The Deaths of Wolfgang Beer and Juliane Plambeck

Wolfgang and Juliane—their deaths are hard for us, especially in such an absurd accident. They had prepared for a different death, not this brutal, daily metropolitan waste.

The bullshit the press is cranking out is really too much. Anyone who ever had anything to do with Wolfgang knows who he was. For him, the most important thing was to learn through and from the attack—living underground, aboveground, or in prison. It was something he also taught others. His clarity about the hows and whys of his undertakings, his militancy, and his political thinking were important to us—the RAF—for eight years.

Juliane wanted the guerilla in the FRG unified, and that’s how we came to be with her. She was someone who through her openness and political radicalism could clear the bullshit out of the way. The decisiveness and the enthusiasm with which she embraced this new chapter had a strong effect on us all.

Regarding the filthy way the BAW and the BKA are making use of their deaths, we can only say that Rebmann doesn’t concern us right now—he already brags enough about attacks against him—and neither does Späth. Nor do we intend to blow Schmidt up. Naturally, we’re still here, which they know better than they let on in their propaganda. “Proving our capacity to act” and “desperate actions” aren’t really our thing. The ’77 offensive opened up possibilities for a new step. Concretely, it is necessary for us to restructure for the next step in the development of our strategy to create politico-military unity between the armed underground and the legal structures in the anti-imperialist movement. Then we’ll decide upon our course of action.

Red Army Faction
July 26, 1980