The Gun Speaks: the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Invention of Terror

From the introduction chapter:

It wasn’t just about killing Americans, and killing pigs, at least not at first. It was about attacking the illegitimate state that these pawns served. It was about scraping the bucolic soil and exposing the fascist, Nazi-tainted bedrock that the modern West German state was propped upon. It was about war on the forces of reaction. It was about Revolution.

Web Exclusive: Read the entire introduction chapter

The Gun Speaks: the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Invention of Terror will tell the complete story of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and their desperate attempt to kickstart a world Revolution. It will follow prominent German journalist Ulrike Meinhof as she joins with former juvenile delinquent Andreas Baader in launching the most terrifying era in German postwar history. The Gun Speaks will be the first accounting of the Baader-Meinhof era to utilize extensive interviews with dozens of former terrorists to form a complete picture of the inner workings of the group. The lives of Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Baader’s girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin and others will be explored from their childhoods in war-torn Germany, through the Wirtshaftwunder (“Economic Miracle”), to their disillusionment with the trappings of bourgeois society, to the terrorist war they waged on the German state, and will end with their strange suicides by guns in what was billed as the most secure prison block in the world.

I lived in West Berlin, Germany from 1970 to 1972. While in Berlin my father served as the chief bomb disposal technician for the US Army’s Berlin Brigade; he defused seven West German Urban Guerrilla bombs while in Berlin, including one targeted at him personally and one left where my mother was having lunch. It is my family’s personal history that informs my work.

The Gun Speaks is a work perpetually  in progress.