After the Red Army Faction: Gender, Culture, and Militancy 9780231538299

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after the red army faction

charity scribner

after the red army faction

gender, culture, and militancy

columbia universit y press new york

columbia universit y press Publishers Since 1893 new york chichester , west sussex cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2015 Columbia University Press All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Scribner, Charity. After the Red Army faction : gender, culture, and militancy / Charity Scribner. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-16864-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53829-9 (e-book) 1. Rote Armee Fraktion—In literature—History—Exhibitions. 2. Women terrorists in literature— Germany (West)—History—Exhibitions.

3. Terrorism in literature— Germany

(West)—History—Exhibitions. 4. Rote Armee Fraktion—In mass media—History— Exhibitions.

5. Women terrorists in mass media— Germany (West)—History—Exhibitions.

6. Terrorism in mass media— Germany (West)—History—Exhibitions. Fraktion—History—Exhibitions.

7. Rote Armee

8. Women terrorists— Germany (West)—History—

Exhibitions. 9. Terrorism— Germany (West)—History—Exhibitions. 10. Right and left (Political science)— Germany (West)—History—Exhibitions.

I. Title.

HV6433.G32R673 2015 363.3250943—dc23 2014012080

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America

c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

cover image: gerhard richter , atl a s tafel 432, 1989 cover design: chang jae lee

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To Dorothy Foster Teer and Dorothy Scribner Foster, my mother and my grandmother

contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Beyond Militancy 1 part 1. militant acts

25

1. The Red Decade and Its Cultural Fallout 27 2. Damaged Lives of the Far Left: Reading the RAF in Reverse 53 3. Buildings on Fire: The Situationist International and the Red Army Faction part 2. postmilitant culture

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4. The Stammheim Complex in Marianne and Juliane

97

5. Violence and the Tendenzwende: Engendering Victims in the Novel and Film 117 6. Anatomies of Protest and Resistance: Meinhof, Fischer 7.

Regarding Terror at the Berlin Kunst-Werke Afterword: Signs of a New Season Notes 205 Works Cited Index

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acknowledgments

When I was twelve I traveled from the United States to Germany for the first time. I spent the summer in Hamburg, where I lived with the wonderful Ruhnau family and trained with a gymnastics team. While preparing for the trip, I overheard my grandfather talk about the angry youths who lived in European cities, and how they would shoot businessmen, like him, in the knees. He probably meant the German Red Army Faction or the Italian Red Brigades. I didn’t recall this remark until years later, in 1987, when I was studying abroad at Heidelberg University. I was well aware of anti-American sentiment among certain sectors of the student body. Some of the biggest U.S. army installations at the time were close by in Mannheim, and the streets were often occupied by people protesting the arms race. One night I saw an early performance of Johann Kresnik’s Tanztheaterstück Ulrike Meinhof. More than the choreography and staging, what made the biggest impression on me was the scene that unfolded after the curtains closed. As the audience spilled out from the theater and onto the open square, we encountered groups of activists handing out pamphlets and selling books about the RAF—many with illustrations. The pictures that stayed with me the longest were those of Ulrike Meinhof.

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Who was this woman, and what do her pictures mean to those of us who study German culture and history? I returned to this question in graduate school at Columbia, where I had the occasion to cross over from comparative literature and write my first paper in art history—on Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 paintings and Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s book Mausoleum. My dissertation and first years of teaching took me in other directions, but two things brought me back to the topics of militancy, terrorism, and their representation. One was the attack on the World Trade Center, which I experienced from the safe distance of 125th Street in Manhattan, while on a brief trip away from my postdoc apartment in Berlin. The other was feminism, my thoughts about feminism and resistance. My first book, which I had set out to write about gender and socialism, evolved into a project about collective memory. I wanted to write another book in the field of cultural studies that would put women in the middle of the picture. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology I taught Plotting Terror in European Culture, and in working with my students I came see to how prominently women figured in the art, literature, and film that responded to the RAF’s rise and fall. That course became a foundation for this book. After the Red Army Faction has been nearly ten years in the making. Besides the students who took Plotting Terror for the first two semesters I taught it, I have many individuals and institutions to thank for enlivening my research. I’d like to mention them here. A number of sponsors have funded my work. I received much-needed grants from the Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York, the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, and the Class of 1954 Career Development Professorship at MIT. My research was advanced through participation in several CUNY programs: the Center for the Humanities, the Faculty Fellows Publication Program, the Faculty Scholars Publication Workshop, and especially the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, where Ruthie Gilmore, David Harvey, and Peter Hitchcock gave me a chance to discuss this project with other like-minded scholars. Earlier on I benefited from access to the archival resources at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, and I wrote early chapter drafts on these documents while working as a visiting professor at Balliol College, Oxford, in 2006. I appreciate the cooperation of several artists and writers: Thilo Beu, Johan Grimonprez, Alexander Kluge, Gerhard Richter, and Margarethe von Trotta. Yvonne Rainer kindly extended to me the rights to use video

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stills from her film Journeys from Berlin/1971 and to quote at length from the screenplay. For aid in coordinating permissions to cite and reproduce the works that enrich my book, I acknowledge the archive of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, the Goethe Institute-New York, the Alliance Française-New York, the Marian Goodman Gallery, and the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation. My colleagues and students continue to be the greatest inspiration. Thanks to the Department of Writing and Literature at LaGuardia Community College, the Department of Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center, and to the Program in Foreign Languages and Literatures at MIT. From these different “homes” and from my travels I’ve had the good fortune to meet the many people who have read and commented on different parts of the manuscript that became this book. They are Nora Alter, Karen Bauer, Benjamin Buchloh, Sarah Colvin, Isabelle de Courtivron, Ed Dimendberg, Thomas Elsaesser, Tina Gerhardt, Paul Greenberg, Karrin Hanshew, Ursula Heise, Andreas Huyssen, Eric Kligerman, Hans Kundnani, Esther Leslie, Laura Liu, Samantha Majic, Tom McDonough, Leith Passmore, Julian Preece, Ute Staiger, Henriette Steiner, Despina Stratigakos, Margaret Sundell, Edward Baron Turk, Sabine von Dirke, Andrew Webber, John Zilcosky, and Slavoj Žižek. Thinking through their comments—along with the invaluable reports a received from anonymous reviewers at the Columbia University Press—I was able to deepen my grasp of the book’s material and sharpen my arguments. Others have enabled the production of this project in different ways, both in its conception and with a range of practical matters. I’m grateful for the assistance of Jörn Ahrens, Eduardo Cadava, Sorin Cucu, Steve d’Arcy, Brent Edwards, Geoff Eley, Konstanze Ell, Felix Ensslin, Bettina Funcke, Anke Geertsma, Cigdem Göymen, Dagmar Herzog, Richard Huffman, John Hutnyk, Farideh Koohi-Kamali, Phillip Khoury, Carrie Lambert, Anahit Martirosjan, Christine Marx, Helke Sander, Alex Star, Katie Trumpener, Jamie Trnka, Greg Wilpert, Hannah Winarsky, and Rebecca Wittmann. Here Markus Müller stands out for giving me access to research files at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin and responding to an ongoing series of emails. I am also indebted to an inner circle of family, friends, and associates who have supported me over the years that I worked on this book. They are my parents, Simone Burgos, Angelica Emmanuel, Hillary Grill, Angela Le, LaRose Parris, Harlan Protass, Steve Silber, and the staff of Clayman and Rosenberg. Special

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mention goes to my son, Simon, for his excellent company in the last months of revising the manuscript and for teaching me how to do new things with my computer keyboard. I have presented some of the concepts contained here as works-inprogress at several venues: Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts in New York, the 2011 and 2014 Annual Conferences of the American Comparative Literature Association, the 92 Street Y-Tribeca, the Centro Cívico de San Francisco/Arteleku in Bilbao, the Consortium for Intellectual and Cultural History at the CUNY Graduate Center, the Department of Art History at Northwestern University, the Matadero in Madrid, MIT, and the University of Cambridge. Earlier versions of the material in this book have appeared in the following publications: “From Document to Documenta: A German Return to Truth and Reconciliation,” Rethinking Marxism 16, no. 1 (January 2004): 49–56; “Buildings on Fire: The Situationist International and the Red Army Faction,” Grey Room 26, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 30–55; “Controlled Space: The Built Environment of Margarethe von Trotta’s The German Sisters,” in Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis, ed. Emma Wilson and Andrew Webber (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), 141–55; “Engendering the Subject of Terror: Friedrich Christian Delius and Friedrich Dürrenmatt in the Mid-1980s,” in Baader-Meinhof Returns: History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism, ed. Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Ingo Cornils (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 125–36; and “Paradise for Provocation: Plotting Berlin’s Political Underground,” in Memory Culture and the Contemporary City: Building Sites, ed. Ute Staiger, Henriette Steiner, and Andrew Webber (London: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2009), 161–80. My gratitude to the editors who helped me to shape these pieces of writing and to the publishers who granted me permission to use some of the ideas and language from these essays in After the Red Army Faction. For the last year I have had the pleasure of working with my editors at the Columbia University Press. Wendy Lochner has been a tremendous source of expertise and enthusiasm, and Christine Dunbar, Anne McCoy, Kathryn Jorge, Robert Demke, and Lisa DeBoer have guided me steadily through the final phases of preparing the manuscript. I credit my research assistants for working into the night to put the notes and bibliography into proper order. They are Noel Duan, Agata Kasprzyk, Leah Light, Michael Lubing, and Thomas Ribitzky.

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Lastly, I’d like to recognize three friends: Jeremy Varon, for sparking my thoughts on militancy and sharing with me a box of his files on the RAF, and Dalton Conley and Jackie Stevens, for listening to me talk about this project over the years and helping me find a way to make it public. Completing this book would have been impossible without their intelligence and commitment.

after the red army faction

introduction Beyond Militancy

Shortly after September 11, when Berlin curators announced plans for a blockbuster exhibition of art about the Red Army Faction, or RAF, alarms went off across Germany. Masterminded by women, the Rote Armee Fraktion had splintered off from the New Left in 1970, turning from protest to armed resistance. The group’s misguided take on Marxism and its flawed efforts to redress Nazi crimes devolved into a campaign of terror in the German Autumn of 1977. This season was darkened by hijackings and suicides, the proliferation of wanted posters, and the reinforcement of state surveillance. More than thirty years later, many asked whether the public was ready to revisit this explosive period. Memories of these events still trigger powerful reactions. Whereas the broadcast media first answered to the demand that the RAF “revolution” be televised, artists and writers from around the world have recoded this past episode and raised urgent questions about agency and art in a time of political violence. Many of these questions are inflected by gender. The Red Army Faction rose up in the middle of the Cold War and fell soon after its end. Renouncing both parliamentary procedure and public protest, the RAF’s women and men wanted to advance social justice by any means necessary. They saw their interventions as acts of “emancipation

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and defense” against corrupt state powers.1 At the start, the group was led by Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, and Andreas Baader. Two more “generations” of militants succeeded them, and many Germans—from both sides of the formerly divided country—assented to their ideals, if not their methods. Baader-Meinhof militancy veered into terrorism in the early 1970s. By 1998, when the group formally disbanded, they had killed thirty-four people.2 This death toll is relatively low, but the aftershocks of the RAF seem to have had an inordinately deep resonance. The German Autumn left its mark in public policy, law, and media, but it has had its longest half-life in the spheres of art, literature, and criticism. In his study of revolutionary violence in the United States and West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, Jeremy Varon argues that the meaning of the German Autumn lies not in its “body count” or “roster of destruction,” but rather in how it functions “as a symptom of larger political, social, and historical tensions.”3 These lines of tension cut across sex and gender. Expanding the inquiry of Varon and other historians, the present book analyzes the literature and art that have appeared since the RAF’s rise and fall, seeking to measure the symbolic impact of left ist militancy and terror within contemporary culture. To this end, it examines the RAF’s claims for revolt and liberation, holding them up against shifts in socialist and feminist politics that have come about in the past several decades. Some of the writers and artists who emerged after 1977 offer insights about sexual equality that the RAF remained curiously blind to, despite the fact that its tactics were directed largely by women. Toward a critique of this cultural formation, I ask how literature and art might help us look beyond militancy to find new modes of resistance. A rifle on a red star was the RAF’s iconic emblem. Its armed struggle, or bewaff neter Kampf, gave political praxis absolute priority, yet there was always a certain aesthetic or style to the organization.4 RAF communiqués crafted a new subdialect of the German language; the group’s actions offered arresting photo opportunities and prime media feed. The RAF captured the attention of artists, writers, and critics, not only in Germany, but also abroad. Beginning with the militants’ ascendance in 1970 and continuing up to the present, central figures such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Guy Debord, and Slavoj Žižek have addressed the German armed struggle in their works. In a striking number of cases, these works focus on the women who led the RAF. Often at odds with

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militancy and terror, this art and writing seek out some lesson from the German Autumn, a surplus value that the RAF itself never realized. As a series of events, the German Autumn occurred in September and October 1977. As a cultural moment, it has lasted far longer: we see elements of continuity that extend up into the present. More than a single episode, the German Autumn is a trope for Germany’s confrontation with political violence. The topics of militancy and terrorism and their rapport with culture must be understood within the larger historical framework of the twentieth century. The German Autumn took place in the shadow of the Holocaust, and much scholarship on the Far Left is concerned to analyze its relationship to fascism. As research moves forward, the picture of the past becomes clearer. It shows that many aesthetic responses to terrorism are attempts to come to terms with both the traumas of the German 1930s and 1940s and the limits on representation that were perceived to manifest as a result of the Holocaust.5 But when we concentrate only on the rhetorics of memory and forgetting, we can lose sight of the degree to which literature and art about the German Autumn are emphatically gendered. Again and again we see images of women in the work that responds to the RAF. Likewise, critical accounts of the armed struggle accentuate gender assignments and rely on genealogical conventions in their narration. We have come to know the RAF as a succession of three “generations,” we ask if members of the Far Left were “Hitler’s children,” and we call the German Autumn a “family history.”6 Artists and writers display a keen interest in the conflicts engendered within this domain. Analyzing this formation, After the Red Army Faction draws from recent scholarship to open up a new line of investigation. Beyond the RAF’s militant aesthetic, beyond the historical repercussions of fascism, the cultural response to the German Autumn reveals aspects of gender and power that link German history to a number of contemporary antagonisms, both within Europe and outside it. The fi rst literary narratives and artworks that contemplated the Baader-Meinhof “phenomenon” were inflected by sexual politics. In the 1970s, when the RAF and other Far Left groups like the Revolutionary Cells and the June 2 Movement were parting ways from the more moderate New Left, German society was undergoing fundamental changes.7 New social movements came to the fore. The antinuclear Bürgerinitiativen

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and immigrant rights organizations established strong foundations for the Green Party to build upon, and German feminists broke new ground in public and private life. Men and women collaborated to realize this transformation, but the face of these changes was feminine. Marking a difference between Germany’s dark past and its possible futures, this fresh countenance promised, for many, a departure from the violence and authoritarianism that had characterized the nation for so long. It pointed to new techniques of power, new ways of making meaning. With the postwar economic boom, German mass media flourished. Scores of brightly colored magazines and television programs widened the public arena and heightened the demand for news content. Titles like Stern, Bild, and Quick were available at every newsstand. In the 1970s circulation of Der Spiegel approached one million copies a week. With its selfproclaimed mission of intelligent, objective reporting, the newsmagazine positioned itself as a platform for a new society. Spiegel issues from the 1970s are filled with pictures of women—in the stories, in the advertisements, and especially on the covers. When RAF actions hit the headlines, the effect was sensational. Any photograph of the militants would draw a second look, but it was the women of the Far Left, especially Meinhof and Ensslin, whose images worked the deepest into the collective imagination.8 Mass media primed the public sphere for a convergence between two watchwords of German late modernity: the liberated woman and the terrorist. Writers and artists, in turn, have expressed their deep and lasting fascination with RAF women. “Say what you will,” the theorist Alain Badiou writes about Meinhof, she had “the passion of the illegal united with the ferocious.”9 But the most perceptive responses to the RAF don’t romanticize these figures or idealize their actions. Instead they put into relief the failures of left ist militancy in the 1970s and disclose the radical potential that RAF women actually forfeited. The armed struggle was to be fought by the urban guerrilla, or Stadtguerilla, as Meinhof called it, borrowing the term from Latin American insurgents and pointedly leaving out any article—der, die, or das—that would designate a gender for the word in German.10 The RAF’s primary interests lay outside the scope of feminism, but Meinhof and the others knew that gender, too, could be used as a weapon. The first works of art and literature about the RAF accentuated the volatility of the urban guerrilla; they activated channels between gender and power that have yet to be fully examined.

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More recently, artists and writers have tended to steer clear of the historical complexity of what has been called West Germany’s little cultural revolution. Many later renderings of the German Autumn play up the RAF’s “radical chic,” leveling crucial differences between aesthetics and politics, both within and surrounding the Far Left. Concomitant with these developments in art and literature, critics have begun to weigh the cultural significance of left ist militancy and terror in Germany. Some have linked the RAF’s direct actions to the impulses of the Situationists, surrealism, and Dada, venturing a parallel between terrorism and performance art. Others have contested these returns, warning against a mythology of militancy. Debates about the aestheticization of politics were central to both critical theory and German self-understanding in the decades that immediately preceded and followed World War II.11 Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht initiated this discussion; Theodor Adorno, Alexander Kluge, and Peter Weiss expanded upon their accounts of commitment, resistance, and reconciliation. How have these debates shifted with the strikes of the Far Left in the 1970s and 1980s and, more recently, with the return of terrorism to European cities? To answer this question, this book undertakes an analysis of postmilitant culture—the charged field of literature, art, and criticism that responds to militancy and political violence. In this case, the focus is on the response to the West German armed struggle. I am introducing the term “postmilitant” as a provisional tool. The prefix “post-” comes from the Latin for “after,” “behind,” or “beyond.” As I use it here, “post-” has two different meanings. In some cases it simply denotes the temporality of the writing and art that come after a militant intervention; in others it specifies a practice that seeks to redefi ne militancy and break its ties to terrorism. The strongest of the works examined here align with this latter tendency. This writing and art prompt us to think beyond the militant. They censure violence and reactivate the tensions between the aesthetic and the political, revealing the social forces that keep them engaged with each other. The works I analyze are postmilitant, but they are not postpolitical. In fact some of them open channels for new forms of militancy, especially when it comes to feminism. With reference to earlier theories of postmodernism, these works might be considered examples of a resistant postmilitancy: instead of just reacting to militancy or repudiating it, this

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literature and art investigate its historical conditions of possibility. Thus, the language I’m introducing is not only provisional; it is also provocative, volatile. With this in mind I will aim to define my terms, first hypothetically in the book’s introduction, and then through application to the works I take up in each chapter. Tracing the cultural history of militancy and terrorism and envisioning the horizons of postmilitancy are prime topics for critical theory. This project refreshes the problem of politics and its aestheticization that Marxists first articulated. Postmilitant culture has reached critical mass, extending across Europe and into the Americas. The French director Olivier Assayas stands out in this regard. His memoir Une adolescence dans l’après-Mai (first published in 2005 and later translated into English as A Post-May Adolescence in 2012) and his film Après-Mai (Something in the Air, 2012) both take stock of the melancholy that set in after the upheavals of 1968 in France.12 Assayas’s internationally acclaimed television series and film Carlos (2010) dramatizes the life and times of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, or Carlos the Jackal, the polyglot Venezuelan militant who led the terrorist attack on OPEC leaders in Vienna in 1975. In the United States we have had American Pastoral (1997), Philip Roth’s novel that, in part, is a reconsideration of the Newark riots and the “sexual revolution,” and, more recently, Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (2013), a fictional account of an American woman who gets caught up in the late 1970s flash point between the New York art world and Italian operaismo.13 But the cultural productions that reflect upon the German armed struggle have attained an unparalleled degree of density. The RAF’s fallout has registered in novels, poetry, plays, dance pieces, music, exhibitions, fi lms, and paintings.14 Joseph Beuys was one of the first to connect the Far Left to the contemporary art world. His artwork Dürer, ich führe persönlich Baader + Meinhof durch die Dokumenta V (Dürer, I will personally guide Baader + Meinhof through Documenta V) was on view at documenta in 1972. Since then, Gerhard Richter, Don DeLillo, and Fatih Akın have looked back at the margins of terror, draft ing an outline of militancy that links the figures of RAF women to the contours of contemporary suicide bombers. Meanwhile, another wave of writers and artists has produced a hagiography of the German Autumn that risks collapsing politics into art, a danger that the Frankfurt School had already warned against when militancy began to ratchet up in the 1960s and 1970s.

Joseph Beuys, Dürer, ich führe persönlich Baader + Meinhof durch die Dokumenta V (Dürer, I will personally guide Baader + Meinhof through Documenta V), 1972. Installation (chip board, wood, felt, fat, planks). © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

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The Baader-Meinhof group actually helped set the stage for this collapse, as they waged deadly maneuvers, disavowed German cultural and intellectual traditions, and severed ties with the new social movements. Left-oriented intellectuals, especially those working in the areas of critical theory and feminism, have developed sustained analyses of this predicament. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas were among the first to detect a lack of dialectical tension in the radicals’ agenda. In the 1960s, when RAF violence was still only a possibility, they thought back to the Third Reich’s corruption of cultural politics and called the new militancy “leftist fascism.”15 In October 1977, when RAF operations were reaching a fever pitch, Habermas published a prescient article that condemned both the theatrical terrorism of the Baader-Meinhof group and the state’s equally dramatic backlash.16 If the RAF was threatening to commandeer German society into a one-dimensional order of revolutionary violence, he argued, the best counterstrategy was not necessarily to heighten internal security, but rather to cultivate and differentiate distinct spheres of political and aesthetic autonomy. Feminists worked out their own accounts of the Far Left. Given the prominence of women in the RAF—following Meinhof and Ensslin, dozens of young women joined their ranks—the West German women’s movement took an early and close interest in the group. So did government officials, the media, and, in due course, the academy. The German Federal Police estimated that women composed sixty percent of the RAF membership, a much-cited figure. Indeed, many of the wanted posters that were plastered about public spaces in the 1970s and 1980s showed more women’s photographs than men’s. But early reports of the “overrepresentation” of women in the armed struggle were countered by studies that have shown more complicated gender dynamics within the Far Left.17 Lebenslaufanalysen: Analysen zum Terrrorismus, a long-range investigation commissioned by the Ministry of the Interior, indicated that the majority of the militants were men.18 Recent studies suggest that the image of the “anarchist Amazon” or the “phallic woman” as the driving force of RAF terror was more a primal fantasy of magazine editors and television executives than it was something that social scientists could prove with numbers.19 However, criminologists demonstrated early on that women took on roles of greater leadership and risk within the Far Left, and historians have likewise established that Meinhof and Ensslin authored the definitive documents of the RAF’s first generation.

German Federal Police, Anarchistische Gewalttäter (Criminal Anarchists), 1972. Wanted Poster, Plak 006–001–058, German Federal Archive, Koblenz.

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If in reality women made up only one-third of the Far Left, as Gerhard Schmidtchen maintained in Lebenslaufanalysen, we still have to ask why the image of the woman-guerrilla has loomed so large in the arts and media.20 It wasn’t just the press that trained the public’s gaze onto women. The artists and writers who have made work on the RAF consistently position female figures at the forefront of the armed resistance. This possible “misrecognition” or “misprision” of German militancy tells us something that historical documents and statistics can’t fully convey. The protracted aesthetic response to the German Autumn has plotted out a terrain upon which gender relations continue to be negotiated. In the 1970s links between RAF women and the second-wave feminist movement that was sweeping West Germany were held suspect. Some pointed out the perception of an equivalence within West German society—“Feminismus = Terrorismus”—and at least one federal official cautioned against a dangerous “excess of women’s emancipation.”21 This anxiety, noted in numerous accounts of the period, was met with a range of responses from women on the Left. Although a subset of them, notably the splinter group Rote Zora (Red Zora), recognized the legitimacy of political violence within a revolutionary program, most feminists publicly condemned it and strove to distinguish their agenda from the Far Left’s.22 They saw the armed struggle as an attempt to revalidate structures of domination and violent strategies that undermined the project of sexual equality.23 In fact, looking back at the RAF years, several scholars have pointed out how, already by the mid-1970s, Far Left writings and actions had effectively disconnected from both the women’s movement and the class-based campaigns and other democratic initiatives that were transforming the Federal Republic.24 When the RAF went underground and turned in upon itself, the militants lost any claim to actual social agency. Soon after, when authorities arrested the Baader-Meinhof leaders and incarcerated them at the Stammheim Prison in Stuttgart, a facility conceived and built to punish enemies of state, the RAF’s demise appeared to be all but inevitable. Precisely at this time, sexual politics emerged as a major concern for the German Left. The year 1977 didn’t just mark the first breakdown of the armed struggle. It also ushered in a set of texts that enlivened feminist politics and critique: several journals devoted special issues to gender and sexuality, Klaus Theweleit’s classic Männerphantasien (Male Fantasies) appeared, and Alice Schwarzer launched the successful feminist

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magazine Emma. Lines of feminist inquiry that originated at this time thread through postmilitant culture, intertwining in key works of art and literature. As my readings demonstrate, the terror and counterterror of the German Autumn became a crucible within which to test out new sexual sensibilities. The RAF was not a women’s movement, but it is remarkable how many artists and writers have recast the group’s legacy within a feminist imaginary. Such reflections on the RAF differ from the way that critical theorists have regarded left ist militancy. Whereas the Frankfurt School saw the Baader-Meinhof group as a symptom of the collapse between the political and the aesthetic, German feminists perceived in the RAF program a blindness to the social hierarchies that were enacted in everyday life. Doubts about the place of militancy within these three orders—the political, the aesthetic, and the social—remain unreconciled. The writing and art that respond to the German Autumn are poised to investigate this aporia, but some of the weaker and more reactionary examples of postmilitant culture repeat the RAF’s conceptual errors and elide historical contexts that are crucial to a leftist analysis. This tendency finds several mistaken expressions. They range widely from feature films that depict the RAF as the “rock band” that Germany never had, to fictions that construe the entire nation as victims of the Far Left, and on to serial routines in documentary replication. Indeed, much of the cultural response to the German Autumn seems to sustain the condition that Don DeLillo has described in which “the more clearly we see terror, the less impact we feel from art.”25 To challenge this anti-aesthetic, the sharpest minds of postmilitancy aim to open up the space between art and politics in order to reveal the social dynamics that figure within, dynamics that are often emphatically gendered. Drawing from their incisive works, this study aims to amplify and analyze the dissonance between the RAF’s attack and its long decay in cultural productions. What comes forth is the difference between the reality of the German Autumn—both the political violence and the early representations of it—and the aesthetic treatment that has become such a dominant practice today.

From Militant to Postmilitant: Defining Two Concepts Before outlining the book’s individual chapters, I’d like to consider the means we have to elaborate the idea of postmilitant culture. Any definition

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of this concept rests on an understanding of a pair of related terms, “militancy” and “terrorism.” Arguments about how to define “terrorism” have continued to intensify since General Secretary Kurt Waldheim put it at the top of the United Nations’ agenda in 1972, shortly after the Palestinian attacks on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games. Scholars and policy-makers have probed deeply into the ramifications of the signifier “terrorism,” tracing its development from the French Revolution to the present moment of geopolitical conflict.26 Although the term’s meaning is not self-evident, most would agree that terrorism is the deliberate and illegal use of violence against civilians by nonstate actors in order to advance political objectives.27 The majority of the RAF’s direct actions fit these parameters. Other interventions staged by the group fall outside of this scope. Ulrike Meinhof’s extensive reportage and essay writing, which were central to the RAF’s identity and agenda, are more accurately deemed militant, not terrorist. Likewise, the hunger strikes staged by incarcerated members while in solitary confinement at Stammheim. These moves signaled the group’s rigor and self-sacrifice. RAF members understood themselves to be militants, guerrillas, revolutionaries. It was the media and government that called them criminals, terrorists, and, on occasion, feminists.28 Compared to terrorism, the meaning of militancy is perhaps more difficult to pin down. In this project I use the term to refer to individuals or groups engaged in acts of political resistance, both symbolic and armed. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “militancy” as “having a combative attitude in support of a cause.”29 Documents of the United Nations and the Geneva Conventions distinguish militant from terrorist actions in several regards. For example, the 1987 UN General Assembly Resolution on Terrorism, which remains a standard reference for international policy, protects the militant defense of the right to “self-determination, freedom, and independence,” particularly “peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation or other forms of colonial domination.”30 Despite their currency and salience, a literature review shows that the terms “militant” and “militancy” have received little analysis. The history of this concept invites our attention.31 The etymology of “militancy” and its German cognate (die) Militanz reaches back through the Middle French militaire and into its classical origins. From Latin we have militaris, meaning “of soldiers” or “of war,” and miles, which is “soldier.” Miles probably relates to the ancient Etruscan

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word meaning “one who marches in a troop,” and so is understood to derive from the Greek homilos—“crowd” or “throng”—and ultimately from the Sanskrit mela, “assembly.” In English and German the concept attains some frequency in ecclesiastical writings around the time of the Reformation, for example, in the expression ecclesia militans (church militant, streitende Kirche), which refers to the battles waged by Christians against earthly sins. Then, as the languages modernize, the term shifts into a more general understanding, connoting extremism, aggression, and revolutionary violence. By the late nineteenth century, militancy will be associated with nihilism and bolshevism. Sergei Nechaev’s Revolutionary Catechism (1869) becomes an influence, first for Lenin, and then later for the Black Panther Party.32 Just after the turn of the twentieth century, Emmeline Pankhurst will describe the British Women’s Social and Political Union as a “militant suff rage organization.”33 In 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. will call the American civil rights movement a “new militancy” in his speech at the March on Washington.34 Against reform and gradualism, activists like these were attuned to “the fierce urgency of Now.”35 In the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), during the process of postwar reconstruction, the principle of militancy was invoked for a broader range of political ends. It was not only actors on the Far Left (die Linksradikalen) who saw the potential of militancy, but also liberals and conservatives who were working to establish and maintain stable institutions in the new state. Aware of the vulnerability of the Weimar system and fully committed against any recurrence of fascism, they framed the constitution of 1949 to uphold and protect the republic as a wehrhafte and streitbare Demokratie: in other words, a fortified, uncompromising, and militant democracy.36 This legislation would be brought to crisis in the so-called leaden times that surrounded the German Autumn, when the nation found itself caught in the crossfire between two strains of militancy: on one side, defenders of the constitution; on the other, the urban guerrillas of the RAF. Within the Left as well, quarrels arose in the 1970s about where to draw the line between militancy and terrorism. Closer examination of these conflicts comes in the rest of this book, but for this introductory reflection on the language of militancy, I want to note its web of associations in contemporary German society. This complex history makes the German encounter with militancy particularly interesting for the fields of critical theory and cultural studies. As the second part of this book will demonstrate, it also establishes

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a productive tension from which the question of postmilitancy can be launched. Militant, which occurs as both a noun and an adjective in German, as in English, is often underwritten by a sense of struggle for justice and equality. Common examples of its usage are militantes Auft reten (a militant stance or attitude) and militante Gruppen (militant groups). Together with its many synonyms—gewalttätig (violent), kampfbereit (ready to fight), and rabiat (raving, furious)—militant appears frequently in German literature and the popular press. References to the concept of militancy function in various ways; depending on the speaker’s stance, they can connote solidarity or condemnation. Some of these references function reflexively, signifying the politics of the speaker who invokes it. For instance, an Israeli national who identifies him- or herself as “militantly pro-Palestinian” might refuse to do military service. Pejorative examples of the term are more common. When a misogynist calls feminists “militant,” this reflects his (or her) own disregard for women’s rights. Meanwhile it has become the practice of some news organizations to report on “militancy” rather than “terrorism” in order to present an objective account of an incident. Thus Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American targeted by the American CIA for his alleged involvement in al-Qaeda and killed in a drone strike in 2011, is described by the Reuters Agency as “a militant,” not a terrorist.37 The Berlin-based tageszeitung, similarly, has called Hamas a militant organization.38 Moving from the present back into the German literary tradition, we see the considerable extent to which writers have drawn upon the lexicon of militancy in their descriptions of women and feminine characters.39 A line of filiation runs from Jordanes’s history of the Goths, De origine actibusque Getarum (circa 551 a.d.), to contemporary novels and films, and includes the stories of Judith beheading Holofernes, the spear-wielding Valkyrie Brünnhilde, and dramas by major authors like Schiller, Hebbel, and Brecht. Among the warrior women who animate the literary imagination, it is Heinrich von Kleist’s tragic heroine Penthesilea who most forcefully prefigures the representation of RAF women. She is the protagonist of his play from 1808 that dramatizes the battle of the sexes, a play that serves as an allegory of the conflict between the French Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Penthesilea, a daughter of Mars, drops down from the heavens “clad for war” (kampfgerüstet).40 Kleist’s Amazon queen storms wildly across the landscape of the Iliad in pursuit of Achil-

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les, who is both her enemy and her true love. She is an arsenal of passion and destruction. Penthesilea flies as if “shot straight from an iron bow”;41 when Odysseus addresses her, she retorts that he will have her “arrows for reply.”42 Historians have shown that Kleist’s writing was informed by his interest in militancy and a historical conscience that contrasted with the pacifism of Goethe and many of his other contemporaries.43 Indeed, a subversive impulse courses through Penthesilea and keeps the narrative clear of any final resolution. In an essay from 1987, the writer Christa Wolf aptly called Penthesilea the “militant feminine” heroine of this Romantic tragedy, but Kleist becomes our contemporary when we see the whole drama as an early example of postmilitant literature.44 Like Michael Kohlhaas (1811), Kleist’s novella about an extreme quest for justice, Penthesilea continues to resound with its clanging, dissonant chords. The drama draws the reader into the force field of its characters’ actions and speech, letting us thrill at the Amazonian battle cry. But Kleist also marks out the deadlocks of Penthesilea’s fury, for he shows that the queen is actually denied real agency, since her only option is to fight a perpetual war. “What choice has she,” Odysseus asks in the first scene, “except to side with one against the other?”45 In the last pages of the play, Penthesilea has vanquished Achilles, but she doesn’t know what to live for. Although her bow is “victorious,” when a princess asks her what she has done, she has “no answer” and stares out “as if upon an empty page.”46 Penthesilea fuses her quiver of arrows into a single dagger, plunges it into her breast, and dies, leaving the others to contemplate her actions. Kleist envisions a stage of postmilitant inquiry: he moves us beyond Penthesilea’s own impasse by producing a radically open-ended work. Presenting us with a blank page, he gives the reader the choice—and the responsibility—to determine the play’s meaning. More than two hundred years later, its enigmas still inspire heated contests of interpretation. To this extent Penthesilea is an early paradigm of postmilitant literature: it enters the reader into the tempest of revolutionary violence, yet also points toward other modes of resistance, both political and aesthetic. After the Red Army Faction uses critical theory to analyze postmilitant writing and art since the 1970s. Each of the works that I examine connects to the legacy of militancy that I have surveyed above, but the individual writers and artists take different directions from this point. As my readings will show, my thinking about postmilitancy operates in

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two dimensions, descriptively and normatively. Coverage of the RAF in the media and documentaries, for example, has relayed countless images of the German confrontation with militant and terrorist actions. Although some of the literature and art that I examine adds little beyond this—merely cataloguing the German Autumn as a series of events— other examples transform the residues of these events into something else: a site for assessment and reflection. As my analyses of these works unfold, I get traction from their insights. Through them I develop a concept of a critical postmilitancy that might travel further than the study of the German 1970s to find as-yet-untested means of resistance.

From Plot to Text: The Attack and Decay of the RAF This book is divided into two parts. The first, “Militant Acts,” links the evolution of the RAF to important developments in postwar politics and society, including the emergence of second-wave feminism. The second part, “Postmilitant Culture,” connects the response to the RAF’s actions to a number of theoretical exchanges. Together, these two parts cut an alternative path in German and European Studies. Instead of the increasingly common practice of surveying popular culture and tabulating media representations of the Far Left, this project reframes questions about politics and advanced art that have engaged some of the greatest minds of modern Europe. In the section that follows, I will introduce the main lines of inquiry that link the book’s individual chapters. I begin by recounting the development of the armed struggle in Germany after World War II, especially the “red decade” that spanned from the public protests of the late 1960s to the events of 1977.47 An overview of the RAF’s origins and a summary of the factors that precipitated the German Autumn relate the armed struggle to several historical transitions. They include the nation’s entry into a postwar democratic system, Germans’ attempts to grapple with their history of violence, and the emergence of the new social movements. The evolution of German radicalism was guided by a range of intersecting discourses, such as public policy, popular media, and intellectual life. Each of these is recalled here. Most publications on the RAF narrate the German Autumn and its aftermath as part of the larger continuum of European postwar history. Yet the proliferation of art and literature about the RAF merits closer attention. This book posits postmilitancy as a crucial turn in late modernity, a

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subject unto itself. Theorizing the postmilitant moment produces a new model of inquiry, one that could be deployed in the analysis of other conflicts, from the geopolitical, to the ideological, to the sexual. What might the cultural remains of a radical intervention tell us about the historical situation from which it sprang? Postmilitancy has emerged in other times and places: in North America in response to the challenges of radical feminism and black nationalism; in Europe, where the campaigns of revolutionary and separatist movements like the Red Brigades and the Irish Republican Army have wound down; and today in parts of the world under the sway of militant Islam, where some scholars detect the fi rst allusions to a turn toward diplomatic and even humanitarian concerns.48 But the culture that has followed upon the German Autumn provides the most compelling test case. The failures of political extremism offer lessons for contemporary theory and practice. Historians have laid the groundwork for this analysis, documenting the interaction between the RAF and state powers from the 1970s to the 1990s. Yet a deeper meaning of this interchange can be grasped by examining the literary and artistic response to the German Autumn. Chapter 1 begins this investigation by acknowledging the distinctively cultural momentum that obtained within the RAF itself.49 Members of the group gave short shrift to any but the most patently political matters, but their interventions always carried an aestheticized trace. This militant aesthetic has been variously condensed, expanded, and reformulated by the art and literature that have followed in its wake. In a number of recent instances, we see attempts to recapture the RAF “look” or style that make scant effort to complicate or contest the group’s claims. Fixating on the surface images of the Far Left—especially shots of the erstwhile “guerrilla girl”—these productions are often emptied of historical content. Chapter 1 explores how this rehashing of the German encounter with militancy and terror differs from the operations of two early and wellknown works, the film Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn) from 1978 and Gerhard Richter’s cycle of paintings titled 18. Oktober 1977 (October 18, 1977) from 1988. Germany in Autumn was produced by a collective for national television soon after the hostage crisis in 1977. Using a range of experimental techniques, the film conveys many of the lived, material realities that surrounded the RAF. Its complex inquiry is at once historical and compositional. The public exhibition of October 18, 1977, ten years

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later, reawakened controversy about how the RAF and its victims should be remembered. The paintings are based on archival photographs of the militants’ central cadre, especially Meinhof and Ensslin. Despite the fact that Germany in Autumn and October 18, 1977 were produced by artists not usually associated with feminism, both attest to the sexual politics that operated within and around the Far Left. Whereas the Richter paintings heighten the ethical tensions of postmilitant culture, asking how to represent terror and trauma, the film project brings the historical contexts of the RAF—particularly the women’s movement of the 1970s—into sharp focus. Together, these two examples establish a framework through which to assess the range of postmilitant expressions, from the reactionary to the resistant.50 This book discloses a jagged arc that spans four decades. The chapters move from the Cold War, to unification, and into the present coordinates of transnational terror. The examples I select don’t cover all of the responses to the RAF. Rather, they represent major currents in postmilitant writing and art. My analysis draws on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, revised and refined in the late 1960s, when the Far Left was just beginning to militarize, and then it teases out the strands that have shot through radical subculture and its bodies of reception, testing the resistance of “oppositional art” to the culture industry. These strands extend temporally and spatially, back to the French Revolution, across Germany, and into other parts of the world. Grasping them requires careful analysis, archival retrieval, and historicization. If the German Far Left seemed to point the way toward a new mode of politically motivated violence, some of its roots reached down into two of the darkest sources of Europe’s twentieth century, National Socialism and Stalinism. The RAF’s first generation, born during and shortly after the Third Reich, aimed to confront the latent authoritarianism that they perceived in German society. In the FRG this generation’s adolescence seemed riven with contradiction. They learned of war crimes from tribunal reporting at Nuremburg, Frankfurt, and Jerusalem. They watched the first documentaries about German atrocities, but at the same time they saw many Nazi functionaries reinvent themselves as government officials and free-market entrepreneurs. One of the RAF’s initial impulses was to use direct action to accelerate and expedite the process of denazification. Through its vendetta against the surviving agents of Hitler’s regime, the group wanted to disrupt the continuities between Germany’s

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past and present—whatever the price. The retaliatory will that motivated the Far Left went into overdrive within a matter of months, however, and some of the founding actions of the armed struggle actually resumed the direction of Hitler’s plans. In the late 1960s, for example, left ist militants organized a series of attacks on Berlin’s small, surviving Jewish community. Similarly, Ulrike Meinhof commended the assassination of Israeli athletes by agents of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) at the Munich Olympics in 1972.51 Although some commentators have tried to interpret these facts as a challenge to Israeli expansionism and the hegemony of the Western nation-state, the pattern of racist violence that ran through the RAF and its milieu—only recently deciphered—demands closer scrutiny. The RAF’s complex of investments in and aversions to fascism still needs elucidating, but the group’s encounter with state socialism—both its ideology and its implementation—is being discerned with greater accuracy. The militants’ sense of solidarity with communist regimes was more than philosophical; it was also pragmatic. Backed by the Soviet Union, East German intelligence supported cells of the West German Far Left, enabling contact with Middle Eastern representatives and then providing secret asylum to RAF members who wanted to “drop out” of the armed struggle. When the Soviet Bloc disintegrated, some of the group’s backing gave way, and it wasn’t long before the RAF disbanded. Recently available documents from the Stasi archives have renewed interest in the militants who lived under assumed identities in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) during its final decade. After 1989 most of the RAF dropouts were arrested and sentenced for constitutional offenses. In the early 2000s, a series of appeals for their release created tension within the Left. Most commentary on these proceedings has been pitched to either condemn or celebrate RAF militants without reflecting on the larger implications of armed resistance or the state’s repressive means of counterterrorism. But well before the status of these prisoners achieved such primacy, a number of writers and artists were exploring the topics of revolutionary violence and social rehabilitation. Novels by Judith Kuckart (1990) and Christoph Hein (2005), as well as Volker Schlöndorff ’s widely released films on militancy and its place in postwar Germany, compose intricate portraits of intelligence and deceit. Chapter 2 compares these fictional works with archival documentation of Far Left attacks. It rewinds the Baader-Meinhof narrative from the present, back

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to the group’s previous complicity with both state socialist regimes and global terrorist networks, and finally down to its criminal origins. A gulf opens up between the backstories of the RAF and the fictional accounts that followed them. Into this space drift the ghosts of Marx and Mao, which seem to tell us as much about the current nostalgia for socialist ideals as they do about the RAF’s destructive role in the Cold War.52 Investigating the Far Left’s associations with fascist and totalitarian forces, we come upon a paradox. Just as scholars are fitting together crucial pieces of European political history, some writers and artists are misremembering the RAF’s relationship to the neo-avant-garde. One example of this occurs in the various attempts to align the RAF with the Situationist International (SI), the Paris-based group of artists and activists led by Guy Debord. Some have suggested that the RAF can only be comprehended as a consequence of Debord’s work, a premise that depoliticizes situationist strategy and invests the German armed struggle with a visual acuity it never would have laid claim to. The problem of how to distinguish vanguard politics from neo-avant-garde aesthetics, prefigured in Frankfurt School debates and revealed in the desire to retrospectively conjoin the RAF and the SI, serves as a touchstone for this study. Chapter 3 identifies the points of contact between the Situationists and the German Far Left, but it also discloses important differences between them, which have generally gone undiscussed. Recalling a range of sources, from Meinhof’s journalism on gender and consumer society to Debord’s writing on the commodity fetish, this section also reflects upon the status of women within the SI and the RAF. Part 2 moves from the cultural history surrounding the RAF to the phases in postmilitant art and literature that succeeded the German Autumn. Chapter 4 examines Margarethe von Trotta’s film Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne and Juliane, 1981). Based on the lives of Gudrun Ensslin and her sister Christiane, it explores the strains between the personal and the political that ran through the Left in the late 1970s and 1980s. Von Trotta structures the narrative with carefully composed shots that direct the viewers’ gaze onto the thresholds between public spaces and internal enclosures. Laying bare the architectures of restraint, from bourgeois homes to stark prison compounds, she demonstrates an awareness of the built environment that parallels that of the Situationists. But the stories she tells sketch out a different perspective or “elevation” on radical politics.

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Marianne and Juliane depicts the feminine face of the social forces that were changing West Germany in the 1970s. The two sisters who lead the story, one a feminist journalist and the other an urban guerrilla, traverse the divide between the public programs of the Frauenbewegung and the RAF’s underground machinations. Revealing the broader social frameworks that coexisted with the RAF, von Trotta explores issues of sexuality, labor, and militancy that were fiercely debated in the years of the RAF’s first generation. While extremists wrought havoc in West Germany, reformers in the new social movements advanced the process of democratization. They secured rights and freedoms for women, homosexuals, and immigrants, implemented policies to protect the environment, and organized nationwide protests against nuclear proliferation. The social order in the FRG was changing in the 1970s and 1980s. To be certain, this was not as a direct result of the RAF or the incipient cultural response to it, but rather it was because the first generations of postwar citizens were coming of age and beginning to take real power within a democratic framework. In 1983, for example, the Green Party won seats in the Bundestag; it had been founded in the late 1970s by Petra Kelly, Rudi Dutschke, and other New Left leaders. Women like Kelly entered the public sphere with unprecedented strength and gained top positions in the government and national media. But the RAF, by this time, was fighting another battle. Larger questions of social justice fell to the wayside as the group imploded. With an increasingly myopic view, the RAF and its circle of advocates came to see themselves not just as targets of the postwar police state, but as victims of German history as a whole. They called Stammheim another Auschwitz, betraying the sort of ethical amnesia that would severely compromise the militants’ mission. In the decade after the German Autumn, disquiet arose as to who were the agents of German violence and who were its real objects. Within a few years of the Stammheim deaths, West Germany entered a period of relatively conservative consolidation—the Tendenzwende that started in the late 1970s. The Left seemed largely exhausted, but the RAF threat persisted, as many members remained at large. Public intellectuals disputed whether any German could really be a “victim” of modern history, or whether the past could ever be “normalized.” Habermas had a prominent voice, especially in debates about fascism; his interrelated critique of

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postmodernism is a primary reference for this part of the book. In the 1980s and into the 1990s we see instances where the effects of postmodernism and postmilitancy overlapped and intersected. Taking into account selected novels and films, we can see a restructuring of national identity that happened over the course of this period. Through this analysis, we also gain a deeper understanding of the concept of postmilitancy, its potential as well as its problems. To this end, chapter 5 compares novels about terrorism that two authors, Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Friedrich Christian Delius, wrote during the Tendenzwende. I use this comparison as a testing ground upon which to consider the terms “postmodern” and “postmilitant.” How might a postmilitant inquiry expand our analysis of the history and culture of postmodernity? How, in turn, are some of the main topics of discourse about the postmodern, such as identity, enlightenment, and emancipation, configured within the fields of postmilitant art and writing? Explicating the relations between these two concepts is an objective of this chapter. In the 1980s the difficult matter of wartime rapes emerged as a contested site for the discussion of modernity and identity, both national and sexual. For the first time, Germans spoke openly about their victimization by “liberating” Soviet forces during the 1940s. It became possible to picture twentieth-century Germany under two sieges, first by the Russian Red Army, later by the Red Army Faction. Reading Der Auft rag (The Assignment, 1986) and Mogadischu Fensterplatz (Windowseat at Mogadishu, 1987) with regard to this precarious perspective, we observe that each novel “takes” a woman hostage and threatens her with both political and sexual violence. Delius’s and Dürrenmatt’s writing forms a unique optic through which to examine problems of embodiment and agency in continental thought at the time when the wave of postmodernism crested in Western Europe. The best artistic medium for plotting the body in space and time is dance. In the 1980s, modern dance and performance art were at the cutting edge of German culture. Eventually the RAF story worked its way into these forms: Johann Kresnik’s choreography for the Tanztheaterstück titled Ulrike Meinhof provided a counterpoint to the postwar media surge. Playing off of familiar photographs of the German Far Left, Kresnik’s dancers reflect upon the articulation and disciplining of the militant body. Chapter 6 compares the representation of Meinhof’s body in Kresn-

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ik’s Tanztheaterstück to that of another other prominent leftist, Joschka Fischer, once a prominent member of the Extraparliamentary Opposition (Außerparlamentarische Opposition, or APO) and then later Germany’s Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor. Ulrike Meinhof was continuously restaged from 1987 until 2010. This long run allowed the choreography to mirror changes in the Left’s self-identity, especially during the years when the two Germanys became one. What put some left ists on the path to suicide and self-destruction while others rose to power? Juxtaposing images of Meinhof and Fischer, we see that feminism played an important role in this historical moment. Archival records from the mid-1970s show Fischer joining feminists in their censure of armed resistance and urging his comrades to relinquish the tools of violence. If Fischer’s political acumen has consolidated him into a model of restraint and “normalcy,” the fragmented images of Meinhof’s body reflect the “shattered,” discontinuous state of contemporary Germany that the historians Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer have described. If we consider Ulrike Meinhof together with Marianne and Juliane, The Assignment, and Windowseat at Mogadishu, a cultural and political anatomy of the militant body comes into view. Each of these works reveals the important context that feminism provided for the rise—and reception—of the RAF. The gendered traits of this corpus betoken the complex interplay between art and theory, performance and terrorism. Sexual politics are disclosed as a mediating force in the cultural response to revolutionary violence. This observation enables a critique of the most provocative postmilitant event to date, the exhibition Zur Vorstellung des Terrors (Regarding Terror), held at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin in 2005. The Kunst-Werke curators set out to demonstrate how forcefully the media has shaped the RAF legacy. Indeed, many of the artworks they selected lay plain their indebtedness to news sources, especially stock photographs of Meinhof and Ensslin. Chapter 7 analyzes this mediatized condition, moving beyond the apparently mechanical reproduction of RAF imagery that typified Regarding Terror, both in the curatorial propositions of the show and in some of the individual works chosen for it. Drawing upon internal records from the Kunst-Werke, I argue that the social impulses that motivated key artists included in the exhibition were all but eclipsed by the curators’ decision to highlight the power of the media. In recent years the postmilitant arena has expanded well beyond the borders of Germany. The RAF phenomenon is now global. As the book

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concludes, I consider a work that points beyond militancy in the present period of transnational terror. Looking from the margins of Europe toward recent German culture and history, we perceive what has been lost and gained in the decades since the RAF burst onto the scene. Fatih Akın’s German-Turkish film Auf der anderen Seite/Yaşamın Kıyısında (The Edge of Heaven, 2007) transposes the lessons of the German Autumn into the post-9/11 predicament. This fictional narrative rethinks the relationship between feminism and the Far Left, and so serves as a prism onto all of the works examined in this project. Working from the present, Akın processes the implications of the German 1970s and offers us a more skeptical slant on political violence than some of the better-known directors have done. For example, a retrospective feature like The Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008)—the sexed-up action drama that was nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards—delivers a fraction of Akın’s critical leverage. Deepening arguments from the book’s central chapters, the afterword addresses feminist questions about culture and power and indicates new directions for the ongoing investigation into the concrete reality of women’s experience. What is missing from many accounts of postmilitant art and literature are the “bodies that matter”—not only the obituaries of those individuals killed in the armed struggle, but, equally important, the work dedicated to democratic progress in the Federal Republic. The Baader-Meinhof group wasn’t just a “phantom” or “specter,” as many have stated.53 Its agents and victims lived real lives and died real deaths. Refracting the spectacle of revolutionary violence, After the Red Army Faction can’t salvage these material remains. Rather, in tracing the dialectic that relates the aesthetic to the political, and culture to terror, this book illuminates the social forces that correspond between these terms.

part 1. militant acts

1 The Red Decade and Its Cultural Fallout

In 1971, when the Red Army Faction was just over a year old, the members Holger Meins and Jan-Carl Raspe began to make a film about liberation movements and world politics. They sought out Dierk Hoff, a sculptor and welder with ties to Frankfurt’s left ist circles, and asked him to design props for the project: fake hand grenades, pretend pipe bombs, and the like. The film was going to be a Revolutionsfiktion, a tale of insurgency that would awaken its viewers to the international struggle of the urban guerrilla. This job led to further collaboration, including Hoff ’s fabrication of a “baby bomb”: an explosive undergarment fashioned to resemble a pregnant woman’s expanding middle. There is no record of a RAF member infiltrating public space while wearing the bomb, nor is there any of its detonation.1 But a photograph remains. In it, the bulbous, metal device is strapped onto a young woman’s torso. Loose hair obscures her face, but the pointed cups of her white brassiere are clearly visible. The picture, like the baby bomb itself, made it clear that the Far Left had taken the technology of gender into its arsenal and that it was just waiting for the right moment to use it. We know that scores of real bombs were deployed in the campaign that the RAF led from 1970 to 1998. In May 1972, for example, the group

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Klaus Benz, Babybombe (Babybomb), 1976. Published in Der Spiegel 6 (Feburary 2, 1976).

executed lethal attacks on the U.S. army’s Frankfurt Headquarters and its Supreme European Command in Heidelberg, killing four American officers. The RAF defined itself as an antifascist, anti-imperialist organization engaged in revolutionary violence against capitalism. After the government of the Federal Republic (and the administrations of West Berlin, which, at that point, was an affiliated exclave), the United States and NATO were its prime targets. It is believed that some of Dierk Hoff ’s explosives were used in these actions. Hoff disavowed his link to Meins and Raspe shortly thereafter, when the two were arrested together with Andreas Baader, but his small part in the RAF story discloses a truth about the German armed struggle: the force of left ist violence quickly eclipsed the RAF’s subversive intent. Their militancy was always symbolic, but it was also always brutally real. What was the Red Army Faction and which conditions gave rise to it? This chapter outlines the history of the RAF’s emergence and lays the groundwork for an attenuated analysis of postmilitant culture in Germany. It begins with a description of the German Autumn of 1977—the two months when Baader-Meinhof machinations brought West Germany to a state of emergency. The scope then widens to include the social and

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political shifts that first prefigured this season and later followed upon it. Especially in the “red decade” that led up to the crises of 1977, the German Left underwent a series of reinventions, ruptures, and realignments.2 The RAF was one product of these breaks, but the group wasn’t the singular culmination of the “cultural revolution,” as the historian Gerd Koenen has termed it, that overtook much of the FRG in the middle years of the Cold War. Indeed the RAF’s actions—and the artistic response to them—can only really be assessed within the larger context of these transformations. After the siege of National Socialism, Germans from both sides of the country endeavored to build new institutions of democracy. Courts, workplaces, and schools became sites of reconstruction and contestation. The German Left was at the forefront of this critique; two of its constituent groups, critical theorists and feminists, were also the first to perceive the incipient threat of postwar militancy. Their wide-ranging debates about the Far Left offer crucial insights into both RAF militancy and the art and literature that have come after it. Just as these intersecting historical and conceptual currents provide an important context within which to read the unfolding of the German Autumn, a pair of artworks can be identified as foundational for postmilitant culture and its interpretation. They are the film Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn), released right after the events of 1977, and Gerhard Richter’s cycle of paintings 18. Oktober 1977 (October 18, 1977), which was completed and first exhibited ten years later, in 1988. Both works reflect upon the difficulty of laying to rest what Klaus Theweleit has called “the specters of the RAF,” and both detect the sexual politics that stirred within the armed struggle.3 As we shall see, Germany in Autumn articulates the social questions that shaped left ist agendas in the 1970s, even as it conveys the anxiety and despair that beset so many when the RAF took its suicidal dive. October 18, 1977 stands at a remove from the conflicts of revolutionary force. Richter foregrounds the aesthetic practice of painting, blurring the margins between document and memory. His choices of subject matter, composition, and technique have become a central reference point for much of the postmilitant culture that has appeared in the decades since he first exhibited the series. How can a picture or a text take stock of social change, of terrorism, or of symbolic violence? Revisiting Germany’s years of postwar dissent and differentiation, we establish a platform from which to evaluate the

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capacity of art and literature to represent these phenomena. The long and divergent trajectories of postmilitancy were set by several factors: modern German history, artists’ and writers’ first confrontations with the subject of the RAF, and the proliferation of commentary and scholarship on the significance of militancy and terrorism. The next sections introduce these factors and show how they variously come together and move apart.

1977: The German Autumn The German Autumn began in early September 1977, when a RAF cell kidnapped Hanns-Martin Schleyer, a former Schutzstaffel (SS) officer and member of the Nazi Party. Although he was interned as a prisoner of war from 1945 to 1948, Schleyer was not punished for his complicity with the Hitler regime. He returned to West German society as a civil servant, worked his way up in the Daimler Benz Corporation during the years of economic recovery, and eventually became the president of the influential Federation of German Industries and the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations. He was slated to serve as Chairman of the World Economic Forum at Davos. To many on the Left, Schleyer was the picture of evil, living proof that the Bundesrepublik had not fully broken with the fascist strains of the Third Reich. Schleyer’s abduction was preceded by a string of militant and criminal acts. Over the course of seven years, the RAF had used nearly every guerrilla tactic—bombings, robberies, assassinations—in an attempt to make the FRG and its people confront the nation’s legacy of authoritarianism and to resist its integration into NATO’s military industrial complex. Along with these tactics, the RAF exploited opportunities for publicity. In the Schleyer kidnapping, the group videotaped scripted declarations from their hostage, in which he confessed his guilt in Nazi crimes and asked for the release of RAF leaders who were serving life sentences for murder and terrorist conspiracy at the infamous Stammheim Prison. The footage was aired around the world, but when federal authorities refused to negotiate with the terrorists, tensions escalated. On October 13 a commando of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked a Luft hansa aircraft with ninety-one passengers and crew, abducting their flight from Mallorca, across the Mediterranean,

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and into Eastern Africa.4 Their demand: the discharge of RAF members, whom they considered their comrades in the global anti-imperialist struggle. The hijackers (two women, two men) killed one of the pilots, and the standoff was covered by media agencies around the world. Germans sat riveted to their television sets as Chancellor Helmut Schmidt tried to control the damage. They were conjoined as a national audience for one of the first times since the radio broadcasts of the Nazi period. In the early 1970s, the government began unrolling a program to curtail the Far Left that extended deeply into civil society; it included employment restrictions for suspected radicals, wiretapping, and random house searches. As the German Autumn approached its peak, the shocked public further relinquished even more of their constitutional rights. At the same time, the government imposed a news blackout for extended periods of the Schleyer abduction. Rigorously reported papers scaled back coverage, while the tabloid press capitalized on the explosive stories and images. On October 17, 1977, almost five days after the high-stakes odyssey had begun, the Grenzschutzgruppe 9 (GSG-9), a West German counterterrorism unit, together with special task forces from Somalia and Interpol, stormed the Luft hansa plane while it was parked at the Mogadishu Airport. Three of the four hijackers were killed in the barrage, but all ninety of the remaining passengers and crew were rescued. When the news broke, the Stammheim prisoners made the final play of their endgame: following a pact, three committed suicide, two by gunshot, one by hanging.5 They styled their deaths to look like murders, but these acts had the effect of a timed-release suicide bomb—one with repercussions that would last for decades.6 The next day Schleyer’s body was found dead in Alsace-Lorraine, just over the French-German border; RAF members called the German Press Agency and claimed responsibility for the shooting. The second and third generations of the RAF remained at large, but Germany’s most violent phase of left ist terror was ending. The crises of the German Autumn forced Schmidt and his cabinet into a deadly predicament. Many cite their management of the situation as an inaugural act of West German democracy; others concede that the draconian measures taken to control domestic militancy nearly proved the RAF right: the restrictions of civil liberties disclosed the government’s will toward domination and undermined the ethical principles of the Rechtsstaat.7 As the political scientist Herfried Münkler has argued, the asymmetry of

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the German Autumn—left-wing provocation versus the state of exception invoked by federal powers—prefigured the political conflicts that are part of our current global reality.8 Germany’s spell of left ist militancy and terror was preceded by a long “spring” and “summer” of social and political activism. In the 1950s thousands took to the streets across Western and Eastern Germany and demonstrated against both the rearmament of the Bundeswehr and American military interventions in Korea and Southeast Asia. As ideological contests between the United States and the Soviet Union inscribed deep divisions between the FRG and the GDR, a vibrant New Left movement emerged in the West. The New Left’s ideals of world peace were based on socialist principles, but they departed from the labor-based agendas of hard-line communism. Together with the antiwar and antinuclear Bürgerinitiativen, other social movements, particularly feminism and environmentalism, added momentum to the New Left.9 Moving into the 1960s, as the West German economy prospered and the nation entered a new phase of stability, their struggles for social justice made real headway. But dissent among the widening circles of left-oriented West Germans brought about new alignments. The Socialist Student Union (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, or SDS) was excluded from the Social Democratic Party in 1961. Together with other activists, they formed the Extraparliamentary Opposition (Außerparlamentarische Opposition, or APO); by the mid-1960s they had a plan to “march” their radical critique through the nation’s institutions. Looking abroad, young people were galvanized by images and reports of the fights for decolonization and civil rights in Africa, Latin America, and the United States.10 In West Germany, too, a new reality seemed just around the corner.

The Red Decade: 1967–1977 Germans were particularly attuned to the situation in Southeast Asia. In 1965, before many antiwar protests had been waged in the United States, West German left ists organized a series of speak-outs and demonstrations about the political conflicts in Indo-China.11 Some saw significant parallels between the FRG and South Vietnam: the U.S. military occupied both countries and sought to manage the two “subaltern” governments to its own advantage. Even those who would not acknowledge

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such a reductive equivalence between the two situations still felt moved to speak out against the U.S. invasion of Southeast Asia. The first Germans to come of age after World War II considered themselves especially obligated to resist all forces of domination. While most took up a pacifist critique of the American occupation, more radical factions adopted violent tactics. Those who would form the RAF moved toward the cutting edge of this formation, but the group’s not-so-distant origins pointed back to the center of the postwar Left. The Vietnam War evoked several associations for Germans. In his comparative analysis of leftist militancy in the United States and West Germany, the historian Jeremy Varon argues that Vietnam was doubly “coded” for young Germans: they condemned the American military deployment “both in its own right,” Varon stresses, “and insofar as it recalled Nazi violence.”12 Ulrike Meinhof also saw a parallel between U.S. bombings over North Vietnam and Allied air wars over Dresden in 1945: both, she wrote, were war crimes.13 Recently, looking back at the 1960s and 1970s, Birgit Hogefeld, a member of the RAF’s third generation, noted that the analogies between the media images of the Vietnam War and Allied film footage of German death camps could not be ignored. For her and many others, it was “absolutely imperative to take responsibility and to take action.”14 No one needed to rely on these comparisons in order to oppose the conflict, but the memory of German fascism made the geopolitics of the Cold War intolerable. Radicalized protesters sought to sharpen the contradictions they perceived in their society. They wanted to tempt the German state to react with its full force, and to unmask the violence that subtended its foundations. This, they thought, would generate a revolutionary situation, one that the public could not ignore. The founding moment of the RAF was conceived and executed by Meinhof. Long active in New Left circles of media and culture, she had taken an interest in the situation of Andreas Baader, publishing articles that commented on (and in some cases validated) his criminal career of auto theft, arson, and other, more pointedly anarchic activities. In the spring of 1970, Berlin authorities caught Baader on the lam and remanded him to a local prison, where he was sentenced to serve out a long prison term for planting bombs in two Frankfurt department stores, an action he had pulled off with Gudrun Ensslin. Meinhof orchestrated a scheme in which Baader would be temporarily transferred to a research institute in Berlin, so that she could interview him for a study on social issues.

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Authorities granted the request, and Meinhof, with the assistance of three other gun-clad young women, managed to spring Baader back into the radical underground. Shots were fired, and an institute employee was gravely injured, but the operation was otherwise successful. Baader and Meinhof jumped out of one of the institute’s windows and into the headlines of the national media, where their actions—no longer haphazard delinquency, but now considered to be an organized conspiracy—would dominate the news for years to come. Branded as enemies of the state, the militants escaped to safe houses in Berlin and then moved on to Jordan, where they trained with Fatah forces, drilling maneuvers that they would put into practice when they returned home to Germany. Before the RAF was formed, future members of the group were being initiated into various modes of protest and resistance. In June 1967, during the Shah of Iran’s visit to Berlin, German dissidents demonstrated against unlawful U.S. and British involvement in Iranian affairs. Mohamed Reza Pahlavi’s security detail harassed the crowds with its batons and provoked a violent frenzy—guards pitted against protesters pitted against city cops. The Arab-Israeli War was about to break out, and tensions were high in European cities; record-breaking ranks of police were dispatched to the Berlin demonstration. During the event local officer shot and killed Benno Ohnesorg, a literature student participating in the action. In the days that followed, the public reacted with horror and anger.15 Where many sensed a general regression toward authoritarianism, Ensslin detected an eruption of state terror that had been lying in wait since the Hitler years. Urging her comrades to resist, she argued that the violence of the FRG government could only be fought with counterviolence. “This is the Auschwitz generation,” Ensslin insisted, “and there’s no arguing with them!”16 In the spring of 1968, as student protests took hold in Paris, Prague, Mexico City, and Tokyo, another lethal outburst punctuated the time line of the German New Left. A young housepainter pulled a gun on Rudi Dutschke, an outspoken leader of the APO, and shot him in the head. Severely injured, Dutschke survived the attack, but the incident provoked massive protests that ranged from journalists’ dissent to destruction and violence. APO members believed that right-wing media forces had endangered Dutschke and other activists; a set of newspaper articles found in the attacker’s possession targeted him as an enemy of the people. Mili-

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tants staged riots at the Berlin headquarters of the Springer Verlag, which was the publisher of Bild and other mass-market papers and magazines. In their opinion, these outlets had vilified Dutschke by portraying him as a long-haired, grubby instigator of communism. The revolt interrupted paper deliveries, but it also had broader and deeper effects. Converging with the “Easter March” in 1968 against nuclear proliferation, the APO riots invited the participation of workers who were protesting the Emergency Laws that would secure the government’s increased control in case of war, natural disaster, or public unrest. Many Germans, including some from the middle of the political spectrum, perceived in the Dutschke shooting the threat of a fascist return and voiced their solidarity with the militants. Meinhof, who joined the anti-Springer riots, wrote extensively about the changed conditions for German activism. She published a series of articles that both lamented the assault on Dutschke and called for Germans to heed the national liberation movements that, to her mind, were poised to change the world: the Tupamaros of Uruguay, the PLO, the Black Panthers, and the revolutionary South Vietnamese. Pulled into the orbit of these movements, Meinhof drew from texts such as Carlos Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla and began to imagine the Stadtguerilla that would take to the streets of Berlin, Frankfurt, and Hamburg, and advance the international struggle for freedom.17 Historians have analyzed newly available evidence that shows the extent to which the RAF was shaped by Cold War contingencies. It received support from the former Soviet Union and cooperated with international terrorist networks in the Middle East and Africa. Examples of this scholarship by Martin Jander, Thomas Skelton Robinson, and Christopher Daase investigate the links between the West German Far Left and the East German Stasi, as well as the PLO and other international militant groups from the 1960s through the 1990s.18 Using these studies, the historian Jeff rey Herf maintains that the RAF played a role in two intersecting political agendas: the Soviet effort to weaken West German ties to the United States, and the Palestinian effort to weaken the FRG’s support of Israel.19 While it is important to see the RAF as part of a global phenomenon, the aesthetic response to its attempts at revolutionary violence has emerged most intensely within the German world. In the 1960s and 1970s both the radicalization of the Left and the state’s backlash against it triggered

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debates about postwar national identity that shot through every level of society. The armed struggle was waged in a complex attempt to break off from Germany’s own genealogy of violence. Militants imagined an identification with revolutionaries around the world, but they nevertheless chose local targets and framed much of their rhetoric around national symbols. The RAF’s homeward focus determined its strategy; the literary and artistic responses to its actions, in turn, are inflected with a heavy German accent. We sense this in much of the culture that has followed upon the autumn of 1977. During and since the “red decade,” the contest for the meaning of leftist terrorism has been fought most visibly in the national media. In their attempts to connect West German daily life with the anti-imperialist struggles of the 1960s, militants made the press one of their prime targets. At the Springer Tribunal—a conference at Berlin’s Technical University in 1968 that kicked off a grassroots boycott of conservative media conglomerates—participants turned the means of film production against their target. The organizers screened one of Holger Meins’s student fi lms, the three-minute Herstellung eines Molotow-Cocktails (How to Make a Molotov Cocktail, 1968). The didactic strip follows the instructions set out in Régis Debray’s handbook of guerrilla warfare, Revolution in the Revolution? (1967). As it begins, a woman’s hands assemble household items (a bottle, a little gasoline, a rag) into an incendiary device; then they light the fuse. The bomb is passed off to other female figures who set it on fire and take it out into the streets. The final shots are trained on the International Style façade of the Springer Press building.20 The Left’s critiques of the Ohnesorg and Dutschke shootings focused on the institutions that enabled the violence—not only Springer and the other media companies, but also the courts. The legal system that superseded Weimar and the Third Reich still carried with it many traces of earlier legislative structures. The conviction that there were dangerous continuities between the Nazi years and the Federal Republic was one of the central motivators for the broader New Left and the Far Left in particular. The RAF, in its inception, sought to use militancy to counter the authoritarian tendencies that persisted in Germany’s liberal democracy—not only the laws and regulations inherited by the postwar state, but also the sizeable number of people who had perpetrated fascist violence in the 1930s and 1940s and then managed to evade punishment in the new system.

