Biography | RAF co-founder Andreas Baader: "Free in prison"

Can one feel free in prison? Andreas Baader, to some extent, certainly did, according to his biographer, Alex Aßmann. The co-founder of the RAF only felt free "in prison," the title of Aßmann's book, published this spring, about the most well-known figure of the so-called urban guerrilla group, alongside Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin, which disbanded in 1998. "I am a poet. I live a novel," is the first sentence in the book. A quote from Baader that demonstrates his political and personal will to shape his life as a prisoner, long before Stuttgart-Stammheim.

It comes from his prison diaries, which he wrote while he was in pretrial detention in Frankfurt am Main for just over a year, awaiting trial. In early April 1968, he, Ensslin, Horst Söhnlein, and Thorwald Proll set fire to two Frankfurt department stores to protest the Vietnam War. No one was hurt. Just two days later, they were betrayed and arrested. It wasn't until he was in prison that Baader realized what this was all about.

How does one become a revolutionary? While in prison, he filled eleven notebooks and journals, which Aßmann has now analyzed for historical purposes for the first time. This provides a different perspective on Baader than the one usually offered in the media, especially by journalist and RAF chief commentator Stefan Aust .

In feature films like "The Baader-Meinhof Complex" (2008) and "Stammheim: Time of Terror" (2025), in which Aust participated, Baader appears as a loudmouth with a tendency to act macho and asshole. While the script is a bit more supportive of him, he's given a touch of Jean-Paul Belmondo in "Breathless," but he still has to shout a lot, as in "Baader" (2002), for which Moritz von Uslar wrote the screenplay.

In Alex Aßmann's portrayal, however, Baader appears as a thoughtful young man who wants to determine his own image – aware that he is in the public eye due to the department store fires and the upcoming trial. In order to be able to make targeted political demands, he must first gain an understanding of the society in which he lives. This happens through the books he reads in prison (Marcuse, Lenin, Fanon, Flaubert, and, again and again, Wittgenstein) and through the letters he writes from prison, especially to his lover Gudrun Ensslin, who is also an inmate. With her, he discusses his inner states, his reading, and his relationship with his mother. They also develop an eroticism of the incarcerated by discussing the novel "Justine," which the Marquis de Sade wrote while he was also a prisoner.

What's special about Baader's letters: They seem casual and concise, as if thrown together associatively, yet they are the result of several drafts that Aßmann was able to consult in Baader's notebooks. Baader sometimes had to try out six versions before he could finally send a letter that sounded the way he intended: not too lyrical, not too artificial, but as if he had spoken it rather than written it. "In order to make the text sound the same as one would have expected from oral conversation, he had to compose cleanly, so to speak, but write letters with errors," explains Aßmann, who assumes that Baader sometimes recited his letters aloud in his cell to test their effect. A great deal of effort for seemingly spontaneous gestures.

For Baader, this writing had existential significance, as it enabled him to combat the depression that overcame him in prison. According to Assmann, through his reading and writing, he used literary means to create a kind of double of himself that he could freely dispose of, or as Baader put it in his diary: "I sat on Wittgenstein like one sits on a horse, like one sits on it and uses it to climb over the Wall."

He was arrested in Frankfurt two days before his 25th birthday. At that point, he hadn't achieved much in his life. He had been expelled from high school in Munich, failed to graduate from a private school, and was unable to meet the expectations of his mother – a war widow whose brother worked as an actor and who sought connections with so-called artistic circles. Baader was a loner who attracted attention through theft, driving without a license, and fights, not through political ambitions; even after he moved to West Berlin, lived with the artist couple Ellinor Michel and Manfred Henkel, and became a marginal figure in Kommune 1. With Michel, he had a daughter, Suse, whom Henkel had to care for. Although this backstory makes up half of Aßmann's book, Baader remains an unclear character, as if the author wanted to emphasize that for a long time, Baader didn't really know what he wanted.

In contrast, he appears very productive as a prisoner; writing letters and diaries seems like an "exercise on oneself and through oneself," as Aßmann quotes Michel Foucault. This always involves the social framework. For Baader, Western capitalism is violent and manipulative. He believes that protest against it should also be violent, in order not to be talked down and ultimately integrated: "Violence is our only chance not to be crushed in this society. The only chance [...] to show that you have to talk to us and that you can't shut us up with a few reforms." Baader is certain: "Those in power only react to violence."

Baader developed such positions in drafts for his own appearance in court. At the same time, he was writing a screenplay for a feature film about the department store fire, which his friend, the young director Klaus Lemke, was to direct as a "vision from below." At the same time, authors associated with the alternative magazine "Charlie Kaputt" wanted texts for an anthology about the radical left-wing West Berlin scene. Agitation in court, in film, and in books: For Aßmann, Baader was the "curator of a complex multimedia project" with the goal of "taking the protest to its extreme," as Baader put it.

But his big appearance in court failed, Klaus Lemke made the film "Arsonist" differently than Baader had intended, and he also did not like the anthology "Subkultur Berlin" edited by Hartmut Sander, which included letters from Baader, Ensslin and Proll, among others.

Unlike other young revolutionary politicians, who soon began to grandiosely establish groups that they sought to sell as reinventions of proletarian parties, Baader was clear that the workers could not be reached, "because they were chained to the system by the mass media and their manipulated needs." Instead, it should be made clear "that bourgeois existence fails because of us."

He stands on the other side of bourgeois society and believes: "In a cell, so to speak, one is free." A deduction on his own behalf, formulated like a proof of God. He told the court, which he refused to recognize: "The person Baader no longer exists (...) I can tell you something about the prisoner Baader." He never relinquished this status, even though the Red Army Faction (RAF) was founded in 1970 with the release of Andreas Baader. It was first an experiment, then a bloody disaster.

In 1972, Baader was arrested again, this time as Public Enemy Number One, and then he died in 1977 in Stuttgart-Stammheim prison, most likely by suicide. Is this particularly morbid irony, or was he a subversive existentialist? The fact that one can reflect on the paradoxes in his life is a great achievement of Alex Aßmann.

Alex Aßmann: Free in Prison. Andreas Baader, the Arson Trial, and Political Violence. Edition Nautilus, 288 pp., paperback, €22.