Red Army Faction
'Ah, the Land of Europe, gorged with blood like a sanitary napkin, soaked with bile and rot, bristling with shards, bones, and nail clippings'
Red Army Faction
Horst Schreiber had hardened to carceral confinement by now. Stedelheim was a prison of the type they used to build in the nineteenth century and then modernize piecemeal in the twentieth. There was still a dining hall at its 𝔉center, a huge, ice-cold, bleach-disinfected tiled hall supported by sixteen steel columns. Four rows of twenty-five tables and fifty benches, each seating ten.
Horst shared his cell with two fellow inmates. The older one, nicknamed Willy, was hunched like a beggar. The skin o🎉n his face clung to his bones, transparent. Thirty years he’d been there. For rape and murder. He’d survived the war without suffering much other than from the food rationing at the end. He was in his eighties. His fingers were twisted and yellow 🥀like the feet of a chicken.
He killed time playing never-ending games of solitaire, as did Fernando, the wop, the other inmate in their cell, who jerked off four times a day and even five on t🔯he day of the weekly shower. The stud was a likeable, priapic pimp, a hustler who bought peace of mind by the shrewd distribution of cartons of HB cigarettes and porn magazines that who knows how he snuck into the slammer. It was rumored that his whores provided services apt to bend the prison staff to their will.
During a walk in the huge, fenced courtyard, Horst Schreiber had befriended Thorwald Wiesler, a lowlife from the local upper class. A liar, a thief. They shared what every young German of their generation had in common: Nazi parents. Thorwald was in awe of the older Horst for ha🧔ving smothered his sire with a pillow five years before. Triply in awe! Horst had killed. Horst had killed a Nazi. Horst had killed his father. The holy trinity of liberation.
From yard to chow hall, from chow hall to shower, the two had become inseparable. During the scorching summer of 1974, Thorwa🌱ld Wiesler broached the politi๊cal subject of escape with Horst. The two boys, who’d become lovers for the sake of physical hygiene, were not particularly inclined to convert to Marxism, but the thought of fresh air slowly worked its way into their minds tortured by the excruciating heat of the Bavarian summer.
At the time, it was not unusual, at a bend in the corridor, swapping a packet of cigarettes or an extra portion of leberwurst, to come across an apprentice guru of the armed struggle who claimed to have crossed paths with Andreas Baader or Jan-Carl Raspe at the Stammheim prison or Dieter Kunzelmann in Berlin and who, inspired by the righteous and noble cause, had joined the sparse ranks of the Red Army Faction, the Tupamaros, the Kommune, or 🦩the 2 June Movement.
No one, apart from Judge Jürgen Vogel, took an interest in their fate. Thorwald was released when his prison term ended and Horst, on the recommendation of this young liberal judge who was moved by the traumatic experience of the “children of” generation. Who knows why Thorwald didn’t return to his life of petty crime in Munic🧸h, or Horst to tending his garden on the outskirts of Kempten. We lose their trail only to pick it up a few months later in an insalubrious, run-down squat on Ulmenstrasse in Frankfurt, which the municipality had boarded up with corrugated panels and wood planks and slated for a long-overdue demolition. Our heroes lived there with Kurdish families, South American prostitutes, hard rock bands, runaways, and junkies of all colors.
Apparently Horst had swapped the silent use of a pillow for the noisier but evermore expedient Walther PPK 7.65. He and his companion held up Exxon and Chevron gas stations,﷽ and then hit soldiers’ bars, all for the greater glory of the Viet Cong.
Their trail is lost again until November 1976 when Horst and Thorwald are seen in Beirut, in one of Dr. Habash’s PFLP training camps. There they learn their trade before traveling back home via Yemen a🗹nd Bulgaria, and moving into a house in the suburb o🍎f Frankfurt. ;
Having gained weight, Horst resembleꩵs a b༺ank clerk with an enlarged prostate. Thorwald has grown a mustache and sideburns. With his Hawaiian shirts and pleated pants, he looks like the pimp he was cut out to be.
Is it fitting at this point in the story to mention the arrival in Frankfurt of El Al flight TV720 from Tel Aviv, with an old Galician painter onboard, an elderly Jew, contorted with arthritis, who had once spent time with Utrillo, Soutine, Cendrars, Kiki de Mont🔯parnasse, and Kisling? Is it fitting to speak of the joy he felt at the belated tribute to his output by the Rothe Gallery, on Bethmannstrasse 13?
Hillel (Steinmetz) Zerubavel unfolds his finest suit of thick black velvet, smooths ♊the old-fashioned collar with the palm of his hand, hangs it in the wardrobe, slips a gray knitted tie with red pinstripes around the hanger’s wire hook. The starched white shirt is on the bed. From the window of his room at the Steigenberger hotel, he observes the snowflakes jostling in the wind and the heavy pewter plate of the sky.
“Land of Europe,” he 💦mused histrionically. “Ah Land of Europe, gorged with blood like a sanitary napkin, soaked🔯 with bile and rot, bristling with shards, bones, and nail clippings.”
(Excerpted from ‘Grand European Express’ by Shmuel T. Meyer, translated by Gila Walker; with permission from Seagull Books)