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After the assault on Dutschke, many Germans agreed with the New Left’s arguments against retrograde media networks. Prominent figures, including Theodor Adorno, Heinrich Böll, and Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, expressed their solidarity in April 1968 by signing an appeal for tolerance and democratic exchange. “Fear and an inability to engage the arguments of the student opposition have created a situation,” the appeal explained, “in which the targeted defamation of a minority incites acts of violence against it.”21 The signers argued that although the German media was invested with a mandate to uphold the laws of the new constitution, in actuality it was functioning to control an immature and irresponsible public (unmündige Masse) and bolster a “new, authoritarian nationalism.”22 This doubt about constraints on civil liberties continued throughout the RAF years of 1970 to 1998. If the mainstream media never quite grasped this, the artists and writers of the postmilitant moment certainly have. The second half of the book analyzes the means by which some of these figures have superseded the critical scope of this media coverage.

The Frankfurt School, Feminism, and the Far Left Young activists enjoyed the support of the Left’s “old guard” on the Dutschke affair, but relations between the two left ist factions were not always congenial. Many artists, politicians, and public intellectuals who denounced the clampdown on free expression would eventually distance themselves from the protesters, especially when their tactics turned from civil disobedience to the taking up of arms. The rebel youth had a particularly volatile relationship with critical theorists and other leftoriented thinkers and they also clashed with the feminist initiatives that were taking place across the country. Feminists challenged the machismo that was deeply entrenched in the militant underground where the RAF took shelter, as well as the sexist hierarchies that structured much of the New Left. Beginning in the mid-1960s, a complex interplay developed between young radicals and the Institute for Social Research, the Frankfurt-based group of social scientists and philosophers who returned from forced exile during the war to continue their work on Marxist and neo-Marxist criticism up through and beyond the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Students and activists read the work of the Frankfurt School with great

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interest, and some public intellectuals affiliated with the institute, particularly Herbert Marcuse, attracted international attention with their defense of radicalism. But others cordoned off critical theory from the strategies of West German militants.23 Adorno was the most prominent of these critics. His writings addressed the historical importance of “advanced” and experimental art and ideas, but his personal and professional politics kept a steadier line. In 1964 a band of activists that included students, workers, and artists instigated a public confrontation with the renowned professor of critical theory. They printed up wanted posters with provocative quotations from Frankfurt School texts and mounted them around the university. The most potent of these citations turned Adorno’s theoretical language against him: “There can be no covenant with this world; we belong to it only to the extent that we rebel against it.”24 The activists marked Adorno’s name and private address on the posters. They invited the people of Frankfurt to contact him at home and share their views about the antagonisms between theory and practice.25 Few would have paid attention, at first, to the militants’ intervention or realized that the adage was a recasting of words originally written by the surrealist André Breton, but Adorno himself did what he could to put a stop to it. His firm response—to root out the guerrilla poster crew and have its members fined—won him little favor among the dissenters. The media rushed to cover the conflict between the activists and the bespectacled avatar of late Marxism. University lectures by Adorno, Horkheimer, and others were recorded and broadcast on radio and television. Magazine editors published photographs of student-occupied buildings. Stern ran an unflattering shot of Walter Rüegg, the professor of sociology and vice chancellor of the University of Frankfurt: reenacting a skirmish with students, he wielded an upholstered side chair in self-defense. A caption that ran below the picture cited Adorno: “I proposed a theoretical model for thought. How could I suspect that people would want to realize it with Molotov cocktails?” After decades of struggle, scholarship, and exile, when the critical theorists returned to German academia, they were thrust into the spotlight of the mass media. Caught in the glare, the contradictions between the “older” Left and its newer incarnation appeared too great to resolve. Jürgen Habermas, born between these two generations, was one of the keenest critics of West German militancy. Already in 1967, at an SDS

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panel about the Ohnesorg shooting, he warned against a “left ist fascism” that would threaten the country’s fledgling democracy.26 Addressing Dutschke, Habermas dismissed the students’ “voluntaristic ideology” as outdated and uselessly idealistic and called for more reflexive—and modern—strategies for social change. APO members responded by expressing their outrage against the “police state,” its complicity with the nuclear arms race, and the carnage of Cold War conflicts in the global South. They spoke of using “organized irregularity” to foreground the “sublime violence” of bourgeois society, that is, the political and economic forces that connected Berlin to Saigon, to Bolivia, and beyond. Habermas detected a problematic identification with the “third-world” struggles. Later, when the RAF and the PFLP trained their weapons on German noncombatants, the terrorist telos of the urban guerrilla would become only too clear. Ten years after his debate with Dutschke, Habermas’s critique of German militancy had grown deeper and more complex. In the early autumn of 1977, Habermas published an analysis of the cultural conditions that enabled radical violence. “Die Bühne des Terrors” (“The Stage of Terror”) describes left ist militancy in Europe as a “belatedly bourgeois radicalization” of revolutions that had already come and gone.27 In the essay, Habermas sees the armed struggle and the government’s reaction to it as a deformation of modern life, one that resembles the “decline” of both the political and the aesthetic orders of experience. Just as the Schmidt cabinet was losing some of its ethical principles and being downgraded to a bureaucracy of public administration (entstaatlicht), he argued, so was the communicative power of art being obliterated by the onslaught of mass media.28 The task at hand, then, was to widen the public sphere and make space for fuller discussions of politics, culture, and their various intersections. Feminists, many of whom shared the critical theorists’ interests in historical and material dialectics, were also concerned about the ways armed resistance might affect the status of women. The postwar Frauenbewegung was an important element of the social initiatives that motivated much of the New Left. Feminists collaborated in some of the militant actions of the 1960s and 1970s, such as strikes, protests, and the autonomist occupation of condemned residential tracts in Frankfurt and other cities— what was called the Häuserkampf. And in 1969, a group of women students amplified opposition to the Frankfurt School by interrupting one of

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Adorno’s lectures, taking off their tops, and flashing their breasts at him. They waved pages torn out of his Negative Dialectics and reproached him for ignoring sexual oppression in his work. Adorno never recovered from the shock of these confrontations. He canceled his lecture series and died a few months later at the age of sixty-five. Despite this passing collaboration with the largely male-dominated ranks of the Autonomen and other subgroups that agitated to storm Frankfurt’s university and city center, feminists took their dissent in a different direction. Indeed the break between leftist militancy and the women’s movement is evident in several regards. Feminists didn’t just want to occupy “the house”; they wanted to take it down, defuse the dominant forces that dwelled inside, and assert their own agency. In their revolutionary critique, these women (and some like-minded men) called attention to the personal/political dynamic of German society—the sexism that ran from the middle class right through to the hard core of the Far Left. Feminists surely noted the RAF’s wily maneuvers, such as fashioning baby bombs and planting machine guns in carriages, but they were the first to see the great divide between their own revision of German society and the RAF’s absolute rejection of it. RAF texts make little mention of the Frauenfrage that concerned so many of their generation. The Baader-Meinhof group identified itself with a good number of liberation movements, but they largely ignored feminism. Turning away from the ascetic nihilism that beset the RAF and other militant groups, German feminists sought to realize many of the New Left’s hopes for social change. In the early 1970s they changed legislation on women’s reproductive rights that dated back a century. One tactic in this project was the publication of Alice Schwarzer’s pioneering article for Stern in 1971, in which a record 374 women—including many who were prominent in the public sphere—admitted to having terminated a pregnancy. The magazine’s cover was emblazoned with the title “We’ve Had Abortions!” It featured a grid of the women’s identity photos, much like the wanted posters that were at the time one of the most visible signs of national security enforcement.29 Meanwhile, feminists were active on a number of other fronts. They expanded opportunities for equal employment and developed a woman-affirmative counterpublic sphere (Gegenöffentlichkeit) that encompassed medicine, urban planning, and, not least, the arts and media. These alternative sites, we will see, became an important reference for some of the most critical postmilitant art.

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If Habermas saw politics and culture disparaged and diminished on the Far Left’s “stage” of terror, feminists—like the sculptor and performance artist Rebecca Horn and the writer Verena Stefan—were aware of a related tendency in the experience of sexual desire. Their work never squarely addressed the RAF, but Horn’s “body art” and Stefan’s novel Häutungen (Shedding, 1975) turned away from the strictures of militancy and explored erotic and physical sensation. Just as the casualties of the German Autumn began to increase, sexual politics emerged as a major object of interest in public discourse. Feminist papers proliferated in multiple directions of social and political analysis, and in the mid- and late 1970s journals such as konkret, Pflasterstrand, and, in the United States, New German Critique published special issues on sexuality. Most of these texts were written by women, but an important exception to this tendency was Klaus Theweleit’s epic study Männerphantasien (Male Fantasies, 1977 and 1978), which critiqued the paramilitary disciplining of male bodies and explored the underpinnings of fascist consciousness. Besides Theweleit, the writing of other men who participated in the debates on gender was generally met with skepticism. One target of feminist critique was the work of Alexander Kluge, both his books about counterpublic spheres (which he coauthored with his fellow Frankfurt School sociologist Oskar Negt) and his fi lmmaking, including Germany in Autumn (which he helped to write, direct, and produce). This response to Kluge prefigures aspects of the postmilitant critique that develops in the rest of this book, so it merits attention. Feminists closely read Negt and Kluge’s Public Sphere and Experience (1972) and History and Obstinacy (1981) and used the books’ internal logic to scrutinize the characterization of female figures in Kluge’s early cinema.30 Noting Kluge’s portrayals of women as “anarchic” or even outright “irrational,” some critics saw these figures as “sensual embodiment[s]” of the utopian drive. Others, however, had their doubts.31 In an article from 1981 on Kluge’s contribution to Germany in Autumn, the film historian Miriam Hansen asked whether his characters were scripted to fall short of full agency; she remarked that while his women “succeed in creating their own presence as sensual human beings . . . they very rarely do as sexual ones.”32 Kluge’s handling of sexuality is, in fact, uneven at points, but this doesn’t obscure the fact that his films, to an unusual degree, acknowledged the transformative capacity of the 1970s feminism that surrounded the Far Left’s emergence. The films portray women’s dual

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potential within late capitalist society: their undervalued labor and reproductive power help to maintain the status quo, Kluge suggests, but at the same time their ontological difference places them at the cutting edge of social change. In the language of critical theory, women are resistant to total instrumentalization within structures of domination.

Women in the Picture In high and mass culture of the West German 1970s, the body—especially the female body—was examined, explored, and celebrated. It was also (no surprise) exploited, but what set this period apart from other moments in modern German society was a heightened awareness of sexual politics. As the historian Dagmar Herzog has argued, the Frauenbewegung demonstrated by example not only that “human beings” could unite over social problems, but that in fact they could also “be united politically around issues of desire and pleasure.”33 If this emphasis diverged from the general trajectory of the New Left, it stood in diametric opposition to the Far Left’s terrorist campaign. Most feminist principles were contradicted by the RAF’s agenda, despite the fact that the group was led jointly by women and men. Still, many responses to the German Autumn have conflated feminism and the armed struggle. It is more accurate to argue that the Frauenbewegung—even in the early days of the late 1960s—unlocked a cultural shift that enabled Meinhof and Ensslin to take control of the RAF. To understand the tensions between the women’s movement and the Far Left, we need to examine the politics and aesthetics of each, and consider how they factor into recent cultural history. Participating in the gender debates of the 1970s, the art historian Silvia Bovenschen published the widely disseminated essay “Is There a Feminine Aesthetic?” (1976), which drew from Goethe, Freud, and Marcuse to produce a feminist inquiry into modern European culture.34 Bovenschen’s inquiry can be reframed for an analysis of the Far Left’s own forays into the production of texts and images. Was there a militant aesthetic? RAF documents indicate that there was. The next questions, then, are how this aesthetic played into the group’s program and how it has influenced the art and literature that came after the German Autumn. Among the RAF leaders, it was Ensslin who most stridently insisted upon the priority of the political in the German armed struggle. “We don’t want to be just a page in the history of culture!” she proclaimed.35

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But the RAF’s dismissal of aesthetic concerns belied the deep interests in art, literature, and ideas that many members maintained, especially in the years before they joined ranks. Ensslin studied English and German at Tübingen and the Free University of Berlin; in the mid-1960s, together with Bernward Vesper, she also founded a small publishing house, the studio neue literatur, which promoted contemporary fiction. Andreas Baader flirted with a career in Munich’s Action-Theater, where he fell under Fassbinder’s sway before taking his antics to the streets. And Ulrike Meinhof served as head editor of konkret for several years. Before leading the RAF, she also experimented with cinema; she wrote and produced Bambule, a made-for-television film about insurgency in a girls’ reform school.36 This early interest in gender, however, would be quickly surrendered to Meinhof’s deeper commitment to the armed struggle. Later, in the prime of the group’s first generation, the RAF continued to “orient” itself according to aesthetic and especially literary traditions. As the Germanists Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Mark Williams have demonstrated, the Stammheim inmates consulted Brecht’s The Measures Taken and Melville’s Moby-Dick for guidance on “proper behavior” while living in a “collective”—that is, the forced constraints of the prison.37 The Baader-Meinhof group publicly disavowed Western cultural traditions, but in truth the battleground that they plotted out was contoured by aesthetic forces. RAF texts, many of which were authored by Meinhof and Ensslin but published anonymously, had a distinctive style. Their communiqués with German media and government were often written in lowercase lettering (kleinschreibung), which was popular at the time.38 The linguist Olaf Gaetje has recently identified additional characteristics of the Far Left’s pseudo-grammar, including the relatively consistent use of acronyms, enclitics, and logograms such as the symbol + for und.39 RAF texts evidence a tendency to simplify German syntax, using parenthetical clauses in lieu of longer formulations. These reductive devices converged with the stylistics of concrete poetry, which called for a revolution in language. In a contribution to Text + Kritik from 1970, for example, the writer and linguist Chris Bezzel took a stance consistent with the Far Left’s vision of a new order. The absence of uppercase letters in Bezzel’s writing is particularly notable in German: “what’s revolutionary is a literature that transforms the medium of language itself, that refunctions it, destroying its linguistically hierarchical character. through an innovative

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play with language, this writing anticipates the social changes that all revolutionaries work for.”40 In the 1960s and 1970s, many countercultural texts demonstrated an affinity with these stylistics. Indeed the rules and lexicon of this “code” connected a cluster of artists and activists. But the RAF took it to its furthest degree, crafting a language to metonymically signify a radical break not only with “bourgeois” culture, but with German society as a whole.41 As Andreas Baader put it, “language is action.”42 Bernward Vesper was one of the first writers to enter kleinschreibung into the register of German literature. Passages of Die Reise (The Trip, 1977), Vesper’s largely autobiographical Romanessay, use the lowercase to chronicle the author’s travels through Germany and across Europe from 1969 to 1971.43 Although he never joined the Baader-Meinhof group, Vesper was nonetheless linked to it, having closely collaborated with Ensslin, as mentioned above. An editor of the Voltaire Flugschriften (another key journal of left ist politics and culture), Vesper was also the son of Will Vesper, a prominent Nazi-era writer.44 The Trip conveys the psychedelic vibe that thrummed around many German radicals. When it first appeared, posthumously, in 1977, the novel was acknowledged as a document of the militant scene that gave rise to the RAF. It begins with the formula “E = Experience x Hatred2,” passes through smoky meetings of the APO and long afternoons in Meinhof’s apartment, and ends, more than six hundred pages later, in fragments, aphorisms, and single-line sketches that Vesper took down weeks before his suicide in 1971. A product of its time, The Trip is cut across by the question of gender and sexual equality. Vesper conveys his love and commitment to his small son, Felix, the offspring of his relationship with Gudrun Ensslin.45 But at random intervals he also lets loose tirades of misogynist slurs that were current in the subdialects of the Far Left. The dense fabric of personal and political material in the text also enables Vesper to explore the links between his life and the recent history of German fascism. The Trip chronicles the extended adolescence of the Nachgeborenen and also presages tendencies that will develop in the later writing and art that deal with German militancy and terrorism, both at home and abroad. Since Vesper’s early representation of underground life, impressions of the RAF have appeared in various aesthetic practices—poetry, painting, performance, punk—and their actions have been recorded in historical studies and works of cultural criticism.46 Within the growing field of RAF-related publishing, a few books have found large audiences over-

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seas, most notably, Bommi Baumann’s Wie alles anfing (How It All Began, 1975), an early diary of left militancy, and Astrid Proll’s photo album BaaderMeinhof: Pictures on the Run, 67–77 (1998), which became a fi xture on the coffee tables of left-oriented readers in Germany, North America, and the United Kingdom.47 The afterimage of the RAF has registered most forcefully in visual art and cinema.48 The best-known example of postmilitant culture is Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977, a series of paintings that concern the lives and deaths of the RAF leadership. When the cycle was first exhibited, a decade after the German Autumn, it was credited for reawakening the debate about the nation’s confrontation with revolutionary violence, a debate that had become taboo.49 October 18, 1977 has traveled widely and had a large international viewership. Details from it have adorned the covers of books and CDs, and the paintings are a central reference in Don DeLillo’s short story “Baader-Meinhof,” his first publication in the New Yorker after September 11.50 Within the German-speaking world, the significance of October 18, 1977 is matched by the film Germany in Autumn. Taken together, these two works illuminate the correspondences between the aesthetic, the social, and the political in postmilitant culture. That these correspondences are deeply inflected by gender make the film and the paintings central to this study. The fifteen paintings that comprise October 18, 1977—oil on canvas, of varying sizes—are based on a selection of photographs that includes press shots, forensic documents, and a posed studio portrait. Black and white tints blend into a range of grays, producing images that tend toward abstraction. Titled after the night that Baader, Ensslin, and the fellow RAF member Jan-Carl Raspe died in Stammheim, the series illustrates the arrests and incarceration of the group’s first generation, as well as the suicides and funerals that closed the first chapter of German militancy and terrorism.51 Richter uses his “photopainting” technique to remarkable effect: the blurred forms draw the viewer into a space between past and present, between document and memory. This blurring has become a signature of the writing and art that touch upon the RAF.52 The sequencing and repetition of October 18, 1977, perhaps more than any other Richter work, protract the transposition of film to paint. The curator and critic Robert Storr describes Richter’s technique as pulling forward “the physical reality” of the painting while pushing the image back.53 As the art historian Benjamin Buchloh has argued in his extended

Gerhard Richter, Tote (Dead), 1988. Part of 18. Oktober 1977 (October 18, 1977). Oil on canvas.

Gerhard Richter, Erhängte (Hanged), 1988. Part of 18. Oktober 1977 (October 18, 1977). Oil on canvas.

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reflections on Richter’s practice, this tension within the work allows us to sense the gap between a set of photographic events and their belated repositioning as works of memory.54 It also poses a question—central both to the study of European culture after 1945 and to the problem of thinking beyond the militant—about the adequacy of visual art to represent history and its violent traumas. Setting October 18, 1977 within the wider currents of postmilitant culture, we begin to see the fading or even absence of certain historical elements within many other aesthetic responses to the German Autumn. Like some of the more recent art on the RAF, the images in the Richter cycle segregate the RAF members from their victims, from one another, and from the social forces that surrounded them. Only one painting, Beerdigung (Funeral), which depicts the procession to the graves of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe, rejoins the militants into a group. Contemplating the series, we realize that it is not just Richter who detaches the agents of the German Autumn from their context; the RAF members themselves were the first to chart the desolate grounds that the artist depicts. Resorting to terror, the RAF broke from other oppositional networks of its time. Sadly, the RAF’s most significant intervention might well have been its members’ suicides, which cut them off from any shared political praxis and imparted a mythical aura to left ist militancy and terror in Germany. October 18, 1977 can be both seen and watched. Among the fifteen canvasses, several images recur like frames in a motion filmstrip. Gegenüberstellung (Confrontation), Tote (Dead), and Erschossener (Man Shot Down) appear in multiples of two and three, each reiteration degenerating the picture. Note the paintings’ titles. They omit gendered articles, much like Meinhof’s choice to delete the feminine die from her term Stadtguerilla. Moving along the gallery space, one can imagine various narratives unfolding, quite like cinema, albeit interspersed with blank gaps between the images. The cinematic quality of October 18, 1977, as well as its melancholic tone, can be productively compared with the film Germany in Autumn. Whereas the Richter paintings expose the distance between document and memory, the film focuses on the historical and social contexts of the 1970s. Germany in Autumn was a defining moment in several ways. First, it marked the shift from the “hot” autumn of RAF actions and the state’s counteroffensive to a cooler climate of conservative consolidation. In September and October 1977 the RAF challenged the West German government’s monopoly on violence and brought the country to crisis. By the next

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spring the most dangerous elements of the Far Left were either exiled or dead; the wider circles of those who shared many of the RAF’s ideals sat stunned by the militants’ self-destruction and appalled by the state’s severe discipline. For years to come, Amnesty International and other human rights organizations would report on abuses of RAF members and other “political prisoners” who were incarcerated in West German facilities. Heinrich Böll, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other public intellectuals from across Europe voiced concern about the conditions under which these individuals were confined.55 Comprising both facts and fictions, Germany in Autumn is an omnibus film written and directed by Alexander Kluge together with R. W. Fassbinder, Volker Schlöndorff, and other leading lights of New German Cinema. It was aired on national television just months after the hostage crisis. Germany in Autumn begins and ends with documentary footage, first of Schleyer’s state funeral, and then of the burials of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe. Both services were performed in Stuttgart, and they took place only two days apart, but as the clips demonstrate, the tone of the two memorials was quite different. Schleyer was accorded national honors, while the burial of the RAF members was attended by enraged protesters and a great show of police officers, reporters, and flashing cameras. Early on, the directors saw that the conflict between the Far Left and the FRG was being waged not only on the streets of German cities, but also in—and through— the national media. This attention to the press and to television links the film back both to the public intellectuals who criticized the biased coverage of student activists in the 1960s and to the RAF itself, which exploited new means of video production in its attack on German society. As it retrieves disparate archival documents and relates them to other, imagined narratives, Germany in Autumn exposes some of the impasses of 1977. Without trying to resolve these difficulties, the directors sample from a range of cultural and historical materials, leaving it up to the viewer to make some sense of the forces of rogue and state terrorism that both shaped Germans’ collective identity and destroyed individual lives. The film takes an oblique look at the German Autumn, as if to direct the viewer’s attention away from the magnetic images of the militants and onto the social circumstances that, in many ways, influenced the ascendance and demise of the RAF. Of these circumstances, the directors emphasize the shifting sexual politics that shaped German society in the 1970s, from the bohemian communes to the mass market.

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Richter, in contradistinction, trains our gaze on the individuals who led the RAF and ultimately gave their lives for it. Nine of the paintings in October 18, 1977 depict human subjects; interestingly, eight of those nine canvasses take Meinhof and Ensslin as their subject. The gendering of this selection has been discussed by several commentators. Their reflections on the sexual politics at play in the series are useful objects of critique for my own analysis of the way women are represented in postmilitant culture. In an interview from 1989, the critic Jan Thorn-Prikker asked Richter if he focused on Meinhof and Ensslin because the RAF was “primarily a women’s movement.” “That’s true,” Richter replied. “I also think that the women who played the more important role in the group, they made a much bigger impression on me than the men.”56 There’s a difference, however, between characterizing the RAF as a women’s movement and sensing the impact of Meinhof and Ensslin, as individuals, on the German public. It would be difficult to ascribe any “feminist potential” to the Richter cycle, as the Germanist Karin Crawford has recently done, given the laconic nature of the artist’s remarks in the interview and his continuing insistence that his work be seen as nonideological and apolitical.57 I would extend this skepticism to any claim that the RAF itself was a feminist initiative.58 More precisely, we see that Meinhof and Ensslin demonstrated that radical women of postwar Germany had the potential to move history in unprecedented ways, even if this was at variance with their stated intentions. In her powerful essay about the aesthetic function of analogy in Richter’s painting, “Photography by Other Means” (2009), the film theorist Kaja Silverman enters into the problem of gender in October 18, 1977 and calls Thorn-Prikker’s account of the RAF “highly revisionist.” She notes that Andreas Baader “presided over [the group] like a primal father, and subjugated [its female members] in crudely gendered ways.”59 Although anecdotal accounts from those who knew Baader attest to this sexism, and although his prison letters show a misogynist mindset, the fact remains that it was Meinhof and Ensslin who directed the actions of the RAF’s first generation. Besides, in Ensslin’s writings we find the same abusive, antiwoman subdialect used by Baader, Vesper, and many others on the Far Left; Ensslin appropriated these terms for herself and deployed them toward the end of honing the group’s inner core into killer unit.60 Nevertheless, Richter’s emphasis on Meinhof and Ensslin does signal something important about the art and literature that have proliferated

Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn), dir. Alf Brustellin, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, et al., 1978. Film stills.

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in the wake of the German Autumn. The depictions of RAF women, in October 18, 1977 as well as in other artworks, are signals of a radical feminism that could have been, but never was. Instead, this feminist potential was derailed by the armed struggle. Thus, it seems that the sorrow conveyed by so much postmilitant culture is for a misplaced militancy. This art and literature prompt us to ask, what if, instead of terrorism, Meinhof and Ensslin had enlisted their followers in a revolution for sexual equality? What if they had chosen other means of resistance, other opponents? This question is implicit in Germany in Autumn. Female characters dominate the documentary clips and fictional vignettes that thread through the film. At the beginning, the directors Bernhard Sinkel and Alf Brustellin introduce the character Franziska Busch, a filmmaker who interrupts her work on a project about German history in order to help a friend escape from her abusive husband. Later, Hans Peter Cloos and Katja Rupé sketch out a female musician who takes a suspected terrorist into her home. And Volker Schlöndorff and Heinrich Böll invoke Antigone: the segments they jointly created are a parody of a producer’s failed attempts to broadcast the Sophocles drama on national television shortly after the events of October 1977. The Antigone figure exerts a centripetal influence over the multiple elements of Germany in Autumn.61 Just as her defiance prefigures the challenge of the women’s movement, the funerary ethics of the play correspond to the dilemma of how to commemorate the deaths of RAF members and their victims. As we will see later in this book, Antigone is one of the muses of postmilitancy.

Cultural Fallout October 18, 1977 and Germany in Autumn establish a framework through which to critique the cultural response to the German armed struggle. The Richter paintings mark the distance between artistic expression and historical event, that is, they plot out the space between the aesthetic signifier and that which is signified. Germany in Autumn, meanwhile, reveals a third term that mediates between the aesthetic and the political: the social initiatives, particularly the women’s movement, that were a progressive force in German culture of the 1970s and 1980s. As the film ends, it features an extended take of a young mother and her small daughter leaving the RAF funeral procession and hitching a ride from the side of the road. By today’s standards, this closing shot seems dated, but in it we

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see hopes for a feminist future, one that would both testify to the traumas of the German Autumn and look beyond them toward a new season of social change. Comparing October 18, 1977 to Germany in Autumn, we see two divergent currents of postmilitancy, one more conciliatory, the other more critical and resistant. The Richter paintings indicate their temporality posterior to the acts of the RAF. Even as they uncover certain repressed memories of the nation’s past, they also elide many questions of context and agency, and so render a depoliticized vision of the armed struggle. Germany in Autumn, meanwhile, looks for something to take away from this violent passage in German history. The directors collaborated to redefine militancy and drew out lessons from it that remain salient today. The many works that respond to the rise and fall of the RAF convey the lasting resonance of leftist militancy and terror, both in Germany and abroad. While some of these productions attempt to master the past, others recharge questions about power and representation that have, to a large extent, dominated European thought in recent generations. At the same time, the works considered here motivate us to rethink certain premises of both Frankfurt School thought and feminist theory. The task, now, is to investigate the operations of postmilitant culture. As the sociologist Donatella della Porta has noted, “the German Autumn and the 1970s more generally have been overcome, but [they were] never really discussed [or] understood.”62 The attempt to make sense of this period takes place in the writing and art examined in this book. The next chapter furthers this project by comparing several texts—fictional and documentary—that link the legacies of the Far Left to the two most violent episodes of state terror in Germany, the Nazi period and the years of the GDR regime. Reading these narratives “in reverse,” we gain a better grasp on the politics of memory that play out in the postmilitant moment.

2 Damaged Lives of the Far Left Reading the RAF in Reverse

Adorno sketches out a minor ethics for mid-century Europe in his treatise Minima Moralia, published in 1951. “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen,” he writes.1 A true life cannot be lived within one that is false. As the postwar decades moved on, many aspects of German society were set right, but members of the RAF found themselves torn between two lives. The government conducted dragnet searches, and the militants hid under an array of costumes, including business suits, sunglasses, and wigs. For some radicals, this masquerade took over the most personal aspects of their lives. Both Meinhof and Ensslin, for example, had to abandon their children when they went underground. Later, after the German Autumn, leaders of the RAF’s second generation changed their names, put on disguises, and traveled abroad to the Eastern Bloc and the Middle East. Some wanted to go global with the RAF agenda, linking their skewed conception of “socialist anti-imperialism” to transnational movements such as the PLO. Others simply wanted to take a break from the RAF drama. But to do so, they had to leave their former selves behind. The morality and duplicity of the German armed struggle have concerned many writers and artists. They have responded to the Far Left’s charges that Germany had not really denazified, and that authoritarian

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and even fascist tendencies persisted into postwar society. Even if they didn’t endorse the RAF’s tactics, these writers and artists maintained a deep interest in their project of resistance. The novelists Judith Kuckart and Christoph Hein and the filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff have taken up the ethics of the RAF in their work, addressing the group’s traversals of identity and asking if it is ever possible to live rightly as a militant or terrorist. This chapter examines the damaged lives of the Far Left, in both fact and fiction. It sets the work of Kuckart, Hein, and Schlöndorff into comparison with the history of the German armed struggle, comparing the doppelgängers that appear in their writing and cinema to the alter egos that were actually adopted by members of the Far Left. At several junctures, sexual politics play a decisive role. This chapter also takes stock of left-leaning ideological formations on both sides of postwar Germany, from the large-scale socialist experiment that was the German Democratic Republic to the minute cells that composed the RAF, disclosing their links and ruptures. Records of the RAF’s multiple deceits have begun to surface with increasing frequency. They uncover a past that many would sooner forget. Some records have come from the databanks of the former GDR; others have been located by historians and reporters. Most recently, the release of information about the surviving members has deepened interest in the legacy of the Far Left. Christian Klar, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, and Inge Viett, active in the group’s second and third generations, have come up for parole, and their cases have revealed details about the compromises they struck in their wager for revolution. Archives maintained by the East German Ministry of State Security, or Stasi, now accessible to the public, document extensive travels of a number of militants back and forth through the former GDR. Stasi agents supplied them with false passports and then helped transport them (and their weapons) eastward across the Berlin Wall, the so-called antifascist barrier. From that point they could fly to safe houses in Amman, Baghdad, and Beirut. Historians and journalists have also recently drawn on materials from the late 1960s that expose an anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist undercurrent that informed the Baader-Meinhof program. Given their socialist convictions, the Far Left had long maintained a misguided identification with the victims of U.S. military aggression in Southeast Asia. To their minds, Germany, like Vietnam, was an American-occupied land. With the Six-Day War of 1967, the Far Left began to identify with the opponents of Israeli nation-

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hood as well: Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and especially the Palestinian territories. Pledging this allegiance, radical agitators set out to provoke a revolutionary situation in the Federal Republic, staging numerous strikes on Jewish and U.S. outposts of “imperialism” in West Germany and Berlin. For the general public, this was the beginning of terror; for future members of the RAF, it was a call to arms. The Far Left used decoys and tricks to advance a purportedly redemptive campaign. But they came dangerously close to the racist violence of the fascist forefathers that the New Left wanted to disavow. The armed struggle was fraught with contradictions, right from the start. Curiously, a good number of the documents that lay out the inner conflicts of the Far Left have been available for decades, but they were overlooked or underestimated in the first waves of commentary and scholarship on the RAF. Already in the 1970s, insiders’ memoirs were published, and letters and pamphlets describing collaboration between West German militants and terrorist organizations appeared in countercultural and anarchist papers like Agit 883. Carefully preserved in libraries across Western Europe, several of these texts are recalled in this chapter. The historian Wolfgang Kraushaar has asked why those who first chronicled the RAF’s origins didn’t factor these documents into their surveys. What we can see now is that the details of these early accounts unsettle many assumptions about the culture and politics of postwar Germany. For decades most records of the RAF’s emergence, such as Stefan Aust’s Baader-Meinhof Complex, posited the group as a faction produced, in part, by the breakdown of the SDS and the APO in the late 1960s. Aust’s 1985 edition obliquely suggested that the RAF had ties to the authorities of several governments in the Soviet sphere, as well as terrorist organizations, but the book paid little attention to the historical and political circumstances that shaped the group. It emphasized the biographies of individual figures—Baader, Meinhof, Ensslin—who dominated the headlines during the German Autumn. In 2005, twenty years after the publication of the first edition, the curators of Regarding Terror at the Berlin Kunst-Werke structured their display along a similar time line. Aust’s book and the Kunst-Werke exhibition, two milestones of postmilitancy, were organized by a nearly identical chronology. The survey in Regarding Terror starts with postwar democratic initiatives and moves up through the RAF’s dissolution in 1998; it also discounts the RAF’s connections to the GDR and the PLO.2 Through this omission, the Kunst-Werke implied

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a progressive and even enlightening trajectory of the armed struggle and its aftermath. A number scholars and journalists have recently focused attention on the RAF’s place in postwar geopolitics. Wolfgang Kraushaar’s groundbreaking study Die Bombe im Jüdischen Gemeindehaus (The Bomb in the Jewish Community Center, 2005) seeks to dispel the romance of the RAF and expose the criminal, reactionary, and racist underpinnings of the movement.3 Similarly, Julia Hell’s commentary in Telos (2006) describes the German Left’s difficulty in criticizing terrorism, from the beginning of the armed struggle up to the post-9/11 present.4 Related works by Hans Kundnani (2009) and Tilman Tarach (2010) look back to the 1960s and 1970s to examine the linked circles of West Germany’s New Left and Far Left, surveying Kommune 1 and other shared collectives and tracing out the intermeshed lives of RAF members and the insurgents who influenced them.5 Their profiles of the RAF fellow-travelers Michael “Bommi” Baumann and Dieter Kunzelmann reveal crucial facets of the German Left’s history. Yet before this critical turn in writing about the history of German protest and resistance, fiction writers and filmmakers were already exploring the false consciousness of the RAF, composing complex portraits of the militants that challenge the one-dimensional figures that register in many documentary and historical accounts of the armed struggle. Judith Kuckart’s novel Wahl der Waffen (Choice of Weapons, 1990) and Volker Schlöndorff ’s film Die Stille nach dem Schuss (The Legend of Rita, 2000) track the RAF’s eastward migrations and raise provocative questions about political identity and deception—questions that Aust, for example, has overlooked. Likewise, Christoph Hein’s somewhat later novel In seiner frühen Kindheit ein Garten (In His Early Childhood, a Garden, 2005) asked about truth and reconciliation at a time when German courts were preparing parole and clemency hearings for Klar, Mohnhaupt, Viett, and other RAF convicts. Interestingly, each of these works reflects on female members of the Baader-Meinhof group. Kuckart, Hein, and Schlöndorff incorporate biographical fragments from the lives of four women who took command of the German armed struggle from the mid-1970s onward: Mohnhaupt and Viett, as well as Birgit Hogefeld and Ina Siepmann. In order to assume leadership of the RAF’s second and third generations, these

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women acted out split identities. To writers and filmmakers, their intricate lives are fascinating. It appears that postmilitant literary and visual culture registers the quandaries of the RAF more forcefully than standard historical accounts. Deriving traction from the works of Kuckart, Hein, and Schlöndorff, this chapter juxtaposes fact and fiction, reading RAF history against the grain. To disrupt some of the commonplaces about the Far Left, I trace a rearward arc, beginning with the current fascination with surviving RAF members and moving back through the Cold War flashpoints of the 1970s and 1980s, to plot out the possible origins of left ist militancy in Germany. Engaging historical documents as well as works of art and literature, this chapter counters the forward chronology that has determined the dominant narratives about German political violence. It reads the RAF in reverse, counting down time to the founding event—or takeoff—of the German armed struggle: T minus 3, T minus 2, T minus 1, zero. As it nears the null point of the movement, dark reflections of the RAF and its alter egos come into view, reflections that any contemporary critique of postmilitant culture must take into account.

T minus 3: Postmilitancy After the Wende In 2008 the Frankfurt Court of Appeal denied parole to Birgit Hogefeld, the last RAF member remaining in prison. This decision concluded a prolonged legal process that had begun in 1992, just after the Wende of German unification, when Klaus Kinkel, then the federal minister of justice, proposed an initiative to grant amnesty to imprisoned militants.6 Hogefeld is one of the more prominent members of the RAF’s third generation; she was given a life sentence for several crimes, including her role in the murder in 1985 of a U.S. military officer stationed in the FRG. Evading punishment, Hogefeld lived clandestinely well into the early years of reunified Germany. In 1993 she resurfaced in a shootout with the GSG-9 in a small town in Eastern Germany, not far from Berlin. Hogefeld was arrested and sent to a maximum-security facility, but her accomplice, Wolfgang Grams, another RAF member, died in the barrage. In 2001, when the security and intelligence systems of East and West Germany had fully integrated, it became evident that Grams had assisted in the RAF’s last-known lethal attack: the assassination of Detlef Rohwedder in 1991.7

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More recently, in June 2011, Hogefeld was granted parole on her third appeal.8 For a number of reasons, the reemergence of these cases in the German media has refreshed the question of the RAF’s relationship to institutionalized versions of socialism, particularly the Stasi. A West German finance manager, Rohwedder was the first president of the Treuhand Anstalt, the agency established to privatize or, in most cases, decommission the state-owned industries of the GDR. In the first stages of unification, he attempted to advance a kind of “third-way” socialism in the new federal states, but such complex realities didn’t compute with the RAF’s binary program. From the RAF’s reductive standpoint, you were either part of the problem or part of the solution. There was no in-between, no gray area. In a communiqué about the Rohwedder assassination, the RAF claimed it was continuing its fight against the “fascist” Federal Republic, which, through unification, was showing the will of German capital to subjugate the nations of Europe, just as it had in 1918 and 1939.9 Christoph Hein draws from the Rohwedder case, especially the covert actions of Grams and Hogefeld, in his novel In His Early Childhood, a Garden. The novel is narrated from the perspective of Richard and Friederike Zurek, a bewildered couple who lose their estranged, militant son, Oliver, in a shoot-out with German security forces.10 In an attempt to come to terms with Oliver’s activism and death, the Zureks call upon the authorities, asking for documentation of the case. The more they learn about the arrest of their son and his comrade and lover, Katharina Blumenschläger (the couple is modeled on Grams and Hogefeld), the less clear the circumstances of the final showdown become.11 Key documents disappear, witnesses provide contradictory testimonies, and government officials obstruct the parents’ efforts to verify the details of the incident. When unflattering commentary on Oliver and his relatives appears in the national media, discord breaks out within the family, nearly tearing it apart. Over the course of the novel, Richard Zurek, a retired school principal, suffers a moral crisis: he begins to doubt the democratic system and federal laws that he had spent his career teaching about and defending. Unlike some of Hein’s earlier works—for example, the critically acclaimed novels Der fremde Freund (The Distant Lover, 1992) and Willenbrock (2000)—In His Early Childhood received a great deal of public scrutiny. Critics derided the novel’s sympathetic characterization of left-wing terror-

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ists and contrasted it unfavorably to Andres Veiel’s Black Box BRD (2001), a documentary film that compares the biographies of a RAF perpetrator and a RAF victim: Wolfgang Grams and Alfred Herrhausen, the chairman of the Deutsche Bank who was killed by a RAF car bomb in November 1989, just a few weeks after the opening of the Berlin Wall.12 Film, for these critics, seemed to address the matter of political violence in Germany more squarely than literary fiction. Black Box BRD reactivated the remembrance of Grams and Herrhausen in a way that Hein’s novel did not. Turning, now, to compare In His Early Childhood to other works of postmilitant culture, we can explore the ways literature and film variously register the shock of political violence and perform the work of memory—for both the victims and the perpetrators of terrorism. To do this, we take one step backward, to the time of two Germanys.

T minus 2: The RAF’s Ostpolitik The RAF imagined itself to be a revolutionary vanguard. The GDR claimed to be a model of real existing socialism. The militants and the state had two different concepts of socialism, but before the Wende, the RAF maintained a strategic friendship with the Stasi.13 Looking back, we see that the RAF-Stasi connection produced a perversion of socialism. As a signatory to the Helsinki Accords of 1975, the GDR recognized the sovereignty of the FRG and did not actively attempt to destabilize its security systems. Although some have argued that the RAF and the Stasi shared common “enemies” in the West German state and its NATO allies, in the 1970s and 1980s, the GDR government had more pressing concerns than taking down its capitalist counterpart. The greatest threats to state socialism at that time were global economic recession, commodity shortages, and internal dissent. Nevertheless, the Stasi did maintain an interest in West German militants; one example of this investment was the Stasi’s underground subsidies to konkret, the magazine Meinhof edited for several years.14 More significantly, in the 1970s, the East German state welcomed Western militants into its bureaucratic embrace. Besides allowing the militants to pass through the GDR on their trips to the Middle East, officials also granted covert asylum to RAF-Aussteiger: criminal members of the RAF who “dropped out” from the West, either to avoid incarceration in the FRG or because they had grown disillusioned with the armed struggle. The Stasi gave the RAF dropouts false identities—

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fake names, fake passports, fake life stories—and installed them safely across the GDR, where the ex-militants lived more or less as regular GDR citizens until the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, when the whole charade fell apart. Judith Kuckart’s novel Choice of Weapons and Volker Schlöndorff ’s film The Legend of Rita are two works that address the RAF’s border crossings and traversals of identity.15 Kuckart takes a feminine focus, weaving her story around the history of RAF women. Her protagonist Jette resembles Ina Siepmann, a member of Kommune 1, whom the notorious radical Dieter Kunzelmann conscripted into his guerrilla offensive in the late 1960s and 1970s. In 1977, when the German Autumn reached its peak, Siepmann broke off from the Berlin militant scene and moved to Lebanon, where she joined forces with a brigade of Palestinian women. She is believed to have died in the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982. In Choice of Weapons, Jette’s life and death are recalled in fragments remembered and imagined by the narrator Katia, a young woman who was employed to babysit Jette when she was small. Working as a journalist in Paris in the early 1980s, Katia comes across a report of Jette’s actions in Berlin, as well as details about her violent death in Lebanon. As the novel unfolds, it sketches out the prototypical Lebenslauf of a militant German woman: the flight from a small town to the metropolis, the lure of a rogue lover, the wielding of guns in a direct action, and then escape— first into the urban underground, and then to the Middle East, where she dedicates herself to the anti-imperialist cause. Finally she disappears, leaving only a few traces. Katia goes home to Germany to research Jette’s life and finds herself drawn into the militant mindset. At each turn Katia raises a question that resonates with Adorno’s Minima Moralia: what truth is there within a condition of falseness? Although for the narrator the “right life” is “always elsewhere,” perhaps even in Jette’s Middle Eastern militancy, Katia tries, nonetheless, to fight the good fight at home through different means, namely, through the craft of writing.16 Her reflections on the relationship between art and politics heighten her sense of commitment. Through Katia’s research, we learn that Jette, as a schoolgirl existentialist, was called “Sartresse”; she would speak of “a void that opened up between her life and reality.”17 If Jette resorted to violence in order to close this gap, Katia will try to fill it with writing—a project of aesthetic density and resistance. Writing (here, Textarbeit) means “taking the path that refuses you.”18 Kuckart, as an author,

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seems to share this project with the characters of Choice of Weapons. But the resistance seems to come less from political struggle or the assumption of a new identity than from the primary elements of literary practice, the task of communicating meaning with marks on a page. Kuckart’s nonlinear literary strategies in Choice of Weapons differ from the narrative program of Volker Schlöndorff ’s films that thematize militancy, of which there are several: Der Rebell (The Rebel, 1969), which is based on Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas (1811); Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, 1975, codirected with Margarethe von Trotta), which is based on Heinrich Böll’s novel from 1974 of the same name; and the Antigone sequence of Germany in Autumn (1978), discussed in chapter 1. In The Legend of Rita Schlöndorff maintains the feminine focus that we find in Kuckart’s novel; the heroine, Rita Vogt, falls tragically in love with an East German woman. Schlöndorff traces the biographical contours that were first imagined in Choice of Weapons, but switches the setting: whereas Jette enters herself into the Middle East conflict, Schlöndorff ’s Rita tries to sublimate her violent past in the alternate reality of the GDR. Rita is modeled after several militants, but she seems to most closely resemble Ina Siepmann and Inge Viett. Both Siepmann and Viett were initiated into the armed struggle through the Berlin-based June 2 Movement. Although only Viett joined the RAF, both women staged direct actions across West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, and both sought asylum abroad. Viett eventually returned to German territory, but instead of staying in the white-hot core of global conflict, in 1982 she accepted the Stasi’s offer to emigrate to the GDR with the other RAF-Aussteiger. Viett moved to Dresden, changed her name to Eva-Maria Sommer, and worked in a photo lab. Within a few years, however, her disguise began to give way, so she moved to the provincial city of Magdeburg to begin her third “life” as Eva Schnell, a counselor at the summer camp for children of workers at the Karl Liebknecht Collective Plant for Heavy Machinery. In 1990, when the law enforcement bureaus of East and West Germany began to coordinate, Viett was arrested and sentenced to thirteen years in prison for several crimes, including the shooting of a police officer in Paris and assisting in the abduction of Peter Lorenz, a prominent politician in the Christian Democratic Union.19 From prison, Viett published an autobiography, Nie war ich furchtloser (Never Was I Braver, 1997), which recounts her life as a fugitive, including her brief exile (with Stasi assistance)

Die Stille nach dem Schuss (The Legend of Rita), dir. Volker Schlöndorff, 2000. Film stills.

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in Iraq in 1978.20 When she was released early from prison for good conduct, she started a new career as a writer. Viett’s publications—mostly social analyses—make frequent reference to her own lived experience as an activist, an employee of a socialist working collective, and an incarcerated enemy of the state. In them there is no remorse, no apology for her militancy or criminal actions.21 The Legend of Rita hews very closely to Viett’s own life.22 An early scene is shot in the Berlin prison (Frauenhaft anstalt Lehrter Straße) that Viett escaped from in 1976, before going underground. The Rolling Stones’s “Street Fighting Man” accompanies the title sequence as the camera pans over the desk and bookshelves of a Berlin commune; we see revolutionary handbooks and ashtrays crowd up against a Jimi Hendrix photograph and a poster from Viva Maria. The characters begin with theatrical bank heists, but their pranks soon grow violent, forcing the group underground and constricting the scope of their actions. When Schlöndorff ’s militants decide to leave the FRG, their intention is to use the Stasi’s assistance to move on to Angola or Mozambique, where they hope to contribute to ongoing humanitarian initiatives. Their first stop is an apparatchik retreat on the outskirts of Berlin, a complex that resembles the actual woodland lodge where the RAF-Aussteiger spent their first few days in the GDR.23 Schlöndorff ’s Rita Vogt decides to remain in the East and to become a factory worker; she studies Eastern dialects, vocabulary, and body language. Together with a Stasi agent, Rita rehearses the scripted biography of the East German alter ego she would assume for the rest of her life—or at least what, at that time, when German unification was nowhere in sight, she thought would be the rest of her life. As Schlöndorff has noted, few Easterners would have believed that a West German would willingly emigrate to the GDR in the dark days of the Cold War, so the Aussteiger had to work up “legends” to enable their transfer and acceptance.24 In The Legend of Rita, Rita and the Stasi agent make a telling choice in constructing the false narrative of her life: Rita’s fictional parents will have died in a highway accident. This detail is pitched into the future anterior tense in order to deflect unwanted questions about Rita’s past. It also signals a persistent desire of many German youths in the 1960s—that of breaking with the genealogy of the authoritarian state. Indeed, Rita’s disavowal of her parents mirrors the disposition of many on the Far Left at the time.

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Central figures of West German militancy pulled off similar sleights. Two of them—Michael Baumann and Dieter Kunzelmann—stand out. Turning to them, we dial back the clock of the armed struggle to its zero hour, to a primal scene that most postmilitant culture—the works of Hein, Kuckart, and Schlöndorff included—doesn’t engage with. Only recently has this episode been discussed. With this retrospective survey I aim to disclose the conflicts of the radical Nachgeborenen whose strikes against their parents’ generation interrupted the New Left’s critique of fascism. Lacking a coherent analysis, the militants entered into a deadlock of historical repetition. As if condensing the condition that Marx described in the Eighteenth Brumaire, this Far Left history repeated itself as both tragedy and farce in a single stroke.

T minus 1: How It All Began One of the most remarkable documents of German militancy was discovered with the opening of the Stasi archives: a 125-page report written by Michael “Bommi” Baumann, an army deserter whose path intersected with the Far Left in the 1960s and 1970s. When arrested in 1973 for carrying a falsified passport at the German-Czechoslovak border, Baumann was interrogated by East German intelligence.25 During his detention, he wrote profiles of ninety-four prominent West German militants: Viett and Siepmann count among them, as do Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. The texts are comprehensive. They cover political positions, diagnose sexual orientation, and give detailed information on the type of weapon each subject was known to handle.26 Baumann wrote the profiles by hand and signed every page. Baumann’s best-known work is his autobiography, Wie alles anfing (How It All Began, 1975), a hardcore chronicle of the German armed struggle. It touches upon the origins of the Tupamaros-West Berlin and the Haschrebellen—two smaller militant groups—and sketches out the counterculture that shaped not only urban guerrillas, but also writers, artists, filmmakers, and even government officials.27 Although Baumann offers a critique of the Far Left here, the FRG government banned the book upon its publication in 1975; federal officials interpreted it as a call for violence.28 Left ist writers and publishers from across Europe protested against this censorship, and the book was quickly reissued and read with even greater interest by many young people. Yet historians and journal-

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ists gave it only passing notice. How It All Began provides key information on both the Black September assassination of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 and the bombing of Jewish and Israeli establishments in Berlin in 1969, events that ushered terrorism into postwar Germany. In fact Baumann presaged some of the most violent attacks of the late 1960s and 1970s—attacks that now, in retrospect, we see to have set the stage for the German Autumn of 1977—but his book failed, as Kraushaar argues, to provoke an adequately critical response from the Left.29 Counting back to the late 1960s, we find a series of militant and terrorist events staged in West Berlin. In April 1968 protesters attacked the headquarters of the media conglomerate Axel Springer AG, located at the foot of the Berlin Wall. An LED monitor on the building’s façade, legible in the East, ran headlines and commercial copy espousing the freedoms of liberal democracy. But it was the radicals of the West who acted out their aggressions against the Springer empire. Many left ists were skeptical of the conservative slant of house publications like the B.Z. and Bild. After the near-fatal shooting of Rudi Dutschke, militants blockaded the Springer headquarters to protest the tabloids’ denunciations of their fellow activists. In the autumn and winter of 1969–70 at least fourteen incidents involving explosive and incendiary devices were reported in Berlin’s western half. Many of them, historians are now arguing, were instigated by Dieter Kunzelmann, a key operator in the Far Left.30 An artist and activist who was expelled first from the Situationist International and then from the SDS, he shuttled among vanguard and avant-garde circles. In Munich in the early 1960s he started a small but influential group called Subversive Aktion. Then, from the subculture of West Berlin, Kunzelmann refunctioned the situationist dérive and shaped it into a blunt object of political violence. His biography is stranger than many of the fictions that have proliferated after the RAF’s demise, such as the works by Kuckart, Hein, and Schlöndorff. In postmilitant novels and cinema, no characters have yet been modeled after Kunzelmann, but his duplicitous story serves as a prime example for investigating the double lives of the Far Left, both real and imagined. In 1967 Kunzelmann helped to found Kommune 1 (K1), the communal living group, or Wohngemeinschaft, that broke away from the more strictly political vector of the SDS and put lifestyle at the top of the oppositional agenda. Located in West Berlin, first in the home of the writer

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and critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger and then the apartment of fellow author Uwe Johnson, K1 attracted a small group of young men and women who were interested in Kunzelmann’s critique of middle-class sensibility. The commune’s influence extended across Berlin subculture, connecting Kunzelmann to Baader and Ensslin. Group discussions explored “the problem of the individual” (Privatperson) and criticized the ways that the bourgeois family unit had made fascism all but inevitable. The only way to start real revolution within capitalist society, they understood, was through the subversion of communal living. Thus, sex was a major concern of K1. Kunzelmann drew a clear line between “free sexuality” and political practice. As the historian Aribert Reimann explains in his recent biography, Kunzelmann imagined that sexual revolution could not be realized in the given social circumstances. Sexuality, as such, was only a “utopian reference point.”31 To instill this logic in the commune, Kunzelmann led long sessions of “self-criticism” (or PsychoAmoks). K1 residents took a mandatory pledge of polygamy, and when one of the group discovered she was pregnant (by Kunzelmann), a meeting was called in which the commune demanded, against her personal choice, that she have an abortion. Reimann’s book on Kunzelmann includes recent interviews with several members of the Far Left who recall the masculine, cliquish (or männerbündisch) character of K1 and the “misogynist sadism” of the “subversive” scene that surrounded and informed it.32 Kunzelmann’s authoritarian machismo was hidden from most people, but it was a key determinant of early militant developments in West Germany. Despite his intimidating tactics, Kunzelmann called himself a Spaßguerilla, or “fun-guerrilla”; he liked street happenings and masquerades. He formed a commando and instructed the members to disguise themselves for the militant and terrorist provocations he directed across Germany. Kunzelmann seemed to take personal pleasure from every aspect of these undertakings. In a long series of photos he made to forge identity cards, published in his memoir in 1998, we see Kunzelmann styled in a range of looks, but always with a wry expression on his face. The function of these disguises went beyond the surface image. His commando usually placed women—ostensibly more deceptive—at the front lines of its operations. In a sense, Kunzelmann used these women as camouflage, much as the Far Left would later use feminine figures and femi-

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nized objects as cover for their machinations, as we saw previously with Dierk Hoff ’s baby bomb.33 Some of the Kunzelmann commando’s actions targeted U.S. and Israeli military imperialism, for example, an attempted bombing of the Amerikahaus and the El Al offices in Berlin; others, such as Ina Siepmann’s bomb-planting at the KaDeWe, a department store, were launched against the Konsumterror (consumption-terrorism, a term introduced by Meinhof) that the Far Left thought was a threat to authentic freedom. As the violence escalated, so did the alarm of the city administration. Authorities ramped up public surveillance, and so amplified the sense of urgency within the German underground, prompting the most radical elements to take ever greater risks.

The Zero Hour On November 9, 1969, an explosive device was planted at the Jewish Community Center (Jüdisches Gemeindehaus) in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin. The bomb—a wad of semtex taped to an alarm clock—was set to go off during a ceremony marking the anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938. The device failed to ignite, but its discovery provoked widespread anxiety nonetheless. This was a founding moment for the Far Left—a terrorist act that summoned forth the violent ghosts of xenophobia and fascism. The perpetrators of this crime, like many others involved in the armed struggle, have never been officially identified and charged, but Kraushaar lays the blame on Kunzelmann. Kunzelmann probably didn’t place the bomb directly in the Gemeindehaus, but he is thought to have conceived the mission and assigned it to two people: Peter Urbach, the one who made the bomb, and Albert Fichter, an architecture student who smuggled it inside under his trenchcoat.34 Kunzelmann laid out his rationale for the attack in a statement he wrote about his training with Fatah in Jordan, which was published in the November 27 issue of the magazine Agit 833 as the “Letter from Amman.” While in Jordan, Kunzelmann reported, he and the other militants studied guerrilla tactics, practiced building time bombs and other weapons, and were briefly introduced to Yasser Arafat.35 Exposure to the harsh conditions of Middle Eastern life, particularly the camps that held war refugees, deepened their understanding of

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Jordan’s historical situation and inclined them toward a “revolutionary” consciousness, as Kunzelmann’s statement suggests. To some extent, the “Letter from Amman” aligned with the New Left’s critique of international imperialism and structures of domination. It also demonstrated a degree of anti-Semitism that exceeded the anti-Israel stance assumed by many left ists at the time.36 As the journalist Hans Kundnani has noted, Kunzelmann’s concept of the armed struggle was fetishistically linked to the Nazi campaign (bewaff neter Kampf : Mein Kampf ).37 Kunzelmann also compared the conflicts in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. “Palestine is for the FRG and Europe what Vietnam is for the Americans[.] Why hasn’t the Left ‘gotten it’ yet?” he asked. Because of its “Jewish Problem” ( Judenknax), a paroxysm “triggered by guilt” for the “gassing” of “six million Jews.”38 Based on a false equivalence between the international struggle against fascism and the defense of the Israeli state, this complex, Kunzelmann argued, blinded Germans to the realities of postwar politics. It turned the New Left into a group of “pansies” (Schwuchteln).39 The imperative of the moment, for Kunzelmann, was to cancel out the Left’s unexamined “philosemitism” and replace it with an unequivocal solidarity with Fatah. Research on Kunzelmann’s life and writings makes it evident that he was one of the first to establish an association between the German Far Left, the PLO, and other foreign liberation movements. Kundnani, Gerd Koenen, and other scholars have gone further, positing direct links between Kunzelmann and the RAF.40 Kunzelmann was ready to stake everything to connect national and international militancy, and he saw Berlin as the ideal screen upon which to enact a shift in the political unconscious of his generation. The divided city, in his words, was a veritable “paradise for provocation.”41 If Fatah was resisting “the Third Reich of yesterday and today” in the Middle East, then German radicals had to wage the armed struggle against neofascists in Berlin.42 But whom, exactly, did Kunzelmann mean? He urged the readers to survey every level of Berlin life—media, architecture, policy— and to look for evidence of state violence. The task, for him, was to “to make the enemy visible again” on the homefront.43 Following the argument of the Haschrebellen, his fellow militants, Berlin had to burn so that the radicals could live. Fortunately the bomb that was planted in the Jewish Community Center never ignited. A custodian heard the clock ticking in the cloakroom and uncovered the device; local authorities carried it away and the

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Holocaust memorial ceremony continued as planned. Many from both inside and outside the Berlin militant scene have asked if the bomb could actually have exploded or whether it was just a fake, an inert decoy set to cause panic. But whatever the intention, the bomb did have a profound effect. On November 11, Innensenator Kurt Neubauer and Heinz Galinski, the official head of the Berlin Jewish Community, held an emergency press conference.44 The Berlin Bureau of Criminal Investigations began a series of shakedowns in suspect sites in the city: not only the communes and clubs of the New Left and Far Left, but also enclaves of guest workers—Turks, Yugoslavs, and others. Editors and producers granted broad coverage to the event, setting the tone for the negative portrayals of left ists that would persist for decades. Already in these early days of armed resistance, a cynical lesson was being taught: guerrilla tactics provoked a federal backlash that compromised the rights of millions across the nation and controverted the larger goals of the Left, both at home and abroad. Soon after intelligence agents confiscated the bomb, they modeled a duplicate upon the original, took it out to Grunewald (the vast, forested district of southwestern Berlin), and detonated it. The velocity of the exploded matter was measured at 3.5 kilometers per second; the circle of debris surrounding its point of ignition extended to fift y meters. Had the original device gone off as scheduled, many in the Gemeindehaus would have been harmed, some probably fatally. The press was invited to the test, and a few hours later, images of the detonation were broadcast across the country. In a recent interview, Albert Fichter, one of Kunzelmann’s hit men, remarked that the officials seemed to want “to stage a spectacle.”45 This, of course, was precisely the kind of repercussion that Kunzelmann wanted to produce. His “psycho-bomb,” as Fichter has called it, didn’t need to actually explode in order to convey its message. With this intervention, art and politics were set on a collision course of destruction.

Playing Dead: The Armed Struggle and Real Existing Socialism Later in Kunzelmann’s career, another incident stands out. In April 1998, just before the RAF pronounced its dissolution, an obituary appeared in the Berliner Zeitung. It read: “He chose freely, not only for his life, but also for his death—Dieter Kunzelmann—1939–1998.”46 Shortly thereafter reporters and activists determined that the announcement was a

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prank—Kunzelmann was actually alive and well and living in Berlin—but his feigned death, or Scheintod, shaped postmilitant culture. Like the RAF dropouts who, with the help of the Stasi, sought to erase their violent pasts so that they could be reborn as GDR citizens, Kunzelmann took the liberty of staging his own death in an attempt to remaster his legacy. These would-be deaths are symptoms of the difficulty many still have in coming to terms with German terrorism, the difficulty that the Left, in particular, still has in dealing with the crimes that the RAF perpetrated in their demands for immediate socialist revolution. Why did early chroniclers of the Far Left disregard the RAF’s complicity with the anti-Semitic agendas of Kunzelmann and the PLO? Tilman Fichter, the journalist and brother of Albert Fichter, has recently commented on this blind spot, claiming that Kunzelmann’s provocations were so shocking that the oppositional writers of the time couldn’t “take them seriously.”47 In many regards, the armed struggle created a crisis that the German Left still contends with. It resonates together with another, larger loss, that of the ideals of state socialism. This brings us back to the RAF-Stasi connection. Volker Schlöndorff has called The Legend of Rita “a requiem to the millions who died for the idea of socialism.”48 But Schlöndorff ’s historical fiction glosses over the contradictions between the Far Left and the final, desperate years of GDR socialism. As the film ends, the Berlin Wall falls. Schlöndorff goes beyond the strategic liaisons between the RAF and East German functionaries; he suggests a deeper, more constitutive bond than the one that most likely existed. The narrative collapses the two separate projects of militancy and real existing socialism into a single campaign of rogue/ state terror. This shuts out the question of how the radically different scales and goals of each project advanced unique and sometimes robust critiques of late capitalism, even if both the armed struggle and the GDR were doomed to fail. Schlöndorff ’s last sequences lose the mordant edge of some earlier scenes—such as the Stasi director’s concession, in the ministry’s ravaged archives in the late autumn of 1989, that Helmut Schmidt and Erich Honecker had made a secret pact to hide the RAF-Aussteiger in the GDR— and wend toward a melancholy conclusion. Fleeing on a stolen motorbike, Rita tries to blow through a border crossing between the two Germanys, but is shot down. The “Internationale” is intoned, played tempo larghetto on a toy piano. Schlöndorff ends his main character’s amnesiac cycle of

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reincarnation, but he also cuts off the chance for her—or the audience— to really come to terms with her militant past. Any further inquiry into the RAF phenomenon is preempted by the roll of the final credits. The “real life” inspiration for Rita, Inge Viett, hasn’t expressed remorse for the crimes she committed, nor has she attempted to distance herself from RAF violence. Speaking at the International Rosa Luxemburg Conference in Berlin in 2011, she called for the creation of “a covertly structured, revolutionary, communist organization.”49 To counter Germany’s current military program, she identified a range of “legitimate” tactics: sabotage on weapons manufacturers, organized strikes, and occupations, as well as “militant, antifascist actions,” including self-defense against police forces.50 In 2007 Viett voiced a similar response to the riots around the summit of the Group of Eight in Heiligendamm, the East German port that still struggles with postcommunist transition. She remarked “how great” it was to witness “strong resistance against state repression” and to see the police, “for once, running for cover.” To her, the GDR was destroyed by “imperialism,” despite the fact that it was always “on the side of the people.”51 Schlöndorff ’s Rita, likewise, never appears to rethink her own violence or to grasp the failures of the GDR. This lack of reflection in The Legend of Rita sets it apart from In His Early Childhood and Choice of Weapons. The novels of both Hein and Kuckart can be seen as real works of mourning; the stories follow the Zureks’ and Katia’s attempts to make sense of the lives and deaths of RAF militants, as well as those of their victims. A pall falls over both of these somber texts. In Hein’s novel, the setting of Bad Kleinen infuses the RAF landscape with an Eastern tint; in Choice of Weapons, Katia is first visited by Jette’s ghost at Christmas in 1989, just after the wall falls and just before German unification was initiated. Rita Vogt, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to mourn—either for her fallen comrades or for the victims of leftist militancy. Her apparent need to repress these deaths thus counters Schlöndorff ’s proposal that The Legend of Rita could play like a requiem in film. Whereas Hein and Kuckart use literary experiment—such as shifts in narrative voice and temporal sequence—to describe and process moments of pain and misunderstanding, Schlöndorff lets the momentum of narrative cinema obscure and even obliterate tasks central to mourning work. As Thomas Elsaesser has argued, cinema is structurally similar to trauma.52 Applying this insight to the works discussed in this chapter, it appears that The Legend of Rita, unlike the novels of Hein and Kuckart,

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transmits the shock of RAF violence; it delivers a blow that interrupts the processes of collective mourning. Whether the medium of film inherently forecloses the signification of mourning work is a question that points beyond the frame of my study, but Schlöndorff ’s title itself—Die Stille nach dem Schuss, literally, “the silence” or “stillness” after the shot— connotes a caesura akin to the voids of grief. The Legend of Rita doesn’t work through, in a Freudian sense, the difficulties and deceits of RAF memory: this charge is more carefully elaborated in the writing of Kuckart and Hein. Schlöndorff ’s smooth narrative dampens the blast of political violence that many felt when Kunzelmann and other militants first launched their attacks. It is recent accounts of the lived history of the Far Left, more than the postmilitant fictions examined here, which really make the traumas of past seem present again. Instead, what Kuckart, Hein, and Schlöndorff suggest, and what a number of artists and writers examined in the second part of this book show us still more clearly, is something the Far Left couldn’t see: the revolutionary moment of German militancy lay not in the performance of terror, but rather in the unprecedented priority of women within its ranks. Reading the armed struggle in reverse—from the contemporary debates on punishment and rehabilitation, through various cinematic and literary representations of the RAF, and back to the primal scenes of antiSemitic terror—we get a new angle on postwar Germany. The premise that the Cold War completely barricaded East from West loses hold. So does the conviction that self-proclaimed left ists were all fighting for tolerance and transparency. This backward glance catches sight of the damaged lives of the Far Left, an aspect of German history that many remain blind to. And these lives, we will see in the chapters that follow, mark out the difference between the aesthetic and political registers of the German Autumn.

