The Ideological Evolution of Horst Mahler: The Far Left-Extreme Right Synthesis by George Michael

In the late 1990s, Horst Mahler, a former leader of the Red Army Faction and scion of the radical left, announced his affinity for the extreme right and joined the NPD Germanys principal far right party. Later distancing himself from party politics, he founded the Deutsches Kolleg, a far right think tank that promotes German nationalism. Although ostensibly now a rightist, Mahler has synthesized much of his original left-wing ideology into a far right Weltanschauung that features nationalism, anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, with a strident critique of capitalism. As such, it has the potential to appeal to some segments of the contemporary anti-globalization movement, the international extreme right, and even Islamists. Introduction

Horst Mahler has emerged as one of the leading far right ideologists in Germany. During the 1970s, he attained international notoriety as a left-wing terrorist, but in the late 1990s, he made a political volte-face declaring his unabashed support for German nationalism. Although identified as part of the far right, he nevertheless retains a Marxian critique of capitalism, which he has interestingly syncretized with rightist themes, including extreme nationalism, anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia. This article examines the ideological evolution of Horst Mahler. First, his early life is sketched. Next, his involvement with the Red Army Faction is examined, followed by discussion on the genesis of his political reversal while in prison. After that, his participation in the NPD is reviewed. Breaking away from traditional party politics, Mahler founded a nationalist think tankthe Deutsches Kollegwhose major themes are discussed in the next section. His controversial pronouncements did not go unnoticed by German authorities and led to legal troubles which are covered in the following section. Finally, the conclusion explains how Mahlers syncretic ideology is indicative of a broader trend in which various dissident movements are increasingly converging on a similar critique of certain aspects globalization.

Early

Life

The son of a dentist, Horst Mahler was born on January 23, 1936 in Haynau in Lower Silesia. Mahlers parents were both staunch Nazis, both during and after the period of the Third Reich. In 1949, Mahler was brought to West Berlin as a refugee from the Soviet zone. He received a scholarship to attend the Free University of Berlin (Freie Universitt Berlin), where he was a member of a nationalist dueling Korps (schlagende Verbindung). However, eventually, the young Mahler began to have misgivings over German nationalism. Too young to be complicit with the Nazi regime, Mahler was emblematic of the so-called skeptical generation that developed its political consciousness in the 1950s. Growing up in that era, he confessed that the Nazi past dictated from an early age his shame of being German: The essential, highly personalized problem was this: how did your parents behave [during the Nazi period]. The question had implications for us, namely, that whenever events occur that even in a distant way recall the twelve years [of Nazi rule], we must resist them. By 1956, Mahler openly identified with the political left by joining the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and also the more radical Socialist Student Union (SDS) (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund) (SDS). He was later expelled from the SPD for his membership in the SDS, which the SPD prohibited in 1959, because of the SDSs strident Marxism -Leninism. After graduation in 1964, Mahler started his own law firm which specialized in medium-size businesses. As he took more and more left-wing clients, Mahler lost his business customers, which effectively ended his mainstream legal career. Nevertheless, Mahler proved himself to be a keen defender of leftist activists. In 1966, the young Mahler was the first German lawyer to successfully lodge a complaint against the European Commission for Civil Rights. To better assist left-wing causes, he and some of his left-wing colleagues formed the Socialist Lawyers Collective. Increasingly, Mahler adopted the Bohemian life -style that was popular with the student left at that time.

On many occasions, Mahler prominently marched with student activists in demonstrations. One particular event that galvanized the political left was a demonstration that took place on June 2, 1967 against the visit of the Shah of Iran to Germany. A melee ensued during which German police fired into the crowd and killed Benno Ohnesorg, a twenty-six year old student. His death sparked outrage among student leftists which precipitated still more protests. Unrest continued to increase after April 11, 1968, when an attempt was made on the life of Rudi Dutschke, the leader of the SDS by a twenty-four-year old housepainter and reputed right-wing extremist, Josef Erwin Bachmann, who was supposedly influenced by the newspaper Deutsche Nationale Zeitung, an organ of the far right National Democratic

Party of Germany (NPD) (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands). At the Technical University, an emotional student meeting, organized by the SDS, was held and blame for the incident was laid on the shoulders of the right-wing Springer press organization, which dominated the press in Berlin and worked to keep public opinion against the student left. The protestors reasoned that the Springer Press had created an atmosphere which inspired Bachmann to make the attempt on Dutschkes life. Demonstrations and riots accompanied with arsons and bombings occurred throughout West Germany. Eventually, in December 1968, Dutschke fatally succumbed to the wounds that he sustained. Out of this student unrest emerged the Baader-Meinhof Group.

