Screening the Red Army Faction: Historical and Cultural Memory 9781501336676, 9781501336706, 9781501336690

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Screening the Red Army Faction

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Screening the Red Army Faction Historical and Cultural Memory Christina Gerhardt

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2018 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Christina Gerhardt, 2018 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Louise Dugdale Cover image © Archive Mandala Vision All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3667-6 PB: 978-1-5013-6163-0 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3669-0 eBook: 978-1-5013-3668-3 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vi List of Abbreviations viii Acknowledgments x

Introduction

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1 Looking Back: The Political and Historical Context, 1945–70 15 2 “It says here”: Print Media and Social Movements in West Germany, 1967–72 65 3 How Violence Comes about and to What It Can Lead: The RAF, Surveillance, and the German Autumn in Cinema, 1966–78 101 4 Diverging Trajectories: The RAF and Political Alternatives in New German Cinema, 1972–82 153 5 Terrorism and the Cold War: The RAF and East Germany’s Ministry of State Security, 1982–90 201 6 Terrorism and Memory: Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 (1989) and the Kunst-Werke Exhibit (2005) 233 Epilogue: Critique of Violence: The Politics of Solidarity Works Cited 265 Index 301

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ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1 Schah-Tüten (Shah Brown Paper Bags), 1967

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1.2 Schah-Tüten (Shah Brown Paper Bags), 1967

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1.3 Jürgen Henschel, “Tod von Benno Ohnesorg, 2. Juni, 1967” 45 1.4 International Vietnam Conference at the Technical University in West-Berlin, February 17–18, 1968 60 2.1 National-Zeitung, March 22, 1968

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2.2 Eddie Adams, “Saigon Execution,” February 1, 1968

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3.1 Kurt Hilliges, “Dutschke Assassination Attempt,” April 11, 1968 114 3.2 The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, dir. Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, 1975 124 3.3 The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, dir. Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, 1975 124 3.4 The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, dir. Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, 1975 125 3.5 The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, dir. Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, 1975 127 4.1 Fordist Production, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975 163 4.2 Fordist Production, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975 164 4.3 Hausarbeit (Housework), Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975 165

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ILLUSTRATIONS

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4.4 Framing, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975 171 4.5 Framing, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975 172 4.6 Framing, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975 172 4.7 Framing, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975 173 6.1 “Cell,” original photo, Stern, 1980

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6.2 Gerhard Richter, Cell, painting, 1989

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6.3 Gerhard Richter, Atlas Sheet 470, Atlas, 51.7 cm × 66.7 cm, 1989 244 6.4 Stern, original photo, June 8, 1972

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6.5 Gerhard Richter, Arrest 1, painting, 92 cm × 126 cm, 1988 246 6.6 Gerhard Richter, Arrest 2, painting, 92 cm × 126 cm, 1988 246

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ABBREVIATIONS

AA ANC APO BKA BND CDU CIA CISNU COINTELPRO DEFA dffb DKP dpa GSG 9 IMF INPOL J2M K1 KPD NATO NEIO NLF

Auswärtiges Amt, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, West Germany African National Congress, South Africa Ausserparlamentarische Opposition, Extraparliamentary Opposition Bundeskriminalamt, Federal Office of Criminal Investigation, West Germany Bundesnachrichtendienst, Ministry of Federal Intelligence, West Germany Christlich Demokratische Union, Christian Democratic Union, West Germany Central Intelligence Agency, United States Confederation of Iranian Students National Union Counter-Intelligence Program, Federal Bureau of Investigation, United States Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft, East German film production company Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin, German Film and Television Academy of [West-]Berlin Deutsche Kommunistische Partei, the [West] German Communist Party Deutsche Presse Agentur, German News Agency Grenzschutzgruppe 9, Border Protection Group 9, counterterrorism taskforce, West Germany International Monetary Fund Domestic information gathering and sharing system of the police, West Germany Bewegung 2. Juni, June 2 Movement Kommune 1, commune in West-Berlin Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, Communist Party of Germany [West] North Atlantic Treaty Organization New International Economic Order National Liberation Front for South Vietnam or Việt Cộng

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ABBREVIATIONS

NPD OAAU OAU OPEC OSPAAAL PFLP PLO RAF RZ SAVAK

SB SDS SED SHB SI SPD SPK SS WDR

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Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, National Democratic Party of Germany Organization of African-American Unity Organization of the African Unity Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Palestinian Liberation Organization Rote Armee Fraktion, Red Army Faction Revolutionäre Zellen, Revolutionary Cells and its sister group, Rote Zora or the Red Zora Saseman Amniat va Etelaot Keschwar, Organization of Intelligence and National Security Iranian domestic intelligence and secret police (1957–79) Sozialistisches Büro, Socialist Bureau Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, Socialist [West] German Students’ Union Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, Socialist Unity Party, East Germany Sozialdemokratischer Hochschulbund, Social Democratic University Union Situationist International Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, Social Democratic Party of [West] Germany Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv, Socialist Patients’ Collective Schutzstaffel, Nazi Shield Squadron Westdeutscher Rundfunk, West German Broadcasting

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As the saying goes, it takes a village. I am grateful to everyone who supported this project in a variety of ways and over an expanse of time and space. This study was researched and written between 2006 and 2016. While I was teaching at UC-Berkeley from 2000 to 2006, I took note of the plethora of films released after 2000 that engaged with the Red Army Faction and of Jeremy Varon’s Bringing the War Home:  The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction and the Revolutionary Violence of the 1960s and 1970s, when it was published in 2004. I sought out a book that engaged with the cultural memory of the Red Army Faction, that is, its frequent appearance and reappearance in various media, including but not limited to literature, art, and film. I remembered how the musician Tom Waits, in an interview, once answered a question about how he came to produce the type of music he did. He said something along the lines of: “Because it did not exist.” At the time, I found it to be a pretty corny answer. But the lack of availability of a book in English devoted to the study of the Red Army Faction in various media led to this project. This book has been generously funded by numerous organizations. I am very grateful to these institutions, the individuals at them, and my mentors. Collectively, this support made possible the requisite time for archival research and interviews, as well as for the reading and writing related to the project. The institutions which supported the project include the following: the DAAD, which funded research at the Center for Contemporary German Literature at Washington University in St. Louis (June 2006); the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Free University in Berlin, where I was a postdoctoral fellow from 2006 to 2007; the Fulbright Commission, which awarded me a Junior Research Grant to conduct archival research at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research in 2007; the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, where I was a visiting scholar in the spring of 2008; the DAAD, which funded participation in a summer seminar at Cornell University on the topic of media that revisits traumatic eras in history (summer 2008); Columbia University, where I was a visiting scholar for two years (2008– 10); the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (Center for Contemporary Research) in Potsdam, where I was a summer fellow, and conducted research at the Volker Schlöndorff Archiv, Deutsche Filmarchiv, Frankfurt am Main

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(summer 2009); and a DAAD Faculty Research Grant, which permitted research to be conducted at the archives of the Ausserparlamentarische Opposition (Extraparliamentary Opposition), Free University Berlin (June–August 2011). Sections of Chapter 1 were presented as guest lectures and at conferences and in numerous contexts over the past decade. Versions of the chapter were presented as guest lectures at Harvard University (2011), the Goethe Institut New  York (2010), the CUNY-Graduate Center (2010), the University of Jena (2007), the University of Leipzig (2007), Bard College Berlin (2007), and the University of California at Berkeley (2005). Previous versions of Chapter  2 were presented as guest lectures at New  York University’s Deutsches Haus (2012), the CUNY Graduate Center (2012), the University of Antwerp (2010), and Temple University (2010); and as papers at the German Studies Association (2010, 2007); and “The Establishment Responds” conference, Heidelberg University (2007). I thank Richard Wolin, Nora Alter, Patricia Melzer, Martin Klimke, Joachim Scharloth, and Kathrin Fahlenbrach for their invitations to present my work in these contexts. Sections of Chapter  3 were presented as guest lectures at Temple University (2010) and the Wentworth Institute of Technology (2010), and as papers at the German Studies Association (2007, 2009); the Modern Languages Association (2007); and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (2010). I thank Nora Alter, Patricia Melzer, and George Katsiaficas for their invitations to present my work in these contexts. Previous versions of Chapter  4 were presented as guest lectures at the University of California at Davis, summer program in Berlin (2011), and Rice University (2010), and as conference papers at the German Studies Association (2009), the Women in German conference (2007), and the Modern Languages Association conference (2005). I  thank Jaimey Fisher and Martin Blumenthal-Barby for their invitations to present my work in these contexts. Sections of Chapter  5 were presented as guest lectures at Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam (2010); Rice University (2010); Wellesley College (2010); Haverford College (2009); the University of California at Santa Cruz (2008); Columbia University (2007); and the University of California at Los Angeles (2007); the Freie Universität (2007); the Humboldt University in Berlin (2006); and as conference papers at the German Studies Association (2006, 2009). I  thank Annette Vowinckel, Quinn Slobodian, Andreas Huyssen, and Todd Presner for their invitations to present my work in these contexts. Previous versions of Chapter 6 were presented as a guest lecture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2007); and as conference papers at Cardiff University (2005), and the German Studies Association (2005).

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Earlier versions of some of the material in this book was published in the following journals: The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture (Chapter 3); Gegenwartsliteratur: Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch (Chapter 3); Film Criticism (Chapter 4); Zeiträume (Chapter 4) and in the edited volume The Place of Politics in German Film (Chapter 4). My gratitude to the editors and to the presses for granting permission to reprint versions of the essays in Screening the Red Army Faction. Thanks to my editor Katie Gallof at Bloomsbury for her enthusiastic response to the project and to both her and editorial assistant Erin Duffy for their excellent support and work. Kindest thanks to the external reviewers who made the time to provide such helpful suggestions. I thank Kalyani, copyeditor, for her careful work.  Enormous gratitude to the production, design, and publicity teams for their stellar work. Thanks to David Barclay for his crucial support of this project early on; to Volker Schlöndorff and Inge Viett for the time for our respective interviews; and to Kathleen Pequeño for our conversation. I appreciate the assistance of staff at the following archives and libraries: Wolfgang Kraushaar and Reinhart Schwarz at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, both of whom made available relevant materials for research and print; Dr. Siegward Lönnendonker, Dr. Birgit Rehse, and Ulrike Groß at the Extra-Parliamentary Archive at the Free University of Berlin for their time and assistance; Anke Hahn at the Deutsche Kinemathek; Beate Dannhorn of the Schlöndorff Archiv at the Deutsches Filmmuseum; and Haden Guest, director of the Harvard Film Archive. Heartfelt gratitude to Gerd Conradt for granting permission to use Holger Meins’s art as the cover image. I thought it perfect for this book’s cover from the moment I saw it in the archives. For their support and edifying exchanges during various stages of my work at Berkeley, in Berlin, and beyond, I thank the following colleagues: in particular, Martin Jay and Tony Kaes, who have always been and continue to be exemplary as mentors and colleagues; as well as Marco Abel, Nora Alter, Hanno Balz, Karin Bauer, Shane Boyle, Tim Brown, Sarah Colvin, Belinda Davis, Thomas Elsaesser, Jaimey Fisher, Gerd Gemünden, Sabine Hake, Andreas Huyssen, Dick Langston, Tricia Melzer, Brad Prager, Andy Rabinbach, Eric Rentschler, Charity Scribner, Quinn Slobodian, Jeremy Varon, Sabine von Dirke, Christina von Hodenberg, Annette Vowinckel, and Jack Womack. For their solidarity and support, as well as informative exchanges related to this book, I thank the following people: Dario Azzellini, Tauno Biltsted, Rachel Brahinsky, Garance Burke, Chris Carlsson, Sarolta Cump, Alexander Dwinell, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, LisaRuth Elliott, Rob Eshelman, Scott Fleming, George Katsiaficas, David Martinez, Rachael Rakes, Rebecca Solnit, A. C. Thompson, Ben Trott, and Eddie Yuen. Last, sincere gratitude to the stalwart support of my family throughout this journey:  my grandmothers and my grandfather, my great-aunt, my godmother and her husband, my father and stepmother, my uncle and aunt, my cousin and his wife, and, in particular, my sister.

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Introduction

In Die Zeit’s July 31, 2003, article “Mythos RAF,” Jens Jessen asked:  “Is it permissible to create an exhibit about German terrorists?” His article participated in a heated debate unleashed by the 2005 exhibit about  the Red Army Faction (RAF) at the Kunst-Werke Museum but most of the discussion predated its opening. The criticism’s fearful tone revealed the unhealed trauma experienced by West German society as a result of the RAF’s decades-long campaign of armed struggle, which began with its establishment in 1970, lasted up to its disbandment in 1998, and included bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, and hijackings, and the severity— unprecedented in post-fascist era democratic West Germany—of the state’s response. As a result of the attacks and the government’s response, questions about the legitimate extent of the state’s authority and democracy took center stage. Decades later, the very idea of an exhibit about the terrorists troubled critics. They feared it would glorify the group and its brutality. In essence, rather than inquiring into works about the RAF, critics seemed adamant about shutting them down. Yet whatever the trepidations of critics faced with the Kunst-Werke exhibit, the RAF consistently appears in Germany in a range of media. As historian Jeremy Varon puts it, “Works on the group include a 1985 bestseller, several biographies . . . popular histories, memoirs by former members . . . studies by government agencies . . . [and] from the disciplines of political science, history, sociology and psychology”1—as well as The Baader-Meinhof Affair, a “romance novel.” The Red Army Faction has also made a strong mark on culture, inspiring movies, plays, exhibits, musical compositions, and countless TV documentaries. The lingering recurrence of the group in media coupled with the vehemence of the response to this 1

Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2004), 15.

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reappearance suggests trauma; or what film scholar Thomas Elsaesser has called the Siamese twins of post–Second World War West Germany: terror and trauma.2 Although a plethora of cultural texts devoted to the Red Army Faction exists, scholarship in English has only begun to analyze what these representations of the RAF in various media tell us. This study explores the RAF in visual media, such as film and art, contributing both a new history and a new cultural history of post-fascist era West Germany that grapples with the fledging republic’s most pivotal debates about the nature of democracy and authority; about violence, its motivations and regulation; and about its cultural afterlife. Cultural texts, as film scholar Anton Kaes has argued, both reveal and shape historical memory.3 Looking back over a history of representations of the RAF in various media, this book considers how our understanding of post–Second World War history, in general, and of the RAF and predating social movements, in particular, is created and re-created through cultural texts. This study refers to this genealogy of narrative retellings—in literature, art, or film—as the cultural memory of terrorism. The following chapters grapple with the question of how texts shape perceptions of events after the fact. What is brought to the story or underscored? Why? What is left out of the discussion? Why? What do cultural texts show or, conversely, obscure about the history of the RAF. Whereas most previous single author books available in English examine the history of the Red Army Faction, this study analyzes the filmic, literary, and artistic depictions of the RAF, revealing both the history of the group and the cultural memory of it. Additionally, most extant studies argue that the RAF was a post-fascist era phenomenon, working through the past of its parents’ generation. These works claim that the RAF’s actions stemmed from their guilt for their parents’ active or passive participation in the fascist era. This study does not argue that this claim is wrong: in fact, it also dwells on and underscores it, since it was a vital factor in the late 1960s West German student movements and played out in the subsequent terrorist attacks in a manner particular to West Germany’s post-fascist era. This book does expand the historical and political framework, however, in order to bring in the international context as well as other vital domestic factors. This global focus reveals the very impetus for the turn to what was called “armed struggle” by its participants, a shift deemed to express solidarity with movements worldwide. Yet this assumed solidarity also 2

Thomas Elsaesser, Terror und Trauma:  Zur Gewalt des Vergangenen in der BRD (Berlin: Kadmos, 2006), 7; German Cinema—Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory since 1945 (New York: Routledge, 2013), 4. 3 Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989), ix.

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INTRODUCTION

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formed the RAF’s pivotal miscalculation, as it failed to take into account the domestic perceptions of and relationships to its actions. The following six chapters scrutinize the relationship between historical and cultural memory. The texts examined are organized chronologically, so that, as one moves through the analyses, one sees the shifts in debates about the group and in discourses of terrorism. In this manner, the study offers a chronological account of the cultural memory of the Red Army Faction from texts produced concurrent to the group’s founding in 1970 to the 2008 Oscar-nominated Baader Meinhof Complex. Left-wing terrorism was arguably the most important political issue facing post-fascist West Germany. The discourse surrounding terrorism touches upon vital questions, such as the rights, limits, and failures of liberal democracies; the points of relationship, overlap and difference in armed struggle groups operative in so-called First, Second, and Third World contexts; and the possibilities and limitations of solidarity alliances. Terrorism raised and raises questions and responses—across the political spectrum. Often these manifest in related terminology, such as terrorism and armed struggle; the role of trauma; and concepts of violence, including Max Weber’s concept of Gewaltsmonopol (state’s monopoly of violence), laid out in his “Politics as a Vocation” (1918), Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” (1921), and Judith Butler’s critique of ethical violence. Cultural texts, this book argues, played a decisive role in shaping this history, intervening in discourses concurrent to the attacks early on and more recently looking back at the Red Army Faction. Chapter 1, “Looking Back: The Political and Historical Context, 1945– 70,” presents the historical and political context out of which the Red Army Faction grew. This chapter draws the history back to the long 1960s and considers not only domestic but also international events, since both impacted West Germany’s social, student, and armed struggle movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Subsequent chapters examine the literature, film, and art on this historical and political basis. Domestically, the social movements grappled with key concerns in the newly established West German democracy. These topics included questions about the extent of denazification; whether or not to rearm, join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), or acquire nuclear weapons; the limits of representative democracy, that is, how parties, to some extent, failed to represent citizens’ political positions, and how nonviolent direct action, demonstrations, and marches filled the vacuum; the role and politics of corporate media; and the permissible scope of state surveillance, that is, the extent to which a democracy should be allowed to monitor its citizens and residents. The social movements also engaged pivotal political issues of the post– Second World War global arena. These subjects included the Cold War, with West and East Germany resting at its geographic, political, and economic

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frontlines; and the self-liberation and self-determination wars being waged around the globe, particularly in Africa and Southeast Asia. Often these anticolonial and anti-imperial wars involved armed struggle. Shifting the historical and political framework beyond binary Cold War relations allows readers to see the importance of Third World struggles and alternatives— such as the Non-Aligned Movement and the Tricontinental Conference—for 1960s social movements. These influences were not only remote locations for misconstrued projections, as is often argued. By contrast, foreign exchange students, guest workers, refugees, asylum seekers, and dissidents from countries undergoing these struggles played a key role in organizing protests and working groups in West Germany, which, in turn, were vital in politicizing student and social movements. Yet the importance of both international events and internationals in West Germany are often overlooked in scholarly historiographies about West Germany’s 1960s and 1970s.4 Chapter  2, “ ‘It says here’:  Print Media and Social Movements in West Germany, 1967–72,” considers representations of social movements both in corporate media—in particular, in newspapers of the Springer-owned press— and in leftist publications, such as Agit 883. Although the events themselves fueled discussion, the representations of them in media did as well. As Todd Gitlin famously argued in The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left,5 the media played a decisive role in “framing” or shaping depictions of the New Left in the United States. In West Germany, the media of the Springer press, participating in a consensusoriented framework, came under scrutiny by the federal government for its media monopoly and under criticism from student movements and intellectuals for its skewed depictions of them and their actions. At the heart of consensus journalism, which was dominant in West Germany in the 1950s, as historian Christina von Hodenberg argues, “lay the idea that the function of mass media was to foster social and political consensus. This consensus in turn was meant to stabilise the state, which was regarded as a value in itself. Since the media was to serve the interests of the state . . . ‘consensus journalists’ promoted broad co-operation with governmental institutions, [and] shied away from conflict.”6 In the late 1950s, a shift to zeitkritischer 4

Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham: Duke UP, 2012), forms a notable exception for the West German context, as does Kristin Ross, May ‘68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), for the French context. 5 Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 6 Christina von Hodenberg outlines that at press conferences throughout the 1950s, journalists shied away from asking challenging questions and that the chancellor rarely attended but that instead Chancellor “Adenauer’s ‘chats over tea’ (Teegespräche) or becoming a member of the Deutsche Pressclub, where high-ranking members of the Adenauer administration socialised with Bonn journalists” mattered. Christina von Hodenberg, “Mass Media and the Generation of Conflict:  West Germany’s Long Sixties and the Formation of a Critical Public Sphere,”

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Journalismus (critical contemporary journalism) developed. The proponents of this new form of journalism sought “to foster democratization by establishing a more participatory public sphere.”7 By the late 1960s, mass media publications such as Spiegel and Stern were thus also supporting the student movement due to a shift in journalistic practices in West Germany. Springer was a source of widespread contention in the late 1960s. Critics charged that it had a monopoly on West Germany’s media, which threatened a democratic press. The government conducted two federal inquiries— the Michel Commission and the Günther Commission—into Springer’s monopoly in the late 1960s, ultimately leading the press to sell a third of its periodicals. The student movements and prominent intellectuals criticized Springer’s coverage of demonstrations for being misleading or even false and accused the press of fomenting violence against the social movements. Aware early on of the role the media played in shaping the reception of events, West German student activists and groups, such as Dieter Kunzelmann and SPUR, drawing on theories of the French Situationist International, for example, the concept of détournement, used the media in order to subvert (détourner) its message and relay an alternate one. In this way, the underground media forms as much a history of the 1960s as the aboveground media. Read together, they tell the story of competing narratives about 1960s politics. For this reason, Chapter 2 considers both corporate and underground media representations of student and social movements in the late 1960s. Alternative publications reflected the political preoccupations of the student movements.8 For example, in its first issue, the West-Berlin radical paper Agit 883 laid out its commitment to using nonviolent direct action; to fighting the repression of minorities and guest workers; to opposing militarism; and to working for workers’ and women’s rights. The alternative press also documents social movements’ shifting politics and internal debates about violence. As an analysis of the era’s underground press reveals, numerous late 1960s leftist publications discussed the issue of violence, engaging historical and contemporary texts from struggles worldwide. The Red Army Faction also published its founding statement in Agit 883 in 1970. Considering the alternative press reframes the political preoccupations of the student and social movements and allows the debates around violence—for and against, why, what kind—that took place in the Contemporary European History 15.3 (2006):  367–95. Here, 379–80. The relationship between the government and corporate media is examined in detail in Chapter 3, which focuses on Heinrich Böll’s novel The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1974) and the eponymous adaptation of it directed by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta. 7 Von Hodenberg 382–3. 8 John McMillian, Smoking Typewriters:  The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (Oxford:  Oxford UP, 2011), undertakes such a study of the 1960s alternative press in the United States.