3 Buildings on Fire The Situationist International and the Red Army Faction

In Guy Debord’s late film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978), a correspondence between the Situationist International (SI) and the Red Army Faction comes into view. In the middle of the film, the camera rests on two photographs: the exterior of the Stuttgart-Stammheim maximum-security facility, where the leaders of the RAF’s first generation committed suicide in 1976 and 1977, and an earlier press shot of Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin on trial in 1968. “La plus belle jeunesse meurt en prison,” reads the narrator. The flower of youth dies in prison.1 From these two documents of RAF history, Debord looks back over the wouldbe revolution that rocked Europe in the late 1960s and the repercussions it produced a decade later. The sequence of images in In girum imus calculates a sum of what they had hoped to effect by “putting an end to art,” as the film’s narrator describes it. In his words, the Situationists had been “plotting to blow up the Eiffel Tower,” “announcing, right in the middle of the cathedral, that God was dead.”2 This recollection of the year 1968 prompts the narrator to ask a series of questions about why certain militant struggles failed, whether the proletariat still existed, and, if so, how it might be identified. Images of a

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In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, dir. Guy Debord, 1978. Film stills.

lost Paris flicker across the screen—girls at the thresholds of forgotten cafés, night shots of Les Halles markets before their condemnation by Pompidou planners—while Debord reminds the viewer of the fate of les enragés and other ’68ers: “Suicide carried off many.”3 But then the voice translates the film’s obscure title: we turn in the night, consumed by fire. Debord awakens desire for a turning, a return—out of the ashes, back to

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the impulses that propelled the SI and the RAF, as well as other avantgarde and vanguard movements of the time. Debord wasn’t alone in linking the RAF to the Situationists. In recent years several scholars and artists have associated Debord’s “situations” with Baader-Meinhof strikes.4 Both the Situationists and the RAF worked to disrupt the complacencies of liberal democracy, sometimes taking similar approaches. They drew from the ideas of anarchism and Marxism and tested their powers in the modern cityscapes that postwar planners brought to life. The SI screened its aesthetic imagination onto Paris and other northern European cities; the RAF took refuge in the high-rises of Berlin, Frankfurt, and Hamburg in order to plot its terror on the German public. Members of each group were alert to the politics of the image. They worked both with and against the popular press and broadcast television. But whereas Debord critiqued the society of the spectacle—the condition in which capital accumulates and “becomes image”—the leaders of the RAF became fodder for the media machine, leaving a legacy heavy on style but light on political analysis.5 To compare the RAF and the SI, we need to discern the correspondences between their conceptual and tactical programs. To this end, this chapter explores the ways that the SI’s and the RAF’s different defi nitions of autonomy generated divergent modes of resistance. It examines key junctures in the history of each group, including the early impulses to set fire to European cities, the groups’ analyses of consumer society, the status of women within the SI and the RAF, and finally the modes by which each group disbanded and dissolved. Debord articulated an institutional critique of the culture industry and reactivated the modernist critical impulse. The RAF, meanwhile, rejected theoretical reflection in favor of direct actions that threatened to inflame anti-Semitism and neofascism. The German militants took what they considered to be a concrete and practical approach to revolution, but their attempts to gain autonomy ended, paradoxically, in the spectacle that Debord had already analyzed. This comparison extends and supplements the objectives of chapter 2, as it analyzes the political and aesthetic tendencies that gave rise to the RAF and its cultural fallout. This chapter is an account of the “prehistory” of postmilitancy. As this story unfolds, we discern the RAF’s perspectives and blind spots.

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The Situation As Europe recovered from World War II, it encountered challenges to its imperial powers, altered its modes of statecraft, and accelerated its technological modernization. The Situationists and the RAF both responded to these shifts, but their initial impulses and dispositions contrasted. Taking an interest in urban theory, the SI used Henri Lefebvre’s analysis of alienation in everyday life to sharpen its critiques of the built environment. In particular, Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, another member of the group, saw the city as a prime locus of social transformation and envisioned alternative “psychogeographies.” Condemning modernist architecture and planning, they disparaged the apartment blocks that were rapidly standardizing French cities and denounced the autoroutes that seemed engineered to erase cultural and historical difference. Debord pitched the program of détournement, or artful diversion, to skew both the Cartesian grids that formatted French cities and the lives that were led within them. The Situationists sought to undo urban management with the forces of desire. Like the SI, who wanted to rework and subvert the prefab city and its expanding periphery, the RAF’s Stadtguerillas operated within the modern metropolis. Breaking away from the student movement, they moved stealthily from place to place, renting out high-rise flats and converting them into holding cells for their hostages. Both the SI and the RAF located the germ of fascism in the processes and products of modernization. As the RAF understood it, the regulation of German cities became a metaphor for the homogenization of life and death in factories and concentration camps. The shopping arcades and housing blocs of West Germany’s postwar Wirtschaftswunder were an extension of this predicament. Exploiting this culture and economy would disrupt authoritarian structures of politics and society, they thought; well-executed acts of insurgency would provoke the German state to clamp down and thus betray its will toward domination. Beneath the new and developing institutions of Cold War democracy, the Baader-Meinhof group sensed the unquelled fervor that drove the Nazi military-industrial complex. RAF attacks were intended to work a homeopathic effect on the body politic, conjuring up the virus of fascism and inciting Germans to finally kill it off with their own hands. Vaneigem ennumerated the main points of the situationist critique of postwar European cities, identifying a concentrationary order in every-

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day life. In “Comments Against Urbanism,” he surmised that “if the Nazis had known contemporary urbanists, they would have transformed their concentration camps into low-income housing.”6 The SI’s perspective on Auschwitz exemplifies its analysis of the spectacle. Vaneigem saw urban planning, advertising, and ideology as interlinked cogs in an “immense conditioning machine.”7 Debord’s film Society of the Spectacle illustrates this with cinematic means, focusing on the “mass character” and “formal poverty” of the new city.8 Part of this film illuminates the situationist concern with German cultural politics, relating images of Nazi concentration camps with several shots of Paris, including one of the street barricades of 1968. Edited into this progression are lines that present Situationism as a response to the disasters of European totalitarianism: “Social peace, reestablished with such great difficulty, had only lasted a few years when, to herald its end, there appeared those who will enter the annals of crime under the name ‘Situationists.’ ”9 Of the stills that appear in this montage, two come forth with particular intensity. Marking the flashpoints of situationist history, they show buildings on fire: the Reichstag in 1933 and the stores and apartment blocs of the Watts district of Los Angeles in 1965.10 The trajectories of the SI and the RAF parted and converged at several points, but they both accelerated around the Watts riots. Followed on television around the world, the insurgence started in a central district of Los Angeles, where wide streets and low-slung buildings defined a neighborhood that was predominantly inhabited by working-class African Americans. Young people condemned police brutality and the failed infrastructure of their city, setting fire to parked cars, smashing storefronts, and looting from the wrecked shops. Officials needed six days to control the unrest. For years to come, local activists and social scientists would investigate and rethink the causes and effects of the Watts uprising.11 The Situationists, however, were quick to offer a critique. In an issue of the Situationist International from 1966, they published “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” an analysis of the riots.12 The accompanying illustration, which they captioned “Critique of City Planning,” shows a large shop on fire. Tall flames burst out of the display windows and consume the upper floors. At the time, a number of leftists were obsessed with the idea of riotous explosion. As Gerd Koenen argues, in the “red decade” of 1967–77, the image of buildings on fire became a militant zeitgeist that traveled from Los Angeles to Paris, and then alighted again and headed westward to

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Germany. The artist and activist Dieter Kunzelmann, discussed in chapter 2, was one of those who took note of the Watts uprising. Like Debord, Kunzelmann fi xed on the picture of the flaming storefront window and incorporated it into a provocative leaflet he published with Berlin’s Kommune 1 (K1). The leaflet carried a situationist trace: before Kunzelmann’s expulsion from the SI, he edited the situationist journal Spur.13 Together with his housemates Rainer Langhans and Fritz Teufel, Kunzelmann used the K1 flyers as a medium to import the situationist dérive into the German alternative scene. Within a few weeks, Debord’s avant-garde strategies would combust with the most volatile strains of left ist militancy in Germany. On its way from Los Angeles to Berlin, the spark of anarchy touched down in Brussels, where arson in a department store killed 253 people in 1967. When newspapers across the continent covered the fire, Langhans and Teufel diverted the media surge toward their own interests. Belgian investigators never established any political motivation for the event, but the communards reframed it as a protest against the war in Vietnam. The arson was intended, they suggested, to lift the spell of apathy that had settled on postwar Europe. Under the rubric “When Will Berlin’s Department Stores Burn?” Langhans and Teufel encouraged the Kommune 1 audience to at least imagine anarchy in the Federal Republic, if not necessarily to unleash it: “For the first time in a European metropolis, a burning department store with burning people inside is giving us that crackling Vietnam feeling . . . that feeling that we in Berlin have missed up to now. . . . Brussels has given us the only answer: burn, department store, burn!”14 When Kommune 1 circulated the leaflet, none of the members felt moved to act, choosing instead to devote themselves to other concerns. However, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, who had close contacts with K1, were alert to the incendiary rhetoric. Less than two weeks after the leaflet’s publication, they traveled from Frankfurt to Berlin and told the commune of their plans to “play with fire” in German department stores.15 On the way back, they equipped themselves with homemade explosives and detonators. Baader and Ensslin cruised the Zeil, Frankfurt’s main shopping venue. Near closing time, when the crowds had thinned, they left bombs in two department stores, the Kaufhaus Schneider and the Kaufhof. At midnight, as planned, the bombs detonated, engulfing

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the showrooms in flames. The next day, the fire headlined in local papers. Although the arson endangered several individuals in the vicinity of the stores, no one, in the end, was injured. Insurance companies covered the costs of repair: DM 282,339 for the Kaufhaus Schneider; DM 390,865 for the Kaufhof. Within days, Ensslin and Baader were tracked down and arrested, and their hearing was set for October 1968. Before their trial an important precedent was set when a Frankfurt court considered the cases of Langhans and Teufel, who were suspected of provoking the criminal activity of Baader and Ensslin. The jury had to decide whether the K1 leaflet was an expression of artistic freedom or a blueprint for terrorism. The investigators took up a central question. How, the courts asked, do we distinguish between aesthetic performance and acts of terror? Their response traced out a network that links the historical avant-garde with postwar militancy. To deliberate the Langhans-Teufel case, the judge convened a board of university professors and asked them to analyze the K1 publications, placing emphasis on the leaflet “When Will Berlin’s Department Stores Burn?” The panel’s assessment placed the text within a broad intellectual field that encompassed Germany’s great thinkers as well as some of the most advanced tendencies in continental philosophy. The experts began by engaging two discourses: Schiller’s and Kant’s classical definitions of beauty, on one side, and Sartre’s arguments for critical social engagement, on the other. They surveyed Kant’s Critique of Judgment, presenting his concept of art as “purposive without purpose,” and contrasted it to Sartre’s existentialist insistence on the fundamentally political nature of all cultural production.16 Once they established this distinction, the experts tried to assess the aesthetic merit of the K1 articles and determine the extent to which they might have provoked Baader and Ensslin. They prefaced their excursus with a pointed question about the text’s seriousness, or Ernsthaft igkeit.17 Taking the panel’s query as their cue, Langhans and Teufel interrupted the proceedings with an outcry. “Anyone who feels he’s been provoked to arson is a fool,” they quipped. “And certainly this court has distinguished itself in that regard.”18 The parodic interjection presaged the most telling moment of the trial, as the experts shifted their deliberations from the wide frame of aesthetic theory to the particular legacy of surrealism. The

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panel endeavored to tease out the connections between K1’s individual article and avant-garde practices. This move would eventually exculpate Langhans and Teufel. The experts designated the K1 leaflet as a “surrealist document”—a call for literary interpretation, not a terrorist instruction sheet. When the judge asked them to substantiate their claim, the panelists offered a definition of surrealism—in their words, an influential, Paris-based movement with unique stylistic devices (Stilmitteln)—and explained that, among other rhetorical instruments, the surrealists’ primary strategy was “the provocative call for acts of violence.”19 To distinguish provocation from prescription, Jacob Taubes, the Free University professor of hermeneutics and Judaic studies, paraphrased the writer Raymond Queneau’s conceptual program for surrealism: “Among all conditions, the surrealist revolution does not want to change material, visible relations. Much more than this, it wants to set into play the thinking of every single individual.”20 Ultimately, the panel convinced the judge that “When Will Berlin’s Department Stores Burn?” posed no material threat to the public. Langhans and Teufel were dismissed, but their case functioned to extend the influence of the avant-garde into the postwar order. Before the conclusion of the trial, the experts read out a passage from the “Second Surrealist Manifesto” (1930), emphasizing what is perhaps André Breton’s most infamous mandate: “The simplest surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd, with his belly at barrel level.”21 The citation of the manifesto in the austere quarters of the Frankfurt court triggered a minor convulsion of subversive energies, as the captive audience heard Breton’s challenge and gasped. There, if nowhere else, art had been forced into life. Kommune 1 had channeled the surrealist impulse; soon, the RAF would recharge it as militancy and political violence.

Aesthetics and (Internal) Politics Like the Langhans-Teufel trial, Baader and Ensslin’s case would turn on the axis of aesthetics and politics. Their hearing illuminated the points

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of rupture that distinguished the Zeil fires from the situationist project. It also disclosed the correspondences that linked the arson to the subsequent escalation of RAF attacks. When Baader and Ensslin appeared before the court, echoes of the K1 leaflet case reverberated in the chamber. The defendants seemed to enjoy their spot in the limelight, wearing fashionable leather outfits and playing at schoolroom pranks whenever the proceedings lagged. In her testimony, Ensslin explained that she and Baader hadn’t intended to endanger human life, only to damage property in protest against the Vietnam War. The two had pursued other channels of political dissent, but as the violence increased in Southeast Asia, they felt they had to resort to more radical means. “We have found that words are useless without action,” Ensslin argued.22 Putting their wager in these terms, Ensslin marked a fundamental departure from the situationist interventions of Kommune 1. Whereas the RAF turned to armed resistance, K1 had kept to a largely aesthetic practice. The historical avant-garde cast a long shadow on the RAF, particularly in its early years. Key members of the group were active in the visual and performing arts, creating a counterculture that linked German cities. In Munich Andreas Baader belonged to Fassbinder’s circle of filmmakers and admirers, and Horst Söhnlein directed the Action-Theater.23 Holger Meins studied at the Berlin film academy.24 In 1968, after laying their department store bombs, Ensslin and Baader spent the evening at Frankfurt’s Club Voltaire, a locale that associated itself with the Dadaists’ Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. As the RAF developed, however, it made concerted efforts to distinguish itself as a militant vanguard with an agenda separate from the artistic avant-garde. A few minutes after the bombs went off in the Frankfurt department stores, a woman, possibly Ensslin, telephoned the German Press Agency to make this distinction clear. Not wanting the act to be seen as “a mere happening,” she called the fires “a political act of revenge.”25 How do the department store bombings in Frankfurt figure into the relationship between the SI and the RAF? When Ensslin and Baader targeted the Frankfurt Zeil, they distorted the situationist strategies of Kommune 1 and turned them into a program of vanguard militarization. This statement is accurate, yet it suggests that the SI limited its agenda to aesthetics while the RAF’s motivations were purely political. In fact, the two groups operated on both levels. Aesthetic and political drives influenced them at different times and in different ways. Although the SI

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made its most significant interventions in the fields of visual culture and critical theory, Debord in particular tended to privilege the group’s political identity over and against its aesthetic inclinations. At moments when the SI came to crisis, Debord would reach, rhetorically, for his revolver, first reiterating the movement’s political premises, and then dramatically expelling offensive members from the group’s inner circle. The SI reinvented and fortified itself through such rejections.26 The group studiously avoided defining the term “Situationism,” but such acts of exclusion nonetheless articulated a negative aesthetic with a force to match any manifesto. These moves also changed the situationist rhetoric, such that it approached the militant tenor of the RAF’s later communiqués. At the start, the Situationists saw architecture and city planning as the prime instruments for channeling radical desire. But artists and architects were the first to be forced out of the SI. Simon Sadler argues that Debord and the other “hard-liners” eventually turned away from material questions of “spatial location and decor” and concerned themselves more with formal and conceptual matters. Soon they came to regard “the situation” itself as pure “revolutionary consciousness.”27 In contrast, RAF insiders chose more brutal methods of expulsion: for example, when the militant Ingeborg Barz tried to defect from the group in 1972, Baader allegedly shot her. The SI distanced itself from terrorist actions, affirming in a statement from 1964 that it would “only organize the detonation” of social unrest. “The free explosion,” the group asserted, “must escape us and any other control forever.”28 But as the art historian Tom McDonough has demonstrated, this stance didn’t mean that the Situationists simply privileged thought over practice.29 Rather, they resisted the conditions of the Far Left—the obsession with operational details, the need for secrecy—and strove to balance their means and ends.30 In this regard, the SI anticipated the stance of a critical postmilitancy, in that it oriented itself toward the public interest. Although its membership dwindled, it always remained “above ground,” as have the contemporary thinkers, activists, and artists who have descended from the group. Several issues of the SI, including the one that contained the essay about Watts, evince the group’s interest in the social repercussions of their initiatives. More recently, Retort, a California collective that works with situationist theory, has emphasized that they still heed Debord’s warnings against the “narrowness and secretiveness” of political vanguards. In Afflicted Powers (2005), Retort re-

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views the vanguard ideals that linked the RAF with Lenin, Blanqui, Mao, and “the words and actions of bin Laden,” acknowledging them as at once “understandable” and “disastrous.”31 Rejecting terror as a political means, Retort has maintained that “the society of the spectacle” cannot be destroyed “by producing the spectacle of destruction.”32 From this renewed Debordian perspective, one perceives an antinomy: the RAF’s underground operations contradicted SI principles, but the deed that triggered the group’s formation—Baader and Ensslin’s crude reenactment of the Watts riots—was a pointed response to the Situationists’ provocation.

Toward a Political Economy of the Household Appliance The Frankfurt court quickly settled the trial of Baader and Ensslin, sentencing them to three years in prison. In 1968, however, Ulrike Meinhof used her column in konkret as a platform to reconsider the case. Aesthetic and political tensions recur in her reporting on the trial. Asserting the sanctity of human life, Meinhof begins her article “Warenhausbrandstiftung” (“Department Store Fire”) with a distinction between harming people and destroying property. Although she doesn’t endorse the actions of Baader and Ensslin, Meinhof situates the Frankfurt fires within the matrix of the political economy. On one level, she argues, the arson called into question the conditions of postwar commodity culture, in which Germans had shifted from securing basic needs to a historical moment overdetermined by profit motives. The new market facilitated capital accumulation; the social safety net was only a by-product. “What you find in capitalism, you find in the department store,” Meinhof wrote. “What you don’t find in the department store is scarcely found in capitalism, an age of insufficiency and inadequacy: hospitals, schools, kindergartens, [or] health care.”33 Media coverage of the fires and the trials could awaken the public to the excesses of consumer society. That alone, however, would fail the imperatives of the present moment. After all, since insurance companies fully covered the damages, Baader and Ensslin’s intervention actually rejuvenated the economy, bleeding it out just enough to stimulate capital’s recuperation and reentrenchment. On a deeper level, Meinhof remarked, the attacks on the department stores were hardly anticapitalist actions; rather, they perpetuated “the system” of administrative society. In her words, the fires themselves were “counter-revolutionary.”34

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And yet, Meinhof noted, a progressive potential remained in Baader and Ensslin’s intervention. It didn’t consist in the destruction of commodities, but rather in the criminal nature of their acts, that is, in legal violation. The law they broke did not protect people; it was framed to protect property.35 Drawing on André Gorz’s “Toward a Strategy of the Workers’ Movement in Neocapitalism,” Meinhof asked how legislation might be changed to defend individuals against the forces of capitalist accumulation and the “barbaric consequences” of the postwar market. Diverging from the political-economic analysis of the essay, Meinhof’s final two points intersected with a situationist agenda. Like the editors of the SI, she expressed a keen interest in the Watts uprising, seeing the Los Angeles case as a precursor to the Frankfurt department store arson. To Meinhof, both events illuminated the promise of militancy. Whoever sets buildings on fire and then plunders them, she maintained, learns that “the system” won’t fall apart when he or she takes what is needed to get by. The looter can learn that capitalism is rotten when it withholds life’s necessities. In conclusion, Meinhof brought this parallel to bear on the statement of Fritz Teufel at a 1968 SDS conference: “It is always better to burn a department store than to run one.”36 A materialist premise subtends both Meinhof’s essay and the SI issue on the spectacle-commodity economy. To Meinhof, the people of Watts stole basic necessities: food, clothing, household things. Conversely, whatever Baader and Ensslin could have managed to steal would have been idle and sundry, the sort of commodities targeted by the Situationists in their journal. Yet, as Meinhof remarked in a parenthetical aside, there was one important exception: dishwashers.37 Demonstrating her early interest in sexual politics, she argued that a substantial portion of working, married women in West Germany didn’t have the dishwashers they needed. Not only the expense prohibited the purchase of these appliances, but, speaking practically, the sheer weight did. This, Meinhof suggested, kept the Frankfurt militants from hauling off the dishwashers and delivering them to working wives. The message of the department store fires wouldn’t carry far enough, Meinhof concluded, because it limited the public’s focus to the order of the spectacle economy. In the end, the matter of real needs remained repressed. Consciousness of these needs, Meinhof argued, betokened a sea change in modern culture—one that feminists would soon bring about. Indeed, the question of gender offers a useful point of comparison between the

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RAF and the SI. Meinhof’s konkret article, written two years before the RAF’s formation, emphasizes sexual politics in a way that later would not compute with the Baader-Meinhof program. In its subsequent turn from protest to resistance, the RAF shut down the conversation about sex and power. None of its communiqués addresses the gender issues that were so central to debates within the Left. And yet the RAF, unlike most other militant organizations, was mostly led by women. Things were quite different among the Situationists. Michèle Bernstein, Debord’s wife, was one of the very few women to collaborate with the group or contribute texts to the Situationist International. The journal frequently featured photos of scantily clad women that had been taken from advertisements and reworked. Although some critics have pointed to this as proof that the Situationists treated women as sex objects, the art historian Kelly Baum maintains that these images were actually a platform “from which the Situationists launched their rebuke to capitalism and the spectacle.”38 The selection, reinscription, and placement of found photographs in the journal do suggest that Debord and his associates meant to critique them. Still, the internal dynamics of the SI appear to have reproduced the gender biases that inflected other radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The RAF, with its many women members, was a remarkable exception to this trend. But back to the Watts riots and household appliances. The Situationists developed a more conceptual critique of the uprising, taking up not the dishwasher, but rather the air conditioner as their prime example.39 To the Situationists, the Watts rioters brought about “the first rebellion in history to justify itself with the argument that there was no air conditioning during a heat wave.”40 The larceny of such modern conveniences proved the point of the situationist agenda. “Comfort,” they wrote, “will never be comfortable enough for those who seek what is not on the market.”41 Watts residents rebelled against the subordination of consumers to commodity values; they refuted the market’s oppressive rationality. The theft of appliances by people whose homes weren’t properly electrified, the SI maintained, rendered “the best image of the lie of affluence, transformed into a truth in play.”42 If looted, merchandise can be subverted and refunctioned. Purchased with legal tender, it is fetishized as a status symbol. These two perspectives on the Los Angeles revolt distinguish the RAF’s relative pragmatism—at least in the early years—from the situationist imagination. Whereas Meinhof identified the materialist issues at

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hand, the Situationists’ article “Decline and Fall” underscored the symbolism of Watts residents stealing electrical appliances during a blackout. In an essay from 1953, the Situationist Ivan Chtcheglov had anticipated the rioters’ subversive desires and scorned the utilitarian drive of postwar society. “Presented with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit,” he complained, “young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit.”43 Chtcheglov’s early visions of playful sprees and dancing in the streets, however, differed from the actual program Debord and company developed over the next twenty years. Subsequent issues of the SI advanced an ever more totalizing critique. Refusing reform, the Situationists disregarded the shifting terms of new social movements. Thus they were blind to the materialist and feminist critique that Meinhof introduced in her early essay “Department Store Fire.”

The Spectacle In their own ways, both the SI and the RAF warned against the lure of the spectacle. But a striking contrast lay in their different relationships to the mass media. Especially in the 1970s, the RAF’s principal interlocutors were news editors and producers. Meinhof, Baader, and Ensslin played to media outlets, prefacing their acts of subterfuge with telephone calls to news bureaus. When the RAF’s second generation, still at large, resorted to kidnapping, it mobilized new technologies to pull off its plans. For example, the Baader-Meinhof group made media history in the fall of 1977 when it forced Hanns-Martin Schleyer to give testimony on a videotape they recorded in the so-called people’s prison. Turning on the camera, they opened a new aperture for terrorism. In the RAF’s video production, the hostage Schleyer sits before the group’s rifle-and-red-star insignia, atoning for his Nazi past and pleading for government negotiation with the militants. The tape became a key tool in the RAF’s discursive apparatus. The Situationists, by contrast, resisted mediatization, aiming instead at its negation. A line from Debord’s In girum imus seems to address the RAF tactic of playing to the press: “this society signs a sort of peace treaty with its most outspoken enemies by giving them a spot in its spectacle.”44 Caught in the spotlight of the German media, the RAF lost some of its sharp edges. If television and tabloids didn’t exactly domesticate the armed struggle, they lent a kind of consumable glamour to the move-

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ment. Both the women and the men of the RAF and Kommune 1 attracted the camera’s eye: a recurring series of photos in Bild and Der Spiegel showed some of the more photogenic upstarts loping around with their long, loose hair and, at times, short skirts. Baader gave the opposition a distinctive look. Something of a dandy, he made his mark, according to RAF chroniclers, by insisting on wearing self-tailored velvet trousers during training with the PLO in Yemen while the other comrades wore camouflage.45 Such theatrical trappings trademarked the movement. When RAF leaders died in the prime of life, a tragic allure was imparted to their legacy. Today, the more reactionary examples of postmilitant culture seem pitched to capitalize on this.46 Together with the proliferation of mainstream films about German militancy—from Starbuck: Holger Meins (2002), to Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (The Edukators, 2004), to The Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008)—this pop culture tendency connotes a reappropriation of the RAF agenda. But it was the RAF itself, through its self-styling, that first played into this spectacular co-optation. Debord located the danger of the spectacle not only in society at large but also in his own films. Key interventions—such as the inclusion in In girum imus of a photo captioned “age forty-five” that shows the filmmaker looking bloated and worn out—seem intended to neutralize and even deeroticize the cinematic space. An essay by Asger Jorn positions Debord’s scenarios beyond the circuits of the culture industry, in which fame and careerism obscure aesthetic process and distort political salience.47 These remarks square with an early statement Vaneigem made at an SI conference in 1961. The imperative was not, he insisted, to elaborate the spectacle of refusal, but rather to refuse the spectacle itself.48 In resistance to the aestheticization of politics, Debord responded to Vaneigem’s challenge in his film work. Debord’s work interrogated the notion of the individual subject and aimed to deflect the aura that surrounded cinema auteurs in the 1960s and 1970s. Such a critique marked another point of divergence from the RAF and its circles of sympathizers, because the armed struggle in Germany invited heroization. With few models of rebellion in the postwar period—no James Dean, no Led Zeppelin—radical Germans looked westward for subversive impulses, to France, Britain, and the United States. The emergence of the RAF, in all its fury, gave them more familiar profiles of autonomy and provided a focal point for the militant democratization and denazification that many youths took as their cause.

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In the late 1970s, a multimedia hagiography began to develop around the RAF, amplifying over the next decades and generating a full-blown RAF-Kultur. This growing formation distinguishes the RAF from other radicals of the 1960s and 1970s. The aesthetic response to the Weathermen or the Black Panthers, for example, has been less persistent. The Weather Underground, with its ordinary, on-campus looks, didn’t hold a grip on mainstream culture in the way the RAF has since the German Autumn. The Black Panther Party has also left a legacy that seems to withstand extensive recycling. To date, the iconic photographs of black nationalists raising their fists have resisted misappropriation. Rapid suppression by the American FBI meant that the Panthers figured only briefly in the national press. More important, the party’s “ten-point” program for the survival and advancement of African Americans retains its founding urgency, unlike the communiqués of the RAF, which quickly became outmoded. When the RAF officially disbanded in 1998, the members conceded that the group’s mediatization signaled the failure of its objectives: instead of inciting widespread revolt, the militants’ media encounter fanned the flames of a personality cult and gave the state the justification it needed to clamp down. Coming too close to the spectacle, the RAF’s anti-imperialist mission burned out. But the remarkably long half-life of its image carries on in postmilitant culture.

Terror and Autonomy The SI and the RAF both argued for autonomy, but they understood its principles differently. Aligning with the surrealist and Dadaist trajectories of the historical avant-garde, the Situationists called for the supersession of art. They departed from universal aesthetic principles and sought to release art practice from the boundaries of the atelier, the salon, and the museum. The German New Left, meanwhile, redefined the notion of autonomy in the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing from Marcuse’s critique of the “one-dimensional” thought that was determined by postwar affluence and the strictures of “administrative society,” dissidents sought to reclaim parts of German cities and turn them into autonomous zones. The Autonomen wanted to make their squats into sites for the “great refusal” that Marcuse described.49 In his writings, Marcuse exposed structures of imperialist domination and colonialist repression, and called for a moral and cultural critique. To some extent, his concept of refusal

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seems to have converged with (or at least echoed) the Situationists’ call, in 1961, to “refuse the spectacle.” But the RAF and other factions of the Far Left yearned for revolution and sought out direct and often vulgar applications of Marcuse’s Marxist vision, enlisting themselves in street battles as if to defend democracy on an international scale. The RAF stood on the front lines of the antitheoretical vanguard, first conflating its struggle with national liberation movements (in Vietnam, in the Palestinian territories), and then entirely dispensing with the question of how and when a revolutionary subject could be identified and defined. This collapse of critical autonomy within the RAF aligned the Far Left of the 1960s and 1970s with the right-wing nationalists of the Third Reich. Habermas was one of the first to warn about the similarity between the “anti-imperialists” and the Nazis. When a youth demonstration in 1967 escalated to armed violence, Habermas published a series of articles denouncing the German dissidents’ facile equation of local and international antagonisms. Although he shared their outrage at any use of repression “in the name of freedom,” he warned against the radicals’ “emotional identification” with other oppressed groups, including “the blacks in urban slums.” As Habermas explained in his essay “Die Scheinrevolution und ihre Kinder” (“The Pretend Revolution and Its Children”), the situations in Southeast Asia, California, and West Germany were as “incomparable” as the problems that each posed and the tactics that each demanded.50 Some of the extraparliamentary opposition was alert to this criticism. Others, especially those who formed into militant groups like the RAF and the June 2 Movement, rallied around this distorted sense of internationalism.51 In a prescient essay of 1968—published two years before the RAF came into formal existence—Habermas diagnosed the increasingly brutal uprisings of students and other radicals as “masochistic.” Condemning their attempts to trigger state violence, he denounced the militants’ agenda, seeing in it the potential for “left ist fascism.”52 Although Marcuse, among Frankfurt School thinkers, was the closest ally of the New Left, he concurred that West Germany didn’t present the objective conditions for social revolution. Indeed, the RAF and other extremists seemed to confuse regression with revolution, blindly demanding the priority of action over theoretical elaboration. This slant, Adorno maintained in an exchange with Marcuse, did, in fact, portend an eruption of neofascist violence on the Left. Denying that the radicals could somehow fast-forward West Germany to a more democratic state, he

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identified parallels between the Far Left of the 1960s and the Nazis of the 1930s. Both movements stifled debate and insisted upon technocratic formalism, and—yet more alarming—the young radicals’ pro-Palestinian agenda was approaching anti-Semitism. Dieter Kunzelmann’s staged attack on Berlin’s Jewish Community Center in 1969 (discussed in chapter 2) is a prime example of this. For Adorno, left ist militancy was “mixed with a dram of madness,” in which “the totalitarian” resided not simply as a repercussion, but in its very telos.53 Habermas would complement this proposition by arguing that the radicals’ strident insistence on political objectives over and against aesthetic ones augured an anticultural backlash (Kulturstürmerei) of the most dangerous kind.54 Whether or not all of the militants harbored authoritarian tendencies, extremists like the RAF inadvertently provoked a conservative turn in West German law and prompted an increase of repressive mechanisms, including the reinforcement of the penal system. The Situationists, meanwhile, grew increasingly concerned with their critique of the built environment. Vaneigem once claimed that there was “no such thing as Situationism,” not even a situationist work of art. This statement had rhetorical force when he made it in 1961, and, in retrospect, the dematerialized condition of the SI seems to express the clearest truth about the group’s project. If the situationist legacy seems transitory, ephemeral, and contingent, RAF actions, on the other hand, broke German law and transgressed the internalized boundaries of the middle classes. As a result, their political interventions can be more substantively documented than those of the SI. The least we can say about the RAF is that it left Germany with a hulking paradox: Stammheim endures as the most concrete precipitate of its actions.

Dissolution The two statements of the SI’s and the RAF’s dissolution present a final moment of contrast. By the early 1970s, Debord had cut his group back to the quick, and internal disputes foreclosed any viable future for the SI as an organized movement. A document from 1972 by Debord and Gianfranco Sanguinetti titled “The Real Scission in the International” acknowledged this fractiousness, but, over and against this, it emphasized the new conditions of the situationist critique. It located the revolutionary impulses that, to their minds, continued to course through culture and society.

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Debord and Sanguinetti drew from early SI texts to justify their dissolution. The Situationists had long expected that cultural revolution would make their strategies redundant. Now they saw that the public no longer considered “improbable” the subversion of the spectacle. As viewers took more cynical views of the icons of late modernity, the situationist project became less imperative.55 The SI itself, Debord and Sanguinetti insisted, amounted to nothing more than the concentrated expression of a universal subversion “that is everywhere.”56 The RAF’s dissolution—after nearly thirty years of existence—was predicated by fragmentation. Well before the moment it formally disbanded, the group found itself marginalized. The first generation of the RAF had been dead for two decades. Nine core members were still doing time in German prisons, and the RAF-Aussteiger who had hidden in the GDR were being arraigned; but many other RAF members remained active and at large well into the 1990s. In the first decade of postcommunist unification, the RAF issued communiqués justifying the movement’s continued existence. Then, in 1998, when it finally released to Reuters a statement of dissolution, the RAF articulated a partial self-critique. Although the authors tried to justify their attempts in the 1970s and 1980s to free RAF prisoners from what they considered state torture, they conceded that most members had lost sight of the “social-revolutionary dimension” of their struggle and had become mired in internal difficulties. In trying to reject West Germany’s liberal democracy, the RAF had broken off its relationship to society as a whole. Soon its energies were exclusively directed toward tactical violence. The matter of addressing larger political and cultural processes—which, the group admitted, should have been the precondition for any “new revolutionary project”—fell by the wayside.57 Setting the end point of urban-guerrilla history, the authors of the RAF’s final communiqué gained a belated purchase on German militancy. What the statement brought into view was that RAF members had wagered their lives and those of their victims before developing a viable social alternative to West Germany’s Gewaltmonopol, or exclusive right to wield violence. Instead of undertaking the protracted labor of looking for “new ideas for the process of liberation,” they accelerated a violent implosion.58 Seeking to subvert authority, the RAF increased the intensity of its attacks, but did not attend to the hegemonic consensus between the state and the society. Instead, this enormous and complex task was left to the

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new social movements, including the Frauenbewegung. Without revolutionary consciousness in the general public, the RAF’s historical effect could only be self-limiting. How to compare the ends of the RAF to those of the SI, each movement’s goals and the cultural and political significance of their dissolution? A death toll of the German armed struggle can be counted up, but the broader social impact of the Far Left defies precise calculation. The repercussions of the RAF are both material and discursive. Thomas Elsaesser has asked whether we can argue that “despite its very real victims,” the armed struggle that gripped the FRG in the 1970s was “essentially symbolic.”59 Indeed, to a considerable extent, the meaning of German militancy was inflected and disseminated by the reactions of the government and media. Responding to the RAF’s provocations, West German society helped generate the symbolism of the movement. To extend and develop Elsaesser’s question, we could ask whether the RAF exploited the conditions of spectacle society or, instead, inadvertently reinforced them. For the Situationists, to commit symbolic violence is to refunction the spectacle, so that it breaks the circuits of commodification. As a result, sites of political contestation once suppressed or obscured by systems of domination are disclosed. Some RAF actions worked along these lines, but many of its assaults backfired. Not only did they give German authorities the grounds to tighten controls, these maneuvers served as prime media feed. When the militants lost interest in journalistic agitations and spontaneous acts of civil disobedience, they resorted to violence and played into the hands of their opponents. Setting fire to the Frankfurt department stores, the future founders of the RAF entered themselves into the media spectacle of terrorism. In their hopes for global revolution, radicals of the 1960s and 1970s sought to link subversive energies from city to city. But the Watts riots disclosed the differences between the European vanguard and avantgarde factions. From the flames of Los Angeles, the Situationists gleaned that social change had ignited and would transform the world. Having met its mandate, the SI could dissolve. But the RAF derived another lesson from Watts: it tried to advance cultural revolution from underground, but ended up burying it instead. Traces of the RAF persist in a wide range of material substrates, from the lightweight cotton of fashionable T-shirts to the reinforced concrete of Stammheim. But the SI, in contradistinction, is everywhere and no-

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where at once.60 The group seems to have fulfilled the prescriptions they made from their earliest appearances to their final statement of dissolution. Debord’s prohibition against the screening of his films made Situationism clandestine and inaccessible. And yet the obscurity of these vestiges is offset by an aura that surrounds the SI legacy. In the wake of Debord’s suicide, many have received and relayed the situationist current. Today the movement’s concepts and practices are open to contest and further elaboration, as seen in the work of visual artists such as Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, and Thomas Hirschhorn, as well as in the initiatives of the Retort group. The RAF, meanwhile, ended at a deadlock. Lacking a coherent program, the group failed to advance any progressive transformations or to secure connections to other social movements. Thus, much of the postmilitant culture that has followed in its aftermath can only mimic these postures. The RAF was neither reformist nor revolutionary; first it imploded into narcissistic self-sacrifice, and then it returned in collective memory as a style, not a stratagem. In order to avoid just mimicking those postures, postmilitant critique needs to disclose their flaws. The history of the RAF points to a number of truths anticipated by the Situationists. RAF violence revealed one endgame of our post-1968 predicament to be not just late capitalist alienation, but death. Indeed Habermas’s and Adorno’s anxieties about the Far Left accord with this critique. Not simply an unfortunate excess of cultural politics in the Federal Republic, the RAF collaborated in the operations of spectacle society. It was its producer and product at once. Even though Debord might have agreed with this assessment, it nonetheless sharpens the question about what, in In girum imus, he wanted with the RAF and how his impression of it might have been wrong. Perhaps Debord saw in the BaaderMeinhof group a complement to the situationist project. But if, to his mind, the German militants conducted a charge of radical negation, then he misread their message. Dead-set on destruction, the RAF could not supersede the spectacle. Baader and Ensslin distorted situationist signals in their rush to arson and in their dive underground. Meinhof, meanwhile, misperceived in the Watts fires all the components for immediate and international revolution. And although the RAF put a kind of subconscious feminism into practice by placing women in the lead, the group’s deliberate violence and withdrawal from larger social issues corrupted any viable political program. Meinhof and Ensslin didn’t heed

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the critiques of the SI and other radicals of the time, who insisted that theory and practice move forward in a dialectical process. They put deeds before words. The dissonance between the SI and the RAF—in their formal agendas, their mutual misrecognition, and their eventual decay—unsettles many certitudes about Europe’s first postwar generation. This discord prevents the sort of historicization that configures “1968” as the cipher for an entire generation. Once marked, it reveals the antagonisms that unleashed a series of historical events and discloses the SI and the RAF as agents of a fraught cultural moment—two torn halves that don’t add up.

part 2. postmilitant culture

4 The Stammheim Complex in Marianne and Juliane

For eight months, from 1972 to 1973, Ulrike Meinhof was held in solitary confinement in the Women’s Psychiatric Section of the Cologne-Ossendorf Prison. While incarcerated, she wrote many notes and letters. On a typewritten page from that time she describes her reduced life in the toten Trakt, or dead section of the prison. Wardens, visits, courtyard seem made of celluloid— Headaches— flashes . . . the feeling that time and space are interlocked[,] that you are caught in a time loop— reeling—1 Meinhof’s incarceration put a halt to her engagement in the armed struggle. Constantly exposed to fluorescent light, separated from other inmates in a soundproofed cell, she lost her sense of location and began to detach from the material world. As Margrit Schiller, another RAF member, recounted in her memoir Es war ein harter Kampf um meine Erinnerung (It Was a Real Struggle to Remember, 1999), the voids of the dead section depleted

Ulrike Meinhof, “aus der zeit 16.6.72–8.2.73” (“from the period of 6.16.72–2.8.73”), 1972–73. Page from prison notebook, MeU 009–002, Archive of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research (HIS Archiv), Hamburg.

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prisoners’ abilities to “distinguish internal perceptions from external reality.”2 The austerity of internment delivered Meinhof into an altered state: the silence, the stillness seemed to cordon off a space outside of history, and she began to see the confines of her cell dissolve into a surreal figment. As Meinhof’s distorted perceptions transubstantiated the prison architecture, reducing cubic space to two dimensions, her life shifted down to the horizontal and vertical of a celluloid filmstrip, and then slowed to a still frame. Margarethe von Trotta’s feature film Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne and Juliane, 1981) reenvisions the circumstances that Meinhof describes in her writings, the concrete constraints of the prison complex and the psychological strictures of forced isolation. It navigates the controlled space at the intersection of these two conditions, surveying the prison grounds and illuminating the surfaces of its enclosures. Although the film draws elements from the biographies of several RAF militants, Marianne and Juliane most closely follows the life, incarceration, and death-in-captivity of Meinhof’s comrade, Gudrun Ensslin. The composite character is called Marianne; her experiences are chronicled by her sister, Juliane. In a series of flashbacks, von Trotta develops a cinematic bildungsroman about the fictional sisters: born just before the bomb raids of World War II, they come of age in the somber years of the 1950s, and then are startled into social action by the turbulence of 1968. In the late 1970s, when the film approaches its climax, Juliane has become a grassroots activist and an editor of a feminist magazine. Marianne has been charged as a terrorist and imprisoned in a modern, maximum-security facility modeled after Stammheim, the jail that held Meinhof and Ensslin when they died and that has become a central reference in postmilitant culture. The film looks back over this past from the so-called bleierne Zeit, or “leaden time,” that followed the perceived failure of the student movement and, especially, the German Autumn of 1977, when many on the Left surrendered to melancholic resignation. Marianne and Juliane dramatizes this season of introspection and discontent and refracts Germany’s ongoing process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or “coming-to-terms with the past.” Von Trotta structures the narrative with carefully composed images of the built environment, training the viewers’ attention on the correspondences between external spaces and internal enclosures. Using wide pans, she connects different sites and temporal moments, a technique that lays bare the links between the

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prison institution and the generic modern condition that Guy Debord and the Situationists gave witness to. Her direction portrays the poetics of the RAF’s failures: the female terrorist stands as a metaphor for the marginalized and insurgent forces of the oppressed; Stammheim, meanwhile, functions as a metonym of the West German police state.3 Together, these tropes present questions about dominance and victimization that were central to discussions in the 1970s and 1980s about the history of postwar Germany and, more precisely, women’s position within it. A number of cinema scholars have written about Marianne and Juliane. The first waves of reception focused on the gender dynamics of von Trotta’s narrative, and the project has long stood as a beacon of feminist filmmaking. More recently, critics have begun to study Marianne and Juliane from other angles.4 Karen Beckman, for example, introduced the concerns of art history and architecture into the scholarship of von Trotta’s work. In her analysis of Marianne and Juliane, published in 2002 in Grey Room, a journal on the politics of art, architecture, and media, Beckman considers “building relations” in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks. But instead of elaborating a spatial analysis of the film, she concentrates on the possible parallels between the two sisters and the twin towers.5 It remains to be examined how von Trotta’s concern with the built environment informs her response to both the German Autumn and the FRG’s technologies of surveillance, control, and counterterrorism. The film’s framing of architectural enclosures presents the prison as a hidden but vital organ of the city.6 We could draw upon the conceptual arsenal of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and Bentham’s panopticon to work out a particular reading of Marianne and Juliane.7 But this would leave unaddressed another important element of von Trotta’s feminist imagination. For it isn’t just her shots of penal quarters that frame the film; her interest in the smaller objects of the urban quotidian also guides her narrative. Delineating the fullest dimensions of modern life, von Trotta extends her scope to include both massive prisons and housing blocks, as well as the more ephemeral constructions of the built environment, particularly those of made of textiles. She works within the constraints of the tight shot in her sequences of domestic and carceral confinement and focuses in on the lightweight, mobile structures that furnish and clad these worlds. Engaging the architecturally inflected cinema studies of Giuliana Bruno, we can develop another analysis of Marianne and Juliane, one at

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variance from a Foucauldian critique. Bruno has argued that film is a product of “the metropolitan era,” for it enables a technique of perception that shifts continuously between the interior and the exterior.8 Her study of Elvira Notari’s early-twentieth-century films maps out a landscape of Naples as it traces the parallels between flânerie and cinema— their shared juxtapositions of space and time, their privileging of montage.9 Whereas Notari’s work highlights the flow of men and women through Neapolitan cinemas and arcades, Bruno’s theoretical reflections open up a line of inquiry into von Trotta’s filmmaking. Marianne and Juliane seeks out the deadlocks of urban planning, its sites of stasis, most specifically those of the prison. Thomas Elsaesser also offers tools we can use for an analysis of von Trotta’s cinema. In a seminal article on the visual representation of the RAF, he considers the figure of the urban guerrilla in film and television. Although he touches only obliquely on von Trotta, his observations on the dynamics between militancy, media, and surveillance can be brought to bear on the portrayal of public and private space in Marianne and Juliane. Elsaesser notes that, in the first postwar decades, German society was shaped by the dual forces of its elite culture (that was focused on the theater stage) and its elite government (that was focused on the parliament). Recalling situationist critiques, he observes a turn, since the 1970s, toward the dispersed and disseminated politics of the media spectacle.10 The RAF’s urban assaults and the postmilitant film that has ensued are prime examples of this turn, for they both reveal how space is activated as a political category.11 A major determinant of this condition are the technologies of surveillance. German militants, Elsaesser argues, weren’t simply the targets of these urban networks; through their actions they provoked and disclosed the powers of state control.12 Von Trotta shows this in her film work, as she captures a pivotal moment when these powers began to escalate. Von Trotta’s attention to the surfaces and structures of authority skillfully conveys the literal and figurative confinement of militants like Meinhof and Ensslin. Yet elements of Marianne and Juliane cede to the RAF’s own despair, particularly as Meinhof expressed it in her prison notebooks. This compromise exposes flaws in von Trotta’s historical vision. In the following section I will demonstrate how von Trotta blends certain surfaces of the film—walls and windows—into a homogenous screen that doesn’t adequately differentiate the events of the German

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Autumn from the deeper traumas of fascism. Making Stammheim into a metonym of German authoritarianism, the director, like her heroines, blurs the margins between police state and nation-state. More than this, she also risks equating the RAF prisoners with Holocaust victims. Marianne and Juliane opens itself up to such scrutiny through its ambiguous incorporation of sequences from Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, released in 1955 and first broadcast on French television in 1959), one of the first films to document the architecture of the Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration camps. And yet despite this flaw, von Trotta’s observation of the smaller objects of the built environment ultimately resists such a totalizing account. Her film is unique within postmilitant culture, for it situates the German Autumn in a broader context, one that links different moments in the nation’s politics and culture by showing historical continuities in architecture and design.

Controlled Space Incarceration at Stammheim both shaped the RAF identity and brought about the group’s demise. The prison’s deployment of restraints and the Brandt and Schmidt government’s restrictions of constitutional rights confirmed the RAF’s belief that the FRG was an authoritarian state, thus fueling their militant commitment. The architecture and technologies of the German penal system provided the foundation upon which the Far Left took full form. By the mid-1970s, the RAF and the government had locked into a relationship in which each agent’s action was matched with a reaction from the other side. Armed struggle invited martial clampdown, which then provoked the RAF’s death games of 1977. In September of that year, two days after RAF operatives had taken Hanns-Martin Schleyer hostage, the government banned contact between the seventytwo political prisoners of German jails (many of whom were RAF associates) and all visitors, including their attorneys. Overriding the critics who doubted the validity of this intervention, the Bundestag passed the Contact Ban Law (Kontaktsperregesetz), which legalized the isolation of public enemies during a state of emergency. This law, still in place today, had a potent effect.13 The desperate acts of the German Autumn seem to have been the natural end point of the RAF’s reckless trajectory, yet many have argued that the federal ruling made the group’s caustic explosion all but inevitable.

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If, in their first years of engagement, militants like Meinhof and Ensslin sought to address social inequality and imperialism, the RAF’s subsequent campaign to exonerate the Stammheim inmates introverted the group’s energies. Meinhof was one of the first to see Stammheim as an example of the repression of German administered society. In her words, “[the] anti-imperialist struggle is fundamentally about liberating prisoners— freeing them from the prison that the system has always been for the people who are exploited and oppressed[,] from the imprisonment of total alienation and self-estrangement.”14 Although Meinhof never fully substantiated this comparison, the RAF’s broader allegations of abuse at Stammheim can’t be entirely discounted. As their advocates initially attested, and as some historians have since affirmed, wardens were authorized to use unconventional means—including the confiscation of clocks and watches, bodily restraints, and feeding by intubation—to control the militants. Skeptics, meanwhile, have detailed the unusual privileges accorded to RAF inmates, such as the right to speak with one another within the prison and to accumulate large collections of books and recordings in their cells.15 Indeed, if Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe actually committed suicide at Stammheim in 1977, they probably relied on several modes of communication to seal their pact, some of which their visiting attorneys could have enabled.16 Marianne and Juliane dramatizes the circumstances of the RAF’s imprisonment, activating questions about human rights and criminal justice. Von Trotta accentuates continuities that connect institutions like Stammheim with the postwar order that was developing in the FRG. She underscores other associations as well, such as those that link personal choices with political tendencies, particularly within the field of vision. Tracing the limits between the internal and the external, the public and the private, Marianne and Juliane situates itself at the political intersection of two discourses: the cinematic and the architectural. The RAF operated within emphatically urban conditions. What becomes evident in the proliferation of the group’s documents as well as the subsequent accounts of the group’s history is that the cityscape was both the medium and the material support of the German armed struggle. The structures of buildings, traffic medians, and underpasses generated the syntax of the RAF idiom. Although Marianne and Juliane was shot mostly in and around Berlin, parts of the production also took place in suburban parts of the Federal Republic and the former Czechoslovakia,

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as well as several locations in Italy and Tunisia. But Marianne and Juliane strays far from the genre of metropolitan Überblick. While von Trotta tracks broad swaths of the urban condition, she also directs our gaze inward to the private lives lived within the ever smaller precincts of both domestic and penitentiary space. Cinema scholars were quick to emphasize the “personal-is-the-political” premise that informs von Trotta’s feminist aesthetic, but a finer detail of Marianne and Juliane—the movement across the threshold of the public and private spheres—is what generates the film’s narrative. Focusing on this, we can bring the critique to a deeper level.17

Framing a Narrative Von Trotta’s repeated focus on windows—particularly barred windows— reminds the viewer of the control systems that define both the public sphere and much of urban life. The film’s first shot is framed through a mullioned window in Juliane’s study that gives onto the bleak interior courtyard of her apartment block. Von Trotta returns again and again to this perspective, using parallel shots of other windows—generic school windows, prison windows girded with metal grillwork—to lend a consistent vision to the film as a whole. The recurrence of these shots both reinscribes von Trotta’s elaboration of the personal/political duality and registers key aspects of the relationship between Marianne and Juliane, the two protagonists. When Juliane first visits her sister in prison, one shot shows her looking out of a waiting-room window. The window is made of opaque glass, but Juliane finds a small, translucent spot to look through. She leans close and peers into the vacant prison courtyard; all that she can see are brick walls and barred windows. As the camera pans, the shot segues into a view of another residential courtyard, this time that of the sisters’ childhood home, circa 1947. These early years are recalled without nostalgia. The girls’ father, portrayed as harsh and authoritarian, dominates the sequences. With this scenic progression, von Trotta suggests a spatial continuum between prison architecture and the conditions of the traditional German home. She also establishes a temporal link between the 1970s and another related period: the “leaden years” of the 1950s, when Germans found themselves stunned among the wreckage of World War II.

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A similar sequential pattern structures another flashback in the film, reiterating the architectural motifs that subtend the story. Here von Trotta doesn’t use dissolves or fades, but rather makes hard cuts to move from time to time and from place to place. When Juliane comes back for another prison visit, the camera follows her gaze upon the building’s windows, perhaps in search of the one that opens onto Marianne’s cell. This image segues to a shot of yet another brick wall: the exterior of the school where the sisters, together in the same class in 1955, are studying Rilke. Marianne recites Rilke’s poem “Herbsttag” (“Autumn Day”), which Juliane derides as kitschig, provoking her dismissal from the class. The scene suggests that it was Juliane, the elder of the two, who first scouted out the path toward rebellion. The reading of Rilke’s poem also helps establish the film’s somber tone: Who doesn’t have a house won’t build one now. Who is now alone will long remain so, Will stay up, read, write long letters, And will walk restlessly along the promenades When the leaves drift down.18 One reason, perhaps, why the architectural motifs of Marianne and Juliane register so forcefully today is because they figure so prominently in Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 (1988), the photopainting series that is a central reference in postmilitant art. Consider Erhängte (Hanged), one of the fifteen canvasses. Based on a forensic photograph that was widely publicized in television and mainstream media in the 1970s, the painting shows a blurred image of Gudrun Ensslin’s corpse hanging from a window casement in her cell. Richter emphasizes Ensslin’s hyperextended form, her tilted head, and the grillwork from which her body is suspended. The deeper meanings of Marianne and Juliane develop according to the spatial parameters that von Trotta describes in the film. Her study of the German cityscape includes smaller structures, especially articles of clothing—the mobile “architecture” that has been conventionally designed and fabricated by women. Von Trotta shapes several key scenes by staging Marianne’s and Juliane’s clothing; their pullovers and slips serve as links between the sisters’ shared past and their divided present. In the

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scene of Juliane’s first prison visit, von Trotta gives a detailed account of the security protocols. The camera focuses on Juliane and the female warden, who searches her clothing for weapons and contraband. Juliane doesn’t resist the screening until she is asked to remove her pullover. When told that this is standard procedure, she hesitates, and then lifts the garment up over her head, revealing her naked torso beneath. During their next meeting, Marianne recalls the slips or petticoats (Leibchen) that the sisters wore as girls: “Do you remember our slips?” she asks. “The ones that closed only from the back? No matter how cross [Spinnefeind] we were with one another, we’d button each other up.” They recall how the straps of the white, cotton slips were either too long or too short, how the fabric itched. But then Marianne quickly changes the subject, switching to the plight of her jailed comrades. This recollection of the sisters’ shared past precipitates a brief but explosive quarrel about their political differences. Within a few expository lines, the viewer grasps their conflict. Although both women are fully committed to radical social change, only Juliane has chosen to work “above ground” in the public sphere of civil society, where second-wave feminism was at the time aiming to transform German law and media. She sees Marianne’s decision to join the Far Left as a miscarriage of their generation’s struggle for social justice. At Juliane’s next visit, Marianne relates an extended monologue about her penal isolation and changes the direction of their conversation. Juliane begins to grasp her sister’s militant commitment just as the visit times out. When the sisters embrace, Marianne asks Juliane to give her the pullover she is wearing. They quickly undress and then put on each other’s tops, in a single, fluid movement. Refunctioning the control and exposure that marked Juliane’s first visit—for a moment they face each other with bodies exposed, woolen forms held briefly overhead—the sisters perform the gesture as a defiant double maneuver. Then the guards forcibly separate the women and conduct them to the exits. Juliane realizes the portent of the exchange in the next scene, when she finds a small note in the pocket of Marianne’s pullover. On it she had written: “Talk to friends. Intellectuals, liberals, important people. They should damn well do something for us this time.” In this sequence and in several scenes that follow, fabric objects continue to serve as both medium and message at once. The news of Marianne’s death, a purported suicide by hanging, devastates Juliane: suffering a nervous collapse, she

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grieves her sister’s loss and has a fevered dream. In it she recalls, again, the slips and the shared ritual of buttoning them up.

Wall, Dress, Screen It might seem strange to speak of fabric and clothing as part of the city, but von Trotta’s alertness to the connections between small-scale, mobile structures and the architecture of power has a notable precedent. Indeed, Marianne and Juliane makes several points of contact with the early modern architectural theses of Gottfried Semper and Adolf Loos. Semper’s study Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten (Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, 1860) locates the crux of architecture in the textile, disclosing the tight knot that binds the fabrication of buildings with the clothing of the human body. In his “Prinzip der Bekleidung” (“Principle of Cladding” or “Principle of Dressing”), Semper extends his analogy between walls and dressing (Wände and Gewände) to argue that architecture’s truth consists not in its internal supports, but rather in its covering layer.19 Taking Semper’s lead, in 1898 Adolf Loos published his own “Prinizip der Bekleidung,” a manifesto that calls for an architecture that emphasizes the “outer layer” building.20 Even though it dissimulates the structure it covers, this layer of cladding mediates our perception of the building. For Semper, architecture originated with the use of woven fabrics. Textiles—historically a woman’s craft—weren’t simply placed within an enclosure to give a sense of interiority, he argues. Rather, by introducing the idea of dwelling, they enabled the production of space itself.21 Fabrics thus generate both the house and social structure. The interior isn’t defined by a continuous enclosure of walls, but by the folds and twists in an often discontinuous decorative surface. Von Trotta’s interest in textiles both recalls Semper and Loos and anticipates the most recent tendencies of design. The staging of objects in Marianne and Juliane draws our attention to the possibilities of modern and contemporary architecture, such as the tensile construction of Günter Behnisch and Frei Otto’s stadium for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Suspended from steel pylons, the stadium’s perspex tents created a seemingly ethereal contrast to Albert Speer’s colossal arenas for the Berlin games in 1936. Against the fascist ideal of a static Heimat, this variable architecture participates in a nomadic culture of transit and contestation. What seems mobile or portable in the Munich structure is more

Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne and Juliane), dir. Margarethe von Trotta, 1981. Film stills.

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fully realized in the “wearable shelters” of several other designers: Peter Cook’s works for the firm Archigram in the 1960s, Hussein Chalayan’s “furniture dresses” of the 1990s, and the armored garments being produced by engineers at the MIT Media Lab today.22 This sort of clothing outfits the body for duress, subterfuge, and escape. Von Trotta’s mobilization of cloth objects in Marianne and Juliane approaches the horizons envisioned by these designers. It privileges the portable and mutable; it gestures toward nonstandard and even transgressive designs. After introducing the slips and pullovers into Marianne and Juliane, von Trotta enters a third material object into the narrative, bringing it to a close. Juliane splits with her partner Wolfgang (an architect) and moves to her own apartment. Although she once resolved not to have children, she finds herself with little choice but to take custody of Marianne’s orphaned son. Then Juliane devotes herself to investigating the cause of her sister’s death, reading books about knot-tying and marking the pages that show nooses. She requisitions the belongings Marianne kept when incarcerated and works out a whole calculus of figures—her sister’s weight, the height of the window grates, the maximum load that it could bear—all in an attempt to assess whether she could have committed suicide from inside her prison cell. Von Trotta films Juliane absorbed in the task of stitching together a life-sized model—Marianne’s body double. A pattern is cut from cloth; each limb is tacked and sewn, filled with sand, and finally assembled into a puppet or dummy. Juliane ties a rope to her own window casement and hangs the dummy from it. The form dangles a few seconds as she looks on in horror, crouched in the corner. Then, suddenly, the cord breaks, letting the dummy drop and corroborating Juliane’s conviction that, since a prison suicide was impossible, Marianne must have been murdered. Semper’s comparison between Wände and Gewände finds its third term in the Leinwand, or “screen,” of Marianne and Juliane. Von Trotta emphasizes the structural essence of this cinematic screen in her framing of walls and windows, particularly toward the end of the film, when Marianne is transferred from her quarters in a Wilhelmine-era jail to a modern facility that resembles Stammheim. The sisters have their last visit under the surveillance of armed guards, stenographers, and closed-circuit television. A wall of mesh-reinforced glass separates them, forcing the women to communicate via an intercom system. As Juliane’s voiceover notes, there are no more iron grates on the windows in the modern prison, only

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blinds and screens. Seated to face each other directly, their individual reflections on the glass obscure the sisters’ view of each other. Von Trotta shows Marianne’s face superimposed onto the reflection of Juliane’s, creating an image like a blurred photomontage. This composite picture connotes the distorted ego boundaries of the two sisters—as Marianne’s prospects for exoneration dim, Juliane’s identification with her grows more desperate. This might be seen to symbolize the relationship of the Stammheim inmates to their outlying supporters in the 1970s, a relationship that merits closer attention.

The Stammheim Complex Penal architecture gave shape to German militancy. It also left an impression on postmilitant culture, as we see in Marianne and Juliane. Von Trotta’s staging of the sisters’ final encounter in the prison’s visiting room dramatizes the alienating effects of the federal discipline for many on the Left during the German Autumn. Marianne describes her confinement as disorienting and dehumanizing. Isolated from any sound, constantly exposed to bright light, she loses track of time and, ultimately, all sense of self in the “dead stillness” of her cell. As the Far Left broke off from the more moderate course of the New Left, it also seemed to lose its own temporal bearings and sense of history, much like Marianne does in the film. The RAF, in particular, succumbed to this disorientation and historical amnesia, delusionally imagining that its plight was akin that of Hitler’s victims. Legal advocates who defended Meinhof, Ensslin, and other militants posited an association between Stammheim and the death camps of German fascism. In her prison writings, Meinhof remarked that her understanding of Auschwitz and its effects became clearer while serving her sentence; in her words, the “political conception of the Cologne prison’s dead section . . . is the gas chamber.”23 As the journalist Hans Kundnani writes, RAF inmates referred to Stammheim’s conditions as Sonderbehandlung, or “special treatment,” the Nazi euphemism to describe Jewish genocide. Vernichtungshaft, or “extermination incarceration,” was another term used by the RAF.24 The New Left might have suspected that fascist tendencies persisted in the postwar period. The RAF, meanwhile, was utterly convinced that the Third Reich’s structures of domination extended into the foundations of the Federal Republic.

