Regarding Peter-Jürgen Boock’s Lies
August 1988

We hadn’t intended to say anything about Boock.  The main point we want to make here is that he knowingly betrayed the group for months, wasting a significant amount of its energy and - after his lies were out in the open - preventing a reasonable resolution of the issues.  It was always more important for us to clarify the conditions within the group – the subjective and political structures – than to deal with Boock and his contributions to the anti-RAF smear campaign since 1981, and this allowed him to play his game for quite some time.

We are now going to present a few basic facts, as there is a serious lack of concrete information - information that we now realize could contribute to a more useful discussion.  (A more complete report will be issued when that is necessary.)

Early on, Boock told the group – he told several individuals – a story about being examined by a doctor before he went underground and learning that he had intestinal cancer.  As a result he only had a certain amount of time left to live.

Later, Boock would complain of, and was visibly in, extreme physical pain.  The painkillers that he wanted at first were relatively easy to acquire.  His pain got steadily worse.  He doubled over from the cramps and screamed – at first every few days, then daily.  Now it was a question of specific painkillers, which were hard to come by, especially for people living in an illegal group structure.  It was dangerous.  A comrade found herself on her own, taken prisoner as a result, because she had to use an uncool prescription to try to get more dope for Boock.   He pressured people.  He wanted larger and larger quantities to deal with “unbearable bouts of pain,” which inevitably made acquiring the drugs more risky.

We quickly considered the obvious options.  We needed to organize a decent and safe hospice.  By decent we mean a place that would allow Boock to remain in contact with the group and with doctors who understood the situation.  And this obviously meant a place where the imperialist apparatus had no power.  He didn’t want to be examined, because, he said, he only had a few months left to live and wanted to spend them with the people he had struggled alongside, and because even comrade doctors were in the final analysis bourgeois and treated illness as an object.

At one point doctors came to the house, but were unable to examine him, though he did accept the painkillers they gave him.  His greatest fear was to be examined, because then it would have been clear that he was healthy.

The situation got increasing serious, and we were arranging - against Boock’s objections - for a hospice that met the necessary criteria.  Nobody thought that his story was simply an invention; it was compelling, and it made sense.  Eventually, everything was ready.  Boock didn’t want his lies to fall apart, so he had to make the trip.  In transit through Yugoslavia, the four were arrested.   So now there was an arrest the comrades had to deal with - they struggled desperately to convince the authorities that Boock was seriously ill and needed immediate medical attention.  Now, there was no way left for him to avoid an examination, and it showed that Boock was completely healthy.

After being released the four went together to a safe country.  One important thing that came out of this was the clarification.  The issues were very simple:  the lies that had cost the group much energy and many arrests, why Boock had lied, as well as his future relationship to the group. All of this would have to be clarified through further discussion.

He had got caught up in a form of politics in which he was always the “tough guy” and his cunning led him to make up stories and develop an overall political rationalization that he used to justify his drug use; it was a dynamic in which he was a rat in a maze of consumption, drugs, lies, and the exploitation of his comrades.  What had happened became increasingly clear with time.

The first question was how he and the group would carry on.  This was at a time when we were clarifying the 77 actions, their effects, the errors, and what to do next – in other words, the overall development of a new phase of struggle and a more clear-minded focus on strategy and planning.  Obviously no one could accept working with him after everything that had happened, which meant we had to set up a safe life for him, a living context that was viable in the long-run.  That was soon made clear.

There was one option, but Boock still had to decide.  Boock was only one factor in the overall clarification.  Over the following months, there was also the question of how to develop the next phase of struggle, and one after another, eight people decided to leave the group.  The reasons and routes that led to these departures varied, and the desire to clarify matters always came in part from the individuals themselves, but sometimes the initiative came from those who would later continue the politico-military project.

For those who wanted to leave, we sought a place that would be more than just a safe hideout, something that would offer much more of a life and a future.  We found a good solution, and Boock could have chosen to accept it.  This would have been possible, because the solidarity and the sense of responsibility within the group (and the political bonds) were more important than the personal and political differences about whether to continue the struggle here after 77.  The group was soon deeply immersed in both the reflection and the practical steps required to carry on politically.  At first, this was more focused on new concrete actions than on fancy conceptual formulations.

Soon, Boock was insisting that he wanted to return to West Europe with us to continue the struggle.  There were many discussions about this.  He didn’t want an organized exile and overcame the group’s resistance to the idea of continuing to work with him.

Boock conducted multiple self-criticisms to achieve his goal, and, most importantly, he rejected exile.  We couldn’t jam up the comrades there with a guy who absolutely didn’t want to be there.  That would have been a disgraceful solution.  They were already finding his demands hard to bear.

Eventually, we organized Boock’s trip back to West Europe and integrated him into a section of the new structure.  It wasn’t long before he began trying to acquire dope.  That made it perfectly clear that a different decision was required, that we could no longer work together.  Exile was the solution, and we weren’t giving in this time.  Boock saw that this was now a clear group decision and that we were organizing his trip.  That was when he ran for it.

There was a reason he was so determined to return to West Europe: the kind of drug consumption that is only possible in the metropole; and ultimately his confidence in his own cunning, which made him think he could deal with life in the underground, and that should he ever be arrested he could simply continue his deal on a new terrain thanks to Baum’s offer at that time.   This was the basis for the deal he tried to make with Rebmann, which proved his cunning to be nothing more than political idiocy.  In this way, Boock eventually defected with the support of individual public figures and all those who wanted dirt on the RAF.  That was the road before him from that point on, and it is along that road that he has foraged ever since.

It isn’t clear that Boock is connected to the state security apparatus, but it is obvious that he is managed – for journalistic purposes.  Among the defectors, Boock is a special figure .  In pursuing his fraud, he has become morally bankrupt.  That makes him particularly useful to state security propaganda.  He is an empty vessel that can be filled with anything.  His claim to fame in this regard:  “Insider” (but not too far inside).  Even a section of the left, with its consumerist and voyeuristic mentality, sits at home believing that there is much in Boock’s many stories that is true. But there isn’t.  His story is a house of cards.  It’s nothing more than his trip.  He used vengefulness, projections, and a rejection of everything in his own life to make a deal for pardon:  this is what his cunning really amounts to.

The most important thing is the campaign he is engaging in.  It always includes the tried and true model of the state security campaign; the campaign to politically and morally denounce the guerilla and all other decisive efforts for liberation in the metropole.  Boock’s fabrications:  an underdog’s special relationship with the original Stammheim prisoners – the early RAF was still political – the RAF continues as the struggle against prison conditions – the hierarchy – the futile attempt to shape the new human – group pressure – his friendship with the Palestinians, which served to protect him from the group – the return home – and the red carpet rolled out for his rehabilitation, with the claim that the Nazis were worse and they never had to serve time in prison.

This has created a feeding frenzy on the part of the deflated German intellectual left.  They aren’t victims of Boock’s lies.  It’s a mutual arrangement.  It all serves to justify the ir shameless subservience to power.  The brief moment of truth that these sectors of the left had in 77 dissipated in their dance with the fraud, Boock.

Zeit proudly presents, while in Spiegel one reads, “Weizsäcker is interested in the case.”  The widespread media campaign – the use of neutered, repentant former militants and an exemplary imposed peace - all of this is fuel for expanding the role of German imperialism on a world scale.

Knut Folkerts, Rolf Heissler, Sieglinde Hofmann, Christian Klar, Christine Kuby, Roland Mayer, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Adelheid Schulz, Günter Sonnenberg, Rolf-Clemens Wagner