The

Baader-Meinhof

Group

The militant left in West Germany emerged from the student milieu in West Berlin in the 1960s. The radicalization of the German Left commenced around the time of the formation of the formation of the Grand Coalition in 1966, which included the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD). This political alliance alienated some of the more radical left-wing activists in Germany who viewed it as a compromise. Consequently, some activists and political groups looked for political expression through channels outside of parliament. Various elements of the left-wing opposition coalesced into the Ausserparliamentarisch Opposition (APO) or Extra-Parliamentary Opposition in 1968. Although officially non-violent, the APO attracted militant elements that were impatient with the pace of political change in West Germany. One such group was the BaaderMeinhof Gang, or as it would come to be known, the Red Army Faction (RAF) (Rote Armee Fraktion). Disillusioned with the German Lefts ability to effect radical change, some elements of the left opted for armed struggle.

On April 2 and 3, 1968, several German leftists, including Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Thorwald Proll, and Horst Shnlein, attempted to burn down a Frankfurt department store in protest of the Vietnam War. After they were arrested, Mahler, along with Otto Schily and Ernst Heinitz served as the lawyers for the defendants. All four of the defendants were convicted of arson and endangering human life for which they were sentenced to three years in prison. In June 1969, however, they were temporarily paroled under an amnesty for political prisoners, but in November of that year, the Federal High Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) demanded that they return to prison. Only Shnlein complied with the order; the rest went underground and made their way to France, where they stayed for a time in a home belonging to the prominent French socialist and revolutionary,

Rgis Debray. Eventually, they made their way to Italy, where Mahler visited them and encouraged them to come back to Germany to form an underground guerilla group with him. On April 2, 1970, police stopped Baader for driving recklessly. Although he was let off with a warning, the traffic cop later recognized him on a wanted poster. An intensive search for Baader ensued and he was arrested in Berlin the next day.

Historians usually mark May 14, 1970 as the birth of the RAF. On that morning, a band of RAF members led by Ulrike Meinhof, broke Andreas Baader out of the German Institute for Social Questions located in Dahlem, a suburb of Berlin. The prison administration granted Baader permission to use the library at the institute for research on a book he supposedly planned to write on the organization of young people on the fringe of society. During the melee, two security officers were shot and an elderly staff member was nearly killed. For the next eighteen months, the group was the object of the largest manhunt in West German history, which involved five thousand police officers. Baader, along with Ensslin, Meinhof, and Mahler, fled to East Germany and eventually made their way to Lebanon, where they trained with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The West German terrorists were seen by some as intellectuals who engaged in extensive ideological debates. Many of them were in fact university students, primarily, social science majors. Most of the RAF members actually came from the middle class, not the working class. A loosely-organized terrorist organization, at its peak, the RAF consisted of twenty to thirty cadres and up to 200 supporters, who provided refuge and logistical support. Although Baader was recognized as one of the groups important leaders, he did not really evince much ideological sophistication. Rather as one observer put it, he liked to defy for the sake of defying.

Mahler was recognized as the groups chief organizer, theoretician, strategist, and tactician. He is believed to have written a bookletConcerning Armed Struggle in Western Europe which included instructions for manufacturing weapons and forming commando groups. According to its analysis, the revolution could only be effectively led by an avant-garde composed of students. As a leftist, Mahler originally saw his struggle in class terms describing it not as a war among nations but a war of classes, which will sweep all nations, social, cultural, and religious boundaries and barriers forever from the stage of history. As time went by, the RAF would speak derisively of the working class in Germany, viewing them as compliant and kept in their place by fear of cheap foreign labor, the threat of unemployment, and the worry of recession. This was similar to the analysis of Herbert

Marcuse, a prominent French left-wing philosopher, who lamented that the working class did not have much revolutionary potential in that it was generally content with its predicament. Thus in order to effect its goals, the left had to look elsewhere for support, viz. students.

Many left wing revolutionaries were greatly inspired by the Brazilian revolutionary Carlos Marighella and his concept of the urban guerilla. He is best-known for his book, the Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla, in which he propounded a strategy to move revolutionary violence from the countryside to the city. Marighellas most original concept was that all revolutionary violence could be based in the urban areas and controlled by a small group of urban guerillas. Violence did not necessarily have to be structured or coordinated in order to provoke a crisis, and in doing so, create the atmosphere conducive for a revolution.