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student and social movements in the late 1960s and dominated a certain sector of the left in the 1970s to come to the fore—from within. Chapter 3, “How Violence Comes about and to What It Can Lead: The RAF, Surveillance, and the German Autumn in Cinema, 1966–78,” analyzes terrorism in 1970s films. In particular, it considers Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta’s codirected The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975), the adaptation of Heinrich Böll’s novel. This film takes up the emergent discourse, outlined in Chapter 2, that questions the relationship among institutions of power, such as the political establishment, the legal system, and the corporate media. While this film dwells on the media’s depiction of terrorism, it also focuses on surveillance mechanisms and their impact on personal lives. In this way, this film both functions as a symptom of but also intervenes in early 1970s public debates about print media and surveillance. Chapter 3 also discusses laws passed in West Germany over the course of the 1970s, which led to an increasingly tense atmosphere. The laws passed over the 1970s encompass the 1972 ratification of the Radikalenerlass (AntiRadical Decree), also known as the Berufsverbot (Professional or Work Ban), which demanded that civil servants—such as professors, teachers, and post office clerks—vow to uphold the constitution. In April 1976, Section 88a of the Criminal Code was passed, which banned publications that promoted violence. In October 1976, section 129 of the Criminal Code was expanded to 129a, banning domestic terrorism. Additionally, in response to the RAF’s attacks and to the Black September attack on the Israeli athletic team at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, West Germany, the West German minister of the interior established a new special counterterrorism taskforce, the Grenzschutzgruppe 9 (GSG 9, Border Protection Group 9). These laws and the ramped up security apparatus, which included roadblocks and checkpoints, car searches and identification paper checks, as well as the establishment of a centralized database, were responsible for creating an atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia. Chapter  3 closes with a discussion of the film Germany in Autumn (1978), which manifests palpably the laws’ effects. The events, known collectively as the “German Autumn,” began on September 5, 1977, when the RAF attempted to pressure the West German government to release imprisoned RAF members by kidnapping Hanns-Martin Schleyer, president of the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations and the Federation of German Industry, as well as a former member of the Hitler Youth and the Schutzstaffel (SS, shield squadron). When the West German government stalled, the RAF together with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked the Landshut, a Lufthansa jet, on October 13, 1977. After numerous stops, the hijackers and their hostages landed in Mogadishu, Somalia, on October 17. The newly established West German special counterterrorism taskforce GSG 9 sneaked up on the plane and

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stormed it, freeing the hostages. The German Autumn ended on October 18, 1977, when four of the RAF’s first generation imprisoned at Stammheim maximum security prison in West Germany were found dead or dying in their cells, and Schleyer was shot, his body left in the trunk of a car and its location phoned in to the Deutsche Presse Agentur (dpa, German News Agency). Germany in Autumn, coproduced by eleven directors of New German Cinema, traces this repression’s impact both on the media and on personal lives, best understood in light of these laws. Chapter 4, “Diverging Trajectories: The RAF and Political Alternatives in New German Cinema, 1972–82,” explores the alternative political trajectories, other than terrorism, that social movements pursued over the course of the 1970s—particularly after the splintering of the Ausserparlamentarische Opposition (extraparliamentary opposition, APO) in 1968 and the dissolution of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS, Socialist German Students’ Union) on March 21, 1970—and how New German Cinema depicted these political trajectories. The chapter focuses on three films that engage these other political paths and terrorism on parallel tracks: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975); and Margarethe von Trotta’s films The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1978) and Marianne and Juliane (1981). In Mutter Küsters’ Fahrt zum Himmel, Fassbinder picked up on factors similar to the ones motivating Schlöndorff and Von Trotta’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, discussed in Chapter  3, dwelling on how the media skews, sensationalizes, and even invents stories. Fassbinder’s film shifts the focus to labor and political organizing related to the working class. This focus dovetails with an uptick in strikes in West Germany in the 1970s. In this way, Fassbinder also picks up on the related burgeoning engagement with labor by cultural media in West Germany in the 1970s: in literature (Literatur der Arbeitswelt, literature of the working world); in reportage (Wallraff, Runge); and in cinema in the genre of Arbeiterfilme (workers’ films). Fassbinder participated in and contributed to the latter genre. Between 1972 and 1973, he directed a made-for-television five-part workers’ film Eight Hours Are Not a Day. His film also provides a contemporary take on Weimar era workers’ films, and on Phil Jutzi’s Mother Krause’s Journey to Happiness (1929) in particular, but with key revisions: Jutzi’s film presents the Communist Party as a source of hope, while Fassbinder’s film is critical of it. Finally, Fassbinder’s film at once exhibits and revises both the stylistics of Sirk’s melodramas and their thematics by shifting the entire focus onto working-class politics. Margarethe von Trotta’s films The Second Awakening of Christa Klages and Marianne and Juliane both focus on armed struggle and on second wave feminism. In The Second Awakening of Christa Klages, the main character co-organizes a cooperatively run daycare center. Childcare and wages for housework were key aspects of the 1970s women’s movement. In the film,

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when the daycare center winds up in dire financial straits, Christa Klages robs a bank with two other people, in order to secure funds for it. Thus begins Christa Klages’ life underground and on the run. In this way, the film grapples with feminist politics reflected in implementing affordable daycare centers and terrorism. Jenifer Ward reads the film as a companion piece to Germany in Autumn, but, as she puts it, it is much more “a document of feminist history grounded in a specific historical, national context, but also in a context of international theorizing about women’s morality.”9 I concur and also read it together with the decade’s campaigns to organize Kinderläden (cooperative childcare) and wages for housework. Von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane also considers the 1970s women’s movement and armed struggle but takes a different tack. The film presents the different political paths activists took over the course of the 1970s through the trajectories of two sisters: Marianne, modeled on RAF cofounder Gudrun Ensslin; and Juliane, modeled on Gudrun Ensslin’s sister, Christiane Ensslin. Marianne joins a terrorist group and goes underground to fight for the anti-imperialist cause, while Juliane focuses on feminist rights, deciding not to marry or have children, cofounding a collective feminist paper and demonstrating against the ban on abortion (paragraph 218), then very much a source of contention in West Germany. In this way, Von Trotta’s film broadens the historical scope to consider not only the political path of terrorists but also the trajectories taken by other activists after 1968 and over the course of the 1970s. It begins and ends with the death of Gudrun Ensslin during the German Autumn:  she was one of the four imprisoned RAF members found dead or dying in the Stammheim maximum security prison on October 18, 1977. Marianne and Juliane shows the impact the Nazi era and the Holocaust had on shaping each sister’s future trajectory by citing Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955). In this way, it considers the effect of the Nazi era on the generation of the 1960s, discussed in Chapter 1. Toward the end of the film, Marianne’s son, Jan, is brutally attacked by others, who tell him that his mother is a terrorist who set off bombs. Juliane takes Jan in and offers to tell him about his mother in the closing scene. This event is based on a real-life attack suffered by Gudrun Ensslin’s son Felix. The film is thus structured not only around Juliane’s attempt to understand what led to Marianne’s death but also around Jan’s attempt to understand his mother’s actions that led to the attack on him. The film thereby considers not only 1970s terrorism and feminism through the two main characters, the sisters Marianne and Juliane, but also the impact of 1970s terrorism on the subsequent generation, what this book calls the “trauma of terrorism.”

9

Jenifer K. Ward, “Enacting the Different Voice: Christa Klages and Feminist History,” Women in German Yearbook 11 (1995): 49–65.

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Almost twenty years later, Berlin School director Christian Petzold picks up the thread from Von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane and shifts the site of intergenerational trauma: while Von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane dwells on the impact of the Nazi era on the 1968ers, The State I  Am In (2000) focuses on the effect of 1970s terrorism on the next generation.10 In Petzold’s film, a family lives underground. The parents—Clara and Hans—have given up armed struggle but are on the run from the police for unspecified past actions undertaken around twenty years ago. They are on the run from their past, although trapped by it. Unfortunately, their 15-year-old daughter, Jeanne, is as well.11 Petzold’s film marks a shift in narratives about the RAF by no longer focusing on what impacted it but on what effect it had and still has on subsequent generations. Chapter  4 compares the path of members of terrorist groups and the alternative:  the burgeoning political movements, in particular labor organizing and feminism, as depicted in New German Cinema between 1972 and 1982. The end of New German Cinema, generally dated to Fassbinder’s death in 1982, also marks the end of what one could term the first generation of the cultural memory of the RAF. For reasons that have as much to do with shifts in the West German film industry as they do with shifts in international and domestic politics and in the RAF’s actions, it would be almost two decades before the RAF would manifest anew in cinema, with a broad distribution, starting with Petzold’s The State I Am In and Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita (2000).12 The final two chapters, 5 and 6, grapple with a new era in the cultural memory of the RAF: they focus on films and art produced between 1989 and 2008. After the dissolution of the RAF in 1998, which constitutes the swatch of time discussed in Chapters  5 and 6, the cultural media productions no longer dovetail with or are produced concurrent to the political developments depicted. So the texts discussed in chapters 5 and 6 10 Petzold worked with Harun Farocki on all of his films until the latter’s death in 2014. Farocki attended the deutsche film- und fernsehakademie berlin (dffb, German Film and Television Academy Berlin) after its opening in 1966 and was active in both filmmaking and social movements in West-Berlin and in the late 1960s. The opening pages of Chapter 3 briefly discuss Farocki’s early work. 11 The main characters in Running on Empty are loosely modeled on former Weather Underground members Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. 12 During the 1980s and 1990s, only two pivotal films were produced about the RAF: Stammheim (1986), directed by Reinhard Hauff; and the made-for-television Todesspiel (Deathgame, 1997), directed by Heinrich Breloer. Stammheim premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival on January 30, 1986, and screened at six other international film festivals. It was picked up for distribution in West Germany by Future Film but not for US distribution and thus did not have a broad US audience. Deathgame was a made-for-television docudrama funded by the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) and likewise not picked up for US distribution. Thus, these two films did not have a broader impact on the discourse surrounding the RAF or on the cultural memory of the RAF during the 1980s and 1990s, especially outside of West Germany.

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do not intervene in a discourse surrounding contemporaneous events but rather look back on them as historical events. They thus mark a new era in the cultural memory of the RAF. This period raises questions about the stakes of cultural narratives told about past historical and political events. As Chapter 5, which focuses on Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita, illustrates, inclusion and omission play as vital a role as the form and content in producing this cultural memory of the RAF. Chapter 5, “Terrorism and the Cold War: The RAF and East Germany’s Ministry of State Security, 1982–90,” discusses Volker Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita. Although the international solidarity alliances forged among 1960s social movements and 1970s armed struggle groups had not ended, they did retreat into the background over the course of the 1970s in domestic cultural texts about the group. Chapter 5 presents the historical contexts of the 1970s, highlighting the number of collaborations between West German left-wing terrorist groups and other terrorist organizations, such as the Japanese Red Army, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the French Action Directe. Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita contrasts starkly with other recent films about the RAF by focusing on East Germany and on ten of its members who decided to give up armed struggle. Between 1980 and 1982, East Germany’s Ministry of State Security granted asylum to these ten members of the RAF’s second generation. They moved to various locations in East Germany, were given new identities and life histories, housing, and employment. A  postreunification collaborative production set mainly in East Germany, the film is as much about East Germany and the Ministry of State Security as it is about West Germany and the Red Army Faction. The film suggests that East Germany’s Ministry of State Security and West Germany’s Red Army Faction were Germany’s two major Cold War ideological forces on either side of the Wall. To this end, this historical drama forms part of Germany’s post-reunification wave of so-called heritage cinema, focused on one of Germany’s three main twentieth-century historical events: the Nazi era and the Holocaust; East Germany and the Ministry of State Security; and West Germany’s Red Army Faction. While Schlöndorff’s film contributes a new angle to the cultural memory of the RAF, its lack of substantive engagement with the historical details of the relationship between the West German RAF and East Germany’s Ministry of State Security raises and leaves unanswered numerous questions about it. In contrast to Olivier Assayas’s Carlos (2010), Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita does not zoom out to consider shifts both in Cold War politics and their impacts on terrorist groups, or the inverse. During this decade, as Assayas’s biopic presents, terrorist groups both manipulated Cold War fault lines but also unwittingly became pawns in bigger Cold War machinations. Thinking that their alliances with Eastern European governments could

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outwit Western intelligence agencies, they overlooked or were unprepared for the potential demise of these governments. The main character of Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita is a composite figure based on the lives of three actual women:  Susanne Albrecht, Silke Maier-Witt, and Inge Viett. Viett published her autobiography, Nie war ich furchtloser (Never Was I  More Fearless) in 1998. Chapter  5 closes with a discussion of the autobiography of Viett, former member of the June 2 Movement from 1972 to its dissolution in 1980. After the group’s dissolution, she joined the RAF. Then, after much consideration about the trajectory of terrorism and her possible futures, she decided to stop participating in it and engineered the asylum of ten of its former members, including herself. The autobiography provides a remarkably different story about her politicization and the factors that led to it. Key differences hinge upon issues of poverty and sexism: Viett became a ward of the state at the end of the Second World War and was raped when young by a neighbor. The scope of politics engaged is also much broader: international events, unlike in Schlöndorff’s film, frequently form part of her narrative. The point in considering what types of historical narrative the film and the autobiography provide is not to ascertain their historical accuracy or verisimilitude. As Rentschler argued persuasively in his article on the “The History of Heritage and the Rhetoric of Consensus,” there are many histories.13 The point, instead, is to raise this question in order to ask the viewer to consider what narratives emerge about the era and what aspects of the era, of the story, of the history, are included and what aspects are blocked from view or are left out altogether. The point is also to consider why one narrative might predominate or be left out, to consider what this contributes to or erases from historical narratives, to consider which narratives wind up being hegemonic and why, and which are erased from view and why. To do so is to be mindful of each text’s contribution to the cultural memory of the RAF. Chapter 6, “Terrorism and Memory,” examines recent art depicting the RAF, in particular Gerhard Richter’s cycle of fifteen oil paintings October 18, 1977, created in 1988, and the Kunst-Werke Museum’s 2005 RAF exhibit. The two main stylistics of Richter’s paintings—the use of blurriness created through the techniques of rephotographing, repainting, and squeegee, and the use of mass media images originally found in newsmagazines—force questions about historical memory to the fore. The vehement debates mentioned at the outset of this introduction, which predated the KunstWerke exhibit’s opening, reveal the unresolved and traumatic legacy of the Red Army Faction. 13

Eric Rentschler, “The Lives of Others:  The History of Heritage and the Rhetoric of Consensus,” in The Lives of Others and Contemporary German Film: A Companion, ed. Paul Cooke (New York: De Gruyter, 2013), 241–60.

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*** The absence of a scholarly study on representations of the RAF led to my project. Conducting research in archives and libraries and interviewing former members of the RAF and surviving family members of RAF attacks, I quickly realized two things. First, a tremendous discrepancy exists between the sheer mass of materials available on the group in German and the scant academic studies of the RAF available in English. Jeremy Varon’s Bringing the War Home:  The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies brought an academic analysis of the RAF to readers in English for the first time in 2004. Karrin Hanshew’s subsequent Terror and Democracy in West Germany (2012) built on this foundation, by examining the RAF and the questions terrorism raises for a postwar democracy in West Germany.14 Previously, readers of English had very few texts to consider, each fraught. Stefan Aust’s Baader Meinhof Complex, first published in 1985 and reprinted in 2009, provides a journalistic account of the RAF.15 Two books have been available that are oriented from and toward a radical leftist political position: the two volume The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History, first volume published in 2009 and second in 2013, presents the RAF’s communiqués translated into English for the first time, accompanied by short historical introductions16; and Tom Vague’s Televisionaries: The Red Army Faction Story, 1963–1993, first published in 1994, provides a short chronology of the group.17 Jillian Becker’s Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Gang was published in 1977, at the end of the German Autumn, thus unable to take into account subsequent decades of events.18 As this short list shows, few single author books have been published in English; most are not academic; and only one academic study devoted solely to the RAF had been published. Given that the RAF is arguably one of the most important political issues of West Germany in the post-fascist era, a study of the group and its cultural mediations was desperately needed. Second, one of the biggest factors that led to the formation of the RAF and its early actions has—with rare exceptions—been erased from most history books:  the international context. To understand what motivated the group and to discuss its missteps necessitates a consideration of the 14 Karrin Hanshew, Terror and Democracy in West Germany (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge UP, 2012). 15 Stefan Aust, Baader Meinhof Complex (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009). 16 The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History, vol. 1, Projectiles for the People, J. Smith and André Moncourt, eds (Oakland: PM Press, 2009); The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History, vol. 2, Dancing with Imperialism, André Moncourt (Oakland: PM Press, 2013). 17 Tom Vague, Televisionaries: The Red Army Faction Story, 1963–1993 (Oakland:  AK Press, 1994). It was published in 1994, prior to the group’s dissolution in 1998. 18 Jillian Becker, Hitler’s Children:  The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1977).

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global uprisings, systematically whitewashed from accounts of 1968 social movements taking place in First World contexts. Two recent books— Kristin Ross’s May ’68 and Its Afterlives and Quinn Slobodian’s Foreign Front:  Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany—bring Third World struggles into the histories of 1960s France and West Germany respectively. My study builds on their work. Returning international alliances to the forefront reframes narratives about the RAF and permits new questions to come to the fore about the group, about West Germany, and about tensions between the two. It also allows the geopolitics going into and coming out of the 1960s to emerge. Newer films, such as Olivier Assayas’s Carlos, touch on this larger international framework for left-wing armed struggle and the complex web of shifting sympathies within it. Expanding the historical lens to encompass international relations among 1960s and 1970s social and terrorist groups provides a more nuanced account of West German domestic political events. This book undertakes this work and, by contrast, focuses mainly but not solely on cinematic representations, since the films have had a much greater impact on shaping historical narratives about the RAF inside and outside of Germany. It grapples with the limits of representative parliamentary democracy in post-fascist era West Germany and establishes an international framework, considering how it relates to cultural mediations of the RAF. Taking seriously the differences between First and Third World armed struggle movements, it considers how Third World self-liberation and self-determination struggles formed a pivotal point of departure for the politics of solidarity yet how the RAF quickly wound up in a cul de sac. The external reasons—such as skewed media representations or the relationship between political institutions and the media—raise questions about democratic governments. The RAF repeatedly reappears in cultural mediations, I contend, because the group and the state’s response raise concerns fundamental not only to postwar West German history and its attempt to establish a democracy but also to democracies, writ large. *** Terrorism is a central issue shaping current domestic and foreign policy debates in the United States and in Europe. In July 2007, Germany’s Minister of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble warned against terrorist attacks and called for changes to Germany’s constitution in order to assist in the fight against terrorism. He suggested expanding law enforcement agencies’ powers to seize personal computer data, survey citizens, and detain suspects without charge for extended periods of time. These proposals stirred debates across the political spectrum. Germany’s antiterrorism laws date back to the 1970s, when the state sought to prosecute the Red Army Faction and other leftist terrorist groups. Yet the questions raised in the 1970s about how best to protect democracy and what role the state should play in this task

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remain relevant. To that end, this in-depth exploration of the RAF’s traumatic legacy could prove useful for contemporary debates about terrorism. More recently, whether or not to preserve or alter aspects of the Schengen Agreement, permitting people who are EU citizens or have a Schengen visa to move freely across national borders within the European Union without passport controls has been discussed. The Schengen Agreement was implemented in 1985 and includes twenty-six countries. In September 2015, Germany reinstated border controls as a result of the number of refugees arriving. In November 2015, after the terrorist attacks in Paris, France closed its borders, too. The Schengen Agreement also encompasses the Schengen Information System (SIS), a database system through which member states share intelligence about its citizens, residents, and third country nationals; missing persons; and vehicles, in order to combat terrorism. The Schengen agreements’ very survival hinges on questions about how to provide simultaneously freedom of movement and security. This question will remain central to the modern era, in general, and to attempts to negotiate terrorism, in particular. Relevancy has been added to my project by the terrorist attacks in New York City in 2001 on the World Trade Center; in 2004 in Madrid on a train; in 2005 in London on the underground; and in 2015 in Paris; in 2016 in Nice, Brussels, and Berlin; and in 2017 in Manchester and London. In response to the most recent attack in Paris, in November 2015, President Hollande reined in civil liberties, calling for tighter security and arguing it was necessary in order to fight terrorism, while demonstrators responded with protests, arguing he was infringing on civil liberties. Precisely these issues and discussions of them were already negotiated by West Germany’s 1970s struggles with terrorism. Thus, with both the United States and Europe, as well as many other parts of the globe, currently negotiating terrorism, this study’s findings contribute well beyond German Studies. The questions raised by the debates surrounding terrorism of the 1970s inform central questions for current policy decisions being made both in the United States and in Germany  and beyond. These questions include the following. How does a democracy best protect itself against terrorist attacks? When and on what grounds should a democracy be allowed to rein in civil liberties? What are the rationales for and limitations to be set for surveillance of citizens and residents in a democracy? What role does the press play in shaping the discourse around terrorism? Drawing the history back to explore its political, cultural, and economic origins is key to understanding 1970s terrorism and what motivated it. Equally as important to this book’s narrative is an analysis of the aims and the missteps of both the terrorist groups and of the government. In these ways, examining the questions raised by West Germany’s recent experience negotiating terrorism could usefully inform ongoing attempts to grapple with it and current Transatlantic policy decisions about terrorism.

