The Red Army Faction (RAF) is a German trauma. Many of the crimes committed by the RAF from the 1970s to the 1990s remain unsolved to this day, and myths continue to surround the members who terrorized West Germany. In this book, Silke Maier-Witt offers unique insights into the group’s inner workings.
On 7 April 1977 – the day West Germany's Attorney General, Siegfried Buback, was murdered – Silke Maier-Witt joined the RAF and went into hiding. From then on, she became one of the most wanted terrorists in West Germany. During the “German Autumn,” she was part of the RAF’s inner circle, which kidnapped and killed Hans Martin Schleyer in Cologne. After an RAF bank robbery in which a bystander was shot dead, she became critical of the group and left it. With the help of the Ministry for State Security, she went into hiding in East Germany and began a new, bourgeois life – which ended abruptly when she was arrested after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In her book, Silke Maier-Witt looks back on her life – from her childhood in Hamburg to her time in the RAF, her new identity in East Germany, her imprisonment, and her reinvention as a trained peace worker. Above all, she explores how, as a young woman, she came to join the Red Army Faction and why she accepted killing as a means to achieve the group’s goals.