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Meinhof and Ensslin made frequent reference to the design of Stammheim in their writings. Paradoxically, the building’s physical restraints worked to amplify the militants’ communiqués. Kept under close watch, the RAF inmates reoriented their critique and recoded the terms of their agenda according to the constraints of incarceration. Transcripts of their depositions record the RAF’s shift in strategy from an active, international struggle to an interiorized politics of discontent. Under the sway of what we could call a social or psychological Stammheim Complex, Meinhof and Ensslin saw the prison as a symbol or microcosm of the police state—its architecture of repression, its systems of surveillance. If the penal institutions served as a theater of state violence, the RAF could incite revolt from within the walls of Stammheim. The inmates’ resistance was pitched to spark a revolution that would overtake the country and then spread into the international domain. In the mid-1970s, as the RAF’s outlook contracted to Stammheim’s pinpoint perspective, Meinhof and Ensslin tried to subsume the complicated array of social, political, and economic conflicts into their own singular predicament. They worked out a reactionary rationale that united the destinies of the RAF and other oppositional movements and projected illusory bonds of solidarity and shared purpose. Despair magnified this distortion, blinding the RAF to the actuality of its situation: protracted confinement had ruptured most of the group’s external affiliations and stunted its powers. In effect, the militants had switched from open revolt to the institutionalized revolution that Julia Kristeva has theorized.25 Ceasing to question themselves, the first generation lost hold of any real transformative power. The RAF was becoming an empty signifier lacking any referent to the transformations taking place outside the prison complex, whether within West Germany’s new social movements or elsewhere. Underscoring their victim status, the Far Left sought to legitimize the violent tactics of the armed struggle.26 Marianne and Juliane skews its spatial and temporal coordinates, replicating some of the historical misrepresentations that were symptomatic of RAF’s Stammheim Complex. The film’s interlinked sequences from 1947, 1955, 1968, 1977, and the last years of the 1970s fi x our focus on the concentration camp as the defining historical moment of German modernity. The continuity that von Trotta establishes between the German home and the German prison recurs in her portrayal of the associations

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between different historical periods. Marianne and Juliane maintains an intertextual relationship to Resnais’s Night and Fog, particularly the final segment depicting Auschwitz and Majdanek after liberation.27 Indeed, von Trotta’s investigation of Marianne’s enigmatic death echoes Hitler’s order, mentioned in the film, that arrested members of the resistance be made to disappear “in the fog of the night” (Nacht und Nebel), such that their deaths wouldn’t be divulged. The narrator in Resnais’s film describes the concentration camp as “an abandoned town” set into a landscape “pregnant with death.” The deadlocks of Marianne and Juliane are repeatedly projected over this same terrain, a place from which, von Trotta implies, no German can escape. In her efforts to illuminate the correspondences between domestic, penitentiary, and concentrationary space, von Trotta risks setting all of German modernity under the sign of the Holocaust and depleting other moments of their historical specificity. The indeterminate incorporation of Night and Fog prompts a crucial question: might Marianne and Juliane invite viewers to falsely identify with the victims of German fascism—the Jews, above all, but also communists, Slavs, and other targets of the Nazi siege?28 Ceding to the impulses that guided Meinhof’s and Ensslin’s declarations, von Trotta nearly elides Stammheim with Auschwitz. The German Autumn reopened the wounds of the fascist past and forced many to confront difficult questions about individual and collective responsibility for mass violence. This belated encounter unlocked the process of ethical reckoning for some, but it also disclosed a range of flawed perspectives. Marianne and Juliane ventures a parallel between the victims of the Holocaust and the Far Left, falsely framing them as linked objects of fascist and neofascist domination. Yet the film steers clear of a broader tendency in the national media and popular culture. While the Stammheim trials became a platform for the RAF’s phantasmatic identification with the victims of the Nazi state, other judicial proceedings that were unfolding in the 1970s contributed to a broader pattern of public disavowal. The Stammheim trials began in 1975, the same year that the Dusseldorf tribunal for war crimes at Majdanek. The two trials were conducted according to different legal codes, and they were covered differently in the popular press. These differences provide an important context for understanding the circumstances surrounding the realization of Marianne and Juliane.29 As was the case in other war crimes tribunals conducted in Germany, the Majdanek defendants were tried according to the Nazi

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laws that existed during the years of their actions. The use of these codes enabled the defense to significantly mitigate the sentences. Although the former Majdanek guards were charged with up to seven thousand murders each, most were acquitted. In the Stammheim hearings, meanwhile, Meinhof, Ensslin, and the other RAF leaders were judged by the far more rigorous guidelines that had been established in the new constitution of 1949. Over and against the genocide trials, in the 1970s the federal courts framed the RAF as Germany’s most dangerous enemy. Presented in this way, the Stammheim cases dominated the media for years. Newspapers and networks gave relatively little coverage to the Majdanek proceedings, despite the fact that they ran until 1981, the year Marianne and Juliane was released. Editors and broadcasters chose, instead, to keep the Far Left in the headlines. Hundreds of witnesses and survivors from across Europe came to Dusseldorf to testify about the (estimated) 250,000 deaths in the Majdanek camp, but the public seemed to take a much greater interest in the Stammheim hearings. Journalists wrote detailed accounts of the RAF’s situation, describing their renegade lives in the terrorist underground and documenting their deprivations while behind bars. Meanwhile, the Majdanek findings seemed to fall on deaf ears. More than a common desire to let the past fade into oblivion, the favoring of the Stammheim story over the Majdanek tribunal facilitated a treacherous recasting of guilt and complicity. By the late 1970s, the RAF had perpetrated about half of the thirty-four fatal attacks they would ultimately commit, a death toll that is a tiny fraction of the millions who were killed in the Holocaust. But the focus on Stammheim elevated the targets of RAF terrorism into dominant symbols. As if to disregard the history of Majdanek or other acts of German genocide, many construed the entire postwar nation as victims of leftist violence. If Marianne and Juliane points to the problems of representing and confronting rogue and state terror, von Trotta’s feminist vision nonetheless offers an uncommon perspective on the significance of the German Autumn within the postwar period. Her investigation of the margins between the personal and the political, evident both in her treatment of the architecture of public and private spaces and in her depiction of the sisters’ relationship, lays a foundation for discussing the shift ing sites of truth and power within German democracy. In an attempt to wipe out left ist militancy, policymakers instituted a series of controls on both

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political dissidence and its legal defense.30 This legislation placed the first restrictions on constitutional rights since the founding of the FRG. The Stammheim trials also extended the state’s incursion into the private life of the individual. When RAF inmates held hunger strikes and refused to attend their own hearings, authorities compelled them to force-feedings and, in several instances, prosecutors conducted the trials in the defendants’ absence. As Jeremy Varon has argued, these actions conveyed the state’s imperative that there be no space “outside-the-law.” Thus Stammheim became a “space of total confinement” that reinforced the state’s “monologic authority.”31 The injunctions of the Stammheim court made it difficult to dismiss a central message of Marianne and Juliane: that Germans remained in a concentrationary universe decades after the liberation of the death camps. But Varon’s account can also enable a new critique of the film. Von Trotta leaves open the question of Marianne’s murder under the wardens’ watch; when the film was released, conclusions hadn’t been drawn about the cause of the Stammheim deaths in October 1977. The subsequent consensus that the RAF inmates committed suicide gives new meaning to von Trotta’s investigation of the public/private divide in postwar German society. Meinhof’s and Ensslin’s decisions to take their own lives might be seen as an attempt to claim autonomy from the state power that was driven to annihilate them. Committing suicide, they used their bodies to delimit a discursive “outside” to prison law. But what a high price to pay.

Modes of Redress Already in the 1970s, critics doubted the agency of the Far Left, whether inside Stammheim or at large. In 1975 Spiegel editors prepared a set of pointed questions for Meinhof, Ensslin, and the other inmates; they asked about the perception that the RAF lacked “an influence on the masses” and had no “connection to a base.” The militants offered a telling reply. Within the FRG, they noted, there endured only a “trace of RAF politics.”32 Their response acknowledges a degree of defeat, but we can also take it toward a new line of inquiry. Where did the RAF’s political “trace” appear when Meinhof and Ensslin sat for years in solitary confinement, or when they were at the hour of their death? Where has it become manifest in the decades that have followed? The incarceration of the Far Left’s top cadre channeled their energies into a series of hopeless

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ultimatums. After armed struggle, first came implosion and then a general malaise that emptied out the RAF’s larger objectives. In its production and at its release, Marianne and Juliane carried vestiges of Meinhof’s and Ensslin’s lives, the compromises and choices they made—particularly as women—to resist state domination with guerrilla violence. Viewed today, the fi lm is an example of the continuing difficulty of accounting for militancy. Yet von Trotta’s reflections on spatial politics nevertheless make a feminist intervention at the levels of the political as well as the aesthetic. They capture the complex temper of the late 1970s, a time when women sought to counter political melancholy, reclaiming their bodies and transforming German society through all available means, from margin to center. Marianne and Juliane conveys the dynamics of collaboration and dissonance among women that charged this moment. To Giuliana Bruno’s modernist insight that “film spectatorship incarnates the metropolitan body,” von Trotta might counter that penal complexes and the techniques of visual surveillance function to control it, to still it.33 But, in a minor key, Marianne and Juliane also grants us purchase on the transgressive potentials that inhere in the built environment. The sisters’ subversive play with fabric objects contravenes the dictates of the police state. Their acts also gesture toward a new mode of design, where variably fashioned structures might enable autonomous challenges to tradition and state authority. Some have asserted that the most enduring effect of the German Autumn has been the divestment of constitutional rights and the entrenchment of federal power. Indeed, revolutionary violence could only accelerate this counterdemocratic tendency. And yet Marianne and Juliane, perhaps despite von Trotta’s intentions, indicates that the state’s grip isn’t so total, after all. More than a generation after 1977, her film still attracts a wide audience.34 It engages cinematic means to promote critiques of both government repression and political violence. If Marianne and Juliane discloses the structures and systems that control targets of suspicion, it also shows us how the targets might return that gaze, in other words, how the object might look back. As Marianne contends from inside the prison walls, the authorities will always have to vie with autonomous forces: “They’ll never pull us down from the windows,” she claims, “because they have no power over our souls.”35 The idealism and romance of these lines stem out of the militancy of the German Far Left and extend into a broad field

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of postmilitant culture. As we shall see in the next chapter, von Trotta’s attempt to align German history with the systemic oppression of women also set a precarious precedent for the next wave of culture that sought to make sense of postwar militancy and terrorism. The matters of autonomy and victimization that von Trotta explored would become increasingly difficult for artists and writers in the 1980s, especially when they were laid over the uneven terrain of gender politics.

5 Violence and the Tendenzwende Engendering Victims in the Novel and Film

The German Autumn peaked with the RAF-backed abduction of Lufthansa Flight 181 in October 1977. Hijackers from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) overtook the plane and its ninety-one passengers and crew, detouring the Boeing 737 from Mallorca to Dubai and onward to Bahrain, Yemen, and finally to the runways of the airport in Mogadishu, Somalia. When negotiations between the PLO, the RAF, and West German security reached a stalemate, the terrorists shot one of the Luft hansa pilots and doused the passengers with alcohol, preparing them for immolation. Then they started a countdown to death. Back in the Federal Republic, viewers sat riveted before their television sets, where history seemed to explode onto the screen. A series of images repeated over the five-day odyssey: maps of the Middle East and Africa, mug shots of militant women and men, diagrams of terrorist cell networks, and clips of the “Landshut” aircraft, stalled on the tarmac of distant airports. Across Europe, the German Autumn entered into the registers of collective memory as one of the most volatile outbreaks of political violence in the postwar period. The events of October 1977 were particularly momentous for Germans. The targeting of a German plane and its fragile human cargo awakened a

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shared sense of victimization. For the first time since World War II, Germans found themselves able to speak about being the targets—not the perpetrators—of political violence.1 But the divide between agents and victims was problematic for Germans, as it still is. Since Hitler, the nation has struggled with questions about agency, capitulation, and complicity in National Socialism. The eruption of the RAF just a generation after the Third Reich prompted some to speculate about an essentially “Germanic” inclination toward terror and domination. The shock of the Landshut hijacking opened the floodgates for a series of transitions in West German society. The government capitalized upon the attack as an opportunity to roll back constitutional rights. Already in 1972, Chancellor Willy Brandt had passed the Radikalenerlass, or “antiradicals decree,” which banned suspected communists and militants from civil and public service occupations, such as teaching. This law impinged upon the freedoms of many citizens, not just those who sympathized with the Far Left.2 The Federal Criminal Police expanded its powers and coordinated a systematic search for those aiding and abetting the RAF; this included border controls, wiretapping, house searches, and thousands of arrests. Many citizens who had nothing to do with the armed struggle got caught in this dragnet, and tensions rose, both within the state apparatus and among the German public. Computer profiling became common practice. It was a time when having long hair or wearing jeans was enough to attract police scrutiny. In October 1977 an international counterterrorism unit finally gained control of the Landshut hijacking, rescuing the remaining passengers and crew, shooting dead one of the assailants, and apprehending the rest. News of the Stammheim deaths and Schleyer’s killing soon followed. Although the RAF’s second and third generations would continue their militant campaigns until the late 1990s, the Far Left’s most acute phase of violence was passing. As those right of center regrouped and set the stage for Helmut Kohl’s election in 1982, many on the Left found themselves disillusioned by both the ideals and agendas of 1968. The Federal Republic entered a Tendenzwende as it turned toward a phase of conservative consolidation. This transition was clearly noted in German politics and culture of the 1980s. It shifted the coordinates of national identity and motivated new inquiries into the topics of historical progress and the status of the individual subject within civil society. This discursive terrain has been

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closely surveyed within German Studies, but little attention has been given to the ways that these discussions influenced the cultural response to the German Autumn. A key moment of this transition was the Historikerstreit, a public dispute about the legacy of National Socialism. Jürgen Habermas’s contributions to this exchange deepened German—and European—self-understanding. He criticized the conservative propensity to relativize the crimes of the Third Reich, arguing that fascism was not simply a defense against a Soviet threat, but rather an expression of retrograde nationalism and capitalist crisis. For Habermas, there was no way to “normalize” German history; the postwar Republic had a responsibility to continually recall the lessons of its past.3 These claims aligned with a guiding thesis of Habermas’s scholarship: that modernity is an “incomplete project,” a mission that needs to be continued instead of rejected, as some critics have implied. His critique of the “postmodern condition” helped to disclose the connections and ruptures among German cultural currents that ranged from outmoded narratives of romance and heroism to aesthetic interventions pitched to investigate binary systems and decenter human subjectivity. Regarding the literature and cinema of the 1980s and early 1990s that treat the matter of terror, we see instances where the effects of postmodernism and postmilitancy overlapped and intersected. Comparing selected novels and films of this period, we can discern a restructuring of national identity that unfolded over the course of the Tendenzwende. Through this, we also gain a fuller understanding of the concept of postmilitant culture, its potential as well as its problems.

Taking the Woman Hostage: Delius and Dürrenmatt To a great extent, the questions of national and cultural identity in the 1980s pivoted around the problem of how to account for the terrors and traumas of Germany’s twentieth century. Who were the victims and agents of the German Autumn? How were they defined and described in different discourses and narrative modes? How did postwar explosions of violence link back to the era of fascism? Two novels of the mid-1980s grapple with the forces—both material and symbolic—that produce, engender, and register the targets and perpetrators of terrorism. They are Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Der Auftrag (The Assignment, 1986) and Friedrich Christian Delius’s Mogadischu Fensterplatz (Windowseat at Mogadishu, 1987). Significantly, these

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novels connect the investigation of national and cultural identity to that of gender identity. Each text “takes” a woman hostage and threatens her with political and sexual violence. Interestingly, these feminine protagonists carry as many traits of the victims of October 1977 as they do the agents of RAF violence. The novels fuse together victim and agent. The two narratives also link the predicament of postwar terrorism to the state terror that gripped Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Bringing gender to the fore, Delius and Dürrenmatt play out some of the concerns that inflected debates about the history of World War II during the Tendenzwende, particularly the difficult matter of wartime rape. In the 1980s documentation of violent assaults on German women—perpetrated by “liberating” Soviet forces—was widely circulated and became a platform upon which some Germans began to see themselves as war victims. In their reflections on transnational militancy and terrorism, Delius and Dürrenmatt evoke the horror of these war rapes. Their literary strategies lead them to very different ends, but the two novels, considered together, provide a good case for examining the renegotiation of national, cultural, and gendered identity that was taking place in the first decades after the German Autumn. F. C. Delius’s Windowseat at Mogadishu is a historical fiction about 1970s-era hijackings.4 The story splices together different accounts of the Mogadishu abduction to focus on the condition of the individual hostage. Delius’s novel draws upon airline culture—the strictures of seatbelts and tray tables, the wait to be relieved of remaining service items— to convey the scale of terror that develops when the indignities of long-haul travel metastasize into a death game. Together with Ein Held der inneren Sicherheit (A Hero of Internal Security, 1981) and Himmelfahrt eines Staatsfeindes (The Ascension of a Public Enemy, 1992), the novel is part of Delius’s trilogy Deutscher Herbst (German Autumn). The frameworks of restraint in Windowseat at Mogadishu might appear contiguous with the architectures of confinement that Margarethe von Trotta captured in Marianne and Juliane. But where von Trotta alludes to the dangerous notion that RAF militants were trapped in a situation comparable to that of the victims of German fascism, Delius’s voyeuristic angle into the Landshut hijacking appeals to a masochistic interest and leads the reader into a fog of misidentification wherein all Germans might cast themselves as “victims of history.” However, what that history is and who the real perpetrators were remain unclear in Delius’s writing.5

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Like Marianne and Juliane, Windowseat at Mogadishu also illuminates the sexual politics that shaped postwar Germany. Delius designates the figure Andrea Boländer as the primary hostage; she is a young zoologist taking a holiday break from her boyfriend back home. Andrea recalls the main character of Heinrich Böll’s Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, 1974), but a sharper comparison can be drawn between Windowseat at Mogadishu and Dürrenmatt’s novel The Assignment.6 Dürrenmatt places at center stage a feminine figure called simply by her first initial, F.: a documentary filmmaker working in the Arab world, she drinks Campari in the morning, wears a long fur over her denim pantsuit, and breaks off from her crew to go it alone. Neither Delius nor Dürrenmatt explicitly names the RAF as actors in the terrorist scenarios they describe, but both novels are deeply imprinted by the blowback of the Far Left. With their scenes of feminine victimization and defiance, Window Seat at Mogadishu and The Assignment variously engage and test the tropes of “woman,” “militant,” and “terrorist” that circulated and sometimes intersected in Western Europe in the 1970s and 80s.7 RAF members drew a lot of attention, but it wasn’t just the Far Left that was getting noticed; as the postwar economy flourished, professional women attained an exceptional degree of public prominence. They entered new areas of the workforce and called for constitutional reform, including expanded rights. The market catered to the demands of a changing world and launched advertising schemes that infused cityscapes with brighter colors and hypersexualized energies. The message of this media surge was mixed: the public was confronted with pictures of alluring, strong, and even threatening women, but at the same time it also witnessed a conservative uptick through headlines and articles that announced a “return to femininity.”8 The heightened presence of women—both real and represented—in the public sphere reshaped national identity. The Vaterland began to accommodate and enable feminine agency in unprecedented ways. These social changes were attended by new formations in culture and critical thought. Postmodern aesthetics expanded into art, architecture, literature, and philosophy. Meanwhile, the waves of French structuralism and poststructuralism—initiated by thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Lacan—were starting to crest in the West German world of ideas. Habermas had already warned, very early on, against these tendencies. He doubted the capacity of these theories

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and practices to investigate structures of power, both material and discursive. Over and against them, he argued for the power of communicative action. In his Adorno Prize lecture from 1980, Habermas criticized both poststructuralist thought and the notion that postmodernism enabled a radical departure from modernity, calling it neoconservative and ahistorical.9 To his mind, this perspective could not contend with either the complexity of culture in late capitalism or the gains and losses of modernism itself. The contexts of the Tendenzwende informed both Habermas’s thinking and the reception of his thought in German society. Countering the Left’s disillusionment after the German Autumn, Habermas recalled the emergence of the social movements of the 1960s and defended their emancipatory potential. As he saw it, the New Left’s incremental steps to open communication about democratic change advanced the Enlightenment project. The New Left also defied the problematic belief, held on the far end of the political spectrum, that by rejecting the traditions of Western rationality they would liberate themselves from domination. Although Habermas wrote relatively little about the women’s movement, it is clear that German feminists in the 1980s doing their own work to recalibrate their initiatives in a changed political climate. As Dagmar Herzog has demonstrated, the Tendenzwende presented a paradox of postwar morality. For example, the Kohl government dialed back the clock on “sex-affirmative” curricula in the state schools, but at the same time sexual liberalization continued apace.10 Feminists were actively involved in these transitions. On the one hand, they were attuned to the poststructuralist theoretical investigations of sex and gender; on the other, they fought—in very material ways—to fend off the incursions of Kohl’s conservatism. Meanwhile, the continuing threat of the Far Left posed a unique challenge for some sectors of the women’s movement. Now that Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin had become household names, the task of differentiating radical feminism from left ist militancy had become more complicated. Windowseat at Mogadishu and The Assignment are part of this cultural moment, as they present female protagonists who are caught up between agency and objectification. Their heroines alternate between victim and perpetrator positions, embodying at once the recent memories of the “liberated woman,” the urban guerrilla, and the vulnerable hostage. The intersecting tropes of women, militants, and terrorists that appear in

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these two novels mirror back a facet of the West German public sphere in the 1970s and 1980s. Reinforcement of internal security measures made it impossible to forget the looming danger of the armed struggle, especially the disquieting photos of young women who were enemies of state. At the same time, the media became saturated with images of women doing things they had never done before, including taking power. The parallel campaigns—most-wanted notices and commercial publicity— led some to infer that if feminists were not exactly outlaws, they were nonetheless a distinct threat. As Alice Schwarzer contended in an editorial for Emma at the height of the German Autumn, the media’s alarm about women militants was really a reaction to their anxiety about the Frauenbewegung.11 Women’s full participation in public life was taken as an attack on traditional values. It wasn’t just conservatives who saw it this way. Margarete Mitscherlich, the psychoanalyst who coauthored the influential study of postwar German society, Die Unfähigkeit zu Trauern (The Inability to Mourn, 1967), published a report on gender and terrorism in 1978 that portrayed women as irrational, weak, and fanatical. Incapable of reflecting on the repercussions of their actions, the female subjects were seen as more likely than men to act violently once they had stepped away from the bonds of home and family.12 Most importantly, as the Germanist Sarah Colvin has demonstrated, Mitscherlich’s study maintained that the feminist movement was “exacerbating the problem,” since “emancipation leads women to identify and compete with men, reaching for weapons as phallic symbols.”13 It was a combination of these developments that configured women like Meinhof and Ensslin as militant sex bombs, dissidents who challenged bourgeois femininity in the interests of the anti-imperialist struggle.14 In war-torn Germany, the deutsche Frau had been imagined as a “pale mother” to the nation; in the first postwar decades, she kept to the church, the kitchen, and the kindergarten.15 With the rise of the RAF, this woman was suddenly armed and dangerous. In the Tendenzwende gender identity was being fundamentally renegotiated. We see this process unfold in Windowseat at Mogadishu and The Assignment. Delius, a German, and Dürrenmatt, a Swiss, play off both mainstream and countercultural profiles of modern women and make extended references to the Far Left in their novels. But whereas Delius’s main character, Andrea, endures the trial of terrorism to emerge redeemed as a “natural”

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woman, Dürrenmatt’s protagonist, F., enters deeply into historical conflicts that resist reconciliation. Although she is taken hostage and threatened with rape, her fearlessness actually matches that of the militant women who stole the limelight during the RAF years. As the narrative proceeds, F.’s investigation sets off a series of mistakes and missed encounters that eludes any standard definition of the woman, the militant, or the terrorist. While Dürrenmatt ventures into poststructuralist experiment in his tale of abduction, Delius sticks to the standards of bestselling fiction. Why do both authors assign their hostages the feminine gender? After the influx of second-wave feminism, the figure of the damsel in distress had all but lost its viability in European literary fiction. But in choosing Andrea and F. as their protagonists, Delius and Dürrenmatt primed their novels to explore timely issues of subject formation, both gendered and national. Part of Kohl’s agenda in the 1980s was to strengthen West German identity; his nationalist rhetoric and targeted deployment of German symbols sparked off heated disputes. Placing Windowseat at Mogadishu and The Assignment in the literary-critical context of the mid1980s—that is, just after the German Autumn—we see how the problems of militancy and terror were handled in the first phase of recovery. Whereas it leads Delius to consolidate a historical fiction, Dürrenmatt uses it to deconstruct documentary objectivity. Anxieties of perception charge The Assignment, and a number of disciplinary forces emerge to brook them. Fundamentalism and digital surveillance are two such regimes that Dürrenmatt invokes. Each of the novel’s twenty-four chapters is composed as a single, breathless, and, at times, beautiful sentence, but this rigorous form (actually it’s a novella) is no guarantee for literary self-sufficiency. Dürrenmatt puts totalization and fragmentation into traction, using the condition of the hostage to examine the construction of the contemporary subject. Unlike most of his other writing, in this case the subject is markedly femininized. As several scholars have noted, Dürrenmatt conceived this novel as an attempt to complete or at least respond to Ingeborg Bachmann’s unfinished manuscript for Der Fall Franza (The Book of Franza, 1973), a postmodern investigation of nationalism and the “gender war.”16 In order to tell his story, Dürrenmatt’s protagonist necessarily had to be a woman. The Assignment starts out with a mystery: the body of a European woman named Tina von Lambert is found raped and murdered at the ru-

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ins of the Al-Hakim monument in an unspecified but presumably North African or Middle Eastern country called M. The desert location evokes the foreign terrains visited by German militants, such as Yemen and Jordan, where they trained with Fatah guerrillas. F. is assigned to make a documentary on von Lambert’s life and death. She learns that another woman, the journalist Jytte Sørensen, has also been raped and murdered, and that F. herself is next in line. As the plot progresses, the fictive mode travels from the novelistic toward the experimental, often frustrating expectation. In search of clues, F. interviews officials implicated in the two murders and moves ever deeper into the desert to find the site of the crime. When she gets there, intelligence agents take her hostage. Dürrenmatt’s novel departs from “the assignment” of solving Tina von Lambert’s murder and considers larger questions about language, history, and power. Windowseat at Mogadishu, meanwhile, takes a different tack. Delius’s novel is one long claim of damages. Much of the language follows the formulas of the Victims’ Compensation Law of 1976.17 “Bodily Injuries,” “Place of Incident,” “Possible Relationship to Perpetrator”— each of these blanks on the claim form solicits Andrea’s memory of the hijacking.18 At first she resists the questionnaire’s demands for proof and substantiation. Merely reading the document, Andrea finds, returns her to the confines of the hijacked plane. It summons forth the sights, sounds, and sensations that she wanted to forget: the “dark, black face” of Jassid, her captor, and the painful swelling of her bound hands.19 But then she gives in and inventories her injuries. Checking each limb, testing each memory, she makes herself whole again over the course of Delius’s story. The survey becomes more than an expository device for the novel: it documents Andrea’s recollection, delivering her out of the state of emergency and toward resolution, precisely the kind of closure that Dürrenmatt resists in The Assignment.

Documenting the State of Terror If Windowseat at Mogadishu is an account of the body in pain, it offers a specific perspective on the contingencies of the subject, a subject, we shall see, which is shot through with sexualized frissons. Through the device of the claim form, Delius plots out a body that is categorically female. Andrea’s subjective development materializes in what is perhaps the most remarkable scene of the novel: the weirdly extended description

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of the protagonist’s midhijack menstruation, which Delius imagines to bring about a revelation. Preparing for an emergency landing, Andrea assumes the crash position, catches the scent of her unwashed body, and suddenly recognizes her agency: “All sorts of bodily odors condensed and concentrated into a peculiar note, into the personal, distinguishing feature of Andrea Boländer. That’s it, that’s what will remain of you. Your scent. Unmistakable!”20 Nearing disaster, her body manifests itself as a locus of resistance. It demands to be recognized, even as it sheds and heaves in cycles of collapse and recovery. Here, two-thirds of the way through the novel, Andrea names herself for the first time since entering the letters into the blanks on the claim form. The Germanist Franz Futterknecht views the hijacking in Delius’s novel not as an incident of bodily harm, but rather as the advent of Andrea’s subjective rehabilitation.21 Perhaps the truth of such a violent event is more complicated. The incident renews Andrea’s self-recognition, but it also measures the value of her life to both the hijackers and the federal authorities that would make claims on her. When the terrorists give their ultimatum, Andrea realizes that, while she may serve as a pawn in their scheme, her physical body remains a singular asset.22 Only alive does she have any negotiable value, as she and the other passengers embody the hijackers’ Kapital.23 Against Futterknecht’s interpretation, this reading opens a new angle onto Andrea’s literary desire, voiced at the end of the novel, to write something about her ordeal, an article, a book, anything that would move beyond the bounds of the claim form that trains our focus on her body and obliterates her conscience, her doubts. To see this possibility, however, we must read Windowseat at Mogadishu against the grain; we must bring Delius’s drive toward the biological essence of the “eternal feminine” into contradiction with the possibility of Andrea’s literary potential. Here, The Assignment provides counterpoint. Dürrenmatt takes us even further from Futterknecht’s assertion of the stabilized subject. The anxieties of his novel sometimes register as a thunderous shudder and other times figure in textual detail. An excerpt from Kierkegaard that appears twice in the novel—first as the epigraph, and then reformulated in the body of the book—conveys this dissonance. F. discovers the Kierkegaard citation midway through her investigation; she finds it written on a discarded piece of paper in a hotel room where von Lambert once stayed. Parenthetical notes in Danish punctu-

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ate Dürrenmatt’s German, emphasizing the provisional nature of F.’s reading: “What should come, what should strange times ( fremtiden) bring? I do not know, I have no presentiment. When a black widow (edderkop?) plunges down from a fi xed point to its consequences, it constantly sees an empty space (tomt rum?) before it, in which it cannot find a firm foothold ( fodfaeste?), no matter how it kicks about.”24 Recognizing her own predicament in the message, F. is overcome by a wave of terror. The “strange times” that she glosses from the excerpt derive from Kierkegaard’s reflections about the future in Either/Or (1843), the influential discourse on the aesthetic and ethical “stages” of existence.25 Here, for Kierkegaard, the future is a moment both unknowable and still profoundly determined. “Thus is it with me,” F. continues: “before me perpetually an empty space (tomt rum?), what drives me forward is a consequence that lies behind (bag) me. This life is backward (bagvendt) and puzzling (raedsomt?), intolerable.”26 As the novel proceeds, F. realizes that her fate is contingent upon a matrix of historical discord. Past conflicts stipulate a radically insecure aftermath, impelling Dürrenmatt’s world toward alienation and existential angst. Against the warnings of a secret service officer, F. leaves the monitoring station that is both controlled by war veterans and protected by the rule of law. She traces von Lambert’s and Sørensen’s footsteps and senses danger, yet she cannot resist the pull of her obscure destiny. As explosions and crashing noises bear down upon her, F. recalls the insight of an old colleague: what constitutes the individual is nothing more than “a countless chain of selves emerging from the future.”27 Avoiding the essentialism of Windowseat at Mogadishu, Dürrenmatt does not reify the human subject in his account of terror.28 He destabilizes this subject and concludes the novel with a postmodern ending, mixing different styles and finishing with the flourish of a media spectacle. A rapacious attacker reels off Homeric pentameter and takes hold of F. Once she throws off his embrace, tanks arrive on the scene and the story whites out in the flare of camera flashes. Dürrenmatt’s concluding scene recalls the liberation of the Landshut craft, when a special unit of antiterrorism forces stormed the plane and the international media swept in to capture the event. In the beginning of The Assignment, F. sets out to shoot a film that will be a “total portrait” of the world, but over the course of the novel, such attempts at documentary objectivity devolve into a system of “ruthless observation” (unbarmherzige Beobachtung)29 that crushes subjective identity,

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reducing idiosyncrasy to standard iteration. Departing from her assignment “to document,” F. puts herself on a path from which there is no return to the certainties of realism—no stable subject, no total portrait. In Windowseat at Mogadishu, meanwhile, Delius relies heavily on documentary frameworks to organize his narrative. Andrea reconstructs herself as she completes the claim form. By filling in the blanks, she answers back to the federal inquiry and confers legitimacy to it. With reference to Althusser, we can see the report as an ideological apparatus: it reinforces the citizenship of the subjects of political violence, reconsolidating the German state.30 The narrator’s bureaucratic duty becomes an exercise in normalization. In the first pages of the novel, Andrea takes a somewhat cynical stance toward the compensation application, but as the story develops, this skepticism dissipates. Delius’s lack of cynicism sets Windowseat at Mogadishu apart from an earlier German novel that used a government document as its template: Ernst von Salomon’s Der Fragebogen (The Questionnaire), published in 1951.31 Interned by U.S. forces in 1945 and 1946, von Salomon, a prominent screenwriter in the 1930s and 1940s, based this work on the Allied Powers’ “131 Fragen der Entnazifizierungsbehörden,” a survey issued to German nationals suspected of Nazi collaboration. The Questionnaire offered a derisive overview of the country’s recent history, asking whether the U.S. government was eligible to propagate democracy abroad, given its own will to power. It’s easy to see the novel as an attempt to disassociate von Salomon from the crimes of Nazism, and one could even read it as a collective apologia for all Germans, but at least its cynicism helped to investigate the extent to which administrative taskmastering could really work through the traumas of fascism, or whether it would merely contain and preserve them for future retrieval.32 Von Salomon’s challenge to the Allied survey in The Questionnaire aligns, notably, with several points in Habermas’s reflections on German history in the lecture “Keine Normalisierung der Vergangenheit” (“No Normalization of the Past”), delivered in 1985 in the midst of the Historikerstreit. Here Habermas countered the “normalizing” arguments, advanced by some public intellectuals, that National Socialists were justified in their “defense” against the perceived threat of bolshevism. According to Ernst Nolte, a prominent voice in the debates, the atrocities of the Third Reich could have erupted anywhere; they were not unique to Germany. As Nolte notoriously argued in the Frankfurter Allgemeine in

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1986, the Holocaust itself was an understandable, if terrible, overreaction to geopolitical crisis.33 In Windowseat at Mogadishu, Delius avoids the relativism that Habermas criticized, but the literary substance of the novel nonetheless corresponds with the “normalizing” direction of Nolte’s historical interpretation.34 Through Andrea’s account, Delius sketches out possible correspondences between German anti-Semitism and its counterpart in Fatah, but the overarching mission of the novel is to restore the protagonist to postwar normalcy. When we read Windowseat at Mogadishu and The Assignment in relation to the Historikerstreit—both novels were published in the middle of the controversy—important differences between the two texts become apparent. In their reflections on militancy and terrorism, Delius and Dürrenmatt touch on questions about the representation of the subjects and objects of violence, questions that recharge the problems of national identity. After the traumas of the Holocaust, after the social changes of second-wave feminism, how might language reconstruct the subject? How might writers challenge conventions of literary characterization? Windowseat at Mogadishu and The Assignment both consider the status of the political hostage, but their narrative strategies take them to diverging ends. Delius follows the formulas of docudrama without establishing the cynical distancing of von Salomon’s Questionnaire. Dürrenmatt, meanwhile, exhausts the limits of realism. To a great degree, this differential is determined by the authors’ presentation of their protagonists. After being liberated by the German unit, Andrea recounts the traumas of the German Autumn and, through this task, bolsters her identity; the claim form simultaneously interpellates her into the Federal Republic and grounds her in her physiology. In contradistinction, Dürrenmatt’s heroine is progressively decentered and deracinated. Although F. is identified as a German national, her character is influenced by the figure of Jytte Sørensen, a Dane. The novel refracts the stable subject into multiple images, leaving the narrator unnamed but for the initial F. Read through the critical lens of Althusser’s or especially Lacan’s work, the letter that stands for her name carries a series of associations: Frau, fraulich, feminin. From these associations, other poststructuralist propositions could be deduced, such as Lacan’s provocative expression la femme n’existe pas or the multiple pronouncements of the “death of the author.” But even without pursuing this theoretical trajectory, it’s clear that Dürrenmatt’s decision to unname his narrator militates

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against the assumption of a solid identity, whether personal or political. Thus, within the novel’s logic, there is no woman, no authentic document. No normalization of the past.

Rape and the Nation In the 1980s, the question of how to document and testify to violence became a particular concern for German feminists. A number of books and memoirs appeared that tried to make sense of the mass rapes of German women during and after World War II, crimes that were committed by the occupying military forces, especially the Soviet Red Army. It’s worth bringing this body of work into comparison with The Assignment and Windowseat at Mogadishu, for it anticipates the authors’ concerns with narration and subjectivity. Historical research into war rape, together with a proliferation of paperback “firsthand” accounts, prompted a reexamination of gender identity among Germans.35 This reflection took place at the national level, but also internationally, as scholars of history and culture entered into the discussion. Encircling the once-silenced traumas of violence against German women, some of the texts under discussion constructed a tenuous arena in which Germans could position themselves as victims, not agents, of National Socialism and war.36 In many cases, these writings also functioned to deflect the necessary work of confronting German crimes against humanity. As the historian Atina Grossman has argued, documentation of sexual assault was sometimes deployed to confirm Germans’ self-identification as the objects of abuse. The term Missbrauch (abuse, especially sexual abuse), which frequently appeared in testimonies, seemed to extend out from the individual rape accounts and into an experience of collective, national subjugation. It conveyed the problematic notion, as Grossman puts it, of “all the ways in which the German Volk as a whole had been woefully abused—by the Nazis, by Hitler, who reneged on his promises of national renewal and led them into a war that could not be won, by the losses on the front and the Allied bombing raids, and then by defeat, occupation, and a denazification that was generally perceived as arbitrary and unfair.”37 In other words, these revelations worked in two ways: they documented the disgrace of German women, yet they also constituted these women as subjects of a victim-nation. Their accounts emerged in force at the same time that Windowseat at Mogadishu and The Assignment

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were published, but a close analysis of the matter of documenting the rapes did not follow for several years. These intersecting debates about the representation of violence against women sharpened questions that are salient to the examination of aesthetic treatments of militancy and terror during the Tendenzwende. Around 1987 Helke Sander, the filmmaker and cofounder of the Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frauen (Action Committee on the Liberation of Women, an important constituent of the APO), began making a documentary about the rape of German women. Released in 1992, BeFreier und BeFreite (Liberators Take Liberties: War, Rapes, Children) was credited with sparking discussion of the sexual politics of World War II and its aftermath, but, at the same time, it also became the object of intense scrutiny by scholars who detected several flaws: the film’s “revisionist” and “militant” focus on the German experience, its near exclusion of atrocities delivered upon Jews and other victims of National Socialism, its lack of selfreflection, and its problematic incorporation of documentary evidence.38 The film provoked a new round of debates in Germany and abroad; in 1995 the American journal October published a special issue in response, “Berlin 1945: War and Rape.” The style of Liberators Take Liberties has been compared to that of the film Germany in Autumn (1978).39 It juxtaposes archival material with several staged interviews and draws upon the myths of Antigone and Penthesilea. But unlike the more intersubjective compositional strategies we have seen in Alexander Kluge’s work, Liberators is presented as a monologic lesson. In it, Sander endeavors to count and measure the damages inflicted upon German women by Soviet soldiers. Her empiricist slant parallels Delius’s proclivity for closure and completion in Windowseat at Mogadishu. Comparing Sander and Delius, we strike upon another parallel. Both narratives constitute German identity in opposition to an “Other.” For Sander, the Other is the Soviet Red Army; for Delius, it’s the Red Army Faction. In an essay on Liberators Take Liberties, Sander insists that she wanted to stick with “hard facts”; indeed, much of the documentary is devoted to demography and statistical analysis.40 This empirical emphasis, however, obscures fundamental issues. Sander doesn’t pose questions about the Eastern Front, for example, whether German soldiers raped the women among their enemies, or whether the German victims’ complicity in Nazism might shade our interpretation of the events. The film’s narrator

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estimates that 1.9 million women were raped by Red Army troops. This large figure is a plausible estimate of the casualties. But Sander’s fi xation on the reckoning of this number presents ethical problems that the film doesn’t address. Shortly after the first screenings of Liberators, Grossman wrote a review that criticized the documentary’s myopic focus on data. In an article for the journal frauen und film, Grossman emphasized the importance of statistical accuracy, but at the same time she acknowledged that historians would probably never manage to calculate exact numbers for the rapes.41 Sander’s “noncontextualized” pursuit of “real information,” she maintained, actually distorts the representation of the rapes. Further, Sander’s “focus on numbers” stages a contest for “the status of victim,” one that puts Jews in contest with women.42 Watching Liberators, the viewer must concentrate on what Sander calls the “gender war” between Russian men and German women, and so loses sight of the larger conflicts and ideologies that fueled German fascism. The critiques of dehistoricization and empiricism in Sander’s documentary—well known to Germanists in the early 1990s—can be brought to bear on Windowseat at Mogadishu. If Sander wants to count up the victims of war rape, Delius seeks narrative control by naming the victims of terrorism. The formulas of his novel feminize the status of the victim, quite like the calculus of Sander’s documentary. Delius’s account of the German Autumn also plays into a peculiar vindication that Grossman identified in Liberators: his dramatization of Far Left hijackings depicts the victim as at once violated and confirmed.43 For Sander and Delius, it seems, the best vehicle for this double operation is the body of a woman. Completing the federal claim form, Delius suggests, Andrea enters her full name into the official record and so takes the first steps toward overcoming her ordeal. Against the neat closure of Delius’s historical fiction, Dürrenmatt pursues an open inquiry. Abstracting and erasing temporal and spatial coordinates, he unfolds multiple sites for the reader to participate in the text’s meaning. The literary critic Margaret Scanlan maintains that The Assignment refutes two key oppositions: first between self and other, and then between democracy and terror.44 The novel explores the limited capacity of literary realism to either secure individual subjectivity or convey the full force of global antagonisms. Dürrenmatt breaks down the smooth narrative arc that obtains in much postmilitant literary fiction. A

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closer look at the handling of gender in The Assignment, however, casts doubt on Scanlan’s interpretation of the novel. In fact, it shows a key parallel with Delius’s postmilitancy.

Postmilitancy and the Postmodern The open inquiry that shapes The Assignment aligns with literary strategies that developed in postmodern writing in the 1980s. It also leads us to ask how the concept of postmilitant culture that I’m testing in this book might correspond to the concept of the postmodern. The postmodern is perhaps best defined in relation to its precursor, the modern. Within literature either it can denote the end of modernism or, alternatively, it can signal an interrogation of the devices of authorship, structure, and narration that are central to the modern. Postmilitancy relates to militancy in a similar way. To lay it out as an analogy, modern is to postmodern as militant is to postmilitant. This analogy is relational. In other words, I am not positing a link between the modern and the militant, nor between the postmodern and the postmilitant. Rather, what matters is the way that the latter terms respond to their precursors. If there is a spectrum of postmodern culture, ranging from the affirmative to the critical, in the case of postmilitancy we see a comparably wide range of positions. Reading The Assignment and Windowseat at Mogadishu, it becomes evident that neither of the two novels achieves a critical postmilitancy. Delius’s inclination toward closure demarcates the “before and after” of the German Autumn. Dürrenmatt, on the other hand, uses several postmodernist strategies, but only to intensify the prevalent fascination with violence and terror. In the conclusion of The Assignment we will see that this fascination bears a misogynist charge that is at odds with the sharpest insights of postmilitant thought. The Assignment takes a postmodern perspective that can be clearly distinguished from the realism of Windowseat at Mogadishu. Delius’s Andrea Boländer follows the directions of the claim form, and so formats herself as a new, feminine subject of the state. Dürrenmatt’s narrator, meanwhile, offers a fragmented account of transnational militancy and terror; the narrative voice resists the reconciliation of documentary form. The postmodern and poststructuralist devices of The Assignment convey the shocks of both guerrilla warfare and the government’s backlash against it. Despite these differences, both novels nevertheless betoken the conservatism that

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Habermas criticized in his reflections on the postmodern condition. A comparison of the ways the two works conclude makes this manifest. The Assignment is a dynamic exploration of literary and linguistic conventions, yet it configures a suspect sexual politics. Like the memoirs that Sander explores in Liberators, Dürrenmatt stages a rape that enacts the violation and confirmation of the novel’s victim. In a concluding chapter of The Assignment, F. reviews archival footage of a scene in which a beastly “creature” ravages and murders Sørensen. To describe the assailant, Dürrenmatt uses language similar to that of the war rape accounts that were circulating in the 1980s. Not unlike a soldier from the Bolshevik “hordes,” Dürrenmatt’s foreign rapist doesn’t speak, but just moans; his face is “greedy, fleshy, vacant.”45 He abuses and then kills off his victim, but in the end the woman is sanctified, elevated by the crime. Sørensen’s dead body lies “among the holy men.”46 Here the opposing categories of victim and perpetrator are reinscribed, as is the opposition between Self (German, Westerner) and Other. Scanlan’s premise about the suspension of such dichotomies doesn’t hold, especially when it comes down to gender in The Assignment. Although Dürrenmatt refuses to name and number the figures of terrorism, he nonetheless describes victims that are as categorically feminine as those of Delius’s literary imagination. The deconstructive operations of The Assignment are undermined by the novel’s own reinscription of traditional gender roles. The conclusion of Windowseat at Mogadishu depends, to a great degree, on this same constitutive opposition. Moreover, it draws upon sexual difference to secure the national identity that is central to the narrative. The terrorist attack heightens Andrea’s sense of herself as both a woman and, importantly, a German. After security forces take command of the hijackers, Andrea flees from the plane and runs across the fields surrounding the Mogadishu airport. She wants to escape from the terrorists, but fi nds herself quickly surrounded by military personnel and photographers. To Andrea, these men look no different than Jassid, the head hijacker. Deflecting them, she runs away and asks herself if “now maybe all men look like him, like Jassid.”47 Over the course of the novel, Delius attempts to portray Andrea as a modern, autonomous woman, but this reductive divide between masculine and feminine ontology places Windowseat at Mogadishu on the side of conservatism. The feminine subjectivity that Delius constructs does not function to investigate gender roles. Instead it becomes a means through which to

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heighten the political tensions that run through the narrative. As the novel ends, Andrea steels herself against “Jassid and all the Jassidpeople.”48 The precarious position of the woman hostage opens out onto a world of historical conflict. Seen “through Western eyes,” as Edward Said argued in an article in 1980, such a portrayal of helplessness makes this world only more “vulnerable to military aggression.”49 Delius’s sexual binary mirrors another dyad, between Europe and its Others, especially Africa and Asia. The characterization of the female hostage in both Windowseat at Mogadishu and The Assignment is a telling sign of the Tendenzwende. As if to ward off the danger of the RAF’s militant women, Delius and Dürrenmatt move their female protagonists back to the side of the victim and permit the reader to imagine a society newly fortified against the threat of militancy and terror, both foreign and domestic. In their conclusions, the novels present the two main tendencies of the postmodern that Habermas described in his lecture in 1980. Delius uses posttraumatic recovery in a troubled attempt to normalize the German past. Dürrenmatt, on the other hand, enjoins the reader in a literary venture set to decenter the grand narratives of modernity. There is one narrative that he leaves intact, however: male dominance. The conclusion of The Assignment presents an unambiguous stroke of misogyny. Describing the attack on Sørensen, the narrator notes that the woman “had wanted it all, her rape and her death.”50 The last shot of Sørensen shows her face “twisted [in a] grimace of lust.”51 The pornographic tone of this scene—unusual for Dürrenmatt’s writing—works a reactionary effect. Subjugating and victimizing the woman, the scene also calls out for her protection. Although Dürrenmatt steers clear of the nationalistic paternalism evident in Windowseat at Mogadishu, he nonetheless shares Delius’s blindness to the prospect that the woman could deflect an attack (or instigate her own assault, as women on the Far Left did many times). The authors’ shared interest in the figure of the new German woman, evidenced in their depictions of Andrea and F., stops at the surface. Women’s truly radical potential—one of the lessons of the RAF’s emergence—doesn’t factor into either narrative. These two novels of the Tendenzwende write off some of the most complex developments of 1970s and 1980s. Delius and Dürrenmatt invoke the legacy of left ist militancy, but their depictions of women don’t account for the broader, deeper transitions of the period, which included the

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RAF’s deployment of women at the forefront of the armed struggle, as well as the ways that the Frauenbewegung put women at the center of the public sphere. German feminists advanced the Enlightenment project that Habermas reexamined, expanding it into new directions and calling for new modes of communication, negotiation, and consent. But at the same time they also turned some postmodern strategies into tools to dismantle traditional hierarchies of sex and nation and to test out alternative identities. Feminists found the critical fulcrum of postmodernism, a point that lies outside the scope of Delius’s novel as well as Dürrenmatt’s. The cultural shift that surrounded the production of both texts calls for an alternative reading of Germany’s postwar turbulence, one that travels beyond militancy to illuminate sites of change. The works of art and literature examined in the next two chapters, produced in the 1990s and 2000s, offer good opportunities for this kind of analysis.

6 Anatomies of Protest and Resistance Meinhof, Fischer

Ulrike Meinhof’s body was found hanging from the window grillwork in Stammheim Prison on the morning of May 9, 1976, Mother’s Day. Investigators ruled the cause of death as suicide. Two days later Meinhof’s sister called for a second postmortem, but the official report remained the same. Protesters expressed incredulity and outrage; many saw Meinhof’s death as a covert execution. Demonstrations denouncing the report broke out across West Germany and retaliatory bombs were set off at the U.S. air base in Frankfurt and as far away as Paris and Nice. Thousands came to mourn when the RAF leader was buried on May 16 in Berlin. Meinhof was given two funerals—one in 1976, the other, much smaller, in 2002, when her daughter had her remains reinterred. In the interim between these two rites, some of the deepest impressions of postmilitant culture were taken. Journalists recalculated the casualties of terrorism and counterterrorism; the German government sought various means to control the damage of the Far Left. Meanwhile, hundreds of artists and writers registered the shock of the German Autumn in their works. For many, Meinhof was their muse.1 One of the most protracted reflections on Meinhof’s life and death is the Tanztheaterstück titled Ulrike Meinhof, which Johann Kresnik choreographed

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and staged multiple times from 1987 to 2010. During this period the production switched locations from Heidelberg to Berlin and was later revived in Bonn and Darmstadt.2 As the work evolved, it responded to the enormous shifts that took place in German society, particularly the collapse of communism and the unification of East and West Germany. Geopolitics were changing dramatically, and the meaning of the armed struggle was contested and recoded. Each new phase motivated a recalibration of the RAF legacy. Kresnik, an Austrian-born choreographer who has worked across Europe, often engages sexual politics as a theme in his performances, many of which have been held up as examples of postmodern dance. In this piece he shows Meinhof’s body as a medium for the ongoing negotiation with Germany’s history, especially its history of violence. Working against the media representations—mostly photographic—that have instilled fi xed images of Meinhof into the collective imagination, the Tanztheaterstück reanimates the militant body and sets it in motion, in real space and real time. Watching the dancers’ movements in Kresnik’s performance, we are reminded of the physical, lived-in, gendered bodies that weathered the German Autumn. How has the militant body been articulated and disciplined in postwar German society, in the nation’s culture and media? To address this question, this chapter takes up representations of Meinhof’s body and compares them to those of other prominent left ists, particularly Joschka Fischer. The German Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor from 1998 to 2005, Fischer came out of the same militant milieu as Meinhof, but his destiny diverged sharply from hers. Cultural configurations of their two bodies make manifest this divergence: Meinhof appears progressively fragmented and wasted, Fischer solid and dynamic. It is not only sexual politics that have inflected their images, but, strikingly, Meinhof’s and Fischer’s different stances toward feminism, as well as their different understandings of women’s place in the world. Comparing the disparate representations of Meinhof and Fischer, a cultural anatomy of protest and resistance comes into view, one that discloses the sexual politics that have shaped militant acts as well as postmilitant memory. In this chapter, the main line of inquiry is my analysis of Kresnik’s Tanztheaterstück, particularly its extended run at the Volksbühne in Berlin. Through the performance and subsequent restaging of Kresnik’s work, we see a choreographer, his dancers, and their audience grapple with the problem of the body—the problem of how, in modern

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German society, it has been engendered by factors of consumption, discipline, and punishment. My analysis of Ulrike Meinhof has a dialectical structure. It is imbricated with brief readings of the militant body in a range of media and cultural forms. The chapter pulls into its scope items from the popular press, a key sequence of the film Germany in Autumn, and references to the recent historiography of postwar Germany. Drawing these strands together into a single argument, I try to give a critical perspective on the legacy of German violence, raising issues of identity that remain central to our understanding of the RAF. I begin with a reflection on Meinhof herself. The handling of her body is my preliminary concern—how it was dealt with in prison and how, at death, her corpse was treated in the morgue and in the media.

The Neuropathology of Militant Life Before she died, Meinhof had served four years of a sentence that included two extended periods of solitary confinement. Her letters and notebooks chronicle her physical deterioration in the “dead sections” of maximum-security facilities like Stammheim and, before that, the Cologne-Ossendorf Prison. She suffered sensory deprivation and, at times, force-feedings. Her judicial process was lengthy, incendiary, and closely monitored, but Meinhof died before her case was resolved.3 Pictures of her behind bars, or underground, or before she launched the RAF were well known to the German public. As the editor of konkret, she made regular radio and television appearances in the late 1960s. Her voice was deep and her look was serious: angular spectacles under a curtain of dark hair, holding a cigarette at the margin of the screen. Even when she was a part of “respectable” society, she never fit the standard image of German femininity. Wanted posters showed her with downcast eyes, looking like she held a secret or harbored some regret. Then in prison she began to change. Grey uniforms, hacked-off hair, and hunger strikes transformed her image from that of a poised public intellectual into a raging lunatic, an enemy of the state. Or, for some, a martyr. It wasn’t just photos of Meinhof that were well known. Even her private medical records had circulated widely. In 1968 the Zentralblatt für Neurochirurgie, a journal for neurosurgery, presented Meinhof as a subject in a case study. In 1962 she had undergone a successful surgery to remove a small brain tumor and so was a notable patient.4 Later, when she became

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a figure of national renown, Meinhof’s medical history resurfaced. In 1970 her estranged husband, Klaus Rainer Röhl, the then publisher of konkret, referred to Meinhof’s previous illness as a possible factor in her rapid descent into criminal activity and decision to abandon her family.5 Then in 1972 photographs from the journal article from 1968 were republished in a Stern magazine feature on the RAF. A sidebar to the article, illustrated with the brain X-ray from 1962, considered whether the German armed struggle could be reduced to neuropathology. The Stern reportage reflected much of the thinking of the time, as it asked, with some bewilderment, why a middle-class German woman like Meinhof would join the Far Left and put everything on the line—her children, her own body—in the interest of politics.6 The week of the magazine’s publication, Meinhof’s medical records were used against her, this time by state authorities. After two years of running bank heists, bombings, and shoot-outs for the RAF, Meinhof was confronted by the police in a Hamburg hideaway apartment. She refused to identify herself, and her fingerprints were not on file, so the officers arrested the suspect and took her to a medical facility, where she was forced to undergo anesthesia and another X-ray. The X-ray film matched the Stern photo: a metal clamp, placed on a blood vessel, was visible in both images. Meinhof was consequently charged with multiple counts of murder, attempted murder, and the intent to form a criminal organization. Long after she died, her body remained the object of public interest. Policymakers convened behind closed doors to decide how to downplay her death and discretely bury the body of the notorious criminal. And in the counterculture of postwar Germany, an underground hagiography formed in Meinhof’s absence, sublating her self-destruction into a purported aesthetics of resistance. Meinhof’s twin daughters, Regine and Bettina Röhl, were thirteen years old in 1976. They came of age when Meinhof’s afterimage was widely reproduced and disseminated; they grew up with a lot of questions about their mother’s life and death. Their last contact with Meinhof had been in 1970, on the day she went underground. She removed the girls from the legal custody of their father and instructed a RAF member to deliver them to a guerrilla training camp in Jordan. The journalist Stefan Aust, however, intercepted the transfer and accompanied the children back to their father in Germany, where they were enrolled in Gymnasium and returned to the bürgerlich circles of Hamburg society.7

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Regine became a doctor, Bettina a journalist. Much of Bettina Röhl’s writing has concerned her mother’s work and the militant subculture that flanked the New Left. In 2001 Röhl reported that something had gone wrong with the handling of Meinhof’s body at Stammheim: her brain had been removed from the autopsy slab and was taken into possession by a series of neuropathology researchers, without her family’s knowledge or permission. During that time the specimen had been used in a number of studies on brain dysfunction, violence, and criminality.8 Röhl campaigned fiercely for full charge of her mother’s remains, including the right to bury them as she saw fit. She visited state archives and contacted government authorities. She filed a lawsuit in Stuttgart, citing paragraph 168 of the constitution, the Totenruheschutz to protect the dead. Finally, she started up bettinaroehl.de, an editorial blog that discussed the impact of the RAF within what Röhl calls the durchgeknallte Republik— the “screwed-up” FRG—a nation that was wasted by the Left.9 Like Antigone, who contravened Theban law to bury her traitorous brother, Röhl was convinced that she knew where her “true duty” lay.10 She got the rights to her mother’s brain, arranged for a private burial in 2002, and published articles about her investigation in some of the same magazines that had covered Meinhof’s rise and fall, such as Der Spiegel and Stern.11 Röhl examined her mother’s fate within the larger contours of Germany’s postwar politics. Analyzing the ascendancy of left ists in the Bundestag and other national organizations, she focused on Gerhard Schröder’s coalition of Social Democrats and Greens. Some of the most prominent members of this administration had risen to legitimacy from out of the same militant and moral quandaries that brought Meinhof to ruin. Röhl asked how Schröder’s “third-way” Social Democrats had managed to reconstruct themselves so skillfully and emerge with renewed force, while her mother’s memory was freighted with such massive guilt and anxiety. In her reporting, Röhl sought not so much to redeem Meinhof’s militancy, but rather to indict the left ists who flourished in the aftermath of the German Autumn. Her main target was Joschka Fischer. Like Meinhof, Fischer had rioted against postwar Germany’s authoritarian structures and consumer society. He had been active in the Far Left, serving as a delegate in a Fatah conference in Algiers in 1969 and joining in Frankfurt street fights in the early 1970s. Fischer had also taken part in one of the more fractious demonstrations that mourned Meinhof’s death in

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1976. But he gradually reinvented himself as a conscientious public servant, helping to found the Green Party and ascending to high office.12 Without apologies, Fischer found a way to work his history of resistance into his interests and, perhaps, into the interests of the nation as a whole. A range of factors precipitated the turn to left ist militancy and terrorism in Germany, but for three decades the figure of Meinhof, above all, has borne this legacy. Although she led the RAF until her arrest in 1972, Meinhof is believed to have taken up arms only once—to free Baader—and even then she allegedly kept the safety latched on her gun.13 Within the RAF’s high command, it was actually Ensslin who insisted that violence was the “only way” toward social justice in postwar Germany.14 Meinhof’s actions were always accompanied by extensive writings that sustained the possibility for a radicalizing discourse.15 Her rhetoric, however, perpetrated forms of symbolic violence that continue to threaten more than a decade after the RAF’s demise. With reference to these details, Röhl’s writing, despite its conservative slant, sharpened the question of how and why Meinhof—her memory, her life, and especially her body— had come, above all, to betoken the armed struggle and the German Autumn. Die Meinhof she was called in the 1970s press, emphasis on the feminine article die. The Meinhof. Public enemy number one.

Embodiment and Discipline In a way, Meinhof was “undead” in the quarter century that spanned the Stuttgart and Berlin burials. Her legacy still haunted Germany, and so did photos of her body and face. Johann Kresnik’s Tanztheaterstück and Röhl’s inquest activated these recollections and, in a sense, brought Meinhof back to life. Deploying the choreographic and dramatic devices of modern Tanztheater, the work deft ly exploits both the literary and political dimensions of Meinhof’s radicalism.16 Kresnik splits Meinhof’s character into three parts. Two dancers play out different aspects of her past. One is a fair-haired Meinhof, the other dark; they are like Margarete and Sulamith, the opposing figures of German Weiblichkeit. The third Meinhof—a gaunt, elderly woman—appears in the drama’s present tense, that is, the sections that take place in unified Berlin. This multiplication of the Meinhof figure parallels the proliferation of alter egos in The Legend of Rita as well as the identity tricks of Dieter Kunzelmann, discussed in chapter 2. A distinct kinetic vocabulary corresponds to each of

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the three leading roles, exposing the ruptures that shot through Meinhof’s life and compounding the resonance of her death in the present. Supporting parts are given to Klaus Rainer Röhl, as well as Baader and Ensslin. A corps of another dozen dancers re-creates the various social frameworks that shaped the heroine’s career. As Ulrike Meinhof begins, the tapping of a typewriter fills the theater. The young, dark Meinhof sits at the wing and writes, gripped in concentration. Then the ghost of Meinhof walks down the center of the stage and steps over piles of rubbish. Thin strains of a single violin rise up over the typing, and then starker tones mark the start of the next scene. A herd of dancers moves along the floor in a single but frenetic formation: lying on their sides, their bodies contract toward a fetal position and then uncurl, thrusting forward, pelvis first. As they undulate across the stage, the figures pick up food from the ground, stuff it into their mouths, chew, and spit. Chords of nearly intolerable volume and dissonance drown out the music of the opening scene, driving the dancers on. Behind their convulsions trails a wake of discarded wrappings, half-eaten things, and vomit. Kresnik’s introduction of these two brief scenes establishes the main themes of Ulrike Meinhof: alienation and consumption. In her writings for konkret (for example, the article “Department Store Fire”), Meinhof drew from the social critiques of Western Marxism and traced the links between systems of domination and degenerate expressions of consumer capital. Only with a radical restructuring of social life (from the GNP down to individual dining habits), she argued, could Germans break away from their past. Scene 3 of Ulrike Meinhof takes an oblique look at this argument, activating a different modality of overconsumption. Another dancer, the fair Meinhof, enters the stage and is trussed to an examination table. Aproned figures stick a large funnel into her mouth and pour a pitcher of water through it, mimicking the force-feedings that were imposed on prisoners at Stammheim. Meinhof turns her head toward the audience and spews out her food. Over the course of the work, the dancers build and unfold variations on this phrase, consuming, convulsing, and expurgating in cycles. The restagings of Ulrike Meinhof in 1990, 1993, and 1999 expanded the scope of the premiere in 1987, projecting its protagonist into postcommunist Berlin. They incorporated an extended sequence directly after the force-feeding scene that elaborates upon the loss of the GDR’s “socialist alternative,” linking together crude movements and grotesque imagery.

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Meinhof’s ghost sits before a wide gap in a bricked edifice, presumably the ruins of the Berlin Wall, and before her proceeds a series of characters: nationalists, Hitler Youths, and finally Heino, the pop impresario of German Schlager. The ghost looks on blankly. She puts on a wedding veil, dances a Marshall Plan duet with Uncle Sam, and then turns away, pausing under the spotlight. The two young Meinhofs reject the excesses of the new, unified Germany; they stand off near the wing and commit themselves to anorectic refusal. Kresnik’s interest in the use of the body as a weapon in the armed struggle stands in productive comparison to other bodily configurations that have circulated in contemporary Germany. Decades after the RAF’s correctional regimen at Stammheim, the cultural politics of physical discipline found different expressions. Eventually these dynamics extended into the field of politics proper, touching upon the body of Joschka Fischer, the target of Bettina Röhl’s vendetta. In an unorthodox move for a European politician, Fischer went public with many aspects of his private life while he was in office. When he joined the Schröder administration, he attracted attention by turning his personal struggle with obesity into the subject of national fascination. Having grown quite fat in his Bundestag office in the 1980s, Fischer dedicated himself to a strict course of diets and jogging. The media tagged after him, photographing nearly every stride through the streets of Bonn. Astonishingly, Fischer responded with his own memoir. Mein langer Lauf zu mir selbst (The Long Race to Finding Myself, 1999) soon found its place in bookshops not in the section for politics or current events, but rather on the “self-help” shelf.17 In the introduction, Fischer makes a cursory effort to connect the book to his public service, offering a few observations about the relationship between the individual and society over the course of German history. Showing his New Left stripes, he cites Marx’s maxim that “existence determines consciousness” and briefly discusses postwar consumerism and the rise in obesity that beset West Germany in the 1980s and 1990s.18 But then Fischer shifts the topic to his plan to get down to his “fighting weight” (Kampfgewicht) of seventy-five kilograms, what he weighed in 1983, when he became one of the first Bundestag representatives of the Green Party. He recalls the sharp profile he cut earlier on in the Frankfurt Häuserkampf in the 1970s. In Fischer’s subsequent ascent to high office, professional demands brought him to the brink of exhaustion (Raubbau), driving his weight up to violent (gewaltige) proportions.19 In appearance

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Joschka Fischer, Mein langer Lauf zu mir selbst (The Long Race to Myself ), 1999. © Verlag Kiepenheuer und Witsch GmbH, KG, Cologne. Book cover.

and stature, Fischer began to see himself resemble less the angry young man of his past and ever more the corpulent leader of the Christian Democratic establishment, Helmut Kohl. Fischer’s political career later merged with his pursuit of amateur athletics. In 1998, when the Greens formed a successful coalition with Schröder’s Social Democrats, he ran the Hamburg Marathon and finished in good time for a man of fift y: 3:41:36. Meinhof’s destiny starkly opposed Fischer’s fortune; her political convictions led her to the noose at the age of forty-one. Yet both figures came from common ground. What put some German left ists on the path to suicide and self-destruction, while others rose to power? This question—inherent in Röhl’s comparison of Meinhof and Fischer and relevant, as well, to Kresnik’s Tanztheaterstück—was prefigured by the unforgettable performance of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in the film Germany in Autumn. A brief excursus into this performance will disclose the stakes at play in my study of militant anatomies. Fassbinder’s twenty-minute film segment surveys Germany’s violent past and locates its impulses in the vulnerable human form. He fills the frame with

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Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn), dir. Alf Brustellin, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, et al., 1978. Film still.

long takes of his own naked body. Watching Fassbinder grieve the Stammheim deaths, we are given a chance to gauge the physical toll exacted by the events of the German Autumn. On camera he compulsively consumes food, alcohol, and cigarettes, but finds no satisfaction. The film segment comprises a series of vignettes shot soon after October 1977: Fassbinder with his mother at the kitchen table, Fassbinder with his partner in their cramped, dark flat. Using his own body as a signifying medium, he explores the aesthetics and politics of identity, rendering himself a subject split by German history.20 Interspersed in these two dialogues are sections of a filmic self-portrait: squatting, naked, Fassbinder assumes a frontal position vis-à-vis the camera, which tightly frames his ample body. His face is swollen and distended, and yet it is hard to take your eyes off of him. In one hand Fassbinder cradles the telephone receiver; he speaks to his mother and friends, sobbing, falling to pieces, wracked with worry. The other hand moves down to mess with his penis. The frankness of his pose and the melodrama of his monologue make these scenes the most volatile of Germany in Autumn. The segment stands as an important precursor to Kresnik’s choreography in Ulrike Meinhof. Fassbinder’s excruciating close-up layers his own physicality over that of the militants, weaving the two tissues into a complex fabric. His body

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enacts some of the same narcissism and desperation that motivated the RAF. Fassbinder’s contribution to Germany in Autumn condenses his film work, his biography, and the social circles in which he lived into a single but broken image. Far from the “bourgeois respectability” that the historian Georg Mosse identifies as the crux of German nationalism, Fassbinder’s choice strikes a radical wager with the audience—one not unlike the life-or-death stakes that Kresnik dramatizes in Ulrike Meinhof.21 We must hate Fassbinder, hate the film, or fall tragically, totally in love with his vision, his mind, his body. Bringing art one step closer to life, Fassbinder’s performance of a breakdown in Germany in Autumn foreshadowed his own lethal overdose in 1982. West German news in the 1970s was full of images of militants ravaged by starvation, images that are the inverse of Fassbinder’s self-portrait. Hunger strikes were a primary tactic of the armed struggle, and the Far Left exploited them to a mortal degree. A photograph of the RAF member Holger Meins’s emaciated corpse that was widely disseminated by the Left was held to be an indelible symbol of state brutality. As the historian Leith Passmore argues, RAF members staged hunger strikes as “performative moments” that presented their bodies as “loci for both Nazi resistance and anti-colonialist struggle.”22 But if the Far Left imagined that these acts of self-sacrifice consecrated their mission, the general public perceived the “carefully choreographed spectacle” of the hunger strike as an act of self-destruction.23 Kresnik’s Tanztheaterstück reconfigures the maneuvering of RAF militancy. It unfolds the contexts of Meinhof’s radicalization, asceticism, and suicide, dramatizing the darkest hours of her violence and incarceration.