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1 Looking Back: The Political and Historical Context, 1945–70

It is inadequate to affirm that a people was dispossessed, oppressed or slaughtered, denied its rights and its political existence, without at the same time doing what [Frantz] Fanon did during the Algerian war, affiliating those horrors with the similar afflictions of other people. This does not at all mean a loss in historical specificity, but rather it guards against the possibility that a lesson learned about oppression in one place will be forgotten or violated in another time and place. —EDWARD SAID, REPRESENTATIONS OF THE INTELLECTUAL, 25

Around 1968 self-liberation and self-determination struggles rose up the globe over, seeking to challenge hegemonic structures in society, at the workplace, at universities, and at home. While these movements sought to address This chapter was generously funded by an appointment as postdoctoral fellow at the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Free University Berlin (2006– 2007), by a Junior Research Grant from the Fulbright Commission (2007–2008), and a DAAD Faculty Research Grant (2011), which permitted research to be conducted at the archives of the Ausserparlamentarische Opposition (Extraparliamentary Opposition), Freie Universität Berlin (Free University Berlin), and the Hamburg Institut für Sozialforschung (Hamburg Institute for Social Research) in Hamburg, Germany. Previous versions of this chapter were presented as guest lectures at Harvard University (2011), the Goethe Institut New York (2010), CUNYGraduate Center (2010), the University of Jena (2007), the University of Leipzig (2007), Bard College Berlin (2007), and the University of California at Berkeley (2005).

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conditions domestically, they also expressed solidarity internationally. For example, as many of the speeches, writings, leaflets, banners at demonstrations, and films of the era evidence, people around the world protested the US war on Vietnam. Often citing and encapsulated by Che Guevara’s “Create Two, Three, Many Vietnams,” the movements organized in solidarity with the anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles of the Viê. t Cô.ng and drew inspiration from Che Guevara’s role in the 1959 Cuban Revolution, which overthrew US-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. At the same time, each late 1960s movement emerged from and responded to the distinct political concerns posed by its unique national history. In West Germany, the fascist legacy, the ruins of the Second World War, and the Cold War shaped the ensuing social movements. The Second World War ended on May 8, 1945, in Europe, and West Germany was established on May 23, 1949. Seeking to work through the past,1 the younger generation inquired into their parents’ active or passive participation in the fascist era. They criticized the silence about the National Socialist (Nazi, Nationalsozialistisch) period and the lack—especially in contrast with East Germany—of denazification of West Germany.2 In the Allied occupied zones, denazification programs were scaled down and handed over to the regional states in August 1948, with the order to finish prosecutions by the end of 1949, at which point prosecution rates fell dramatically.3 As William Graf points out, “Almost all the representatives of big business labeled as war criminals by the American Kilgore Commission in 1945 were back in their former positions by 1948; and of roughly 53,000 civil servants dismissed on account of their Nazi pasts in 1945, only about 1000 remained permanently excluded, while the judiciary was almost 100% restored as early as 1946.”4 According to Jeremy Varon, a few decades later, “as of 1965, fully 60 percent of West German military officers had fought for the Nazis, and at least two-thirds of judges had served the Third Reich.”5 1

Theodor W. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working through the Past,” trans. Henry W. Pickford, in Can One Live After Auschwitz?, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003), 3–18. 2 East Germany denazified to a larger extent than West Germany since many of East Germany’s future leaders had been imprisoned during the Nazi era because they were communist. Some had fled to and stayed in Moscow. A discrepancy existed, however, between the rhetoric of the East German government around denazification and its actual extent. For more on this issue and to what extent denazification worked or was rhetoric, see also Timothy Vogt, Denazification in Soviet-Occupied Germany: Brandenburg, 1945–1948 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000). 3 “Denazification Summary,” OMGUS bulletin, September 6, 1949 (Berlin: Office of the Military Government (OMGUS), 1949). 4 William D. Graf, “Anti-Communism in the Federal Republic of Germany,” Socialist Register (1984):  167. Civil servants, in West Germany, encompassed a range of positions, including judges and lawyers, police and fire fighters, professors and teachers, mail carriers, bus drivers, and train conductors. 5 Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home:  The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction and the Revolutionary Violence of the 1960s and the 1970s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 33.

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In West Germany, former Nazis thus continued to hold high-ranking positions in the military and the judicial system, and carried on as leading figures in politics and big business.6 For example, Hans Globke, who had been the Nazi’s official commentator on the 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripping Jews of German citizenship,7 subsequently served as a head of the Federal Chancellery and as West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s National Security Adviser from 1953 to 1963.8 During the height of the student movements, Kurt Kiesinger, who had worked in the Nazi Foreign Ministry’s Department of Radio Propaganda, was chancellor of West Germany from 1966 to 1969.9 Furthermore, at the Federal Office of Criminal Investigation (BKA, Bundeskriminalamt), established in 1951 and later instrumental in the fight against terrorism, former Nazis held forty-five of the forty-seven highlevel administrative appointments in 1958; of these forty-five former Nazis, thirty-three had been members of the Shield Squadron (SS, Schutzstaffel).10 The Ministry of Federal Intelligence (BND, Bundesnachrichtendienst), founded in 1956, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (AA, Auswärtiges Amt), set up in 1951, have also recently conducted studies and publicly acknowledged having hired former Nazis and SS.11 6

See also Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration (New York: Columbia UP, 2002). 7 Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (New York: Norton, 1999), 559–73. On Globke, see also Frei 55. 8 Norbert Jacobs, “Der Streit um Hans Globke in der öffentlichen Meinung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1949–1973:  Ein Beitrag zur politischen Kultur Deutschland,” dissertation, Universität Bonn, 1992. Erik Lommatzsch, Hans Globke:  1898–1973; Beamter im Dritten Reich und Staatssekretär Adenauers (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2009). 9 In 1968, Beate Klarsfeld slapped Kiesinger across the face at a public gathering, stating, “I slapped Chancellor Kiesinger because I  wanted to prove to the public worldwide that a portion of the German population, particularly its youth, is opposed to having a Nazi at the head of government.” Spiegel 46, November 11, 1968, http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/ print/d-45878690.thml. Last accessed May 18, 2010. Beate Klarsfeld was charged with insulting the chancellor and sentenced to serve one year of imprisonment. Horst Mahler, her lawyer and a future member of the RAF, challenged the sentence. She was eventually released early. Mahler then sued Kiesinger on Klarsfeld’s behalf, arguing that having a former Nazi as chancellor constituted an insult to his client. Beate Klarsfeld and her husband Serge, a French Jew whose father was killed in the Holocaust, are activists who search for and expose former Nazis, so that they can be prosecuted for their crimes. They were integrally involved in tracking down and finding Klaus Barbie. Beate Klarsfeld was a German presidential candidate in 2012. 10 Dieter Schenk, Die braunen Wurzeln des BKA (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2003); Bundeskriminalamt (ed.), Das Bundeskrimininalamt stellt sich seiner Geschichte:  Dokumentation einer Kolloquienreihe (Cologne: Luchterhand, 2008). 11 The BND, intending to write a history of its activities since its founding in 1956, gave the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) access to its files. See Peter Carstens, “Zweite Entnazifierung,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 18, 2010, http://www.faz.net/aktuell/ politik/inland/ns-verbrecher-im-bnd-eine-zweite-entnazifizierung-1640084.html. Last accessed May 18, 2010. On the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, see “Fischer beruft Historiker Kommmission,”

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The postwar society had periodically confronted the Nazi past through trials. From 1945 to 1946, the Nuremburg Trial prosecuted twenty-three high-ranking political and military Nazis,12 and in 1961, the trial of Adolf Eichmann took place in Israel. Yet it was the Auschwitz Trials, which were held from 1963 to 1965 in Frankfurt am Main, that politicized the younger generation that would become the 68ers vis-à-vis the Nazi past.13 For example, Christian Semler—a future leading figure in the Socialist German Students’ Union (SDS, Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund)14—worked his way through the Nuremburg Trial’s files when he was a law student and discovered that a former neighbor, who was a doctor, had participated in experiments conducted at a concentration camp. Likewise Kursbuch—which was cofounded by Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Karl Markus Michel, and which wound up being one of the most influential publications of West Germany’s Extraparliamentary Opposition (APO, Ausserparlamentarische Opposition)—included an article by Martin Walser on the Auschwitz Trials in its first issue published in 1965.15 In a seven-hundred-page introduction to the hearings, which drew on the testimony of “254 witnesses, both survivors and former SS officers from Auschwitz,”16 prosecutors described the three camps and the crimes committed at Auschwitz.17 Over the course of the trial’s two-year duration, hundreds of witnesses, including survivors and former guards, were called to testify. West German media provided wide coverage of the trial and the testimony of the witnesses. Venues that covered the court each day included the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau, Frankfurter Neue Presse, and Die Welt.18 Moreover, a twovolume work including much of the testimony was published shortly after the trial. Yet, as Rebecca Wittmann argues, as a result of limitations in the West German criminal code and how it was interpreted, as well as of media coverage of the trials,19 atrocities committed were depicted as isolated acts Spiegel, July 11, 2005, http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/0,1518,364782,00.html. Last accessed May 18, 2010. 12 On Nuremberg “Trial” vs. “Trials” and numbers prosecuted, see Kim C. Prieml and Alexa Stiller, Reassessing the Nuremberg Military Tribunals (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), xi. 13 Peter Schneider, Rebellion und Wahn (Cologne:  Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2008), 144. See also Rudi Dutschke, Bernd Rabehl, and Christian Semler, “Ein Gespräch über die Zukunft,” Kursbuch 14 (August 1968): 146–74. 14 No relation to the US-based Students for a Democratic Society or SDS. The West German SDS was initially the youth organization of the Social Democratic Party (SPD, Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands). In West Germany, each political party had an affiliated youth organization. 15 Martin Walser, “Unser Auschwitz,” Kursbuch 1 (1965): 189–200. 16 Rebecca Wittmann, Beyond Justice:  The Auschwitz Trial (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard UP, 2005), 3. 17 See also Devin O. Pendas, The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963–1965: Genocide, History, and the Limits of the Law (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2010). 18 Wittmann 3. 19 Martin Walser’s aforementioned Kursbuch article offers a scathing critique of press coverage of the Auschwitz Trials.

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of particular sadists, rather than as resting on and implicating widespread support for the Nazi regime.20 While West Germany continued to grapple with the legacy of the fascist era, the period after the Second World War also marked the beginning of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union—and West Germany rested at its front lines. As outlined in the Truman Doctrine (1947), the United States sought to prevent the spread of communism, by following a policy of containment.21 West Germany became a bulwark in this effort.22 Truman’s subsequent Marshall Plan (European Recovery Program) provided funding to Western European nations from 1948 to 1952 chiefly to help postwar economic reconstruction efforts but the aid money was contingent on the implementation of free trade policies.23 It contributed to but was not solely responsible for the economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) of West Germany in the 1950s, characterized by consistent growth in the gross national product, investments, and imports and exports.24 These factors, in turn, led to decreased unemployment and the need to recruit guest workers in the 1960s.25 20

Wittmann 12–13. President Harry Truman’s policy of containment, the “Truman Doctrine,” sought to prevent the spread of communism by providing military and economic aid to governments to oppose it, in particular, to Greece amid its Civil War (1946–49) and to Turkey. See Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment and the Remaking of Liberal Internationalism (Louisville:  University Press of Kentucky, 2006); Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism (New York:  Knopf, 1972); and Eugene T. Rossides, The Truman Doctrine of Aid to Greece and Cyprus (New York:  American Hellenic Institute Foundation, 2005). 22 For example, West Germany’s Hallstein Doctrine (1955) stipulated that it would not recognize states that recognized East Germany, splitting alliances along faultlines that paralleled those between the United States and the Soviet Union. Radical students took a stance on this policy early on. See Roland Rall, “Keine Hallsteindoktrin für Studenten. Der Verband Deutscher Studentschaften tagte in München,” Konkret (May 1962):  9. The Hallstein Doctrine was abandoned in 1970. 23 See Tony Judt, “The Rehabilitation of Europe,” in Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York:  Penguin, 2006), 63–99. For the Marshall Plan, see especially 90–9. Decisions to reduce the barriers to free trade and capital flows had already been put forward through the Bretton Woods system, established by the eponymous conference held in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, from July 1 to 22, 1944. Attended by over 700 delegates from forty-four countries, Bretton Woods established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on December 27, 1945; and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), which today is part of the World Bank. On Bretton Woods, see Jeffry Frieden, “Bretton Woods System in Action,” in Global Capitalism: Its Rise and Fall in the Twentieth Century (New York:  Norton, 1997), 278–300. 24 Werner Balsen and Karl Rössel (eds), Hoch die internationale Solidarität: Zur Geschichte der dritten Welt Bewegung in der Bundesrepublik (Cologne: Kölner Volksblatt Verlag, 1986), 46. 25 West Germany signed its first guest worker agreement with the government of Italy on December 20, 1955. Further agreements were signed with Spain and Greece (1960), Turkey (1961), Portugal (1964), Tunisia and Morocco (1965), and Yugoslavia (1968). Karl-Heinz Meier Braun, Deutschland. Einwanderungsland (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002). 21

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Domestically, in addition to the fascist legacy and strategic Cold War position, five shifts in the political landscape formed an important backdrop to the West German New Left of the late 1960s: (1) The 1956 ban of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD, Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands)26; (2) the 1959 Godesberg Program of the Social Democratic Party of [West] Germany (SPD, Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands), in which the SPD explicitly stated that it was no longer the party of the working class (Arbeiterpartei) and that it supported a free market economy27; (3) the 1961 split of the SPD and the West SDS, the SPD’s youth organization28; (4) the 1964 establishment of the right-wing National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD, Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands), which exists to this day; and (5)  the 1966  “Grand Coalition” between the Christian Democratic Union (CDU, Christlich Demokratische Union) and the SPD. Taken together, these shifts marked the growing failure of representational politics for an increasingly broad swatch of people. One emblematic issue expressing the divide between the politics of parties and of people was West German rearmament. Subsequent to the Second World War, West German social movements agitated against their country’s remilitarization, its membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and nuclear weapons and energy.29 As part of the 1945 Potsdam Accord, West Germany was to be demilitarized.30 Nonetheless, West Germany’s first Chancellor Adenauer (CDU) publicly declared his commitment to rearmament as early as 1950, the year after West Germany was founded and he was elected its first chancellor.31 His announcement was met with widespread opposition.32 According to a survey

26

Patrick Major, The Death of the KPD: Communism and Anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945–1956 (Oxford:  Oxford UP, 1998), 15–16, 292–3. See also Andrei Markovits and Philip Gorski, “Deutsche Kommunistische Partei (DKP),” in The German Left:  Red, Green and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993), 60–1. 27 Basic Programme of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Bonn: The Social Democratic Party of Germany, 1959), 5–17. Here 5. Also available online at http://www.spd.de/de/politik/ grundsatzprogramm/indes.html. Last accessed July 18, 2010. 28 In West Germany, each political party had an affiliated youth organization. 29 APO Archive, Freie Universität Berlin, Kampf gegen Remilitarisierung, Kampagne für Abrüstung, Anti-Atomtod-Bewegung, Ostermarsch-Bewegung (1950–69). 30 David Clay Large, Germans to the Front: West German Rearmament in the Adenauer Era (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 22–3. 31 Gordon Craig, “Germany and NATO: The Rearmament Debate, 1950–1958,” in NATO and American Security (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1959), 243–9. 32 Michael Geyer, “Cold War Angst: The Case of West German Opposition to Rearmament and Nuclear Weapons,” in The Miracle Years:  A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968 (Princeton:  Princeton UP, 2000), 376–408. As Geyer’s article makes clear, the position was not solely one of pacifism across the board. Some West Germans believed that the United States, having defeated Germany, now had a responsibility to protect it. So for some, the position taken was not necessarily to oppose militarization but to shift military responsibility to the United States.

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conducted in December 1950, 70 percent of West Germans were opposed to rearmament.33 One expression of this opposition was the “Without Me” (Ohne Mich) campaign, which was waged from 1949 to 1955, in which men refused to carry out military service. West Germany regained full sovereignty in 1955 as result of the Paris Accords, immediately became a member of NATO, and established the West German armed forces (Bundeswehr). Shortly thereafter, in 1957, Chancellor Adenauer declared his intention to rearm with nuclear weapons, a decision that was ratified the same year by the West German parliament.34 Also in 1957, the first nuclear reactors began operation in West Germany, and East Germany.35 On April 12, 1957, the Göttingen Eighteen—a group of West German nuclear scientists, including four Nobel Prize winners—wrote to Adenauer to voice opposition.36 Moreover, in April, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer delivered his “Declaration of Conscience” speech, broadcast around the world and demanding the end of nuclear weapons.37 In March 1958, a broad-based movement named “Struggle against Atomic Death” (Kampf dem

33 Gordon D. Drummond, The German Social Democrats in Opposition, 1949–1960: The Case against Rearmament (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982), 54. 34 The West German nuclear industry began as a result of an agreement signed between West Germany and the United States on July 3, 1957. The United States signed similar agreements with France and Italy. “Atomabkommen mit den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika,” Bulletin der Bundesregierung, July 6, 1957. 35 According to the European Nuclear Society:  “On June 26, 1954, at Obninsk, Russia, the nuclear power plant APS-1 with a net electrical output of 5 MW was connected to the power grid, the world’s first nuclear power plant that generated electricity for commercial use. On August 27, 1956 the first commercial nuclear power plant, Calder Hall 1, England, with a net electrical output of 50 MW was connected to the national grid.” The first nuclear power plant in the United States started generating power on October 25, 1957, in Pleasanton, California. According to my research: In East Germany, the first nuclear reactor became active on December 17, 1957, in Rossendorf near Dresden. Representatives from East Germany underscored that the nuclear reactor was solely intended to generate nuclear energy, unlike the West German rearmament intentions. “Erster Atomreaktor der DDR,” Neues Deutschland, December 17, 1957. In West Germany, the first nuclear reactor was under construction in 1957 in West-Berlin near Stölpchensee, near the border to East Germany. APO Archive, Freie Universität Berlin, Anti-Atomtod-Bewegung (1950–69). 36 Nick Thomas, Protest Movements in 1960s West Germany: A Social History of Dissent and Democracy (New York: Berg, 2003), 34. 37 A similar appeal was published in East Germany by fourteen nuclear physicists, “Erklärung von 14 namenhaften Kernphysikern unserer Republik,” Neues Deutschland, May 5, 1957, and by doctors calling on other doctors to take a stand against nuclear energy due its negative health effects, “Appell an die deutschen Ärzte,” Neues Deutschland, May 10, 1957. For a history of the worldwide nuclear disarmament movement, including West Germany, see Lawrence Wittner, Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement (Stanford:  Stanford UP, 2009). On protests against nuclear weapons, see Holger Nehring, Politics of Security: The British and West German Protest Movements and the Early Cold War, 1945–1970 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013).

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Atomtod)—cofounded by Renate Riemeck, future Red Army Faction (RAF) member Ulrike Meinhof’s adopted mother—sprang into action to oppose Adenauer’s plan.38 The coalition included unions, as well as Protestant and Catholic churches.39 In July 1958, a survey found that 92  percent of West Germans supported a ban on nuclear weapons and in November 1958, a survey found that 64 percent of poll respondents considered “nuclear tests harmful to future generations.”40 Despite the overwhelming opposition, the CDU-dominated Bundestag (West German lower house of parliament) voted for rearmament on March 25, 1958.41 In response, demonstrations took place in cities across West Germany on April 7, 1958. Not only the CDU supported rearmament and West German membership in NATO, but the other main political party, the SPD, did as well. After a tumultuous period between 1953 and 1959, during which the SPD experienced a profound crisis and altered its political platform substantially, it came out in support of militarization. In the 1953 and 1957 elections, the SPD lost votes while the CDU secured an absolute majority in the Bundestag. As a result, at the SPD’s annual convention in 1959, it discussed and ratified a new party program, the Godesberg Program, which remained in effect until 1989 and the subsequent reunification.42 Aside from the aforementioned shifts in the SPD platform, whereby the program stated that the SPD would no longer be a party of the working class (Arbeiterpartei) and that “the SPD favors a free market wherever free competition really exists,”43 it also renounced its previous position against rearmament, stating that “it is in favor of national defense.”44 Last, in 1960, the SPD announced its support for West German membership in NATO. The SPD’s shifting political platform was underscored by further actions it took in 1961:  on November 6, the SPD voted in favor of a resolution that stated the politics of the SDS—the SPD’s youth organization—were not compatible with the politics of the SPD and that forced the SDS to split from SPD.45 Since its founding in 1946, the SDS had existed as an organization separate from but closely affiliated with the SPD.46 Future SPD

38

Wittner 60. Wittner 148. 40 Matthias Küntzel, Bonn und die Bombe:  Deutsche Atomwaffenpolitik von Adenauer bis Brandt (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1992), 11; Wittner 61. 41 Küntzel 32. See also Craig 243–9. 42 Basic Programme of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Bonn: The Social Democratic Party of Germany, 1959), 5–17. Also available online at http://www.spd.de/de/politik/ grundsatzprogramm/indes.html. Last accessed July 18, 2010. 43 Basic Programme 5. 44 Basic Programme 4. 45 Siegward Lönnendonker and Tilman Fichter, Kleine Geschichte des SDS: Der Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund von 1946 bis zur Selbstauflösung (Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 1977), 28. 46 Lönnendonker and Fichter 15. 39

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party members were often groomed early on by the SDS for political office, such as future West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Over the course of the 1960s, the shifts in the SPD’s political positions, however, led to tensions between the SPD and the SDS. For example, the SDS was very critical of the Godesberg Program and it maintained positions against rearmament and nuclear weapons.47 Thus, the SDS was forced to become independent from the SPD in 1961. The Social Democratic University Union (SHB, Sozialdemokratischer Hochschulbund) took its place as the SPD-affiliated student organization.48 Meanwhile, the movement against militarization gathered momentum in West Germany with the annual Easter March (Ostermarsch), which first took place in 1960 and which gave voice to the widespread opposition to rearmament, NATO, nuclear weapons, and nuclear energy.49 Throughout the 1960s, the number of participants in the march continued to grow: in 1960, 1,000 participated; in 1961, almost 10,000 took part; in 1962, 50,000 participated50; in 1966, 100,000 marched; in 1967, the number had grown to 150,00051; and in 1968, 300,000 took part. The movement was broadbased, encompassing teachers, students and youth organization members, artists, authors and journalists, professors, trade unionists, theologians and spiritualists, and scientists.52 Future cofounders of the RAF Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof took part in and were politicized by the Easter March. The Easter March used two tactics that were to have an influence on and be key strategies of the late 1960s student movements: extraparliamentary organizing and nonviolent direct action. With the CDU-led government in power, the SPD reneging on many of its original political platforms and forcing the SDS to separate, and

47

For more information about the SDS, see also its publication Neue Kritik, which was launched  in 1960 after the split from the SPD and published up to the SDS’s dissolution in 1970. Neue Kritik appeared every other month and was based in Frankfurt am Main. 48 Starting in 1972, SHB stood for Sozialistischer Studentenbund, Socialist Student Union. 49 The UK Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which was established in 1958, served as a model for the West German Easter March. For more information about the Easter March, see also Karl A. Otto, Vom Ostermarsch zur APO. Geschichte der außerparlamentarischen Opposition in der Bundesrepublik 1960–1970 (Frankfurt:  Campus Verlag, 1979); Andrei Markovits and Philip Gorski, “From Ostermarch to KFA,” in The German Left: Red, Green and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993), 47–9. 50 Balsen and Rössel 117. 51 George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left:  A Global Analysis of 1968 (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 51. 52 Andreas Buro, “Die Entstehung der Ostermarschbewegung als Beispiel für die Entfaltung von Massenlernprozessen,” in Friedensanalysen, ed. Reiner Steinweg, vol. 4 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 50–78. The breakdown of participants by occupation, according to a survey conducted in 1965 by the Easter March organization, found that 34 percent of participants were salaried employees, 22 percent academics, 15 percent self-employed, 13 percent civil servants, 11 percent workers, 11 percent students, and 8 percent housewives. Otto 23. Thomas 40.

