Im Gefängnis frei

In April 1968, two years before the founding of the Red Army Faction, Andreas Baader is arrested in Frankfurt and placed in pre-trial detention along with Gudrun Ensslin, Thorwald Proll, and Horst Söhnlein due to a nighttime arson attack on two department stores. At this time, Baader is hardly ideologically educated or politically ambitious. He spends the following 14 months primarily catching up on what others in the APO have ahead of him: he reads Wittgenstein and Marcuse, Marx and de Sade, writes a diary, excerpts from his readings, letters, and screenplay drafts. His time in prison can be understood not only as a process of radicalization, culminating in Baader's release with a pronounced hatred for the state, but also as a process of education and subject formation, during which the prisoner sometimes feels freer in prison than outside. Alex Assmann was the first to examine Baader's prison writings from the arson trial—note books totaling over a thousand pages and countless letters, primarily addressed to Gudrun Ensslin. Based on this material, Assmann approaches the figure of Baader and his life up to the arson trial in a way that is unusual in the existing historiography of the RAF, offering a different perspective alongside some portrayals of the pampered boy and later notorious criminal, and situating the personal development of a state enemy within the intellectual history of the Federal Republic of Germany.