The act of challenging the state authority of the state, of fundamentally questioning property and power, is a “criminal” charge that never expires: at 67 years old, alleged RAF member Daniela Klette has been sentenced to 13 years in prison.
The arrest and conviction of Daniela Klette became a national spectacle. In this commentary, Ian Nadge and Jakob Reimann explain why the RAF still functions as a political enemy image in Germany today—and why this obsession says far more about the present than the past.
Helicopters over Berlin. Armed police units outside apartment buildings. Breaking news specials. Politicians in full panic mode. For a moment, you could almost believe the German state had finally decided to crack down on tax fraud, real-estate corporations, or far-right networks.
Instead, it was Daniela Klette.
Arrested in Berlin-Kreuzberg in 2024, she was sentenced this week by the Regional Court in Verden to 13 years in prison—for several alleged robberies supposedly carried out to finance life underground.
Meanwhile, the pseudo-journalists behind the ARD podcast “Legion: Most Wanted – Where Is RAF Terrorist Daniela Klette?” acted like volunteer deputies, publicly broadcasting the results of their investigations into Klette’s identity. Two months later, she was arrested.
A woman in her mid-sixties. For decades an underground figure, a ghost haunting Germany’s security apparatus, the favorite enemy image of a state that selects its historical traumas with roughly the same care Netflix uses to pick its next true-crime series.
German security agencies treat Klette almost as if she personally sabotaged capitalism, wiped Olaf Scholz’s memory, and hacked Deutsche Bank’s servers.
This obsession reveals quite a lot about modern Germany.
Violence? Sure—as long as it is properly managed
The same political system that suddenly discovers “complicated jurisdictional questions” whenever the Cum-Ex tax fraud is discussed, sells weapons exports as peace policy, and comments on the social collapse of entire Palestinian cities with the same gravity as a weather forecast, somehow never seems to run out of energy when dealing with left-wing enemies.
Forty years later, the security apparatus can still mobilize a level of determination that, when it comes to Nazis inside the same institutions or far-right terror networks, often feels almost mythical.
This is not because the state opposes violence. The German state gets along perfectly well with violence—-as long as that violence is properly managed, legally formatted, and justified with spreadsheets. People dying at the borders of Fortress Europe become border security. Destroyed healthcare systems become fiscal responsibility.
When exploding rents force people out of their homes, it is dismissed as unfortunate market dynamics—essentially natural disasters with Excel spreadsheets. When corporations eliminate thousands of jobs, it becomes “transformation.” When hedge funds buy entire neighborhoods, it is praised as a healthy “investment climate.” And when rail systems collapse, schools decay, and municipalities slash budgets, we are told these are simply unavoidable necessities. The common thread is that decisions made in pursuit of profit are presented as inevitable facts of life rather than political choices made by identifiable actors.
Capitalism produces new crises every week and then sells them back to us as unavoidable administrative tasks.
But the moment someone directly attacks property? Suddenly this republic turns into Liam Neeson in Taken and everything works. There are special task forces, dragnet searches, mass raids, political determination, and weeks of headlines.
The same country that regularly explains that unfortunately radical action is impossible when facing climate collapse, suddenly develops, when confronting left-wing enemies, the operational energy of a Marvel movie’s final battle.
The RAF as German state mythology
This is exactly why the Red Army Faction was never seriously considered historically.
Instead, it was demonized, psychologized, and transformed into a kind of national state mythology.
The social conditions that produced it conveniently disappear: Nazi continuities in postwar Germany, authoritarian restructuring, the Vietnam War, isolation prisons, and police violence.
Instead, the backstory of RAF is usually retold as if a few irrational fanatics simply crawled out of a bad psychological thriller.
Germany approaches the history of the RAF with roughly the historical depth of an officially sponsored remembrance ritual: lots of archive footage, lots of biographies, and as little social analysis as possible.
History becomes political drama with an educational mission. Somewhere between Andreas Baader’s sunglasses, sepia-toned wanted posters, and melancholic piano music emerges the comforting narrative that the greatest threat to postwar Germany was always “extremism”—and not an economic system that distributes wealth upward and crises downward.
Defeat as permanent ideological advertising
None of this means romanticizing the RAF’s armed struggle. Small militant groups did not bring capitalism to its knees. Going underground often produced political isolation rather than stronger social movements. Social powerlessness did not disappear through weapons—it merely acquired worse communication structures.
But Germany’s historical defeat of the RAF continues to serve as ideological advertising for the state.
The message is not simply: “The RAF failed.” The message is: If you fundamentally challenge property and power, you eventually end up either in prison or as the subject of a four-part TV documentary with ominous piano music.
The actual purpose of this narrative is deterrence. Every critique of capitalism should smell vaguely of smoke, conspiracies, and failed underground fantasies.
That is why German security institutions transform the trial against the non-violent Ulm 5 into something resembling political theater at a zoo exhibit: people who harmed nobody and did little more than throw sand into Israel’s war machine sit in Stammheim, behind glass, handcuffed in cages.
What matters is the spectacle. The history of the RAF is remembered not in order to understand it, but in order to preemptively coat any last dream of social change with the language of security politics.
The state wants to win history
At this point, the Klette case is no longer simply about prosecution. The state wants to win historically.
It wants to demonstrate that it never forgets, never forgives, and still possesses enough resources decades later to treat a retirement-age former underground figure as though this were the final scene of an especially expensive security-services roleplay.
And this is exactly why this decades-long hunt feels so absurd. When it comes to the NSU, files disappear. Far-right networks inside police and military institutions somehow produce institutional memory loss.
Nazis inside state structures become tragic exceptions. With the NSU, officials speak of mistakes. With far-right police chat groups, they speak of isolated incidents. When ammunition disappears or death lists emerge, police and security services often sound like an overwhelmed maintenance service with the logo of an intelligence agency.
But when it comes to the RAF? Suddenly everything works. Searching, tracking, archiving. remembering. With the emotional dedication of someone stalking an ex-partner: officially long over, secretly checking their profile every day.
The nervous “end of history”
Is the real fear here actually Daniela Klette herself? Or is it the possibility that people might once again begin fundamentally questioning property and power?
Capitalism likes to present itself as simple common sense—as the natural order of things, without alternatives. Or, as Francis Fukuyama famously called it, “the end of history”: liberal democracy, market economics, and the quiet assumption that no further questions really need asking. History settled, the system decided; case closed.
Thank you for visiting the ideological theme park of Western modernity. Its security apparatuses, however, often behave like institutions secretly checking at night whether the front door is really locked.
Maybe that is exactly why Germany still reacts so hysterically to the ghosts of radical resistance decades later. Because a society genuinely confident in itself would not spend forty years publicly waging war against the undead remnants of its own left-wing past.
Or, put differently:
A system constantly insisting there are no alternatives becomes remarkably nervous the moment people start imagining some.
The German version of this article was originally published on May 30, 2026, by Etos.Media.