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the KPD banned, a range of voters suddenly found themselves without solid political representation in the parliamentary system. Although the overwhelming majority of the population was opposed to rearmament, NATO, and nuclear weapons, their voices were not represented politically. Moreover, with the establishment of the NPD in 1964 and the formation of the “Grand Coalition” between the CDU and the SPD in 1966, leftist voters saw their political positions trammeled. Siegward Lönnendonker and Tilman Fichter describe the situation as a political vacuum.53 According to Andrei Markovits and Philip  Gorski, “With no parliamentary alternative to the SPD’s left, extraparliamentary articulation of politics became a structural necessity for these leftist critics.”54 As a result, the extraparliamentary opposition social movements in West Germany grew dramatically, starting in the mid-1960s, and one of its main, although not sole, motors was the student groups. Initially, student groups focused mainly on two issues: education reform55 and so-called Third World social movements.56 The student groups criticized the lack of denazification and the authoritarian educational structure of the university, encapsulated by the expression, “Unter den Talaren, den Muff von 1000 Jahren” (“Under the professors’ robes, the stuffiness of one thousand years”). Aside from the the still dominant authoritarian nature of education,57 the students also demanded that the overcrowding of

53

Lönnendonker and Fichter 9. Markovits and Gorski 50. 55 Nick Thomas, “University Reform,” in Protest Movements in 1960s West Germany, 49– 68 and 127–46; Bernd Rabehl, Am Ende der Utopie:  Die politische Geschichte der Freien Universität Berlin (Berlin:  Argon, 1988). Bernd Rabehl was—along with Rudi Dutschke, Gaston Salvatore, Wolfgang Lefevre, and Christian Semler—one of the leading figures of the Berlin SDS. And like Dutschke, he was originally from East Germany, having immigrated to West Germany in 1960. 56 Student groups active in the 1960s included the following:  SHB (Der  Sozialistische Hochschulbund, Socialist University Union, student wing of the SPD); LSD (Liberale Studentenbund Deutschlands, Liberal Student Federation of Germany); HSU (Humanistische Studenten-Union, Humanist Student Union); ESG (Evangelische Studentengemeinde, Protestant Student Group); DIS (Bundesverband der Deutsch-Israelischen Studiengruppen, Federal Association of German-Israeli Student Groups). See also Nick Thomas, Protest Movements. The APO archive at the Freie Universität Berlin contains original source materials for the following student groups: SHB, LSD, ESG, DIS, RCDS (Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten, Ring of Christian Democratic Students), and  SDS. Although often used pejoratively, the term “Third World” was coined by Resistance fighter, anthropologist, and historian Albert Sauvy in an article published in L’Observateur on August 14, 1952, to suggest an alternative to First World capitalism, typically referring to the NATO members, and Second World communism, usually associated with the Soviet Union, the latter two being terms that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had used in a speech delivered on March 1946. 57 See also Lönnendonker and Fichter 15. “Bis zur Studentenbewegung dominierten an den deutschen Universitäten autoritäres Denken und Verhalten” [Until the arrival of the student 54

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universities be addressed. Between 1952 and 1964, the number of students had doubled from 123,154 to 274,392.58 This rate of expansion challenged resources and led to problematic professor-to-student ratios. In addition to education reform, student groups began to organize around Third World student movements. Jens Hager comments on both, stating that “after the SPD decided that the membership of the SPD and SDS were irreconcilable (1959/1960) . . . the theoretical groundwork was laid for a political practice, which since 1965 focused on two issues:  the social revolutionary movements of the Third World and the oppositional movements at the universities.”59 This dual focus is evident in the new charter of the Association of German Student Organizations (VDS, Verband Deutscher Studentenschaften), which was drafted and ratified in 1966 and stated its opposition to colonialism, imperialism, totalitarianism, dictatorship, and racial discrimination and segregation.60 Thus, while the social movements of the 1960s grappled with political and educational concerns stemming from their unique domestic context, they were also increasingly expressing solidarity internationally. Aside from these domestic factors, international events influenced the student movements of the late 1960s as well. The student and social movements of 1968 were a global phenomenon, acknowledged as such by everyone from their participants to their critics. As Martin Klimke puts it, “Whether we describe sixties’ protest as a revolution in the world-system, a global revolutionary movement or a conglomerate of national movements with local variants but common characteristics, its transnational dimension was one of its crucial motors.”61 Sociologist George Katsiaficas points out: The international connections between social movements in 1968 were often synchronic . . . In May 1968, for example, when a student revolt led to a general strike of nearly ten million workers in France, there were significant demonstrations in Mexico City, Berlin, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Berkeley and Belgrade, and students and workers in both Spain and Uruguay attempted general strikes of their own. These are instances of what sociologists have called “contagion effects” . . .; they remain

movements, authoritarian thinking and conduct dominated at the German universities]; translation my own. 58 Thomas “University Reform,” 49–69. Here, 54. Also Judt 392–5. 59 Jens Hager, Die Rebellen von Berlin: Studentenpolitik an der Freien Universität, eds Hartmut Häußermann, Niels Kadritzke, and Knut Nevermann (Cologne:  Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1967), 48; translation my own. 60 Hager 34. 61 Martin Klimke, “Introduction,” in The Other Alliance: Global Protests and Student Unrest in West Germany and the U.S., 1962–1972 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009), 8.

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to this day understudied, a moment of neglect which stands in inverse proportion to their significance.62 Although there has been no shortage of studies about 1968, the global nature of 1968 has been underexamined. While historical studies exist that focus on the First World, comparing student and social movements between Europe and the United States,63 ones that look beyond to analyze the interplay between the First World of Western capitalism and the Third World in Latin America, Africa, and Asia were—until recently—less common.64 Moreover, studies that examine the influences of Third World countries on First World countries from within a First World national context remain relatively rare. Kristin Ross’s May ’68 and Its Afterlives65 and Quinn Slobodian’s Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties Germany66 form rare exceptions, exemplifying this method of analysis.67 Two lessons from these volumes prove particularly useful for understanding the history out of which the RAF grew:  (1) the history of 1960s social movements begins prior to 1968 in what historians refer to as the long 1960s; and (2) beginning a study of 1968 or 1970s terrorism with the long 1960s undoes historical whitewashing, revealing the interplay between foreign students, guest workers, refugees, and asylum seekers from Third World countries and of West German social, student, and armed struggle movements. As Kristin Ross argues in May ’68 and Its Afterlives, dominant narratives about the 1960s in France reduce events temporally to May ‘68 62

Katsiaficas 1. In addition to Klimke’s aforementioned study, see also Karl-Werner Brand (ed.), Neue soziale Bewegung in Westeuropa und den USA:  Ein internationaler Vergleich (Frankfurt:  Campus Verlag, 1985); Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, Die 68er Bewegung; Deutschland, Westeuropa, USA (Munich: Beck, 2001); Varon. 64 Studies that take into account the global dimension include CheSchahShit. Die sechziger Jahre zwischen Cocktail und Molotow (Hamburg:  Rowohlt, 1984); George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left:  A Global Analysis of 1968 (Boston:  South End Press, 1987); Carole Fink, Philippe Gassert, and Detlef Junker (eds), 1968: A World Transformed (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge UP, 1998); Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey (ed.), 1968: Vom Ereignis zum Gegenstand der Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen:  Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1998); Vom Ereignis zum Mythos (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008); 1968. Eine Zeitreise (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008); Norbert Frei, 1968: Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest (Munich: dtv, 2008). 65 Kristin Ross, May ‘68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 66 Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties Germany (Durham:  Duke University Press, 2012). 67 See also Balsen and Rössel; Ingo Juchler, Die Studentenbewegungen in den Vereinigten Staaten und der Bundesrepublik der sechziger Jahre. Eine Untersuchung hinsichtlich ihrer Beeinflussung durch Befreiungsbewegungen und  –theorien aus der Dritten Welt (Berlin:  Duncker und Humblot, 1996); Niels Seibert, Vergessene Proteste:  Internationalismus und Antirassismus 1964–1983 (Münster: Unrast Verlag, 2008). 63

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and spatially to Paris’s Latin Quarter, which erases workers’ strikes68 and French colonization from history books. As Ross puts it, “The massive politicization of French middle-class youth in the 1960s took place by way of a set of polemical relations and impossible identifications with two figures so conspicuously absent from this picture:  the worker and the colonial militant.”69 Additionally, not only are these two population groups erased, a politics of solidarity is as well.70 Ross argues that 1968 was preceded by “the growth of a small but significant opposition to the Algerian War and . . . the embrace by many French of a ‘third-worldist’ north/south analysis of global politics in the wake of enormous successes of the colonial revolutions.”71 Her observations prove useful when applied to accounts of West Germany’s 1968, although with different ramifications: in contrast to France (and Italy for that matter), worker uprisings in West Germany were less common. The Algerian War, however, played a vital role in social movements not only in France but also in West Germany. Throughout the 1960s, the Algerian War (1954–62) formed a focal point of French media—print, radio, and television. The 1961 publication of Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth)72 called attention to the Algerian struggle for independence in particular and to colonization in general, studying its effects on the colonized and suggesting how to build a movement against it.73 In 1962, Saadi Yacef’s memoir, Souvenirs de la Bataille d’Alger (Memories of the Battle of Algiers) was published.74 And in 1966, Gillo Pontecorvo’s film La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers) was released.75 Based on Yacef’s memoir, the film 68

Ross 32. On the Rhodiacéta strike, see also Chris Marker and Mario Marret, directors, A bientót, j’espère. Film documentary, 1968, broadcast on French television, station Antenne 2, in February 1968. 69 Ross 10; emphasis added. 70 As Ross puts it, a reading of France’s 1968 focusing exclusively on “May” is predicated on “a geographic reduction of the sphere of activity to Paris and, more specifically, to the Latin Quarter. Again, striking workers on the outskirts of Paris and across the nation recede from the picture; successful experiments in worker/student/farmer solidarity in the provinces and elsewhere are erased” (9). 71 Ross 8. 72 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth: A Negro Psychoanalyst’s Study of the Problems and Colonialisms in the World Today, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1963). The title of the original refers to the opening lines of the Internationale: “Debout, les damnés de la terre” (Arise, wretched of the earth). 73 Vijay Prashad also mentions the betrayal that “came shortly after 1945, when a battered France, newly liberated by the Allies sent its forces to suppress the Vietnamese, and Africans who had once been its colonial subjects. Many of these regions had sent troops to fight for the liberation of France and indeed Europe, but they returned home empty-handed.” Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007), 3. 74 Saadi Yacef, Souvenirs de la Bataille d’Alger (Paris: R. Julliard, 1962). 75 Gillo Pontecorvo, dir., The Battle of Algiers, 1966. The Criterion Collection. It was allegedly RAF cofounder Andreas Baader’s favorite film.

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vividly conveys events of the Algerian War; although a fictional feature film, it adopted and employed the look and feel of a documentary.76 West Germany’s 1968, like France’s May ‘68, began earlier. In West Germany, drawing back the history of student movements of the late 1960s and armed struggle movements of the 1970s to take into account the preceding social movements allows an active earlier history of organizing to emerge, one that involved and was often initiated and organized by immigrants—students, workers, refugees, and asylum seekers—from Third World countries. These earlier international relations are often underexamined in accounts of West Germany’s 1968, yet they were pivotal in shaping its tenor and aspirations. In what follows, I  discuss in particular the role of events in and of immigrants from Algeria, the Congo, and Iran. Algeria played a vital and oft overlooked role in politicizing 1960s social movements in West Germany, albeit—of course—a different one than in France. As Claus Leggewie puts it, “What for the older generation was represented by ‘Spain’ [the Spanish Civil War], was represented for the younger generation by ‘Algeria’—[it formed] the early history and layer of the protest movements of the sixties.”77 In 1958, four thousand to six thousand recently emigrated Algerians lived in West Germany, predominately moving to urban environments, and about three hundred persons regularly organized and participated in actions and demonstrations. In 1960, Algerian students organized an Algeria Day, which consisted of actions and events held simultaneously across West Germany.78 On November 5, 1960, students demonstrated against the Algerian War in Marburg and on April 5, 1961, they demonstrated in front of the “Maison de France” in West-Berlin. The West German federal government responded with attempts to curtail the demonstrations. Yet its efforts failed. As Slobodian points out, “As Foreign Ministry officials discovered to their dismay while trying to prevent a march of Algerian students against the French colonial war in 1958, a court ruling in 1953 had guaranteed the right to ‘stage and participate in gatherings and protest marches’ to non-Germans.”79 Additionally, the democratic rights to demonstrate were guaranteed to citizens and noncitizens alike by the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights, the 1949 West German Constitution, and the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights. Indicative of the impact the Algerian War had on the student movements, “the VDS declared

76

Other sources of disseminating information about Algeria’s struggle for independence include Jamila the Algerian, dir. Youssef Chahine, 1958, about Djamila Bouhired’s role in the FLN; and the journal Révolution africaine, which focused on African self-determination struggles. 77 Claus Leggewie, Kofferträger:  Das Algerien Projekt der Linken im Adenauer Deutschland (Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 1984), 9; translation my own. 78 Peter Mosler, Was wir wollten, was wir wurden (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1977). 79 Slobodian 35.

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its first political position in 1962 . . . against the apartheid policy of South Africa and the colonial wars of Portugal in Angola and France in Algeria.”80 Like in France, information about the Algerian War was disseminated in West Germany, even if or perhaps precisely because it was not at the forefront of the corporate media. The newspaper Free Algeria (Freies Algerien)—published in Cologne and distributed across West Germany—shared information about the Algerian War from 1958 to 1962.81 In 1960, Volker Schlöndorff—who had gone to high school and subsequently studied in Paris during the late 1950s and early 1960s—produced a film titled Wen kümmert’s (Who Cares) about the Algerian War under the pseudonym Volker Loki, but it was not allowed to be screened by the West German Voluntary Self-Regulation of the Film Industry (FSK, Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle der Filmwirtschaft) because it “took a position against an allied nation.”82 In 1960, SDS members Reimar Lenz and Wolfgang Fritz Haug organized an exhibit about the Algerian War, which opened in West-Berlin and then traveled to other cities in 1961, including Göttingen, Heidelberg, Frankfurt, München, Braunschweig, and Kiel. Author and editor Enzensberger gave an address at the exhibit’s opening in Frankfurt, underscoring the discrepancy between the flood of information coursing through the media and the dearth about the ongoing war in Algeria:  “We are flooded with information, we have . . . [television] channels stuffed with . . . news, but our news is structured in such a way that the most important things do not have any room.”83 “In every larger city in Germany, you can,” Enzensberger pointed out, “hear lectures about minnesong and how to breed rabbits . . . cultural conferences are being organized by the dozen . . . But nobody wants to hear anything about Algeria.”84 Enzensberger also reminded that the war in Algeria was not solely a war being waged between the French and the Algerians: “The Algerian War is being carried out in our name; it is being carried out by NATO troops, from NATO support sites, with NATO materials and funding.”85 80

Slobodian 21, referencing Ball 9. Angolan students—who were experiencing a war in their home country being waged by the colonizing nation Portugal—and West German students organized solidarity demonstrations in 1960 and in 1961. 81 APO Archive, Afrika/Einzelne Länder A-Z; Freies Algerien (1958–62), Signatur 011-013. 82 “Volker Schlöndorff,” Website: Film Zeit. Last accessed July 7, 2012, http://www.film-zeit.de/ Person/33270/Volker-Schl%C3%B6ndorff/Biographie/. 83 Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Algerien ist Überall,” cited in Brand and Rössel 72–4. Here 73. “Wir sind überflutet von Informationen, wir haben . . . Kanäle vollgestopft mit Programmen und Nachrichten, aber unsere Informationswelt ist so beschaffen, daß das wichtigste keinen Platz darin hat”; translation my own. 84 Enzensberger, cited in Balsen and Rössel 72. “Man kann in jeder größeren Stadt Deutschland über Minnesang und Kaninchenzucht Vorträge hören . . . Es werden Kulturkongresse zu Dutzenden veranstaltet . . . Aber von Algerien will niemand etwas wissen”; translation my own. 85 Enzensberger cited in Brand and Rössel 73. “Der algerische Krieg wird in unserem Namen geführt, er wird geführt mit den Truppen der NATO, von den Stützpunkten der NATO aus, mit dem Kriegsmaterial und auf Kosten der NATO”; translation my own.

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As a NATO member, West Germany was thus involved in the Algerian War. This war would become an increasingly pivotal point of discussion for the New Left over the course of the 1960s as it sought to trace the financial and military relays between countries and to underscore West Germany’s role in continuing colonial wars. In addition to the aforementioned films and exhibits, an excerpt of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth was published in German in the second issue of Kursbuch in 1965 and the book was translated into and published in German in 1966, making a larger audience aware of the Algerian War.86 During the years of the Algerian War and the 1960s, self-liberation wars were waged throughout Africa, as nations sought to attain independence from colonization.87 Between 1957 and 1977, thirty of Africa’s fifty-three nations (including the island territories) achieved independence. Most of the wars of liberation were waged against colonizers France and Portugal. In 1960 alone ten African nations secured independence from colonial regimes. In countries that had not yet thrown off the shackles of colonization, wars raged and were protracted. In Guinea-Bissau, the war for independence from Portugal started in 1956 and lasted until 1973.88 Angola’s struggle for independence from Portugal started in 1961 and lasted until 1971. Mozambique battled for independence from Portugal beginning in 1964 and achieved independence in 1975. In sum, the 1960s was a period of intense self-determination battles throughout Africa.89 Solidarity groups active in West Germany addressed the independence movements in countries extending from Zimbabwe in the southwest to Morocco and Tunisia in the north.90 In West-Berlin in 1968, the Biafra Union West Berlin, Komitee der Aktion Biafra Hilfe (Biafra Union WestBerlin, Committee for Action to Assist Biafra) and the Evangelische Studentengemeinden in West-Berlin (Protestant Student Unions in WestBerlin) agitated for the independence of Biafra, which seceded from Nigeria and existed as an independent state from 1967 to 1970. They organized demonstrations, for example, at gas stations, such as BP and Shell, to protest the fact that natural resources were being extracted and exported while the war continued, and wrote letters to the West German foreign minister.91 86 Frantz Fanon, “Von der Gewalt,” Kursbuch 2 (August 1965):  1–55; Frantz Fanon, Die verdammten dieser Erde (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966). 87 See also Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940:  The Past of the Present (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2002). 88 The African Student Union organized a solidarity demonstration at the Free University in Berlin on November 28, 1970. APO Archive, Afrika/Einzelne Länder A-Z:  Flugblätter, Flugschriften, Zeitschriften; Signatur 011-013. 89 See also Prashad. 90 APO Archive, Afrika/Einzelne Länder A-Z: Flugblätter, Flugschriften, Zeitschriften; Signatur 011-013. 91 APO Archive, Afrika/Einzelne Länder A-Z: Flugblätter, Flugschriften, Zeitschriften; Signatur 011-013.

