most interesting and culturally sophisticated character of the group, was herself struggling, ex-post, with how to make rational sense of the RAF. While in jail, in late 1973 she started to write a history of the group, a sign of exaggerated self-importance perhaps, given that the group had been in existence for a mere two years before its core members were arrested. But it also demonstrates the need to reflect on and explain what they had done – Ulrike’s foster mother, in her letter, had acutely pointed out that a ‘spirit of sacrifice and the readiness to face death become ends in themselves if one cannot make them understood’. In her notes for the RAF’s history project, Ulrike, speaking in the third person plural, wrote:

Not because they were so blind as to believe they could keep that initiative going until the revolution triumphed in Germany, not because they imagined they could not be shot or arrested.

Not because they so misjudged the situation as to think the masses would simply rise at such a signal.

It was a matter of salvaging, historically, the whole state of understanding attained by the movement of 1967/1968; it was a case of not letting the struggle fall apart again.

She must have felt the need to deny the suspicion that the RAF’s members were blind and wrongheaded, incapable of thinking rationally about what they were doing. Instead she claims they were aiming at something else which cannot be measured in ordinary terms. The exact nature of this something else is, however, unclear. There is a marked contrast between the searching questions implicit in her denials and the vagueness of her answer – ‘salvaging …the whole state of understanding’. She seems desperate to rescue the RAF’s project from going down in history as an episode driven by strategic lunacy.

She never completed the history of RAF. In fact, one can surmise that, around this time (early 1974), she began to go quietly mad. She had been in solitary confinement for over a year. This must have weighed heavily on her mental state, combined with the difficulties of making sense of her trajectory. Her writings become intermittently incoherent – for instance, when she describes her fraught relation with Baader, or launches into abject self-criticism for having doubts.[4] She inexplicably stops all contacts with her twin daughters, who were corresponding with her and visiting her in jail.

She will never see them again. After two more years of increasingly difficult relations with the rest of the group (Ensslin in particular with whom she sometimes shared a cell) Meinhof could no longer bear her own doubts, her sense of guilt at having them, and the mercilessness with which her comrades attacked her because of them. She hanged herself in her cell the night of the 8 May 1976. She was too intelligent not to feel troubled by the folly of it all, too honest to deceive herself about what she felt – her husband described her after they first met as ‘the incarnation of intellectual honesty’.[5] Yet she was too blindly loyal to the group, or perhaps too weak, to defect ‘even when the group no longer stood behind her’.[6] The group satisfied a deep human need in her to belong: ‘TV appearances, contacts, public attention’ – she wrote in a letter to an undisclosed recipient sometime in the 60s – ‘are part of my career as a journalist and a socialist and give me access to radio and television beyond konkret [the leftist magazine her husband published and for which she wrote for a decade]. It’s all agreeable on a human level, but doesn’t fulfil my need for human warmth, solidarity, and belonging to a group.’[7]

Aust’s book leaves no doubt that the RAF’s ‘quasi-religious’, ‘deranged crusade’ managed to achieve nothing of whatever it is that they intended – though the protagonists have been inspiring artists ever since. Ulrike Meinhof’s story in particular ‘has made it to the stage in a variety of ways’, in opera, ballet, theatre, and cinema, of course, in the film derived from Aust’s book.[8] In 2005, ‘Regarding Terror: The RAF Exhibition’, at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, displayed media and art inspired by the group over the entire arc of their existence. One of the curators was, touchingly, Felix Ensslin, the son that Gudrun had with Bernward Vesper in May 1967 before she met Baader and abandoned both husband and son.[9]

For some romantic souls, the life and fate of the main protagonists remain touching to this day: ‘there are flowers everywhere – bunches of red roses, white lilies, carnations. They look crisp, as if they were placed on the grave just this morning. Someone has lit red candles and raked the sand in careful patterns. The grey tomb slab on the Dornhaldenfriedhof in Stuttgart says, in purple letters: “Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe”’ (The Times, 12 November, 2008). Still, one thing they did achieve, all the more puzzling given their tiny number and gangster-like lethality: they made the establishment of the Federal Republic fearful. Wolfgang Kraushaar, a political scientist who edited a history of the RAF,[10] said in an interview: ‘You have to remember that this period represents the greatest challenge Germany ever faced between the end of the War and the fall of Communism. The RAF – or Baader-Meinhof Gang – essentially held the German state to ransom. It was a frightening time for the country.’ (Independent on Sunday, 18 February, 2007).

Here I see a monumental paradox: the effect of rocking West Germany political institutions was achieved only because the German state and its make up were not what the Baader-Meinhof Gang claimed them to be. One of the RAF’s ploys was to provoke the state ‘into showing its cunningly hidden and well camouflaged “true fascist face”’. The German state, once they were incarcerated, seemed at first to oblige: it unnecessarily kept them in harsh penal conditions – isolation, sound deprivation, white furniture, lights on all the time. Still, these tactics represent not unabashed use of force, but muted alternatives, weaker substitutes. West Germany was, as Aust says, ‘a reasonably well-functioning constitutional state’. If the state had had a ‘true fascist face’ to reveal, matters would have been very different. We might not even know about the RAF, since the freedom of the press would have been curtailed and secret executions would have replaced trials. By contrast, thanks to the huge media attention the Gang received, their terror effect multiplied and spread far and wide. Never did they have such a grip on public opinion as when a benign judicial system allowed them to use their trial as a platform. ‘At no time of their “underground struggle” did the RAF have so magnetic a power of attraction as they did when imprisoned. Once in prison the group developed a political stature they had previously lacked. The larger-than-life security precautions endowed the prisoners with a political significance they had never come near to achieving with their writing and actions’.

The RAF’s attitude was reminiscent of a teen tantrum – the state is bad, it deserves to be hit hard, instead of a pat on our head it responds by shooting us when shot at, arresting and putting us in jail! Bastards! Fascists! You see, we were right all along. The state is so very fascist! Free the comrades! Avenge the fallen!

In a Sturm und Drang sense their ploy worked, and lots of people on the left were taken in. But it wasn’t actually true. Andreas Baader made the ultimately whingeing speech at his trial: to the policy of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office towards the RAF he compared the ‘terrorist’ policies of Israel toward the Palestinians, the US in Vietnam, and the Pinochet Junta in Chile. He said: ‘its basic rule being as many dead fighters as possible, as many dead prisoners as possible, executions in the open street, shooting to kill, and so on.’ Baader was allowed to make that farcical parallel because he was alive and free to speak and be heard. The police had used velvet gloves when they surrounded him, Meins and Raspe in a garage: even though they were being shot at, the police patiently chose to arrest them. With 150 guns trained on the men at one point, it would have been much easier to kill them. Furthermore, Baader spoke because there was a trial and at the trial he was allowed such statements. Finally, Baader’s speeches had an effect only because the press was allowed to attend the trial and to report them to the world outside. (Incidentally, Horst Mahler must have learnt from this tactic: his six-year jail sentence for denying the Holocaust came from a court case he brought against himself, to use the courtroom as a stage.)