In the late 1960s, this strategy was put into practice in Uruguay by a group called the Tupamaros. Founded by Raul Sendic in 1963, the Tupamaros was composed primarily of students. In 1968 the Tupamaros launched a massive campaign of decentralized terrorism against the Uruguayan government. Their grand strategy centered on winning support from the middle class and the working class. However, their propensity for violence alienated many people. Both Marighella and the Tupamaros believed that people would flock to the revolutionaries once government repression was employed. However, the opposite was true, as the people wanted order, and as a result, actually supported the harsh counterterror measures. Consequently, the left-leaning government was defeated in the election of 1971 and a right wing government came to power. Soon thereafter martial law was declared and a brutal counterterrorist campaign ensued. Despite its failures, many left-wing terrorist groups in the late 1960s and 1970s were heavily influenced by the Tupamaros and viewed their campaign as a model of urban terrorism.

Mahler proposed the creation of a German urban guerilla movement based on the model of the Tupamaros in Uruguay. Mimicking the Tupamaros, the RAF conducted numerous armed robberies to procure weapons and finance their campaign. In an effort to codify their revolutionary approach, the RAF released an ideological text titled Das Konzept Stadtguerilla (The Urban Guerilla Concept). Published in April 1971, the small tract provided a justification for armed struggle against the West German government. The tract detailed government repression against left-activists and voiced common cause with Third World liberation movements revolutionaries in other parts of the world, in particular, those in

China, Latin America, Algeria, and Vietnam. The U.S-led war in Vietnam had a catalyzing effect on the left both in the U.S. and in Europe. Although the West German government was only indirectly involved in the prosecution of the Vietnam War by way of U.S. military bases that were located on German soil, the RAF believed that by attacking the German government, it could undermine the war effort. Mahler identified the U.S. and NATO as the heart of the imperialist-feudal system. The West German government was identified as an integral part of the system without which U.S. imperialism could not be successfully waged.

As their struggle continued, the Palestinian cause featured more and more prominently among RAF members, who framed that issue in the context of a larger anti-imperialist struggle. The Middle East was seen as a vital strategic, military, and economic region for the forces of imperialism. Around that time, the Federal Republic of Germany had the highest concentration of Palestinian students in Europe in large part to the gover nments generous subsidies in granting stipends to Arab students. Al Fatah, the armed branch of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), managed to infiltrate and dominate some Palestinian student organizations and establish ties with left-wing organizations. In June 1970, Mahler, along with Hans-Jrgen Bcker, Monkika Berberich, Brigitte Asdonk, Manfred Grashof, Petra Scheim, flew to Beirut and made their way to an al Fatah training camp. Palestinian assistance to German left-wing terrorists usually took the form of training and offering safe havens. While in Lebanon, however, the Arab terrorists took a dim view of the permissiveness of their German counterparts.

Although stridently anti-fascist, over time, the RAF evinced an increasing anti-Zionism that veered closely to anti-Semitism. For example, some RAF members, including Mahler, expressed approval of Black Septembers murder of Israeli athletes at the Summer Olympic Games held in Munich in 1972, as it was described as a courageous anti-imperialist commando raid. To demonstrate their solidarity with the Palestinians, some left-wing radicals, for example, the Tupamaros West Berlin, attacked Jewish targetsincluding synagogueson the anniversary of Krystal Nacht. RAF leader, Ulrike Meinhof, once described saw anti-Semitism as a manifestation of anti-capitalism in the sense that people resented their dependence on Jewish bankers (or as she put it, Money Jews). She argued that the people did not hate Jews qua Jews, but rather Jews as capitalists. Furthermore, she sought to exonerate the working class from the culpability of the Nazi genocide, claiming that they were not aware of the final solution. Increasingly, members of the RAF cast Zionism as a form as racism, which was actually consistent with the Zeitgeist among Third World liberation movements during that period and culminated in the UN General

Assembly Resolution 3379 announced in 1975 which determined that Zionism was a form of racial discrimination. According to the journalist Jillian Becker, members of the RAF were Hitlers children in the sense that they were, on the one hand, reacting against the recent past and sought to compensate for it and, on the other hand, subconsciously identifying with the Nazi era. Often evoking Germanys Nazi past, the RAF maintained that U.S. imperialism was merely a continuation of fascism, albeit in another guise. In a sense, the RAF saw its activities as a way to expatiate guilt for Germany Nazi past.