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Additionally, in November of 1968, the Groupe d’étude et d’action socialiste tunisien (GEAST—Tunisian Group for Socialist Study and Action) based in Wedding, West-Berlin, called for social movements in West Germany to express solidarity with demonstrations that took place in Tunisia against the repressive and authoritarian regime. In particular, they asked that students denounce the sentencing of student demonstrator Ben Jennet to twenty years forced labor for taking part in anti-imperialist demonstrations at the US and British embassies in Tunisia in 1967. They also called for solidarity with people arrested and tortured after demonstrations that took place in Tunisia in March 1967. These persons included ten schoolchildren, five university students, seven professors, and three lawyers. Information about the ongoing struggles in Africa also moved from East Germany to West Germany. For example, the Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee in the GDR92 published occasional memoranda providing information about the wars in Africa. In September 1964, it published a memorandum in English and French about the political and military collaboration of the Federal Republic of Germany with the Republic of South Africa. In May 1967, it published The Alliance:  Bonn-Pretoria, examining again the relationship between the Federal Republic of Germany and the apartheid government of South Africa.93 These ongoing struggles for self-determination deeply impacted black solidarity movements throughout Africa and internationally. In 1963, the Organization of the African Unity (OAU) was founded. The OAU promoted solidarity between all African people and sought not only to end colonialism in Africa but also to work against racism in other countries, such as the United States and France.94 Malcolm X traveled to Africa twice in 1964, participating in the OAU conferences.95 When he returned from these trips to the United States, he was so inspired by the OAU that he established the Organization of African-American Unity (OAAU). In visiting Africa, Malcolm X also learned about struggles against inner colonization that were taking place in South Africa, where blacks lived under apartheid, the explicit policy of racist segregation implemented by the Afrikaner-led National Party when it came to power in 1948. The African National Congress (ANC) was one of a number of groups that nonviolently agitated against apartheid.96 In 1960 after police fired on peaceful 92

German Democratic Republic or East Germany. APO Archive, Afrika, 1969–87; Signatur 022-023. 94 Klaas van Walraven, Dreams of Power: The Role of the Organization of African Unity in the Politics of Africa, 1963–1993 (Hants: Ashgate Publishing, 1999). 95 William L. Sales, From Civil Rights to Black Liberation:  Malcolm and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (Boston:  South End Press, 1999), 104. See also Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Penguin, 2011). 96 Meli Frances, A History of the ANC: South Africa Belongs to Us (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989); Raymond Sutter, The ANC Underground in South Africa, 1950–1976 (Boulder:  First Forum Press, 2009). 93

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demonstrators at Sharpeville killing sixty-nine, the government declared a state of emergency and outlawed the ANC. As a result of this attack, the ANC concluded that nonviolence—as practiced by Gandhi in South Africa around the turn of the early twentieth century against racism and later on in India against British colonization—was not enough to fight back against apartheid in South Africa and took up armed struggle in 1961.97 The ANC was soon listed as a terrorist organization and Nelson Mandela, its head and future president of South Africa, was arrested and imprisoned in 1962. The struggles of the ANC against apartheid and the solidarity promoted by the establishment of the OAU were enormously influential on movements elsewhere, including in the United States and Europe. Beyond the OAU, solidarity alliances were also being forged between African and Asian states that brought worldwide attention to a third position beyond Cold War binaries. In 1955, African and Asian nations met in Bandung, Indonesia, for the Asian-African Conference. Twenty-nine mostly newly independent nations from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East participated,98 in order to discuss how to preserve their independence from European colonization and intervention or domination by Cold War powers, including the United States, China, and the Soviet Union.99 It became known as the Bandung Conference and brought together leaders such as Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Jawaharlal Nehru of India, and Sukarno of Indonesia. In 1961, the Belgrade Conference took place:  Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia joined, adding another form of socialism. Together, the five aforementioned leaders established the NonAligned Movement. The Belgrade Conference was followed by a conference in Cairo (1964) and further gatherings.100 By the mid-1970s, the NonAligned Movement had developed the New International Economic Order as an alternative to Western-style capitalism and Soviet communism. Thus, in addition to the OAU, the Non-Aligned Movement marked an attempt to shift the balance of power after the Second World War, to draw more attention to the economic positions of newly independent and Third World countries, and to offer and promote a counterpoint to the free market ideology of the Bretton Woods system.101 97

History based on the ANC’s account at its official website:  http://www.anc.org.za/show. php?id=206. Last accessed May 12, 2012. 98 George McTurnan Kahin, The Asian-African Conference:  Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1956), 1. 99 Kahin 3. See also “Final Communique of the Asian-African Conference,” Kahin 76–95; and “The International Background:  Cold War, Decolonization, Vietnam, China-US Tensions,” in Jamie Mackie, Bandung 1955:  Non-Alignment and Afro-Asian Solidarity (Paris:  Editions Didier Millet, 2005), 34–53. 100 Mackie 108–23. 101 The Non-Aligned Movement exists to this day and currently includes 120 nations. Mackie 124–9.

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In 1966, another organization, like the Non-Aligned Movement, was established to provide an opportunity for countries to gather together and discuss strategies for fighting imperialism and Western-style capitalism: the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL). It was established after the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, Cuba, in order to give countries and groups an opportunity to gather and discuss strategies to stave off imperialism. The first meeting included delegates from eight-two countries, including Chile, Puerto Rico, Angola, the Congo, South Africa, Syria, North Korea, and Vietnam, and from the Palestinian Liberation Organization. A predecessor was the Organization for the Solidarity for the People of Asia and Africa (OSPAA), which was established in 1957 at a conference held in Cairo, Egypt, and which 500 people from thirty-five countries attended. At this meeting, delegates tended to represent national liberation movements rather than states. OSPAAAL published the magazine Tricontinental, which disseminated information worldwide about the self-determination and self-liberation struggles. The magazine also featured poster inserts, commonly displayed as a sign of solidarity in organizing spaces of the New Left. As mentioned, West Germany’s “1968,” like France’s, started earlier. In 1961, in response to the assassination on January 17 of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the Republic of Congo,102 and of two other ministers, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito, which was not made public until three weeks later, protests took place worldwide.103 As Slobodian writes, “In the week after Lumumba’s death became public, protestors marched through Cairo, London, New Delhi, Lahore, Vienna, Amsterdam, Colombo, Dakar, Tel Aviv, Accra, Tehran, Calcutta, Montreal, Paris, New  York, Washington D.C., Havana, Caracas, Lagos, Dublin and all of the Eastern European capitals.”104 Although often overlooked by historians, Slobodian argues that “the global protest wave following the death of Lumumba in 1961 would be a more appropriate starting point than the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964 for historical narratives of the global 1960s.”105 The focus on the Congo continued as students in 102

Known as the Democratic Republic of Congo since 1964. “Three Days before Kennedy’s official entry into the White House, we heard the tragic news of the transfer of Lumumba, Okito and Mpolo to Katanga. It was on January 17 . . . Two days later, on the 19th, I heard of the deaths of Lumumba, Okito and Mpolo . . . But from the public at large it was kept secret.” Thomas Kanza, “Lumumba’s Murder,” in Conflict in the Congo: The Rise and Fall of Lumumba (London: Penguin, 1972), 322–3. See also Kwame Nkrumah, “The Murder of Lumumba,” in The Challenge of the Congo (London:  International Publishers, 1967), 119–33; and Ludo De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba (London:  Verso, 2001); and Raoul Peck, dir., Lumumba, 2000. Zeitgeist Films. 104 Slobodian 62. See also Kanza 324. 105 Slobodian 14. 103

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West-Berlin protested the arrival of Congolese leader Moïse Tshombe for his role in the murder of Lumumba in 1964.106 The demonstrations with Congolese students marked a broader political shift toward analyses of imperialist politics. As Slobodian puts it: “Before the Vietnam War, West German New Leftists saw the Congo conflict as the key case in understanding how the dynamics of imperialism could persist after decolonization.”107 SDS leader Bernd Rabehl laid out the implications of the demonstrations against Tshombe for broader analyses of imperialist politics: “The Tschombé demonstration outlined the relationship between the third world and the metropolises . . . and the intervention of the strongest imperial world power as a figurehead of capitalism against all self-liberation movements became self-evident.”108 (As a further indication of international relations among movements, the unstable political situation created by the murder of Lumumba motivated Che Guevara to go to the Republic of Congo in 1965.109) Films, plays, and books about Lumumba’s life, politics, and execution appeared throughout the 1960s. In 1961, Cuban director Fausto Canel released the documentary El Congo, 1961 (The Congo, 1961).110 In 1966, playwright Aimé Césaire wrote Une saison au Congo (A Season in the Congo), published the same year in German.111 Biographies about Lumumba’s life and studies by political scientists, sociologists, and historians were published as well.112

106

Katsiaficas 49. Seibert 27–34. The success of these demonstrations’ reception by the media would play an instrumental role in the decision by social movement organizers’, such as Dutschke and Kunzelmann, to focus their actions on West-Berlin. For an analysis of the media coverage of social, student, and armed struggle movements, and, inversely, the movements’ intervention in and use of the media to their own political ends, see Chapter 2. 107 Slobodian 13. 108 Bernd Rabehl, “Von der antiautoritären Bewegung zur sozialistischen Opposition,” in Rebellion der Studenten oder die neue Opposition, ed. Uwe Bergmann, Rudi Dutschke, Wolfgang Lefevre, and Bernd Rabehl (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1968). Here, 160–2. 109 Paco Taibo II, Froilan Escobar, and Felix Guerra, Das Jahr, in dem wir nirgendwo waren: Ernesto Che Guevara und die afrikanische Guerrilla (Berlin: Edition ID Archiv, 1996); Che Guevara, The African Dream:  The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo (New York: Grove Press, 2001). 110 Fausto Canel, dir., El Congo, 1961, 1961. 111 Aimé Césaire, Im Kongo:  Ein Stück über Patrice Lumumba, trans. Monika Kind (Berlin:  Wagenbach, 1966). In English:  A Season in the Congo, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Grove, 1969). 112 Kwame Nkrumah, Challenge of the Congo (New  York:  International Publishers, 1967); Robin McKown, Lumumba: A Biography (New York:  Doubleday, 1969); Thomas R. Kanza, Conflict in the Congo:  The Rise and Fall of Lumumba (New  York:  Penguin, 1972); Patrice Lumumba (New  York:  St. Martin’s Press, 1973). For a discussion of the literary and filmic representations of Lumumba, see also Karen Bouwer, Gender and Decolonization in the Congo: Lumumba’s Legacy in Literature and Film (New York: Palgrave, 2010).

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While the Congo underscored self-liberation and self-determination struggles from colonization, Vietnam’s independence struggles became the most pivotal rallying cause around the world, as they illustrated the continuity between colonialism and imperialism. The country liberated itself first from French colonization and then from US imperialism.113 The Vietnamese had fought for independence from France between 1945 and 1954 under nationalist and Communist leader Hồ Chí Minh and General Võ Nguyên Giáp in what became known as the First Indochina War.114 The United States argued that, given the Cold War context, it had concerns about the spread of communism—what President Dwight D.  Eisenhower called the “domino theory.”115 It was concerned both about the spread of communism from the Soviet Union,116 where Hồ Chí Minh had spent time, and from China, which was supplying the Việt Minh with weapons.117 Thus, the United States began to support the French politically and financially. By the end of the First Indochina War in 1954, the United States was bearing about 80 percent of the costs of war, although it did not contribute armed forces at the time.118 When the war ended on August 1, 1954, France was forced to relinquish the colonial territories known as Indochina, which encompassed modern-day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Vietnam was partitioned into North and South Vietnam. The United States supported the South Vietnamese government with the Kennedy administration sending military “advisers.”119 It was the second time a Southeast Asian resistance movement had liberated itself from colonial rule.120 The victory was important, especially when taken together with selfliberation struggles taking place concurrently against France and Portugal in Africa. Overlap also existed between the Indochina War and the 113 Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 (New York: Harpers, 1991); Christopher Goscha, Historical Dictionary of the Indochina War (1945–1954):  An International and Interdisciplinary Approach (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012). 114 The Indochina Wars took place from 1945 to 1975 and were wars of national liberation fought in Southeast Asia against France, the United States, and China. 115 The “domino theory,” coined by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, continued Truman’s policy of containment put forth in the Truman Doctrine. 116 Anne Foster, “Before the War: Legacies from the Early Twentieth Century in United StatesVietnam Relations,” in A Companion to the Vietnam War, ed. Marilyn B. Young and Robert Buzzanco (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 115–29. Here, 121. 117 Bruce Elleman and Spencer C. Tucker, “China, People’s Republic of, Policy toward Vietnam,” in The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social and Military History, ed. Spencer C. Tucker (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 199–201. Here, 199. 118 Mark Atwood Lawrence, The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010), 42. 119 William Conrad Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War:  Executive and Legislative Roles and Relationships, vol. IV, July 1965–January 1968 (Princeton:  Princeton UP, 1995), 8. 120 Indonesia declared its independence from the Netherlands in 1945. It was also, as mentioned, a key player in the Non-Aligned Movement.

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Algerian War, as French troops were pulled out of Southeast Asia and stationed in Algeria.121 When President Lyndon B. Johnson took office in 1963, he increased the military presence in Vietnam and, after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in 1964—when Johnson claimed that North Vietnam had attacked US Navy ships in the Gulf of Tonkin—announced in 1965 that the United States must defend itself and South Vietnam against the communist government of North Vietnam, ratcheting up the Vietnam War.122 As the Pentagon Papers revealed, Johnson knew it was a losing battle but nonetheless continued to send US military to fight the war and continued to fund it, while lying to both the US public and to Congress about it. The Vietnam War did not officially end until 1975. North Vietnam’s ability, aided by the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, to organize an oppositional force that consisted both of an army and of the Vietnamese people underscored the solidarity within the country. As the war transitioned from one against France to one against the United States, resolve among the Vietnamese remained strong to fight off both colonial and imperialist forms of subjugation. Strategically, the Việt Cộng123 demonstrated tactics that outwitted the US military, even though the US military was the bestfunded, best-equipped, and most powerful military force. The Vietnam War was a global rallying point. As Gilcher-Holtey puts it, “The protest movements, which culminated in 1968, were transnational movements, its main groups related to one another and were connected worldwide. Although the protest movements in the various countries each have specific trajectories, protests against the Vietnam War were a central factor for mobilization everywhere.”124 Clearly, the Vietnam War resonated with anticolonial and anti-imperialist independence struggles. Around the world, people who deemed the Vietnam War to be imperialist took note of the Việt Cộng’s ability to hold off the US military. In West Germany, the Vietnam War quickly became the focal point of student agitation. In 1964, the SDS in West-Berlin set up a working group on Vietnam led by Peter Gäng, Klaus Gilgemann, and Jürgen Hörlemann to study its socioeconomic, political, and military history.125 The group regularly 121

See, for example, the trajectory of General Raoul Salan, who fought in the Indochina War and then the Algerian War and was also the chief of the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS), or the trajectory of Yves Guérin-Sérac, who fought in the Indochina War and the Algerian War and was also a founding member of the OAS. Justin Corfield, The History of Vietnam (Westport: Greenwood, 2008), 47. 122 Elleman and Tucker 436. 123 The Việt Cộng or National Liberation Front for South Vietnam (NLF) joined forces with the People’s Army of Vietnam (the North Vietnamese army) to fight back against the armies of South Vietnam and the United States. 124 Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, 1968:  Eine Zeitreise (Frankfurt:  Suhrkamp, 2008), 8; translation my own. 125 Lönnendonker and Fichter 89. Hörlemann was studying sociology with an emphasis on Asia. In the late 1960s, he was wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (research assistant) to the author

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read and compared coverage of sixty-five newspapers and magazines of the domestic and international press.126 They read and discussed over one hundred books.127 Moreover, the group traced the roots of the conflict back to the waning days of the Second World War, when France was under the Vichy regime and Japan occupied Vietnam, and published its findings in Vietnam:  Genesis of a Conflict (1967).128 Starting in 1965, “Vietnam was the international topic of the SDS, the Easter Marches and the entire Extraparliamentary Opposition movements of the 1960s.”129 West German students “organized a ‘Vietnam Summer,’ ” educating themselves and others “about the conflict in Southeast Asia.”130 It was followed by a “Vietnam Action Week,” which took place from September 28 to October 4, 1965, in Frankfurt and included discussions, films, and an exhibit.131 The winter semester of 1965–66 was declared a “Vietnam Semester” and kicked off with a “Declaration against the War in Vietnam” signed by over one hundred prominent authors and professors.132 According to Balsen and Rössel, “That Vietnam was a topic solely for the Extraparliamentary Opposition,” as had been the case previously vis-à-vis the opposition to remilitarization, NATO, and nuclear weapons, “resulted from the fact that all the parliamentary parties from the CDU/CSU to the FDP and the SPD supported the U.S.’s Vietnam War politically, morally and economically for the entirety of its duration.”133 The “Declaration against the War in Vietnam” indicated that the SDS knew itself to be a powerful force on the left and a third alternative to the SPD and KPD, as part of the Extraparliamentary Opposition.134 In the late 1960s information about the Vietnam War—its historical, political, and economic background as well as the current situation on the ground—spread through various media. Hörlemann and Gäng’s Vietnam:  Genesis of a Conflict (1967) went through four print runs in two years.135 In 1966 and 1967, future RAF member and then well-known Peter Weiss, researching and providing material for his Viet Nam Diskurs. In 1989, Hörlemann founded the Hörlemann Verlag (publishing house), devoted to publishing writings of the so-called Third World in German translation. For more information see Lönnendonker and Fichter, page 32 and footnote 137. 126 APO Archive, Freie Universität Berlin, Privatarchiv, Jürgen Hörlemann, Vietnam, INFI. 127 APO Archive, Freie Universität Berlin, Privatarchiv, Jürgen Hörlemann, Vietnam, INFI. 128 Lönnendonker and Fichter 137–8. Jürgen Hörlemann and Peter Gäng, Vietnam – Genesis eines Konflikts (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966). 129 Balsen and Rössel 126; translation my own. 130 Varon 33. 131 Balsen and Rössel 119. 132 Balsen and Rössel 145. 133 Balsen and Rössel 126; translation my own. Not only the political parties but also the official representatives of the two West German churches—both Catholic and Protestant—remained uncritical of the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1968. 134 Lönnendonker and Fichter 138. 135 Hörlemann and Gäng. It sold out of its first print run within a few months and was reprinted the same year, selling 13,000 copies in 1966 alone and going into a third and fourth print

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leftist journalist Ulrike Meinhof published three articles on the conflict in konkret136:  “Vietnam and Deutschland”; “Napalm und Pudding”; and “Vietnam und die Deutschen.”137 In 1968, the writings of Vietnamese Prime Minister Hồ Chí Minh and Võ Nguyên Giáp, the primary military commander in the Indochina War and the Vietnam War, appeared in German translations.138 Some of the films produced by students at the newly established German Film and Television Academy of Berlin (dffb, Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin), such as Harun Farocki’s White Christmas (1968),139 also thematized the Vietnam War. Peter Weiss’s Discourse on Vietnam increased awareness of the Vietnam War. It was published in 1967 and included a chronology, outlining Vietnam’s history; Hörlemann advised on the drama and publication.140 It was first performed on March 20, 1968, in Frankfurt am Main. Finally, the Vietnam War and its atrocities directly entered private homes through the nightly news on television: in contrast to contemporary media, where the source of news is much more diffused, in the late 1960s, televisions were relatively new, and the main source of news, which featured much more explicit images of the violence of war.141

run in 1967, selling 26,000 copies. Subsequently, in 1968, Jürgen Hörlemann published a book of political cartoons about the Vietnam War with Arno Ploong, Napalm macht frei (Frankfurt: Edition Voltaire, 1968). 136 konkret is a magazine established by Klaus Rainer Röhl in 1957. In 1961, Röhl and Ulrike Meinhof married. She was editor-in-chief of konkret from 1962 to 1964. From 1964 to 1968, she wrote for the magazine as a freelancer. In 1968, Meinhof divorced Röhl. And in 1969, she resigned from the paper. In 1973, the paper closed down. In 1974, it was reintroduced under new editorship. The first incarnation of the paper was tremendously influential on 1960s West German student and social movements. 137 Ulrike Meinhof, “Vietnam und Deutschland,” konkret 1 (1966): 2–3; “Napalm und Pudding,” konkret 5 (1967): 2; “Vietnam und die Deutschen,” konkret 11 (1967): 2–3. APO Archive, Freie Universität Berlin. Reprinted in Ulrike Meinhof, Die Würde des Menschen ist antastbar (Berlin:  Wagenbach, 1980), 71–3, 92–5, and 108–11. Two of these articles are available in English: “Vietnam and Germany,” and “Napalm and Pudding,” in Everybody Talks about the Weather . . . We Don’t:  The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof, ed. Karin Bauer (New  York:  Seven Stories Press, 2008), 157–60, 229–33. 138 Hồ Chí Minh, Gegen die amerikanische Aggression, trans. Gisela Erler (Munich:  Trikont, 1968); Võ Nguyên Giáp, Volkskrieg. Volksarmee (Munich: Trikont, 1968). In English: Hồ Chí Minh, Against U.S. Aggression for National Salvation (Hanoi:  Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1967); and Võ Nguyên Giáp, People’s War. People’s Army (New York: Praeger, 1962). 139 Harun Farocki, dir., White Christmas, 16 mm, 1968. DFFB Archive, Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin. 140 Peter Weiss, Diskurs über die Vorgeschichte und den Verlauf des lang andauernden Befreiungskrieges in Viet Nam als Beispiel für die Notwendigkeit des bewaffneten Kampfes der Unterdrückten gegen ihre Unterdrücker sowie über die Versuche der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika die Grundlagen der Revolution zu vernichten (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967). For obvious reasons, the work is typically referred to as “Viet Nam Diskurs” in German. Published in English as Peter Weiss, Discourse on Vietnam (New York: Atheneum, 1970). 141 The role of the media in conveying images of 1968, from demonstrations to protracted self-liberation struggles and wars, is discussed at greater length in Chapter 2. The fixation on

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As with previous demonstrations against the murder of Congolese Prime Minister Lumumba or the Algerian War, the protests against the Vietnam War showed international solidarity. In 1966, philosopher and peace activist Bertrand Russell organized the Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal, which took place from November 13 to 15, 1966, in London.142 The Tribunal held two subsequent meetings in 1967: the first in Stockholm and the second in Copenhagen.143 The host locations and even more so its roster of speakers made the tribunal international: the latter included, among others, Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Wolfgang Abendroth, Günther Anders, James Baldwin, Simone de Beauvoir, Stokely Carmichael, and Peter Weiss. In Sweden, 462 persons from sixty-three countries participated in the Tribunal.144 On October 21, 1967, an international day of actions took place against the conflict: “hundreds of thousands demonstrated in London, Paris, [West-]Berlin, Rome, Oslo, Amsterdam and Tokyo against the Vietnam War.”145 In the midst of these protests against the Vietnam War, a demonstration took place in West Germany on June 2, 1967, that wound up being a pivotal turning point for social movements. First, in addition to the aforementioned but often overlooked actions to protest Lumumba’s murder and the Algerian War, June 2, 1967, definitively—even in popular historical accounts— established the beginning of West Germany’s “1968.”146 Second, organizing efforts around June 2, 1967, reaffirmed how central Vietnam was to the SDS. Third, the demonstrations instantiated yet again how international 1960s social movements in West Germany were. Fourth, the events of June 2, 1967, politicized and radicalized the West German student movement, and set off a chain of events there were the direct forerunners of the Red Army Faction (RAF). The June 2, 1967, demonstration, which protested the state visit of Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to West-Berlin, was—as Slobodian has argued—initiated and organized by the Confederation of Iranian Students National Union (CISNU), a student organization of Iranian dissidents from

violence predominated not only on the nightly television news programs but also in fictional feature films of the time, both mainstream and low budget. 142 Bertrand Russell, War Crimes in Vietnam (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967). 143 John Duffett (ed.), Against the Crime of Silence: Proceedings of the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal, Stockholm Copenhagen (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968). 144 Balsen and Rössel 183. 145 Balsen and Rössel 182; translation my own. 146 Among these earlier demonstrations, many of which underscored solidarity alliances in West Germany, one could also include the 1966 demonstration, organized by African students and the SDS in West-Berlin, protesting the screening of Africa Addio, and the 1967–68 demonstrations against the statue of colonial governor Hermann von Wissmann in Hamburg. On the protests against Africa Addio, see Slobodian 137–46; and Seibert, “Alte Themen, neue Protestformen: Der Film Africa Addio (1966),” 35–42; “Geschichtspolitische Denkmalstürze: Die Wissmann-Statue,” 51–8.