In jail the RAF members ‘compared themselves with the inmates of Nazi concentration camps’. A comparison at once laughable and offensive to the millions who died in the camps without the chance to address the press. Yet people outside saw the picture of Meins’s arrest: ‘TV cameras were rolling. The picture of the skinny, almost naked figure of Holger Meins went around the world. And RAF sympathisers, or those close to them, were reminded of the pictures of concentration camp inmates. The myth of the pitiless persecution of the RAF warriors had been born.’[11] Democratic states are generally more vulnerable to terrorist tactics. The Federal Republic was  more vulnerable still because it was untested, haunted by a dreadful past, and recently conceived under the tutelage of the vanquishers.

* * * *

Before one finds a good explanation of a phenomenon, there are no such things as trivia in science. Anomalies that go against commonsensical expectations or stand out as peculiar or unique, are often uninformative quirks. Yet, at times, anomalies turn out to be apertures to unexpected insights. Here I pick from Aust’s book those details that struck me, even though I am not sure to which of the two categories they belong.

Four of the original members – Baader, Mahler, Meinhof and Raspe – lost their fathers before birth or when very young. Baader, Meinhof and Raspe grew up in households with lots of women, mothers, grandmothers, aunts and sisters.

Baader was a school drop-out, unlike the other main members, who were educated – Mahler had a law degree, Meinhof a degree in psychology and pedagogy, and Raspe in sociology. Baader was often involved in ‘boozing and brawling’, had a past as a petty criminal, and did time in a young offender institution and in an adult prison for stealing a motorbike and driving without a licence. He came out in 1967, just in time to catch the wave of students’ protests, and perhaps also a screening of the film Bonnie and Clyde, which came out in that year.

He could be kind or brutal, generous or mean – and one never knew which. He was fond of Mickey Mouse comic books, pace American cultural imperialism, but this did not endear him to children: Ulrike’s daughter, Bettina Röhl, aged seven, said that Baader reminded her of Rattler – a character from the childrens’ book Winnetou. Rattler is ‘one of a band of rough-mannered land surveyors, an unscrupulous figure, and cowardly too, so much so that the Indians break off his execution at the stake in contempt and drown him in the river instead’. Baader cheated in the hunger strikes, eating secretly while pouring scorn on wavering comrades.

But, unlike many manipulative individuals, he was also an exceptionally hard man: he never recanted, never showed a moment of weakness, and remained defiant of authority till the very end. ‘It still amazes me’ – said Chief Commissioner Herold after the siege in which Baader and his comrades were captured – ‘that they then ventured to fire. They must have known that they were sitting on a powder keg’.

The two lead women, while different from both Baader and each other, also had some peculiarities in common. Ensslin was the daughter of a protestant pastor. Meinhof on her father’s side came from ‘an old Würtenberg family, notable for producing protestant theologians’, who can’t have been amused when Meinhof’s mother, after her husband’s death, went to live with Renate Riemeck, her female lover, who later became  Ulrike’s foster mother. Ulrike described herself as a Christian pacifist until 1957, when she joined the communist party in East Berlin (the party was banned in the FDR). This at the time when communist party members in western countries were leaving the party following the brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprisings.

Both women could respond very emotionally to oppression and social injustice. Gudrun wept ‘uncontrollably’ when Benno Ohnesorg was shot by a policeman during a demonstration against the Shah of Persia, on 2 June 1967. Ulrike, while watching ‘dreadful pictures from Vietnam’ on TV, ‘jumped up and said no one was going to do this to her, it debased everyone. We must act, she said, we couldn’t just sit around doing nothing’ [my italics]. At Ulrike’s funeral, the theologian Helmut Gollwitzer said: ‘I see this woman whose life was hard, who made her life hard by allowing the misery of others to affect her so much…I see her now in the peace of God’ [my italics].

Still, like Gudrun and Andreas before her, Ulrike abandoned her children in pursuit of her ideological ends; she was even prepared to ship them off to a Jordanian orphanage camp rather than allow their father, Klaus Rainer Röhl, to look after them. (Aust, a friend of Röhl, rescued the children, tricking some ‘comrades’ in Sicily where the girls had been temporarily hidden prior to their final destination. He recounts how he only just managed to escape Baader’s murderous vengeance). If Ulrike was affected by the misery of others, she was not so affected by that which she herself caused. Her attitude is reminiscent of Mrs Jellyby’s, the ‘telescopic philanthropist’ memorably described in Dickens’s Bleak House, who allows her children to live in squalor, while devoting herself to solve African social problems.  Compare also Mohammad Sidique Khan, who expressed his outrage at the killing of women and children in Iraq by blowing himself up on the London underground and killing six passengers on the 7 July 2007: he did not think twice about leaving his pregnant wife and young child behind. Puzzlingly, hatred for perceived injustice and empathy for the suffering of strangers can motivate self-sacrifice yet blunt empathy for family and offspring.

Gudrun Ensslin was besotted by Andreas Baader, an unflinching love even during the dramatic years in detention (1972-1977), during which she promoted him like a cult-figure to be worshipped: ‘The rival, absolute enemy, enemy of the state: the collective consciousness, the morale of the humiliated and insulted, of the urban proletariat – that is what Andreas is (…)’, she wrote in a letter to Margrit Schiller, also a RAF member in prison. ‘We could measure ourselves by Andreas.’ She called him ‘baby’ and he reciprocated by calling her ‘cunt’. To avoid injustice, he used the same epithet to the other women. The Andreas-Gudrun pairing propelled the group and welded it together (the name Baader-Meinhof was a press invention, which gave pre-eminence to Ulrike because she was a well-known journalist before she went underground).

The RAF had an astonishing gender balance – 40 men and 35 women – hard to find in any institution let alone in one specialising in extremist violence. This anomaly is interesting. Although they have used them as suicide bombers, Islamic extremists include no women at all among their cadres. Right-wing violent groups have only a few. Women have a presence only in left-wing extremist groups  – 30% of FARC fighters are women and 25% of Red Brigades members were women (39 out of 147). Even compared to these groups, the RAF stood out. Mario Moretti, a leader of the Red Brigades, recounts that once they arranged with the RAF for their emissaries to be met at Milan central station for a meeting. The agreed identification signal was carrying a thriller book in view. The ‘brigatista’ sent to the rendezvous came back from the station saying that he had seen no one sporting a thriller in view – except a few women. He never expected to find his Teutonic kindred spirits incarnated in three women’s bodies. ‘We rushed back looking for them’, Moretti says, ‘and did not tell them that the first appointment had fallen through because of a macho prejudice. We were not sure they would find it as funny as we did’.[12]

* * * *

There never was a proper plan to set up the Gang. As Ulrike wrote in her notes for the history of the RAF, the group emergence was ‘spontaneous’. The coming together of such diverse characters emanates a strong sense of evitability. Toss the main protagonists in the air a hundred times and they will never come down again in the pattern in which they did form. Remove one of them and the group trajectory would change. In spite of their name, they were in this sense the opposite of an ‘army’ in which individuals are interchangeable.