Figuring Militancy on the Stage and in the Press As a choreographer, Kresnik has an unusual ability to make meaning by contrasting moving sequences with still poses. We see this in his multiple references, staged within Ulrike Meinhof, to iconic photographs from recent German history. As Benjamin Buchloh has argued, the medium of photography has played a constitutive role in Germans’ collective memory. In an essay from 1999 he portrays the nation’s postwar culture as “entangled in the double bind of the collective disavowal of history, the repression of the recent past, and an almost hysterically accelerated and expanded apparatus of photographic production to solicit artificial

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desire and consumption.”24 Here photography is more than just an archival technology; it is also a means to generate a new and different identity. Kresnik’s work responds to both the “memory crisis” and the appetite for consumption that Buchloh describes. His concern with photography in Ulrike Meinhof allows for constructive comparison with Röhl’s work, for her journalism has also mobilized photographs to tell her mother’s story. Reading Kresnik’s Tanztheaterstück together with Röhl’s writing, we advance the dialectic of postmilitant inquiry. We also encounter a peculiar cultural operation, one that leaves Meinhof’s body fragmented and troubled and, at the same time, consolidates Joschka Fischer into a model of singular resilience. When Röhl expanded the campaign for her mother’s remains into a wider denunciation of the 1968 generation, she uncovered documentation of the guerrilla tactics that shaped the most extreme forms of militancy. Her investigation delineated a network that linked mainstream left ists with some of the worst violence of the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing from an array of documents, Röhl alleged that Fischer had thrown a Molotov cocktail during a pro-RAF demonstration held the day after Meinhof’s death in 1976. Although this charge was never substantiated, another of Röhl’s accusations cast a long shadow over Fischer’s career. In 2001 she released photographs from Fischer’s years on the Frankfurt squatter and Sponti scenes that show him assaulting a police officer.25 The evidence from this fracas in 1973 raised national concern about Fischer’s competency as a highly ranked public officer. Some conservatives were appalled that Germany’s liberal democracy had appointed a one-time revolutionary to lead its foreign ministry. For pacifists on the Left, meanwhile, the photos increased their doubts about Fischer’s decision to send German military forces into combat in Kosovo in 1999. “Yes, I was militant,” Fischer admitted in a Stern article that followed the publication of the incriminating photographs.26 The sequence, taken by the photographer Lutz Kleinhans, indexes a moment of explosive intensity. The first picture shows two men facing off in the center of a street. One figure, wearing a white helmet, bears the shield, pistol, and baton of the military police. The other, in a black helmet and leather motorbike jacket, is the young Fischer. Subsequent shots show the approach of five more Spontis, who attack the officer, knocking off his helmet and forcing him to the ground. Fischer delivers the final, decisive blows: a shorter series of frames captures him with his hand clenched in an angry

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Ulrike Meinhof, Theater Bonn, dir. Johann Kresnik, 2006 (photo © Thilo Beu).

fist, striking down upon the crouched policeman. In response to this photographic “proof” of Fischer’s extremism, in 2001 the Bundestag deliberated the Foreign Minister’s case. Fischer refuted the charges that he had collaborated with the RAF or the Revolutionary Cells, but he refused to disavow his initial commitment to militancy. The inquest was heated, but Fischer managed to finesse the proceedings and ultimately withstood the scandal with increased approval ratings.27 Kresnik’s staging in Ulrike Meinhof moves the dancers through some of the same formations that Fischer made in the anarchic, testosteronedriven street fights of his youth. Kresnik’s juxtaposition of the fi xed photographic image and the danced sequence lays forth the distance between the media’s accounts of the German Autumn and the complicated, often inchoate reality of the way this violence was experienced by the human body. A central scene of Ulrike Meinhof harks back to one of the seminal photographs of the West German counterculture. A unit of prison wardens enters from the wings and takes center stage. Outfitted with visors and lead aprons, the guards dominate the space, obscuring the inmates’ movements. When the RAF corps returns, the wardens round them up and reduce them to captives in a concentrationary order. Stripped of their street clothes, the militants stand in a row, spread-eagled against a

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concrete wall. This configuration mimics a widely circulated image from the early years of the Berlin alternative scene: Thomas Hesterberg’s group photo of Kommune 1, first published in a self-produced pamphlet, and then reprinted and captioned “Naked Maoists up against the Wall” in Der Spiegel in 1967.28 Seven communards and one of their offspring pose as suspects about to be frisked, but their smiling faces parody an actual arrest. The multiple reproductions of this photograph seem pitched to evoke humor or nostalgia, yet as Kresnik’s refunctioning of the image implies, the picture weighs heavily on Germans’ historical conscience. Dagmar Herzog has analyzed the history of “Naked Maoists,” engaging critical responses to the photo that speak to the question of representing militancy and political violence. As she writes in Sex After Fascism, although the men and women pictured in the image probably meant to “recreate and expose” a police search of the commune, they assumed a position that betrayed an “unconscious identification” with Nazi victims. At the same time, however, their act mocked those victims as it recoded the “predetermined message” of the photograph, investing it with the potential for sexual liberation. The members of Kommune 1 appear to identify unconsciously with the previous generation of fascist perpetrators, whom the activists had resolved to reject. As Herzog notes, the sociologist Reimut Reiche locates an analogy in the K1 photo; the message it wants to mediate—“sexuality shall set you free”—echoes the words Arbeit macht frei inscribed in the gates of Auschwitz.29 Invoking “Naked Maoists” and adjoining it with the events of Meinhof’s life as well as the Nazis’ Final Solution, Kresnik illuminates the necrophilic and sexualized currents that shaped the German confrontation with militancy and terrorism. Reenacting this and other familiar photographs from the years of the Far Left’s emergence, Kresnik uses Tanztheater to give his audience pause. His staging and choreography establish a critical tension between the still photograph and the transient flux of lived time. They span the distance between the captured past and the continuing present, but, in the same stroke, they also illuminate the correspondences between Germany’s violent, volatile history and the revolutionary potential that might still remain in the collective memory of the RAF. Thus, Ulrike Meinhof stands out as an example of the kind of postmilitant culture that doesn’t just repudiate the Far Left’s troubled legacy, but rather seeks to take some lessons out of it.

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Misogyny and Militancy In order to fully analyze Kresnik’s treatment of militancy and gender, it helps to situate his Tanztheaterstück with regard to German sexual politics as they played out from the RAF’s rise in the 1970s to the years when he created and staged Ulrike Meinhof. Meinhof’s and Fischer’s individual statements on the women’s movement are key referents here, as are descriptions of relations between men and women on the Left that have appeared in several historical studies and investigative reports, including Bettina Röhl’s journalism. Unlike the members of Kommune 1, Meinhof didn’t think that sexuality would set anyone free. Early in her career, she had commented on sexual politics and written articles that corresponded with some points on the agenda of the Frauenbewegung. But as the Germanist Sarah Colvin argues, Meinhof came to see feminism as “a terrible thing” that would pit men and women against each other in a gender war, obstructing the urban guerrillas’ path to international revolution.30 Meinhof’s notebooks from 1974 include a page that contrasts women’s liberation with the first liberatory action that she directed, freeing Baader from prison in 1970. In her words, it was chicks got the guy out of jail. not liberation like in the women’s movement fighting against the guys—but the liberation of women through armed anti-imperialist struggle.31 When Meinhof wrote these notes, she had already been in prison for two years and had long since left behind the concerns with the reality of women’s lives that she had expressed in her early journalism. In effect, the RAF’s campaign had narrowed itself down to the precincts of the prison. However, as Colvin observes, the notebooks were not concerned with feminism, but rather with “humanity” in its most abstract sense. Meinhof, in her own words, put it more bluntly: “fuck equal rights for women.”32 In postwar Germany the Left was internally divided into multiple factions. As the historian Sibylla Flügge has shown, one of those divisions was sharply drawn between feminists and other dissenters. Feminists, she maintains, did not want “to take on the state with violence.”33 Indeed,

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a gender gap divides the memory and meaning of “the movement” that the Left put into action. In retrospect, the street fighting in which Fischer participated appears as an outmoded ritual of masculinity, one performed, perhaps, in attempt to distinguish the male militants from their female comrades. And yet Fischer, remarkably, was one of the first to doubt this posturing. This skepticism would have a decisive effect on his political career as well as the way he would be depicted in the media. Both men and women inhabited Kommune 1 and other oppositional Wohngemeinschaften. But when their alternative lifestyles became increasingly militant, many men chose to strategically separate themselves from the collectives. Fischer was one of them. With his companions he headed out for the countryside in order to prepare for future encounters with the police. While the men practiced guerrilla maneuvers, the women joined together in the city flats that housed the countercultural communes. But the women did not just grow bean sprouts and knit pullovers there. Back in the cities, the women began to elaborate a feminist agenda that would produce a real cultural revolution in Germany: a feminist movement that has long outlasted the involuted fits and starts of the street fighters. Indeed, more than thirty years later, we might ask whether some left ist militancy of the 1970s was a vain attempt for German men to maintain their sexual primacy within the opposition.34 Early on, Fischer discerned the gender gap in the Left. In a 1977 issue of the magazine Autonomie, he urged his readers to pay attention to feminists, pointing out that there had never been a shortage of men to bring about “Auschwitz, the Gulag, or Vietnam.” To break from this pattern, men had to take the feminist path toward social engagement. “Brothers,” he declared, “there’s really no other choice now: either we—the tough guys—manage to cross over to the other side of the barricades, to the side where the women and children are, or we’ll get done in by the schizophrenia of our own demands for liberation, our own masculinity.”35 The street fighters were pitting themselves not only against the myths of “the eternal feminine” and “the innocence of children,” but also, unwittingly, against mass movements that could undermine forces of domination such as the nuclear arms race and military imperialism.36 Channeling the energy of Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies (1977), Fischer refined his argument about masculinity and violence, insisting that the multiple problems of modern German society originated from a single misogynist source. In the alternative scene, Fischer argued, “the same sexist

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mechanisms functioned that had taken place elsewhere and at earlier times. Ultimately they culminated in militancy[:] the desperate leap to a fundamentally destructive framework that could only lead to death, madness, and a culture of collective suicide.”37 Fischer took his fellow militants to task on feminist issues and thus began his transition from the radical margins to the center of power. This process was incremental, but ultimately successful. Although Fischer’s grasp of feminism needed clarification (why put women on the same side as children, as he did in Autonomie?), his engagement with the women’s movement set him apart from Meinhof in important ways. When the RAF exploded into public consciousness, feminist politics ranked low on its agenda, if anywhere at all. But a paradox of the German Autumn was that the image of enraged militants—pointedly feminized within media and culture— opened up new spaces for women to act. To borrow an expression from American aeronautics, the RAF “pushed the envelope” for a wide range of left ist initiatives, including feminism. What did Röhl make of all this? Gender is central to her account of militancy and terrorism in the 1970s: she emphasizes how women and men expressed protest differently, and how the next generations, including Röhl herself, have passed different verdicts upon their predecessors. Although Meinhof’s late writings rejected feminist propositions, much of her early work as a journalist, editor, and filmmaker took up women’s issues.38 With disappointment, Röhl recounts the way Meinhof’s militancy derailed her from her early analysis of the status of women and into the hard core of armed resistance. For the average German, however, the question of Meinhof’s purpose was neither here nor there. What mattered was the terrible force with which she came to public renown. At a time when the women’s movement was reshaping German society, the mass media invested Meinhof’s image with enormous power. Many mistakenly found her to be the face of feminist fury. But as the historian Alan Rosenfeld has suggested, there was a wide gap between the women’s movement and the Far Left. Urban guerrillas like Meinhof weren’t reacting to an “excess” of emancipation, as some conservatives feared in the 1970s.39 Rather, they suffered from “an excess of self-sacrifice.”40 Fischer, notably, avoided this mistake and found a way to work women’s liberation to his advantage. Keenly aware of body politics, Fischer maintained certain aspects of his left ist orientation while reshaping his profile, both personally and

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politically. His public struggle with his weight, charted in the mass media and in his memoir The Long Race, marked the end of that process. More than just a footnote to recent German events, Fischer’s regimen was a biomachine for political reinvention, since he reformed his public identity through physical discipline. On an individual level, Fischer embodied the possibility of normalization, something that, since 1945, the Germans as a nation have sought to approach, even if they might never fully achieve it. Several photographs of Fischer and Meinhof put their differences into high contrast and align with the cultural anatomy that Kresnik delineates in his Tanztheaterstück. Shots from Fischer’s wild years show him as a self-stylized warrior—muscles flexed, radiating provocation. But over the course of his career, Fischer modulated his image from street-fighting man, to zaft ig bureaucrat, to fit management executive. Meinhof’s image, on the other hand, remains under arrest, first in agony, in the shots taken of her in prison, wasting away to skin and bone, and then dead on the autopsy table. If Fischer has endured as a respectable figure of left ist politics, Meinhof’s specter is his antithesis. The trials of Fischer’s past have matured him into a consummate politician whose career still holds promise. The fragments of Meinhof’s memory, meanwhile, can only haunt the present, as Kresnik shows. The public’s engagement with these two figures accords with the dynamics of working through and acting out that the historian Dominick LaCapra sees driving German collective memory.41 Germans project their desires for normalcy onto Fisher, investing him with the power to overcome excess and quell violent appetites. The media makes him into a screen for coping with the agonies of militancy, for Fischer’s self-restraint implies that other Germans might also be cured of their extremism. The memory of Ulrike Meinhof conversely, creates an undertow against the broader cultural currents that process German violence. The many postmilitant returns to her biography, including Ulrike Meinhof, disclose the impasses that persist in this process. This tendency corresponds to another point of LaCapra’s analysis, for it indicates the extent to which the return to traumatic scenes is “intimately bound up” in the task of working through.42 Meinhof has emerged as an archetype of impossibility; Kresnik takes this configuration as his point of departure.43 His choreography acknowledges Meinhof’s complexity, yet it also attempts to disaggregate the various components of her life in a way that enables critique. Kresnik splits Meinhof into several entities, summoning her forth as vigilante,

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militant mastermind, and self-mutilating depressive. Developing each of these roles, the Tanztheaterstück tests out sites of resistance and helps weigh the cultural significance of the militant body.

Postmilitant Remainders Bettina Röhl carried out her fi lial duties—reclaiming her mother’s remains, and then laying them to rest. But Meinhof is a revenant. Her image prompts us to reconsider the meaning of political violence in Germany. Reading Röhl’s investigation and Kresnik’s drama within this frame, we encounter the struggle to remember and work through what Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer, building upon LaCapra’s work, have called Germany’s “shattered” past: a history marked by rupture and conflict.44 Their study from 2003 describes postwar Germany as torn between the Holocaust, the Wirtschaftswunder, and postcommunist unification. Analyzing this fragmentation, Jarausch and Geyer ask whether any single historical record could encompass both the stigma of genocide and Germany’s subsequent recovery and rehabilitation. The historians mention only briefly the Far Left and the public’s reaction to the armed struggle, but some examples of postmilitant culture would seem to make their point. Kresnik’s choreography, for instance, dramatizes the shattering that Jarausch and Geyer have described. Distinguishing the truth claims of the photographic document from the flux of bodies in motion, Kresnik’s Tanztheaterstück cancels out and repositions the iconography of Meinhof and, in doing so, overcomes the limits of standard historical accounts. In the decades between Meinhof’s two funerals, Kresnik reanimated the ruins of the RAF and conveyed a grave message about German history. This history is founded, in part, upon the discipline and repression of bodies—dissident bodies, women’s bodies, as well as Jewish, Slavic, and homosexual ones. In her writings, Meinhof sought to both expose this subjugation and investigate the precarious foundations of the Federal Republic. But together with the RAF, she soon found herself caught in a destructive spiral, reprising some of the violent measures that defined the Nazi regime. As the Tanztheaterstück Ulrike Meinhof reaches its conclusion, Kresnik contrasts a sequence of mortuary ablution with one of shrill theatrics. The wardens hose down the naked prisoners, as if to prepare them for

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slaughter. Then they catch their heads in large abattoir hooks and tow them off stage. The young, dark Meinhof returns to her desk and types out her last words. She picks up a manuscript page that has fallen to the floor and forces herself to eat it, closing herself off into a mute, self-enclosed unit. As if to mitigate the drama’s solemnity, here Kresnik changes up the mood and inserts a bombastic interlude: another middlebrow pop star takes the stage and Meinhof unbuttons the top of her uniform. Using black ink, the dancer draws a pig’s face on each of her breasts. She reaches into the typewriter, pulls out its long, inky ribbon, and binds her torso with it, confronting the audience with a blank stare. Ulrike Meinhof, in the end, is an uneven artwork; each innovation is countered by a regression to convention. Too often Kresnik’s corps assumes the obscene and monstrous movements of völkisch stereotypes. The radio hits and caricatured costumes contrast too neatly with Meinhof’s sacrosanct martyrdom. Except for the militants, all Germans in the play seem to be stalled in the moment of Hitler’s ascent: Kresnik dresses the characters in costumes dating from the 1930s and 1940s. The choreography reduces the dancers to sadists and SS officers; they are abject counterparts to the militant sublime that is variously embodied by Kresnik’s three Meinhofs. It is as if nothing has changed in the more than half century that has ensued since the war. As the Germanist Birgit Haas puts it, the message of Kresnik’s choreography is that “violence has dominated and will always dominate Germany.”45 Further, the drama relies heavily on the clichés of Volksbühne Tanztheater. Bodily fluids (blood, vomit, shit) make their requisite appearances on the stage, leading up to the full frontal female nudity that has become the “money shot” of Berlin choreography in the past two decades. A stand-in for “the Real”—a naked woman—erupts into the symbolic order of the Tanztheaterstück, yet somehow, despite this shock, Kresnik’s project never manages to distance the viewer from the conventions of melodrama. Certain truths of the RAF’s cultural legacy can nonetheless be discerned in the drama’s flaws. The long sequences of pop spectacles and revolting fits of consumption and expulsion, while hard to watch, force the viewer to critically revisit the customs and manners that the Left wanted to reject. From the 1950s onward, West Germans embraced commodity culture. As Jarausch and Geyer argue, consumption oriented them away from fascism and toward market democracy. But the drive to consume superseded Germans’ attempts to reckon with their past. The

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RAF resisted these appetites and demanded that Germans atone for their violence. In Ulrike Meinhof, the militants move along the margins between the Third Reich and the Konsumparadies of unified Germany. Indeed, Kresnik’s stereotyping might even serve a critical purpose: it poses the terrors of the Hitler regime as a “negative foil” for contemporary figures of “postnational identity.”46 In its structure, Ulrike Meinhof plays out some of the contradictions that Jarausch and Geyer have highlighted. With its fluctuation between the periods of pre- and postwar, and its movement along the flash points of Meinhof’s life, the drama weighs up the disjointed remains of Germany’s late modernity. Kresnik’s attempt to force a naked woman upon his viewers points back to the impulses that have cast Ulrike Meinhof as both sacrificial victim and agent of destruction. Kresnik’s graphic depiction of the human form recalls the brute physicality of the armed struggle as well as the first aesthetic responses to it, particularly Fassbinder’s contribution to Germany in Autumn. But it was Meinhof’s daughter’s campaign in the early 2000s that went straight to the marrow of the militant body, as she asked the public to closely consider the complicities between the ruling administrative authority and the Far Left. Röhl’s search for her mother’s brain became a pivotal episode in recent German history. Over decades the Meinhof specimen was dissected by pathologists and its significance was parsed out by journalists, but today it nonetheless persists as an indivisible remainder of a culture that is itself riven by multiple forces: political, economic, and sexual. Kresnik concludes Ulrike Meinhof with two oblique tableaus. On stage right the dark Meinhof resumes her position at the typewriter, brandishes a knife, and swift ly cuts off her own tongue. Blood gushes out, but the dancer maintains her stoic posture. With an upright torso, knees turned out in a grand-plié, she keeps the knife in one hand and holds the other out to the audience. Her severed tongue—a thick lump of flesh— rests in her palm. The fair Meinhof, on stage left, is entombed by two figures in folk costumes. They dress her in the starched uniform of a girl from Hitler’s Bund Deutscher Mädel, and then place her between two large sheets of plexiglass. Vises tighten the plates together, sealing off Meinhof in a flat, hermetic capsule. What we see is something like a living photographic still. The ghost has exited the stage, but the two young Meinhofs enact a contradiction upon which the RAF was constituted. Meinhof’s body is alternately fragmented and frozen, her voice forever distorted

Ulrike Meinhof, Theater Bonn, dir. Johann Kresnik, 2006. Photo © Thilo Beu.

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through acts of self-mutilation and misrepresentation in mass culture and the media. This closing scene shows her legacy to be phallic and castrated at once, as, Bettina Röhl might attest, only a mother could be.47 Meinhof’s legacy, for Kresnik, is a living one. Working against the constraints of documentary photography, his dancers’ performance constantly splits the militant’s image, refusing any attempt to construct a reliquary of resistance from the shards of Meinhof’s life and death. Breaking apart the militant icon, the Tanztheaterstück forces us to confront the continuing political phenomenon that Meinhof first set into play.

7 Regarding Terror at the Berlin Kunst-Werke

In an Artforum review in 1997, the historian Anders Stephanson speculated that “hijacking may continue, but its historical moment (in a Hegelian sense) is over.”1 Written twenty years after the German Autumn and almost ten years after one of the last massive terrorist attacks—the Libyan bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland—the review discussed Dial History (1997), Johan Grimonprez’s film about air traffic, militancy, and death. When Dial History became the hit of documenta X, the international exhibition of contemporary art held in Kassel, Germany, the tempest of transnational terrorism and its attendant media surge seemed, to many, to have died down.2 Grimonprez’s film set a series of airplane hijackings to a disco beat and imparted a saturated glare to the screen, as if to consign to the outmoded databanks of the 1970s not only the terrorist acts of the RAF and other Far Left groups, but the progress of history itself. It pieced together film clips of the Landshut hijacking with footage of strikes and demonstrations around the world. As half a million documenta visitors flocked to the Fridericianum Museum to see the film, aeroterrorism lulled. But Dial History and its audience were only resting in the eye of the storm, for the events of September 11, 2001, were nearing the horizon. When al-Qaeda planes crashed into the World

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Trade Center, and when security systems everywhere went up to code red, Germans were reminded of their own legacy of political violence. On the culture front, a sonic boom in postmilitant art would soon follow. In 2005 Dial History played to its second large audience, this time as part of Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Die RAF (Regarding Terror: The RAF), the popular and controversial exhibition that was held at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Here Grimonprez’s film was shown to be just one example of the scores of artworks that have responded to left ist militancy and terrorism. Regarding Terror was a milestone in postmilitant culture, as it set out to measure, for the first time, the profound and lasting artistic response to the German armed struggle. At that point many well-known artists had made work about the RAF (for example, Joseph Beuys, Martin Kippenberger, and Gerhard Richter), and a sort of Baader-Meinhof “culture industry” had been exported to other European countries and the United States, but no show on the topic had been curated, no survey published.3 If Grimonprez had created a stir at documenta X, news of the American air war seemed to touch a nerve for many Germans. Within months of September 11, the Kunst-Werke curators began to prepare the RAF exhibition. In 2002, when word of the show first got around, it ignited a media blitz that covered Mohamed Atta’s Hamburg-based cell of Islamic radicalism, the growth of the RAF in Germany, and the state’s backlash against it. This reportage factored into the curators’ conception of the exhibition. As they reviewed the artworks that mobilized pictures of the Far Left, the Kunst-Werke team realized that, in many cases, the artists weren’t just looking at the RAF; they were looking at the way the media looked at the RAF. Their paintings, installations, and films recalled and reproduced news images that had circulated for decades. Foregrounding the role of the media in the cultural response to revolutionary violence, the exhibition promised to offer a unique perspective on art and political extremism in the public sphere. The curators were fully aware that the RAF itself had contended with national news networks from the beginning to its end.4 Conservative conglomerates like Axel Springer AG had been a prime target for militants. Ulrike Meinhof, for example, had used her status as a journalist and commentator for radio and television as a tool for subversion. And in 1998 the RAF had enacted its dissolution by issuing a final communiqué to the Reuters Agency. The choice of media as a framing device for the Kunst-Werke exhibition was thus well considered.5

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The problem with Regarding Terror was that the emphasis on the media’s role eclipsed the questions of why so many visual artists have fi xated on the RAF’s actions, how the artists have handled and transformed documentary material, and what we can learn from this aesthetic formation. The layout of the show, the production of its catalogue, and the programming of related events such as press conferences and public lectures combined to disinterestedly survey postmilitant culture, but not to analyze it in any substantive way. However, certain artworks within the exhibition did activate this kind of investigation on their own terms. These works ask about the potential for visual art to compete with documentary and mass media images that, today, are culturally dominant.6 They also take up the RAF image and turn it into a prism that refracts a range of concerns, including Germany’s history of violence and the access to power in late modernity. In order to articulate this investigation, in this chapter I focus on the work of four artists included in Regarding Terror: Johan Grimonprez, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Gerhard Richter, and Yvonne Rainer. Considering them together, we further our investigation of the margins between art and terror, aesthetics and politics.

Curating the Urban Guerrilla Klaus Biesenbach, the founder and former artistic director of the KunstWerke, first conceived the exhibition under the rubric “Mythos RAF”— “The Myth of the Red Army Faction.” Collaborating with a team of young curators that included Ellen Blumenstein and Felix Ensslin, Biesenbach drew up a list of the extant artworks that referenced the RAF—they knew of nearly one hundred—and began to contact mostly left-leaning critics and historians, asking them to contribute texts to the project. Biesenbach’s team also held a series of press conferences and applied for government funding, both of which quickly brought the Kunst-Werke into the harsh light of public criticism. By early 2003, most of the major German newspapers had reported on the curators’ plans for the show. Families of Jürgen Ponto and Alfred Herrhausen, two prominent figures killed by the RAF, made their objections plain, lobbying their local representatives to block a project that would risk idealizing militancy and terror.7 When the Berlin Senate began to deliberate the Kunst-Werke’s funding application, Biesenbach changed course.8 Preempting a possible denial of

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subsidies, he withdrew his proposal and raised private resources for the exhibition by auctioning works donated by Andreas Gursky, Thomas Demand, and other notable artists.9 The institute also changed the exhibition’s title from “Mythos RAF” to Regarding Terror, a choice that suggested a more cautious approach to the topic. Although many artists agreed to participate in the show, the original plans to manage the project started to fall apart. Gerhard Richter refused the inclusion of October 18, 1977, offering instead to lend several elements of another work keyed into the theme.10 The historian Wolfgang Kraushaar provided a text for the exhibition catalogue, but then publicly denounced the show.11 Jan Philipp Reemtsma, the director of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, which maintains the largest archives on the RAF and other protest movements, had planned to contribute an essay, but he broke ties with the Kunst-Werke and gave lectures that criticized the curators’ role in glamorizing and distorting the history of the Far Left.12 In the process that led up to Regarding Terror, the Kunst-Werke team faced the close scrutiny usually reserved for curators of major international exhibitions such as documenta and the Venice Biennial. The stakes were high: since no other museum had directly addressed the RAF story, Biesenbach’s proposal drew attention far beyond the art world. Skepticism prevailed at every stage. Were Germans ready to reopen the wounds of the German Autumn? Could artists give an ethical—or even adequate— response to this chapter of history? As if to deflect this criticism, the curators chose to organize Regarding Terror according to the principle of historical chronology. They devised a media time line that documented events in RAF history from the late 1960s to the group’s dissolution in 1998. The information presented in the chronology was drawn from articles in five national newspapers and magazines: Bild, Der Spiegel, Stern, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, some of the same outlets that the Far Left had contended with in the 1960s and 1970s. The didactic time line was mounted on large panels that encircled the Kunst-Werke’s main gallery. Below the panels were television monitors that rolled period tapes produced by national and international broadcasters. Many museum visitors took the opportunity to put on headphones, watch the screens, and read the wall text. Centered within the time line and anchoring the main gallery was Hans-Peter Feldmann’s artwork Die Toten (The Dead, 1988), a series of chronologically ordered images of all the people who died as a result of

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RAF violence. The linear sequence of the items in the main gallery was further reinforced by the exhibition catalogue. The first and largest of its two volumes consists of facsimiles of German print journalism, ordered by date. The hundreds of articles collated in the book testify to the sustained media interest in the Far Left over the course of three decades. While preparing the exhibition, Felix Ensslin noted that the RAF story had been repeatedly “written and rewritten” by reporters and historians.13 The time had come, he noted, to show how visual artists had responded to the RAF and to confront the viewers with the “objects” they had produced.14 In its display, however, Regarding Terror mainly reiterated standard historical accounts of the German Autumn and rehashed the common observation that the armed struggle had drawn a huge amount of media attention. Analysis of the specific art objects and inquiry into their modes of resistance were left by the wayside. Further, the central position of the Kunst-Werke’s time line and Feldmann’s The Dead in the main gallery overshadowed other, more complex artworks included elsewhere in the exhibition. This effect can be discerned most clearly by comparing The Dead to the works of Grimonprez, Richter, and Rainer, which were installed on the museum’s upper floors. Each of these three projects recalls the chronology of the RAF years, but the artists use aesthetic means to offer counterhistorical perspectives on political violence and state security. In “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum” (1990) the art historian Rosalind Krauss notes a growing tendency for sensational museum events, such as the hiring of star architects to build new galleries and the staging of hit shows, to impede the viewer’s personal encounter with the individual artworks contained within a given exhibition.15 To a great extent the Kunst-Werke curators enacted this kind of public spectacle. This chapter takes its cue from Krauss’s article and goes beneath the surface of Regarding Terror. It elaborates a comparison of works by Feldmann, Richter, Grimonprez, and Rainer, setting them first into the curators’ narrative and then reading them against the cultural logic of the Kunst-Werke time line. What we find are a range of temporal and compositional strategies that, to varying extents, work against the museum’s chronological standard to posit alternative spaces for reflection and critique. Rainer’s early film Journeys from Berlin/1971, made in 1977–78, is particularly notable in this regard, for it deploys strategies that plot out a “counterpublic sphere,” one that is distinctively feminist.

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RAF Chronologies: Feldmann and Richter Since the mid-1970s, articles and books, documentary films, and websites have recounted the Far Left’s march through history and the state’s response. The media time line in Regarding Terror was only one instance of this routine in compulsive documentation. Many artists in the exhibition used news items as a point of departure in their work. But their handling of media chronology differs: while Feldmann replicates its linearity, Richter, Grimonprez, and Rainer variously denaturalize and undermine the notions of resolution and progress that are seen to inhere in standard accounts of the RAF. As we shall see, their work aligns with some of Adorno’s thought on dialectics, history, and time. Feldmann’s The Dead operates primarily as a conceptual project.16 Adhering to strict formal principles of format and order, it is essentially a chronology in pictures. To create the series, Feldmann found press photographs related to each of the ninety casualties that resulted from German terrorism and counterterrorism.17 He selected pictures of unusual intensity. Schleyer held hostage under the RAF emblem. Meinhof in a prison courtyard, giving a look that could kill. A forensic shot of Baader with blood pooled around his head. Each death is marked by a single image, untouched, but cropped to a uniform size. Feldmann photocopied the pictures in black and white onto 30 x 40 cm sheets of paper and captioned each page with the name of the individual and the date he or she died. The sheets are ordered by date, beginning with the student activist Benno Ohnesorg (†June 2, 1967) and ending with RAF member Wolfgang Grams (†June 27, 1993).18 Between these two end points, the time line is punctuated by the deaths of victims and perpetrators alike. The standardization of the sequence cancels out the attributes that distinguished agents from targets, factoring suicides and killings into a single death toll. Ordered in this way, the images of The Dead show the viewer a temporal progression that glides over historical antagonisms. Ideological and political differences are leveled. Many critics of the Kunst-Werke show disparaged Feldmann’s series, perceiving in it an implication that the armed struggle was a civil war, that its soldiers should be mourned equally, that death erased the distinctions of the fallen. Gerhard Richter, in his reflections upon left ist militancy and the state’s reaction to it, has played against the discursive order prescribed by official accounts of the RAF. Atlas (begun in 1962 and continuing to

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Gerhard Richter, Atlas Tafel 432 (Atlas Sheet 432), 1989. Black and white photograph reproductions.

the present), his massive archive of images, is an ongoing study, begun in 1962, of the ways that photography registers a range of social conditions. Among other things, it indexes the “anomie, amnesia, and repression” that Benjamin Buchloh has identified as features of postwar Germany.19 Atlas has an irregular temporal structure that challenges the strict chronology of works like The Dead. Playing with time, Richter opens up his project to a number of compelling contradictions. He also opens up a line for postmilitant criticism. As Buchloh argues, Atlas functions as a critique of “photography as a system of ideological domination,” a system, I would add, that enforces the ordering of time and space.20 The subjects Richter includes range widely, from everyday snapshots, to self-portraits, to official documents of major historical events. Ten individual sections of Atlas (identified by the Richter studio as sheets 470–79) were exhibited in Regarding Terror. Retitled Baader-Meinhof Photographs for the show, the Richter sheets allow for productive comparison with The Dead. The ten sheets were rigorously produced: each one is the same size, and each displays eight or twelve black-and-white photo reproductions,

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also of equal dimension. In total, one hundred pictures appear on the sheets. But Richter upsets this formal balance with a number of tactics. Intentionally blurred, the pictures were made by reshooting press photographs from a large collection that Richter used as resource material for the photopaintings in October 18, 1977. Images that recall Festnahme (Arrest), Gegenüberstellung (Confrontation), and Zelle (Cell) are readily identifiable to viewers who know Richter’s work; however, the artist chose to exclude the original photographs that he relied on to produce the October 18 canvasses. A group of other pictures that Richter collected while working on the RAF paintings in the 1980s provides a critical supplement to the ten sheets: several Baader portraits (again, still blurred), familiar photos from the Stammheim trials, and a seemingly random picture of a man holding an infant. Taken together, they are a record of the artist’s comprehensive research process, a record, in fact, of his life. The Atlas sheets are dated 1989, which is the year that followed Richter’s completion of October 18, 1977. Richter’s decision to situate the photographs posterior to the paintings created a temporal wrinkle that motivates the viewer to consider the effects of standard chronology on our understanding of the RAF. Other instances of untimely sequencing in Atlas suggest that Richter is exploring the larger relationships between lived history, collective memory, and the media. However the KunstWerke curators’ treatment of the Baader-Meinhof Photographs in Regarding Terror made it difficult to appreciate this aspect of Richter’s practice.21 Indeed the curators’ (temporary) removal of the ten sheets from the rest of Atlas elided the important correspondences between the RAF photos and other formal, historical, and pictorial themes that Richter develops in his larger project. Particularly striking are the associations between the Baader-Meinhof Photographs and certain key elements of Atlas, for example, sheets 16–20, which depict concentration camp prisoners, and sheets 21–23, which depict women posing in pornographic scenarios. A number of other sequences interspersed throughout Atlas incorporate photographs of Richter and his family members, including his wives, his children, and an uncle who was an SS officer. Integrated within Atlas, the RAF photos open channels of inquiry into several interrelated topics, such as ideological contestation, crimes against humanity, and the status of women. They also place the German armed struggle into a much broader context, mapping its movement out from the sphere of the exter-

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nal and public and into the domain of the internal and private. The manner in which the Kunst-Werke curators exhibited the Baader-Meinhof Photographs could do no more than repeat the organizing principle of Regarding Terror: the RAF was best accounted for in accordance with a linear sequence, a chronology proving that something had been overcome and resolved. How to compare Feldmann’s The Dead to Richter’s ten Atlas sheets? How does each work relate to the concept of postmilitancy? Like the Kunst-Werke’s media time line, The Dead aims for documentary objectivity. It tabulates empirical evidence and orders it accurately, but even as Feldmann holds out the possibility of “total recall” about the German armed struggle, this very totality connotes the amnesia and anomie that Richter has challenged. Other problems are apparent in Atlas sheets 470– 79. Like October 18, 1977, these images blur the distinctions between document and memory, but they also risk obliterating certain casualties of RAF terrorism. Richter shows only Meinhof, Ensslin, and Baader, not Schleyer, Ponto, or any other victims targeted by the group. Viewed in relation to the concentration camp photographs in Atlas, these pictures also risk implying that members of the RAF were victims of the German state, and not criminal actors in a complex arena of politics. Certainly, Richter is not going for the objectivity of Feldmann or the Kunst-Werke curators. With his counterhistorical tactics and incorporation of personal material into Atlas, he doesn’t seek to “cover” or “master” the story of the RAF. By integrating the Baader-Meinhof Photographs into the corpus of Atlas, he shows how even the extreme actions of militancy and terrorism are integral to German self-understanding. Seeing sheets 470–79 within Atlas, we sense the critical leverage of postmilitancy; the pictures that figure there function within the larger work of art to heighten the tension between the aesthetic and the political. Taken out of context, however, the pictures lose this acuity. Like The Dead, the Baader-Meinhof Photographs, as selected by the Kunst-Werke curators, operated primarily as temporal markers in Regarding Terror. The curators conveyed the information that the German armed struggle had taken place and had been surmounted, but they stopped short of analyzing the persistent effect of the RAF on the many lives that carried on in its aftermath. Turning to works by Johan Grimonprez and then to Yvonne Rainer, we’ll see other examples of postmilitant practice in which aesthetic means are used to move beyond the impasse of Regarding Terror.

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History, Counterhistory: Grimonprez At a Kunst-Werke press conference in January 2005, a reporter asked about the goals of Regarding Terror. “This show isn’t about the RAF,” Biesenbach responded, explaining that the initiative was rather “about reflections of the RAF in newspapers, magazines, and then in the art works.”22 Biesenbach’s introductory essay to the exhibition catalogue reinforces this point. The media, he argues, has “uncoupled” images of the RAF from their historical contexts, “alienating and mythologizing” them.23 The art included in the Kunst-Werke exhibition, according to Biesenbach, countered this “displacement and repression” of “the real world” with “the precise, slow, focused use of images.”24 But in fact the curators repeated this kind of uncoupling when they removed Richter’s Baader-Meinhof Photographs from the framework of Atlas and repackaged them for convenient consumption. Grimonprez, in Dial History, did something similar. He spliced together disparate clips to produce a film that becomes precariously entertaining. Yet certain compositional choices distinguish Grimonprez’s work from the Kunst-Werke logic. Dial History is a panorama of aeroterrorism from 1931 to 1996. Edited with a quick pulse and accompanied by the dance track “The Hustle” from 1975, the jump cuts of this sixty-seven-minute film operate in opposition to the “slow, focused” reflection that Biesenbach emphasized in his essay. Like Richter’s Atlas, Dial History signals a resistance to standard chronologies, as it uses interruptions and interjections to show the limits of such conventions in representing historical contradictions.25 In addition to this temporal manipulation, Grimonprez contrasts multiple sources in Dial History—raw documents of airplane hijackings and popular demonstrations, random television advertisements, and a number of literary references. He also directs our gaze toward the victims of terrorism. An extended interlude shows a woman on a Tokyo runway searching for a loved one among the survivors of a hijack. Another sequence excerpts B-roll footage of a worker mopping up blood after a lethal strike at an airport gate. Interspersed among the various images are scenes that have marked the development of modern ideological fundamentalisms: Soviet masses gathering to see Lenin, flag-waving ranks of the Red Guard marching across Beijing, enraged mourners at Khomeini’s funeral in Teheran. The flashbacks and montages provide a cinematic response to Don DeLillo’s novels White Noise (1984) and Mao II (1991), which Grimonprez

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cites at length. This literary interplay gives Dial History an unusual texture, leading us away from the visual spectacle of hijacking to search for some deeper meaning between the frames. With its peculiar syncopation, Grimonprez’s film is pitched to enter into the viewer’s mind and turn it into a “construction site,” as Alexander Kluge has put it. Like Germany in Autumn, which Kluge helped direct and produce, Dial History invites our active involvement. About two-thirds of the way through the film, Grimonprez shows a series of clips that document the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181 at the peak of the German Autumn. The pace picks up, and we see a series of captions: October 1977: Mogadishu, Somalia. Pilot executed. Plane stormed. Hijackers killed. Stammheim, Germany. RAF leaders found dead in cells. At this point, instead of showing stock images of corpses in Stammheim (as, for example, Feldmann and Richter do), Grimonprez reverses the chronology and inserts an earlier clip of Gudrun Ensslin being counseled by Otto Schily, the young litigator who would later become the Minister of Interior Affairs under Gerhard Schröder. After this interjection, the tension of the Landshut standoff is broken with an odd bit of tape from the Mogadishu control tower. Grimonprez’s caption—“Hijackers order birthday cake and champagne for stewardess”—comes from the official record. One of the Luft hansa flight attendants did have a birthday during the abduction, and the Palestinian agents did request party refreshments. The hijackers were addressing a viewership that would extend far beyond their place and time. They wagered that films of their operation would be played and replayed for generations to come, for its documentary value as well as its dark humor. Here Grimonprez clearly indicates the date “1977” at the bottom of the screen, but the historical moment in Dial History is a continuous, media present. Grimonprez’s compositional strategy distinguishes his film from the anti-aesthetic of The Dead. Accelerating, slowing, and freezing the frames, his postmilitant project exposes how militants and terrorists have exploited the linear coordinates of media time in their campaigns.

Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, dir. Johan Grimonprez, 1997. Film stills.

Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, dir. Johan Grimonprez, 1997. Film stills.

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When Dial History was screened at documenta X, some viewers warned of a danger in the film: Grimonprez had risked dehistoricizing and aestheticizing violence.26 Indeed, as it scans from site to site, the film provides only partial information about the place and time of each event. The various actors that figure in the film—for example, Soviet dissidents, Black Nationalists, and PLO guerrillas—are wrested from their material circumstances and dissolved into a thin veneer of optical effect. But the persistence of this operation in Dial History suggests that Grimonprez is pushing precisely this point. The film asks the viewer to consider the correlations among different forms of militancy and terrorism. It also asks us to imagine that the occasion for political radicalism has not yet passed. If Feldmann, in The Dead, shows the German armed struggle to be a closed chapter, Grimonprez puts the history of the RAF into a contemporary nexus of social, historical, and political antagonisms. Comparing these works, we encounter a paradox of postmilitant art. Feldmann turns to the certitudes of chronology in an attempt to articulate a moral code for The Dead. But his recourse to documentary objectivity risks forfeiting both the social and aesthetic dimensions of cultural practice that are necessary to such a code.

The Culture Industry and the Counterpublic Sphere: Adorno and Rainer Bringing into the same scope The Dead, the Baader-Meinhof Photographs, and Dial History, we approach the critical terrain that Adorno plotted out in “Toward a Theory of the Artwork.” Composed in the same years that the New Left was rising up in West Germany, and published posthumously in Aesthetic Theory in 1970, the year that the Baader-Meinhof group broke onto the scene, Adorno’s essay explores the relationship between documentary and aesthetic production in a way that illuminates some of the problems that have subsequently emerged in postmilitant culture. He draws upon Walter Benjamin’s reflections about the difference between art and documentary production and refines his own distinction between the discourse of art (Kunst), on the one hand, and the particular artwork (Kunstwerk), on the other.27 Many works objectively are artworks, even when they don’t present themselves as art, Adorno argues, for although certain works can be regarded as art, no real art can function like a work. The transfer operates in only one direction: from work to art, not the other way around.

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Adorno doesn’t identify a particular instance of the artwork that tends toward art, perhaps as part of his rhetorical strategy. However, he does describe an example of art that attempts to present itself as an artwork, but fails: his example is documenta. At the time of the essay’s composition, three documenta surveys had been held—in 1955, 1959, and 1964— and the 1968 installment was already being promoted in the press. Adorno remarks that the choice of the term “documenta” as the title for the exposition was inauspicious, for it “glosses over” the persistent divide between art and the document that impedes any circuit that would run from art to artwork.28 This blind spot in the documenta vision, then, actually undermines the modern curatorial project. In suggesting some equivalence or exchangeability between art and document, Adorno argues, the organizers were abetting the very historicist, aestheticized consciousness that proponents of contemporary culture should want to oppose. The documenta initiative, by privileging the documentary function of art, returned to the affirmative, conservative folds of the culture industry. The curators of the Berlin Kunst-Werke made the same misstep in Regarding Terror. Surveying the cultural fallout of the RAF, they seemed stunned by the mass media forces that had been unleashed during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Instead of illuminating the differences between documentary and experimental representations of the Far Left, they chose a curatorial tactic that reinforced and corroborated the official, public order of information. But postmilitant critique calls for another strategy, one that challenges the limits of this discursive space. We find this in the work of the American filmmaker Yvonne Rainer. Her attempts to produce a cinematic counterhistory of left ist militancy and terror open up a particularly dynamic platform from which to regard the RAF. Rainer’s film Journeys from Berlin/1971, like the work of Richter and Grimonprez, accentuates the tension between chronological documentation and aesthetic invention. Made in 1978–79, it contemplates a range of interrelated topics: history and protest, gender and psychoanalysis, and suicide and terrorism. The film was shot mostly in black and white in Berlin, New York, and London, and was performed in English. Two hours long, and one of the most demanding films to watch in Regarding Terror, Journeys stands out within the field of postmilitant culture. Indeed, its aesthetic difficulty brings it to the cusp of a new militancy. The fi lm consists of multiple “tracks,” as Rainer calls them, which include historical

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time lines, dialogues, and mass media images. Interspersed among them are extended narratives from the psychoanalytic therapy of a middle-aged woman, played by the film theorist and art critic Annette Michelson, and a documentary sequence of Yvonne Rainer, herself, reading a letter to her mother. The tracks are laid out in complicated and, at times, contradictory ways. Text, sound, and image underscore, overlap, and cancel one another out. In her notes to the script, Rainer indicates that the fi lm’s composition aims to allow a range of “meanings [to] emerge across the interconnectedness” of the tracks.29 This interplay distinguishes Journeys markedly from both Feldmann’s The Dead as well as the guiding principles of the Kunst-Werke exhibition. Each track is a “journey” that takes the viewer through space and time, leading her toward a new horizon of social experience. Rainer’s explicit, mannered manipulation of the visual and temporal components of the film is emphasized right from the beginning. The screen is black; there is no image. We hear sounds of work being done in a kitchen, and then conversation between a man and a woman who remain unnamed and unseen throughout the film.30 The man unpacks a few groceries and says he’s tired. The woman replies, “I’ll cook.” Then plain white text scrolls across the screen. Its content appears incongruous with the conversation. “Let’s begin somewhere” are the first words to appear. There follows a chronological account of confrontations between militants and state authorities in postwar Germany. The text outlines a number of legislative changes, including restrictions on public dissent, the banning of the Communist Party, and the mandate of compulsory military service everywhere but Berlin. Next the text lists flash points in the history of the RAF’s first generation: Baader and Ensslin’s arson attack in Frankfurt in 1968, the passing of the Emergency Laws later that year that consolidated the state’s monopoly on violence, the RAF’s direct actions, and finally the arrests of each leader and their subsequent deaths while in Stammheim in 1976 and 1977. Date comes after date, but Rainer interrupts this forward progression with a tangle of threads, both pictorial and narrative. Countering the motion of the time line’s upward scroll is a series of horizontal tracking shots that recur throughout the film. The camera pans across a mantelpiece decked with an assortment of objects.31 Among household items such as a teapot, dishes, and bottles of pills, Rainer displays books by Walter Benjamin and Freud, a paving stone, a pistol, and a photograph of

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Journeys from Berlin/1971, dir. Yvonne Rainer, 1980. Frame enlargements.

Meinhof at the Cologne-Ossendorf prison (the same look-that-could-kill picture that Feldmann uses in The Dead). The assortment changes slightly with each pass of the camera. In one instance, an actor’s open hand hovers among the row of stationary objects and holds a snippet of newspaper between two fingers. This incursion animates the mantelpiece tableau and plays against the forward march of the black-and-white text.

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Journeys strikes across several boundaries of separation: temporal, spatial, social, and ontological. Rainer’s close attention to the divide between public and private spheres distinguishes the film from most of the artworks in Regarding Terror. This concern was evident in her earlier work as well: Rainer began her career as a dancer, but turned to filmmaking in the late 1960s and 1970s in an apparent attempt to explore the medium’s potential for “intersubjective experience” and communication among speakers. When Rainer came to spend a year in West Berlin, she must have found a powerful accord with her ideas, for debates on the public/ private dynamic were active in the city’s intellectual and artistic circles. Whereas local feminists elaborated their claim that “the personal is the political,” members of the New Left discussed the weakening of social bonds. Writers such as Peter Schneider and Karin Struck picked up on this shift, exploring new sensibilities and individual subjectivity (Neue Subjektivität); their work, often autobiographical, focused on introspection and “personal authenticity.” Meanwhile, many activists and policymakers across Germany worked to counter social apathy by increasing access to public institutions, government offices, and the media.

Journeys from Berlin/1971, dir. Yvonne Rainer, 1980. 16mm, color, 125 minutes. Frame enlargement.

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The key terms of these debates had been framed by Habermas in Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). A decade later they were reframed by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge in Public Sphere and Experience (1972). With the dual threats of homegrown terrorism and state repression, doubts began to emerge in the 1970s about the capacity of the German public sphere to accommodate rational and critical exchange between individuals and the authorities. Habermas surveyed this changing arena in a set of articles that warned against a collapse of distinctions between public and private spheres. This breakdown appeared most evident in the mass media, especially once reporters unleashed a veritable “witchhunt” (Hexenjagd) to smoke out RAF members and their “sympathizers.” Extensive coverage of RAF actions would become a case in point of Habermas’s disquiet about the collapse of distinctions between public and private. The media surge combined with the state’s tightening controls on civil liberties and entered deeply into the personal experiences of every German who read a newspaper, listened to the radio, or watched television. Negt and Kluge moved beyond Habermas’s analysis to actively oppose the hegemonic forces of West German media conglomerates. Their collaboration called for cultural producers to envision alternative means of social experience: not just to participate in the public sphere, but rather to establish a Gegenöffentlichkeit, or “counterpublic.” We might imagine Journeys from Berlin as a response to their appeal.32 There is an intersection between Rainer’s counterhistory in Journeys and Negt and Kluge’s concept of the counterpublic. The tracks that compose the film negotiate the effects of historical fragmentation; they mediate between individual perception and social parameters. Rainer layers the film with an array of sources—historical, contemporary, documentary, and fictional. The narrative moves back and forth between the time of the film’s production (1978–79), the Russian Revolution, and Rainer’s own life in 1971. Rainer’s intersubjective reach allows the film to challenge the understanding of the German Autumn to an extent that few other artists have sought to do. This challenge is subtended by Rainer’s stance on sexual politics. As she noted in an interview in 1980, certain options present themselves “more readily” to women than to men: “suicide in the personal sphere, assassination in the political.”33 Journeys permits the viewer to identify with the situation of RAF members, focusing in detail on Meinhof. But at the same time the film draws fundamental distinctions between Meinhof’s circumstances and those of other radical women who

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came before her—Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldmann, and the “Amazons” of Bolshevik Russia.34 Investigating the historical contexts of the armed struggle, Journeys moves beyond the mass media temporality of the Kunst-Werke’s Regarding Terror. It opens up a counterpublic space in which to critically engage the individual choices that Meinhof made. The space that Rainer opens up is a feminist one.

Under the Sign of Antigone As Journeys approaches its conclusion, Rainer lays the groundwork for a close reading of a letter that Meinhof wrote at Stammheim, briefly before her death. But it is the sequence directly preceding it that presents Rainer’s sharpest analysis of Meinhof’s militancy. Here she interweaves two tracks to produce a dialectical reflection on social action and intersubjective exchange. One track plays a dialogue between two speakers (identified in the script as He and She), the other (a patient’s monologue from a therapy session) cuts in and out of the conversation. He and She are disembodied voices; when they speak, the viewer sees only a static image of loft windows. The patient’s face, in contradistinction, is filmed. Rainer places the camera directly across from it, so that it is viewed from the therapist’s perspective. The sharp cuts between the dialogue and the analysis combine with the periodic blanking out of the patient’s lines. This impedes any direct access to meaning and foregrounds the apparatus of the film’s own production. In the dialogue, the speaker She discusses the difference between the RAF’s circumstances and those of earlier activists, especially the militant women who appear elsewhere in Journeys. The problem with Ulrike Meinhof, She notes, was that she turned her attention away from the complexities and contradictions of the public sphere and toward herself. Without recourse to the larger networks of social activists in Germany or abroad, Meinhof and the other self-styled martyrs of international resistance set themselves on a path to destruction. Moving underground, they allowed themselves no margin of error. As Rainer’s speaker sees it, one moral of the German Autumn is that the “heroic” autonomy for which the RAF struggled ultimately cut the group off from its constituency and foreclosed possibilities for radical change. This questioning of autonomy is recast in the patient’s monologue. Becoming a “free agent,” she realizes, came at the price of

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“suppressing everything—thought, feeling, doubt.” These remarks on “perfect detachment” echo the strident convictions of Meinhof’s writings, from her earliest pleas for the release of Baader and Ensslin to the last pages of her prison notebooks. The means by which Rainer elaborates this critique are complex; they fully exploit the medium of cinema to advance a feminist proposition. In one track, the speaker She considers the need for humility, not heroism, to make social justice possible. Addressing an unspecified but presumably left ist constituency as “we,” she puts it like this: if we accept our own “fallibility,” we might take greater risks in using our power “for the benefit of others.” This can happen by “inhabiting” our own history and “resisting inequities close at hand.”35 In the second track, the patient reflects upon the necessary role of “compassion”—for the self and for others—in imagining political alternatives. Rainer miters together the two tracks in a way that both heightens the tension between them and primes the viewer to respond skeptically to Meinhof’s concluding letter. Consider this excerpt from the screenplay: Image

Sound

Loft windows.

she: . . . risks in using one’s power . . . patient : Hmm . . . Suicide, then, can be seen as a failure of the imagination . . . she: . . . for the benefit of others . . . patient : . . . a failure to imagine what may lie outside one’s own experience . . . she: . . . working with people patient: . . . a failure to imagine a world . . . she: . . . inhabiting one’s own history . . . patient: . . . where conscious choice . . . she: . . . resisting inequities close at hand . . .

Therapy session.

Loft windows. Therapy session.

Loft windows.

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Therapy session.

patient: . . . and effort . . . she: . . . risks in love . . . patient: . . . might produce mutual respect . . . she: . . . mistakes . . . patient: . . . between you and me.36

In this sequence the narrative comes together and breaks apart between the two women’s voices, allowing for philosophical reflection. The women do not address each other directly, and it is unclear whether they occupy the same moment in time, but they are nonetheless made to speak together through the film’s composition. Their closely interspersed lines allow the audience to note the correspondences between their utterances. First “power” counters “failure,” and then the words “conscious choice” and “resisting inequities” resonate, if only briefly, as a single concept. Rainer’s precise editing of these two tracks approaches a synthesis, for example, in the patient’s proposition that “conscious choice . . . and effort . . . might produce mutual respect . . . between you and me.” However, the incursion of the word “mistakes” complicates any easy resolution. Between the two tracks Rainer lets a counterpublic sphere unfold, a sphere that is full of obstacles but which nonetheless serves as a site for the kind of detailed negotiation of power that RAF militancy and terror refused. A dialectic obtains in Journeys, yet it doesn’t point toward Hegelian sublation. Rather, like the open-ended helix of Adorno’s critical imagination, this is a materialist and negative dialectic, one that seeks proximity and recognition, but not domination or reconciliation.37 Rainer’s notion of “mutual respect” recalls the reciprocal recognition that is yielded in Hegel’s struggle between two subjects in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Indeed we can find several points of contact between the premise of Journeys from Berlin and Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, but the points of divergence are what take us furthest into a postmilitant critique. As critics have noted, Hegel’s elaboration of the relation between identity and difference is at the center of the feminist project to realize freedom and equality. But where Hegel discusses sexual difference, for example, in the Phenomenology as well as the Philosophy of Right, he places limits on women’s agency that both reveal and reinscribe male domination. These limits also disclose the aporias of his own dialectical philosophy, showing it to be a totalizing system of identity logic. Hegel’s femi-

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nine ideal, of course, is the classical figure Antigone, one of the muses of postmilitancy, as I have argued.38 Although Antigone doesn’t appear in Journeys, Rainer’s investigation into the matters of gender, justice, and suicide puts the film directly under her sign. The postmilitant Antigone remains closer to the narrative of Sophocles’s drama than she does to Hegel’s handling of her role. She embodies the tragic conflict between law and kinship, but she also represents the history of “the revolt of women who act in the public sphere on behalf of the private sphere,” as the political theorist Patricia Mills maintains.39 Sophocles’s Antigone prefigures the “Amazons” recalled by Rainer in Journeys, the women for whom suicide and assassination might have once been legitimate political choices. Hegel, as many have remarked, devotes little attention to the ethics of Antigone’s self-liquidation, which is the climax of Sophocles’s drama; this elision disconnects aspects of the tragedy that are germane to feminist analysis, in general, and postmilitant critique, in particular. In the Sophocles play the dramatic tension pivots around the gendering of political agency. Antigone breaks the boundaries of the private sphere to act within the polis, and her suicide refutes patriarchal authority. Sophocles emphasizes Antigone’s place within the community of women. This is different in Hegel’s reflections, since the dialogues between Antigone and her sister Ismene—so central to the establishment of her character—are all but ignored. As Judith Butler has noted, Antigone, for Hegel, “passes away as the power of the feminine” and instead “becomes redefined” as a more narrowly maternal figure that serves to defend the family.40 The Phenomenology, in particular, holds as ideal the male-female relationship of identity-in-difference (for example, between Antigone and Polyneices) and leaves no space to consider the allegiance of sister to sister or woman to woman. In Journeys, as in some of the most incisive works of postmilitant culture, Rainer underscores the tremendous power of relationships between women. In the film’s mitered tracks, cited above, we see this through the provisional and strategic exclusion of the male voice. The crucial moment of recognition comes between Rainer’s two female voices: She and the patient. What the speakers realize together is both the lesson of Journeys and a retort to the violence of the RAF. The mortal acts of Meinhof and the others could not offer a “promising fatality,” as Butler has called Antigone’s suicide.41 Instead, these acts signified a failure of the imagination.

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Rainer’s intertwining of the two tracks sets the stage for the fi lm’s conclusion: a voiceover of one of Meinhof’s last letters, which she wrote to another RAF member, Hanna Krabbe, from her Stammheim cell. Here, weeks before her death, Meinhof sounds as furious with her comrade as she was with the criminal justice system and, indeed, herself. Rainer handles the letter skeptically in her film and suggests that the conditions for protest and opposition have substantively changed since the time of the Russian Revolution. In the 1970s and 1980s the situation was not as clear-cut as it was in the early twentieth century, when Rainer’s Amazons were fighting “the good fight.” Politically active women had more options than the struggle unto death. Today, I would argue, they have even more. To actualize these options, however, requires reflection, collaboration, and persistence. Journeys maps out a counterpublic sphere. To make the film, Rainer dug into the terrain of RAF terrorism, reading the group’s writings, exploring their objectives, and seeking out points of contact between her own life and the lives of the Far Left. This endeavor, together with Rainer’s editing strategies, sets Journeys apart from The Dead, the Baader-Meinhof Photographs, and Dial History. But, more than this, it also affords us a crucial perspective on the gains and losses of militancy. With its openended and counterhistorical structure, the film gestures toward a means of intersubjective recognition that is as much at odds with the RAF’s tactics as it is with a hypermilitarized state apparatus. As we see in Rainer’s editing of the women’s two voice tracks, this means of recognition refutes Hegelian reconciliation, or what Adorno has called “the philosophical imperialism of annexing [that which is] alien.”42 Instead Rainer puts her two speakers into a proximity that preserves difference—in other words, she establishes a situation in which mutual respect might be accorded. One of the morals of Journeys goes beyond the Kunst-Werke’s approach to the RAF: Rainer shows that social justice must be realized through collaboration, not violent confrontation.

Post-Mortem If the media time line that structured Regarding Terror implied an Idealist notion of historical progress, the curators’ selection of Slavoj Žižek as the central theorist of the exhibition pushed the Hegelian references further to the fore. The catalogue essay “Das Unbehagen in der Demokratie”

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(“Democracy and its Discontents”), like much of Žižek’s writing, grounds its arguments in a particular reading of Hegel’s philosophy and then directs them toward an exegesis and validation of psychoanalytic theory. Among contemporary critical theorists, Žižek is one of the most perceptive surveyors of subject formation, complicity, and collective action; his best works reveal the deadlocks of democracy and indicate viable channels out of them. But this essay doesn’t really address the deeper meanings of left ist violence and its representation.43 In line with the curatorial plan of Regarding Terror, Žižek tabulates the twentieth-century history of revolutionary events and portrays the RAF as a symbol of what Biesenbach, in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, calls Germany’s “singular, but missed chance  .  .  . for a greater democracy.”44 Unlike Rainer, Žižek doesn’t acknowledge the social and political contexts that surrounded the RAF; as a result he gives up the chance to assess the long cultural decay that has followed upon their attacks. What his essay does offer, however, is a peculiar, if not perverse, assessment of suicide as an effective mode of resistance. Žižek argues that activists and social theorists on the Left have failed to recognize the authentically transformative potential of “self-violence:” what he describes as “the violent re-formation of the very substance of the subject’s being.” His essay ventures to reposition armed resistance as “the ultimate political version . . . of the Hegelian process of Bildung [or] educational self-formation.”45 What the RAF grasped, Žižek maintains, is that intellectual reflection can’t break the ties of subjection. Instead, liberation must be “staged” through masochism, since this performance, in his words, discloses “the simple fact that the master [the state, the father, the law] is superfluous.”46 Despite the advantage of thirty years of hindsight, Žižek misses a reality that some of the earliest works of postmilitant art gave body to: the RAF’s hunger strikes and suicides convinced most Germans that the group was a danger to society, giving the authorities ample opportunity to roll back rights that the first postwar administrations had written into the federal constitution. As the political scientist Ulrich Schneckener has demonstrated, RAF masochism prompted the state to strengthen its controls.47 So, in the end, did the RAF’s sadistic campaign of bombing, abduction, and murder. In the last line of his essay, Žižek offers a few sober words of warning—that the RAF’s direct actions should be condemned—yet his goal is clearly to illuminate the “potentially redemptive disciplinary drive” of

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the initiatives that challenge dominant institutions of liberal democracy. To this end, he identifies the (mistaken) rationale of the Far Left: only “violent intervention” and radical “externality,” not political education or consciousness-raising, could undo the alienation that gripped the FRG in the postwar years.48 As we have seen, selected artworks in Regarding Terror convey messages consistent with Žižek’s argument. At several points in the Kunst-Werke project, the curators noted that some contemporary artists consider the RAF, like other militants and terrorists, to have superseded the signifying power of aesthetic practice. After October 1977, after September 2001, why paint another Guernica? This challenge, implicit in much of the exhibition, is significant. For if RAF members actually attained the advanced, “external” position that Žižek indicates, it was only through their suicides— acts of utter dejection. We have to ask, in fact, if the leaders of the German armed struggle really achieved this externality. When the first generation began to appear in the headlines and on the nightly news, their acts became prime media feed. By the time the second generation was staging Schleyer’s forced confessions and dispatching the videotapes to national broadcasting networks, the conditions of any BaaderMeinhof revolution became clear: it would be televised, or it would not be at all.49 As Jean Baudrillard noted early on, by playing to the mass media, the RAF entered into the internal dynamics of that same media “machine.”50 Today we can take this insight further. Looking back at the German Autumn, we see that the RAF was speaking not just to publishers and broadcasters, but also to the dominant public sphere, which those media outlets serviced. Soon after its inception, the group disconnected from the social movements that opposed the status quo as well as the vital counterpublic forces that bound those movements together. Flawed as it was, Regarding Terror—or something like it—was bound to happen, for postmilitant culture was reaching critical mass after the alQaeda attacks of 2001. Perhaps the Kunst-Werke was only the quickest to shoot in a game of curatorial inevitability. We can credit the exhibition, in its strengths as well as its flaws, for designating a space in which to reexamine German militancy and terror; the Biesenbach team initiated several productive debates in the public sphere; indeed, we might see Wolfgang Kraushaar’s indispensable study of the German armed struggle, Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus (2006), as a timely, scholarly response to the Kunst-Werke controversies. Only one essay in Kraushaar’s two-

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volume set squarely addressed Regarding Terror, but many of the contributors acknowledged the heightened tension between aesthetics and politics in the postmilitant culture that developed in Germany in the early 2000s.51 If Regarding Terror didn’t provide answers as to why the Far Left has interested so many artists, it still added urgency to this question. Today, more than thirty years after the German Autumn, we can offer this proposition as a response: since the RAF’s ascent in the 1970s, some have understood the possibility of “the most radical gesture” (a situationist concept) to exist only within the media or on the streets, but not in the production of art.52 As a character in DeLillo’s Mao II puts it, now we look to the news for emotional experience that culture no longer makes available.53 Artists, in particular, seem to have sensed that the RAF’s direct actions commandeered the field of symbolic exchange. But if revolutionary violence appeared to exceed the signifying capacities of visual art in the 1970s and 1980s, certain critical minds have sought to reverse this operation. Whereas much postmilitant culture seems unable to do more than copy or collage reporting on terrorism, some artists nevertheless strive to disenchant the violent idols of the mass media. Rainer makes this move in Journeys from Berlin/1971. Others seek to disrupt the purported documentary objectivity that curators and editors have recently favored. The impulse of Grimonprez’s Dial History, for example, lines up with this latter tendency, unsettling the documentary terms of the “ever-falsifying photography” that Adorno examined in Aesthetic Theory.54 And in her film Rainer contrasts fictions with factual documents to take the viewer to the crux between counterhistorical time and counterpublic spaces. Disclosing the important distinctions between Europe’s early revolutionary struggles and the modes of postwar protest and resistance, this film, like some of the most compelling works examined in this book, shows the postmilitant turn as a signal moment in late modernity. Had the KunstWerke curators foregrounded the aesthetic strategies of Grimonprez, Rainer, and other critical and resistant artists in their planning, Regarding Terror might have added new depth to the debates about the cultural response to militancy and terror. Maybe it was the funding problems and press frenzy surrounding the RAF show that put the Kunst-Werke on guard, distracting it from the mission of analyzing the visual mythologies of the Baader-Meinhof

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group. Instead, its museal program defused the contributors’ means of critical analysis and returned the viewers to the premises retro-styling and the déjà vu. Aesthetic innovation and historical reflection were of secondary importance in both the exhibition and the catalogue. Biesenbach’s project gave in to the anti-aesthetic that DeLillo diagnosed in his novels and Grimonprez recalled in his film, whereby “the more clearly we see terror, the less impact we feel from art.”55 That the curators continued in this direction—possibly against their original intentions—brought the exhibition into accord with the RAF’s own failures. Without a viable agenda, members of the RAF shunted their energies from social change to self-obsession. The Kunst-Werke made a parallel move in Regarding Terror. In their appeal for immediacy, in their anti-aesthetic wager, the curators got caught in their own media spectacle. From there, they tilted a degree toward the RAF’s long arc—the arc that fell on the terrible night of October 18, 1977. Since that darkness began to set in, the task of the postmilitant critic has been not just to overcome the German Autumn, but to try to understand it. Indeed it is really only at this moment, as Hegel might have noted, that our work begins, that we spread our wings, like the owl of Minerva, and take flight.

afterword Signs of a New Season

Hari Kunzru’s novel My Revolutions (2008) begins with an epigraph from “The Concept of the Urban Guerrilla,” the founding statement of the RAF, written by Ulrike Meinhof in 1971: “The question of what would have happened if . . . is ambiguous, pacifistic, moralistic.”1 Meinhof had no patience for the logic of “if . . . , then . . . ” With the RAF she wanted revolution and she wanted it right away. Kunzru sets his novel in contemporary Britain but derives much of its texture from the documents and legends of the Baader-Meinhof group. Part of the cultural fallout of the German Autumn, My Revolutions gauges the distance that the militants’ legacy has traveled, from the RAF’s ground zero in 1970s West Germany, across Europe, and on to other continents. Kunzru’s citation conveys a significant aspect of the armed struggle: it was waged in the simple present tense. The RAF spoke in the imperative; its agenda was concrete. Meinhof had no time for the conditional or the subjunctive, the modes of aesthetic production. This grammatical code distinguishes the Far Left’s direct actions from much of the postmilitant art and literature that has come after it. As we have seen, Margarethe von Trotta, Judith Kuckart, and Johann Kresnik, for example, have looked beyond left ist militancy

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and responded with hypothetical questions. Imagining alternative histories and calling forth the ghosts of the RAF, their works also revisited some of the New Left’s desires: social justice, sexual equality, and collective action. Meinhof demanded immediacy. Some of the artists and theorists engaged in the leftist reform of postwar German society took a more gradual approach, remembering the nation’s violence and envisioning a different future. Their thinking expanded upon modern theoretical impulses, such as those of the Frankfurt School and the women’s movement. The RAF’s imperatives, on the other hand, can be seen to have ceded to “the failure of the imagination” that Yvonne Rainer diagnosed in Journeys from Berlin/1971. Similarly, the narrow scope of the militants’ agenda can be seen as the nadir of the conditions that Habermas and Adorno were both analyzing in the 1960s and 1970s. The eruption of armed resistance reactivated debates about the relation between politics and culture. The exchanges that ensued, among theorists, writers, and artists, have striking relevance to postmilitant inquiry, both in Germany and abroad. In the article “The Stage of Terror” in 1977 Habermas warned against the simultaneous consolidation of political and aesthetic forces in Western society.2 In postwar Europe and especially in West Germany, politics was being reduced to administrative bureaucracy (entstaatlicht). This process, Habermas argued, operated within a circuit of “surreal sideeffects”: the desublimation of art into mass culture, on the one hand, and into counterculture, on the other.3 If today we see this tendency in many aesthetic responses to left ist militancy and terror, its origins lead back to the RAF’s own conflation of style and strategy. Used at the peak of the German Autumn, Habermas’s term Entstaatlichung correlated to several propositions in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970), particularly his elaboration of Entkunstung.4 An undoing of art’s autonomy, this “de-arting” or “de-aestheticization” was understood to be a component of the administered society that dominates in late capitalism. In “The Stage of Terror” Habermas aligned Adorno’s reflections on Entkunstung with his analysis of other signs of social disintegration, such as the cultural “decriminalization” of assaults on human life and the concomitant “aestheticization of violence.”5 Linking militancy back to surrealism, Habermas maintained that both the tactics of direct action and the psychology of terror were made possible through the compression of politics and culture that was taking place in the postwar public sphere.