During the early 1970s, the RAF stepped up its campaign and bombed U.S. military bases, police stations, and offices of the Springer Press. By doing so, it brought down the wrath of West German authorities who mounted a massive manhunt for RAF fugitives. Mahler, along with Monika Berberich, Brigitte Asdonk, and Irene Georgens, was arrested in an apartment on October 8, 1970. In May 1972, German authorities launched Operation Watersplash in an effort to round up RAF members still on the lam. On June 1, 1972, police arrested Holger Meins, Andreas Baader, and Jan-Carl Raspe after a shootout. Shortly thereafter, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof were arrested as well. Despite these setbacks, the RAF idea lived on, as new members picked up the banner of the organization and continued to carry out sporadic acts of terrorism. Using their lawyers as conduits, leaders of the RAF were able to direct some terrorist operations while incarcerated in prison.

Increasingly, the RAF became preoccupied with securing the release of its imprisoned comrades, or a freeing the guerilla movement, rather than effecting its political goals. The death of Holger Meins on November 9, 1974 following a hunger strike to protest prison conditions sparked a renewed campaign of left-wing terrorism in Germany. On November 10, the president of the West German Supreme Court, Gnter von Drenkmann was assassinated in his home. The June 2 Movement claimed responsibility. On April 25, 1975, six members of the Holger Meins Brigade seized the West German embassy in Stockholm, where they took twelve hostages and demanded the release of twenty-six political prisoners in Germany. An accidental explosion of the guerillas arsenal, which resulted in the deaths of two guerillas and one hostage, ended the incident. By 1976, most of the leadership of the RAF was under arrest and in prison. However, the June 2 movement and various Red Cells continued their sporadic attacks .

The fall of 1977Der Deutscher Herbst (The German Autumn) was the high point of the conflict between the RAF and West German authorities. On October 13, 1977, four Arabs and three Germansincluding a womanhijacked the Lufthansa Boeing 737 in Morocco

and ultimately settled in Mogadishu. The hijackers intended to use the passengers as blackmail to release RAR members from prison. A special counterterrorism squadthe Grenzschutzgruppe 9 (GSG 9)flew in from Bonn, along with two British Special Air Service men, stormed the plane and ended the crisis, which resulted in the death of three hijackers and the wounding of a fourth. None of the captives were killed in the ordeal. Just a few hours after the episode, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe committed suicide at the Stammheim Prison where they were incarcerated. Ulrike Meinhof had hanged herself earlier. On October 9, the RAF announced that they had killed Hanns Martin Schleyer, the president of the Employers Association of West Germany and also president of the Federation of German Industry whose body was later discovered in the town Mulhouse new the French-German border. A month earlier, members of the RAF had kidnapped Schleyer and held him for ransom, threatening to kill him if imprisoned RAF members were not released. A former SS-officer who served under Rheinhard Heydrich in Czechoslovakia during World War II, the leftists saw Schleyer as emblematic of the Federal Republics Nazi past.

As to be expected, the West German government took the RAF very seriously. The example of Weimar was often invoked by the media and leading politicians as an historical analogue insofar as the new West German democracy was again threatened by anti-democratic forces. In order to avoid the mistakes of the past, the government responded forcefully and resolutely to the RAF disproportionate to the violence that the latter unleashed. To combat terrorism, the German government created a massive security apparatus. Arguably, the RAF managed to keep the extreme left from being effective on the political spectrum, as its violence did much to the discredit the far left in Germany. The terrorists became a liability to the more respectable German left. In fact, left-wing critiques of the RAF were probably the most scathing of all.

The RAF greatly overestimated its support from among the German populace. Members had the mistaken notion that revolutionary violence would spark a national conflagration that would drive the masses to its cause. In 1992, with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the RAF issued a communiqu announcing cessation to violence against representatives of business and the state. Finally, in March 1998, the group formally announced its disbandment, explaining that the concept of the urban guerilla was no longer relevant in contemporary German society.

Prison

For his RAF-related activities, Mahler faced several criminal trials. Otto Schily, who would later go on to serve as Germanys Minister of the Interior from 1998 -2005, defended Mahler during his 1971 trial for demonstrating in front of the Springer Press. The following year, Mahler was tried for his part in the Baader rescue, along with Irene Goergens and Ingrid Schubert. Once again, Schily served as his defense counsel. Mahler was found guilt for membership of an illegal organization. In the fall of that year, Mahler was also tried for bank robbery along with other RAF members. In yet another trial in 1974, Mahler was convicted of forming a criminal organization. All totaled, Mahler was sentenced to fourteen years in prison for his various convictions. To make matters worse, he was dismissed from the bar in 1974.