Contrary to what we may be tempted to expect, highly salient outcomes are not necessarily the result of big, chunky causes. They can – as Milan Kundera says of Anna Karenina’s decision to kill herself – come out of a ‘conspiracy of details’.  Here I can piece some such details together. One, the spark: on the 2 April 1968, Baader and Ensslin decide to live up to the student movement anti-capitalist violent slogans and set fire to two department stores. ‘The fascist state’ catches them and puts them in jail. Two, the encounters: Meinhof reports on their trial for konkret and later interviews Ensslin in jail. Mahler is a defence lawyer for Baader in the trial for the arson, for which they are sentenced to three years. Raspe’s girl friend Marianne happens to be a friend of Ulrike. During the months in which Baader and Ensslin are freed pending an appeal (which they lose), Meinhof, Ensslin and Baader meet again through their shared interest in institutionalised youth. Three, the fugitives: Baader and Ensslin run off to avoid being put back in jail. They knock on Ulrike’s door. She agrees to hide them (this is when Baader gains his reputation as the Rattler with Bettina). Four, the escape: Baader is caught and the plan to free him is hatched. (Notice that until now there is no talk of engaging in armed struggle.) Meinhof takes part in the ‘liberation action’; she pretends she is writing a book with Baader so the authorities will agree to have him taken under escort to an institute library where they can work together. Five, the shots: during the escape operation, an innocent institute employee is seriously wounded. ‘The group that would become the RAF would have developed very differently if the shots had not been fired.’ Six, the jump: Ulrike was meant to stay behind, keeping up her pretence of innocence – her daughters were at school and she had not entrusted them to anyone – but, in a metaphorical gesture, she decided to follow the others who run away from the institute by jumping out of a window. ‘Likely, she panicked when shots were fired.’[13]

This happened on the 14 May 1970, the self-attributed date of birth of the RAF. Only from that moment onward the conspiracy of details turns into one of the will, and the planning to develop the armed struggle begins. On 5 June, the fugitives issue their first communiqué, ‘Build up the Red Army’, a founding declaration at once defiant and exalted. As Karin Bauer observes, ‘this process of text production literally wrote the RAF into existence’. But now they are fugitives, known to the police, and that is not the most comfortable position to be in if you want to organise a revolutionary army. ‘They were on the run’ – Aust writes – ‘a fact which determined the group’s life more than any strategic notions of their aims.’

Once on the run, a host of mechanisms kicked in, and began to govern the RAF’s actions. Following Baader’s escape, the Gang’s first feats were a choreographed simultaneous triplet of bank raids, ‘expropriation’ exercises, in Berlin in September 1970. Life on the run is expensive, as Aust notes. The path of the fugitive guerrilla is dense not just with constraints, but also with insidious mental traps, which affect their ability to make considered decisions. Volker Speitel, a young graphic artist, who joined in 1974, later said that during his life in illegality ‘he was afraid the group might plunge into rash ventures in the grip of their persecution mania. “Somebody [in the group] once said that his fear of taking action was growing every day, so he would like to take action at once, and then he would be rid of his fear’”.

Forces other than the lofty goals proclaimed by the communiqués kept the Gang going and made it attractive to new recruits.

The thrill: Beate Sturm recollected: ‘We did not ask ourselves what we were actually looking for any more. You just slip into that sort of thing. And as we thought we knew we’d got into all this for the correct political reasons, we liked the thrill of it too.’ ‘There’s adventure, wild, exciting driving, you are going into action in a minor way against anything that comes along’ – said one of RAF young recruits from a young people’s home – ‘getting the better of a waiter in a café, getting the better of this or that liberal shit. There is always something going on with the Baader group. That is why all the young people are drawn to them’.

The self-reinforcing beliefs: Ulrich Scholze joined the group when ‘he was 23, and a tutor in the physics department at the Free University’. (This, incidentally, is interesting: among Islamic violent extremists there is a disproportionately large number of engineers,[14] but in the RAF there were no engineers, and Scholze was the only scientist). Aust reports Scholze’s analysis of what it took to join the RAF: ‘You have to be emotionally convinced that all attempts at reform simply stabilise the present system of society and consolidate capitalism. And the harmony of reason and emotions which then exists is the pre-condition of resolute action. Then the prosecuting authorities put pressure on you, and that confirms all you thought’ (my italics). More illogical still: ‘When the Socialist Patients Collective (SPK) in Heidelberg heard the news of Petra Schelm’s death [in a shoot out with the police in July 1971] its members felt confirmed in their view that it was necessary to go underground’ [my italics].

The fame: Scholze also had this to say on what helps a urban guerrilla to stay the course: ‘And the sensational press reports and descriptions such as ‘Public Enemy Number 1’ from government sources create a feeling of success that gives you the strength to carry on’ (my italics). ‘The newspapers were stirring up more fear of the Baader-Meinhof group daily, whipping up emotions, and thus giving the members of the group, who regularly studied the reports of their activities in the press, a sense of their own importance.’

Fear of shame or ostracism kept members from defecting: Klaus Jünschke, a psychology student who joined in 1971 via the SPK, later said: ‘it was only too clear to most members of the group that there could be nothing but prison or death at the end of their road. Many of them had doubts, and thought of getting out, but they were all afraid of telling anyone else, even though that person might be thinking just the same.’

The reinforcement of the leadership, which typically accompanies life under great pressure, made deliberative democracy within the group impossible. Astrid Proll reports that once Ulrike told her: ‘I am fed up with this. All this hanging around, acting as look-out, checking out cars. I don’t want to end up in jail for that kind of thing, not anymore, not for such petty details.’ According to Aust, Astrid felt the same, ‘but the group wouldn’t tolerate any discussion. Now that they had gone underground, the authority of the two leaders, Baader and Ensslin, was even more powerful than before’. On the run, any attempt to engage in discussion ‘seems like treachery’, Proll said.

The solidarity effect: when news of the arrest of Baader, Meins and Raspe spread, Peter Jurgen Boock realised he had to go underground now: ‘He had to do something to get Baader out. It’s our turn now. “We must go into action. (…) They got me out of a hole [he was taken out of a juvenile delinquent home by Baader and Ensslin]. Now it’s up to me to get them out of one’”. Many actions by the RAF, especially after 1975 when the second RAF generation went into action, aimed to redress the failures of previous actions, by freeing the ‘comrades in jail’. For example, the attack on the German Embassy in Stockholm (April 1975), the attack on the OPEC conference in Vienna (December 1975), and the kidnapping of Hanns Martin Schleyer (September 1977) were all aimed at freeing the old guard in prison.