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the Iranian Tudeh and the National Front political movements, which existed in various countries, such as England, France, West Germany, the United States, and India.147 “When members of CISNU approached the SDS about collaborating on the June 2 demonstration,” Slobodian notes, “they were turned down. Focused on Vietnam, the socialist students were concerned that working on Iran issues would divide and dissipate the energies of the anti-imperialist movement.”148 CISNU had been actively organizing at West German campuses since the late 1950s.149 The West German government took repressive measures to prevent dissent from Iranians within its national borders during the Shah’s visit. Drawing on the 1965 Foreigner’s Law (Ausländergesetz), West Germany sought to control the movement of foreign residents in the period leading up to the Shah’s visit.150 “In the week before his arrival,” Slobodian writes, “police told Iranian residents in many cities, including Bonn, Cologne, Düsseldorf and Frankfurt, that they could not leave their cities in the four days of the Shah’s visit. In addition, they had to appear to the authorities in person at least twice—and in one case an extraordinary six times—per day to confirm their presence in the city.”151 In one instance, Slobodian states, “authorities instructed ninety Iranians and seventeen other foreign students to leave Munich and the surrounding area of Upper Bavaria and Middle Franconia for the duration of the Shah’s time in West Germany.”152 That is, Iranians living in West Germany were not confined to cities but—inversely—asked to leave for the duration of the Shah’s visit. As West Germans became aware of the repressive measures taken against Iranian dissidents during the Shah’s visit, they became doubly (or triply) sensitized to political pressures. They realized the ways in which Iranian dissidents were treated in Iran and their country’s complicity in fostering 147

CISNU was established in 1962. Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge UP, 2008), 144. See also Afshin Matin-Asgari, Iranian Student Opposition to the Shah (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2002). The subsequent analysis of the June 2, 1967, demonstration, writing Iranians back into the history of this date, draws on Quinn Slobodian, “The Missing Bodies of June 2,” in Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham:  Duke UP, 2012), 101–34. See also Arif Dirlik, “The Third World in 1968,” in 1968:  A World Transformed, ed. Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge UP, 1998), 295–320. The analysis of the historical and political situation in Iran is based on Ervand Abrahamian and Bahman Nirumand’s writings. 148 Slobodian 103, citing Bahman Nirumand, Leben mit den Deutschen (Hamburg:  Rowohlt, 1991), 105. 149 “Revolutionäre Romantik,” interview with Bahman Nirumand, Cicero (January 2005), http://www.cicero.de/berliner-republik/revolution%C3%A4re-romantik/37216. Last accessed June 6, 2010. 150 APO Archive, Freie Universität Berlin, SDS, Aussenkommission, Hannah Kröger, 1962–69. 151 Slobodian 105. See also Siegward Lönnendonker and Tilman Fichter, Freie Universität Berlin, 1948–1973. Hochschule im Umbruch (Berlin:  Pressefreiheit der Freien Universität Berlin, 1973), 169. Balsen and Rössel 157. 152 Slobodian 105.

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political repression, both abroad and at home, and the reprisal Iranians risked if they visited or returned to Iran.153 The events of June 2, 1967 only added to instances of clampdowns.154 Information about political repression in Iran had been disseminated in West Germany since at least the early 1960s through various media. Domestic newspapers, including Die Zeit, had been covering Iranian student activism in West Germany and in Iran since the mid-1960s, and Iranian newspapers, such as Iran Azad, the paper of the National Front, had been available in West Germany since 1962 and in German since 1964.155 An additional source of information about the situation in Iran was Bahman Nirumand’s Persia:  A Model Developing Country—a slim but informative volume published in March 1967 just a few months before the June 2, 1967, demonstration.156 Nirumand—a dissident who witnessed the toppling of Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953—presented some of the book’s findings the day before the demonstration, although the Iranian embassy attempted to intervene and prevent him from doing so, at a teach-in that was attended by over 3,000 students.157 At the teach-in, an “Open Letter for Farah Diba”—a two-page letter written by Meinhof, who was a close friend of Nirumand’s—was distributed.158 It underscored the discrepancy between the economic situation of the majority of Persians and of the Shah and his wife.

153

In another instance of the international relays among solidarity movements, one could also trace the path of Ali Shariati, an Iranian who won a scholarship to study at the Sorbonne and “participated in demonstrations for Algerian and Congolese independence . . . wrote articles for the organ of the Confederation of Iranian Students . . . translated Jean Paul Sartre . . . and Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare . . . began translating Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth.” Abrahamian 143–4. For more about this repression, see Chapter 2, footnote 19. 154 This repression did not only affect Iranian dissidents. As mentioned at the outset, this chapter focuses specifically on the Congo, Vietnam, and Iran as three instances of solidarity. Of course, these nations were not the only ones to repress dissidents abroad but rather are indicative of a more widespread systemic phenomenon. See Chapter  2, footnote 10, for the repression unleashed by the Indonesian government under General Suharto after the ousting of Sukarno in 1967 and against dissidents living in West Germany and for the actions organized in solidarity with them. 155 Slobodian 104. The National Front was the democratic political opposition group that had helped to bring Mohammad Mossadegh to power in 1949. 156 Nirumand had studied in Germany and then returned in 1960 to Iran, where he taught first at the Tehran University and then, due to repression from the Iranian government, at the Goethe Institut. During this time, he met Enzensberger, who encouraged him to write a book for a German audience about the political situation in Iran. Due to the increasingly repressive political situation in Iran, Nirumand returned to West Germany in 1965, where he wound up publishing the book with an epilogue by Enzensberger. 157 Balsen and Rössel 157. 158 Ulrike Meinhof, “Offener Brief an Farah Diba,” konkret 6 (1967):  21–2. Reprinted in Deutschland Deutschland unter anderm: Aufsätze und Polemiken (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1995). In English: “Open Letter to Farah Diba,” Everybody Talks about the Weather 171–7.

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Both in his talk and the book, Nirumand provided a brief history of Iran in the twentieth century.159 The volume’s subtitle gave readers a choice of how to read Iran’s current political situation:  Persia: A Model Developing Country or the Dictatorship of the Free World. (The title’s second half— “or The Dictatorship of the Free World”—was printed on the book’s front cover in a tiny typeset demanding a close reading.) The opening chapter discusses Iran’s existence after the First World War as a “quasi-colony” of Western nations keen on its oil deposits.160 Nirumand’s study underscored the history of the United Kingdom and the Soviet invasion of Iran in 1941 known as Operation Countenance, as well as the United States’ political and economic involvement in the country, calling attention to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-assisted coup (Operation Ajax), which toppled democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953161 and brought Shah Pahlavi to power as an authoritarian monarch.162 Mossadegh had nationalized the oil industry.163 Nirumand argued that oil interests also motivated West Germany’s alliance with Iran at the time of his writing. The volume’s penultimate chapter discusses the repression under Shah Pahlavi’s authoritarian regime164; its last chapter outlines “Europe as a sickness” and asks whether there will be a “bloody revolution or a revolution of reason.”165 The book quickly ran through over seven print runs in 1967 and sold roughly 150,000 copies within a few months, spreading the word about the political situation in Iran. On June 2, 1967, the day after Nirumand presented his work at the teach-in, two demonstrations took place in West-Berlin. Around midday, Shah Pahlavi arrived at Schöneberg city hall. Roughly 3,000 demonstrators were awaiting his arrival. Some wore Schah-Tüten (Shah bags) over their

159 Bahman Nirumand, Persien: Modell eines Entwicklungslandes oder die Diktatur der Freien Welt (Hamburg:  Rowohlt, 1967). In English:  Iran:  The New Imperialism in Action, trans. Leonard Mins (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969). 160 See also Ervand Abrahamian, “Reform, Revolution and the Great War,” in A History of Modern Iran, 34–62, as well as L. P. Elwell-Sutton, Persian Oil: A Study in Power Politics (London:  Lawrence and Wishart, 1955). According to Abrahamian, no publisher, academic or otherwise, would touch Elwell-Sutton’s study when he originally submitted it because of how sensitive its contents, discussing Britain’s interests in Iran’s oil, were deemed to be at the time. 161 See also Ervand Abrahamian, “Premier Mossadeq (May 1951–August 1953),” in Iran between Two Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982), 267–80. 162 See also Ervand Abrahamian, “The 1953 Coup in Iran,” Science and Society 65.2 (Summer 2001): 182–215; and Abrahamian, A History of Iran, 118–22. 163 As Abrahamian succinctly puts it, “The 1953 coup has often been depicted as a CIA venture to save Iran from international communists. In fact, it was a joint British-American venture to preserve the international oil cartel.” Abrahamian, A History of Iran, 118. 164 See also Abrahamian, “Muhammad Reza Shah’s White Revolution,” in A History of Iran, 123–54. 165 Nirumand, Iran, 169 and 176.

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FIGURE 1.1 Schah-Tüten (Shah Brown Paper Bags), 1967. APO Archive, University Archive, Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany.

heads: brown paper bags with the face of the Shah and his wife drawn on them (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). These bags effectively hid the identity of the demonstrators and had the Shah and his wife peering back at their own faces. Soon thereafter, “a West Berlin public transit bus pulled up and discharged a group of Iranian men on the inside of the police barricades . . . The group proved to be pro-Shah demonstrators”166—often referred to in German as “Jubelperser” (cheering pro-Shah Persians). “The protestors shouted “SAVAK!” [Saseman Amniat va Etelaot Keschwar] at the arriving group, identifying them as members of the Iranian secret service.”167 A violent exchange, including beatings, among the “Jubelperser,” the anti-Shah demonstrators, and the police ensued. 166

Slobodian 111. Slobodian 111. “Geheimdienste SAVAK:  Spur in den 4.  Stock,” Spiegel 43 (1967):  64–6, http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-46196304.html. Last accessed June 5, 2010. SAVAK was established in 1956 by Reza Shah Pahlavi. Abrahamian, A History of Iran, 126.

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FIGURE 1.2 Schah-Tüten (Shah Brown Paper Bags), 1967. APO Archive, University Archive, Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany.

That evening, another demonstration took place in front of the Opera House where the Shah and his wife were going to see a performance of Mozart’s Magic Flute. About 4,500 demonstrators and dissidents were present, chanting “Mo, Mo, Mossadegh” and “Shah Shah Charlatan.” Again, the “Jubelperser” (cheering pro-Shah Persians) showed up. The police had blocked off the road at either end. As demonstrators attempted to leave, SAVAK and the “Jubelperser” attacked them with wooden sticks and iron rods. Fighting intensified. Since police had blocked off both ends of the street, they had closed or penned in the demonstrators. Then, police mounted on horseback entered the mêlée. In a later press conference, WestBerlin Police Chief Erich Duensing called it the “liver sausage” strategy, stating when “the left end stinks,” we “have to cut into the middle to take off the end.”168 As unarmed and peaceful demonstrator Benno Ohnesorg 168 “Nicht zu fett,” Spiegel, July 7, 1967; “Kurras und die Folgen,” Sueddeutsche Zeitung, November 24, 1967.

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FIGURE 1.3 Jürgen Henschel, “Tod von Benno Ohnesorg, 2. Juni, 1967” (photograph). Deutsches Historisches Museum, Inv.-Nr. Ph 2001/20, Berlin, Germany.

was attempting to flee, police officer Karl-Heinz Kurras fatally shot him (Figure 1.3). Officer Kurras was later acquitted of all charges.169 The events of June 2, 1967, politicized and radicalized the student movement and kicked off West Germany’s 1968 one year earlier.170 The 169

Cornelia Jabs and Helmut Müller-Enbergs reviewed files of East Germany’s Ministry of State Security and discovered that although Kurras was working for the West-Berlin police, he was also a spy for East Germany. Helmut Müller-Enbergs and Cornelia Jabs, “Der 2. Juni 1967 und die Staatssicherheit,” Deutschland Archiv. Zeitschrift für das vereinigte Deutschland 42.3 (2009): 395–400. 170 See also Inga Buhmann, Ich habe mir eine Geschichte geschrieben (Frankfurt: zweitausendeins, 1983), 265. Additionally, on April 21, 1967, as part of Operation Gladio, a CIA-assisted coup brought a military junta to power in Greece. (See also Costa-Gavras’s Z, 1969, about earlier events but filmed during Greece’s “Regime of Colonels.”) See also Kostis Kornetis, Children of the Dictatorship:  Student Resistance, Cultural Politics and the “Long 1960s” in Greece (New York: Berghahn, 2013). In the Middle East, the Six-Day War was being waged between Israel and neighboring Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in June 1967.

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SDS gathered students that evening and future Red Army Faction cofounder Gudrun Ensslin exclaimed: “This fascist state means to kill us all . . . violence is the only way to answer violence.”171 Another West German left-wing armed struggle group, the Bewegung 2.  Juni (June 2 Movement or J2M), named itself after the date. Underscoring the impact of June 2, 1967, J2M member Ralf Reinders said, “The actual politicization only came after the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg on June 2, 1967.”172 “The police had shot us all,” he notes elsewhere: Against beatings you can defend yourself to a certain extent. But that somebody was just shot down like that took things a step further. I know many who kind of flipped out this day. They immediately knew, you have to take to the streets. You have to take a position . . . They were neither for the students nor for some other thing. They were just against these shootings.173 According to Reinders, the June 2 Movement named itself after this date because “everyone knew what June 2 meant . . . by having this date as our name, it will always remind [people] who shot first.”174 Historian Nick Thomas states that 65 percent of West German students claim to have been politicized by Ohnesorg’s death.175 Subsequent to the June 2, 1967, demonstrations against the Shah’s visit, solidarity actions continued in response to the ongoing war in Vietnam. After the January 1968 Tet Offensive, in which the People’s Army of Vietnam (the North Vietnamese army) and the National Liberation Front (NLF) for South Vietnam (or Việt Cộng) successfully fought back against the armies of South Vietnam and the United States, events focused on Vietnam exploded in number and frequency. From February 17 to 18, 1968, the West German SDS organized an International Vietnam Conference (Vietnam Kongress) at the Technical University in West-Berlin, in order to discuss solidarity actions. The conference issued a call to the worldwide movement for continued actions: “We call on the anti-imperialist resistance movement . . . to continue to build unified mass demonstrations against US imperialism and its helpers in Western Europe. In the course of this unified struggle, political and organizational working unity between the revolutionary movements in Western Europe must be intensified and a 171 Stefan Aust, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (Hamburg:  Hoffmann und Campe, 1985), 44; in English:  Stefan Aust, Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. (Oxford:  Oxford UP, 2009), 27. 172 Kristina Konrad, dir., Greater Freedom, Lesser Freedom, 2000. Weltfilm Productions. 173 Ralf Reinders and Ronald Fritzsch, Die Bewegung 2. Juni: Gespräche über Haschrebellen, Lorenz-Entführung, Knast (Berlin: ID Verlag, 1995), 18. 174 Reinders and Fritzsch 39. 175 Thomas 114.

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United Front must be built.”176 Additionally, the conference itself was a fertile meeting ground for activists from all parts of the globe. It brought together over 5,000 participants, including British historians Tariq Ali177 and Robin Blackburn,178 French German activist Daniel Cohn-Bendit,179 Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli,180 and Dale Smith from the Student NonViolence Coordinating Committee (United States).181 Solidarity with the event was expressed by those who could not attend through advertisements published in newspapers, as well as through telegrams and letters sent by supporters in a roster that, according to RAF scholar Karin Bauer, reads “like a who’s who of the intellectual left.”182 Supporters included actors, artists, authors, composers, filmmakers, journalists, lawyers, literary critics, professors, theater directors, theologians, and unionists. Among them were Michelangelo Antonioni, Lelio Basso, Ernst Bloch, Helmut Gollwitzer, Hans Werner Henze, Eric Hobsbawn, Herbert Marcuse, Alberto Moravio, Luigi Nono, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Giorgio Strehler, Luchino Visconti, Peter Weiss, and “50 other authors.”183 “At this point and time,” as Gretchen Dutschke, wife of SDS head Rudi Dutschke, put it in her biography of him, “the revolutionaries were still all seated together. It was the last time.”184 After the International Vietnam Conference, the West German extraparliamentary movement would split among various factions. The reasons for the split were numerous but revolved around a constellation of concerns:  (1) The increasingly violent clampdowns on nonviolent demonstrators and activists; (2)  the passage of the Emergency Laws

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Katsiaficas 51. Tariq Ali is also a novelist and filmmaker, on the editorial board of New Left Review, and cofounder of Verso Books. 178 Robin Blackburn is on the editorial board of New Left Review. 179 Daniel Cohn-Bendit is a German politician who was active in events leading up to the Paris May ‘68 uprisings. Of German and French heritage, he frequently moved between events in Paris and West-Berlin. 180 Giangiacomo Feltrinelli was a left-wing political activist and publisher. He established the publishing house Feltrinelli Editore in 1954. In the 1960s, he traveled extensively, meeting Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 1964 and 1967; and traveling to Bolivia and meeting with Régis Debray. Feltrinelli published the writings of, among others, Régis Debray, Che Guevara, and Hồ Chí Minh. 181 Sibylle Plogstedt (ed.), Der Kampf des vietnamesischen Volkes und die Globalstrategie des Imperialismus. Internationaler Vietnam-Kongreß, 17./18. February 1968. West-Berlin (Berlin: SDS West-Berlin und Internationales Nachrichten und Forschungs-Institut INFI, 1968). 182 Karin Bauer, “Introduction:  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), 12–100. Here, 47. 183 Lönnendonker and Fichter, Kleine Geschichte der SDS, 183. 184 Gretchen Dutschke, Wir hatten ein barbarisches, schönes Leben:  Rudi Dutschke (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1996), 184; translation my own. 177

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(Notstandsgesetze) in West Germany on May 30, 1968; and (3)  the increasingly divergent political strategies on the left. The year 1968 marked a turning point domestically in West Germany and also internationally.185 Internationally, as mentioned, the Việt Cộng’s Tet Offensive on January 30, 1968, unleashed attacks on the US military throughout South Vietnam, resulting in a high number of casualties of US soldiers and making the war increasingly unpopular in the United States. On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was supporting striking black sanitary workers, who were protesting dangerous working conditions and demanding higher wages. In May of 1968, a general strike of students and workers paralyzed Paris for weeks.186 At its peak, between eight and nine million, or roughly two-thirds of the workforce, was on strike, as millions marched through Paris, students occupied universities, and workers occupied factories throughout France. The crisis was implicated in De Gaulle’s premature resignation in 1969 as France’s prime minister. In West Germany, on April 2, 1968, future RAF members Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, as well as Thorwald Proll and Horst Söhnlein, set fire to a department store in Frankfurt.187 They planted bombs in the store during the day.188 The bombs were timed to go off after hours through remote control devices. At around midnight, the German Press Agency received a call: “In a moment, Schneider and Kaufhof department stores will burn. It is an act of political revenge.”189 The fire was quickly put out. No one was hurt. Damages were estimated at between 282,339 and 390,865 Deutsch Marks (approx. $175,000 total) for the Schneider and over 1.6  million marks (approx. $831,842) in the Kaufhof department store.190 The four arsonists were arrested two days later. Their trial began on October 14, 1968.191 The four defendants were represented by Horst Mahler, at the time a lawyer for leftist movement activists and later a member of the Red Army Faction. Baader and Ensslin claimed sole responsibility for the action and stated that Proll and Söhnlein were innocent. Arguing that they sought to connect consumerist politics at home with the wars being waged in the Third World, Ensslin said they 185

For the key dates and events related to 1968, cf. Gilcher-Holtey, 1968: Eine Zeitreise. See also Andrew Feenberg and Jim Freedom, When Poetry Ruled the Streets: The French May Events of 1968 (Albany: State University New York Press, 2001). 187 Thorwald Proll and Daniel Dubbe, Wir kamen vom anderen Stern:  Über 1968, Andreas Baader und ein Kaufhaus (Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 2003). 188 Gerd Koenen, Vesper, Ensslin, Baader:  Urszenen des deutschen Terrorismus (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 2003), 139–49. Here, 139. 189 Proll and Dubbe 17; Koenen 139–40. 190 Butz Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum:  Die Geschichte der RAF (Berlin:  Argon, 2004), 37–43. Here, 40. 191 Peters 105–16. 186

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set the fire in order to challenge the “narrow-minded stupor of a saturated consumerist society” and to “protest the indifference toward the murders of the Vietnamese” amid “monopoly capitalism.”192 Meinhof covered the trials for konkret.193 On October 31, 1968, the judge sentenced the defendants to three years in prison.194 The defendants started to serve their sentences but appealed the court’s decision. Just days after the arson attack in Frankfurt, right-wing activist Joseph Bachmann attempted to assassinate SDS leader Rudi Dutschke on April 11, 1968, in West-Berlin, wounding Dutschke with a shot to the head, the complications of which ultimately led to his death a decade later. If the fatal shooting of peaceful demonstrator Benno Ohnesorg raised concerns about increased police repression, the subsequent assassination attempt on Dutschke called attention to the corporate media’s role in fomenting increased violence.195 In the late 1960s, controversy existed about the representation of student movements in corporate media in general, and, in particular, in the media published and owned by Springer, such as the daily tabloid magazine Bildzeitung, from which, according to Bachmann’s statement when on trial, he had “taken his daily information.”196 Bachmann’s act led to a high point of condemnation of West Germany’s daily tabloids. In response to the attempted assassination of Dutschke, roughly 2,500 persons blockaded the streets in front of the Springer West-Berlin headquarters that same evening and demonstrated against the publisher in 192

Reinhard Rauball, “Urteil des Landgerichtes Frankfurt (‘Brandstifterurteil,) vom 31. Oktober 1968,” in Aktuelle Dokumente:  Die Baader-Meinhof Gruppe (Berlin:  De Gruyter, 1972), 167–209. Here, 172. “Nachdem die vier Angeklagten wiederholt an Demonstrationen teilgenommen hatten, kamen sie zu dem Entschluß, daß ihre bisherigen Bemühungen angesichts der ‘bornierten Stumpfheit einer saturierten Konsumgesellschaft’ keinen Erfolg haben können.” Translations my own. Frustrations over this stark contrast loomed large in student movements at the time. See also Harun Farocki’s film White Christmas (1968), which plays a soundtrack of Bing Cosby singing “White Christmas” while showing images, on the one hand, of a family in West Germany celebrating Christmas and opening presents, while, on the other hand, cutting to shots of the bombing of Vietnam and the consequences of it on the civilian population. DFFB Archive, Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin. 193 Ulrike Meinhof, “Warenbrandhausstiftung,” konkret 14 (1968). APO Archive, Freie Universität Berlin. Reprinted in Die Würde des Menschen ist antastbar (Berlin:  Wagenbach, 1980), 153–6. In English, “Setting Fire to Department Stores,” Everybody Talks about the Weather, 244–9. 194 Peters 112–13. 195 This assassination attempt is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2, which focuses on media representations of student and social movements. 196 Spiegel special edition, Die wilden 68er, June 1988:  23. “Attentäter ist der 23 jährige Hilfsarbeiter Josef Bachmann . . . auch liest er, neben ‘Bild,’ gläubig die ‘Deutsche Nationalzeitung,’ in der am 22. März groß die Aufforderung stand:  ‘Stoppt Duschke jetzt! Sonst gibt es Bürgerkrieg.”

