Writer probes the terrorist mindset

WHEN author and journalist Stefan Aust began his career at a small left-wing journal, he had little inkling that one of his colleagues, Ulrike Meinhof, would become one of Germany's most notorious home-grown terrorists.

WHEN author and journalist Stefan Aust began his career at a small left-wing journal, he had little inkling that one of his colleagues, Ulrike Meinhof, would become one of Germany's most notorious home-grown terrorists.

The author of The Baader-Meinhof Complex, who is visiting the Sydney Writers Festival this week, was in a unique position to record the lives of the well-educated, middle-class men and women who formed a radical German resistance group that carried out bank robberies, bombings and kidnappings during the early 1970s.

Like Aust, individuals such as Andreas Baader, Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe were the children of German parents who had lived through World War II.

While their parents' generation harboured guilt or anguish over Germany's Nazi past, Aust's generation was primed to resist even the faintest hint of fascism or the misuse of state power.

As a youth movement protesting against the war in Vietnam gathered momentum, those on the far Left incited a more radical resistance movement, and the Red Army Faction was born, an organisation described as a forerunner of international modern terrorism.

Aust first met Meinhof, who committed suicide in her jail cell in 1976, when both worked at the left-wing journal konkret during the 1960s. Aust said it was clear to him that the future resistance leader was prone to radicalism.

"She was a very impressive person: good-looking, intelligent," he said. "But she saw everything through political eyes, and she was a depressive."

Aust believes Meinhof did not plan to fall in with the Red Army Faction, which used arson, kidnap and murder to attempt to achieve its radical political aims.

"I think it was not a plan; I think she was desperate," Aust said. "She was desperate about her personal life, she was despondent about her own influence as a journalist, she thought writing was not enough to promote revolution and political change."

Aust, who edited German news magazine Der Spiegel for 14 years, had 60m worth of files lining his apartment during the writing of The Baader-Meinhof Complex.

He said that probing the psychological make-up of the Red Army Faction ringleaders was one of the most absorbing parts of writing the book.

"What I have learned about terrorism through writing my books is that the real reasons why people are attracted to extreme movements are beyond what they claim as being their political goals," Aust said.