Astrid Proll: We were strangers in our country, so we turned to violence

Joschka Fischer and I were both radicals in the 1960s and 1970s. He denies having been involved in armed violence. I, as a former member of the Baader-Meinhof gang, do not. Still, I have much sympathy with Fischer's plight today.

Joschka Fischer and I were both radicals in the 1960s and 1970s. He denies having been involved in armed violence. I, as a former member of the Baader-Meinhof gang, do not. Still, I have much sympathy with Fischer's plight today.

The differences between us are obvious enough. Fischer, the German foreign minister, is one of Europe's most powerful politicians. I am a freelance picture editor living and working in London. That is already a sizeable gap.

Ideologically, too, the differences between Fischer and myself are almost as great as the similarities. Fischer was in court this week giving evidence about a former friend who is charged with political murder. But he was never part of the extremist corner that I once occupied, when the name Baader-Meinhof was widely feared. (When I worked under an assumed name in an east London factory in 1977, after escaping from detention in Germany three years earlier, workmates called me "Nazi" or "Baader-Meinhof" - that was all they knew of Germans and Germany.)

I played an early part in the group surrounding Andreas Baader and the journalist Ulrike Meinhof, before things had spiralled out of control. I did, however, go for military training in Palestinian camps. I took part in a bank robbery for which I spent four years in jail. When Meinhof died in jail - an alleged suicide, though many questions remain unanswered - I was shattered.

Fischer, by contrast, renounced violence even then. He and his friend Daniel Cohn-Bendit ("Danny the Red") hated what we stood for, and we hated back. He has said that it is sometimes more difficult to hold back than to go on, and I agree. I went on to violence, and feel much more of an idiot.

When Fischer testified in court this week about his former friendship with Hans-Joachim Klein, who faces murder charges in connection with the kidnapping of Opec oil ministers in Vienna in 1975, he talked about the "massive dispute" about seizing weapons and violence against people at that time. Fischer, who was one of the leaders of the Spontis - the radical street-fighting left - in Frankfurt was involved in individual acts of violence, including against a policeman. His own line was already clear, however, that armed violence "had nothing to do with freedom. It would produce disaster and it did produce disaster".

I believe that he was right. A good case can be made for suggesting that those of us who did favour violence came close to repeating what we claimed to reject. In connection with a forthcoming book, Ulrike Meinhof's daughter, Bettina Röhl, made public a series of photographs this month in which a helmeted Fischer is seen hitting a policeman. (He has apologised to the policeman involved.) But, while acknowledging that limited use of violence, he describes it as a way of hitting back after he himself was "beaten nappy-soft" at one demonstration, as he put it in court this week. "At that time, I decided not to run away any more."

He has hotly denied the suggestion that he ever threw Molotov cocktails, or encouraged others to throw them. Above all, however, it is interesting to see how little Fischer's popularity has been dented by the latest revelations.

Germany was a very different country then. Until 1968, there had been little attempt to confront the Nazi legacy. The students noticed that, and rebelled against the suffocating silence of that time. As Fischer himself has noted, we felt like strangers in our own country.

Willy Brandt is the most famous postwar German social democrat leader. In modern Germany, he is held in almost universal high regard. During the 1960s, however, he was attacked for his socialist-communist past and his work with the Resistance in Norway when he escaped from Hitler's Germany. There were repeated campaigns for him to step down because of his past. Here, I see parallels to the Fischer case.

It is interesting that the woman who has led the charge against Fischer in recent weeks is Bettina Röhl, Meinhof's daughter, who has dug out the old photographs showing Fischer beating up a policeman.

In the 1960s, Ulrike was one of the few prominent female journalists in postwar Germany. Later, when Bettina was a schoolchild, Ulrike became a terrorist. Now, Bettina's move to get the press talking about her story, and her revenge on her mother via Fischer, shows the strange leaps that history can make.

I feel convinced that Fischer is right not to back off from his own history. He himself has said: "Without my biography I would be a different person today, and I wouldn't find that good." Herbert Wehner, a leading Social Democrat in the Brandt era, argued: "If you are not an anarchist in your youth, you will never become a good democrat." People ask: why doesn't Fischer resign? No way should he resign. He has a past - and now he has changed. That is what life is about.

The writer was a member of the Baader-Meinhof gang