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riots that resulted in 400 injured and 2 dead. Across West Germany, an estimated 300,000 participated in the demonstrations in front of Springer offices and publishing plants including in Cologne, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Munich.197 Solidarity demonstrations took place at West German embassies around the world, including in Washington DC, London, Amsterdam, Bruxelles, Paris, Oslo, Vienna, Prague, and Belgrade, as well as at West German consulates in New York City, Milan, and Tel Aviv.198 Soon after the assassination attempt on Dutschke, the Emergency Laws (Notstandsgesetze) were passed in West Germany on May 30, 1968. Throughout the 1960s, the impending passage of the Emergency Laws had been at the forefront of student actions.199 The Emergency Laws permitted a temporary reduction of constitutional rights during a state of emergency and were thus a source of contention. Initial drafts of the West German constitution made no mention of a state of emergency. The Western Allies, however, stipulated that the constitution include a clause addressing what to do in a potential state of emergency before they would grant West Germany complete sovereignty. The West German government agreed and the laws were drafted in 1958, and revised in 1960 and 1963. Leftists—including unions, the SDS, and the extraparliamentary opposition—opposed the Emergency Laws, since they permitted infringements on constitutional rights. Mail and telephone communications, for example, could be intercepted. Meinhof wrote numerous articles against them.200 Demonstrations sprang up against the Emergency Laws. On May 11, 1968, around 10,000–15,000 persons took to the streets, departing from various cities and converging on Bonn, in opposition to the proposed laws.201 Teach-ins shut down the Free University in West-Berlin on May 20. A strike was called for on May 29, which 50,000 of the Metalworkers’ Union (IG Metall) in Munich and 120,000 in Cologne supported, with 10,000 workers in Frankfurt striking.202 According to Katsiaficas, “Hundreds of steel workers in Bochum went on a wildcat strike, as did 200 chemical

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Kraushaar puts the number at 11,000. Wolfgang Kraushaar, 1968:  Das Jahr, das alles verändert hat (Munich: Piper, 1998), 108–109. 198 Katsiaficas 51; Varon 41. 199 See also Nick Thomas, “Conspiracies and Counter-Conspiracies,” Protest Movements in 1960s West Germany, 87–106, esp. 87–93; and 183–200. 200 Cf. Ulrike Meinhof, “Gegen wen? Wider ein deutsches Notstandsgesetz”; “Notstandsgesetz 1.  Lesung,” in Deutschland, Deutschland unter anderem (Berlin:  Wagenbach, 1995), 49–55 and 74–6; and Ulrike Meinhof, “Große Koalition,” in Die Würde des menschen ist antastbar (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1980), 88–91. 201 Gerhard Bauß, Die Studentenbewegung der sechziger Jahre in der Bundesrepublik und Westberlin: Handbuch (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1977), 152. 202 Katsiaficas 52.

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workers and hundreds of Ford workers in Cologne.”203 The next day, as the legislation passed, protests took place nationwide and 100,000 people demonstrated in Bonn.204 These demonstrations brought together workers and students.205 As Peter Birke put it: “Already during the protests against the emergency laws in May 1968 there had been . . . collaborations between student and worker activists.”206 In contrast to other countries in Western Europe, such as France and Italy, where workers’ strikes had taken place throughout the 1960s, the number of worker uprisings in West Germany in the 1960s was relatively subdued: in Italy, 10,500 striking days occurred between 1958 and 1968; in France, 2,484 striking days occurred between 1958 and 1967; and in West Germany, 340 striking days occurred between 1958 and 1968. Prior to 1968, West German workers and student alliances were fairly rare.207 Thus, the demonstrations against the Emergency Laws marked a transition for leftist politics in forging this new alliance, which would grow in the last two years of the 1960s, heading into the APO’s splintering and the SDS’s end but also into such new cooperations. The Emergency Laws could only be passed through the 1966 Grand Coalition between the CDU and the SPD, which secured a majority of votes to ensure ratification on May 30, 1968. The passage of the Emergency Laws marked the increasingly conservative trajectory of the ruling parties. Domestic events of 1968, in sum, were marked by a divergence between left and right politics and an increase in left-wing and right-wing violence, as evidenced by Bachmann’s assassination attempt on Dutschke. The student movement argued that the latter was fomented by the corporate media and the state. Internationally, events continued to escalate as well. From January 5 until August 21, 1968, the Prague Spring took place—seeking increased democratic rights in Czechoslovakia, such as freedom of the press and more political parties to exist—until the Soviet Union stepped in and clamped down on what it perceived to be tendencies that deviated from its position and reduced its sphere of influence.208 Together with troops from four 203

Katsiaficas 52. Katsiaficas 52. 205 See also Bernd Gehrke and Gerd-Rainer Horn (eds), 1968 und die Arbeiter:  Studien zum “proletarischen Mai” in Europa (Hamburg: VSA, 2007). 206 “Bereits während der Proteste gegen die Notstandsgesetze im Mai 1968 hatte es eine . . . Zusammenarbeit zwischen studentischer und betrieblichen Aktivistinnen und Aktivisten gegeben.” Peter Birke, “Der Eigen-Sinn der Arbeitskämpfe: Wilde Streiks und Gewerkschaften in der Bundesrepublik vor und nach 1969,” 1968 und die Arbeiter, 53–75. Here, 64; translation my own. 207 Gerd Horn, “Arbeiter und ‘1968’ in Europa: Ein Überblick,” 1968 und die Arbeiter, 27–50. Here, 38. 208 See the articles in the section titled “Der ‘Prager Frühling’ und seine Niederschlagung,” in Die letzte Chance? 1968 in Osteuropa: Analysen und Berichte über ein Schlüsseljahr, Angelika Ebbinghaus (ed.) (Hamburg: VSA, 2008), 28–74. 204

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other Warsaw Pact countries—Bulgaria, East Germany, Hungary, and Poland—the Soviets invaded Prague on August 20, 1968.209 Seventy-two Czechoslovakians died in the resulting battles.210 The Prague Spring not only liberalized Prague and the Czech Republic during that time but also inspired activists in other Eastern European countries.211 Later that same year, on October 2, 1968, police killed demonstrators in Mexico City in what has become known as the Tlatelolco Massacre.212 Students and workers had been demonstrating for economic justice: while their basic daily needs went unmet, lavish amounts of money were being spent by the city’s government for the 1968 Summer Olympics. Six thousand to ten thousand workers, students and families were demonstrating for economic justice in La Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco area of Mexico City when tanks as well as armed military and police surrounded them. At dusk, the military and police, including rooftop snipers, began firing into the crowd, killing roughly 300 persons.213 Back in West Germany, on June 13, 1969, Baader, Ensslin, Proll, and Söhnlein were released from jail under an amnesty for political prisoners.214 While they awaited the court’s decision vis-à-vis their appeal of its earlier verdict, they lived in Frankfurt and worked with youth who had grown up in and ran away from state-run homes, so-called Apprentice Collectives. Their work was part of the “home campaign” (Heimkampagne), a broader movement initiated by the SDS, particularly in Frankfurt and West-Berlin, to release students from group homes, which were often repressive and abusive, and to offer more humane living arrangements. Meinhof had been 209

Stefan Karner, “Der kurze Traum des ‘Prager Frühlings’ und Moskaus Entscheid zu seinem Ende,” in Die letzte Chance? 1968 in Osteuropa: Analysen und Berichte über ein Schlüsseljahr (Hamburg: VSA, 2008), 28–44. Here, 28. 210 Kieran Williams, The Prague Spring and Its Aftermath:  Czechoslovak Politics 1968–1970 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1997), 158. 211 For more about the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia and uprisings elsewhere in eastern Europe, see Ebbinghaus. 212 In “The Tlatelolco Massacre,” researcher Kate Doyle of the National Security Archives argues on the basis of declassified documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act that the claims by the Mexican government to be shooting in self-defense were fabrications and furthermore that the CIA was involved. Kate Doyle, “The Tlatelolco Massacre,” National Security Archives Electronic Briefing Book, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/ NSAEBB99/index.htm. Posted October 10, 2003. Last accessed May 16, 2012. For the historic importance of these Olympics and of Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s demonstration of black pride, see Jules Boykoff, “1968 Olympics in Mexico City,” Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics (New York: Verso, 2016), 102–11. 213 See also Paco Ignacio Taibo II, 1968 (New York: Seven Stories, 2003); and Elena Poniatowska, Massacre in Mexico (New York: Viking, 1975). 214 Peters 120. For details about their visits of and work with persons in group homes, including setting up communes or collective homes for them, see Peters 123–30. Future RAF member Peter-Jürgen Boock first met Baader and Ensslin in this time, when he was living in a group home.

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engaged in similar work during this time. In 1969, she published a long article in konkret, “Stupid—Because Poor” (Doof—weil arm),215 which examined how students were deemed to be mentally handicapped and sent to special schools when what they lacked was not intellectual abilities but economic resources. At the time, Meinhof was working on the screenplay for Bambule, a film about a group home and school for girls.216 (“Bambule,” Meinhof had stated in a radio report in 1968, “means rebellion, resistance, counter-violence—efforts toward liberation.”)217 While the film thematized the authoritarian conditions at the home, it also emphasized the role of economic disparity in bringing the girls to the schools, leading to their inhumane treatment at the schools, and how they had few prospects upon leaving.218 In November 1969, the court rejected the arsonists’ appeal.219 They then appealed for clemency, but this appeal, too, was denied and on February 4, 1970, the four arsonists were ordered back to prison. Horst Söhnlein alone turned himself in and served his sentence; Baader, Ensslin, and Proll went underground and traveled to Paris, where Thorwald Proll’s sister Astrid Proll met them. Together, they stayed in the apartment of journalist Régis Debray, who was imprisoned in Bolivia.220 Thorwald Proll split from the group and 215 Ulrike Meinhof, “Doof  – weil arm,” konkret 5 (1969): 37; and konkret 6 (1969); 41. Reprinted in: Die Würde des Menschen ist antastbar (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1980), 173–84. 216 Ulrike Meinhof, Bambule: Fürsorge – Sorge für wen? (Berlin:  Wagenbach, 1971). See also Meinhof’s introduction to the volume. The film was to be aired on West German television channel ARD on May 24, 1970. After Meinhof assisted in springing Baader from jail and went underground, the broadcast was cancelled. The film was eventually shown in 1994, having become one of the best-known censored West German films. 217 Aust 52. 218 Not only were problems associated with special schools and group homes considered during this time: in 1968 in Heidelberg, West Germany, Dr. Wolfgang Huber established the Socialist Patients’ Collective (Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv, SPK), which argued that the medical establishment—including hospitals, doctors, and medicines—did not help but rather hindered patients’ well-being. The group argued that capitalism was the source of the patients’ lack of well-being and sought to redress it by living together communally. Dr.  Huber met with Baader and Ensslin during this time and provided them with a place to stay in February 1971. “From 1971 onwards . . . about a dozen people from within the sphere of the Socialists Patients’ Collective [became] a large part of the so-called ‘second generation’ of the RAF.” Stefan Aust, “Madmen to Arms!” in Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. (Oxford:  Oxford UP, 2009), 109–13. For more information, see SPK – Aus der Krankheit eine Waffe machen. Eine Agitationsschrift des Sozialistischen Patientenkollektivs an der Universität Heidelberg. JeanPaul Sartre, intro. (Munich: Trikont, 1972). 219 Peters 131; Aust 51; Varon 62. 220 After studying in France, Debray had taught political philosophy in Cuba. In January of 1967, Debray had published Revolution in the Revolution? Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America (New  York:  Grove, 1967), a study of militant strategies in Latin America, published in translation in French, English, Italian, and German. It was considered, along with Che Guevara’s study, by many to be a classic analysis of guerrilla strategy. Debray had gone to Bolivia to cover the armed struggle uprisings taking place there for the Mexican

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turned himself in, while Baader, Ensslin, and Astrid Proll continued on to Italy.221 In February of 1970, Baader, Ensslin, and Proll returned to West Germany. Baader and Ensslin, who had met Meinhof when she covered their trials and then interviewed Ensslin when she was imprisoned, stayed with Meinhof in WestBerlin for a while. They discussed the formation of urban guerrilla groups with Dieter Kunzelmann,222 who had been involved with the Munich group SPUR (the self-proclaimed West German wing of the Situationist International),223 Subversive Aktion,224 and the West-Berlin based Kommune 1,225 before becoming involved with the Central Council of the Roaming Hash Rebels (Zentralrat der herumschweifenden Haschrebellen). Established in 1969, the Hash Rebels encompassed the Tupamaros West-Berlin226 and

weekly Suceso and the Paris publishing house Maspero. He was arrested on April 20, 1967, and charged with having been part of Che Guevara’s guerrilla army. In November 1967, he was sentenced to thirty years. Almost six months after Debray’s arrest, on October 8, 1967, Che Guevara was captured in Bolivia and executed the next day. Jean-Paul Sartre insisted that Debray was arrested not for assisting Che Guevara but rather for publishing the study. After an international public campaign for his release, Debray was freed in 1970. He moved to Chile, where he interviewed Salvador Allende, who was later ousted from power in a CIAassisted coup on September 11, 1973. Régis Debray, The Chilean Revolution: Conversations with Salvador Allende (New York:  Pantheon, 1972). See also Régis Debray, Prison Writings (New York: Random House, 1973). 221 Astrid Proll, Pictures on the Run, 1967–1977 (New York: Scalo Press, 1998). 222 Dieter Kunzelmann, Leisten Sie keinen Widerstand! Bilder aus meinem Leben (Berlin: Transit, 1998), 127; Aribert Reimann:  Dieter Kunzelmann:  Avantgardist, Protestler, Radikaler (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009), 254. 223 For more about the role of the Situationist International’s theories in the late 1960s student movements in West Germany, see Chapter  2, as well as Wolfgang Dreßen and Eckhard Siepmann (eds), Nilpferd des höllischen Urwalds:  Situationist, Gruppe SPUR, Kommune I (Gießen:  Anabas, 1991); Mia Lee, “Umherschweifen und Spektakel:  Die situationische Tradition,” in Handbuch 1968:  Zur Kultur- und Mediengeschichte der Studentenbewegung, ed. Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (Stuttgart:  Metzler, 2007), 101–106; and Charity Scribner, “Buildings on Fire: The Situationist International and the Red Army Faction,” Grey Room 26 (2007): 30–55. 224 Alexander Holmig, “Die aktionistische Wurzeln der Studentenbewegung:  Subversive Aktion, Kommune I und die Neudefinition des Politischen,” in Handbuch 1968: Zur Kulturund Mediengeschichte der Studentenbewegung, 107–18; Frank Bröckelmann and Herbert Nagel (eds), Subversive Aktion: Der Sinn der Organisation ist ihr Scheitern (Frankfurt:  Neue Kritik, 2002). 225 Rainer Langhans, K1:  Das Bilderbuch der Kommune (Berlin:  Blumenbar, 2008); Christa Ritter and Rainer Langhans, Herz der Revolte:  Die Kommune 1 von 1967 bis 1969 (Innsbruck:  Hannibal, 2005); Ulrich Enzensberger, Die Jahre der Kommune 1: Berlin 1967– 1969 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2004); Rainer Langhans and Fritz Teufel, Klau mich (Berlin: Edition Voltaire, 1968). 226 The name refers to the Tupamaros Uruguay, a left-wing guerrilla group founded in Uruguay in 1965 to fight back against privatization and to improve deteriorating economic conditions. For more information about the Tupamaros, see Christina Gerhardt, “Narrating Terrorism:  Kristina Konrad’s Große Freiheit, Kleine Freiheit,” Questioning the RAF:  The

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Black Rats (Schwarze Ratten). Some members of the Hash Rebels—such as Michael “Bommi” Baumann, Ronald “Bernie” Fritzsch, and Ralf Reinders— subsequently joined the June 2 Movement.227 Although the Hash Rebels and the RAF coordinated a bank raid together in 1970, they mostly worked autonomously. On April 3, 1970, Baader was arrested again, after being pulled over by a police officer for speeding. Baader produced false identification papers but failed to answer questions about his identity correctly based on them, such as how many children he had. He was arrested and taken to Tegel prison in West-Berlin to serve the remainder of his original sentence. In a plot to spring Baader from jail, Meinhof requested permission to meet with Baader at the Institute for Social Studies in the West-Berlin district of Dahlem, claiming that they were planning to work together on a book about “young people on the fringe of society.” In support of her project, Meinhof produced a letter from the publishing house Klaus Wagenbach.228 A meeting between Baader and Meinhof was granted to take place on May 14, 1970, in the Institute’s library. While Baader and Meinhof met, their accomplices Irene Goergens and Ingrid Schubert arrived at the Institute, supposedly to conduct research on juvenile delinquents in the library. Two further masked accomplices—Ensslin and a male—arrived. Together, the four stormed the room in which Baader and Meinhof were meeting. After a melée in which librarian Georg Linke was shot and seriously wounded, all six quickly escaped out the window, thereby freeing Baader. Wanted posters immediately sprang up all over West Germany; Meinhof’s Bambule was pulled from airing on state television. On June 5, 1970, the

Politics of Culture, ed. Karin Bauer, a special issue, Seminar 47.1 (2011):  64–80; Thomas Fischer, “Die Tupamaros in Uruguay:  Das Modell der Stadtguerrilla,” in Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus, ed. Wolfgang Kraushaar, vol. 2 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006), 736– 50; and Alain Labrousse, Tupamaros: Urban Guerrilla in Uruguay, trans. Dinah Livingstone (London: Penguin, 1970). 227 For more information about the June 2 Movement, see Christina Gerhardt, “Narrating Terrorism:  Kristina Konrad’s Große Freiheit, Kleine Freiheit,” Questioning the RAF:  The Politics of Culture, ed. Karin Bauer, a special issue, Seminar 47.1 (2011):  64–80; as well as the original communiqués gathered in Der Blues:  Gesammelte Texte der Bewegung 2.  Juni (Dortmund: Schwarzer Stern, 2001); and the writings of former members:  Gabrielle Rollnik and Daniel Dubbe, Keine Angst vor Niemand:  Über die Siebziger, die Bewegung 2.  Juni und die RAF (Hamburg:  Edition Nautilus, 2003); Ralf Reinders and Ronald Fritzsch, Die Bewegung 2.  Juni:  Gespräche über Haschrebellen, Lorenz-Entführung, Knast (Berlin:  IDVerlag, 2003); Inge Viett, Nie war ich furchtloser (Hamburg:  Edition Nautilus, 1997); and Inge Viett, Einsprüche:  Briefe aus dem Gefängnis (Hamburg:  Edition Nautilus, 1996). Both Bommi Baumann and Till Meyer left the June 2 Movement and provided extensive information about its structure, organization, and members to the East German Ministry of State Security. Bommi Baumann, How It All Began (Munich:  Trikont, 1975); and Till Meyer, Staatsfeind. Erinnerungen (Berlin: Rotbuch, 2008). 228 Aust 59.