The martyr effect: ‘avenge Holger Meins’, ‘Ulrike Meinhof, we will avenge you’. Every death ‘on the job’ has a consequence among not only the surviving members, but also new potential recruits who already sympathise with the cause and are spurred into action. The death makes them want to vindicate the sacrifice, make it count, take up the baton. This is a fairly general mechanism – we find traces of this effect among entities as different as the Palermo judges who fought against the mafia since the 1980s and the organisations which practice suicide attacks. The ‘martyr effect’ was very strong for the RAF. The death of Meins by hunger strike, for instance, made a huge impression and gave RAF a boost: the number of people the police were looking for went from 40 to 300. Experts estimated that the sympathisers grew to over 10,000.

The combined force of these mechanisms kept the RAF in business and allowed its reproduction regardless of any strategic reasoning, sometimes regardless of any reasoning. Because of the trial of the first generation (solidarity effect) and later of the deaths in Stammheim prison (martyr effect), the second generation emerged and went into action: ‘different groups were formed that hardly knew each other and whose only common denominator was their relationship with the prisoners’ – whom, by then, very few members had met in person.

* * * *

Although Germany and Italy were and have remained democratic countries, the possible resurgence of Fascism – about which not only the RAF but the student movement in its entirety worried – did not seem so far-fetched at the time. And for good reasons. Consider that many people in the post-war establishments of the two countries – judges, industrialists, academics and politicians – were compromised by contact with the Third Reich or Mussolini’s regime. In Europe there were still two fascist dictatorships, Portugal and Spain. Further, in 1967, when the student movements across the world erupted, there was a coup d’état  in Greece led by a group of colonels, which inaugurated a series of ultra right-wing military governments until July 1974. One can retort: but these things were not going to happen in Germany, where the Allies still ran the show. Well, not so sure. In 1973 there was another coup d’état against the socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile, and this was backed by the US; the US did not complain about the coup in Greece either. The Americans (and the British) were prepared to do anything to defend their freedom against communism, including supporting Fascism. Left-wing rhetoric included overstretched parallels, equating too many events around the world to the Holocaust; it mistook incompetence, occasional police brutality or niches of authoritarianism in public institutions as evidence that Fascism was soon to be reborn. Still, even if it is hard to get the balance right, it was far from ludicrous to entertain those fears. The Germans and the Italians of my generation may have been over reactive. Still, I wonder whether it is the Italians of today who aren’t numbed and uncomprehending in front of the risk of resurgent neo-Fascism masked by Silvio Berlusconi’s clownish face.

This politically ambiguous state of affairs and the student movements’ response to it, created the Zeitgeist in which the RAF emerged.[15] Here, however, we are grappling with a more precise question. Although many were worried about Fascism and its viral representatives hidden in the neo-democratic states, only a handful leaped into the armed struggle. The question, why did Ulrike jump out of that window? could be flung back at me: why did I not even think of jumping?

Here is a conjecture. In Paradise Now (a 2005 film directed by Hany Abu-Assad) Said and Khaled, two Palestinian friends who live in Nablus, volunteer to go on a suicide attack against Israel. As the fatal moment approaches, Khaled changes his mind while Said goes ahead. Before, Said reveals his unbearably painful reason for carrying out the mission: his father was a collaborator, who covertly worked for the Israelis and was executed by fellow Palestinians. This grim story is served as a perfect Tolstoyan sandwich: it tells how three levels – from the macro to the micro – are jointly required to produce an event. Without the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, there would not be any opportunity to betray anyone and no reason to mount an attack. Without an organisation such as Hamas, willing and capable of mounting an attack, individuals alone would hardly be able to do so (all suicide attacks are organised rather than solo operations). But without Said’s all-consuming desire to atone for his father’s betrayal, there would not be a volunteer ready to self-sacrifice. Said is not sacrificing his life because the present is, in and of itself, unbearable. Nor does he act only because he wants to bring about a happier and more just future for his people. The past is what truly weighs and makes his present unbearable. It is the past that we know, rather than the future we imagine – the past within shouting historical distance, as it were, that can bring up emotions raw enough to motivate actions that plain rationality would deem ill-advised.

It is in the shadow of Germany’s past that we need to look. That is where the thinking protagonists of the RAF themselves looked. They were members of a generation which – as Ulrike Meinhof wrote in a column in konkret in 1961 entitled ‘Hitler within you’ – ‘was not involved in the crimes of the Third Reich or in determining the direction that was taken in the postwar period; it has grown up with and into the arguments of the present, entangled in the blame for something it is not responsible for’.[16] Even if technically blameless, the proximity to the parents’ generation, just as in Said’s case, puts one under a great and special pressure.

Most people put up with it and get on with their lives. Some people, very few, develop an urgency for action, an ‘heroic impatience’ – as a psychiatrist described a trait of Gudrun’s personality – to ensure that the bitterly disappointing world around them is forced to live up to their ideals. They become possessed of a sacred fury, intolerant of nuances or delays. In L’Education Sentimentale, Flaubert describes this syndrome, whose deep sources I do not really understand, when he portrays Sénécal, the only one in the circle of friends who in the 1848 revolution ends up taking violent action:

Sénécal était un répétiteur de mathématiques, homme de forte tête et de convictions républicaines, un futur Saint-Just… Homme de théories, il ne considérait que les masses et se montrait impitoyable pour les individus… s’éveillant chaque matin avec l’espoir d’une révolution qui, en quinze jours ou un mois, changerait le monde. Enfin, écoeuré par la mollesse de ses frères, furieux des retards qu’on opposait à ses rêves et désespérant de la patrie, il était entré comme chimiste dans le complot des bombes incendiaires; et on l’avait surpris portant de la poudre qu’il allait essayer à Montmartre, tentative suprême pour établir la République. [my italics]

It is unlikely that Baader was of this type, but Ensslin and Meinhof were: remember what Ulrike says when she watches on TV scenes of Vietnamese horror, ‘they cannot do this to me’ – the casualty that she perceives is her own self. This kind of people may succumb more easily to the pressure of distinguishing themselves from the faults of others, and of the previous generation in particular. How do I prove (to myself and others) that if I had lived under the Third Reich I would not have been supine or complicit? How do I show to my Palestinian friends that I am not like my father? In her 1961 column Meinhof wrote: ‘One day we will be asked about Herr Strauss [Franz Joseph, a very right wing Bavarian politician] in the same way we now ask our parents about Hitler.’

Walter Benjamin imagined history as an Angelus Novus – he was describing a painting by Paul Klee – seeing not ‘a chain of events’, but ‘one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet’. The image fits Meinhof, for whom Strauss was like Hitler, Vietnam like Auschwitz, and we like our parents.[17] At some point the pressure to rid oneself of the burden of the past becomes unbearable, and acts of violence become the only perceived exit.

The most startling words in Aust’s book were said by Gudrun Ensslin’s father, the protestant pastor, who was interviewed concomitantly with his daughter’s trial for the arson attacks on the Frankfurt stores.

