With its logo on T-shirts and its leader up for parole, the Red Army Faction still provokes anger, writes Derek Scallyin Berlin.
Brigitte Mohnhaupt has a face familiar to many older Germans, but few remember why. The most famous shot of her - with mascaraed, mocking eyes and a knowing smile perched on thin lips - could have featured in a perfume advertisement.
Mohnhaupt was never a model but she was a poster girl, for a left-wing extremist group that killed 34 people and, three decades ago, forced West Germany into a state of emergency.
Her face stared out from every post office and police station noticeboard for the five years that Mohnhaupt served as a leader of the Red Army Faction (RAF) until her capture in 1982.
She has been in prison since then. Last week, the now 57-year-old woman with greying hair but cheekbones as sharp as ever appeared before a Stuttgart court to apply officially for parole. Her pending release - likely to come as early as next month - has reawakened memories of the havoc and hysteria of the so-called "Deutscher herbst" (German autumn) of 1977, when the RAF waged war on the West German state and establishment, with consequences that can still be felt today.
Mohnhaupt was one of the "second generation" of the RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, formed when left-wing journalist Ulrike Meinhof met high-school dropout Andreas Baader and his girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin in 1968 while Baader was standing trial for bombing two German department stores as a protest against public apathy towards the Vietnam War.
In May 1970, Baader escaped prison, his group went underground and the RAF was born.
AFTER TRAINING INweapons and bomb- making in Jordan, they returned to West Germany, moving from protests against the Vietnam war to a campaign to undermine a state which, in their view, had pursued the economic "Wirtschaftswunder" at the expense of an examination or repudiation of the Nazi past.
Their fury was directed at their parents' generation in general and, in particular, against extreme cases like the Frankfurt advertising executives exposed as having learned their craft under Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, or the state secretary of post-war chancellor Konrad Adenauer, exposed as the man who put the "J" for Jew in Nazi-era passports.
Conservative politicians and the powerful Axel Springer newspaper group were not interested in looking for explanations for the RAF. Instead they saw a group of young people rebelling violently against their well-off family backgrounds and killing 34 people along the way.
The RAF spent two years on the run, robbing banks and bombing buildings, but were arrested in 1972 and went on trial in 1975.
Baader and Meinhof soon became folk heroes among German left-wingers, and posters of the pair were an absolute must for every student bedroom wall.
With the RAF founders in prison, Brigitte Mohnhaupt emerged as a leader of a second generation which observers say was less idealistic and more trigger-happy.
On Mohnhaupt's watch, the RAF murdered leading members of the West German establishment such as Dresdner Bank chief executive Jürgen Ponto and West Germany's chief prosecutor Siegfried Buback.
Their most infamous moment came on September 5th, 1977 when a gang of five RAF members including Mohnhaupt pushed a pram out in front of the car of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, the head of West Germany's Employers' Federation. When the car braked, the gang struck: they shot dead the driver, a bodyguard, two police officers in an accompanying car, and vanished with Schleyer.
For the RAF, Schleyer was a perfect model of West German hypocrisy: a respected figure in the West German business world despite his Nazi past.
Schleyer had joined the Nazi Party in 1933 aged 18, was an engaged leader of Nazi student bodies and, after time as a soldier, served in Prague by assisting in the "arianisation" of local industry.
After the war, Schleyer lied about his Nazi involvement to Allied authorities and, when found out, was classified a "fellow traveller" in the "denazification" process.
In the 43 days after kidnapping Schleyer, RAF members released pictures of their increasingly distraught hostage with demands for the release of Baader and other imprisoned RAF leaders.
After German commandos ended another related hostage-taking, the imprisoned RAF members committed suicide in their prison cells.
Schleyer was shot in the head and his body dumped in the boot of a green Audi 100 over the border in France.
The German government responded to the killing with a severity that was as unexpected but far reaching: thousands of apartments were searched and civil rights were suspended because of the "present danger" posed by the extremists, an echo heard again in the US after 9/11.
ONE OF MOHNHAUPT'S RAFcolleagues - and fellow accomplice in the Schleyer kidnap - Christian Klar, has also applied for release, appealing for clemency to German president Horst Köhler, although he doesn't come up for parole until 2009.
Both Klar and Mohnhaupt were given several life sentences in 1985 but, under German law, "life" prisoners are entitled to be released after 24 years if they are not viewed as a threat to society.
Asked in a 2001 television interview if he regretted his RAF crimes, Klar said: "With the background of our fight, those aren't the words." Mohnhaupt, too, rejected the idea of remorse last week.
"I think it would be inappropriate to say now, 'I regret my crimes'," she told the Stuttgart court through her lawyer. "It would come over as rather insulting to the families of the victims."
The families of the RAF's victims are already insulted.
"These people don't deserve mercy," said Waltrude Schleyer, the 90-year-old widow of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, to Bildnewspaper. "To this day neither Klar nor Mohnhaupt have shown any sign of remorse, or apologised." Their pending parole has excited the German media, and Spiegelmagazine splashed this week with an RAF cover story: "Mercy for the merciless?" But, as legal observers point out, German law does not deal in mercy or revenge but in justice and rehabilitation.
"I can understand the relatives of the murder victims, but the sentence was passed in the name of the people and the state is not irreconcilable," said former interior minister Gerhard Baum. "Even criminals who have committed terrible crimes can be re- integrated into society."
One leading Green Party politician pointed out that Mohnhaupt and Klar have each spent longer behind bars than Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and armaments minister, who was released after 20 years.
Regardless of the emotional argument, the release of Germany's last RAF prisoners is a question of when rather than if. But they will be released into a different, united Germany.
The RAF officially disbanded in 1998 and, for today's young Germans, their campaign seems as far away as what they were fighting: West Germany's post-war retreat into a refuge of economic strength at the expense of fully analysing her past.
Far less radical than their parents, it seems that young Germans today are more interested in wrapping themselves in the German flag, such as during last year's World Cup, than planting bombs and killing bank managers to undermine western imperialism.