Interview with Margit Schiller, former Red Army Faction Political Prisoner and Author of Remembering the Armed Struggle
Margrit Schiller was an early member of the Red Army Faction, the West German urban guerrilla group. In 1971 she was captured and charged with a murder she did not commit, and upon her release she returned to the underground, being captured again in early 1974. She would spend most of the 1970s in prison, enduring isolation conditions meant to break the human spirit, and participating hunger strikes and other acts of resistance along with other political prisoners from the RAF.
Also included are a foreword by Ann Hansen, who situates the draconian prison conditions inflicted on the RAF within the context of a global counterinsurgency program that would help spawn the plague of mass incarceration we still face today, an afterword by the late Osvaldo Bayer, and an appendix by J. Smith and André Moncourt summarizing the politics and history of the RAF throughout the group’s existence.
Schiller was recently interviewed by comrades at CKUT’s Prison Radio Show; she discusses the RAF, her political and personal development, life in prison, solidarity and resisting torture on the inside; recovery from the trauma of prison, and much more. Definitely worth listening to, either here (https://prisonradioshow.libsyn.com/full-show-april-8-2021) or here:
Schiller’s book Remembering the Armed Struggle is available from leftwingbooks.net at https://www.leftwingbooks.net/book/content/remembering-armed-struggle-my-time-red-army-faction
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