Well, I – I like the whole Federal Republic – would object to any admonishments made in that way. However, what she wanted to say is this: a generation that has seen the building of concentration camps, the encouragement of anti-Semitism and the committing of genocide among and in the name of its own people must not allow any revival of such things, must not admit that hope of a new beginning, of reformation and rebirth can come to nothing. These are young people who are not willing to go on swallowing frustration and be corrupted by it. It has astonished me to find that Gudrun, who has always thought in a very rational, intelligent way, has experienced what is almost a condition of euphoric self-realisation, a really holy self-realisation such as we find mentioned in connection with saints. To me, that is more a beacon light than the fire of arson itself – seeing a human being make her way to self-realisation through such acts.

Even if perhaps tinted by a father’s desire not to disown his daughter, the choice of Father Ensslin’s arguments is nonetheless striking. Here we have it all. The guilt over Germany’s past, the fear of its revival. Quasi-religious, utterly irrational belief: that only a dramatic (but actually incommensurate) gesture like the fire his daughter set off could achieve a cathartic effect. This wasn’t the rational, reflective self that Gudrun was known for, but her transmogrification into a euphoric state of mind. A gesture could do away with the burden of the past and truly bear witness of rebirth.

We may be asking the wrong question when we try to reconstruct the reasoning of those few individuals who take extreme violent actions (when their chances of success are close to zero) if we attempt to identify what they thought they could achieve. The secret may lie, not in an imagined future, but half buried in their past and in their at once hyper-moral and brittle egos.

There is a difference between Said’s case and that of the Gang, who turned the conspiracy of details into an act of the will. There is an almost Nietzschean delirium omnipotentiae in what they attempted: even though the conflict between the student movement and the German state could not seriously be compared to the conflict in Palestine, and even though there was no armed organisation to rely on, they set out to create both. This, I think, is what gives these tragic Übermenschen and Überfrauen a sense of historical evitability – the forces that were pushing them in the direction they took were well short of inexorable.

* * * *

Aust accepts the official version: Baader, Ensslin and Raspe committed coordinated suicides during the night between the 17 and 18 October 1977 in their cells in Stammhein prison. Baader and Raspe shot themselves with handguns apparently smuggled in by their lawyers. Ensslin hanged herself. They faced the prospect of spending their lives in prison – at the trial, which lasted for 192 days, this was their sentence. The hijacking of the Lufthansa airplane by Palestinian insurgents asking for the Gang’s release had literally just ended on the 17 with the death or capture of the attackers and the rescue of the hostages. The prisoners must have heard of this, so they knew their hopes were over. They also knew that Helmut Schmidt’s government was not going to yield to the demand for their release by the RAF cell that was holding Schleyer hostage.

Aust has indirect evidence to support the suicide hypothesis, showing that ‘the legend of the murders in Stammhein was born outside the group, not in its inner circle’. He relies on the stern words that Brigitte Mohnhaupt (one of the few members of RAF’s new generation to have met the old guard and to know how the guns had been smuggled in the prison) apparently delivered to the stunned members of the RAF who were in Baghdad when the news reached them. We do not know Aust’s source, but this is how he reports Mohnhaupt’s words:

I suppose you lot can only suppose that they were victims. You didn’t know them. They are not victims and they never were. You don’t get made a victim, you have to make yourself a victim. They were in charge of their situation themselves right up to the last minute. So what does that mean? I’ll tell you: it means they did it themselves, not that it was done to them.

Aust, however, also reports several unanswered questions about what really happened that night in Stammhein, and castigates the authorities for not clearing up all doubts. It is baffling for instance that none of the ordinary prisoners who were in their cells on the floor below heard any of the four shots that night. If the authorities ever admit to eavesdropping on the cells, as seems likely they did, and if they release the tapes, we may be in for some surprises. For the time being, the account we have is that on that night the tantrum reached its self-destructive climax. They agreed to die and decided to make it seem as if they were the victims of an extra judicial execution: the fascist pigs are pretending not to be fascist pigs, let’s show everyone what they are really capable of – let’s die and teach them a lesson. They left no notes behind. Baader fired a couple of aimless shots in his cell before shooting himself in the head from behind to make it seem, according to Aust, as if there had been a scuffle before his execution. This may sound far fetched. Yet it is consistent with the group mentality: ‘When their cells in Stammheim prison were being cleared, a copy of the Bertold Brecht’s play The Measures Taken, from which they were quoting in their letters, was found in almost all of them. The play contained the creed of the RAF, talking of the absolute will to change the ‘murdering world’ by murders of their own and, if need be, by suicide. “We are the missiles”, they had written.’

© Diego Gambetta

Stefan Aust, The Baader Meinhof Complex. The Bodley Head, 2008.[18]

[2] 1995 data, http://www.safecarguide.com/exp/statistics/statistics.htm.

[3] On average the 75 members would be 61 years old now. By that age the average life expectancy in Europe for males would predict the death of about 8 individuals. Thus, the extra deaths caused by the ‘profession’ are 11.

[4] See also Karin Bauer, “In search of Ulrike Meinhof”. In Karin Bauer (ed.), Everybody talks about the weather. We don’t. The writings of Ulrike Meinhof.  New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008, p.81

[5] Karin Bauer, op.cit., p. 26.

[6] Karen Bauer, op.cit., p. 64.

[7] Karin Bauer, op. cit., p. 43.

[8] Karin Bauer, op. cit., p. 92-3.

[9] Bernward is the son of Dichter Will Vesper, a Nazi poet.

[10] Wolfgang Kraushaar (ed.), Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus, Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006.

[11] One can see footage of the arrest at http://www.baader-meinhof.com/videos/Videos4.html.

[12] Mario Moretti, Brigate Rosse. Una storia italiana, Baldini&Castoldi, Milano, 2000, 3^rd edition, p.187.

[13] Both this and the previous quote are from Karin Bauer, op. cit., p. 61.

[14] Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, 2008, “Engineers of Jihad”, www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/users/gambetta/Engineers%20of%20Jihad.pdf

[15] On how the fascist past affected the emergence of terrorism see Peter Fritzsche, “Terrorism in the Federal Republic of Germany and Italy: Legacy of the ’68 movement or ‘Burden of Fascism’?”, Terrorism and Political Violence, vol. 4 (1), pp.466-481, 1989.

[16] Karin Bauer (ed.), op.cit., p. 138.

[17] The whole paragraph reads: “There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet.”  Walter Benjamin. “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003, Vol. 4: 1938-1940.

[18] I would like to thank Valeria Pizzini-Gambetta for her comments and generous suggestions, and Thomas Grund for his assistance.