While in prison, Mahler appeared to have a genuine change of heart with respect to terrorism, commenting that he refused to justify the murder of unarmed civilians, massacres, [and] kidnappings, as a form of anti-imperialist struggle. Acts like these Mahler opined are crimes against the revolution. Mahler finally broke with the RAF in 1974. As he saw it, the radical left in Germany failed to develop a mass following as the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre counseled the left to do Disillusioned by the violence of the RAF, in the aftermath of the events of 1977, he described the campaign of the RAF as a sign of weakness of the German socialist left insofar as it resorted to violence rather than seeking to develop power through legitimate and politically constructive means. In 1978, he dismissed the charges of his fellow RAF inmates that they had been tortured in prison, describing the allegations as a propaganda lie intended to morally blackmail the left and legitimate the brutal form of struggle employed by t he guerillas seeking to extort the release of their imprisoned comrades. Instead, Mahler recommended that his comrades accept the consequence of their actions without making specious complaints. When German radicals kidnapped Peter Lorenz, a high-ranking official in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and pressured the West German government to release certain prisoners, Mahler refused to be included in the exchange. Mahler was eventually released on parole in the early 1980s. Seeking to once again practice law, Mahler hired, Gerhard Schreder, a former associate, who would go to become the German chancellor in 1997, to serve as his lawyer. Schreder helped Mahler regain admission to the bar in 1988, which allowed Mahler to restart his legal business in Berlin. He would go on to use his legal skills to defend Germanys most prominent far right political party.

The

NPD

Far right political parties emerged in Germany at the time of the creation of the Federal Republic in 1949. However, the Economic Miracle of postwar Germany produced a broad legitimation of the new Federal Republic. As a consequence, extreme right parties were effectively marginalized in the electoral arena. With the economic slump in 1966, though, a new party, the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands), marked a return of the electoral extreme right in Germany. The party was founded in November 1964 by Adolf von Thadden, Fritz Thielen, and Waldemar Schtz in Hanover as an umbrella organization of several extreme right and conservative parties. In the 1969 Bundestag election, the party received 4.3 percent of the vote the best result that an extreme right party achieved in a national election in postwar Germany; however, by 1972, its success had come to an abrupt end. But, by the 1990s, several trends, including concern over immigration and economic problems in the East, contributed to the sporadic success of far right parties. For example, in 2004, the NPD entered the Dresden parliament with 9.2 percent of the votes cast in the election. Currently, the party has about 6,000 members and publishes a monthly periodical called Deutsche Stimme. In 1996, Udo Voigt took over the reins of the NPD.

The platform of the NPD demands the reinstatement of Germanys 1937 borders. For years, NPD leaders have cast doubt on the Nazi Holocaust, depicting it as a fabrication to bring guilt to the German people and stymie their nationalist aspirations. The NPD has interfaced with some American far rightists, most notably, the late Dr. William L. Pierce, the founder of the neo-Nazi National Alliance. In 1998, after remaining politically dormant for many years, Mahler revealed his new political beliefs and announced his support for the NPD. In an article titled Trut h Revealed, or the Legacy of the Generation of 68 he wrote for a right-wing newspaper called Junge Freihet, he drew a connection between the generation of 1968 and the development of a new German vlkisch ideology:

The 1968 generation destroyed tradition and religion as world-shaping conceptionsand brought our people a step nearer to maturity. The ground is now ready for completing this enlightenment, which will simultaneously mean their surmounting. We experience this result of the cultural revolution of 1968 as Hell, since also with tradition and religion our moral substance has departedAs a cultureless Volk we live in a second Stone Age. It

requires some effort of thought to really extinguish the mental vacuum this condition of absolute negativity, which threatens to destroy us now as humans and as a Volk and recognize as something positive, and in this sense as an historical service of the 1968 generation. Let us be warriors of thought! Let us argue togetherfor God and our forefathers country! ,

Since reunification, right-wing violence has been a serious concern of the German government, especially in Landers in the east. In 1999, the German federal government requested that the countrys highest court consider a ban against the NPD for its connections to neo-Nazi skinhead gangs. Soon thereafter, both houses of parliament the Budesraat and the Bundestagannounced their intentions to ban the party as well. In an interesting twist, the German Interior Minister, Otto Schily, led the effort to ban the NPD. His old comrade, Mahler, represented the NPD in the court proceedings, which began in 2002. In a case of tit-for-tat, Mahler called for the banning of Jewish organizations in Germany. Ultimately, the case against the NPD failed on procedural grounds. In March 2003, the Federal Constitutional court ruled that the evidence submitted against the NPD was tainted insofar as it included testimony from paid informants who had infiltrated the party and whose identities the government refused to disclose. Eventually, Mahler decided to break with party politics and instead focus his efforts in the realm of ideas. To that end, he and Reinhold Oberlercher founded the Deutsches Kolleg.