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In other words, the dialectical mediation of opposites (subject and object, art and terror, perpetrator and victim) was giving way to a near-total “identity” between them. But does Habermas’s argument still hold today? The examination of postmilitant culture in After the Red Army Faction opens a different perspective on the collapse of distinctions (Entdifferenzierung) that Habermas describes in his article. In the less critical examples of art and literature that have come in the RAF’s wake, we don’t see just the dubious attempt to give militancy and terrorism an aura of the beautiful or the sublime. We also see something peculiar to our time: the inability, in some instances, to perform the transformation of documentary material into cultural memory. This alters our relationship to the processes of Entkunstung and brings up a related question. If Adorno had lived to see postmilitant culture unfold over the past thirty or forty years in Germany, would he have observed an absolute aestheticization of politics? Probably not. More likely he would have remarked that artists and writers hadn’t aestheticized RAF politics enough. Take the example of Hans-Peter Feldmann’s series The Dead and the way it was curated in Regarding Terror. Considered from the position of critical theory, the project lacks the social and technical mediation necessary for approaching the order of the aesthetic. Stalled in a documentary mode, the Kunst-Werke enterprise returns to the past without really working it through. In this book I’ve sought to analyze postmilitant art, literature, and criticism from the 1970s to the present. Although my methods come from literary and cultural studies, I have kept an eye on the published histories of the period. Depending on the time that a given artwork or text was produced, we see that the perspective on the German Autumn has shifted, as if to recalibrate the narrative of the Far Left according to new coordinates. Different events—the Tendenzwende, unification, and September 11, for example—have prompted artists and intellectuals to rethink the meaning of militancy, terrorism, and security. The Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek has reflected upon this continual recalibration. Her drama Ulrike Maria Stuart (2006), for example, illuminates the ways that Germans of different generations have different accounts of revolutionary violence and the state’s response to it. Jelinek imagines the relationship between Meinhof and Ensslin, and references Shakespeare and Marx, as well as Friedrich Schiller’s drama Maria Stuart (1800). The dialogues let citations from RAF women play against these textual references and become objects

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of a trenchant commentary on the illusions and delusions that have inspired many to revolt at inopportune moments. Ulrike Maria Stuart targets both the New Left circles in which Jelinek herself first emerged as well as some of the cultural producers of what has been described as our “postideological present”: those who strive to capitalize on the phenomenon of revolution.6 Here the attempt to commodify militancy through the fashion campaigns of “Prada Meinhof” comes to mind, but we could also extend this analysis to aspects of Regarding Terror as well as some of the literary fiction that has sought to appropriate the Far Left’s allure. In Ulrike Maria Stuart, Jelinek suggests that the current fi xation on the RAF was produced by a longing for a time when the struggle for social change was more straightforward—or at least when it was mistakenly imagined to be so, as Meinhof’s and Ensslin’s progressively reductive writings demonstrate. This skepticism about the nostalgic wish for “the good fight” is of a piece with Yvonne Rainer’s handling of Meinhof’s last letters from Stammheim in Journeys from Berlin. The Germanist Karin Bauer argues that Jelinek’s play doesn’t just show what she calls the “futility” of left ist engagement, “but also the ridiculous ‘despair over futility,’ a despair that has left the younger generation cynical and empty.”7 Bauer identifies Meinhof’s daughter, Bettina Röhl, as an embodiment of this cynicism, but we also see this outlook in some of the less critical or even reactionary works of postmilitant culture and media.8 Against such examples, in this book I have attempted to convey a more attenuated view of the radical ideals that have motivated various factions of the Left since the late 1960s. Comparing documentary accounts of the German Autumn to their cultural representations, we see that many primary objectives of the Left are still very much worth fighting for. Sexual equality is just one example of this. If Jelinek and Röhl despair over the futility of the RAF, the most critical and resistant works examined in the previous chapters seek to redeem something from the wreckage of the Far Left. This undertaking continues to inflect the latest waves of postmilitant thought. Fatih Akın’s recent cinema, for instance, brings this tendency to light.

An Untimely Rush The RAF announced its dissolution on April 20, 1998; in their eight-page communiqué the group wrote that “the urban guerrilla, in the form of

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the RAF, is history.”9 The statement lists the names of twenty-six dead, all fallen members of the RAF, the June 2 Movement, and the Revolutionary Cells. None of the thirty-four victims of RAF violence is noted. Although the statement begins by marking the passing of the Far Left, it ends with a citation from Rosa Luxemburg that looks forward to an authentically radical future—one that the armed struggle could never realize. The first line is authored by the RAF, the rest come from Luxemburg’s last writings, published in the Spartacist paper Die Rote Fahne on January 14, 1919, the day before her execution by the Freikorps. The revolution says: I was I am I will be10 This RAF communiqué marked the end of the group’s militant and terrorist campaigns. But in 2007, near the much-discussed thirtieth anniversary of the German Autumn, Wolfgang Kraushaar maintained that “the RAF will never be history.”11 Indeed, the proliferation of work on and about German revolutionary violence shows how deeply and painfully some have experienced it. Within the scope of postmilitant culture, the complex relationship between history and memory has particular relevance to film. As I have noted, Thomas Elsaesser sees a parallel in the structures of cinema and psychological trauma.12 In Johan Grimonprez’s Dial History, as in Volker Schlöndorff ’s The Legend of Rita and other films that respond to the rise and fall of the RAF, we see the terror of the German Autumn repeatedly replayed in the present, as if to remaster a traumatic event. Surveying the subgenre of postmilitant cinema in Germany, we see how the image of RAF violence has shifted over time, as have representations of the Left as a whole. Whereas an early project like Marianne and Juliane dramatized the debates between direct action and broad-based activism, later fi lms like Uli Edel’s Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008) patch together a thin pastiche of postwar militancy. Apropos of the trend to flatten out the history of the protest movements, in 2007 the screenwriter and director Fatih Akın commented upon the perception that German society, thirty years after the German Autumn, had become depoliticized. “The Left,” he noted, “functions today

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as nothing more than a caricature.”13 In the interview Akın’s regret about this predicament echoes the despair I observe in Jelinek’s play, but in fact his own cinematic explorations of cultural politics—particularly in Auf der anderen Seite/Yaşamın Kıyısında (The Edge of Heaven, 2007)—suggest that the prospects for real democracy are just beginning to come into view in Europe, now that the dangers of revolutionary violence have abated there. The narratives of Akın’s closely plotted film shuttle back and forth between Germany and Turkey, linking two generations into a matrix of love, death, and militancy. The RAF doesn’t figure explicitly in The Edge of Heaven, but the film nevertheless opens up an important new chapter of postmilitant culture, as it expands upon several themes that have emerged in the response to the German Autumn. Akın seeks out convergences and ruptures between the orders of the aesthetic, the political, and the social, devoting special attention to the matter of women’s agency. The film is an uneven work, at turns both affirmative and critical. Conceived at a remove—both spatial and temporal—from the German Autumn, The Edge of Heaven can serve as a lens through which to look back at the trajectory of postmilitant culture. Meinhof’s “Concept of the Urban Guerrilla” declares the futility of the European moral tradition. Against this, The Edge of Heaven reactivates the ethical inquiries that connect Eastern and Western civilizations. The scriptures of Judeo-Christianity and Islam, particularly the story of Abraham/Ibrahim’s sacrifice of his child, stand as intertexts to the screenplay, as do several works of German and Turkish literature and philosophy. The character Nejat Aksu, the son of a guest worker and a professor of German literature, travels to Turkey in search of a young woman, Ayten Öztürk. Following Ayten’s mother’s last wish, Nejat wants to bring the daughter money for her university studies. But she is no longer in Turkey. As the story progresses, we see that Ayten, a left ist militant, has fled to Germany not only to escape arrest by counterterrorism agents, but also to find her mother. In Hamburg Ayten falls in love with a young woman, Lotte Staub, but is soon deported and incarcerated in Turkey. Nejat and Ayten’s missed encounters establish a pattern for the rest of the film: the narrative is propelled by bodies in motion, people moving from one side to another. Literally translated, the film’s title, Auf der anderen Seite, means “on the other side.” Lotte and her own mother, both Germans, are pulled into the orbit of these two Turks; they make separate trips from Bremen to Istanbul in an attempt to negotiate for Ayten’s free-

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dom. Lifelines cross and new correspondences arise among the main characters, delivering a promise of transformation, emancipation, and even enlightenment. Akın presents Ayten’s militancy as volatile and immature, but also as charged with romantic and creative intensity. Emphasizing character development, the film uses only rough strokes to sketch out the characters’ political positions. When Ayten lived in Istanbul she was presumably fighting for the Marxist-Leninist group Devrimci Sol. Akın skips over the details of her cause: the militants’ origins and platform remain obscure. We are briefly introduced to Ayten’s comrades, all women. When they are arrested, early in the film, Akın trains his focus not on the suspected offenders, but rather on the gathering crowds of neighbors, who applaud the police’s effort to handcuff them and keep the peace. Later, in Germany, Ayten speaks only a few, cursory lines about her mission: “100% human rights. 100% freedom of speech. 100% social education.” Hearing these slogans, Lotte’s mother, Susanne, who came of age in the protest milieu of the late 1960s but who has since yielded to a kind of bourgeois complacency, asks if perhaps Ayten is a person who “just likes to fight” without any particular goal or direction. With its elision of Ayten’s collective purpose and emphasis on the individual subject, The Edge of Heaven suggests that the Far Left has been impelled by brute Oedipal conflicts rather than by more authentically social or political ones. In an expository scene, Nejat expresses skepticism about the prospects of militancy and radical politics. Lecturing at the University of Hamburg, he discusses Goethe’s various references to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. The Weimar classicist, he argues, was against political insurrection, as he found that such uprisings disrupted the deeper, truer rhythms of life that were thought to inhere in nature. Nejat quotes from a text attributed to Goethe and asks: Who would really want to see a rose blooming in deepest winter? Everything has its own season: leaves, buds, blossoms . . . Only fools long for such an untimely rush.14 As Nejat reads out this passage, the camera pans across the room; Ayten happens to be among the students, but she’s in the back, deeply asleep

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and deaf to the lesson. An urban guerrilla on the run between two countries, she is seeking temporary refuge in the modern university—its lecture halls, cafeterias, and students. In this regard she takes after RAF members, who derived subversive power by exploiting the urban built environment. In order to pursue her mission, Ayten risks everything, including Lotte, who is shot down while acting as a reluctant accomplice. But later, when Ayten does time in prison, she turns her attention to books and reading, and changes her ways. Susanne, meanwhile, hires legal counselors who help her to broker a plea bargain: after agreeing to serve as an informant for federal investigators, Ayten regains her freedom. Lotte’s death creates a turning point in The Edge of Heaven. Her senseless murder forces Ayten to confront the consequences of her actions and inspires Susanne to reconsider the ideals of her own rebellious youth. Ayten renounces her commitments—in the language of this film, she “repents”— and the viewer is left to consider what will become of the other guerrillas she fought together with. But her initial, revolutionary desire works indirect and unexpected effects, as Ayten’s militancy spurs Susanne to change her own life. Akın includes a long sequence of the mother grieving her daughter’s violent death. We see her stricken face and hear her anguish. We get a measure of the lived time that fills Lotte’s absence. Then, in the memory of her daughter’s fierce love, both erotic and filial, Susanne forgives Ayten and resolves to stay in Istanbul to help win her release. As this new phase begins in her life, Susanne takes on the flush of the astonishing winter rose that Nejat described in his Goethe lecture. In an earlier scene that establishes Susanne’s character, she wonders aloud if the need for armed resistance might disappear with the unification of European states, especially the proposed inclusion of Turkey as a member. Susanne embodies the spirit of consensus—and even compromise—that comes to dominate The Edge of Heaven. The distance between her views and the passions of Ayten’s commitment can be sensed in the scene when, after reasoning that economic development and constitutional procedure will eventually settle political conflict among Europeans and their neighbors, Ayten snaps back at Susanne, “Fuck the European Union!” Significantly, this exchange is conducted in English, as are several other key dialogues in the film. English, for Akın’s cinema, serves as a mediating lingua franca; here it is the idiom of Ayten and Lotte’s love. In The Edge of Heaven, German and Turkish are just two of the things that the characters must put aside—at least provisionally—to cross over

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to another state of mind, or, to borrow from the film’s title, to go to “the other side.” This willingness to live within changed conditions sets the postmilitant moment of Akın’s project apart from the stridency that the RAF voiced in “The Concept of the Urban Guerrilla.” The Edge of Heaven, like some of the texts and artworks analyzed in this book, occupies the conditional modes that Meinhof wanted to forgo. It also probes topics foreclosed by revolutionary violence—the ambiguity, pacifism, and morality that figure in Hari Kunzru’s Meinhof epigraph. Akın’s characters get caught up in the novels of the young German writer Selim Özdoğan and the accounts of the Amnesty International Report. This interest in literature and learning extends throughout the film, countering the anti-intellectual bent of the Far Left. We see Nejat’s pleasure as he first enters a German bookshop in Istanbul, Susanne’s absorption in her daughter’s notes on human rights, and Ayten’s flash of understanding when she looks up words in her German-Turkish dictionary. The Grimms’ fairytale “The Town Musicians of Bremen” weaves its way into the narrative, as do stories from One Thousand and One Nights. Demanding an imperative of international revolution, the RAF rejected most aspects of German intellectual formation, or Bildung, from its moral philosophy and literature, up to and including the aesthetic and social theories of the Frankfurt School. What Akın shows us, in a different but related time and place, is the humanism that both subtends and outlasts the impulse for revolutionary violence. When Ayten finally walks out of prison, she passes her books on to the other inmates, leaving her friends, we might imagine, with new hope. This sense of resolution, however, is quickly disrupted, as, in the next sequence, a betrayed comrade denounces Ayten’s repentance and spits in her face. The path beyond militancy, Akın suggests, is an arduous one. Although The Edge of Heaven refers to the German armed struggle only in passing, many elements of Akın’s cinematic aesthetic are deeply informed by the RAF story. There are numerous examples of this. Nejat’s commentary on Goethe was derived from notes that Akın took during a lecture at the University of Hamburg by Jan Philipp Reemtsma, the philanthropist and Germanist who publicly criticized the Kunst-Werke’s program for Regarding Terror.15 Ayten and Lotte’s homosexuality parallels the love relationship at the center of Volker Schlöndorff ’s The Legend of Rita. As in Marianne and Juliane, Akın scripts an exchange of clothing and the passing of a handwritten

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Auf der anderen Seite/Yaşamın Kıyısında (The Edge of Heaven), dir. Fatih Akın, 2007. Film still.

note during a prison visit. And the scene in which Susanne and Ayten speak across a prison’s glass partition is indebted to von Trotta’s iconic representation of penitentiary space. Facing each other in the visiting area, the women’s features are mirrored in the pane that separates them. Both cameras—Akın’s and von Trotta’s—show a blurred montage of two faces. Further, Akın borrows from the cinema of Fassbinder. Susanne is played by Hanna Schygulla, a collaborator in many of Fassbinder’s bestknown films. In recent years Schygulla has had only a few roles. Her reappearance as a lead actor in The Edge of Heaven recalls Fassbinder’s prime, when he directed her in a number of projects, including Die dritte Generation (The Third Generation, 1979), his farce on infighting among left ist radicals. Most of Akın’s films nod to the auteurs who defined the New German Cinema from the 1960s until the 1980s. The Edge of Heaven indicates how deeply this body of work was informed by the German Autumn and how its confrontation with the problem of representing militancy and political violence remains urgent for Akın’s own generation.

Crossing Over Any good account of the aesthetic response to the armed struggle needs to recall Fassbinder’s remark at the release of The Third Generation: “I don’t throw bombs, I make movies.”16 Often cited, this assertion resonates

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strongest when set within the larger context of postmilitant culture. Fassbinder was one of the first artists to answer back to the militant wager of the Far Left. As we see in his contribution to Germany in Autumn, he was greatly troubled by the casualties of homegrown terror—the deaths of the RAF’s victims, as well as the state’s backlash against the broader opposition. Fassbinder’s own body manifests this anguish in the film, as it mediates between the terrorist attacks and the cultural effects that were just beginning to ensue. This segment also appears to challenge a position that Meinhof assumed in “The Concept of the Urban Guerrilla.” The RAF defined its mission in this 1971 communiqué as “that praxis which . . . draws a clear line between itself and the enemy.”17 Enforcing this Maoist division, the militants blocked themselves off from what Meinhof once claimed was the RAF’s constituency: the working class, third-world revolutionaries, and women. Fassbinder, in contradistinction, transgressed every limit he encountered. Like Rainer’s open-ended Journeys from Berlin/1971, Fassbinder’s film work occupies the resistant end of the postmilitant spectrum. Here the aesthetic choices militate against the rapid consumption and superficial closure of the culture industry. Fassbinder deployed his films as stealth weapons in the postwar cultural revolution. As we have seen, Meinhof and Ensslin had once sought to skillfully engage German media and reform national power structures from within, but as the RAF hit the headlines, the group put action before words and started reducing its arsenal of tactics to bank heists, abductions, and killings. In “The Concept of the Urban Guerrilla,” the RAF proclaims its “immunity” to the mainstream press, but in reality the group would act out each role—“anti-Semite-criminal-subhuman-murdererarsonist”—that the reporters scripted for them.18 Although Meinhof and the others continued to write and disseminate their ideas as communiqués, their texts became more schematic and fragmented as the RAF turned to direct action. This primacy of physical and material actions was influenced by the international insurrections against imperialism of the time. RAF members weren’t the only Germans attuned to these strategies. Already in 1967 Rudi Dutschke urged his peers to talk less and do more, invoking the struggles of revolutionaries in Southeast Asia and Latin America and calling for a new mode of “sensuous” knowledge or experience (sinnliche Erfahrung) in the struggle against Germany’s old guard.19 As factions of the New Left radicalized into the Far Left, they wanted to match the gestures of

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anti-imperialist insurgents, putting their own bodies in the line of fire. By 1969, when the Brazilian militant Carlos Marighella published the Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, Meinhof became convinced that even the bourgeois enclaves of German cities could be made into sites of resistance. It was effectively a question of mobilizing bodies of the middle class—by force, if necessary. Whereas RAF praxis aimed to ground itself in the physical and the material, in some works of postmilitant culture we see representations of revolutionary violence that register more as surface or image. The photocopies in Feldmann’s The Dead are a good example of this, but this effect is also articulated as a longer process in Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 series, especially the three images of Meinhof’s head. Richter’s technique of photopainting blurs the indexical traces of the real body, the body in pain, and renders a product that tends toward dematerialization. Against this, what stands out, for example, in Fassbinder’s self-portrait in Germany in Autumn, as well as the choreography of Johann Kresnik’s Ulrike Meinhof, is an extension of the lived, material realities that shaped the experiences of militants, their sympathizers, and their victims. We see this materiality in Akın’s cinema as well: his direction goes further than the “allegorical sensuality” for which feminists once criticized Alexander Kluge.20 As in Fassbinder’s work, in The Edge of Heaven the sensual becomes sexual as the protagonists find the fullest expression of their agency and desire. Fassbinder, like Kresnik, Rainer, and several other artists and writers I have discussed, aimed to resist the collapse of aesthetics and politics that Habermas warned against in “The Stage of Terror.” Their works variously illuminate the social and technical forces that mediate between those two ends. Charged by gender issues, these artists and writers give critical leverage to postmilitant inquiry. As I argue, German feminism has been one of the most important social forces to mediate the impact of left ist militancy and terrorism. Some feminists have aimed to situate their agenda outside the institutions of democracy, much as the RAF tried to do. But the women’s movement as a whole has sought to enable equality in both the public and private spheres—it has opened channels for women to move from margin to center. As a result, the feminist mediation of the Far Left is complex. Although the earliest forays of the Frauenbewegung of the 1960s cleared the way for women like Meinhof and Ensslin to take power—at least within their own small faction—since

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the 1970s feminists have voiced the keenest criticism of RAF terror. In an editorial in Emma from 1977, the writer Alice Schwarzer astutely asked why the RAF’s leaders would want to increase the marginalization they already faced as women by going underground, dropping out, or giving in to suicide.21 With its mapping of counterpublic forces, Journeys from Berlin/1971 frames the same questions in cinematic terms. Following the logic of Schwarzer and Rainer, many would look forward to the day when all women could experience freedom without having to take up arms first.22 There are other ways to be militant. At the time of the Emma editorial, Joschka Fischer based his criticism of the RAF on similar grounds. His rejection of revolutionary violence in Autonomie was fundamentally informed by the theory and practice of the women’s movement, as he himself stated. His appeal to his comrades on the Far Left to “cross over” and stand by the feminists strikes the same chord as Fassbinder’s radical rule-breaking in Germany in Autumn. The RAF stopped short of such traversals. Turning inward, its members compounded the isolation that the state was forcing upon them. Ensslin, with her partial knowledge of guerrilla tactics and Maoist thought, swore to “draw the battle line, each and every minute.”23 Journalists and scholars observed this intransigence already before the German Autumn. In 1978 the sociologist Marlis Dürkop published a study of women terrorists that analyzed the potential of crossing “the threshold of political abstinence.”24 Terrorism, she maintained, was not the only way to promote social change. Entering into the public sphere with great collective force, these women could generate a new order of politics. Despite this commentary and scholarship, it has remained for artists and writers to really convey the lessons of the armed struggle across Germany and past its borders. Fatih Akın, in The Edge of Heaven, draws on the tradition of German postwar cinema to show us the value of moving to the other side, or die andere Seite. Fischer, Schwarzer, and Dürkop, among others, saw this back in the 1970s, but it is only through the waxing of postmilitant culture that these lessons fully register. As The Edge of Heaven transposes the critiques of von Trotta, Schlöndorff, and Fassbinder into different aesthetic and geopolitical contexts, it transcends some of the limits of the German case and shows contemporary viewers something we can take away: the power of dialectical mediation, as Adorno would have put it. In the postmilitant moment we can recognize and respect difference, but still move from side to side in order to form strategic alliances.

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Looking again into the German literary tradition—not back to Goethe’s European landscape, but eastward, for a moment, to Kleist’s Trojan tragedy, Penthesilea—these works indicate that we have more choices than “to side with one against the other.”25 The legacy of German militancy has several contrasting aspects: conservative, liberal, and radical. The terrorism of the RAF and other groups prompted the Federal Republic to restrict constitutional rights—not only of the activists themselves, but also of large sectors of the Left. Indeed it is this aspect that makes the German Autumn so compelling for those studying the U.S.-led “war on terror.” As Germans work to make sense of the armed struggle, through research, investigative reporting, and cultural production, they are coming to discern a certain codependency between terrorism and the state. In fact the government’s response to the RAF threat may have exacerbated the situation. The German Autumn showed the precarious position that a democracy assumes when it uses force to discipline and punish its political enemies. While the chancellery became more conservative in the 1970s and 1980s, civil society grew more liberal. Interestingly, the Far Left played a part in this. Its violent interventions intensified Germans’ concerns about the fascist past and the threat of neofascism. The militants also sparked debates about a number of issues, including the Federal Republic’s penal systems, its capacity for democratic discourse, and its allegiance to U.S. economic and NATO military objectives. Beyond this, RAF women, in particular, made the sexual politics of postwar Germany impossible to ignore. Forming a vanguard front of the Far Left, Meinhof and Ensslin expanded the means by which women could act in the public sphere. This is a delicate and difficult point. Even if it wasn’t their intention, the RAF women’s deadly commitment to militancy helped to widen the space for political action, not only for feminists but also for those active in the social movements that were emerging at the time. It is hard to imagine, for instance, how the Green Party would have gained legitimacy in the 1980s without the challenges to the state’s monopoly on violence that were first launched by the Far Left in the late 1960s and contested in the national media from the 1970s onward. In The Edge of Heaven, Akın takes up the dynamic relationship between militancy and democracy and lets it play out between two generations: Ayten’s subversive acts unleash a chain of events that unsettle Susanne’s convictions and reveal new ways of seeing.

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Although RAF violence was terminally misguided, the complex social and cultural responses to it merit further reflection. Only a small number of people were actively engaged in the German armed struggle, but their impact has been disproportionately large. The interest and anxiety invested in the concept of militancy—from the 1960s to the present—betoken doubts about the democratic structures and historical consciousness of the Federal Republic. In particular, the actions of the RAF forced the postwar Left both to redefine its relationship to international protest movements and to sharpen its arguments about domestic social problems and outmoded federal institutions. Today the aesthetic response that has followed upon the RAF’s demise is affecting the broader currents of postmilitant culture, not only in Germany, but well beyond, as we see in the work of Akın, DeLillo, Žižek, and others. The strongest examples of this literature and art testify to the traumas of militancy and terror. Unlike historical documentation of the Far Left, they move beyond reconstructing the empirical details of the perpetrators and victims in order to try to make meaning of their lives and their deaths. This inquiry controverts the nihilistic drive of the RAF itself. Instead of retracting into the dead certainties of a Stammheim Complex, it generates new modes of resistance, both critical and aesthetic. After the brisance of October 1977, postmilitant culture can explore the margins between thought and practice that the RAF left untended. Out of the German Autumn, these works can open new seasons and yet sustain many things: the Left’s critique of Germany’s past, the advance of feminist strategies, and the radical desire for social justice, vital and untimely at once.

notes

I ntroduc tion: Beyond Militanc y 1.

2.

Karrin Hanshew identifies the Red Army Faction’s self-justification for violence as both “emancipation and defense” and “self-emancipation and self-defense.” See Karrin Hanshew, “Daring More Democracy? Internal Security and the Social Democratic Fight Against West German Terrorism,” Central European History 43 (2010): 117–47, at 117; and Karrin Hanshew, Terror and Democracy in West Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3. The Red Army Faction is alleged to have killed the following individuals: Norbert Schmidt, Herbert Schoner, Hans Eckhard, Paul Bloomquist, Clyde Bronner, Ronald Woodward, Charles Peck, Andreas von Mirbach, Heinz Hillegaart, Fritz Sippel, Siegfried Buback, Wolfgang Göbel, Georg Wurster, Jürgen Ponto, Heinz Marcisz, Reinhold Brändle, Helmut Ulmer, Roland Pieler, Arie Kranenburg, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, Hans-Wilhelm Hansen, Dionysius de Jong, Johannes Goemans, Edith Kletzhändler, Ernst Zimmermann, Edward Pimental, Rebecca Bristol, Frank Scarton, Karl Heinz Beckurts, Eckhard Groppler, Gerold von Braunmühl, Alfred Herrhausen, Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, and Michael Newrzella. These names are listed in several RAF studies, including Butz Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum: Die Geschichte der RAF (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2007), 844–46. Together with the members of the RAF who died in action, the death toll of the German armed struggle is sixty-two. Casualties among the German Far Left

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introduc tion include Petra Schelm, Georg von Rauch, Thomas Weißbecker, Holger Meins, Katharina Hammerschmidt, Ulrich Wessel, Siegfried Hausner, Werner Sauber, Brigitte Kuhlmann, Wilfried Böse, Ulrike Meinhof, Jan-Carl Raspe, Gudrun Ensslin, Andreas Baader, Ingrid Schubert, Willi-Peter Stoll, Michael Knoll, Elisabeth van Dyck, Juliane Plambeck, Wolfgang Beer, Sigurd Debus, Johannes Timme, Jürgen Peemöller, Ina Siepmann, Gerd Albartus, and Wolfgang Grams. These names are listed in the RAF’s statement of dissolution in 1998, Rote Armee Fraktion [RAF], “Auflösungserklärung,” April 20, 1998, www.rafinfo.de /archiv/raf/raf-20–4-98.php. See also Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum, 717. The dissolution statement omits the names of the RAF’s victims. Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the 60s and 70s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 198. Commentary on the RAF has questioned the extent to which any terrorist group could be described as properly “political.” Oskar Negt, for example, denounced RAF actions in the May Offensive of 1972 as “unpolitical.” Negt, “Sozialistische Politik und Terrorismus,” in Keine Demokratie ohne Sozialismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), 439. More recently Jürgen Habermas spoke of the attacks in 2001 on the United States and argued that terrorist actions do not envision or advance a political agenda. See Jürgen Habermas, “Fundamentalism and Terror,” in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 25–84. There is an immense literature on the problem of aesthetic representation after the Holocaust, which centers on Adorno’s inquiry into the possibility of art “after Auschwitz.” For a study of both Adorno’s reflections on the topic and the many subsequent references to (and misquotations of) his formulation, see Michael Rothberg, “After Adorno: Culture in the Wake of Catastrophe,” New German Critique 72 (Autumn 1997): 45–81. On trauma and the limits of representation after the rise and fall of the RAF, Thomas Elsaesser has interpreted the autumn of 1977 as a mistaken attempt to master the shocks of Germany’s fascist past. Thomas Elsaesser, Terror und Trauma: Zur Gewalt des Vergangenen in der BRD (Berlin: Kadmos, 2007). A central essay of Terror und Trauma, “Antigone Agonistes,” created a watershed in postmilitant criticism with its complex analysis of the RAF’s assault on German cities, media, and minds: Thomas Elsaesser, “Antigone Agonistes: Urban Guerrilla or Guerrilla Urbanism? The RAF, Germany in Autumn and Death Game,” in Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity, ed. Michael Sorkin and Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1998), 267–302. A notable discussion of literary treatments of trauma and the RAF is Sabine von Dirke, “The RAF as Trauma and Pop Icon in Literature since the 1980s,” in Baader-Meinhof Returns: History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism,

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ed. Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Ingo Cornils (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 105–24. For reflections on trauma and the RAF in visual art, see the essays by Peter Weibel and Svea Bräunert that were published in the catalogue for the exhibition Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures: Peter Weibel, “Repression and Representation: The RAF in German Postwar Art,” and Svea Bräunert, “The RAF and the Phantom of Terrorism in West Germany,” in Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures, ed. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (New York: Abrams, 2009), at 256–59 and 260–73, respectively. 6. One of the earliest English-language accounts of the German Far Left is Jillian Becker, Hitler’s Children (London: Michael Joseph, 1977). Subsequent works that use the concept of generations within the RAF include Andreas Musolff, “Hitler’s Children Revisited: West German Terrorism and the Problem of Coming to Terms with the Nazi Past,” Terrorism and Political Violence 23 (2011): 60–71; Alexander Straßner, Die dritte Generation der “Roten Armee Fraktion”: Entstehung, Struktur, Funktionslogik und Zerfall einer terroristischen Organisation (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2003); Hans-Jürgen Wirth, Hitlers Enkel oder Kinder der Demokratie? Die 68er, die RAF und die Fischer-Debatte (Giessen: Psychosozial Verlag, 2001); and Tobias Wunschik, Baader-Meinhofs Kinder: Die zweite Generation der RAF (Opladen: Westdeustcher Verlag, 1997). 7. In studies of West German society from the 1970s to the 1990s, the term “Far Left” (die Linksradikalen) is distinguished from “the Left” (die Linke). In chapter 1, I discuss in greater detail the different forms of left ist politics in postwar Germany. 8. Jamie Trnka surveys mass media representations of women and terrorist violence in West Germany in Trnka, “Frauen, die unzeitgemäß schreiben: Bekenntnisse, Geschichte(n) und die Politik der Terrorismusliteratur,” in Nachbilder der RAF, ed. Inge Stephan and Alexandra Tacke (Vienna: Böhlau, 2008), 216–31. Patricia Melzer examines early feminist responses to the representation of women in the RAF and the June 2 Movement, in West German mass media sources, especially selected issues of Der Spiegel that were published in 1977. Patricia Melzer, “ ‘Death in the Shape of a Young Girl’: Feminist Responses to Media Representations of Women Terrorists during the ‘German Autumn’ of 1977,” International Journal of Politics 11, no. 1 (March 2009): 35–62. Clare Bielby compares the “feminization” of terrorism in media coverage of the German Autumn both in the late 1970s and at the thirty-year anniversary, which was a prominent news item in print and broadcast reporting in 2007. See Clare Bielby, “Remembering the Red Army Faction,” Memory Studies 3, no. 2 (2010): 137–50. 9. Alain Badiou, Le Siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 179. 10. One example of Meinhof’s usage of the term is: “Stadtguerilla zielt darauf, den staatlichen Herrschaftsapparat an einzelnen Punkten zu destruieren, stellenweise außer Kraft zu setzen, den Mythos von der Allgegenwart des Systems und

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introduc tion seiner Unverletzbarkeit zu zerstören.” Ulrike Meinhof, “Das Konzept Stadtguerilla,” in texte: der RAF (Malmö: Bo Cavefors, 1977), 357. The term also appears frequently in several of the RAF’s writings that have been collected and published as Rote Armee Fraktion: Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF, ed. Martin Hoff man (Berlin: ID-Verlag, 1997). A key text on the aestheticization of politics, death, and violence is Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 217–52. English translations of the broader debates on this topic are collected in Perry Anderson, ed., Aesthetics and Politics (London: New Left Books, 1977); and Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Urizen Books, 1982). Parts of Assayas’s memoir describe the influence that Guy Debord and the Situationist International had on him. Olivier Assayas, Une adolescence dans l’aprèsMai (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2005). Translated by Adrian Martin and Rachel Zerner as A Post-May Adolescence: Letter to Alice Debord (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). Philip Roth, American Pastoral (New York: Vintage, 1998); Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (New York: Scribner, 2013). In the past few years, several overviews of this cultural formation have appeared. One recent example is the special issue of Seminar, which contains German and English contributions: Karin Bauer, ed., “Questioning the RAF: The Politics of Culture,” special issue, Seminar 47, no. 1 (February 2011). Other collections of essays on the RAF and culture include: Norman Ächtler and Carsten Gansel, eds., Ikonographie des Terrors? Formen ästhetischer Erinnerung an den Terrorismus in der Bundesrepublik, 1978–2008 (Heidelberg: Winter, 2010); Berendse and Cornils, Baader-Meinhof Returns; and Matteo Galli and Heinz-Peter Preusser, eds., Mythos Terrorismus: Vom Deutschen Herbst zum 11. September (Heidelberg: Winter, 2006). There are several studies of the representation of terrorism in German literature, including the comprehensive study by Julian Preece, Baader-Meinhof and the Novel: Narratives of the Nation/Fantasies of the Revolution, 1970–2010 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); the short and dry book by Thomas Hecken, Avantgarde und Terrorismus: Rhetorik der Intensität und Programme der Revolte von den Futuristen bis zur RAF (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2006); and Thomas Hoeps, Arbeit am Widerspruch: “Terrorismus” in deutschen Romanen und Erzählungen, 1837–1992 (Dresden: Thelem Universitätsverlag, 2001). Gerrit-Jan Berendse, Schreiben im Terrordrom: Gewaltcodierung, kulturelle Erinnerung und das Bedingungsverhältnis zwischen Literatur und RAF-Terrorismus (Berlin: Edition Text + Kritik, 2005) is the most complete treatment to date of the relationship between RAF violence specifically and literary culture.

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16. 17.

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An example of scholarship on the representation of the RAF in music is Michael T. Putnam, “Music as a Weapon: Reactions and Responses to RAF Terrorism in the Music of Ton Steine Scherben and their Successors in Post-9/11 Music,” Popular Music and Society 32, no. 5 (December 2009): 595–606. Jürgen Habermas variously explicates and qualifies the concept of “left ist fascism” in “Kongreß ‘Hochschule und Demokratie’ ” and “Diskussion über die ‘Tätigkeit der Regelverletzung’ und ‘linken Faschismus’ (9 June 1967),” in Jürgen Habermas, Kleine politische Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981), 205–16, 241, 245; and Habermas, “ ‘Etikett des linken Faschismus’ vom 13. Mai 1968,” in APO: Die außerparlamentarische Opposition in Quellen und Dokumenten, 1960–70, ed. Karl A. Otto (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1987), 249–58. For an overview of the discussion of fascism and the New Left, see Iring Fetscher and Günter Rohrmoser, eds., “Der Faschismus-Vorwurf,” in Ideologien und Strategien: Analysen zum Terrorismus 1 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1981), 185–203. Jürgen Habermas, “Die Bühne des Terrors: Ein Brief an Kurt Sontheimer,” Merkur 31, no. 353 (October 1977): 944–59. One of the first studies to observe the “overrepresentation” of women in the German Far Left is by the American military analysts Charles A. Russell and Bowman H. Miller. They noted that women planned and executed most of the actions perpetrated by the RAF and other groups in the armed struggle. See Charles A. Russell and Bowman H. Miller, “Profi le of a Terrorist,” Terrorism 1, no. 1 (1977): 17–34, esp. 21–23. In the late 1970s and early 1980s a number of social scientists and criminologists began to study the central role of women in West Germany’s homegrown terrorism. Examples of the scholarship include Marlis Dürkop, “Frauen als Terroristinnen: Zur Besinnung auf das soziologische Paradigma,” Kriminologisches Journal 10 (1978): 264–80; Susanne von Paczensky, ed., Frauen und Terror: Versuche, die Beteiligung von Frauen an Gewalttaten zu erklären (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1978); Ilse Korte-Pucklitsch, “Warum werden Frauen zu Terroristen? Versuch einer Analyse,” Vorgänge: Zeitschrift für Gesellschaft spolitik 4/5 (1979): 121–28; and Werner Jubelius, “Frauen und Terror: Erklärungen, Scheinerklärungen, Diffamierungen,” Kriminalistik 35 (1981): 247–55. A more recent investigation of women’s participation in the Far Left is Gisela DiewaldKerkmann, “Bewaff nete Frauen im Untergrund: Zum Anteil von Frauen in der RAF und der Bewegung 2. Juni,” in Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus, ed. Wolfgang Kraushaar (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006), 657–75. Analysen zum Terrorismus is a series of studies on terrorism and security, with a rotating editorship. Here I reference an article in the second volume: Lieselotte Süllwold, “Stationen in der Entwicklung von Terroristen: Psychologische Aspekte biographischer Daten,” in Lebenslaufanalysen: Analysen zum Terrorismus 2, ed. Herbert Jäger, Gerhard Schmidtchen, and Lieselotte Süllwold (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1981), 106.

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19. For example, Alan Rosenfeld, “ ‘Anarchist Amazons’: The Gendering of Radicalism in 1970s West Germany,” Contemporary European History 19, no. 4 (2010): 351–74, at 352; and Dorothea Hauser, Baader und Herold: Beschreibung eines Kampfes (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2007), 16. 20. Gerhard Schmidtchen, “Terroristische Karrieren: Soziologische Analyse anhand von Fahndungsunterlagen und Prozessakten,” in Jäger, Schmidtchen, and Süllwold, Lebenslaufanalysen: Analysen zum Terrorismus 2, 23; cited in Rosenfeld, “Anarchist Amazons,” 357. 21. Christina Thürmer-Rohr describes the public perception of the equivalence between feminism and terrorism in “Erfahrungen mit Gewalt,” in Paczensky, Frauen und Terror, 87–97, at 95. The remark about terrorism being the product of an “Exzeß der Befreiung der Frau” is attributed to Günther Nollert, President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. It was first quoted in Dick Schubert, “Die Frauen waren die Seele der Gruppe,” Christ und Welt (June 23, 1972), and was cited in Der Spiegel 33 (1977): 23. For a reflection on Nollau’s concerns, see Gisela Diewald-Kerkmann, Frauen, Terrorismus und Justiz: Prozesse gegen weibliche Mitglieder der RAF und der Bewegung 2. Juni (Dusseldorf: Droste, 2009), 138–39. 22. Rote Zora was one of the smallest subfactions of the left wing in West Germany. Active from 1977 to 1995, the all-female group grew out of (and effectively broke off from) the Revolutionären Zellen (Revolutionary Cells), mentioned in the introduction. Rote Zora was allegedly responsible for a series of nonlethal bomb attacks on German institutions and concerns, including the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, several “sex shops” in Cologne, and the Institute for Human Genetics at the University of Muenster. Communiqués released by the group indicate that its actions were aimed to destroy property, but never harm human or animal subjects. Rote Zora affirmed its links to the women’s movement and described its agenda as a militant and feminist attack on patriarchy, particularly on the restriction of reproductive rights, sex trafficking, and genetic engineering (which was perceived as a threat to women). Two useful publications that document the group’s ideology and actions are “Interview mit der Roten Zora,” Emma (June 1984): 598–605; and Die Früchte des Zorns: Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der Revolutionären Zellen und der Roten Zora (Berlin: Edition IDArchiv, 1993), esp. 594–633. The filmmaker Olivier Ressler produced a short documentary film about Rote Zora (of the same title, in 2000), but unlike the RAF, the group has received relatively little critical attention, whether from artists or scholars. For an example of a more general statement of feminist support for the armed struggle, see the article “Frauen und Gewalt oder Gewalt und Frauen,” Dokumentation zur Situation in der BRD und zum Verhältnis BRD-Schweiz (Berlin: Clip-Archiv, Freie Universität, 1977), 31–34, cited in Melzer, “Death in the Shape of a Young Girl,” 48–49.

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23. The feminist critiques of the armed struggle are discussed in Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 229, 236–37. 24. See, for example, Negt, “Sozialistische Politik und Terrorismus,” 434–45. For an analysis of the multiple divisions between the RAF and other left ist initiatives, see Varon, Bringing the War Home, 212–14, 228–29. 25. Don DeLillo, Mao II (New York: Penguin, 1991), 157. 26. As the political scientist Audrey Kurth Cronin has argued, the definition of “terrorism” resists consensus because of its subjective character. Terrorism is “intended to be a matter of perception and is thus seen differently by different observers and at different points in history.” Audrey Kurth Cronin, How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 6–7. Recent articles that analyze the problem of defining “terrorism” include Eva Herschinger, “A Battlefield of Meanings: The Struggle for an Identity in the UN Debates on a Definition of International Terrorism,” Terrorism and Political Violence 25, no. 2 (2013): 183–201; and James Khalil, “Know Your Enemy: On the Futility of Distinguishing Between Terrorists and Insurgents,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 36, no. 5 (2013): 419–30. A foundational reflection on the use and abuse of “terrorism studies” is Marie Breen Smyth et al., “Critical Terrorism Studies: An Introduction,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 1, no. 1 (2008): 1–4. In the German sphere, Peter Waldmann’s definition of “terrorism” from 1998 might be seen as a response to the German Autumn of 1977; he defines terrorist acts as “planmäßig vorbereitete, schockierende Gewaltanschläge gegen eine politische Ordnung aus dem Untergrund. Sie sollen allgemeine Unsicherheit und Schrecken, daneben aber auch Sympathie und Unterstützungsbereitschaft erzeugen.” Peter Waldmann, Terrorismus: Provokation der Macht (Munich: Murrman, 1998), 10. 27. The political scientist Edward Newman expands this concept of terrorism. He argues that terrorist acts may also be perpetrated without regard for—or without explicitly targeting—civilians. His observation that terrorism can also convey an intention “to exert influence and change upon third parties” is thus germane to analyses of the RAF and its cooperation with other armed resistance movements. See Edward Newman, “Weak States, State Failure, and Terrorism,” Terrorism and Political Violence 19, no. 4 (December 2007): 463–88, at 472. 28. How militant and terrorist organizations see themselves often differs from the way that scholars see them. Organizations such as the RAF have been categorized according to a number of factors, including motives, targets, demands, organizational structure, operative methods, and arenas of action. Gregory D. Miller presents a four-part model to describe terrorism that includes nationalseparatist, revolutionary, reactionary, and religious terrorism. As revolutionary

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29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

terrorists, the RAF sought to use violence “as a catalyst for societal change.” Miller observes that most terrorist organizations that promoted a MarxistLeninist ideology (the RAF, the Italian Red Brigades, and the Japanese Red Army, for example) have declined since the Cold War. Some Far Left groups continue in this campaign today, particularly in Latin America and Asia, such as the Shining Path in Peru, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and the Revolutionary Left (Devrimci Sol) in Turkey. These organizations want “dramatic change,” not only in particular governments, but “in society itself.” Gregory D. Miller, “Confronting Terrorisms: Group Motivation and Successful State Policies,” Terrorism and Political Violence 19, no. 3 (2007): 331–50, at 335. For wider discussions of the problems of distinguishing terrorism, militancy, and political violence, see Andrew H. Kydd and Barbara F. Walter, “The Strategies of Terrorism,” International Security 31 (Summer 2006): 49–79; Bruce Hoff man, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 1–41; Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 21; and Jutta Bakonyi, “Terrorismus, Krieg und andere Gewaltphänomene der Moderne,” in Terrorismus und Krieg: Bedeutung und Konsequenzen des 11. September, Arbeitspapier Nr. 4/2001 Forschungsstelle Kriege, Rüstung und Entwicklung, ed. Jutta Bakonyi (Hamburg: Universität Hamburg, IPW 2001), 5–20. In the Anglo-American world, Charles Tilly’s foundational work on political violence was some of the first to investigate the semantics of the term “terrorism.” See Charles Tilly, “Revolutions and Collective Violence,” Handbook of Political Science 3 (1975): 485–555. “militant, adj. and n.” OED Online. March 2014, www.oed.com.central.ezproxy .cuny.edu:2048/view/Entry/118418. United Nations, Resolution on Terrorism: A/RES/42/159, 7 December 1987 (New York: United Nations, 1987). Two models for this enterprise are Leonard Weinberg, “The Challenges of Conceptualizing Terrorism,” Terrorism and Political Violence 16, no. 4 (2004): 777–94; and Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Sergei Nechaev, The Revolutionary Catechism, www.spunk.org/library/places /russia/sp000116.txt. Although the pamphlet doesn’t use the terms “militancy” or “terror,” Nechaev does give a portrait of a “revolutionary,” who “has no attachments, . . . no name”; he is “prepared destroy himself” and obliterate everything that stands in his way. Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story (New York: Source Book Press, 1970), 37. Ewa Płonowska Ziarek has recently demonstrated that Pankhurst made compelling claims about the term “militancy,” as she argued before a jury that it

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35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

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need not be interpreted to mean “only violence” and that “ ‘militancy’ itself,” when closely considered, “becomes militant, indeterminate, giving rise to new conflicting interpretations.” Cited in Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 33–34. Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World, ed. James M. Washington (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 103. Steve D’Arcy discusses King’s use of the term “militancy” within a broader political and philosophical reflection on the concept in his forthcoming study “ ‘Languages of the Unheard’: Why Militant Protest Is Good for Democracy,” working paper. King Jr., “1963 speech,” in I Have a Dream, 103. Since the 1960s critics in the Anglo-American and French spheres have continued to draw on a similar resource of significance in their writings. See, for example, Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” October 51 (Winter 1989): 3–18; Alain Badiou, Philosophy for Militants [La relation énigmatique entre philosophie et politique], trans. Bruno Bosteels (New York: Verso, 2012); Faisal Devji, Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). As Hanshew explains, early debates on the objectives of militant democracy in the postwar period were elaborated in works such as Karl Lowenstein, “Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights, I and II,” American Political Science Review 31 (June 1937): 417–32 and 638–58; and Karl Mannheim, Diagnosis of Our Time: Wartime Essays of a Sociologist (London: Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1943). See the discussion in Hanshew, Terror and Democracy, 34–35. Alexander S. Kirschner considers Germany’s wehrhafte Demokratie in his study of political violence. See Alexander S. Kirschner, A Theory of Militant Democracy: The Ethics of Combatting Political Extremism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). For a foundational analysis of the concept of militant democracy, see Markus Thiel, ed., Wehrhafte Demokratie: Beiträge über die Regelungen zum Schutz der freiheitlichen demokratischen Grundordnung (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003). Mark Hosenball, “Secret Panel Can Put Americans on Kill List,” uk.reuters.com, October 5, 2011, www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/05/us-cia-killlist-idUSTRE79475 C20111005. Suzanne Knaul, “Anerkennung von Palästina durch die UN: Fatah und Hamas nähern sich an,” taz.de, November 30, 2012, www.taz.de/!106633/. Examples of this scholarship include Sarah Colvin and Helen WatanabeO’Kelley, Women and Death 2: Warlike Women in the German Literary and Cultural Imagination since 1500 (Rochester: Camden House, 2009); Sonja Hilzinger, Gewalt und Gerechtigkeit: Auf den Schlachthöfen der Geschichte: Jeanne d’Arc und ihre modernen Gefährtinnen (Berlin: Matthes und Seitz, 2012); and Diana Reese, Reproducing Enlightenment: Paradoxes in the Life of the Body Politic: Literature and Philosophy around 1800 (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), esp. 123–63.

214 introduc tion 40. Heinrich von Kleist, Penthesilea: A Tragic Drama, trans. Joel Agee (New York: Harper Collins, 1998), 6. von Kleist, Penthesilea: Ein Trauerspiel, in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Roland Reuß and Peter Staengle (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2010), 1:376. 41. von Kleist, Penthesilea: A Tragic Drama, 20. 42. Ibid., 8. 43. Kleist drafted sections of Penthesilea from the cell of a French prison, where he was held as a suspect for espionage. While a youth in Brandenburg, he kept a close watch of Robespierre and the Jacobins to the west. Later, he took an interest in guerrilla fighters who were caught in the crossfire between Prussian and French forces and sympathized with their actions of grassroots resistance. See Jost Hermand, “Kleist’s Penthesilea: Battleground of Gendered Discourses,” in A Companion to the Works of Heinrich von Kleist, ed. Bernd Fischer (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 2003), 55; as well as Peter Horn, Positionen I: Heinrich von Kleist (Cape Town: Cape Town University Press, 1982), 105. 44. Christa Wolf, “Laudatio auf Thomas Brasch aus Anlaß der Verleihung des Kleist-Preises,” in Christa Wolf: Ein Arbeitsbuch: Studien, Dokumente, Bibliographie, ed. Angela Drescher (Berlin: Aufbau, 1989), 437–44, at 443. 45. von Kleist, Penthesilea: A Tragic Drama, trans. Agee, 6. The translator Joel Agee emphasizes the lack of choice in his translation of “Sie muß zu Einer der Parthein sich schlagen” (Kleist, Penthesilea: Ein Trauerspiel, 376). 46. von Kleist, Penthesilea: A Tragic Drama, 129. 47. The years from 1967 to 1977 are referred to as “the red decade” in Gerd Koenen, Das rote Jahrzent: Unsere kleine deutsche Kulturrevolution (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2001). Koenen’s book is one of several that have established the subfield of “RAF Studies” in contemporary German history. One of the first and bestknown works on the RAF is Stefan Aust’s investigative account Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex, which appeared in 1985, but was expanded, revised, annotated, and translated for ever larger print runs in 1987, 1997, and 2008. See Stefan Aust, Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex (Hamburg: Hoff man und Campe, 1997); and the English translation, Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon, trans. Anthea Bell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). More recent historical overviews of the RAF and left ist terrorism in Germany include Klaus Weinhauer, Jörg Requate, and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, Terrorismus in der Bundesrepublik: Medien, Staat und Subkultur in den 1970er Jahren (Frankfurt: Campus, 2006); and the more popularly oriented book by Willi Winkler, Die Geschichte der RAF (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2007). 48. Postmilitant perspectives have also emerged in Italy, Ireland, and Spain, as well as Turkey, places where Far Left and separatist movements have begun to wind down. Examples of scholarship on this tendency include Sotera Fornaro, L’ora di Antigone dal nazismo algi “anni di piombo” (Tübingen: Narr, 2012); Michael Storey, Representing the Troubles in Irish Short Fiction (Washington, D.C.: Catholic Uni-

introduc tion

49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

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versity Press, 2004); and Josetxo Beriain, “Los ídolos de la tribu en el nacionalismo vasco,” in Relatos de nación: La construcción de las identidades nacionales en el mundo hispánico, ed. Francisco Colom-González (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2005), 477–505. As to the question of postmilitant Islam, I’m thinking of Faisal Devji’s work, mentioned above, which assesses al-Qaeda’s potential to shift from direct actions toward humanitarian concerns. For a reflection on “amilitancy,” a concept that might be productively compared to postmilitancy, see Nicholas Thoburn, “What Is a Militant?,” in Deleuze and Politics, ed. Ian Buchanan and Nicholas Thoburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 109–20, at 114. Moving from scholarship into popular culture, a postmilitant perspective can be discerned in the curating of Gerçeklik Terörü/Reality Terror at Depo, a space for contemporary culture, in Istanbul in 2012. Gerrit-Jan Berendse has also studied the dynamics of art and culture within the RAF. He describes the relationship between aesthetics and the terrorism of the RAF as “reciprocal.” The extant art and literature on the RAF find a complement in the various ways that the RAF itself “instrumentalized” aesthetic means as part of their political interventions. Gerrit-Jan Berendse, “Die Wunde RAF: Zur Reziprozität von Fiktion und Terrorismus im Spiegel der neuesten Sekundärliteratur,” Seminar 47, no. 1 (February 2011): 10–26, at 11. Hal Foster introduces the concepts of reactionary postmodernism and its resistant forms in Foster, “Introduction,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: New Press, 2002), xii–xiii. Meinhof’s statement, directed largely against Oskar Negt, was reprinted in “den antiimperialistischen kampf führen! die rote armee aufbauen! die aktion des schwarzen september in münchen,” in texte: der RAF, 411–47. A useful historical study on the events of 1972 is Kay Schiller and Christopher Young, The 1972 Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). A similar argument is made by Klaus Theweleit, Ghosts: Drei leicht inkorrekte Vorträge (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1998). For reflections on postcommunist nostalgia and melancholy, see Claude Lefort, La Complication: Retour sur le communisme (Paris: Fayard, 1999); Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001); and Charity Scribner, Requiem for Communism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003). Theweleit uses the term “Gespenst” in Ghosts. Other examples of this tendency include Gerrit-Jan Berendse, “Das Gespenst von Stammheim: Notizen zur Gewalt und Literatur um die Jahrtausendwende,” in Zur deutschsprachigen Literatur der neunziger Jahre: Rückblicke, Überblicke und Ausblicke, ed. Christiane Cosentino, Wolfgang Ertl, and Wolfgang Müller (Frankfurt: Lang, 2002); and Gerhard Wisnewski, Wolfgang Landgraeber, and Ekkehard Sieker, eds., Das RAF-Phantom:

216

introduc tion Wozu Politik und Wirtschaft Terroristen brauchen (Munich: Droemer Knaur, 1997). Sabine Eckmann uses the terms “phantom” and “specter” in her introductory essay “Historicizing Postwar German Art,” in Barron and Eckmann, Art of Two Germanys, 34–44, at 43, 44.

1. The Red D ecade and Its Cultur al Fall ou t 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

Note my usage: “a RAF member,” not “an RAF member.” In spoken German the Red Army Faction is conventionally referred to as die RAF (pronounced “raff ”). In Germany the political Left has encompassed an array of progressive, socialist, and anarchist movements, organizations, and parties. In the Cold War years, West German left ists were central to both the government of the Bundestag and the Extraparliamentary Opposition. The spectrum of left ist politics in the Federal Republic has ranged from center left (for example, the Social Democratic Party), to the New Left, to the extremism of the RAF and other Far Left groups. The German Democratic Republic, in contradistinction, recognized only one political organization, the Socialist Unity Party. Klaus Theweleit, Ghosts: Drei leicht inkorrekte Vorträge (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1998). Investigations into the RAF’s relationship with both pro-Palestinian militants and Fatah have motivated research in European political history. Examples include Rossana Lucchesi, RAF und Rote Brigaden: Deutschland und Italien von 1970 bis 1985 (Berlin: Frank und Timme, 2013); and Stefan Malthaner, “Internationaler Terrorismus und seine Bezugsgruppen,” in Determinanten des Terrorismus, ed. Peter Waldmann (Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2005), 119–31. For a recent analysis of “German-born” networks of militant jihadism, see Guido Steinberg, German Jihad: On the Internationalization of Islamist Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). See also founding PLO statements by George Habash in Rote Armee Fraktion: Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF, ed. Martin Hoff man (Berlin: ID-Verlag, 1997), 70–72; and statements by Wadi Haddad in Oliver Schröm, Im Schatten des Schakals: Carlos und die Wegbereiter des internationalen Terrorismus (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2002), 17. Most investigations of the deaths of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe indicate that they committed suicide, but no conclusive proof has been produced. A fourth RAF member, Irmgard Möller, is also believed to have participated in the alleged suicide pact. Prison guards found her alone in her cell, suffering from multiple stab wounds. Möller recovered from the injuries and remained incarcerated at Stammheim until her release in 1995. In Germany many published sources investigate the conditions at Stammheim and the events of October 18, 1977. A recent example is Helge Lehmann, Die Todesnacht in Stammheim: Eine Untersuchung (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 2012).

1. the red decade and its cultur al fall ou t 6.

217

Talal Asad touches briefly upon the RAF in his study of suicide terrorism: Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Although a thorough analysis of the role of suicide terrorism in the RAF agenda lies outside the scope of this book, starting points for an investigation of this matter— especially of the feminist questions raised by Meinhof’s and Ensslin’s suicides— would include Asad’s book as well as Cindy Ness, ed., Female Terrorism and Militancy: Agency, Utility, and Organization (New York: Routledge, 2008). 7. Many on the West German Right—and some in the center as well—commended the government’s harsh response to the German Autumn, calling it a success for the militant democracy (streitbare Demokratie) of the young Federal Republic. Against this, Sven Reichardt has described the state’s reaction to the threat of left ist terrorism as “excessive.” As he argues in the German History forum on 1977, the 1970s witnessed “a massive increase in state security personnel.” The expansion and centralization of the rights of the police and the Verfassungsschutz, Reichardt maintains, worked to undermine the principles of a liberal constitutional state. See Belinda Davis, Donatella della Porta, Geoff Eley, Karrin Hanshew, and Sven Reichard, “Forum: 1977,” German History 25, no. 3 (2007): 401–21, at 405. 8. Herfried Münkler, Neuen Kriege (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2002), 48–57. Giorgio Agamben’s recent reflections on Carl Schmitt’s theorization of dictatorships align closely with Münkler’s arguments about the RAF and German state power. See Giorgio Agamben, States of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 9. For a survey of these tendencies, see Donatella della Porta and Mario Diani, Social Movements: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), esp. chap. 3, “The Symbolic Dimension of Collective Action.” 10. Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey’s Die 68er Bewegung compares the cultural histories of the 1968 generation in Europe and the United States, as does her volume coedited with Freia Anders. Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, Die 68er Bewegung: Deutschland— Westeuropa, USA (Munich: Beck, 2003); Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey and Freia Anders, eds., Herausforderungen des staatlichen Gewaltmonopols: Recht und politisch motivierte Gewalt am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt: Campus, 2006). 11. As Jeremy Varon notes, in May 1966 more than two thousand activists ratified a statement describing the “national and social liberation struggle of the South Vietnamese people” as an act of “political necessity,” as well as a model for other anticapitalist movements. Karl A. Otto, ed., “Schlußerklärung des Frankfurter SDS-Kongresses ‘Vietnam: Analyse eines Exemples,’ ” in APO: Die außerparlamentarische Opposition in Quellen und Dokumenten, 1960–70 (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1987), 213; cited in Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the 60s and 70s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 34.

218

1. the red decade and its cultur al fall ou t

12. Varon, Bringing the War Home, 34. 13. Ulrike Meinhof, “Dresden,” in Everybody Talks About the Weather . . . We Don’t: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof, ed. and trans. Karin Bauer (New York: Seven Stories, 2008), 134–37. 14. In the original: “Für viele ergab sich daraus zwingend die Notwendigkeit zu handeln und Verantwortung zu übernehmen.” Birgit Hogefeld, “Zur Geschichte der RAF,” in Versuche, die Geschichte der RAF zu verstehen: Das Beispiel Birgit Hogefeld, ed. Carlchristian von Braunmühl, Birgit Hogefeld, Hubertus Janssen, HorstEberhard Richter, and Gerd Rosenkranz (Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 1996), 19–58, at 30. 15. Following Ohnesorg’s death, one of the most violent factions of the New Left sheared off: the June 2 Movement. Other splinter groups at the vanguard of leftist militancy included the Tupamaros-West Berlin, the Haschrebellen, and the Revolutionary Cells. Several members of these organizations cooperated with (and eventually joined) the RAF. 16. Cited in Stefan Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Bodley Head, 1987), 44. In Das rote Jahrzehnt Gerd Koenen casts doubt on the assertion—now a commonplace in RAF studies— that Ensslin actually made this statement. Koenen, Das rote Jahrzent: Unsere kleine deutsche Kulturrevolution (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2001), 383. 17. Carlos Marighella, The Terrorist Classic: Manual of the Urban Guerrilla, trans. Gene Hanrahan (Chapel Hill: Documentary Publications,  1985). First published in Portuguese in 1969. 18. All of these articles were published in Wolfgang Kraushaar, ed., Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006): Martin Jander, “Differenzen im antiimperialistischen Kampf: Zu dem Verbindungen des Ministerium für Staatssicherheit mit der RAF und den bundesdeutschen Linksterrorismus,” 1:696–713; Thomas Skelton Robinson, “Im Netz verheddert: Die Beziehung des bundesdeutschen Linksterrorismus zur Volksfront für die Befreiung Palästinas (1969–1980),” 2:828–904; and Christopher Daase, “Die RAF und der internationale Terrorismus: Zur transnationalen Kooperation klandestiner Organisationen,” 2:905–29. 19. Jeff rey Herf, “An Age of Murder: Ideology and Terror in Germany,” Telos 144 (Fall 2008): 8–37, at 9. 20. In 2001 students of the fi lmmaker Harun Farocki remade Herstellung eines Molotow-Cocktails, introducing a number of contemporary elements, for example, a closing shot of Naomi Klein’s book No Logo (2000). 21. “Solidaritätsbekundung namhafter Intellektueller vom 13. April 1968,” in Otto, APO: Die außerparlamentarische Opposition, 264. 22. Ibid.

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23. Horkheimer, Adorno, and other prominent figures in the Institute were among the first to disavow the protesters’ militancy. The junior faculty who stood in the middle ground between the professors and the students (Oskar Negt and Claus Offe, for example) eventually distanced themselves from the revolutionary stance of the youngest left ists, especially when protests became violent. Despite these conflicts, some commentators continued to associate the Institute with the militants well into the 1970s. For example, the political scientist Kurt Sontheimer, in an interview on ZDF television in September 1977, drew parallels between the Institute and the Linksradikalismus that was challenging democratic structures in the FRG. To his mind, Habermas and the protesters—all Scheißliberaler—were operating on the same base level. This exchange is discussed in Sontheimer, Das Elend unserer Intellektuellen: Linke Theorie in der BRD (Hamburg: Hoff mann und Campe, 1976). 24. Reprinted in Frank Böckelmann and Herbert Nagel, eds., Subversive Aktion: Der Sinn der Organisation ist ihr Scheitern (Frankfurt: Neue Kritik, 2002), 145. 25. As noted by Esther Leslie, “Introduction to Adorno/Marcuse Correspondence on the German Student Movement,” New Left Review 233 (January/February 1999): 120. 26. Reprinted in Jürgen Habermas, Protestbewegung und Hochschulreform (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969), 145–52. Andreas Musolff suggests that Habermas issued his warning “from a position of solidarity with the protest movement,” but that the students interpreted his message as “a malicious defamation.” Andreas Musolff, “Hitler’s Children Revisited: West German Terrorism and the Problem of Coming to Terms with the Nazi Past,” Terrorism and Political Violence 23 (2011): 60–71, at 64. 27. Jürgen Habermas, “Die Bühne des Terrors: Ein Brief an Kurt Sontheimer,” Merkur 31, no. 353 (October 1977): 957. 28. Ibid. 29. Stern editors do not allow the cover of the June 6, 1971, issue to be reproduced. 30. In 1974 a special edition of the journal Frauen und Film was dedicated Kluge’s Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin (Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave): Frauen und Film 3 (November 1974). Alexander Kluge responded in Gerhard Theurig, “Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin: Gespräch mit Alexander Kluge,” Filmkritik 18, no. 6 (1974): 279–83. Later reception of Kluge’s cinema includes: Jutta Brückner, “Carmen und die Macht der Gefühle,” Ästhetik und Kommunikation 4, nos. 53/54 (December 1983): 226–32; and Heidi Schlüpmann, “Femininity as Productive Force: Kluge and Critical Theory,” New German Critique 49 (Winter 1990): 69–78; and Helke Sander, “ ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’: The Films of Alexander Kluge,” New German Critique 49 (Winter 1990): 60–68. 31. Miriam Hansen credits Gertrud Koch for this assessment. Miriam Hansen, “Cooperative Auteur Cinema and Oppositional Public Sphere: Alexander Kluge’s

220 1. the red decade and its cultur al fall ou t

32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

Contribution to Germany in Autumn,” New German Critique 24/25 (Autumn 1981/ Winter 1982): 36–56, at 51–52n34. Ibid., 52n34. Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 228. Silvia Bovenschen, “Über die Frage: Gibt es eine weibliche Ästhetik,” Ästhetik und Kommunikation 25 (September 1976): 60–75; translated and republished as Bovenschen and Beth Weckmueller, “Is There a Feminine Aesthetic?,” New German Critique 10 (Winter 1977): 111–37. Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Group, 59. The network Südwestfunk/ARD had scheduled the program Bambule for broadcast in 1970, but when Meinhof suddenly appeared on the list of public enemies, they shelved the project. The program was finally aired in 1997, twenty years after the German Autumn, when postmilitant culture was hitting one of its fi rst peaks. The major Meinhof biographies discuss Bambule and its broadcast. See Jutta Ditfurth, Ulrike Meinhof: Die Biografie (Berlin: Ullstein, 2007); Sarah Colvin, Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism: Language, Violence and Identity (Rochester: Camden House, 2009), esp. 51–80; and Leith Passmore, Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction: Performing Terrorism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Mark Williams, eds., Terror and Text: Representing Political Violence in Literature and the Visual Arts (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2002), 197. More recently Berendse has argued that these works of literature are “ein wichtiger Bestandteil terroristicher Strategie, die zum Model allgemein ideologischen Denkens werden sollte.” Berendse, “Die Wunde RAF: Zur Reziprozität von Fiktion und Terrorismus im Spiegel der neuesten Sekundärliteratur,” Seminar 47, no. 1 (February 2011): 10–26, at 11. Examples of kleinschreibung are the titles konkret (the journal), die taz (the newspaper), studio neue literatur (the imprint), and texte: der raf (the standard edition of the RAF’s writings, published in 1977). We can also see the kleinschreibung effect in documenta, the name of the international survey of art and ideas, which is often written in lowercase letters. Olaf Gaetje has analyzed the correspondence among the RAF members imprisoned at Stammheim (and other penitentiaries) and their legal advocates, a body of texts that was part of their so-called information system (or “info”-System). Olaf Gaetje, “Das “info”-System der RAF von 1973 bis 1977 in sprachwissenschaftlicher Perspektive,” in Kraushaar, Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus, 732. Butz Peters discusses the broader significance of the “info”-System, which enabled a high degree of interaction between (and among) the inmates and their defense. Butz Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum: Die Geschichte der RAF (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2007), 307–11. From the original: “revolutionär ist damit eine dichtung, die das medium sprache selbst verändert, umfunktioniert, die den hierarchischen sprachlichen

1. the red decade and its cultur al fall ou t

41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

46.