But probably the most important thing in Carver’s life had already happened. Late in 1967, he was introduced to Gordon Lish, the founder editor of Genesis West, an avant-garde magazine. Lish was also working for a text-book publisher in Palo Alto. In 1969, Lish became fiction editor at Esquire magazine and in November wrote to Carver asking for stories. (Lish’s shift from avant-garde to mainstream was ironised in his 1971 essay ‘How I Got to be a Big-Shot Editor and Other Worthwhile Self-Justifications’ – that title, a boast and a knowing, wry disclaimer, gives you some idea of how clever Lish is.) In 1970, Lish line-edited Carver’s story ‘Neighbors’ and accepted it for Esquire. Carver was grateful – for acceptance and editing.

By 1976, Lish’s assiduous promotion of Carver paid off. McGraw-Hill, under the Gordon Lish imprint, published Carver’s first book of fiction, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? The 22 stories had all been previously published in periodicals and were further edited by Lish, with Carver’s approval. In this year, Carver was hospitalised for acute acoholism and wound up in Duffy’s, a residential treatment centre in the Napa Valley. Did I mention that in 1974, Carver and his wife filed for bankruptcy protection a second time? Well, I did now.

In 1980, Carver, separated from Maryann, set up house with poet and Guggenheim Fellow Tess Gallagher in El Paso, then Syracuse in upstate New York. Carver gave a manuscript to Lish, now an editor at Knopf, and Lish edited the stories so intensively that the original was halved in length. On 8 July 1980, Carver wrote a despairing letter to Lish, insisting that, unless the original text was restored, publication of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love should be cancelled. Part of Carver’s problem was that several other writers, like Tobias Wolff and Stephen Dobyns, had seen the originals. They would know what Lish had done.

In the event, publication went ahead and Carver’s name was made. Though thereafter Carver was confident enough to resist Lish’s editing, ever since, there have been rumours that Gordon Lish was responsible for everything valuable in Carver’s work. The editors of the Library of America Collected Stories (not complete) have chosen to publish Carver’s original manuscript (Beginners) alongside Lish’s edit (What We Talk About When We Talk About Love). They have done so at the urging of Carver’s widow, Tess Gallagher, who feels the original manuscript is superior to Lish’s edit. It isn’t. It is manifestly inferior. Lish was an editor touched with genius.

But does this mean that Carver was untalented? Think of Ezra Pound’s peerless and ferocious editing of The Waste Land. Every edit an improvement – and Eliot’s reputation unaffected. Think of Charles Monteith’s editing of the original typescript of Lord of the Flies: no one would wish back the 30 introductory descriptive pages of nuclear war cut by Monteith, who was Golding’s editor at Faber. What remains is brilliant and all Golding’s own work.

Is Carver a Golding or a T S Eliot? That is the fundamental question. We can test the hypothesis by examining Carver’s work before-Lish and after-Lish. Before 1971 and after 1980. A related issue is the nature of the editing. Pound and Monteith cut. On occasion, Lish added and re-arranged. He treated Carver’s stories as rough drafts – which is what they were in reality after Lish had redesigned them, a bit like Picasso taking massive liberties with Velasquez’s Las Meñinas. Except that Carver was no Velasquez.

One of the things non-musicians find difficult is the attitude of serious composers to tunes. Stravinsky lifts the opening melody of The Rite of Spring from a collection of Russian folk tunes. Beethoven writes variations on the English National Anthem. Bartok and Kodaly go out on the road, transcribing folk material. Tunes? They’re for the birds. Olivier Messiaen notates birdsong. Carver thought of the tunes: the blue-collar drunks, the spaced-out infidelities, the bitter abruptnesses of alcoholic behaviour, those inexplicable aporias. Lish composed them, sometimes radically, sometimes delicately – but never mistakenly.

‘So Much Water So Close to Home’ in Carver’s original was nineteen pages long. In Lish’s edit it takes six pages. It is improved beyond recognition. ‘I Could See the Smallest Things’ is Lish’s retitled version of Carver’s ‘Want to See Something?’ The original is seven prolix pages, the edit four pages. It, too, is changed and improved beyond recognition.

An easy example. We have two versions of a Carver story where the tune is itself taken from the judgment of Solomon: offer each mother half the child and the true mother will give up her share. (As a topos of justice, this comes in for some searching, only apparently stupid, criticism from Jim in Huckleberry Finn.) Carver’s version is the self-destructive alcoholic version, in which the two parents struggle for physical possession of a baby. It is all about the struggle of two wills. The object of the struggle, the baby, is merely the site of contention. Lish has added a brilliant, ironically affectless title, ‘Popular Mechanics’. The original is called ‘Mine’. It is a perfect, tiny touch and it is Lish’s. He has changed only one word and added two, but the effect is massive. It adds sardonic detachment, ironic contempt, to the palette of colours.

Lish has also taken out two clunks. Nothing ‘major’, you might think, but the short story depends on getting everything right. In Carver’s original, as the two parents struggle for physical possession of the child, there is an over-explanatory, distracting sentence:  ‘She felt her fingers being forced open and the baby going from her. No, she said, just as her hands came loose. She would have it, this baby whose chubby face gazed up at them from the picture on the table. She grabbed for the baby’s other arm. She caught the baby around the wrist and leaned back. // He would not give. He felt the baby going out of his hands and he pulled back hard. He pulled back very hard. // In this manner they decided the issue. [my italics]’ There are several alterations to this passage, but the main one is the excision of the sentence in italics – a sentence that pulls focus somewhere else, disastrously. Lish also cuts the repetition of ‘he pulled back hard. He pulled back very hard’. In the edit, it is ‘he pulled back very hard’.

The opening paragraph is immeasurably improved by two slight, crucial alterations. Carver is a naturally repetitive writer – heavy on the gas, too reliant on the pedal. His version opens: ‘During the day the sun had come out and the snow melted into dirty water. Streaks of water ran down from the little, shoulder-high window that faced the backyard. Cars slushed by on the street outside. It was getting dark, outside and inside. [my italics]’ This is Lish’s version: ‘Early that day the weather turned and the snow was melting into dirty water. Streaks of it ran down from the little shoulder-high window that faced the backyard. Cars slushed by on the street outside, where it was getting dark. But it was getting dark on the inside too.’ You lose the repetition of ‘water’ and the apparent redundancy of Carver’s ‘outside and inside’ is made quietly ominous.

Both Carver and Lish are copying Hemingway, but Lish is better at it. As the opening phrases show – ‘During the day the sun had come out’ and ‘Early that day the weather turned’. Carver’s awkward pluperfect is taken out and the time-scale is clearer. It is nothing – nothing at all – and it is everything.

Carver, of course, was copying Hemingway before Lish happened along with his dark green eye-shield, his sharp, bloody pencil and his ample spike. Nothing wrong with imitating a great writer. Hemingway is no exception. This is the famous opening of ‘Up in Michigan’, in which Hemingway takes us inside Liz’s amorous fixation on Jim: ‘Liz liked Jim very much. She liked it the way he walked over from the shop and often went to the kitchen door to watch for him to start down the road. She liked it about his moustache. She liked it about how white his teeth were when he smiled…’ The catalogue continues, all-inclusively. There isn’t anything much she doesn’t like. It ends: ‘One day she found she liked it about the way the hair was black on his arms.’ Hemingway repeats the trope in ‘Cat in the Rain’: ‘The wife liked him. She liked the deadly serious way he received any complaints. The she liked his dignity. She liked the way he wanted to serve her.’ And so on. The addition in ‘Up in Michigan’ of ‘liked it about’ is only two words, but those extra words are lode-bearing.

