An apolitical process? In a – as the court emphasized – completely apolitical trial, Daniela Klette was sentenced to 13 years in prison.

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In the reporting on the verdict against Daniela Klette, there is hardly a report without the remark that anyone who sees her appearance can almost believe the descriptions of the neighbors, who described her as a friendly and nice older woman. However, this must obviously be a dissimulation: “Remorse looks different,” criticizes the “Bildzeitung,” and the “Taz” criticizes Klette’s “almost unbearable hubris.”

Apparently the 67-year-old is still not ready to distance herself from the RAF across the board. Whether Klette was a member of the RAF is - contrary to what the reporting suggests - actually not at all the subject of the proceedings, which originally concern 13 robberies, some attempted and some carried out, that the defendant is said to have committed together with her comrades Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub in order to finance their illegal life (prosecutor and court call this greed). During the trial it was decided that five offenses would not be prosecuted. This meant that there were only eight robberies before the court. The possible involvement in three attacks between 1990 and 1993 will only be clarified in a later trial. The offense of membership in a terrorist organization itself has been statute-barred for some time.

“We are not conducting state security or terrorism proceedings here, even if we are negotiating in the state security room,” the presiding judge Lars Engelke emphasized right at the beginning of the hearing, and on the occasion of the verdict the “Taz” once again supported him: “There is little to suggest that the proceedings are politically motivated. Others have also been sentenced to comparably long prison sentences for similar robberies on cash-in-transit vehicles.” This is not completely wrong in that there have been cases where similarly high sentences have been handed out for perpetrators with significant criminal records for series of robberies – when significant sums of money are involved, the class justice system is no laughing matter.

But the fact that the trial against Daniela Klette was a political procedure should be obvious even to a "Taz" journalist, for whom the refusal to admit a revolutionary anti-capitalist claim as a mistake apparently represents a permanent provocation. The location of the trial ensures this: a former riding hall in the area around Verden was specially converted into a fortress-like temporary courthouse at a cost of several million euros. Klette herself and her defenders were placed in a bulletproof glass box; special forces with balaclavas and machine guns were stationed at the building's exits. During the two and a half hour transport to the trial, the defendant had to wear a heavy lead vest and was tied on her hands and feet.

Although no one was injured in the attempted robberies, the public prosecutor's office insisted on the charge of "attempted murder." The “acceptance of fatal acts of injury” that the Federal Prosecutor’s Office (BAW) accuses Klette of is based solely on the assumed former membership in the RAF. Ultimately, it is also this suspected affiliation with the long-dissolved urban guerrilla group that could make the chain of evidence on the basis of which the verdict was made plausible in some way. The argument clearly refers to the well-known collectivity in the decision-making structure of the RAF. The admissibility of this argument was confirmed by the Federal Court of Justice in 1998 and is now used to accuse Daniela Klette of involvement in robberies in which there is only little evidence of her specific involvement: witness statements or surveillance videos that clearly identified her as the perpetrator are not available, and the mixed DNA traces that the evidence collection found in getaway vehicles are not particularly meaningful in themselves.

Although the RAF issue dominated the entire trial, the public prosecutor's office and court decided it should not play a role. Only a further trial at the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court will focus on an attempted attack on a Deutsche Bank building in Eschborn, Hesse in 1990, the shooting at the US embassy building in Bonn in 1991 and finally the blowing up of the new prison building in Weiterstadt in 1993. No one was injured in any of these actions. In 1992, the RAF announced that it would "stop attacks on leading representatives from business and the state for the process that is now necessary." If Daniela Klette had actually been a "leading member of the RAF," she would have been involved in ending the armed conflict - a goal that the repressive authorities of the Federal Republic of Germany had not achieved in over twenty years, even through the use of massive violence and the erosion of constitutional standards.

The example that is being made of Daniela Klette is clearly due neither to a real threat nor to the appeal that the idea of ​​armed resistance to capitalism might currently have on younger leftists.

In August 1971, the RAF declared in its “Urban Guerrilla Concept”: “We are not saying that the organization of illegal armed resistance groups could replace legal proletarian organizations and that individual actions could replace class struggles, nor that armed struggle could replace political work in the workplace and in the district. We only claim that one is the prerequisite for the success and progress of the other. … The Red Army Faction talks about the primacy of practice. Whether it is right to support armed resistance now

to organize depends on whether it is possible; Whether it is possible can only be determined practically.

