Bruce Allen Scharlau PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText

person feels less experienced and inferior in the company of someone who
better expresses themselves.135
A survey of the top four influential people amongst
140
left-wing
terrorists showed 57% were members of the same group, 23% were
influencial due to their idol and emotional status, while others,
accounting for 9% each/ were influential because of their career, sexual
desires or something else. No data was available for the other 23%.136
Whereas key people and personal influences exert more of an
immediate effect on people, key experiences may not always be
immediately seen as such. Key events do not always cause decisive
impulses, but can lead individuals already predisposed through
socialisation towards a particular path. In the closed hanogeneity of a
group, the choice of alternatives is already somewhat foreclosed and
some options therefore appear more valuable than others.137
Key experiences can also be long term in nature, where continued
exposure to an influence has a lasting effect on a person's attitudes.
This was the case with Angelika Spei tel ( and presumably others) who
worked in Klaus Croissant's stuttgart office. The daily reading of
prisoners' mail to Croissant became too much for her and she wanted to
do more than office work so the Stammheim prisoners "could walk in the
woods". Via a middle-man she made her first contact with the underground
in 1976 when she met Peter-Juergen Boock. 138
Sigrid Sternebeck wanted to work against the unfairness of the ten
year sentence against Werner Hoppe in July 1972. He had been sentenced
for three attempted murders in a 1971 shootout with policemen, although
only one spent cartridge was found fran Hoppe's gun. This led Sternebeck
to work with the prisoner support group Red Aid.139
One suspected illegal militant member of the Red Army Faction wrote
in 1988 that the emotions of working together in the militant scene of
anti-nuclear power, defending squats and other protests can be that they
are not focused enough, because one has not yet become a subject of the
revolution and removed divisions between goals and means. This is what
he says the Red Army Faction hunger strikes are to show by example, and
is what those outside of prison seek to achieve. However, when the goal
is unclear, the means are also unclear. This is where discussion with
135 Wasmund, 230.
136 Schmidtchen, 70.
137 Wasmund, 231.
138 Angelika Speitel, "Ein ungeliebtes Leben", Stern 39 (30) 17-23
July 1986, 134-8, 138.
139 Sternebeck, Der Spiegel 33/1990, 57-8. Petra Sche~n died in this
shootout.