The trope itself is taken directly from that great source work Madame Bovary. Charles is in undeclared love with Emma and visits her father to supervise the recovery of his broken leg: ‘He liked to find himself riding into the farmyard and to feel the gate turning against his shoulder. He liked the cock crowing on the wall and the boys running to meet him. He liked the barn and the stables, he liked old Rouault, who patted him on the hand and called him saviour. He liked Mademoiselle Emma’s little clogs on the scrubbed stones of the kitchen floor…’

Carver has noticed only Hemingway’s notorious repetition – hence that ‘water’ twice at the beginning of ‘Mine’ [‘Popular Mechanics’]. And he knows that Hemingway’s prose is a beady necklace of terse, declarative sentences. In actuality, Hemingway’s prose can be deliberately prolix and is much more various and rhythmical in a way that escapes Carver. It can also be economical in a way Carver’s prose hardly ever is.

On his own, without Lish, Carver leaves very little out. Try ‘What would You Like to See?’ It recycles something cut by Lish from ‘Want to See Something?’ – a woman killed by a heart attack at the wheel, so her car crashes slowly into the carport – but is mainly remarkable for its mantra of unremarkable detail. Not technique, so much as obsessive compulsion disorder. It reads more like a suspiciously circumstantial alibi than a short story.

The first story in this Library of America edition of Carver’s stories is ‘Fat’. It is pre-Lish. The opening story of Cathedral is (post-Lish) ‘Feathers’. This is Carver trying to describe a fat baby in ‘Feathers’, admittedly protected from criticism (you could argue) by a characterised narrative voice: ‘The baby stood in Olla’s lap, looking around the table at us. Olla had moved her hands down to its middle so that the baby could rock back and forth on its fat legs. Bar none, it was the ugliest baby I’d ever seen. It was so ugly I couldn’t say anything. No words would come out of my mouth. I don’t mean it was diseased or disfigured. Nothing like that. It was just ugly. It had a big red face, pop eyes, a broad forehead, and these big fat lips. It had no neck to speak of, and it had three or four fat chins. Its chins rolled right up under its ears, and its ears stuck out from its bald head. Fat hung over its wrists. Its arms and fingers were fat. Even calling it ugly does it credit.’

A not untypical failure. Carver’s method, in essence, is painstaking notation, the prose of a Sunday painter, only one up from painting by numbers, while shielding the point of the story. Immense literalist clarity of detail paradoxically occluding a narrative enigma. You see everything – except the point. The point usually proves to be allegorical.

In ‘Feathers’, the narrator takes his disaffected wife to supper with a work-colleague and his wife. They are the parents of the ugly baby. There is also a slightly alarming peacock in the story, the pet of the parents, which is allowed indoors because its presence soothes the ugly baby. The narrator and his wife leave – she unaccountably less disaffected  and wanting her husband’s ‘seed’. As a result, she becomes pregnant and their life together enters a period of prolonged drabness and disaffection. The point of the peacock – the narrator’s wife is given peacock feathers to take home – is that the maternal instinct is a mystery, a powerful biological imperative. When the narrator’s wife plays with the ugly baby, we assume she is faking interest and affection. But the behaviour of the peacock sets us straight: ‘The peacock walked quickly around the table and went for the baby. It ran its long neck across the baby’s legs. It pushed its beak in under the baby’s pajama top and shook its stiff head back and forth. The baby laughed and kicked its feet. Scooting onto its back, the baby worked its way over Fran’s knees and down onto the floor. The peacock kept pushing against the baby, as if it were a game they were playing. Fran held the baby against her legs while the baby strained forward.’

It’s the animal in us, you see.

There is one good piece of writing in this story:  the peacock ‘shook itself, and the sound was like a deck of cards being shuffled in the other room’.

In ‘Fat’, the narrator is a waitress, serving a very fat man. We know he is fat because in this story of four and a half pages, the word ‘fat’ occurs 25 times. She is telling her friend Rita what the fat man ate in detail. More Sunday painter literalism. Just before the end of the story, we reach a genuinely promising, anti-narrative point: ‘What else? Rita says, lighting one of my cigarets and pulling her chair close to the table. This story’s getting interesting now, Rita says. // That’s it. Nothing else. He eats his desserts, and then he leaves and then we go home, Rudy and me.’ Rita, like most readers, wants closure and climax. Carver appears to resist, to deny the appetite for story, for point, purpose and narrative destination, the way Wordsworth does in Lyrical Ballads. In ‘Simon Lee’, Wordsworth snubs his readers with their yearning for ‘outrageous stimulation’: ‘My gentle reader, I perceive / How patiently you’ve waited, / And I’m afraid that you expect / Some tale will be related…’

Carver, though, succumbs – succumbs to the obvious – though he is careful to include Rita’s bafflement: ‘That’s a funny story, Rita says, but I can see she doesn’t know what to make of it’. This, of course, is an instruction to the reader: make something of it. It is a story about pregnancy, where ‘fatness’ is a synecdoche for pregnancy. First, the narrator wonders ‘what would happen if I had children and one of them turned out to look like that, so fat’. (Compare, the identical topos of obese baby in ‘Feathers’.) Then when Rudy starts fucking her, ‘here is the thing’: ‘When he gets on me, I suddenly feel I am fat. I feel I am terrifically fat, so fat that Rudy is a tiny thing and hardly there at all.’ Pregnant with a foetus, in fact. O my homunculus.

I nearly forgot. The fat man, when he orders, uses the plural form to refer to himself. ‘I think we will begin with a Caesar salad.’ He’s feeding for two, is all. This could almost be clever, were it not for the insistence on the plural and the unflagging account of the items on the menu and chosen from the menu. The food in ‘Feathers’ isn’t stinted either in Carver’s account. What you have here, in both stories, is an anecdotal twist, an O Henry ending, buried under a dumpster of dog-eared detail.

