The photographer Olaf Jahnke sits on the corner of Bockenheimer Landstrasse and Unterlindau.

In the shade, on a small wall, under an old tree, he has taken a seat and now talks about what happened here, at this intersection, more than 50 years ago.

Alexander Juergs

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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At that time, on February 10, 1971, around 9.15 p.m., a chief detective from Bonn saw two terrorists from the RAF, the Red Army faction, Astrid Proll and Manfred Grashof. When he and a second official, a constitutional protection officer, tried to catch the two of them, an exchange of fire broke out. This shooting in Frankfurt's West End was the first direct confrontation between the left-wing terrorists and the police. Proll and Grashof were not captured that evening. During the chase they managed to escape into the dark night.

Olaf Jahnke photographed this place, from across the street and as objectively as possible.

Autumn trees can be seen in his picture, like painted clouds, a magnificent Wilhelminian style villa, a modern office block in gray.

And the blurred tracks of pedestrians, cyclists and a white car.

Berlin, Hamburg and the Rhine-Main area

Jahnke, 58 years old, took a lot of pictures like this. The photographer from Kelkheim visited the places in the Rhine-Main area that played a role in the history of the RAF, scenes of violence, deaths and arrests. The garages in Frankfurt's Dornbusch district, Hofeckweg 2-4, where Andreas Baader, the head of the first RAF generation, Jan-Carl Raspe and Holger Meins, the gifted film student from Berlin who left the academy to go to in June 1972 Armed fight, and later starved to death in prison, were arrested, he photographed the same way as the Café Voltaire, where Baader boasted in April 1968 that he and his accomplices had set fire in two department stores on the Zeil, or the town hall in Langgöns, where the terrorists stole a large number of blank ID cards.

He captured the bus stop in Bad Homburg's Seedammweg, where Alfred Herrhausen, CEO of Deutsche Bank, was murdered whom they hid. Jahnke documented three dozen places for his project, which he calls a topography. He showed his pictures in a gallery exhibition. He has summarized them in a photo book, which he sells on his own website, with short texts in which he describes what happened at the locations shown.

How did he come up with it?

What drove the photographer, who also works as a cameraman for Hessischer Rundfunk?

In the beginning, says Olaf Jahnke, it was mainly the irritation that hardly anyone knew what the significance of the Rhine-Main area was for the RAF.

When people think of the left-wing terrorism of the sixties, seventies and eighties, Berlin and Hamburg usually come to mind.

Or the prison in Stuttgart-Stammheim, where Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe took their own lives after their successors failed to press them free by kidnapping Hanns Martin Schleyer.