Gerhard Richter's remarkable '18 Oktober 1977' show at the ICA.

AT 38 minutes past midnight on Tuesday 18 October, 1977, a newsflash came over on German Radio. 'The 86 hostages hijacked by terrorists in a Lufthansa Boeing jet have all been safely freed . . . a special commando squad of the Border Police went into action at Mogadishu airport at midnight. According to initial reports, three terrorists were killed.'
 
The terrorists, led by Captain 'Martha' Mahmud, had hijacked flight LH81 from Palma de Mallorca to Frankfurt four days earlier. In return for the safe conduct of their hostages they had demanded that the West German government release four convicted members of the Baader-Meinhof gang from the jail where each was serving a life sentence for murder, attempted murder and a series of urban bomb attacks. With the hijackers failure the Baader-Meinhof group's last realistic chance of freedom seemed to have gone.
 
Jan-Carl Raspe heard about the successful commando raid on the Lufthansa plane on a small transistor radio that had been smuggled into his cell, in Stammheim high security prison. He passed the news to his Baader-Meinhof colleagues and co-inmates at Stammheim, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Irmgrad Moller, and they concluded a suicide pact over a makeshift communications system cobbled together from the record players in their cells.
 
The events that followed form the basis for Gerhard Richter's series of paintings, '18 Oktober 1977' currently on view at the ICA. Andreas Baader, in Cell 719, took out a pistol concealed in his record player, held it against the nape of his neck and blew his brains out. In a neighbouring cell, Jan-Carla Raspe fished out a pistol that he had stowed away behind a skirting board, sat on his bed, put the barrel to his...

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