221

charakter zerstört, die im neuartigen sprachspiel und durch das neuartige sprachspiel diejenige gesellschaft liche umwälzung vorwegnimmt, für die alle revolutionäre arbeiten.” Chris Bezzel, “dichtung und revolution,” Text + Kritik 25 (1970): 34. Cited by Gaetje, “Das “info”-System der RAF,” 733. Gaetje, “Das “info”-System der RAF,” 733. Quoted in Michael Seufert, “Dissension Among the Terrorists: Killing People Is Wrong,” Encounter 51, no. 3 (September 1978): 84. Bernward Vesper wrote The Trip between 1969 and 1971, the year in which he committed suicide. The März Verlag published it in 1977; the book was then republished as Bernward Vesper, Die Reise (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1983). Part of the Blut-und-Boden ideology that informed National Socialism, Will Vesper’s works include Das harte Geschlecht (1931), Kämpfer Gottes (1938), and Bild des Führers (1942). He was an editor and contributor to Die schöne Literatur (Die Neue Literatur) from 1923 to 1943. As an adult, Felix Ensslin has directed a number of theater productions, worked as a Green Party staffer, and translated the works of Agnes Heller. He also cocurated Regarding Terror at the Berlin Kunst-Werke in 2005. Hundreds of writers and artists have responded to RAF attacks in their work. Heinrich Böll’s novel Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, 1974) was one of the fi rst to describe the social complex produced by the intersections of militancy, media, and mass politics. In the 1970s Alfred Andersch wrote several poems about terrorism, as did Erich Fried, who published works titled “Ulrike Meinhof’s Suicide” and “Armed Idyll.” Heiner Müller’s drama Die Hamletmaschine (Hamletmachine, 1978) extended the pall of the Stammheim deaths over the suicide of Shakespeare’s Ophelia. And Elfriede Jelinek’s play Ulrike Maria Stuart (2006) pits Schiller’s portrait of powerful women against RAF figures. By the late 1990s, a veritable subgenre of literary fiction on the RAF was forming, including the novels Kontrolliert (1988) by Rainald Goetz and Erste Liebe Deutscher Herbst (1997) by Michael Wildenhain, Leander Scholz’s Rosenfest (2001), and Ulrich Woelk’s Die letzte Vorstellung (2002). Somewhat later there appeared Berhard Schlink’s Das Wochenende (2008), which was widely translated, and Lukas Hammerstein’s Wo wirst du sein (2010). English-language authors have also added to this trend, for example, Erin Cosgrove, with The Baader-Meinhof Affair (2003), and Ada Wilson, with Red Army Faction Blues (2012). For an overview of novels that treat the RAF, see Julian Preece, “RAF Revivalism in German Fiction of the 2000s,” Journal of European Studies 40, no. 3 (September 2010): 272–83. This trend in literary fiction has been attended by a series of memoirs that chronicle the years of the German armed struggle. First there were the prison letters of RAF members (Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, and Inge Viett), and then the reactions of their relatives and children (Christiane Ensslin and Bettina

222

47.

48.

49.

50.

1. the red decade and its cultur al fall ou t Röhl), and finally the sorrow and outrage of the victims that we find, for example, in Anne Siemens’s Für die RAF war er das System, für mich der Vater: Die andere Geschichte des deutschen Terrorismus (2007). Astrid Proll, Baader-Meinhof: Pictures on the Run, 67–77 (Zurich: Scalo, 1998). Simultaneously published as Astrid Proll, Hans und Grete: Die RAF, 1967–77 (Göttingen: Steidl, 1998). Proll fi rst compiled the photographs for Stefan Aust, who used them as a resource for Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex. Since the late 1970s there have appeared dozens of documentaries, feature fi lms, and television specials that recount and reimagine the rise and fall of the Far Left; a cursory title scan would include Fassbinder’s Die dritte Generation (1978–79), Reinhard Hauff ’s Stammheim (1986), Christoph Petzold’s Die innere Sicherheit (2000), Andres Veiel’s Black Box BRD (2001), Christoph Roth’s Baader (2002), and Uli Edel’s Baader-Meinhof Komplex (2008). A foundational analysis of fi lms about the armed struggle is Petra Kraus and Natalie Lettenwitsch, eds., Deutschland im Herbst: Terrorismus im Film (Munich: Münchner Filmzentrum, 1997). There have also appeared a number of English-language critiques of these fi lms, including Anton Kaes, Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). More recent contributions to the growing field of RAF-cinema studies focus on the work of Heinrich Breloer, Christian Petzold, Andres Veiel, and Margarethe von Trotta. See Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien, “The Wild West and East of Eden: The Red Army Faction and German Terrorism,” in Post-Wall German Cinema and National History: Utopianism and Dissent (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2012), 173–252; Jamie Trnka, “ ‘The Struggle Is Over, the Wounds Are Open’: Cinematic Tropes, History, and the RAF in Recent German Film,” New German Critique 34, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 1–26; Rosemary Stott, “Revolutionary Fiction: The Baader-Meinhof Complex and Other Representations of the Red Army Faction in German Film,” Twentieth-Century Communism 2 (2010): 180– 94; Eric Kligerman, “The Antigone Effect: Reinterring the Dead of Night and Fog in the German Autumn,” New German Critique 38, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 9–38; and Christina Gerhardt, “RAF as German and Family History: Von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane and Petzold’s The State I am In,” in The Place of Politics in German Film, edited by Martin Blumenthal-Barby (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2014): 166–84. October 18, 1977 was first exhibited from February 12 to April 4, 1989, at the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld. It then traveled to London, Rotterdam, Saint Louis, Montreal, and Boston, among other cities, before New York’s Museum of Modern Art acquired it in 1995. Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof,” New Yorker (April 1, 2002): 78–82. A character in DeLillo’s novel Falling Man (2007) also seems to relate to the RAF legacy: Martin, the art dealer, is described as a member of Kommune I.

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51. Richter set the condition that the fifteen canvasses be shown together, but the installation order is variable, and individual curators and gallerists have arranged them differently. 52. For example, the covers of Wolfgang Kraushaar’s two-volume Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus feature two photographs of Baader and Meinhof that the book’s designer has abstracted into the filmy haze of a Richter painting. 53. This effect is particularly evident when the paintings are viewed in person. Reproductions of Richter’s work, like some of the photographs in this book, rarely convey the complex visual sensation of photopainting. Robert Storr, in his discussion of the “substraction” of Richter’s work, distinguishes the technique from that of photorealism: the “removal of information, which varies in quality from a sfumato pall hovering over the canvas to the rich, disorienting impastos that slide vertically in Cell and sweep horizontally in Funeral, is at odds with photorealism generally, where a premium is usually placed on hyper-verisimilitude.” Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 110–11. 54. On the Richter cycle, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s influential studies: Buchloh, “A Note on Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977,” October 48 (Spring 1989): 88–109; and Buchloh, ed., Gerhard Richter: 18. Oktober 1977 (Cologne: Walther König, 1989), 55–59. Other notable accounts include Isabelle Graw, “View: Gerhard Richter: 18. Oktober 1977,” Artscribe International 9/10 (September/October 1989): 7–9; Graw, “Gerhard Richter,” special issue, Parkett 35 (March 1993); and Rainer Usselman, “18. Oktober 1977: Gerhard Richter’s Work of Mourning and Its New Audience,” Art Journal 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 4–25. 55. Meir Seidler criticizes Sartre’s support of Andreas Baader in Meir Seidler, “The Beauty and the Beast: Jean-Paul Sartre and the Baader-Meinhof Gang,” Terrorism and Political Violence 25 (2013): 597–605. 56. Gerhard Richter, “Gerhard Richter: 18. Oktober 1977,” interview with Jan ThornPrikker, Parkett 19 (1989): 130. 57. Karin Crawford ascribes an explicitly feminist consciousness to Gerhard Richter that is difficult to substantiate. She writes, “Given Richter’s statement that, for him, the RAF was ‘a women’s movement,’ I argue that [the] question of the individual [in the contemporary public sphere in Richter’s work] can be viewed only through the lens of the question of women’s rights.” The actual exchange between Richter and Jan Thorn-Prikker, as printed in the bilingual journal Parkett, indicates that it was the interviewer (Thorn-Prikker) who gathered from the paintings that the RAF is “eine Frauenbewegung”/“a women’s movement,” not Richter. Richter assented to this interpretation, but only with qualifications, which are evident in my translation of his remarks. Gerhard Richter, “Gerhard Richter: 18. Oktober 1977,” 130. See Karin L. Crawford, “Gender and Terror in Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 and Don DeLillo’s ‘Baader-Meinhof,’ ” New German Critique 36, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 207–8.

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58. For example, the journalist Klausjürgen Hehn has called Ulrike Meinhof “a feminist icon.” Klausjürgen Hehn, “Im Tod größer als im Leben,” Frankfurter Rundschau (September 9, 2008): 13. Also cited in Sarah Colvin, “Wir Frauen haben kein Vaterland: Ulrike Marie Meinhof, Emily Wilding Davison, and the ‘Homelessness’ of Women Revolutionaries,” German Life and Letters 64, no. 1 (January 2011): 108–21, at 110n7. 59. Kaja Silverman, “Photography by Other Means,” in Flesh of My Flesh (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 168–222, at 190. 60. See, for example, Gudrun Ensslin, “hh-paket, sept./oktober 76,” in das info: Briefe der Gefangenen aus der RAF, 1973–77, ed. Pieter H. Bakker Schut (Kiel: Neuer Malik, 1987), 288–300; and Ensslin, “ ‘Zieht den Trennungsstrich, jede Minute’: Briefe an ihre Schwester Christiane und ihren Bruder Gottfried aus dem Gefängnis, 1972–73,” ed. Christiane Ensslin and Gottfried Ensslin (Hamburg: Konkret Literatur Verlag, 2005). Gerd Koenen also documents the exchange of sexist language between Ensslin and Baader in Koenen, Vesper, Ensslin, Baader (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2003). 61. Several essays on Deutschland im Herbst make this point, including Thomas Elsaesser, “Antigone Agonistes: Urban Guerrilla or Guerrilla Urbanism? The RAF, Germany in Autumn and Death Game,” in Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity, ed. Michael Sorkin and Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1998), 267–302; and Nora Alter, “Framing Terrorism,” in Projecting History: German Nonfiction Cinema (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 68–71. 62. Donatella della Porta, quoted in Belinda Davis et al., “Forum: 1977,” 419.

2. Damaged Lives of the Far Lef t: Reading the RAF in Reverse 1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

Theodor W. Adorno, “Minima Moralia,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 4:43. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. In the mid-1980s, when the first editions of Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex were published, reporters and scholars could access only a portion of the sources (now available) that document the connections between the RAF, the PLO, and the Stasi. Wolfgang Kraushaar, Die Bombe im Jüdischen Gemeindehaus (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2005). Julia Hell draws attention to the German Left’s stance vis-à-vis Fatah and al-Qaeda initiatives. Julia Hell, “Terror and Solidarity,” Telos (October 25–26, 2006): 254–65, www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=165. Hans Kundnani, Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany ’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), esp. 89–94; and Tilman Tarach,

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Der ewige Sündenbock: Heiliger Krieg, die “Protokolle der Weisen von Zion” und die Verlogenheit der sogenannten Linken im Nahostkonflikt (Freiburg: Edition Telok, 2010). Both of these works build upon Kraushaar’s foundational study. Several critics responded quickly to Kraushaar’s allegations of anti-Semitism among the New Left and Far Left; see, for example, Js., ed., “Dem Staate dienen: Das Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, die RAF, und der ‘Sympathisantensumpf,” Analyse und Kritik, March 16, 2007, www.linksnet.de/de/artikel/20421. The Kinkel Initiative proposed parole for prisoners who were ill or who had served out most of their terms. Press articles on the controversial topic include Stephen Kinzer, “German Terrorist Group Says It Will End Attacks,” New York Times, April 18, 1992; and “Kinkel-Initiative nimmt erste Hürde,” die tageszeitung, May 5, 1993. Federal prosecutors released findings on Wolfgang Grams’s relationship to the assassination of Detlev Rohwedder in May 2001. See, for example, “Mordfall Rohwedder: Hogefeld soll vernommen werden,” WDR-Online, May 17, 2001, http:// wdr.de/online/news/rohwedder_mord. Former Bundespräsident Horst Köhler denied Hogefeld’s fi rst two appeals for clemency in 2007 and 2010. She was finally released on parole in 2011. See the RAF declaration, quoted in Andreas Musolff, Krieg gegen die Öffentlichkeit: Terrorismus und politischer Sprachgebrauch (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 1998). Christoph Hein, In seiner frühen Kindheit ein Garten (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005). Julian Preece perceptively identifies Katharina Blumenschläger’s namesake in the protagonist of Heinrich Böll’s Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (1974). Julian Preece, Baader-Meinhof and the Novel: Narratives of the Nation/Fantasies of the Revolution, 1970–2010 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 88. Early examples include Jan Brandt, “Nichts erfunden: Christoph Hein hat ein RAF-Roman geschrieben,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 23, 2005, 24; and Wolfgang von Höbel, “Kohlhaas in Bad Kleinen,” Der Spiegel (January 24, 2005): 168. These studies appeared in rapid succession in the 1990s, when the Stasi files were first opened to the public. Two early, conservative accounts of the relations between the RAF and the Stasi are Michael Müller and Andreas Kanonenberg, Die RAF-Stasi-Connection (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1992); and John Schmeidel, “My Enemy’s Enemy: Twenty Years of Cooperation Between West Germany’s Red Army Faction and the GDR Ministry for State Security,” Intelligence and National Security 8, no. 4 (October 1993): 59–72. Gerhard Wisnewski’s somewhat later take on the relationship between the RAF and the SI betrayed his unreformed commitment to the armed struggle. See Gerhard Wisnewski, “Die RAFStasi-Connection,” in Das RAF-Phantom: Wozu Politik und Wirtschaft Terroristen brauchen, ed. Gerhard Wisnewski, Wolfgang Landgraeber, and Ekkehard Sieker (Munich: Droemer Knaur, 1997), 372–401. Tobias Wunschik, meanwhile, offers

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15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

2. damaged lives of the far lef t a more tempered account in Wunschik, Baader-Meinhofs Kinder: Die zweite Generation der RAF (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997). Uwe Backes and Eckhard Jesse call the relationship between the RAF and the Stasi “ein[e] unübersehbar[e] Geistesverwandtschaft.” Uwe Backes and Eckhard Jesse, eds., Jahrbuch Extremismus und Demokratie, vol. 3 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1991), 200. Judith Kuckart, Wahl der Waffen (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1990). Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. For a comparison of RAF memoirs, both fictional and documentary, including Kuckart’s novel, see Julian Preece, “Between Identification and Documentation, ‘Autofiction’ and ‘Biopic’: The Lives of the RAF,” German Life and Letters 56, no. 4 (2003): 363–76. Kuckart writes of Katia’s “search for the right way of living” ([die] Suche nach dem richtigen Leben), for a life that is “always elsewhere” (immer anderswo). Kuckart, Wahl der Waffen, 38. In the original: “[S]ie [sprach] von einem Loch, das zwischen ihr und der Wirklichkeit sich weitete.” Kuckart, Wahl der Waffen, 115. In the original: “Schreiben heißt, den Weg gehen, der einem verwehrt.” Kuckart, Wahl der Waffen, 50. Thomas Hoeps draws a comparison similar to mine. Thomas Hoeps, Arbeit am Widerspruch: “Terrorismus” in den deutschen Romanen und Erzählungen, 1837–1992 (Dresden: Thelem Universitätsverlag, 2001), 312. The spectacular abduction of Peter Lorenz prompted an unusual response from the German government as it negotiated with the RAF terrorists to free him. The RAF demanded that a group of their members be released from German prisons and granted safe passage into Yemen. The government authorities conceded, and Lorenz was surrendered. (Ina Siepmann was one of the RAF members included in the exchange; this incident features in Kuckart’s Choice of Weapons.) The exchange of prisoners for Lorenz set a dangerous precedent; when the RAF called upon it in the German Autumn of 1977, however, Helmut Schmidt and his crisis management team refused to give in another time. Inge Viett, Nie war ich furchtloser (Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 1997). Details about Viett’s exile in Iraq are included in her Stasi fi le: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, Information zu Aktivitäten von Vertretern der palästinensischen Befreiungsorganisation in Verbinding mit internationalen Terroristen zur Einbeziehung der DDR bei der Vorbereitung von Gewaltakten in Ländern Westeuropas, Berlin, May 3, 1979, Die Bundesbeauft ragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, Zentralarchiv, Hauptabteilung XXII 18613, Berlin, 277–92, esp. 287. See, for example, Inge Viett, “Lust auf Freiheit: Unsere Geschichte als Klassenkampf von unten verteidigen,” Junge Welt, February 24, 2007, 10. In fact, the film uses so many details from Viett’s life that she was able to win a settlement for plagiarism against Schlöndorff and his screenwriting team.

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24. 25.

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28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

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These negotiations are discussed in Viett, “Kasperletheater im Niemandsland,” konkret 4 (2000): 58–59. Viett collaborated in the production of a documentary film that presents an account of her militancy, Große Freiheit, kleine Freiheit, dir. Kristina Konrad (2000). For an analysis of this film, see Christina Gerhardt, “Narrating Terrorism: Kristina Konrad’s Große Freiheit, kleine Freiheit (2000),” Seminar 47, no. 1 (2011): 64–80. In 2007 several press accounts of the RAF’s visit to the Stasi retreat appeared: for example, Jens Bauszus, “Terrorismus: Die RAF-Stasi Connection,” FocusOnline, May 8, 2007, www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/raf/tid-5678/terroris mus_aid_55571.html. Volker Schlöndorff, “Director’s Commentary,” Die Stille nach dem Schuss (Potsdam: Babelsberg Film, 2000), DVD. Baumann’s interrogation was held at the prison in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen and the report on it—registered under the code name “Anarchist”—was forwarded to Markus Wolf, the head of the foreign intelligence division of the Stasi (the Hauptverwaltung Aufk lärung). After six weeks of cross-referencing the figures in Baumann’s profiles, his interrogators released him into West Berlin through a secret passage at the Friedrichstraße checkpoint—what Baumann calls the “Ho-Chi-Minh Passage.” Michael Baumann, HI HO: Wer nicht weggeht, kommt nicht wieder (Hamburg: Hoff man und Campe, 1987), 64. Wolfgang Kraushaar calls Baumann’s report a “who’s who” of the German armed struggle. Kraushaar, Die Bombe, 226. See also “Michael Baumann: Stadtguerilla als Zeuge der Stasi,” Spiegel Online, December 2, 2008, www.spiegel.de /politik/deutschland/0,1518,592746,00.html. Baumann notes the involvement of the high-profile writers Peter Handke and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, the filmmaker Wim Wenders, and the former Minister of the Interior, Otto Schily. Michael Baumann, Wie alles anfing (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1991). Jürgen Arnold and Peter Schult, Ein Buch wird verboten: Bommi Baumann Dokumentation (Munich: Trikont, 1979). Kraushaar, Die Bombe, 224–33. Two early accounts of Kunzelmann’s interventions are Uwe Backes and Eckhard Jesse, “Biographisches Porträt: Dieter Kunzelmann,” in Jahrbuch Extremismus und Demokratie (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1999), 11:200–14; and Konrad Jarausch, Die Umkehr: Deutsche Umwandlungen, 1945–95 (Munich: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 2004). Aribert Reimann’s recent biography of Kunzelmann responds to Kraushaar’s Die Bombe im Jüdischen Gemeindehaus. See Aribert Reimann, Dieter Kunzelmann: Avantgardist, Protestler, Radikaler (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2009). Reimann, Dieter Kunzelmann, 104. Ibid., 303–5.

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33. Another example of a gendered “weapon” is the baby carriage that the RAF used to block the way of Hanns-Martin Schleyer when they kidnapped him in 1977. Terrorist groups have been known to use women (or men dressed as women) to gain access to secured sites. For an overview of such tactics and an analysis of how counterterrorist forces might deflect them, see Karla L. Cunningham, “Countering Female Terrorism,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 30 (2007): 113–29. 34. At the time, Peter Urbach was an agent provocateur who worked for West Berlin’s intelligence office. Thanks to Hans Kundnani for this note. According to Tilman Fichter (Albert Fichter’s brother), Urbach lived under cover and with a false name in the United States until his death in 2011. See Philipp Gessler and Stefan Reinecke, “Wir haben das nicht ernst genommen (Interview),” die tageszeitung, October 25, 2005, http://taz.de/1/archiv/archiv/?dig=2005/10/25/a0178. 35. Kraushaar, Die Bombe, 245–46. 36. Andreas Musolff raises the controversial question of whether support for Palestinian sovereignty might offer Germans “an escape from the ethical burden” of the nation’s responsibility for the Holocaust. Discussing Kunzelmann’s situation, he suggests that it became possible in the protest movement “for ‘left ist’ Germans to voice radically anti-Israeli attitudes while retaining a good antifascist conscience.” Andreas Musolff, “Hitler’s Children Revisited: West German Terrorism and the Problem of Coming to Terms with the Nazi Past,” Terrorism and Political Violence 23 (2011): 64. The relationship between Jews, Germans, and Israelis remains a topic of great interest. See, for example, the special issue on the “German-Jewish Controversy” in New German Critique 38 (Spring/Summer 1986), which discusses the problem of anti-Semitism with regard to the cinema of R. W. Fassbinder. A notable history of the relationship between Israel and the German Left is Martin W. Kloke, Israel und die deutsche Linke: Zur Geschichte eines schwierigen Verhältnisses (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990). The historian Jeff rey Herf has focused on the RAF’s failed attempt to bomb a group of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union while on a trip to Israel. He sees this incident as a repercussion of the attack on Berlin’s Jewish Gemeindehaus in 1969, which marked the Far Left’s ill-fated start of the “age of murder.” Jeff rey Herf, “An Age of Murder: Ideology and Terror in Germany,” Telos 144 (Fall 2008): 11. 37. Kundnani, Utopia or Auschwitz, 92. 38. In the original: “Palestina [sic] ist für die BRD und Europa das, was für die Amis Vietnam ist. Die Linken haben das noch nicht begriffen. Warum? Der Judenknax. ‘Wir haben 6 Millionen Juden vergast. Die Juden heißen heute Israelis. Wer den Faschismus bekämpft, ist für Israel.’ So einfach ist das, und doch stimmt es hinten und vorne nicht.” Dieter Kunzelmann, “Brief aus Amman,” Agit 883 1, no. 42 (November 27, 1969): 5. 39. Ibid.

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40. Gerd Koenen discusses the correspondences between Kunzelmann’s writings and the RAF communiqué about the attacks on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. The RAF statement, authored by Ulrike Meinhof, blames the Israeli government for refusing to negotiate with the PFLP and holds them responsible for the assassinations, accusing Defense Minister Moshe Dayan of “burning up” the hostages “just as the Nazis did the Jews, as fuel for genocidal policies.” Gerd Koenen, Vesper, Ensslin, Baader: Urszenen des deutschen Terrorismus (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2003), 258. Koenen cites from “die action des schwarzen september in münchen,” in Rote Armee Fraktion: Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF, ed. Martin Hoff man (Berlin: ID-Verlag, 1997), 151–77, at 170–71, 173. This translation is from Musolff, “Hitler’s Children Revisited,” 65, 68. 41. Kunzelmann calls divided Berlin “ein geradezu idealtypisches [P]rovokantenparadies.” Dieter Kunzelmann, Leisten Sie keinen Widerstand! Bilder aus meinem Leben (Berlin: Transit, 2002), 49. 42. Kunzelmann, “Brief aus Amman,” 5. 43. In the original, “den Feind wieder sichtbar zu machen.” Kunzelmann, “Brief aus Amman,” 5. 44. In a letter to Die Welt, Heinz Galinski wrote, “Mit dem Anschlag auf das Jüdische Gemeindehaus habe sich die Lage so weit zugespitzt, daß es nun nicht mehr Sache der Jüdischen Gemeinde sei, Stellung zu beziehen, sondern die aller Repräsentanten der Bevölkerung.” Galinski, “Brief,” Die Welt, November 12, 1969, 33. 45. “[E]in Schauspiel inszenieren,” as recounted by Albert Fichter. Albert Fichter, “Gespräch mit Wolfgang Kraushaar,” in Kraushaar, Die Bombe, 249. 46. In the original, “Nicht nur über sein Leben, auch über seinen Tod hat er frei bestimmt—1939–1998—Dieter Kunzelmann,” Berliner Zeitung, April 3, 1998, 10. Kunzelmann spent most of the early 1970s in and out of courts and jails for a number of offenses, but he has not been charged with any hate crimes. He went on to hold several political offices, including representing the party Alternative Liste in the Berlin State Senate from 1993 to 1995. In 1997 Kunzelmann finally got snagged for throwing eggs at the Berlin Mayor Eberhard Diepgen. Kunzelmann hosted a party the night before his prison sentence started and then at daybreak took the U-Bahn to the Tegel penitentiary, where he banged at the gates and shouted, “I want in already! Enough! I want to go to prison!” Meike Bruhns, “Kunzelmann im Gefängnis: Der Arzt wollte ihn sofort sehen,” Berliner Zeitung, July 15, 1999, 33. 47. Gessler and Reinecke, “Wir haben das . . . ,” die tageszeitung, October 25, 2005, www.taz.de/1/archiv/archiv/?dig=2005/10/25/a0178, 25 October 2005. 48. The original is in English. Schlöndorff, “Director’s Commentary.” 49. In the original, “ein[e] revolutionär[e] kommunistisch[e] Organisation mit geheimen Strukturen.” Quoted in Jörn Hasselmann, “Ex-Terroristin Viett im Visier der Justiz,” Der Tagesspiegel, August 5, 2011, www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin.

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50. Ibid. The second passage quoted in this sentence is cited in “Staatsanwaltschaft klagt Ex-RAF-Terroristin Viett an.” Junge Freiheit (June 6, 2011), www.jungefrei heit.de/Single-News-Display-mit-Komm.154+M540153a3969.0.html. In November 2011 a Berlin court fined Viett €1,200 for her conference statement, which was found to be an endorsement of “a violent attack on the state.” Ibid. 51. “Viett fand Randale in Heiligendamm ‘toll,’ ” Focus-Online, July 1, 2007, www .focus.de/politik/deutschland/raf/raf_aid_65094.html. The political scientist Kristin Wesemann detects a similar flaw in Ulrike Meinhof’s vision of politics in the 1970s: the contradiction between her valorization of the communist ideal and the absence, in her writings, of inquiry into the actual experience of life in the GDR is the target of criticism in her biography of the RAF leader. Kristin Wesemann, Ulrike Meinhof: Kommunistin, Journalistin, Terroristin—eine politische Biografie (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2007). 52. Thomas Elsaesser, Terror und Trauma: Zur Gewalt des Vergangenen in der BRD (Berlin: Kadmos, 2007), 17.

3. Building s on Fire: The Situationist I nternational and the Red Army Fac tion 1.

2. 3. 4.

Guy Debord, “In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni” (screenplay), in Complete Cinematic Works: Scripts, Stills, Documents, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Oakland, Calif.: AK Press, 2003), 162–63. Ibid., 163. Ibid., 164. Jürgen Habermas anticipated the comparison of the RAF to the SI in “Die Bühne des Terrors.” With reference to surrealism, he asks for an investigation of the links between the postwar avant-garde and its contemporary political vanguard in the German Far Left. Jürgen Habermas, “Die Bühne des Terrors: Ein Brief an Kurt Sontheimer,” Merkur 31, no. 353 (October 1977): 944–59. In an essay on the mediation of the RAF in television and film, Thomas Elsaesser identifies the common ground occupied by artists and activists in postwar Europe and brings the SI into his analysis. Thomas Elsaesser, “Antigone Agonistes: Urban Guerrilla or Guerrilla Urbanism? The RAF, Germany in Autumn, and Death Game,” in Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity, ed. Michael Sorkin and Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1998), 267–302. Joachim Bruhn has called for an investigation of the overlapping histories of the SI and the RAF: Joachim Bruhn, “Der Untergang der Roten Armee Fraktion: Eine Erinnerung für die Revolution,” in Stadtguerilla und soziale Revolution: Über den bewaff neten Kampf und die Rote Armee Fraktion, by Emile Marenssin, trans. Gabriela Walterspiel and Joachim Bruhn (Freiburg: Ça ira-Verlag, 1998), 7–30. Another relevant comparison is Mia Lee, “Umherschweifen und Spektakel: Die situationistische Tradition,” in 1968: Handbuch zur Kultur- und Medi-

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engeschichte der Studentenbewegung, ed. Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007), 101–6. Julian Preece has recently acknowledged the coupling of radical politics with advanced art and culture—prevalent in discussions of postmilitant culture—in his analysis of aesthetic representations of the RAF beyond Germany. He writes, “In international work, extremist politics [is taken to be] an extension of avant-garde art.” His examples include Yvonne Rainer’s film Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980), Jennifer Egan’s novel The Invisible Circus (1995), and Alban Lefranc’s literary trilogy Des foules, des bouches, des armes (2006). See Julian Preece, Baader-Meinhof and the Novel: Narratives of the Nation/Fantasies of the Revolution, 1970–2010 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 123. One of the closest analyses of Debord’s work on the spectacle is Thomas Y. Levin, “Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 321–454. Raoul Vaneigem, “Comments Against Urbanism,” trans. John Shepley, in McDonough, Guy Debord, 120. Raoul Vaneigem, Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Left Bank Books, 1994), 34. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone, 1995), 122–23. Ibid., 122. Another record of the Situationists’ interest in the Reichstag fire is the article “Le Reichstag brûle-t-il?,” which compares the events of Berlin 1933 to those of Milan 1969. Eduardo Rothe and Puni Cesoni, “Le Reichstag brûle-t-il?,” trans. Joël Gayraud and Luc Mercier, in Écrits complets de la section italienne de l’Internationale Situationniste, 1969 –1972 (Paris: Contre-Moule, 1988), 101–3. Key studies of the Watts riots include Seymour Spilerman, “The Causes of Racial Disturbances: A Comparison of Alternative Explanations,” American Sociological Review 35 (1970): 627–49; and Vincent Jefferies, Ralph H. Turner, and Richard T. Morris, “The Public Perception of the Watts Riot as Social Protest,” American Sociological Review 36 (1971): 443–51. “Le Déclin et la chute de l’économie spectaculaire-marchande,” Internationale situationniste 10 (March 1966): 415–23. The essay is translated, along with most of the journal, by Ken Knabb as “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” in The Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 157. Spur was published under the SI imprint from 1958 to 1962. Kunzelmann’s association with the SI is recounted in Gerd Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt: Unsere kleine deutsche Kulturrevolution (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2001), 152, 155. Kunzelmann is cited several times in the Internationale situationniste. See issues 6:28–29; 7:25, 27, 28, 31, 49; and 8:25. Thanks to Tom McDonough for this reference.

232 3. building s on fire 14. Reprinted in Klaus Hartung, Der blinde Fleck: Die Linke, die RAF und der Staat (Frankfurt: neue kritik, 1987), 223. The last line of the leaflet is in English in the original: “Burn, Ware-House, Burn.” 15. Stefan Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Bodley Head, 1987), 49. 16. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), secs. 3:2, 8:5. For an overview of the Langhans-Teufel case, see Hans Egon Holthusen, Sartre in Stammheim: Zwei Themen aus den Jahren der großen Turbulenz (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982), 117. 17. To develop this point, Holthusen draws upon the Merkur article “Surrealistische Provokation” by Jacob Taubes from 1967. Holthusen, Sartre, 114–16. 18. Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Group, 48. 19. Holthusen, Sartre, 115. 20. Ibid., 116. 21. André Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1972), 124. 22. Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Group, 58. 23. Koenen describes Fassbinder and Baader’s milieu as “bisexual” and “decadent.” Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 156. 24. For views into the so-called radical years of West German fi lm academies, especially the DFFB, see Harun Farocki’s essay on Holger Meins and, in turn, Tilman Baumgärtel’s study of Farocki: Harun Farocki, “Sein Leben einsetzen: Bilder von Holger Meins,” Jungle World 52, no. 1 (December 23, 1998): unpaginated supplement; and Tilman Baumgärtel, Harun Farocki (Berlin: B-Books, 1998). 25. Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Group, 50. 26. Social scientists have identified the dynamic of expulsion as central to the formation of terrorist organizations. For an overview, see Jessica Stern, “Holy War Organizations,” in Terror in the Name of God (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 139–296. 27. Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 161. 28. “Now, the S.I.,” in Knabb, The Situationist International Anthology, 135–38; “Maintenant, l’I.S.,” Internationale situationniste 9 (1964): 367–69; and Sadler, The Situationist City, 161n11. 29. McDonough, Guy Debord, ix–xx. 30. See, for example, René Viénet, “The Situationists and New Forms of Action Against Politics and Art,” in Knabb, The Situationist International Anthology, 213–15. 31. Retort [Iain Boal, T.  J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts], Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (London: Verso, 2005), 173. 32. Ibid., 34. 33. Ulrike Meinhof, “Warenhausbrandstift ung,” in Ulrike Meinhof, Dokumente einer Rebellion (Hamburg: Konkret, 1972), 87.

3. building s on fire 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

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Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 88. Ibid. Kelly Baum, “The Sex of the Situationist International,” October 126 (Fall 2008): 24. In her study of chemistry and aesthetics, Esther Leslie discovers an affinity between the Situationists’ interest in the looted air conditioners of Watts and the Cold War politics of the 1960s. Esther Leslie, Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art, and the Chemical Industry (London: Reaktion Books, 2005). “The Decline and Fall,” 157. Ibid. Ibid., 155. Ivan Chtcheglov, “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” in Knabb, The Situationist International Anthology, 3. Debord, “In girum imus,” 183. For example, Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Group, 93. The fashion world has taken some of its cues from this cultural moment. Editors of the German lifestyle magazine Tussi Deluxe ran a “terrorist couture” feature in 2001; the design house Comme des Garçons ran a pop-up Guerrilla Store in Berlin in 2004; and the Hamburg boutique Maegde u. Knechte sold underwear silk-screened with the logo “Prada Meinhof.” Asger Jorn, “Guy Debord et le problème du maudit,” in Contre le cinéma, by Guy  Debord (Aarhus, Denmark: Institut Scandinave de vandalisme comparé, 1964), 3–8. Knabb, The Situationist International Anthology, 88; and “La cinquième conférence de l’I.S. à Göteborg,” Internationale situationniste 7 (April 1962): 26–27. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon, 1964), 12, 22, 64. Jürgen Habermas, “Die Scheinrevolution und ihre Kinder,” in Kleine politische Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981), 249–60. For overviews of the June 2 Movement, see Peter Brückner and Barbara Sicherman, Solidarität und Gewalt (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1974); and Ralf Reinders and Ronald Fritzsch, Die Bewegung 2. Juni (Berlin: ID-Archiv, 1995). Jürgen Habermas, “Kongreß ‘Hochschule und Demokratie,’ ” in Kleine politische Schriften, 205–16. Theodor W. Adorno, “Letter to Herbert Marcuse, 6 August 1969,” trans. Esther Leslie, New Left Review 233 (January/February 1999): 136. Jürgen Habermas, Protestbewegung und Hochschulreform (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969), 27, also cited in Thomas Hecken, Avantgarde und Terrorismus: Rhetorik der Intensität und Programme der Revolte von den Futuristen bis zur RAF (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2006), 8.

234 3. building s on fire 55. Guy Debord and Gianfranco Sanguinetti, “La pratique de la théorie,” Internationale situationniste 12 (September 1969): 90. 56. Ibid., 5. Although this argument about the pervasiveness of the SI critique enabled the group’s dissolution, Debord amplified his call for scrutiny in subsequent writings and film work; for example, Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (London: Verso, 1990); and the posthumously broadcast television program Guy Debord, son art, son temps, directed by Guy Debord and Brigitte Cornand (Canal Plus, 1995). 57. The communiqué was written in March 1998 and first published by Reuters on April 20, 1998. Rote Armee Fraction [RAF], “Auflösungserklärung,” April 20, 1998, www.rafinfo.de/archiv/raf/raf-20–4-98.php. Translated and republished as “The Urban Guerrilla Is History,” in Arm the Spirit: Autonomist/Anti-Imperialist Journal 17 (Winter 1999/2000): 57–59. 58. RAF, “The Urban Guerrilla Is History,” 61. 59. Elsaesser, “Antigone Agonistes,” 292. 60. Several major exhibitions on the SI have been organized in North America and Europe, including On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International, 1957–1972 at the Institutes of Contemporary Art in Boston and London in 1989 and In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni: The Lost Paradise of the Situationist International at the Central Museum in Utrecht in 2007.

4. The Stammheim C omplex in Marianne and Juliane 1.

2. 3.

4.

Ulrike Meinhof, “aus der zeit 16.6.72–8.2.73,” Me,U 009–002, Archiv des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung (HIS Archiv). Reprinted as “Brief einer Gefangenen aus dem toten Trakt,” in Ulrike Marie Meinhof und die deutschen Verhältnisse, ed. Peter Brückner (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1976), 152–54. In the original: “Wärter, Besuch, Hof erscheint einem wie aus Zelluloid— / Kopfschmerzen— / flashs . . . / Das Gefühl, Zeit und Raum sind ineinander / verschachtelt— / das Gefühl, sich in einem einem Verzerrspiegelraum zu / befi nden— / torkeln—.” Margrit Schiller, “Es war ein harter Kampf um meine Erinnerung ”: Ein Lebensbericht aus der RAF (Hamburg: Konkret Literatur Verlag, 2007), 138–39. With regard to the semantics of the RAF and the Federal Republic’s attempts to contain it, Jeremy Varon argues that “the RAF sought to compensate for its chief political failure: the absence of a sociopolitical referent beyond itself.” See Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the 1960s and 1970s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 225. Notable early analyses of von Trotta’s film include Charlotte Delorme, “Zum Film, Die bleierne Zeit von Margarethe von Trotta,” frauen und film 31 (1982): 52–55;

4. the stammheim complex in marianne and juliane

5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

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E. Ann Kaplan, “Female Politics in the Symbolic Realm: Von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane (The German Sisters),” in Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (London: Methuen, 1983), 104–12; and Kaplan, “Discourses of Terrorism, Feminism, and the Family in von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane,” Persistence of Vision 1, no. 2 (Spring 1985): 61–68. See also Thomas Elsaesser, “Margarethe von Trotta: German Sisters—Divided Daughters,” in New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 232–38. Karen Beckman, “Terrorism, Feminism, Sisters, and Twins: Building Relations in the Wake of the World Trade Center Attacks,” Grey Room 7 (Spring 2002): 24–39. The prison also serves as a stage in von Trotta’s Rosa Luxemburg (1986). See Antonia Lant, “Incarcerated Space: The Repression of History in von Trotta’s Rosa Luxemburg,” in Perspectives on German Cinema, ed. Terri Ginsberg and Kirsten Thompson (New York: Prentice Hall, 1996), 361–77. For an example of cinema studies with Foucauldian and Benthamite tendencies, see Mark Shiel, “Cinema and the City in History and Theory,” in Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (London: Blackwell, 2001), 1–18. Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 53–54. Ibid., 48. Thomas Elsaesser, “Antigone Agonistes: Urban Guerrilla or Guerrilla Urbanism? The RAF, Germany in Autumn and Death Game,” in Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity, ed. Michael Sorkin and Joan Copjec (New York: Verso, 1999), 292. Influential cartographies of political space include Manuel Castells, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); and Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye (London: Faber and Faber, 1990). Elsaesser, “Antigone Agonistes,” 285. The Kontaktsperregesetz endured beyond the German Autumn, compromising the initiatives of outlying RAF cells and other accomplices that were active into the 1980s and 1990s. For an historical overview of the Kontaktsperregesetz, see Anna Oehmichen, “Incommunicado Detention in Germany: An Example of Reactive Anti-Terror Legislation and Long-Term Consequences,” German Law Journal 9, no. 7 (July 2008): 855–87. “rede von ulrike zu der befreiung von andreas, moabit 13. september,” in Rote Armee Fraktion [RAF], texte: der RAF (Malmö: Bo Cavefors, 1977), 65. In the original: “[im antiimperialistischen kampf geht es überhaupt um gefangenenbefreiung  .  .  . ] aus dem gefängnis, das das system für alle ausgebeuteten und unterdrückten schichten des volkes schon immer ist[,] aus der gefangenschaft der totalen entfremdung und selbstentfremdung.”

236

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15. Stefan Aust and Pieter Bakker-Schut have established that the RAF’s counselors facilitated illegal contacts among the Stammheim inmates. See Stefan Aust, Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Bodley Head, 1987); and Pieter Bakker-Schut, Stammheim: Der Prozeß gegen die Rote Armee Fraktion: Die notwendige Korrektur der herrschenden Meinung (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1997). Olaf Gaetje argues that Bakker-Schut’s editing of the prison documents distorts the meaning of the correspondence between the RAF and their legal counsel. See Olaf Gaetje, “Das “info”-System der RAF von 1973 bis 1977 in sprachwissenschaft licher Perspektive,” in Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus, ed. Wolfgang Kraushaar (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006). 16. If we dismiss the conjecture that prison staff killed the RAF leaders, then we should also acknowledge that the incarcerated militants received treatment in accordance with federal conventions on prison conditions. For a fuller consideration of the conditions at Stammheim, see the following: “Folter in der BRD: Zur Situation der politischen Gefangenen,” special issue, Kursbuch 32 (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1973); Sjef Teuns, “Isolation/Sensorische Deprivation: Die programmierte Folter,” in Ausgewählte Dokumente der Zeitgeschichte: BRD-RAF, ed. Christian Schneider (Cologne: GNN Verlagsgesellschaft Politische Berichte, 1987), 118– 126; Heinz Brandt, “Zur Isolationshaft—Interview,” in Kuß den Boden der Freiheit: Texte der Neuen Linken (Berlin: ID-Archiv, 1991); Kurt Oesterle, Stammheim: Die Geschichte des Vollzugsbeamten Horst Buback (Tübingen: Klöpfer und Meyer, 2003), which is based on the accounts of a Stammheim warden; and Oliver Tolmein, Stammheim vergessen: Deutschlands Aufbruch und die RAF (Hamburg: Konkret Literatur Verlag, 1992), which offers a sympathetic slant on the RAF plight. 17. Von Trotta has written about the weibliche Ästhetik of cinema in “Female Film Aesthetics,” in West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices, ed. Eric Rentschler (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988), 89–90. For a consideration of the personal/political dynamic in the film, see Ellen Seiter, “The Political Is Personal: Margarethe von Trotta’s Marianne und Juliane,” in Films for Women, ed. Charlotte Brundson (London: BFI, 1986), 109–16. 18. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Herbsttag,” in Das Buch der Bilder (Leipzig: Insel, 1935), 42. In the original: “Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr. / Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben, / Wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben / Und wird in den Alleen hin und her / Unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.” 19. Gottfried Semper, “The Principle of Dressing Has Greatly Influenced Style in Architecture and in Other Arts at All Times and Among All Peoples,” in Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, or, Practical Aesthetics, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2004), 242–55.

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20. Adolf Loos, “Das Prinzip der Bekleidung,” Neue Freie Presse (September 4, 1898); translated as “The Principle of Cladding” and republished in Adolf Loos, Spoken Into the Void: Collected Essays, 1897–1900, trans. Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), 67. Mark Wigley also references this. See Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 10. 21. Wigley, White Walls, 11. 22. The coupling of architecture and clothing in Marianne and Juliane can also be seen to open a channel for Wim Wenders’s fi lm Notebooks on Cities and Clothes (1989), which identifies parallels between the couture of Yohji Yamamoto and the cityscapes of Tokyo and Paris. Thanks to Nora Alter for this note. 23. Cited in Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Complex, 253. 24. Hans Kundnani, Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany ’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 120. 25. See Julia Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, trans. Brian O’Keeffe (New York: Semiotext[e], 2002), 120–23. 26. Examples of RAF communiqués in which the roles of victim and agent are reversed include “den antiimperialistischen kampf führen!” and “das konzept stadtguerilla,” both of which are reprinted in texte: der RAF. 27. Marianne and Juliane also incorporates brief sequences depicting Cambodian war victims. 28. A similar question guides the line of inquiry in Eric Kligerman, “The Antigone Effect: Reinterring the Dead of Night and Fog in the German Autumn,” New German Critique 38, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 9–38. 29. For a critical comparison of the Stammheim and Majdanek trials, see Rebecca Wittmann, “Zweierlei Maß: Nazis und Terroristen vor westdeutschen Gerichten,” in Die RAF als Geschichte und Gegenwart, eds. Jan-Holger Kirsch and Annette Vowinckel (May 2007): 1–7, www.zeitgeschichte-online.de/themen/zweierlei-mass. 30. These controls included the addition to the Criminal Code of Sections 129, 129a, 130, and 188, what is known as the “Lex RAF.” 31. Varon, Bringing the War Home, 272. 32. “Wir werden in den Durststreik treten (Interview),” Der Spiegel 4 (January 20, 1975): 52–57. In the original: “absoluter Mangel an Einfluß auf die Masse,” “Verbindung zur Basis,” and “die Spur der Politik der RAF.” 33. Bruno, Streetwalking, 56. 34. For a critical retrospective of von Trotta’s career up to 2010, see the special issue “Margarethe von Trotta: Making Films,” Salmagundi (Fall 2009/Winter 2010): 164–65. 35. In the original: “Weg vom Fenster kriegen sie uns nicht, weil sie keine Macht über unsere Seele haben.” Jürgen Weber, Die bleierne Zeit: Ein Film von Margarethe von Trotta (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1981), 55.

238 5. violence and the tendenz wende

5. Violence and the Tendenz wende : E ngendering Vic tims in the Novel and Film 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

The Luft hansa hijacking was preceded by the attack on an Air France flight to Entebbe, Uganda, in July 1976, an unsuccessful mission aimed to force the release of fift y-three “political prisoners” around the world, six of whom were RAF members. Conducted by members of the PFLP and the Revolutionary Cells, the hijacking showed the persistence of anti-Semitism in the postwar period. Wilfried Böse and Brigitte Kuhlmann, who led the Revolutionary Cells, separated Jewish from non-Jewish passengers on the plane, an act that many associate with the Selektion of inmates for execution or slave labor at Nazi death camps. As Annette Vowinckel argues, “while ‘Entebbe’ fills part of the collective memory of Jews, Israelis, and Americans, it has been replaced by ‘Mogadishu’ in Germany in order to distract the collective memory from the Nazi past and to shift attention to Arabic anti-Semitism.” She makes this point in an essay that examines filmic representations of 1970s-era aeroterrorism: Annette Vowinckel, “Skyjacking: Cultural Memory and the Movies,” in Baader-Meinhof Returns: History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism, ed. Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Ingo Cornils (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 251–68, at 251. The Radikalenerlass forbids employment in the civil service and education fields to citizens considered to have “radical views,” especially members of “extremist” party organizations such as the German Communist Party (DKP) and the National Democratic Party (NPD). Jürgen Habermas, “Keine Normalisierung der Vergangenheit: Rede zur Verleihung des Geschwister-Scholl Preises (18.11.1985),” in Kleine politische Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987), 11–17. F. C. Delius, Mogadischu Fensterplatz (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1987). Julian Preece writes that Windowseat at Mogadishu, like the rest of Delius’s Deutscher Herbst trilogy, “comments critically” on the mythologization of the West German 1970s, the RAF’s attack, and the government’s retaliation. My reading of Windowseat aligns with Preece’s acknowledgment that Delius’s writing actually “helps to create” a national mythology of victimization and redemption. See Julian Preece, Baader-Meinhof and the Novel: Narratives of the Nation/Fantasies of the Revolution, 1970–2010 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 47–64, esp. 47. Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Der Auft rag, oder Vom Beobachten des Beobachters der Beobachter (Zurich: Diogenes, 1986); Dürrenmatt, The Assignment, or On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers, trans. Joel Agee (New York: Random House, 1988). In the introduction to her study of the Far Left in Switzerland, Dominique Grisard provides a discursive analysis of the relationship between terrorism and

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8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

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gender. Dominique Grisard, Gendering Terror: Eine Geschlechtergeschichte des Linksterrorismus in der Schweiz (Frankfurt: Campus, 2011). See, for example, the feature articles in “Zurück zur Weiblichkeit,” special issue, Der Spiegel 27 (June 3, 1975). The lecture was translated into English and published as Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” New German Critique 22 (Winter 1981): 3–14. For a critical response to the Adorno Prize lecture and the debates it generated among European intellectuals, see Martin Jay, “Habermas and Modernism,” and Richard Rorty, “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity,” in Praxis International 4, no. 1 (April 1984): 1–14, 32–44. Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 252. Herzog adds that it was in the 1980s that campaigns for the legalization of civil unions for homosexuals made substantial progress. Alice Schwarzer, “Terroristinnen,” Emma (October 1977): 5. See also Gisela Diewald-Kerkmann, Frauen, Terrorismus und Justiz: Prozesse gegen weibliche Mitglieder der RAF und der Bewegung 2. Juni (Dusseldorf: Droste, 2009). Margarete Mitscherlich, “Hexen oder Märtyrer?,” in Frauen und Terror: Versuche, die Beteiligung von Frauen an Gewalttaten zu erklären, ed. Susanne von Paczensky (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1978), 13–23, at 18. Also cited in Sarah Colvin, Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism (Rochester: Camden House, 2009), 192. Colvin, Ulrike Meinhof, 192. For a comparative analysis of female suicide bombers that engages the German armed struggle, see Mia Bloom, “Bombshells: Women and Terror,” Gender Issues 28 (2011): 1–21. Here I have in mind Helma Sanders-Brahms’s fi lm Deutschland, bleiche Mutter (Germany, Pale Mother, 1979), an important document of 1970s feminism. SandersBrahms’s title is the first line of Bertolt Brecht’s poem “Deutschland” from 1933. Der Fall Franza was posthumously edited and published as part of Das “Todesarten”Projekt, ed. Robert Pichl, Monika Albrecht, and Dirk Göttsche (Munich: Piper, 1995). An English translation followed: Ingeborg Bachmann, The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann, trans. Peter Filkins (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999). Parts of the text follow the bureaucratic formulas of the Antrag auf Versorgung nach dem Gesetz über die Entschädigung für die Opfer von Gewalttaten (Application for Assistance according to the Law for the Compensation of Victims of Violent Acts), which was devised in accord with the Opferentschädigungsgesetz (OEG), or Victims’ Compensation Law of 1976. Delius, Mogadischu Fensterplatz, 5. In the original: “dunkles, schwarzes Gesicht.” Ibid., 253.

240 5. violence and the tendenz wende 20. In the original: “alle Sorten des leiblichen Gestanks vereint und konzentriert zu einem einzigartigen Gestank, dem persönlichen Kennzeichen der Andrea Bölander. Das ist es, was von dir übrigbleiben wird, unverwechselbar, dein Gestank!” Delius, Mogadischu Fensterplatz, 191. 21. See Franz Futterknecht, “Die Inszenierung des Politischen: Delius Romane zum Deutschen Herbst,” in F. C. Delius: Studien über sein literarisches Werk, ed. Manfred Durzak and Hartmut Steineicke (Tübingen: Stauffenberg, 1997), 82, 86. 22. Delius, Mogadischu Fensterplatz, 145. Delius’s term Austauschobjekt could also be rendered as “commodity.” 23. Ibid., 135. 24. Dürrenmatt, The Assignment, 70. In the original: “Was soll da kommen, was sollen fremde Zeiten ( fremtiden) bringen? Ich weiß das nicht, ich ahne nichts. Wenn eine Kreuzspinne (edderkop?) sich von einem festen Punkt in ihre Konsequenzen niederstürzt, da sieht sie beständig einen leeren Raum (tomt rum?) vor sich, worin sie keinen festen Fuß ( fodfaeste?) finden kann, wie sehr sie auch zappelt.” Dürrenmatt, Der Auft rag, 75. 25. Kierkegaard published the two-volume work Either/Or under four different pseudonyms, a fact that resonates with the name-play of The Assignment. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). For a feminist analysis of Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms, see Dera Sipe, “Kierkegaard and Feminism: A Paradoxical Friendship,” Concept 27 (2004): 1–25, www.concept.journals.villa nova.edu/article/download/146/117. 26. Dürrenmatt, The Assignment, 70–71. In the original: “So wie dies geht es mir; vorn beständig ein leerer Raum (tomt rum?), was mich vorantreibt ist eine Konsequenz, die hinter (bag) mir liegt. Dieses Leben ist verkehrt (bagvendt) und rätselhaft (raedsomt?), nicht auszuhalten.” Dürrenmatt, Der Auft rag, 75. 27. Dürrenmatt, The Assignment, 24. 28. For a detailed consideration of bodily reification in counterculture German literature, see Gerrit-Jan Berendse, “Schreiben als Körperverletzung: Zur Anthropologie des Terrors in Bernward Vespers Die Reise,” Monatshefte 93, no. 3 (2001): 318–32. 29. Dürrenmatt, Der Auft rag, 15. 30. Louis Althusser elaborates his theory of ideology in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” first published in 1970 in La Pensée. The essay was reprinted in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 85–126. 31. Ernst von Salomon, Der Fragebogen (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1985). In 1922 von Salomon collaborated in the right-wing conspiracy to assassinate Walther Rathenau, Germany’s proassimilation Minister of Foreign Affairs. Franz Futterknecht also compares Windowseat at Mogadishu to von Salomon’s The Questionnaire. Futterknecht, “Die Inszenierung des Politischen,” 82.

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32. Von Salomon’s cynicism about administrative research was substantively prefigured in Adorno’s writings from the mid-1940s. Two examples of Adorno’s critiques of empiricism and the use of questionnaires and other new methods of sociology are Minima Moralia, especially early drafts of the aphorism “Procrustes,” and his correspondence with Paul Lazarsfeld about the Princeton Radio Research Project. This stance is discussed in David Jenemann, Adorno in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 33. Ernst Nolte, “Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will: Eine Rede, die geschrieben, aber nicht gehalten werden konnte,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 6, 1986, reprinted in Rudolph Augstein, ed., Historikerstreit: Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung (Munich: Piper, 1987), 45. 34. A useful English-language analysis of Habermas and Nolte within the Historikerstreit is presented in Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). 35. Examples of mid-1980s historical research on sexual violence against German women during and after the war include Erika M. Hoerning, “Frauen als Kriegsbeute: Der Zwei-Fronten Krieg: Beispiele aus Berlin,” in “Wir kriegen jetzt andere Zeiten”: Auf der Suche nach der Erfahrung des Volkes in antifaschistischen L ändern: Lebensgeschichte und Sozialkultur im Ruhrgebiet, 1930–60, vol. 3, ed. Lutz Niethammer and Alexander von Plato (Berlin: Verlag JHW Nachfolger, 1985), 327–46; and Ingrid Schmidt-Harzbach, “Eine Woche im April: Berlin 1945: Vergewaltigung als Massenschicksal,” Feministische Studien 5 (1984): 51–62. Examples of memoirs on the Red Army rapes are the republication of the book from 1968 by Margaret Boveri, Tage des Überlebens: Berlin 1945 (Munich: Piper, 1985); and Inge Deutschkron, Ich trug den gelben Stern (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1987). From the Anglo-American sphere, Susan Brownmiller’s earlier work on rape set a precedent for German inquiries on the subject. See Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975). 36. Atina Grossman points out that these rapes weren’t always silenced; in the fi rst postwar years, many spoke openly of the crimes, public policies were implemented to protect the women harmed by them, and even antiabortion laws were lifted to deal with the many unwanted pregnancies that resulted from the rapes. Atina Grossman, “A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers,” October 72 (Spring 1995): 42–63. 37. Ibid., 49. 38. The release of Liberators Take Liberties prompted debate among feminists. See, in particular, Gertrud Koch, “Kurzschluss der Perspektiven,” Frankfurter Rundschau (November 17–18, 1992); and Helke Sander, “Du machst es Dir viel zu einfach,” Frankfurter Rundschau (November 26, 1992).

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39. Annette Michelson, Andreas Huyssen, Stuart Liebman, Eric Santner, and Silvia Kolbowski, “Further Thoughts on Helke Sander’s Project,” October 72 (Spring 1995): 89–113. 40. Helke Sander and Barbara Johr, eds., BeFreier und BeFreite: Krieg, Vergewaltigungen, Kinder (Munich: Verlag Antje Kunstmann, 1992), 11. 41. Sander’s collaborator Barbara Johr estimates the number of rapes in “Die Ereignisse in Zahlen,” in ibid., 46–73. A substantive overview of the casualties is presented in Norman M. Naimark, “Soviet Soldiers, German Women, and the Problem of Rape,” in The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–49 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 69–140. 42. Grossman, “A Question of Silence,” 46. 43. With reference to the situation during and just after liberation, Grossman argues that German women felt “confi rmed as well as violated” by the assaults of Red Army soldiers. Ibid., 53. 44. Margaret Scanlan, Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 109. 45. Dürrenmatt, The Assignment, 118. In the original: “gierig, fleischig, leer.” Dürrenmatt, Der Auft rag, 122. 46. Dürrenmatt, The Assignment, 118. In the original: “die Leiche lag zwischen den Heiligen.” Dürrenmatt, Der Auft rag, 122. 47. In the original: “ob vielleicht alle Männer jetzt so aussahen wie der, wie Jassid.” Delius, Mogadischu Fensterplatz, 261. 48. In the original: “Jassid und allen Jassidmenschen.” Delius, Mogadischu Fensterplatz, 261. 49. Edward Said, “Islam Through Western Eyes,” Nation (April 26, 1980): 488–91, at 488. 50. Dürrenmatt, The Assignment, 120. In the original: “hatte es alles gewünscht, was ihr widerfuhr, die Vergewaltigung und den Tod.” Dürrenmatt, Der Auft rag, 124. 51. Dürrenmatt, The Assignment, 120. In the original: “lustverzerrt” Dürrenmatt, Der Auft rag, 124.

6. Anatomies of P rotest and Resistance: Meinhof, Fischer 1.

2.

For a concise overview of Meinhof’s writing and cultural influence, see Karin Bauer, ed., “In Search of Ulrike Meinhof,” in Everybody Talks About the Weather . . . We Don’t: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), 12–99. After early performances of Ulrike Meinhof at the Bremer Theater in 1990, the Tanztheaterstück premiered at the Volksbühne in East Berlin in 1993 and was restaged

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3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

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there in 1999 and the early 2000s. It subsequently moved on to Bonn and Darmstadt. In 1987 at the Theater der Stadt Heidelberg, Kresnik choreographed and produced a preliminary work based on Meinhof’s life. Although it had the same title, the form and content of this first production differed from those at Bremen and Berlin. The Volksbühne performances were the first to attract sustained critical attention, as is evidenced by the publication of a special section on the Tanztheaterstück in Theater heute. See Michael Merschmeier, “Der Gesellschaftstanz: Johann Kresnik oder Ein Lobpreis der politischen Choreographie,” and Michael Wildenhain, “Fleischerhaken, postmodern: Michael Wildenhain contra Johann Kresnik’s Ulrike Meinhof,” Theater heute: Jahrbuch (1990): 76–79, 80–81. Recently several critical biographies of Meinhof’s life and writings have appeared, for example, Jutta Ditfurth, Ulrike Meinhof: Die Biografie (Berlin: Ullstein, 2007); and Sarah Colvin, Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism (Rochester: Camden House, 2009). See also Leith Passmore, Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction: Performing Terrorism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Hans Finkemeyer and Rudolf Kautzky, “Das Kavernom des Sinus cavernosus,” Zentralblatt für Neurochirurgie 29, no. 1 (1968): 23–30. Meinhof is identified by the initials R. U., which stand for her married name at the time, Ulrike Röhl. Bettina Röhl, “Warum ging Ulrike Meinhof in den Untergrund? Das Hirn der RAF,” Rheinische Post (November 9, 2002). In a related vein, Patricia Melzer, in her study of women in the armed struggle, poses the rhetorical question of whether terrorism and maternity “can be imagined only as irreconcilable.” Patricia Melzer, “Maternal Ethics and Political Violence: The ‘Betrayal’ of Motherhood Among the Women of the RAF and June 2 Movement,” Seminar 47, no. 1 (February 2011): 81–102, at 82. Drawing upon writings by Meinhof, Ensslin, and other militant women, Melzer considers both the social compulsion to reproduce children in postwar Germany and the widespread tendency to pathologize militancy. Her article presents the case of the German Far Left as a challenge to the assumption that women’s experience of political subjectivity is necessarily grounded in “maternal ethics.” Ibid., 86. For an account of this episode, see Gerd Koenen, Vesper, Ensslin, Baader (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2003). After the autopsy, the neuropathologist Jürgen Peiffer obtained Meinhof’s brain for further research in his Tübingen laboratory. He later transferred it to the Magdeburg laboratory of Bernhard Bogerts. Bettina Röhl was the first to contest Peiffer’s and Bogerts’s illegal possession of the specimen. For an overview of the handling of Meinhof’s brain, her possible neuropathology, and the question of Meinhof’s mental fitness at her Stammheim trials, see Christian Füller, “Ein Gehirn auf Abwegen,” die tageszeitung, November 13, 2002, 3. Bettina Röhl, “Die durchgeknallte Republik: Ist der deutsche Terrorismus ohne Medien denkbar? Oder: Die Geschichte des 26 Jahre unterdrückten,

244

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

6. anatomies of protest and resistance medizinischen Gehirnbefunds von Ulrike Meinhof.” The site bettinaroehl.de is not active at the time of publication. Sophocles, Antigone, in The Theban Plays, trans. E. F. Watling (London: Penguin, 1974), 159. Bettina Röhl published one of her first accounts of Ulrike Meinhof’s life in an article in Der Spiegel in 1995, which she coauthored with her sister and a staff writer for the same magazine. See Bettina Röhl, Regine Röhl, and Carola Niezborala, “Unsere Mutter: ‘Staatsfeind Nr. 1,’ ” Der Spiegel 29 (July 17, 1995): 88–109. An extended examination of Fischer’s foreign policy is included in Hans Kundnani, Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). For an analysis of Fischer’s early years in the left ist opposition, see Wolfgang Kraushaar, Fischer in Frankfurt: Karriere eines Außenseiters (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001). Together with Gudrun Ensslin, Irene Goergens, Ingrid Schubert, and another, still-unidentified man, Meinhof was part of the group that freed Baader in 1970. It is alleged that the male comrade, not Meinhof, shot and wounded Georg Linke, who was employed to guard Baader. After the Ohnesorg shooting in 1967, Ensslin was quoted as saying, “This fascist state means to kill us all. We must organize resistance. Violence is the only way to answer violence.” Attributed to Ensslin by Stefan Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Bodley Head, 1987), 44. Several of Meinhof’s texts ratcheted up the group’s terror, including her communiqués on the series of fatal bombings in May 1972 and her essay commending the Black September attacks at the Munich Olympics later that same year. The violent potential of Meinhof ’s writing is evident in the Erklärungen that followed the attacks in 1972 on U.S. and West German targets as well as in the text “die aktion des schwarzen september in münchen: zur strategie des antiimperialistischen kampfes (November 1972),” which responds to the assassination of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists. These are reprinted in Martin Hoffman, ed., Rote Armee Fraktion: Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF (Berlin: ID-Verlag, 1997), 145–48, 151–77. Tanztheater is a dramatic form that was influenced by the expressionist choreography of the 1920s of Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman, as well as the politicized street theater of the 1960s. It aims to establish a visceral and often political connection between the performers and audience. Incorporating rehearsed and improvised sequences, Tanztheater takes on the rhythm and cadences of spontaneous “happenings.” Kresnik’s often disturbing work synthesizes elements of ballet, Butoh, and performance art to weave biographical narratives about figures whose work has changed Western culture and society. Besides Meinhof, Kresnik has also taken as his muses other prominent women: Sylvia

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17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

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Plath, Frida Kahlo, and Rosa Luxemburg, as well as Hannelore Kohl, the wife of the former chancellor Helmut Kohl. Joschka Fischer, Mein langer Lauf zu mir selbst (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1999). The book’s title recalls Rudi Dutschke, Mein langer Marsch: Reden, Schriften und Tagebücher aus zwanzig Jahren, ed. Gretchen Dutschke-Klotz, Helmut Gollwit zer, and Jürgen Miermeister (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980). It also plays on the problem of “the long march through the institutions” that was central to left ist debates in the 1960s and 1970s. Already in 1956, Jürgen Habermas detected this tendency: Germany’s booming economy was pulling leisure pursuits into the cipher of “consumption-time,” eradicating whatever vestiges of folk and mass culture that remained untainted by the Nazis. See Jürgen Habermas, “Notizen zum Verhältnis von Kultur und Konsum,” Merkur 10 (1956): 212–28, at 216. Fischer, Mein langer Lauf, 17, 19. Fassbinder’s reflections on subject formation are analyzed in Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996). George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985). Leith Passmore, “The Art of Hunger: Self-Starvation in the Red Army Faction,” German History 27, no. 1 (2009): 32–59, at 32, 52. Ibid., 32. Buchloh describes this condition in order to contextualize the work of Gerhard Richter. See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive,” October 88 (Spring 1999): 117–45. The Spontis were one of several militant groups to shoot off from the collapse of the Socialist Student Union; they were inclined to “spontaneous” acts of dissidence (hence the name), such as squatting and civil disobedience. Quoted in Dirk Kurbjuweit and Günther Latsch, “Ich hab gekämpft,” Der Spiegel 2 (2001): 29. The charges against Fischer were dropped, either for lack of evidence or on the ground of self-defense. For a lucid account in English of Fischer’s militancy and subsequent political career, see Paul Berman, “The Passion of Joschka Fischer,” New Republic (August 27 and September 3, 2001): 36–59. The rights to reprint Thomas Hesterberg’s photograph could not be obtained. Reiche writes: “ ‘Sexuality makes you free’ fits with this picture as well as ‘Work makes you free’ fits with Auschwitz.” Reimut Reiche, “Sexuelle Revolution— Erinnerung an einen Mythos,” in Die Früchte der Revolte: Über die Veränderung der  politischen Kultur durch die Studentenbewegung, ed. Lothar Baier (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 1988), 65. This translation is from Herzog, Sex Aft er Fascism, 405.

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30. In Meinhof’s original terms: “der votzenchauvinismus ist was fürchterliches.” Ulrike Meinhof, “naja der votzenchauvinismus,” Archiv des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung, HIS Ba,A 002–004. Sylvia Schmitz-Burgard identifies a feminist argument in Meinhof’s article “Falsches Bewusstsein” (1968). See Sylvia Schmitz-Burgard, Gewaltiges Schreiben gegen Gewalt (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2011), 23–29. 31. In the original: es waren tanten, die den typen da rausgeholt haben. nicht frauenbefreiung, wie womens lib . . . —gegen die typen—sondern frauenbefreiung durch bewaff neten antiimperialistischen kampf.

32.

33.

34.

35.

