Note: Revolution raged throughout Europe during 1918-23 and 1968-72. Americans learned and participated in these and earlier revolutions. Western Europe's prominent players around 1970 included the Red Army Faction led by Baader and Meinhof, and the young American the FBI has called the "UnaBomber". This is part of his story.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From the journals of XYZ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I wasn't really involved in the radiation release in Heidelberg in '70. I wasn't building bombs then, just getting bombed, staying bombed, every day eating Afghani hash and opium cookies about the size of Kenosha, so I wasn't in shape even to plant explosives, let alone make them. Not like in Paris, where I stayed pretty busy.
Paris with intense, black-haired, -eyed, -hearted Rene in '69, doing 69; that was great. We'd wander around the city most of the night, from the dirty brick walls of Montmartre to the grey stone streets of Montparnasse, poking our little arson toys into obscure corners of expensive-looking or official buildings. Then we'd go back to her white rooms off the Quai de Berry and fuck like weasels until dawn. Sometime in late afternoon we'd regain consciousness, crawl out of bed, come back to life. We'd clean up, fix a meal and watch the TV news about all the fires we'd started the night before. If the pictures were especially exciting we might fuck again, but then it was time to make more toys.
Arson toys are easy. Just wrap some sugar and potassium permaganate into a square of gauze, wrap that with a rag soaked in petrol, put a breakable acid ampoule at the edge, and dip the whole thing in hot wax. This makes a three inch square package; a dozen will fit in a pocket. Pinch one side to break the ampoule, toss the toy down under a building or whatever; a few minutes later the acid hits the sugar and it ignites, and the toy burns long enough to start a good fire. No problem.
So we were torching Paris, and there was a revolution going on. Every day the students and unions and communists and Algerians were out in the streets fighting the cops and the army, trying to overthrow the decadent capital- ists/technocrats/militarists. There were concrete and brick and lumber barricades and burning car-tire trashheaps in the streets, and troops and tanks and police marksmen, and helicopters spraying teargas and bullets. That's when we met Maris, wary red in all her aspects. I think she was with Baader-Meinhof. Things ratcheted up then.
Maris came by every few days with money and a couple kilos of C4, the rotten but effective Czech plastique, so I could make some REAL bombs. And we'd all fuck'n'suck'n'slurp the whole night through, in endless variations. Plastique day was always a lot of fun. Then I'd give Maris the few devices I'd put together since her last visit, and she'd leave for wherever, and Rene and I'd go out to watch the street-fighting.
I don't know what Maris did with my creations [maybe that refinery fire in Flanders?]; but by mid-October she hadn't showed up for ten days, and I got real nervous. I sniffed around until I found that grey slime Alain, who'd connected Maris with me in the first place. He didn't want to talk about her, but after I cut off a couple toes he told me that she'd been busted in Thessaloniki with a carload of weapons.
This didn't sound too promising, so Rene and I grabbed our few things, snuck around the lines of troops that were moving up from Charenton, and got a ride to her uncle's glasswares factory in Pantin. We borrowed a company Citroen and headed east, driving along canals and orchards and dairy farms, avoiding the national roads. After a couple days we were south of Strasbourg, then across the Rhine into West Germany, safely away from the fucking French cops. We drank schnapps and laughed.
Only a few hours' drive north got us to Mannheim and a new car; then we hopped over to Heidelberg, where the Neckar snakes out of the hills and joins the Rheinland. This ancient university town hosts the most modern physics lab on the planet at the Max Planck Institut, and swarms of U.S. soldiers from nearby bases like Graf, and the usual mix of anus-clenched Deutchers and acid-head anarchists, and enough Turkish workers from the Mannheim factories to keep the whole region awash with opium and hash. Just my kind of place, sure.
It was fall, heading into a cold wet winter. We lay low. We still had a lot of Maris' money; we rented an apartment just below the Schloss, the old ruined castle overlooking Heidelberg, that looks like vampire movies should be made there. Rene got a secretarial job at the Institut, and I sold chemicals to G.I.'s, and we stayed stoned a lot. Sometimes we'd play our fugitive games on the wrecked bridge in the upper town, or wander through the Odenwald when it was warm enough, setting little traps of twigs among the green-grey trees. This was my best of fugitive lives.
But in mid-winter Hein showed up, one of Meinhof's "friends". I don't know how he traced us. He wanted me to make more bombs. I told him, "Hey, it's easy. Just set up a nitre pit (it's best if you have a wine-drinking bishop piss into the dungheap.) Then boil out the saltpetre, mix in charcoal and sulfur, and you're ready to roll." Hein wasn't too amused, and he threatened Rene, so I slit his throat. This left a bit of a mess, and we knew more Faction guys would be around, so it was time to move on again. Time to head homewards for awhile, maybe.
America was wild in early '70, with all the Vietnam protests, even back home around Chicago and Milwaukee, it was in all the papers. So we drove down to Geneva, flew to Lisbon and Dakar and Trinidad and New Orleans. It was February, and quiet there, and warmer. And we were nowhere near Heidelberg when the biophysics wing of the Institut was exploded. Maybe I left a few toys behind, and maybe Meinhof's backup crew found those, and maybe they applied some pressure to the war-mongering fascist pigs, I don't know for sure. But I wasn't there; I didn't do that.
(C)opyright 1995 by OTRSS
All rights reserved