Terrorism, Trauma, and the Search for Redemption

By 1979 Maier-Witt's resolve was cracking. She went to Yemen to train with the Palestinians, and there she finally saw how blind she had been. "All the females of the group fell in love with young Palestinians," she says. "So did I. I discovered that their engagement for Palestine was far more sincere than ours was for Germany. They were willing to fight for their people. For us, it was more like an intellectual effort. It was sheer group dynamic that kept us going. We were like robots."

The group planned a bank robbery, but the cause was no longer clear. "One member wanted to leave the group," Maier-Witt says. "One had tuberculosis; several had been killed. There was no unity. There was a lot of quarreling. Three people were arrested when they tried to get drugs for one of our members who insisted he needed them to ease the pain of his cancer. It turned out he was addicted to drugs. We were lying to each other and to ourselves. We never discussed what we were for, what we were against. There was no way back. If you were arrested, you'd be treated harshly, made an example of, probably get a life sentence. I had to realize that I would be going to jail for nothing, for accomplishing nothing. At the same time, there was no real future to what we were doing."

In 1980 the RAF, concerned by Maier-Witt's wavering convictions, slipped her into East Germany under the protective eye of the Stasi, the secret police. She hid there, with the assumed name of Angelika Gerlach and the assumed identity of a nurse. Her job was to perform the lowliest tasks at a drab communist hospital: One of her assignments was to wash the freshly dead bodies, an act in which she found almost spiritual atonement. That lasted until 1985.

"Someone I knew tried to flee from East Germany, but he got caught and was taken to jail," Maier-Witt says. "When he was questioned by the West Germans, they showed him the 'Wanted' poster, and he identified me." She underwent minor plastic surgery and was refashioned into Sylvia Beyer. "I chose the name myself," she says. "Sylvia sounded similar to Silke, and Beyer sounded like Maier. That way, when someone used it, I would have the instantaneous response of anyone who hears their own name called. That was one of the worst experiences of my life, when I had to change my identity again, had to give up everything I had tried to build up as Angelika. That's when I really suffered. If I died, I felt, nobody would care."

She was ready to call off the charade. "For 10 years I lived under assumed identities," she says. "It's a long time. You lose parts of your real self." You cut off the past in order to be plausible in the present, but you also cut off the present. Maier-Witt's father died in 1978, and there was no way she could connect with her family. "Because my father died of a heart attack, people assumed that I had killed him," she says. "So I couldn't return for the funeral. My stepmother told me years later that she had always been thankful to people who did not mention my name to her."

When the police came to arrest Maier-Witt, she was almost relieved. All of the others had already been arrested. In 1990 she went before the highest court in Germany, where five judges sentenced her to 10 years in prison on charges of murder, attempted murder, armed robbery, and kidnapping. She served five years before being released for good behavior. In jail, she used her time to study herself.

"If you refuse to have a good look at who you are, you'll always repeat your actions, over and over; you'll find yourself in the same position over and over," she says. "To come to terms with my past, I've asked myself why I neglected my own moral standards even as I was envisioning social change. I learned how easy it is to listen to some ideology and to have an idea that gives you an excuse for anything. In trying not to be like my father, I ended up being even more like him. Terrorism is close to Nazism. I used ideology to legitimize myself, the same as he did. Creating change requires courage, which I didn't have. That's why I ended up in the RAF."

[But When You Talk About Destruction]

Now she is in Kosovo as a trauma psychologist, a counterrevolutionary, seeking to mend some of the lives torn apart by the ceaseless violence of two sides locked in a cycle of terrorism. Her new job is to rebuild the people who, in time, will rebuild the society.

It is 8 o'clock in the morning, and Maier-Witt is in the muddy van, on the way to Mitrovica, one of the most inflamed enclaves in Kosovo: Serbs on one side, Albanians on the other, United Nations peacekeepers in the middle. To find her route, Maier-Witt has to navigate using the map of the mines, a poster-sized document that identifies the roads that are known to have been swept of buried land mines. The roads are labeled with the names of animals: Hawk, Hen, Rabbit, Lion. To give directions through this land of death, you have to narrate a children's story: Follow the Hawk for 10 kilometers, turn left at Lion, go 12 kilometers into the heart of the Hen.