[Red Army Faction, Prison Literature, Samizdat]

np: np, 1971. Saddle-stapled in wraps, with a clipping of Ulrike Meinhof, formerly taped, now laid in to the second page. 70 pp. Very good, with a few attention markers in an unknown hand. The rear wrap has been ripped and is largely missing; however, the book remains surprisingly clean and tight otherwise. The rare booklet on the ideology of the West German militant left group, the Red Army Faction, written by RAF co-founder Horst Mahler from prison, and published in 1971 with a cover page meant to resemble an East German traffic manual.

Mahler, a former Social Democrat, was expelled from the party in 1960 for his left-wing views; he was a lawyer throughout the 1960s and represented numerous activists during the West German student movement, before co-founding the Red Army Faction in 1970 with Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, and Gudrun Ensslin.

Mahler helped plot to spring RAF co-founder Baader from prison after his arrest in 1970. Once Baader escaped, the group committed a series of bank robberies in September 1970. The four fled to Jordan and trained in guerrilla tactics with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, before returning to Germany later that year. After his return from Jordan, Mahler was arrested with fellow RAF members Ingrid Schubert, Brigitte Asdonk and Irene Goergens on October 8, 1970. He was tried and convicted for the bank robberies and for assisting a prison escape. In the following months, he wrote and published this booklet, which was ultimately rejected by his RAF colleagues as it more closely aligned with the politics of the Maoist KPD/AO. Mahler was in prison until 1988 and remained largely out of the public eye for the next decade after his release . As the millennium neared, however, he publicly aligned himself with far-right politics and has been jailed in Germany several times in the last half century for nationalist hate-speech. According to German newspaper reports, Mahler, whose father was a Nazi sympathizer who committed suicide after the war, was also an asset and informant for the East German police in the years preceding the RAF.

An exceedingly rare artifact of left-wing prison theory from the influential German militant group, and a document of the political turmoil of a influential social democrat lawyer turned leftwing militant who went to prison, turned to Maoism and then came out as a far-right nationalist.

The booklet contains a clipping of a photograph of Ulrike Meinhof, formerly attached with tape to the second page.

OCLC locates 7 examples as of April 2025, and only one in North America.