Ulrike Meinhof, “der dreck, mit dem die bullen,” “14. Mai Notizen,” Archiv des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung, HIS Me, U/025,006. Credit for the previous analysis of this document goes to Sarah Colvin. My translation of this passage varies somewhat from the one she gives in Colvin, Ulrike Meinhof, 200. This is translation is from Colvin, Ulrike Meinhof, 200. Meinhof’s statement, in the original, reads, “scheiß auf die gleichberechtigung der frau.” Meinhof, “hier meine selbstkritik,” Archiv des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung, HIS Me,U 025–005. Sibylla Flügge, “1968 und die Frauen: Ein Blick in die Beziehungskiste,” in Gender und Soziale Praxis, ed. Margit Göttert and Karin Walser (Berlin: Ulrike Helmer Verlag, 2002), 264–65. Thanks to Dagmar Herzog for referring me to this article. In her discussion of Oskar Negt’s commentary on the 1968 generation, Julia Hell notes that the New Left had an ambivalent relationship to political violence. As much as they romanticized the prospects for cultural revolution, they also suffered a sense of “macho guilt” about not having met the RAF’s challenge to take up arms. See Julia Hell, “Terror and Solidarity,” Telos (October 25–26, 2006), www .telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=165; as well as Oskar Negt, Achtundsechszig: Politische Intellektuelle und die Macht (Göttingen: Steidl, 1995), 264–65. The original reads: “In unserer Gesellschaft finden sich immer hunderttausend Männer, die man (Mann!) für ein Auschwitz, Gulag oder Vietnam braucht. . . . Es gibt ja keine andere Wahl mehr, Brüder: entweder schaffen wir’s, die Macker und Gewaltmuft is, auf die andere Seite der Barrikade zu kommen, zu den Frauen und Kindern, oder wir gehen an der Schizophrenie unserer eignenen Befreiungsansprüche und unserer Männlichkeit zugrunde.” Fischer plays on the German homonyms man and der Mann (“one” and “man” in English). Joschka Fischer in Autonomie (1977), cited in Christian Schmidt, “Wir sind die Wahnsinnigen:” Joschka Fischer und seine Frankfurter Gang (Munich: Econ-Verlag, 1999), 111. For an

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36. 37. 38.

39.

40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

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overview of the German autonomist movement, see Geronimo, Fire and Flames: A History of the German Autonomist Movement, trans. Gabriel Kuhn (Oakland, Calif.: PM Press, 2012), 63–66. Flügge makes a similar point. Flügge, “1968 und die Frauen,” 281. Joschka Fischer in Autonomie 1977; cited in Schmidt, “Wir sind die Wahnsinnigen,” 111. In 1968, for example, Meinhof wrote several columns for konkret that examine the status of women, including “Falsches Bewusstsein,” “Die Frauen im SDS oder In eigener Sache,” “Wasserwerfer—auch gegen Frauen,” and “Warenhausbrandstift ung.” English translations have been published in Bauer, Everybody Talks About the Weather. Meinhof also wrote and directed the film Bambule (Riot), about girls in a reform school, for German television. The film Bambule was scheduled for broadcast in May 1970, but executives shelved it after Meinhof forced Baader’s escape from prison. The script was first published in 1971, but the program was not aired until 1997. The script was republished in 2012 as part of documenta 13. See Ulrike Meinhof, Bambule: Fürsorge, Sorge für wen? (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 1971) and Ulrike Meinhof, Bambule: The Script/ Das Regiebuch. 100 Notes—100 Thoughts = 100 Notizen—100 Gedanken, No. 092 (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012). Alan Rosenfeld’s reference here is to the notion, prevalent in the 1970s, that terrorism was the product of an “Exzess der Befreiung der Frau.” As I indicate in the introduction, this expression is attributed to Günther Nollert, President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Alan Rosenfeld, “ ‘Anarchist Amazons’: The Gendering of Radicalism in 1970s West Germany,” Contemporary European History 19, no. 4 (2010): 351–74, at 373. Employing the concepts of psychoanalysis and critical theory, Dominick LaCapra detects a break at the shift ing margins of two mnemonic modes: the “acting out” of Holocaust traumas through repetition and the possibility of their being “worked through.” Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 64–66, 205–23. LaCapra’s central reference is Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” (1914), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1958), 12:147–56. LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust, 65–66. Thanks to Jeremy Varon for helping to develop this point. Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 10, 350. Birgit Haas, “Terrorism and Theatre in Germany,” in Baader-Meinhof Returns: History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism, ed. Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Ingo Cornils (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 191–210, at 206.

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46. Referring to the work of Marc Fischer, Jarausch and Geyer also employ the term “negative foil.” Jarausch and Geyer, Shattered Past, 29n85. See Marc Fischer, After the Wall: Germany, the Germans, and the Burdens of History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). 47. Freud uses the concept of the “phallic mother” in several of his studies. See, for example, his use of the concept in his elaboration on the castration complex and disavowal in Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” (1918), in The Standard Edition, 17:1–122.

7. Regarding Terror at the Berlin Kunst-Werke 1. 2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

Anders Stephanson, “Johan Grimonprez: Deitch Projects,” Artforum International 36 (December 1997): 109. Note the use of all lowercase letters in the exhibition title “documenta.” I discuss the convention of kleinschreibung in chapter 1. Herfried Münkler analyzes the rise, fall, and return of aeroterrorism in Münkler, “Ältere und jüngere Formen des Terrorismus: Strategie und Organisationsstruktur,” in Herausforderung Terrorismus: Die Zukunft der Sicherheit, ed. Werner Weidenfeld (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2004), 29–43. A precursor to Regarding Terror was the film series Red Army Friction held in 2002 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. The ICA followed this with another series in 2007, Baader’s Angels: Women’s Roles in German Terrorism Films. Andreas Elter examines the RAF’s use of public communications and media in Elter, Propaganda der Tat: Die RAF und die Medien (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008). A useful study of the relationship between terrorism and the German media is Klaus Weinhauer, Jörg Requate, and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, eds., Terrorismus in der Bundesrepublik: Medien, Staat und Subkulturen in den 70er Jahren (Frankfurt: Campus, 2008). Raymond Williams elaborates the concept of the cultural dominant in Williams, “Dominant, Residual and Emergent,” in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121–27. Scores of articles covering the response of victims’ families to the Kunst-Werke project appeared in 2003, including “Geld-Vergabe an RAF-Ausstellung geprüft,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 12, 2003, 4; and “Angst vor der Bildermaschine,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 25, 2003, 11. A number of these articles were informed by the press releases of parliamentary organizations, such as the CSU Landesgruppe. See their “Presse Mitteilung 432/2003: RAF-Ausstellung” (July 22, 2003). Reporters from both the national and tabloid presses published a range of articles on the Kunst-Werke proposal in the context of Berlin’s cultural financing crisis. See, for example, Mainhardt Graf Nayhauß, “Warum zahlt Berlin

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9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

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100 000 Euro für Skandal-Ausstellung über RAF?,” Bild (July 22, 2003): 2; and Heribert Prantl, “Auf dem Grund der Geschichte der Republik: Warum Deutschland eine Ausstellung über die RAF braucht,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 21, 2003, 4. Many artists donated works to the auction. See Clemens Niedenthal, “Alternative Finanzierung,” Berliner Zeitung, January 19, 2005, www.berliner-zeitung.de /archiv/alternative-finanzierung,10810590,10250320.html. Felix Ensslin, “post PR,” email to author, April 10, 2004. For an overview of Kraushaar’s criticism of Regarding Terror, see Frank Kallensee and Jan Sternberg, “Kunst allein kann den Terror nicht erklären: ProtestForscher Wolfgang Kraushaar zur RAF-Ausstellung,” Märkische Allgemeine Zeitung, February 22, 2005, 9. As discussed in “Alles nur Stimmungsmache: Wirbel um die RAF-Ausstellung,” die tageszeitung, July 24, 2003, 6. For a discussion of the relationship between Jan Philipp Reemtsma and the Kunst-Werke, see Annette Vowinckel, “Der Terror und die Bilder: Anmerkungen zum Verhältnis von Kunst und Geschichte anläßlich der Berliner RAF-Ausstellung,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 34 (Göttingen: Wallstein-Verlag, 2006), 309–29. Conversation with Felix Ensslin, New York City, February 8, 2004. Ensslin, “post PR,” email to author, April 10, 2004. Rosalind Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” October 54 (Fall 1990): 3–17. Feldmann also published the images in book form: Hans-Peter Feldmann, Die Toten, 1967–1993: Studentenbewegung, APO, Baader-Meinhof, Bewegung 2. Juni, Revolutionäre Zellen, RAF, . . . (Dusseldorf: Feldmann, 1998). Feldmann doesn’t permit the reproduction of Die Toten in any form, hence the absence of illustrations of the work in this chapter. In their discussion of The Dead, Inge Stephan and Andrea Tacke call the source photographs “objet[s] trouvé[s].” Inge Stephan and Alexandra Tacke, “Einleitung,” Nachbilder der RAF, ed. Inge Stephan and Alexandra Tacke (Vienna: Böhlau, 2008), 7–23, at 13. The deaths of Benno Ohnesorg and Wolfgang Grams are discussed in chapters 1 and 2. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive,” October 88 (Spring 1999): 117–45. Ibid., 134. Richter began Atlas in the 1960s, shortly after emigrating from the GDR to the FRG. Sheets 475–79 are followed by a series of sketches of Richter’s studio and house, made in 1994, and then sheet 482 is another, earlier sketch of a table, dating from 1987. Jefferson Chase, “The Art of Terror: An Exhibit About a Group of ’70s Homegrown Terrorists Divides Germany,” Boston Globe, February 13, 2005.

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23. Klaus Biesenbach, “Engel der Geschichte, oder Den Schrecken anderer betrachten, oder Bilder in den Zeiten des Terrors,” in Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Die RAF Ausstellung, ed. Klaus Biesenbach (Göttingen: Steidl, 2005), 11. 24. Chase, “The Art of Terror.” 25. Interestingly, both of these works were included in documenta X in 1997. The entire Atlas project (up to that point) was installed so that it allowed the viewer to move around among the various sheets, skipping forward or tracking back to consider the network of associations and experiences that obtains among the images. 26. For example, Rosie Millard, “It’s the Thought That Counts,” Art Review 50 (April 1998): 28–29. 27. Here Adorno refers to Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1979). 28. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 182. For another elaboration of this section of Aesthetic Theory, see Charity Scribner, “From Document to Documenta: A German Return to Truth and Reconciliation,” Rethinking Marxism 16, no. 1 (January 2004): 49–56. 29. Yvonne Rainer, “Working Title: Journeys from Berlin/1971,” October 9 (Summer 1979): 80–106, at 83. 30. Vito Acconci, the artist, and Amy Taubin, the film critic, play these parts. 31. On objects and object relations in Journeys, see Claudia Mesch’s feminist analysis “Berlin and Post-Meinhof Feminism: Yvonne Rainer’s Journeys from Berlin/1971,” in Berlin: Divided City, 1945–89, ed. Philip Broadbent and Sabine Hake (Oxford: Berghahn, 2010), 135–44. 32. Indeed the art historian Philip Glahn has made exactly this point in his recent study of Journeys. See Philip Glahn, “Brechtian Journeys: Yvonne Rainer’s Film as Counterpublic Art,” Art Journal 68, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 76–93. 33. Noël Carroll, “Interview with a Woman Who . . . ,” Millennium Film Journal 7, no. 9 (Fall 1980/Winter 1981): 37–68, at 51; also cited in Glahn, “Brechtian Journeys,” 80–81. 34. Dominique Grisard discusses the history of Russian women and the “roots” of terrorism. See Dominique Grisard, Gendering Terror: Eine Geschlechtergeschichte des Linksterrorismus in der Schweiz (Frankfurt: Campus, 2011), 44–50. 35. Yvonne Rainer, The Films of Yvonne Rainer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 166–67. 36. Ibid. Reprinted with permission of the author. 37. Theodor W. Adorno, “Objectivity and Reification,” in Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury, 1973), 189–92. My reading of this section is informed by the analyses of Susan Buck-Morss and Simon Jarvis. See Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt

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38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

50.

51.

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Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), 24–25; and Simon Jarvis, “Negative Dialectic as Metacritique,” in Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), 148–74. Hegel’s reading of Antigone and his wider reflections on gender are a major topos of feminist philosophy and criticism. The responses have ranged widely and include: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (London: Vintage, 1989), esp. 62–139; Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992), especially 242–59; Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); and much of Luce Irigaray’s writing, for example, Irigaray, “The Eternal Irony of the Community,” in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 214–26. Patricia Mills, “Hegel’s Antigone,” in Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel, ed. Patricia Mills (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 59– 88, at 77. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 12. Ibid., 82. See also Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 191. It appears that Žižek’s “Das Unbehagen in der Demokratie” was excerpted from a larger project and reworked for the Kunst-Werke show. Many points in the essay align with Žižek’s “From Politics to Biopolitics . . . and Back,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, nos. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2004): 501–21. Biesenbach, “Engel der Geschichte,” 11. Žižek, “Das Unbehagen,” 202. Ibid. Ulrich Schneckener, Transnationaler Terrorismus: Charakter und Hintergründe des “neuen” Terrorismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006), 25–27. As I noted, Habermas also diagnosed the actions of the German Far Left, as early as 1968, as “masochistic.” Žižek, “Das Unbehagen,” 203. A critical account of the RAF’s various appropriations of US-Black Nationalism and other liberation movements has yet to be written. My statement is an inversion of Gil Scott-Heron’s formulation in the poem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” in Now and Then: The Poems of Gil Scott-Heron (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2001), 77–79. Jean Baudrillard considers the impact of the RAF on postwar media society in Europe in Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, Or, The End of the Social, and Other Essays, trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston, and Paul Patton (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), 113–23. Sara Hakemi, “Terrorismus und Avantgarde,” in Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus, ed. Wolfgang Kraushaar (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006), 604–19. Another

252

52.

53. 54. 55.

7. regarding terror at the berlin kunst-werke scholarly article that directly addresses the Kunst-Werke show is Heinz-Peter Preußer, “Warum Mythos Terrorismus? Versuch einer Begriffsklärung,” in Mythos Terrorismus: Vom Deutschen Herbst zum 11. September, ed. Matteo Galli und Heinz-Peter Preußer (Heidelberg: Winter, 2006), 69–84. For reflections on “the most radical gesture” see Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (London: Routledge, 1992). Don DeLillo, Mao II (New York: Penguin, 1991), 72. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 259. DeLillo, Mao II, 157.

Af terword: Signs of a N ew Sea son 1.

2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

In the original, “Die Frage: was wäregewesenwenn, ist aber vieldeutig—pazifistisch, platonisch, moralisch, unparteiisch.” Ulrike Meinhof, “das konzept stadtguerilla,” in texte: der RAF (Malmö: Bo Cavefors, 1977), 340. Cited in Hari Kunzru, My Revolutions (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007), unpaginated front matter. Jürgen Habermas, “Die Bühne des Terrors: Ein Brief an Kurt Sontheimer,” Merkur 31, no. 353 (October 1977): 944–59. Ibid., 957. Adorno introduces the concept of Entkunstung in Prisms, trans. Sherry Weber Nicholsen and Samuel Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983) and further develops it in Aesthetic Theory. See especially Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 7:32–35. Richard Wolin translates Entkunstung as “de-aestheticization” in Wolin, “The De-Aestheticization of Art: On Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie,” Telos 41 (Fall 1979): 105–27. Habermas, “Die Bühne des Terrors,” 957. This notion of cultural decriminalization is to be distinguished from the highly litigious response of the German state to the threat of revolutionary violence. As I demonstrate in the introduction and chapter 1, in the 1970s, strict counterterrorism policies were implemented and new legislation was passed to contain and control the Far Left. For relevant articulations of the “postideological,” see Matthias Konzett, Rhetoric of National Dissent in Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, and Elfriede Jelinek (Rochester: Camden House, 2000); and Peter M. Daly and Hans Walter Frischkopf, eds., Images of Germany: Perceptions and Conceptions (New York: Peter Lang, 2000). Karin Bauer, ed., Everybody Talks About the Weather . . . We Don’t: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008). To support this point, Bauer refers to Jelinek’s published conversation with Nicolas Stemann, the director of the debut performances of Ulrike Maria Stuart at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg in 2006. See Ulrike Maria Stuart [performance program], Hamburg, Thalia Theater, 2006, 18. For a fuller analysis of the play, see Georgina Paul,

af terword

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

253

“The Terrorist in the Theatre: Elfriede Jelinek’s/Nicolas Stemann’s Ulrike Maria Stuart,” German Life and Letters 64 (December 2010): 122–32. In fact, Bettina Röhl intervened into the production of Ulrike Maria Stuart. Claming that she was unfairly represented by one of the characters in Jelinek’s play, Meinhof’s daughter tried to block its run at the Thalia. Although Stemann, the director, prevailed with the plan to perform the drama, Jelinek opted not to publish the script in order to avoid a lawsuit by Röhl. In the original, “Die Stadtguerilla in Form der RAF ist nun Geschichte.” RAF, “Auflösungserklärung,” April 20, 1998, www.rafinfo.de/archiv/raf/raf-20–4-98. php. For an analysis of how and why terrorist organizations die out, see Audrey Kurth Cronin, How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Cronin attributes the RAF’s failures to two main factors, weak intergenerational transmission of goals and objectives and the loss of contact with a broader constituency. Ibid., 97–98, 111. In the original: “Die Revolution sagt: / ich war / ich bin / ich werde sein[.]” RAF, “Auflösungserklärung.” See also Rosa Luxemburg, “Die Ordnung herrscht in Berlin,” Die Rote Fahne 14 (January 14, 1919), republished in Rosa Luxemburg, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, ed. Günter Radczun (Berlin: Dietz, 1970), 533–38, at 538. Wolfgang Kraushaar, “Die RAF wird nie Geschichte sein,” Stern.de, March 21, 2007, www.stern.de/politik/deutschland/politologe-kraushaar-die-raf-wird-niegeschichte-sein-585294.html. Thomas Elsaesser, Terror und Trauma: Zur Gewalt des Vergangenen in der BRD (Berlin: Kadmos, 2007), 17. Christiane Walerich, “Die Linke dient heute nur noch als Karikatur: Interview mit Fatih Akın,” September 20, 2007, www.woxx.lu/id_article/2385. In the original: Wer wollte schon eine Rose im tiefsten Winter blühen sehen? Alles hat doch seine Zeit: Blätter, Knospen, Blüten . . . Nur der Thor verlangt nach diesem unzeitgemäßen Rausch. Associates of the film production company Corazón International have established that Nejat’s lines were drawn from a lecture by Jan Philipp Reemtsma. Establishing the source for this citation has stimulated a lively discussion on the listserve [email protected]. Akın’s screenplay attributes this quotation to Goethe, but the only published source for this attribution can’t be corroborated. The citation appears to come from a paper published on the website for the Humboldt-Gesellschaft in 1995: Helge Martens, “Goethe und der

254

15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

af terword Basaltstreit,” 11. Sitzung der Humboldt-Gesellschaft (June 13, 1995), www.hum boldtgesellschaft.de/inhalt.php?name=goethe. In this paper, Martens attributes the same passage to Goethe, but cites only Richard Friedenthal’s mention of it in Goethe: Sein Leben und seine Zeit (Munich: Piper, 1963). No page number is given, and a search of the most comprehensive database of Goethe’s works, goethe.chadwyck.com, doesn’t support the claim that he wrote these lines. For this collegial inquiry, my thanks to Ronald Speirs, Howard Gaskill, Alan Ng, Jo Catling, John Wieczorek, Johan Siebers, Matthew Bell, Jim Reed, Dan Wilson, Michael Gratzke, Nils Reschke, and especially Karin Yesilada. The relevant online postings are at www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgibin /webadmin?A1=ind0807&L=german-studies. Akın audited Jan Philipp Reemtsma’s course at the University of Hamburg in order to research the role of Nejat. For this helpful note I thank Karin Yesilada. Reemtsma’s criticism of Regarding Terror is discussed in chapter 7. Cited in Klaus Biesenbach, “Engel der Geschichte, oder Den Schrecken anderer betrachten; oder, Bilder in den Zeiten des Terrors,” in Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Die RAF Ausstellung, vol. 2, ed. Klaus Biesenbach (Göttingen: Steidl, 2005), 11. Ulrike Meinhof, “Das Konzept Stadtguerilla,” in texte: der RAF (Malmö: Bo Cavefors, 1977), 337. Ibid., 358. Rudi Dutschke and Hans-Jürgen Krahl, “Organisationsreferat,” in Die Studentenbewegungen in den Vereinigten Staaten und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland der sechziger Jahre: Eine Untersuchung hinsichtlich ihrer Beeinflussung durch Befreiungsbewegungen und -theorien aus der Dritten Welt, ed. Ingo Juchler (Berlin: Duncker und Humboldt, 1996), 242. Also cited in Jamie Trnka, “The West German Red Army Faction and Its Appropriation of Latin American Urban Guerrilla Struggles,” in Counter-Cultures in Germany and Central Europe: From Sturm und Drang to Baader-Meinhof, ed. Steve Giles and Maike Oergel (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003), 320. As discussed in chapter 1. Miriam Hansen identifies Kluge’s tendency to privilege women’s sensuality over their sexuality in Miriam Hansen, “Cooperative Auteur Cinema and Oppositional Public Sphere: Alexander Kluge’s Contribution to Germany in Autumn,” New German Critique 24/25 (Autumn 1981/Winter 1982): 36–56, at 52n34. Alice Schwarzer, “Terroristinnen,” Emma (October 1977): 5. Ibid. Gudrun Ensslin, “Zieht den Trennungsstrich, jede Minute”: Briefe an ihre Schwester Christiane und ihren Bruder Gottfried aus dem Gefängnis, 1972–1973, ed. Christiane Ensslin and Gottfried Ensslin (Hamburg: Konkret Literatur Verlag, 2005). Marlis Dürkop refers to this threshold as “[eine] Schwelle politischer Abstinenz.” See Marlis Dürkop, “Frauen als Terroristinnen. Zur Besinnung auf das soziologische Paradigma,” Kriminologisches Journal 10, no. 4 (1978): 264–80, at

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276. Dürkop’s study is often cited in literature on the RAF. See, for example, Sarah Colvin, “ ‘Wir Frauen haben kein Vaterland:’ Ulrike Marie Meinhof, Emily Wilding Davison and the ‘Homelessness’ of Women Revolutionaries,” German Life and Letters 64, no. 1 (January 2011): 108–21, at 114. 25. Heinrich von Kleist, Penthesilea: A Tragic Drama, trans. Joel Agee (New York: Harper Collins, 1998), 6. von Kleist, “Penthesilea, ein Trauerspiel,” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, vol. 1, ed. Roland Reuß and Peter Staengle (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2010), 376.

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index

abortion, 40, 66 Adorno, Theodor, 5, 8, 37–40, 89–90, 93, 166, 182, 184, 190–91, 201, 206n5, 219n23; Aesthetic Theory, 18, 187; concept of Entkunstung, 190–91, 252n4; Minima Moralia, 53, 60, 241n32; “Toward a Theory of the Artwork,” 174–75 aesthetics, 5–6, 24, 51, 80–83, 163, 194; aestheticization of politics, 5, 87, 190–91, 208n11; feminine, 42, 121, 123–24, 139; militant, 2, 17, 42–44, 86–88, 92–93, 190–91 Agamben, Giorgio, 217n8 Agit 883 (journal), 55, 67 Akın, Fatih, 6, 192–193; Auf der anderen Seite/Yaşamın Kıyısında (The Edge of Heaven), 24, 194–98, 198, 200–202 Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frauen (Action Committee on the Liberation of Women), 131

al-Awlaki, Anwar, 14 alienation, 143, 186 al-Qaeda, 161, 186, 224n4 Alter, Nora, 237n22 Althusser, Louis, 121, 128–29 Amnesty International, 48, 197 Analysen zum Terrorismus, 8–10, 209n18 anarchism, 33, 75, 78, 149, 216n2 anti-aesthetic, 11, 171, 188 Antigone, 141, 183, 206n5, 230n4, 251n38; sequence in Deutschland im Herbst, 51, 61 anti-imperialism, 28, 31, 36, 53, 123, 151, 200 anti-Semitism, 68, 90, 228n36, 238n1; in RAF, 54–56, 70 anti-Zionism, 68, 228n36; in RAF, 54–56 APO. See Außerparlamentarische Opposition Arafat, Yasser, 67

280

index

architecture, 76–77, 82, 100; motifs in Richter’s October 18, 1977, 105; of prisons and concentration camps, 102–5, 109–14, 120; and textiles, 107; in von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane, 99–115 archives and archival documents, 19, 54–55, 64, 164, 224n2, 225n13 armed struggle, 16, 64–72; historical contexts of, 179–80; legacy of, 198–203; as symbolic, 92. See also militancy; terrorism arson, 33, 77–81, 83–84, 93, 176, 199 Asad, Talal, 217n6 assassination: of Israeli athletes at Munich Olympics, 12, 19, 65, 229n40, 244n15; as option for women, 179, 183; as RAF tactic, 30. See also Herrhausen; Ponto; Rohwedder; Schleyer Assayas, Olivier, 6 Auschwitz, 21, 34, 77, 150, 152, 206n5; architecture of, 102; compared to Stammheim Prison, 110–12 Außerparlamentarische Opposition (APO), 23, 32, 34–35, 39, 44, 55, 131, 216n2 Aust, Stefan, 56, 140, 214n47, 236n15 authoritarianism, 34–37, 53–54, 89–90, 102 Autonomen (group), 40, 88 autonomism, 6, 39 autonomy, 75, 87–90, 114–16, 180; and art, 190 avant-garde, 78, 80–81, 230n4; historical, 79, 81, 88. See also Dadaism; surrealism Axel Springer AG, 35–36, 65, 162 Baader, Andreas: arrest of, 28; burial of, 48; criminal career, 33; death of, 45, 103, 216n5; direct actions, 33, 78–79,

93; freed by Meinhof and others, 34, 142, 151, 244n13; and Kunzelmann, 66; on language, 44; and leadership of RAF, 2; and media, 86; misogyny, 49; photographs of, 166, 169; trials of, 73, 79–81, 83 Baader-Meinhof group. See Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction or RAF) baby carriage, as weapon, 40, 228n33 Bachmann, Ingeborg, Der Fall Franza (The Book of Franza), 124 Backes, Uwe, 226n14 Badiou, Alain, 4, 207n9, 213n35 Bakker-Schut, Pieter, 236n15 Baudrillard, Jean, 186 Bauer, Karin, 192 Baum, Kelly, 85 Baumann, Michael “Bommi,” 56; profiles of West German militants, 64, 227n25; Wie alles anfing (How It All Began), 45, 64–65 Beckman, Karen, 100 Behnisch, Günter, 107 Benjamin, Walter, 5, 174; “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 208n11 Berendse, Gerrit-Jan, 43, 215n45, 220n37 Berlin: Bureau of Criminal Investigations, 69; Berlin Wall, 54, 59–60, 65, 70, 144 bewaff neter Kampf. See armed struggle Beuys, Joseph, 162; Dürer, ich führe persönlich Baader + Meinhof durch die Dokumenta V (Dürer, I will personally guide Baader + Meinhof through Dokumenta V), 6, 7 Bezzel, Chris, 43 Biesenbach, Klaus, 163–64, 170, 185–86, 188 Bild (newspaper), 4, 35, 65, 87, 164

index Black Panther Party and Black Nationalism, 13, 88, 251n49 Black September, 65, 224n15 Blumenstein, Ellen, 163 Bogerts, Bernhard, 243n8 Böll, Heinrich, 37, 48, 51; Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum), 61, 121, 221n46, 225n11 bombs and bombings, 27–28, 30–31, 59, 65, 67, 130, 137, 140, 185, 228n36; Babybombe, 27, 28, 40, 67; Frankfurt department stores, 33, 78–81, 92–93; Jewish Community Center (Berlin), 19, 65, 67–69, 90; Pan Am Flight 103 (Lockerbie, Scotland), 161; Rote Zora, 210n22 Böse, Wilfried, 238n1 Bovenschen, Silvia, “Über die Frage: Gibt es eine ‘weibliche’ Ästhetik?” (“Is There a Feminine Aesthetic?”), 42 Brandt, Willy, 102, 118 Brecht, Bertolt, 5, 43, 239n15 Breton, André, 38; “Second Surrealist Manifesto,” 80 Bruhn, Joachim, 230n4 Bruno, Giuliana, 100–101, 115 Brustellin, Alf, 51 Buchloh, Benjamin, 45, 147, 167 built environment, 90, 99–100, 102, 115. See also architecture; textiles; urban planning Bürgerinitiativen. See new social movements Butler, Judith, 24, 183, 251n38, 251n40 Carlos the Jackal. See Sánchez, Ilich Ramírez Chalayan, Hussein, 109 Christian Democratic Union (CDU), 145

281

chronology, 57, 72, 164–65, 168–71, 174 Chtcheglov, Ivan, 86 civil liberties, restrictions on, 31, 37, 69, 102, 114–15, 118, 179, 185, 199 Cloos, Hans Peter, 51 Cold War, 1, 18, 20, 29, 33, 39, 57, 72 collective action, 185, 190 Cologne-Ossendorf Prison, 97–99, 110, 139 Colvin, Sarah, 123, 151 communes, 152. See also Kommune I (KI) concentration camps, 77, 102, 110–12; concentrationary space and images, 112, 114, 149–50; photographs of, 168–69. See also Auschwitz; Majdanek consumerism, 75, 83, 85, 143–44, 156, 192, 233n46 consumption, 67, 148, 156 Cook, Peter, 109 counterculture, 64, 81, 140, 149, 152, 190 counterpublic sphere, 40–41, 165, 179, 182, 184, 187 counterterrorism, 100, 118, 166, 202, 252n5 Crawford, Karin, 49 Criminal Anarchists (Anarchistische Gewalttäter) wanted poster, 9 criminal justice, 57–58, 69, 103, 118 critical theory, 5–6, 8, 11, 13, 15, 38, 42, 82, 191, 247n41. See also Adorno; Habermas; Horkheimer; Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt) Cronin, Audrey Kurth, 211n26, 253n9 culture industry, 18, 75, 87, 162, 174–75, 199 curatorial practice, 23, 55, 162, 164–66, 168–70, 175. See also documenta; Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art; Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Die RAF

282

index

Daase, Christopher, 35 Dadaism, 5, 81, 88. See also avant-garde, historical dance, 22, 138. See also Kresnik, Johann: Ulrike Meinhof; Tanztheater D’Arcy, Steve, 213n34 Debord, Guy, 2, 20, 82–83, 100, 208n12; In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, 73–75, 74, 86–87, 93; Society of the Spectacle, 77; suicide of, 93; “The Real Scission in the International,” 90–91. See also détournement Debray, Régis, Revolution in the Revolution?, 36 DeLillo, Don, 6, 11, 188, 203; “BaaderMeinhof,” 45; Falling Man, 222n50; Mao II, 170, 187; White Noise, 170 Delius, Friedrich Christian: Deutscher Herbst trilogy, 120, 238n5; Mogadischu Fensterplatz (Windowseat at Mogadishu), 22–23, 119–35 della Porta, Donatella, 52 Demand, Thomas, 164 democracy, 75, 132, 156, 194, 202–3. See also militant democracy demonstrations: against Frankfurt School, 37–39; mourning Meinhof’s death, 137, 141–42; against Shah of Iran, 34; state violence in response to, 34–37; against Vietnam War, 78. See also Easter March; Häuserkampf denazification, 18, 53, 87, 128, 130 Derrida, Jacques, 121 Der Spiegel (news magazine), 4, 114, 141, 164 détournement (diversion, hijacking), 76. See also Debord; Situationist International Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn), 17–18, 29, 45–48, 50, 51–52, 146, 171; Fassbinder’s performance in, 145–47,

157, 199–201; feminist critique of, 41; style of, 131 Devrimci Sol (group), 195, 211n28 dialectic, 39, 94, 180, 191; in Adorno, 8, 166, 182, 201; in Hegel, 182 dialectical mediation, 8, 191, 201 Diepgen, Eberhard, 229n46 die tageszeitung (newspaper), 14, 220n38 direct actions, 60–61, 189–90, 193, 215n48; of RAF, 5, 12, 18, 75, 176, 185, 187, 199. See also bombs and bombings; Far Left disavowal, 28, 63, 112, 147, 149; in Freud, 248n47; of militancy, 149, 219n23; of racist violence, 55; of Western culture, 8, 43 documenta exhibition, 164, 175, 220n38, 247n38, 248n2; documenta V, 6, 7; documenta X, 161–62, 174, 250n25 documentary practice, 174–75, 203; in film, 131–32, 163; in visual art, 169, 187, 191–92 dominance, 100; cultural, 29, 57, 113, 163, 186; male, 135 Dürkop, Marlis, 201 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, Der Auft rag (The Assignment), 22–23, 119–35 Dutschke, Rudi, 21, 39, 199; shooting of, 34–37, 65 Easter March, 35 East Germany. See German Democratic Republic (GDR) Edel, Uli, Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex, 24, 87, 193 Elsaesser, Thomas, 71, 92, 193, 230n4; “Antigone Agonistes,” 206n5. See also urban guerrilla Emma (news magazine), 11, 123, 201 empiricism, 131–32, 169, 203, 241n32 Ensslin, Felix, 163, 165, 221n45

index Ensslin, Gudrun: and aesthetics, 43; burial of, 48; death of, 45, 103, 216n5; direct actions, 33, 78–79, 93; imprisonment, 101; and Kunzelmann, 66; leadership of RAF, 2, 42; and media, 4, 86; in Richter’s October 18, 1977, 46, 49; personal life, 53; photographs of, 18, 23, 105, 169; reputation, 122–23; as subject of von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane, 20, 99; trial of, 73, 79–81, 83; on violence, 142, 201; writings, 49, 142, 201 Entebbe, Uganda, 238n1 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 66, 227n27 Extraparliamentary Opposition. See Außerparlamentarische Opposition Far Left, 3, 10, 36, 193–95; agency of, 114; as anti-intellectual, 197; and fascism, 3, 20, 89–90; and feminism, 8–11, 24, 37–40, 153, 200; lives of members, 53–72; move away from New Left, 110; rationale of, 186; sexual politics, 18, 66; victim status, 110–12. See also German Left; New Left Farocki, Harun, 218n20 fascism, 33, 35, 54, 112, 128; and bourgeois family unit, 66; as expression of nationalism and capitalism, 119; and Far Left, 3, 20; and modernization, 76; New Left critique of, 64. See also “left ist fascism”; National Socialism; neofascism; Third Reich fashion, 109, 192, 233n46, 237n22 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 2, 43, 48, 145–47, 198–201; anti-Semitism, 228n36; and Baader, 81; Die dritte Generation (The Third Generation), 198. See also Deutschland im Herbst

283

Fatah, 34, 67–68, 125, 141, 216n4, 224n4 Federal Criminal Police: expanded powers of, 118; RAF wanted posters, 8, 9 Federal Republic of Germany (FRG): cultural changes in, 5, 21, 29; legislation, 13, 36, 40, 84, 102, 114, 176, 235n13, 252n5; Ministry of the Interior, 8; negotiations with RAF, 226n19; parallels between South Vietnam and, 32–33; as police state, 100–102, 111, 115, 118; political parties, 21, 32, 55, 65, 141–42, 144–45, 202, 217n7, 238n2; principle of militant democracy in, 13; as RAF target, 28; Rechtsstaat, 31; restrictions on constitutional rights, 102, 114–15, 118, 179, 185, 199; state violence and repression, 31–37, 68–71, 89–91, 103, 147, 162; support for Israel, 35; Wirtschaftswunder, 76, 155 Feldman, Hans-Peter, Die Toten (The Dead), 163–67, 169, 171, 174, 176, 191, 200 femininity, 121, 123–24, 139 feminism, 4–5, 29; censure of political violence, 10, 23; equated with terrorism, 10, 42, 153, 210n21; and Far Left, 8–11, 24, 37–40, 153, 200; feminist aesthetics, 104; feminist theory, 52; and Frankfurt School, 39–40; and German Left, 151–52; and left ist militancy, 122–23; radical, 17, 51, 122; and significance of dishwashers, 84–86. See also sexual politics; women’s movement Fichter, Albert, 67, 69 Fichter, Tilman, 70 Final Solution, 150. See also Holocaust Fischer, Joschka, 23, 138, 141; body of, 144–45, 153–54; on feminism, 152–53,

284

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Fischer, Joschka (continued) 201; Mein langer Laufzu mir selbst (memoir), 144, 145, 154; as militant, 148–49, 152 Fischer, Marc, 248n46 Flügge, Sibylla, 151 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (newspaper), 128, 164 Frankfurt School. See Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt) Frauenbewegung. See feminism; women’s movement Frauen und Film (journal), 132, 219n30 Freud, Sigmund, 247n41, 248n47 fundamentalism, 124, 170 Futterknecht, Franz, 126 Gaetje, Olaf, 43, 236n15 Galinski, Heinz, 69 Gegenöffentlichkeit. See counterpublic sphere gender identity, 22, 120–21, 123, 130, 136, 139, 146, 182–83. See also femininity; masculinity; women Geneva Conventions, 12 Gerhardt, Christina, 222n48, 227n22 German Autumn (1977), 1–3, 99, 142–43, 191; and autonomy, 180; context of, 16, 102; and counterterrorism, 115, 202; cultural response to, 10–11, 17, 42–49, 119, 137, 164, 187, 191–94; events of, 30–32, 117–18; significance of, 112–14. See also Deutschland im Herbst; Richter: 18. Oktober 1977 German Communist Party (DKP), 238n2 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 32, 59; state socialism, 70; support for West German militants, 19, 54–55, 59–63, 70, 91. See also Ministerium für Staatssicherheit; Socialist Unity Party

German language, use of, 189; gender in, 4, 47; kleinschreibung, 43–44, 248n2 German Left, 10–11, 29, 118, 142–43, 151–52, 203, 216n2; during red decade (1967–1977), 32–37. See also Far Left; New Left Germany: history, 21, 119, 128, 144, 146–47, 155; and militancy, 13–16; unification, 57–59, 155, 191; Weimar, 13, 36. See also Federal Republic of Germany (FRG); German Democratic Republic (GDR); national identity, German; Third Reich Geyer, Michael, 155–57 Gilcher-Holtey, Ingrid, Die 68er Bewegung, 217n10 Glahn, Philip, 250n32 Goergens, Irene, 244n13 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 195, 197 Goldmann, Emma, 180 Gorz, André, “Toward a Strategy of the Workers’ Movement in Neocapitalism,” 84 Grams, Wolfgang, 57–59, 166 Green Party (Die Grünen), 21, 141–42, 144–45, 202 Grimonprez, Johan, 161–63, 165–66, 169, 188; Dial History, 161–62, 170–74, 172–73, 187, 193 Grisard, Dominique, 238n7 Grossman, Atina, 130, 132, 241n36 Group of Eight, riots at, 71 GSG-9 (Grenzschutzgruppe 9), 31, 57 guerrilla: girl, image of, 10, 17; tactics and warfare, 30, 67, 69, 148, 184, 201. See also urban guerrillas Gursky, Andreas, 164 Haas, Birgit, 156 Habermas, Jürgen, 8, 41, 89–90, 136, 206n4, 219n23; Adorno Prize lecture,

index 122; concept of Entdifferenzierung, 6, 8, 11, 179, 191, 200; concept of Entstaatlichung, 39, 190; critique of West German militancy, 38–39; “Die Bühne des Terrors” (“The Stage of Terror”), 39, 190, 200, 230n4; “Die Scheinrevolution und ihre Kinder” (“The Pretend Revolution and Its Children”), 89; and Far Left, 93; “Keine Normalisierung der Vergangenheit” (“No Normalization of the Past”), 128; on postmodernism, 21–22, 121–22, 134–35; Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 179 Hamas, 14 Handke, Peter, 227n27 Hansen, Miriam, 41, 254n20 Hanshew, Karrin, 205n1, 213n36 Haschrebellen, 64, 68, 218n15 Häuserkampf, 39, 144 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 182–85; on Antigone, 251n38; Phenomenology of Spirit, 182–83; Philosophy of Right, 182, 188 Hein, Christoph, 19, 54, 57; In seiner frühen Kindheit ein Garten (In His Early Childhood, a Garden), 56, 58–59, 71–72 Hell, Julia, 56, 246n34 Helsinki Accords (1975), 59 Herf, Jeff rey, 35, 228n36 Herrhausen, Alfred, 59, 163 Herzog, Dagmar, 42, 122; Sex After Fascism, 150, 211n23, 220n33, 239n10, 245n29 Hesterberg, Thomas, “Naked Maoists” photo (Kommune I), 150 hijackings, 30–31, 117–18, 120, 126–27, 161, 170–74, 238n1, 248n2. See also direct actions Hirschhorn, Thomas, 93 Historikerstreit, 119, 128–29

285

Hitler, Adolph, 18–19, 30, 110, 112, 130. See also Holocaust; National Socialism; Third Reich Hoff, Dierk, 27–28, 67 Hogefeld, Birgit, 33, 56–58 Holocaust, 3, 102, 110–13, 129, 155 Honecker, Erich, 70 Horkheimer, Max, 38, 219n23 Horn, Rebecca, 41 hostages, 120, 122, 124, 129, 135. See also Schleyer human body: experience of violence, 149–50; female, 42; as instrument of militancy, 24, 114, 138, 144, 200; of Joschka Fischer, 144–45, 153–54; militant, 138–39, 157; of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 145–47; representations of, 138–39; subjugation of, 155; of Ulrike Meinhof, 138, 142, 148, 153–54, 157 human rights, 48, 103, 195, 197. See also Amnesty International hunger strikes, 12, 114, 139, 147, 185 Huyghe, Pierre, 93 identity: aesthetics and politics of, 146; and difference, 182–83; postnational, 157; RAF political identity and ethics, 53–57. See also gender identity; national identity imperialism, 55, 67–68, 71, 76, 103, 152, 184, 199 Institute for Contemporary Art (Boston), 234n60, 248n3 Institute for Contemporary Arts (London), 248n3 Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt), 6, 11, 20, 52, 89, 190, 197; critical theorists’ conflicts with militants, 37–39. See also Adorno; Habermas; Horkheimer

286

index

Institute for Social Research (Hamburg), 164. See also Kraushaar internationalism, 89 Islam, 17, 162, 194 Israel: 1967 Arab-Israeli War, 34; assassination of Israeli athletes at Munich Olympics, 12, 19, 65, 229n40, 244n15; military imperialism, 67; opposition to, 54–55, 68, 228n36; West German support for, 35 Jander, Martin, 35 Jarausch, Konrad, 155–57 Jelinek, Elfriede, Ulrike Maria Stuart, 191–92, 194 Jesse, Eckhard, 226n14 Jews, 112, 131–32, 155, 228n36; Jewish Community Center bombing (Berlin), 19, 65, 67–69, 90. See also Israel Johnson, Uwe, 66 Johr, Barbara, 242n41 Jordan, 34, 55, 67–68, 125, 140 Jordanes, De origine actibusque Getarum, 14 Jorn, Asger, 87 June 2 Movement, 3, 61, 89, 193, 218n15 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, 79 Kelly, Petra, 21 Kierkegaard, Søren, 126–27 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 13 Kinkel, Klaus, 57 Kippenberger, Martin, 162 Klar, Christian, 54, 56 Kleinhans, Lutz, 148 kleinschreibung, 43–44, 248n2 Kleist, Heinrich von: Michael Kohlhaas, 15; Penthesilea: Ein Trauerspiel, 14–15, 202 Kluge, Alexander, 5, 41, 48, 171, 179, 200 Koch, Gertrud, 219n31

Koenen, Gerd, 29, 77, 214n47; Das rote Jahrzehnt, 218n16 Kohl, Helmut, 118, 124, 145 Köhler, Horst, 225n8 Kommune I (KI), 56, 60, 65–66, 78–81, 152; “Naked Maoists” photo, 150; “When Will Berlin’s Department Stores Burn?,” 78–80 konkret (news magazine), 41, 43, 59, 83, 139–40, 143, 247n38 Konsumterror, 67 Kontaktsperregesetz, 102, 235n13 Krabbe, Hanna, 184 Kraushaar, Wolfgang, 55–56, 65, 67, 164, 193, 225n5; Die Bombe im Jüdischen Gemeindehaus, 56, 224n3, 227n26; Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus, 186, 209n17, 218n18, 220n39; Fischer in Frankfurt, 244n12 Krauss, Rosalind, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” 165 Kresnik, Johann, 22–23, 189; Ulrike Meinhof (performance), 22–23, 137–39, 142–44, 146–51, 149, 154–59, 158, 200, 242n2 Kristallnacht, 67 Kristeva, Julia, 111 Kuckart, Judith, 19, 54, 57, 189; Wahl der Waffen (Weapon of Choice), 56, 60–61, 71–72 Kuhlmann, Brigitte, 238n1 Kundnani, Hans, 56, 68, 110, 228n34 Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), 23, 55, 161–88, 191, 197; funding, 163–64, 187; public criticism of, 163–64, 197. See also Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Die RAF Kunzelmann, Dieter, 56, 60, 64–70, 72, 90, 142; “Brief aus Amman,” 67–68; imprisonment, 229n46; and Kommune I flyers, 78

index Kunzru, Hari, My Revolutions, 189, 197 Kushner, Rachel, The Flamethrowers, 6 labor, 10, 21, 32, 42, 77, 199 Lacan, Jacques, 121, 129 LaCapra, Dominick, 154–155 Landshut hijacking, 30–31, 117–18, 120, 127, 161, 171–74; and Mogadishu Airport, 31, 117, 171–74 Langhans, Rainer, 78–79 Lazarsfeld, Paul, 241n32 Lefebvre, Henri, 76 Left. See Far Left; German Left; New Left “left ist fascism,” 8, 39, 89, 209n15 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 13 Leslie, Esther, 233n39 liberation movements, 27, 35, 40, 68, 89, 251n49 Linke, Georg, 244n13 literary realism, 128–29, 133 Lockerbie, Scotland, Pan Am Flight 103 bombing, 161 Loos, Adolf, 107 Lorenz, Peter, 61 Luft hansa Flight 181, 30–31, 117–18, 171. See also Landshut hijacking Luxemburg, Rosa, 180, 193, 245n16 Majdanek: concentration camp, 102, 112; war crimes tribunal, 112–13 Marcuse, Herbert, 38, 88–89 Marighella, Carlos, Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, 200 Marxism, 1, 37, 75, 143, 212n28. See also Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt) masculinity, 66, 134, 152 maternal ethics, 243n6 McDonough, Tom, 82, 231n13 media: boycott of mass media, 36–37; coverage of Landshut hijacking,

287

117–18; hegemonic forces of, 179; images of women, 4, 10, 121, 123, 153; Nazi war crime tribunals, 112–13; radio, 31, 38, 139, 156, 162, 179; and RAF, 75, 86–88, 92, 137, 140–42, 144, 148, 151–59, 162, 165, 170, 192, 201; and Situationists, 86–88; Stammheim trials of RAF, 112–13; television, 4, 8, 17, 31, 48, 75, 86, 101, 139, 162, 186. See also Axel Springer AG; Bild; Der Spiegel; die tageszeitung; Emma; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; konkret; Stern; Süddeutsche Zeitung media spectacle, 75, 83–84, 86–88, 92–93, 101, 127, 171, 188. See also Debord Meinhof, Ulrike, 179–181; aesthetics, 43, 77; on assassination of Israeli athletes at Munich Olympics, 19, 229n40, 244n15; Bambule, 43, 220n36, 247n38; body of, 138, 142, 148, 153–54, 157; brain of, 140–41, 157; “Das Konzept Stadguerilla” (“Concept of the Urban Guerrilla”), 189, 194, 197, 199; death of, 137; founding of RAF, 33–34; funerals of, 137, 141, 155; imprisonment, 97–99, 101, 139; journalism of, 20, 151, 153, 162; leadership of RAF, 2, 42; legacy of, 159; and media, 4, 86, 137, 224n58; medical records, 139–40; in Richter, October 18, 1977, 46, 49, 200; personal life, 53; photographs of, 18, 23, 139, 154, 166, 169, 176–77; political vision, 230n51; reputation, 122–23; on U.S. bombings, 33; “Warenhausbrandstift ung” (“Department Store Fire”), 83–86, 143; on women’s movement, 151, 153; writings of, 12, 98, 110–11, 139, 142, 180–81, 184, 192

288

index

Meins, Holger, 27–28, 81, 87, 147; Herstellung eines Molotow-Cocktails (How to Make a Molotov Cocktail), 36 melancholia, 6, 47, 70, 99, 115 Melzer, Patricia, 243n6 memory, 3, 29, 45, 47, 59, 148, 152, 169, 191, 193; and amnesia, 167, 169; collective, 93, 117, 147–50, 154, 168, 238n1; and performativity, 59, 191 Michelson, Annette, 176 Middle East, 35, 53, 59–61, 67–68, 117, 125 militancy, 2–6, 51, 84, 90, 101, 110, 175, 184, 190–91, 195, 202–3; aesthetics, 2, 17, 42–44, 86–88, 92–93, 190–91; definition and etymology of, 11–16; in FRG, 8, 10, 28–29, 33, 36, 38–40, 47, 64, 67–69, 78–80, 91–92, 202; and human body, 138–39, 157; and its representation in media, 147–50; and performativity, 23, 72; and sexuality, 150–53, 200, 202. See also postmilitancy; postmilitant culture militant democracy, 13, 87, 213n36, 217n7. See also democracy; militancy Miller, Bowman H., 209n17 Miller, Gregory D., 211n28 Mills, Patricia, 183 Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Stasi), 35, 59–60; archives, 19, 54, 64, 225n13 misogyny, 14, 44, 49, 66, 133, 135, 151–52 MIT Media Lab, 109 Mitscherlich, Alexander, 37 Mitscherlich, Margarete, 37, 123 modernity and modernism, 16, 22, 91, 119, 122, 135, 187; German, 4, 111–12, 157, 163. See also postmodernism Mohnhaupt, Brigitte, 54, 56 Möller, Irmgard, 216n5 morality, 53, 122, 194 Mosse, Georg, 147

mourning, 71–72 Munich Olympics (1972): assassination of Israeli athletes, 12, 19, 65, 229n40, 244n15; stadium, 107 Münkler, Herfried, 31 museum studies, 88, 165, 175. See also curatorial practice Musolff, Andreas, 219n26, 228n36 “Mythos RAF,” 163–64. See also Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Die RAF National Democratic Party (NPD), 238n2 national identity, German, 5, 22, 36, 48, 118–19, 121, 124, 129–30, 169; in opposition to Other, 131; and postnational identity, 157; and sexual difference, 134–35 nationalism, German, 119, 147 National Socialism, 1, 18, 30–31, 33, 44, 52, 68, 86, 118, 128, 130, 147, 155, 221n44; dispute over legacy of, 119; military-industrial complex, 76–77. See also Holocaust; Third Reich NATO, 59, 202; as RAF target, 28, 30 Nazis. See National Socialism Nechaev, Sergei, Revolutionary Catechism, 13 Negt, Oskar, 41, 179, 219n23, 246n34; History and Obstinacy, 41; Public Sphere and Experience, 41, 179 neo-avant-garde, 20 neofascism, 68, 75, 89, 112, 202 Neubauer, Kurt, 69 Neue Subjektivität, 178 New German Cinema, 198 New German Critique (journal), 41 New Left, 3, 36, 40, 122, 178; creation of autonomous zones, 88; critique of fascism, 64; critique of imperialism, 68; emergence of, 32; and political violence, 246n34; radicalization into

index Far Left, 199; social power, 21; splinter groups, 218n15. See also Far Left; German Left Newman, Edward, 211n27 new social movements, 3, 8, 11, 16, 21, 32, 51, 86, 92–93 nihilism, 13, 40 “1968,” 73, 94, 118; 1968 generation, 148, 217n10 Nollert, Günther, 210n21, 247n39 Nolte, Ernst, 128 normalization, 119, 128–30, 154 Notari, Elvira, 101 Offe, Claus, 219n23 Ohnesorg, Benno, 166; shooting of, 34, 36, 39 Otto, Frei, 107 Pahlavi, Mohamed Reza (Shah of Iran), 34 Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), 19, 35, 53, 55, 68, 70, 87, 117, 174; connections to RAF and German Far Left, 68, 87, 224n2; negotiations on Landshut hijacking, 117 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 13 Parreno, Philippe, 93 Passmore, Leith, 147, 220n36, 243n3, 245n22 Peiffer, Jürgen, 243n8 performance art, ix, 5, 22, 41, 44, 79. See also Kresnik, Johann: Ulrike Meinhof; Tanztheater performativity, 22–23, 185; and memory, 59, 191; and militancy, 23, 72; and sexuality, 145–47, 152; and terrorism, 23, 72, 79–80 personal/political dynamic, 40, 104, 113, 178

289

Peters, Butz, 220n39 Pflasterstrand (journal), 41 PFLP. See Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine photography, 159, 166–67, 187; and collective memory, 147–150; photopainting technique, 45, 49, 200 PLO. See Palestinian Liberation Organization Ponto, Jürgen, 163 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), 30–31, 39, 229n40 postmilitancy, 5–6, 11, 14–15, 30, 52, 55, 57–59, 169; critical, 16, 40, 82, 133; and late modernity, 16–17, 187; and postmodernism, 22, 119, 133–36; reactionary, 11, 18, 87, 192; in relation to militancy, 133; resistant, 5, 18, 52, 187, 192, 199 postmilitant culture, 199–203; after September 11 attacks, 186–187; definition of, 11–16; extent of, 6; rehashing of militancy, 17, 93, 165, 187; as response to RAF, 2, 5–6, 11, 15–16, 52, 162, 193 postmodernism, 136; Habermas on, 21–22, 119, 121–22, 134–35; and postmilitancy, 22, 119, 133; reactionary, 215n50; in relation to the modern, 133; resistant, 215n50 poststructuralism, 121–22, 124, 129, 133 Preece, Julian, 225n11, 231n4, 238n5 prisons and penitentiary space, 90, 102–5, 109–14, 198; abuse of political prisoners, 48, 103. See also CologneOssendorf Prison; Stammheim Prison Proll, Astrid, Baader-Meinhof: Pictures on the Run, 67–77, 45 protests. See demonstrations

290

index

public and private spheres, 8, 39, 104, 113, 162, 168–69, 178–80, 183, 190; and media, 4, 186; and sexual politics, 21, 40–41, 121, 123, 136, 183, 200–2. See also counterpublic sphere public intellectuals, 8, 21, 37–38, 48, 79, 128, 139, 178, 191, 197 Queneau, Raymond, 80 Radikalenerlass, 118 RAF. See Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction) Rainer, Yvonne, 163, 166, 169; Journeys from Berlin/1971, 175–84, 177–78, 187, 190, 192, 199, 201 rape, 22, 120, 130–32 Raspe, Jan-Carl, 27–28; burial of, 48; death of, 45, 103, 216n5 Rathenau, Walter, 240n31 Red Army Faction (RAF). See Rote Armee Fraktion red decade (1967–1977), 16, 29, 32–37, 77, 214n47 Reemtsma, Jan Philipp, 164, 197 Reichardt, Sven, 217n7 Reiche, Reimut, 150 Reimann, Aribert, 66 Resnais, Alain, Night and Fog, 102, 112 Ressler, Olivier, 210n22 Retort group, 82, 93; Afflicted Powers, 82–83 Revolutionäre Zellen (Revolutionary Cells), 3, 149, 193, 210n22, 218n15, 238n1 Richter, Gerhard, 6, 162–66; Atlas, 166–70; Atlas Sheet 432, 167; Atlas Sheets 470–79 (Baader-Meinhof Photographs), 167–69; architectural motifs, 105; Beerdigung, 47; 18. Oktober 1977 (October 18, 1977), 17–18, 29, 45–47, 49 –52, 164, 168, 200; Erhängte, 46, 105;

Erschossener, 47; exhibitions, 222n49; Gegenüberstellung, 47; Tote, 46, 47 Robinson, Thomas Skelton, 35 Röhl, Bettina, 140–42, 144, 148, 151–59, 192 Röhl, Klaus Rainer, 140, 143 Rohwedder, Detlef, 57–58 Rosenfeld, Alan, 153 Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction, or RAF): aesthetics and style, 2, 17, 42–44, 86–88, 92–93, 190–91; anti-Semitism, 54–56, 70; connections to GDR and USSR, 19, 35, 54–55, 59–61, 63, 70, 91; connections to pro-Palestinian militants, 55, 216n4; death toll, 2, 28, 113, 205n2; demands for release of prisoners, 226n19; direct actions, 5, 12, 18, 75, 176, 185, 187, 199; dissolution, 90–94, 192–93; ethics of, 53–57; failures of, 4, 70, 88, 93, 100; and feminism, 23, 40, 42, 49–51, 153, 202; founding statement, 4, 35, 189, 194, 199; generations of, 2–3, 31, 54, 56, 118, 207n6; guerrilla tactics, 30, 148, 184, 201; hunger strikes, 12, 114, 139, 147, 185; internationalism, 53, 89; legacy of, 156–57; origins and history, 1–3, 16, 20, 28–29, 33–34; perceptions of, 12, 24, 29, 39; political identity, 53–57; in postwar geopolitics, 1, 35, 56, 59–64; RAF-Aussteiger, 59, 61, 63, 70; rejection of Bildung, 197; scholarship on, 20, 35, 55–56, 68, 201, 209n17; self-definition, 28; and spectacle society, 92–93; status of women in, 2, 8–11, 20, 48–51; in urban environment, 103–4; use of language, 43–44, 189; women in leadership roles, 8, 10, 49, 56–57, 85, 93, 136, 209n17; as women’s movement, 49

index Rote Zora (Red Zora), 10 Roth, Philip, American Pastoral, 6 Rüegg, Walter, 38 Rupé, Katja, 51 Russell, Charles A., 209n17 Russia. See USSR (Soviet Union) Sadler, Simon, 82 Said, Edward, 135 Sánchez, Ilich Ramírez, 6 Sander, Helke, BeFreier und BeFreite (Liberators Take Liberties), 131–32, 134 Sanders-Brahms, Helma, Deutschland, bleiche Mutter (Germany, Pale Mother), 239n15 Sanguinetti, Gianfranco, “The Real Scission in the International,” 90–91 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 48, 79 Scanlan, Margaret, 132–33 Schiller, Friedrich, 79; Maria Stuart, 191 Schiller, Margaret, 97 Schily, Otto, 171, 227n27 Schleyer, Hanns-Martin: kidnapping of, 30, 102, 228n33; photographs of, 166; shooting of, 31, 118; state funeral, 30; video testimony, 86 Schlöndorff, Volker, 19, 54, 57, 201; Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn), 48, 51; Die Stille nach dem Schuss (The Legend of Rita), 56, 60–63, 62, 70–72, 142, 193, 197; films on militancy, 61 Schmidt, Helmut, 31, 39, 70, 102, 226n19 Schmidtchen, Gerhard, 10 Schmitt, Carl, 217n8 Schneckener, Ulrich, 185 Schneider, Peter, 178 Schröder, Gerhard, 141, 145, 171 Schubert, Ingrid, 244n13 Schwarzer, Alice, 10, 40, 123, 201 Schygulla, Hanna, 198

291

Scott-Heron, Gil, 251n49 SDS. See Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund Semper, Gottfried, 109; Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, 107 September 11, 2001 attacks, 24, 100, 161–62, 186, 191 sexual politics, 29, 40, 42, 48–49, 66, 84–85, 121, 134–35, 138, 151, 179, 202; sexuality, 41, 66, 145–47, 150, 152 Siepmann, Ina, 56, 60–61, 67 Silverman, Kaja, “Photography by Other Means,” 49 Sinkel, Bernhard, 51 Situationist International (SI), 20, 100, 208n12; concepts of, 187; critique of built environment, 90; “Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” 77, 86; dissolution, 90–94; exhibitions on, 234n60; gender biases in, 85; and Kunzelmann, 65; and RAF, 73–75, 81–83, 85–86, 88–90; Situationist International (journal), 77, 85; spectaclecommodity economy, 84; on Watts uprising, 85–86. See also Debord social class, 10, 20, 39–40, 44, 66, 77, 123, 140, 147, 195, 199–200 Social Democratic Party (SPD), 32, 141, 145 socialism, 19–20, 32, 58–59; state, 58–59, 69–70, 143 Socialist Unity Party (SED), 216n2 social movements. See new social movements Söhnlein, Horst, 81 Sontheimer, Kurt, 219n23 Sophocles, Antigone, 183 Southeast Asia, 54, 68, 81, 89 Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund/Socialist Student Union (SDS), 32, 55, 65 spectacle. See media spectacle

292

index

Speer, Albert, 107 Spontis (militant group), 148 Spur (journal), 78 Stadtguerilla. See urban guerrillas Stammheim Complex, concept of, 110–14, 203 Stammheim Prison, 21, 30, 43, 99, 102–3, 114; in art and literature, 73, 74, 109–10, 146, 168, 171, 176, 180; deaths of RAF inmates, 31, 45, 47, 103, 114, 118, 137, 185, 216n5; as metonym of German police state, 100, 102, 111; trials of RAF inmates, 112–13; writings of Meinhof and Ensslin, 110–11, 139 Stasi. See Ministerium für Staatssicherheit Stefan, Verena, Häutungen (Shedding), 41 Stephan, Inge, 249n17 Stephanson, Anders, 161 Stern (news magazine), 40, 140–41, 164 Storr, Robert, 45 Struck, Karin, 178 subject formation, 125–30, 185; subjectivity, 119, 130, 132, 134, 178, 243n6 Subversive Aktion, 65 Süddeutsche Zeitung (newspaper), 164 suicide, 74, 93, 153; of Guy Debord, 93; as mode of resistance, 185; as option for women, 179, 183; of RAF members, 31, 45, 47, 103, 114, 118, 137, 185, 216n5 surrealism, 79–80, 88, 190, 230n4. See also avant-garde, historical surveillance, 1, 67, 99–102, 104, 109, 111, 115, 124

Tarach, Tilman, 56 Taubes, Jacob, 80 television, 4, 8, 17, 31, 48, 75, 86, 101, 139, 162, 186. See also media Telos (journal), 56 Tendenzwende, 21, 118–20, 122–23, 131, 135, 191 terrorism: definition of, 12–16; domestic, 31, 135, 179, 199, 209n17; and militancy, 12–16, 174; and performativity, 23, 72, 79–80; psychology of, 190; Situationists’ rejection of, 82–83; transnational, 18, 24, 35, 53, 120, 133, 161; as unpolitical, 206n4. See also counterterrorism; direct actions; German Autumn; September 11, 2001 attacks Teufel, Fritz, 78–79, 84 textiles, 105–9, 115, 198. See also built environment Theweleit, Klaus, 29; Männerphantasien (Male Fantasies), 10, 41, 152 Third Reich, 36, 68, 89–90, 110, 118, 128, 156–57. See also Holocaust; National Socialism Thorn-Prikker, Jan, 49 Thürmer-Rohr, Christina, 210n21 Tilly, Charles, 212n28 trauma, 71–72, 135, 154, 193; of fascism, 3, 102, 119, 128–30; and limits of representation, 3, 18, 47, 132, 155, 170, 175, 206n5; of militancy and terror, 52, 203 Treuhand Anstalt, 58 Tupamaros-West Berlin, 35, 64, 218n15 Turkey, 194–98, 214n48

Tacke, Andrea, 249n17 Tanztheater, 137–159. See also Kresnik, Johann: Ulrike Meinhof

unification. See Germany, unification United Nations General Assembly Resolution on Terrorism (1987), 12

index United States: Black Nationalism and Black Panther Party, 13, 88, 251n49; military imperialism, 32–33, 54, 67; as RAF target, 28; war on terror, 202. See also September 11, 2001 attacks Urbach, Peter, 67 urban guerrillas, 4, 10, 17, 35, 47, 76, 101, 148, 196, 200 urban planning, 40, 76–77, 82, 101. See also architecture; built environment USSR (Soviet Union), 13, 32; Bolshevism, 180, 183–84; Russian Revolution, 179, 184; Soviet Red Army, 130–32; Stalinism, 18; support for RAF, 19, 35 Vaneigem, Raoul, 76–77, 87, 90; “Comments Against Urbanism,” 77 Varon, Jeremy, 2, 33, 114, 217n11, 234n3, 247n43 Veile, Andres, Black Box BRD, 59 Vergangenheitsbewältigung, 3, 70, 99 Vesper, Bernward, 43–44, 49 Vesper, Will, 44 victims: Germans as, 117–18, 120, 130; of National Socialism, 131, 150; of RAF violence, 57–59, 61, 163–69, 199, 226n19; of terrorism, 132, 134, 170, 203 Victims’ Compensation Law of 1976, 125 Vietnam War, 32–33, 54, 68, 152; protests against, 78, 81 Viett, Inge, 54, 56, 61–63, 71; Nie war ich furchtloser (Never Was I Braver), 61 violence: aestheticization of, 174, 190; Gewaltmonopol, 91; on human body, 149–50; and New Left, 246n34; racist, 19, 55; revolutionary, 3, 8, 45, 65–69, 71, 89; sexual, 22, 120, 127, 130–32, 134–35; state, 34–37, 68–71,

293

89, 91, 147; symbolic, 2, 12, 28–29, 92, 119, 142. See also victims Volksbühne, Berlin, 138, 156, 242n2 Voltaire Flugschriften (journal), 44 von Salomon, Ernst, Der Fragebogen (The Questionnaire), 128–29 von Trotta, Margarethe, 189, 201; Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne and Juliane), 20–21, 23, 99–115, 108, 120, 193, 198; Rosa Luxemburg, 235n6 Vowinckel, Annette, 237n29, 238n1, 249n12 Waldheim, Kurt, 12 Waldmann, Peter, 211n26 Watts uprising (Los Angeles), 77–78, 84–86, 92–93 Weather Underground, 88 Weiss, Peter, 5 Wende, 57–59. See also Germany, unification Wenders, Wim, 227n27; Notebooks on Cities and Clothes, 237n22 Wesemann, Kristin, 230n51 West Germany. See Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) Williams, Mark, 43 Wolf, Christa, 15 women: agency of, 182, 194; intersecting tropes of terrorists and, 122–24; leaders of RAF, 8, 10, 49, 56–57, 85, 93, 136, 209n17; militancy, 115–16; power of relationships between, 183; in public sphere, 121, 123, 136, 202; representation of, 4, 10, 121, 123, 153; as sex bombs, 123; and social class, 40, 140; status in postwar Germany, 100; status in RAF, 2, 8–11, 20, 48–51; status in Situationist International, 75. See also femininity; gender identity; misogyny; sexual politics

294

index

women’s movement, 21, 39, 42, 51, 92, 122–23, 131, 136, 151, 190, 200. See also feminism working through, dynamics of, 154, 191; in Freud, 72 World War II, 5, 76, 104, 118, 120, 130–31 Ziarek, Ewa Płonowska, 212n33 Žižek, Slavoj, 2, 184–86, 203; “Das Unbehagen in der Demokratie” (“Democracy and its Discontents”), 184–85

Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Die RAF (Regarding Terror: The RAF) (Kunst-Werke exhibition), 1, 23, 55, 161–88, 191, 221n45; Baader-Meinhof Photographs, 167–70; curating of, 175, 187–88; Dial History, 161–62, 170–74, 172 – 73, 187, 193; Die Toten, 163–67, 169, 171, 174, 176, 191, 200; exhibition catalog, 165, 170, 185; Journeys from Berlin/1971, 175–84, 177 – 78, 187, 190, 192, 199, 201; media time line, 164–66, 184