27 years later, the RAF summed up in its declaration of dissolution: “The RAF was the revolutionary attempt of a minority, contrary to the tendency of this society, to contribute to the overthrow of capitalist conditions. We are glad to have been part of this experiment. The end of this project shows that we could not get through this way.«

As exemplified in the “Urban Guerrilla Concept,” the RAF still saw itself as part of the diverse class struggles in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1970s. In the 1980s, this self-image became difficult to maintain and increasingly gave way to the idea of ​​acting as part of a global anti-imperialist front. With the defeat of the socialist state system in 1989, this strategic determination also became obsolete. In the RAF's dissolution declaration of March 1998, what ultimately remains above all is the existentialist-based radical break with the capitalist social order, which the decision to armed struggle symbolized: "The fight in the social rift that our enmity marked only anticipated a truly social liberation: the rift between a system in which profit is the subject, people are the object, and the longing for a life without lies and Helped this senseless society."

The knowledge gained through practical investigation that the organization of armed resistance in the Federal Republic of Germany was not possible in the given social situation could certainly have occurred much earlier if the state had not taken hostage the members of the urban guerrillas that it was able to get hold of. As early as the 1970s, the evil speech about “Free the guerrillas” was making the rounds on the left – without those who spoke like that knowing how to deal with the situation of the prisoners, some of whom were sitting in inhumane conditions in the high-security wards and many of whom died in the care of the state.

In her closing remarks, Daniela Klette referred to the entire range of what is broadly agreed upon in the remaining “left scene”: to the “fight against militarization, conscription and rearmament,” against “violence against women, queers, trans people and people with disabilities,” against the “repressive isolation system at the borders to ward off refugees,” the “ecological destruction of the world,” and the fight against anti-Semitism and racism as well as – of course – “against Israeli settler colonialism and the apartheid policy against the Palestinian population”. Nevertheless, the solidarity movement was hardly able to have a significant broad impact, even if the bourgeois media eagerly pounced on any banner that could serve as evidence of how real the threat posed by “sympathizers of left-wing terrorism” still was.

Under certain circumstances, the verdict - which is close to the public prosecutor's maximum demand of 15 years - could ensure that the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court does not even have to deal with the political offenses accused of Daniela Klette, because a higher sentence than 15 years is not possible for Klette. This could certainly be an attractive option for the repressive authorities, if it weren't for the open wound in Weiterstadt. The blowing up of the new prison building was the RAF's last action and received unprecedented support from the left. To date, no one has been convicted of this attack.

Both the public prosecutor, who does not want to give up the charge of attempted murder, which the court dropped, and the defense have filed an appeal. In the motion to dismiss that the defense submitted at the beginning of the trial, the court was asked to take into account "the extent to which state and judicial failures led to people going underground and no longer seeing any legal prospects for themselves." It can hardly be assumed that the court was impressed by this. The entire left, on the other hand, would have every reason to think about this. After all, we find ourselves in a social situation in which hardly anyone dares to predict the deadline within which bourgeois democracy will tip over into a situation in which legal opposition work is no longer possible.

In March 1972 - the escalation between the RAF and state power was in full swing - Heinrich Böll published an essay in the "Spiegel" in which he demanded safe conduct for Ulrike Meinhof: "Have everyone who was once persecuted, some of whom sit in parliament, one or the other in the government, have they all forgotten what it means to be persecuted and hunted? Who of them knows what it means to be hounded in a constitutional state by Bild, which has a much higher circulation than the Sturmer had?"

Today, in a situation in which there is no longer a left-wing group that could pose a relevant threat to the state's monopoly on violence, there is no longer a bourgeois newspaper that would print such a text. But there are no intellectuals with the reach of Böll who would make the obvious demand: “Amnesty for Daniela Klette and safe conduct for Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub!”

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happens on July 1st, 2026

web address: https://kontrapolis.info/18941/author/group: Michael Csaszkóczy (specifically 7/26)feed date: Friday, November 13, 2026 - 08:27