Carver is sometimes described as the American Chekhov – about as routinely as William Trevor is described as the Irish Chekhov. It’s no surprise that, towards the end of his life, Carver should examine this parallel in a story, ‘Errand’. Essentially, this story narrates Chekhov’s death from TB in Badenweiler, a German spa town. Carver draws on Olga Knipper’s memoir, Chekhov’s sister’s memoir, Chekhov’s letters and journals. Carver is careful to mention that Chekhov and his friend and patron Souvorin both came from peasant stock – as Carver came from blue-collar, Bruce Springsteen-celebrated, working class. Another important part of the story touches on Chekhov’s relations with his senior writer, Tolstoy. Tolstoy doesn’t think much of Chekhov’s plays, but he admires the stories, and likes Chekhov because he is ‘modest and quiet, like a girl’.  Carver’s figure for himself in the story is equally modest. He is the servant who brings Chekhov, Olga and their doctor a bottle of champagne in the middle of the night – for a last drink before death. The servant, appropriately enough, is a shambles: ‘the champagne was brought to the door by a tired-looking young man whose blond hair was standing up. The trousers of his uniform were wrinkled, the creases gone, and in his haste he’d missed a loop while buttoning his jacket. His appearance was that of someone who’d been resting (slumped in a chair, dozing a little) when off in the distance the phone had clamored…’ (‘Clamored’!)

His appearance was that of someone who has slept in his clothes – because Carver was a drunk. But the next morning, his appearance is sober: ‘he uniform trousers were neatly pressed, with stiff creases in front, and every button on his snug green jacket was fastened.’ He’s been to AA, he’s off the sauce and he’s about to become the American Chekhov – modestly.

Which brings us to the champagne cork that is the point of the story. When he doctor opens the Moët, he works the cork carefully out of the bottle – ‘to minimise, as much as possible, the festive explosion [my italics].’ What is wrong with ‘pop’? Or ‘ring’ for the telephone? Carver is writing in his suit and wearing a nineteenth-century tie.

Anyway, when he has poured three glasses, the good doctor, ‘out of habit, pushed the cork back in the neck of the bottle’. An impossibility, of course. Or people wouldn’t need to buy those chromium helmets that batten on the rim of the bottle-neck.

Why does Carver need the cork back in the bottle? Wouldn’t it be enough for the serving boy to see the cork on the floor and close his hand on surreptitiously. That way, the cork would be a figure for the servant, essential, ignored, peripheral, modest. It would also be a symbol of good writing – and the way it depends on seeing the importance of the detail, the irrelevant detail.

That, however, wouldn’t have brought Carver’s allegory home. The story isn’t about the inadvertent killer detail. The story is about Carver inheriting Chekhov’s spirit. The cork goes back in the bottle so it can leave it – like a soul leaving a body. The boy lays his hand on the soul of Anton Chekhov.

We think we know what Carver thought of Gordon Lish. This is from the famous letter of 8 July 1980: ‘If the book were published as it is in its present edited form, I may never write another story, that’s how closely, God Forbid, some of those stories are to my sense of regaining my health and mental well-being.’ He felt ontologically in danger – as a writer and as a person. When he wrote this letter, Carver was already walking out with Tess Gallagher, whose opinion of Lish hasn’t changed. Carver, I’d guess, was caught between a rock and a hard place – between Lish and Gallagher.  Lish won the battle over What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, but Gallagher has gone on fighting. Lish’s position is that the matter is closed: ‘a dead letter to me.’ In 1991, Lish sold his archive to the Lily Library of Indiana University. The evidence is out there then. Lish knows what the verdict will be. He doesn’t need to fight. He only needs to wait. Gallagher may think publication of the original unedited manuscript in this Library of America edition will set matters right, support her version of the literary record – but she is wrong. It does exactly the opposite.

The title story of Cathedral, the first post-Lish volume, is about the visit of a blind man whose wife has died of cancer. It is narrated by a lush whose wife once worked for the blind man. They have kept in fairly close touch by exchanging tapes. The narrator’s sensitivity has been permanently eroded by alcohol. The prolixity of the narrative is testing but perhaps excused by the narrator’s impaired state. The Joyce story ‘Counterparts’ is written in style indirect libre for Farringdon, the drunken protagonist: ‘He lifted up the counter and, passing by the clients, went out of the office with a heavy step. He went heavily upstairs until he came to the second landing…’ ‘Cathedral’ has comparable passages: ‘Once she asked me if I’d like to hear the latest tape from the blind man. This was a year ago. I was on the tape, she said. So I said okay, I’d listen to it. I got us drinks and we settled down in the living room. We made ready to listen. First she inserted the tape into the player and adjusted a couple of dials. Then she pushed a lever. The tape squeaked and someone began to talk in this loud voice.’ Now you know how a cassette player works.

Would you like to know how people eat food? ‘When we sat down at the table for dinner, we had another drink. My wife heaped Robert’s plate with cube steak, scalloped potatoes, green beans. I buttered him up two slices of bread. I said, “here’s bread and butter for you.” [He’s blind, see.] I swallowed some of my drink. “Now let us pray,” I said, and the blind man lowered his head. My wife looked at me, her mouth agape. “Pray the phone won’t ring and the food doesn’t get cold,” I said. // We dug in. We ate everything there was to eat on the table. We ate like there was no tomorrow. We didn’t talk. We ate. We scarfed. We grazed that table. We were into serious eating. The blind man had right away located his foods, he knew just where everything was on his plate. I watched with admiration as he used his knife and fork on the meat. He’d cut two pieces of meat, fork the meat into his mouth, and then go all out for the scalloped potatoes, the beans next, and then he’d tear off a hunk of buttered bread and eat that. He’d follow this up with a big drink of milk. It didn’t seem to bother him to use his fingers once in a while, either.’

Genius.

Why does he need to cut cube steak?

After this epic meal, the wife and the blind man talk. The narrator is bored, switches on the TV (to his wife’s annoyance) and rolls a joint. His wife takes a toke and is basically out of the action after that. The blind man and the narrator drink Scotch and smoke joint after joint. On TV there is a documentary about medieval cathedrals. The narrator asks the blind man what he knows about cathedrals. The answer is an amalgam of stuff from the TV. Then the blind man says he really knows nothing about cathedrals and he asks the narrator to describe a cathedral. It is a failure. ‘“I’m sorry,” I said, “but it looks like that’s the best I can do for you. I’m just no good at it.”’

The blind man makes a proposition: they will draw a cathedral together. ‘He found my hand, the hand with the pen. He closed his hand over my hand. “Go ahead, bub, draw,” he said. “Draw. You’ll see. I’ll follow along with you. It’ll be okay. Just begin now like I’m telling you. You’ll see. Draw,” the blind man said.’

And they draw a cathedral. ‘You didn’t think you could. But you can, can’t you? You’re cooking with gas now. You know what I’m saying. We’re going to really have us something here in a minute.”’

We think we know what Carver thought of Gordon Lish. But this story is what Carver thought of Gordon Lish. It is a story about writing, a story about the editorial process – in which someone without talent is used by someone else to write. The major contributor is the blind man. He can’t do it without the boobus, but it is clear who does the writing. It was brave of Carver to write the story. And it is odd that no one, I think, has seen what it is about – mainly because it tells us something we’d rather not know – that Carver had courage to disclose the raw material, this kind of self-exposure, but Lish had the literary talent.

Raymond Carver Collected Stories edited by William L Stull and Maureen P Carroll 1019pp $40 .00 The Library of America  ISBN 978 1 59853 046 9