Dem Volk dienen: Rote Armee Fraktion: Stadtguerilla und Klassenkampf

The treatise Dem Volk Dienen: Rote Armee Fraktion: Stadtguerilla und Klassenkampf (Serve the People: Red Army Faction: Urban Guerilla and Class Struggle) was published in April 1972, as one of the texts distributed by the Red Army Faction to provide an ideological justification for their violent actions. While RAF’s short statements on current issues and declarations about their attacks circulated in mainstream media to reach a broader public, the group also published several longer treatises, which were destined for sympathizers and potential members and were distributed in alternative media and underground networks.[1] The text Dem Volke Dienen was written by Ulrike Meinhof, formerly a member of the Socialist German Student Union (SDS) and esteemed journalist of the left-wing journal konkret who subsequently joined the Red Army Faction and went underground.

The publication opens with the slogan “all power to the people!” and not explicitly referenced citations from a 1967 text by the Uruguyan Tupamaros guerilla movement about technical knowledge, training, and practice necessary for armed resistance and Mao tse Tung’s statement on the relative weight of death, drawing on the ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian’s dictum that “to die for the people is heavier than Mount Tai, but to work for the fascist and die for the exploiters and oppressors is lighter than a feather.”[2] These texts, followed by the enumeration of deaths linked to capitalist exploitation and an homage to three killed RAF members, serve as a preface to the main sections of the text that include a critique of Chancellor Willy Brandt’s visit to Tehran and an article about the 1971 chemical industry strike movement, as well as justifications for RAF’s urban guerilla strategy and related issues. The document thus serves to propagate RAF’s idea of armed struggle, presenting the most militant development emerging out of the late 1960s student movement in West Germany.