To me, the production of this book was a way of getting close to my own history as well as the history of the RAF, which has been distorted by myths. And yet, appraising this type of 1970s terrorism in West Germany has become much more difficult since Al Quaida showed their murderous contempt for human life on 11 September 2001. Compared with the commandos who flew jet planes into the World Trade Center in New York, we were troubled amateurs, tormented by moral scruples. While Islamic assassins not only accept the death of civilians but attempt to kill as many as possible, we had long discussions about the issue of legitimate goals. When 17 workers were unintentionally hurt in a bomb attack on the headquarters of the Springer media corporation in Hamburg in May 1972, there was serious criticism about it and heavy tension within the group.

In making this comparison I do not want to, nor can I, deny our responsibility, but I wish to point out nevertheless that the term terrorism has undergone a change of meaning and is now understood in a different context than it was in the seventies. The media revolution through the Internet, satellite TV and 24-hour news channels around the world, creating the possibility of messages from all corners of the world, give the terrorists of today a power and visual impact which we never had.

Today, the propaganda methods we used seem completely antiquated. Andreas Baader did not pose for a video camera like Osama Bin Laden, Kalashnikov in hand, to recruit new comrades. In Ulrike Meinhof we had an excellent, professional journalist, but our press releases were always reduced to brief, formulaic commando-like declarations. We never really tried to use the power of pictures. [my emphasis]

We wanted to be part of the world-wide youth revolt in the late 190s, and we wanted to be its vanguard. We were shocked and enraged by the images of the war in Vietnam, such as the photograph of the Saigon Head of Police who killed a captured Vietcong on a open road by shooting him in the head. Most Germans accepted the Vietnam War without taking action - we, by contrast, identified with Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara and the liberation movements in the Third World. In Nazi Germany our parents had been stranded in an ugly, despicable place in history. We wanted to escape their guilt and their nightmare, as well as their continuing love of law and order.

We wanted to be radical, courageous, pioneers, we considered ourselves to be a vanguard. We overestimated ourselves excessively, indulging in the illusion that revolution was possible in the prosperous German Federal Republic [West Germany]. In this light we were self-timers [i.e., self-justifying] who acted cut off from reality in a void. We lived a kind of armed existentialism. The men were ready to get going. While they were busy affectionately cleaning their guns, the women did the major part of organising and thinking. The women did bank raids, too, but more carefully and reluctantly. I also carried a gun, though I would have tried everything else to defend myself before using it. The weapon was the membership card of the RAF which we, in accordance with the [American] Black Panthers, would only use in self-defence, if it was really necessary.

At first in Cologne I was kept isolated in a normal prison block. Then I was taken to an empty wing, a dead wing, where I was the only prisoner. Ulrike Meinhof later called it the "Silent Wing". The shocking experience was that I could not hear any noises apart from the ones that I generated myself. Nothing. Absolute silence. I went through states of excitement and was haunted by visual and acoustic hallucinations, extreme concentration disturbances, horrible weakness and fatigue. I had no idea how long this would go on for. I had a terrible fear of going mad.