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communiqué announcing the formation of the Red Army Faction (RAF, Rote Armee Fraktion) was published in Agit 883.229 The persons involved with Baader’s freeing traveled to Jordan where they met up with a second group from West-Berlin, in order to train in guerrilla warfare at a PLO Al Fatah camp on the border of Syria and Jordan.230 In September of 1970, the group returned to West Germany, built a stockpile of arms, recruited new members, and planned bank holdups together with the Hash Rebels. On September 29, they robbed three banks simultaneously, seizing 220,000 West German Deutsch marks ($140,200). Shortly thereafter, on October 8, the first arrests took place at two of the RAF’s West-Berlin safe houses.231 Meanwhile, by 1970, the extraparliamentary opposition had split along various political fault lines. The SDS officially disbanded on March 21, 1970. The social movements of the late 1960s encompassed a broad spectrum of political influences and each included further splinter groups or factions, such as Leninist, Trotskyist, and Maoist factions within the communist strand. Eventually, the left split along different political lines. According to Lönnendonker and Fichter,232 the movement split into four main groups: (1) The German Communist Party (Deutsche Kommunistische Partei, DKP), established on September 25, 1968233; (2) the young Socialists (Jungsozialisten or Jusos), the SPD’s youth organization, which shifted to the left politically in 1969234; (3) the Socialist Bureau (Sozialistisches Büro, SB), a group established in 1969 that consisted mainly of the undogmatic Neo-Marxist left235; and (4) Marxist-Leninist groups, which established “KGruppen” (kommunistische Gruppen or communist groups), most of which were Maoist. Of these four main groups, the K-Gruppen were the most numerous in the 1970s. Author and 1960s activist Peter Schneider discusses how the majority of the extraparliamentary opposition, after its dissolution, joined K-groups236 or participated in group therapy.237 This splintering is thematically engaged in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Mutter Küsters’ Fahrt 229

Reprinted in “Die Rote Armee aufbauen:  Erklärung zur Befreiung Andreas Baaders vom 5.  Juni 1970,” in Rote Armee Fraktion:  Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF (Berlin:  ID-Verlag, 1997), 24–7. In English:  “Build the Red Army!” Projectiles for the People, 79–82. 230 The second group included Brigitte Asdonk, Hans-Jürgen Bäcker, Monika Berberich, Manfred Grashof, Horst Mahler, Michèle Ray, and Petra Schelm. 231 Brigitte Asdonk, Monika Berberich, Irene Goergens, Horst Mahler, and Ingrid Schubert were arrested. 232 Lönnendonker and Fichter, Kleine Geschichte der SDS, 11. 233 The DKP had 9,000 members at its founding. Its membership grew to 42,000 by 1978. 234 The Juso membership also increased in the early 1970s, reaching 300,000 by 1973. 235 Für eine neue sozialistische Linke:  Analysen, Strategien, Modelle, ed. Sozialistisches Büro (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1973). Oskar Negt was at the helm of the Socialist Bureau beginning in the early 1970s. For more about the Socialist Bureau, see its publication Neue Linke (New Left). 236 Schneider 336. 237 Schneider 349.

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zum Himmel (Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, 1975), where the two main political groups interested in a worker’s death are communists, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, anarchists.238 According to Varon, “Leftists flocked in droves between 1969 and 1973 into the rapidly proliferating Marxist-Leninist groups . . . There were in 1971 some 130 orthodox communist organizations, twenty Maoist groups and five Trotskyite parties, with a combined membership of 80,000.”239 In The Red Decade: Our Little German Cultural Revolution, 1967–1977, author and 1960s activist Gerd Koenen discusses the overlap, cooperation and tensions among, as well as the limitations of the various Maoist groups of the late 1960s and 1970s.240 A  further segment of the left decided to pursue armed struggle and went underground. To some extent, the social movement’s split in 1970 into K-groups or armed struggle groups was already evident at the International Vietnam Conference where the leaders of the SDS, as Gretchen Dutschke put it, “sat together for the last time.” The conference closed with a demonstration of 15,000 persons, carrying posters with images of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, Lenin and Trotsky, Mao Tse Tung and Hồ Chí Minh, chanting “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh” and “We are a small radical minority.” The action’s images and slogans referenced the various strands of communism extant at the time and influential on student movements. A cursory glance at the publishing lists from more mainstream publishers—such as Fischer and Rowohlt, to smaller independent presses, such as Edition Voltaire,241 Trikont Verlag,242 Wagenbach,243 and the 238 Fassbinder’s often overlooked Niklashauser Fart (The Niklashausen Journey, 1970)  and Rio das Mortes (1970) also grapple with 1968. See Christina Gerhardt, “Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975) in a Genealogy of the Arbeiterfilme,” Film Criticism 41.2 (2017); and Eric Rentschler, “Many Ways to Fight a Battle,” in The Use and Abuse of Cinema: German Legacies from the Weimar Era to the Present (New York: Columbia UP, 2015), 187–208. 239 Varon 67. See also Gerd Langguth, Die Protestbewegung der BRD, 1968–1976 (Cologne: Wissenschaft und Politik, 1976), 50. 240 Gerd Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 1967–1977 (Frankfurt:  Fischer, 2002). Koenen was part of the West German Communist League (Kommunistischer Bund Westdeutschland, KBW), a Maoist communist group established in 1973. 241 Edition Voltaire was cofounded in 1968 by Gudrun Ensslin’s ex-husband, Bernward Vesper. She had met and started a relationship with Andreas Baader in the summer of 1967. Vesper and Ensslin had had a son, Felix Ensslin, on May 13, 1967, who lived with Vesper after Ensslin’s arrest in April 1968. Edition Voltaire followed on the heels of Voltaire Flugschriften (pamphlets), which he had established in 1966. Ensslin and Vesper had previously cofounded a small press, Studio Neue Literatur, in 1963, which published politically focused literature. 242 Trikont Verlag was established in 1967 by SDS members Gisela Erler and Herbert Röttgen. Its name references the “Tricontinental,” the publication of OSPAAAL. In 1975, Trikont published Bommi Baumann’s Wie alles anfing (Munich: Trikont, 1975). 243 Wagenbach Verlag was established in 1964 and sought from early on to overcome divisions between East and West Germany by publishing, for example, the work of Wolf Biermann and Stephan Hermlin.

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short-lived Oberbaumpresse244—reveals not only the number of antiimperial revolutions taking place at the time but also the intense interest in learning about them in West Germany. Between 1960 and 1970, in short succession and generally soon after their initial publication, the following titles appeared in German: Kwame Nkrumah’s I Speak of Freedom245 and Africa Must Unite246; Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth247; Mao Tse Tung’s On Guerrilla Warfare248 and Little Red Book249; Malcolm X’s Autobiography250 and Malcolm X Speaks251; Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare252 Create Two, Three, Many Vietnams,253 and Bolivian Journal254; Régis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution255; Hồ Chí Minh’s Against American Aggression256; and Võ Nguyên Giáp’s People’s War. People’s Army257; and Amílcar Cabral’s The Weapon of Theory.258 These texts—just a handful of the plethora published during the decade—made students in

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The Oberbaumpresse was established in 1966 and closed in 1968. Kwame Nkrumah, Sprung über zwei Jahrtausende:  Unser Weg in die Freiheit (Düsseldorf: Econ-Verlag, 1963). Kwame Nkrumah was Ghanaian. He organized and achieved Ghanaian independence from British colonization in 1957, making it the first colony in Africa to declare independence. Nkrumah was born in Ghana and studied in Philadelphia, United States, prior to returning to Ghana. In the United States he met, was influenced by, and worked with Marcus Garvey, Trinidad American C. R. L. James, and Chinese American Grace Lee Boggs. He was also friends with and a supporter of Lumumba’s efforts toward independence in the Congo. 246 Kwame Nkrumah, Afrika muss eins werden (Leipzig: Koehler und Amelang, 1965). 247 Fanon, Die verdammten dieser Erde (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966). 248 Mao Tse Tung, Theorie des Guerillakrieges oder Strategie der dritten Welt (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1966). 249 Mao Tse Tung, Das rote Buch (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1967). 250 Malcolm X, Der schwarze Tribun: Eine Autobiographie (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1966). 251 Malcolm X, Schwarze Gewalt: Reden (Berlin: Edition Voltaire, 1968). 252 Che Guevara’s Partisanenkrieg went through numerous print runs, including Berlin: Deutscher Militärverlag, 1962; Cologne: Facit Verlag, 1966; Berlin: Wagenbach, 1968. 253 Che Guevara, Schaffen wir zwei, drei viele Vietnam (Berlin:  Oberbaumpresse, 1967). This volume went through two print runs in 1967. 254 Che Guevara, Bolivianisches Tagebuch, intro. Fidel Castro (Munich: Trikont Verlag, 1968). This volume went through three print runs in 1968. 255 Régis Debray, Revolution in der Revolution (Munich: Trikont, 1967). 256 Hồ Chí Minh, Gegen die amerikanische Aggression (Munich: Trikont, 1968). 257 Võ Nguyên Giáp, Volkskrieg. Volksarmee (Munich: Trikont, 1968). 258 Amílcar Cabral, Die Theorie als Waffe:  Der revolutionäre Befreiungskampf in den portugesischen Kolonien Afrikas (Berlin:  Oberbaumpresse, 1968). Cabral delivered “Theory as a Weapon” at the first OPSAAAL conference in Cuba in January 1966. Cabral was Guinean and founded the guerrilla group PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) in 1956. Bisseau was also working toward its independence, which was achieved on September 24, 1973, eight months after Cabral was assassinated, an action assisted by Portuguese agents on January 20, 1973. His life and work is also discussed in Chris Marker’s film Sans Soleil (1983). Cabral’s theories are explicitly referenced by the SDS working group on Africa. APO Archive, Freie Universität Berlin, SDS, Gruppe Berlin, Ausland, Sammlung Hannah Kröger, 1962–69. 245

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West Germany aware of ongoing anticolonial and anti-imperialist selfliberation and self-determination struggles worldwide. Beyond their international span, these texts encompass various strands of communism, from Soviet-style Marxism-Leninism to Trotskyism, from Mao Tse Tung’s Chinese communism to Cuban-style revolution. As a result of the authoritarian nature of Stalinist communism, a critique of it and alternatives to it emerged.259 From the outset of the Cold War, alternative forms of communism existed in theory and praxis. Just six days prior to the founding of East Germany on October 7, 1949, for example, Mao established the People’s Republic of China after decades of war, on October 1, 1949. In Eastern Europe, Yugoslavian President Tito had split with the Soviet Union early on in 1948.260 Debates about the pros and cons of the various forms of communism continued after Stalin’s death in 1953, as manifested by Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev’s “Secret Speech” of 1956 in which he denounced certain aspects of Stalin’s regime, the Sino-Soviet split, and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. As reprehensible campaigns of Stalinism261 and of Maoism262 came to light, the Cuban Revolution (1952– 59) provided a “third way.”263 In addition to the communist and socialist models, the worldwide selfliberation and self-determination movements, be they anticolonial or antiimperial, typically brought about change through war or revolution and much of it involved armed struggle. Thus, revolution was also at the forefront of discussions in social movements exemplified by the banner under which the International Vietnam Conference of 1968 (Figure 1.4) took place: the flag of the National Liberation Front for South Vietnam (NLF or Việt Cộng), inscribed with the words of the recently deceased Che Guevara264—“For the

259

See, for example, the work of British Marxist historian Edgar Palmer Thompson, the Socialist Register, the early years of the New Left Review, the Yugoslavian Praxis School, the French Situationists, the Italian operaísm and autonomism movements, as well as the aforementioned role of the Non-Aligned Movement. 260 A strand of Marxism within Yugoslavia critical of Stalinist communism was the Praxis School. See their journal Praxis (1964–74), and Mihailo Markovic and Robert S. Cohen, Yugoslavia:  The Rise and Fall of Socialist Humanism. A  History of the Praxis Group (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1975). 261 Information about the Soviet gulags, including the Great Purge (1937–38), started to circulate after the Second World War. See, for example, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (New York: Random House, 1963). 262 See, for example, the backlash against the Great Leap Forward (1958–61), the Anti-Rightest Campaign (1957–59), and the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). 263 Rudi Dutschke brought the discussion of political systems and revolution together in Rudi Dutschke, Ausgewählte und kommentierte Bibliographie des revolutionären Sozialismus von Karl Marx bis in die Gegenwart (Heidelberg:  Druck- und Verlagskollektive, 1969), citing as the “main theoreticians of the colonial revolution Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare:  Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Mao Tse Tung’s On Guerrilla Warfare.” 264 Che Guevara was executed in Bolivia on October 9, 1967.

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FIGURE 1.4 International Vietnam Conference at the Technical University in West-Berlin, February 17–18, 1968, Ullstein bild. © Getty Images.

victory of the Vietnamese Revolution, the obligation of every revolutionary is to create a revolution.”265 The quotation is from Che Guevara’s speech Create Two, Three, Many, Vietnams,266 which SDS leaders Rudi Dutschke and Gaston Salvatore267 had translated into German and published just the year prior to the conference.268 In his speech, Che Guevara explained the need for armed struggle in South 265

Lönnendonker and Fichter, Kleine Geschichte der SDS, 183. Che Guevara published the speech in the newly established Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL)’s magazine Tricontinental in April 1967. 267 Gaston Salvatore was Chilean and had emigrated to West Germany in 1965 through a fellowship of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, in order to study Political Science at the Free University. Gretchen Dutschke 147. He was the nephew of Salvador Allende, the Chilean president, who was democratically elected in 1970, and subsequently assassinated in a CIAassisted coup in 1973. 268 Che Guevara, Schaffen wir zwei, drei, viele Vietnam:  Brief an das Exekutivsekretariat von Ospaaal, trans. Gaston Salvatore and Rudi Dutschke (Berlin:  Oberbaumpresse, 1967). In English:  Che Guevara, Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution:  Writings and Speeches of Ernesto Che Guevara (New  York:  Pathfinder, 1987). The German version was published through the International Nachrichten- und Forschungsinstitut (INFI, International News and Research Institute), which was funded by Peter Weiss and Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. 266

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America and Africa, in order to fight off the meddling of the US government, economically and politically, and to create an alternative to First World capitalism.269 In the preface to their translation of Guevara’s text, Dutschke and Salvatore underscored that the situation was different in Western Europe and warned about a simplistic transfer of Guevara’s concepts. Others, such as Régis Debray, argued similarly. In Revolution in the Revolution, Debray stated: The armed revolutionary struggle encounters specific conditions on each continent, in each country . . . One may well consider it a stroke of good luck that Fidel [Castro] had not read the military writings of Mao Tsetung before disembarking . . . he could thus invent, on the spot and out of his own experience, principles of military doctrine in conformity with the terrain.270 Thus, for some, armed struggle made sense in a Third World revolutionary context attempting to liberate itself from colonization, war, or dictatorship but not in a First World democratic context. Others, by contrast, argued for its use in either context, if there were no other means by which to bring about change in the political system and in the economic conditions. Discussions about how best to organize politically and whether or not to use violence became increasingly divisive among the left in the late 1960s. After the dissolution of the SDS in 1970, many former members joined the SPD or the K-Groups. Between 1969 and 1973, about 100,000 persons joined the SPD.271 A  large number joined the various MarxistLeninist groups. Others continued extraparliamentary action through the Sponti movement, which contrasted its methods with Marxist-Leninist forms of organizing, by drawing instead on spontaneous, theatrical, and antiauthoritarian tactics.272 The Spontis, as well as others, became active in squatting movements. The women’s movement grew as feminists worked

269

See also Peter Weiss, Diskurs über die Vorgeschichte und den Verlauf des lang andauernden Befreiungskrieges in Vietnam als Beispiel für die Notwendigkeit des bewaffneten Kampfes der Unterdrückten gegen die Unterdrücker sowie über die Versuche der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika die Grundlagen der Revolution zu vernichten (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968). 270 Régis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution, trans. Bobbye Ortiz (New  York:  Monthly Review, 1967), 20. 271 Andrei Markovits and Philip Gorski, The German Left:  Red, Green and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993), 94. 272 Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Joschka Fischer were two of the key members of the Sponti movement. See also Pflasterstrand, the publication of the Frankfurt Spontis, as well as Geronimo, Feuer und Flamme:  Zur Geschichte und Gegenwart der Autonomen (Berlin:  IDVerlag, 1990). In English: Geronimo, Fire and Flames: A History of the German Autonomous Movement (Oakland: PM Press, 2012).

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on the repeal of paragraph 218, which outlawed abortion.273 And, of course, these movements were not mutually exclusive:  some were active in a combination of these movements.274 Additionally, Bürgerinitiativen (citizen’s action groups) took off in the 1970s, increasing in number from 1,000 to over 4,000 in 1975.275 These action groups often concentrated on environmental issues and formed the basis for the establishment of the West German Green Party in 1980. Some carried out “Der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen” (The long march through the institutions) advocated by Dutschke, which sought to achieve change from within institutions, for example, educational, juridical, and political, by pursuing careers as teachers and professors, lawyers, or as politicians. Finally, a portion of the leftist social movements, which was small yet determined, decided to pursue armed struggle—including the Red Army Faction, the June 2 Movement,276 the Revolutionary Cells,277 and Red Zora278—and dominated the headlines for the following decade.

273

On the women’s movement in Germany, see Ute Kätzel, Die 68erinnen: Porträt einer rebellischen Frauengeneration (Berlin:  Rowohlt, 2002); Kristina Schulz, Der lange Atem der Provokation. Die Frauenbewegung in Deutschland und Frankreich 1968–1979 (Frankfurt:  Campus Verlag, 2002). On abortion laws in Germany, see Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex:  The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950 (Oxford:  Oxford UP, 1997); and Myra Marx Ferree, Shaping Abortion Discourse:  Democracy and the Public Sphere in Germany and the United States (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2002). 274 For a discussion of how one political concern would sometimes eclipse the concerns of another, see also Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Outlaw Woman:  A Memoir of the War Years, 1960–1975 (Norman:  University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), which forms part of her autobiographical trilogy. On this particular issue, see also the review of the autobiographical trilogy:  Christina Gerhardt, “Headfirst into History:  Memoirist Lived through Poverty, Feminism, War,” San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, February 5, 2006, http://www.sfgate.com/ books/article/Headfirst-into-history-Memoirist-lived-through-2542077.php. Last accessed December 15, 2013. 275 George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics:  European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1997), 52. 276 The June 2 Movement was established in the winter of 1971 and dissolved on June 2, 1980. A portion of the June 2 Movement joined the RAF, some ceased their involvement in armed struggle, some went underground in the Middle East, and some were given asylum in East Germany, a topic engaged in Volker Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita (2000) and discussed in Chapter 5 of this volume. 277 The Revolutionary Cells (Revolutionäre Zellen) was founded around 1973. Unlike the RAF and the June 2 Movement, its members lived aboveground and had day jobs. In 1975, a group of women from the Revolutionary Cells carried out an attack on the Federal Court in Karlsruhe. For more information about both groups, see Früchte des Zorns. Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der Revolutionären Zellen und der Roten Zora (Berlin: ID Archiv, 1993). 278 In 1980, the Red Zora (Rote Zora), which had initially been part of the Revolutionary Cells, separated from the Revolutionary Cells. It consisted exclusively of women and, according to an interview conducted with them and published in the women’s journal Emma in 1984, carried out attacks to protest against Paragraph 218, genetic and reproductive technologies, sex tourism, and the situation of women.

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Previously, historians have often argued that the social movements of the late 1960s and the subsequent terrorist groups of the 1970s suffered from an overly idealistic sense of international solidarity. The way the argument runs, it sounds as though these students’ relationship to self-liberation and self-determination struggles going on elsewhere rested on little more than a poster of Che tacked to their wall or a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book resting on their bookshelf. Third World countries, their peoples, and their struggles, the argument goes, were a mere projection surface. Yet to the West German social and terrorist movements the anticolonial and anti-imperial wars that dominated Africa and Southeast Asia were not such distant or vague phenomena. Violent images of the atrocities were broadcast into family homes through the increasingly ubiquitous color television. Foreign students living in West Germany actively organized actions and forged alliances as well as working groups with West German students. The working groups sought to understand the history and economic interests motivating international relations and events. Publications—newspapers, articles, books—sharing information about the uprisings taking place worldwide abounded. In tandem with a growing international movement that was critical of and proposing alternatives to First World capitalism and Second World communism, the student and social movements grew in West Germany. As the social movements split and took up armed struggle, the relationship to the Third World struggles and these struggles themselves shifted. Telling the history out of which the Red Army Faction and other terrorist groups emerged, and returning this international history to it, allows different questions to emerge. Was this international solidarity perceived or real? What role did the difference in context make for the political methods used? How did the Third World struggles shift over time, that is, between the 1960s and the 1970s? How, in turn, did the responses to them change? How were international relations depicted in re-presentations of the groups? Domestically, West Germany’s fascist past as well as questions about how to work through this past and to what extent West Germany denazified shaped the subsequent social movements. Added to it were the nascent West Germany’s attempts to define its democracy. While some fixated on parliamentary democracy, others focused on democratic rights:  such as the right to protest and a thriving media, unimpeded by monopoly. The social movements were also increasingly nervous about curtailments of civil liberties, for example, through the Emergency Laws. These domestic tensions predate laws that were passed over the course of the 1970s, as the newly established democracy sought to steel itself against both domestic and international terrorism. Recasting the international and domestic history out of which the Red Army Faction emerged does not undo the RAF’s missteps and mistakes, but it allows a different framework—international and domestic—to come

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to the fore, one that reframes the RAF’s failures and the prehistory of West Germany’s 1968 and subsequent era of terrorism from 1970 to 1998, and casts equal light on failures and reprehensive uses of power concurrently extant elsewhere at the time. Furthermore, this historical backdrop allows answers to emerge to the question of why the RAF consistently reappears in media.

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2 “It says here”: Print Media and Social Movements in West Germany, 1967–72

I would have taken exception, were it my place to [the] adjective “inflammatory” applied wholesale to “new Left” literature outside the context of equally inflammatory ideology displayed in, say Reader’s Digest with its historically inflammatory cold war fury or odd language about “dope fiends”; or in NY Daily News which in editorials has proposed atombombing China counting 200 million persons at their own estimate as reasonable; or for that matter the

This chapter was generously funded by a Junior Research Grant from the Fulbright Commission (2007–2008), which permitted archival research to be conducted at the Hamburg Institut für Sozialforschung (Hamburg Institute for Social Research) and by an appointment as postdoctoral fellow for the Berlin Program at the Freie Universität Berlin (2006–2007) as well as a DAAD Faculty Research Grant (2011), which funded research at the archive of the Ausserparlamentarische Opposition (Extraparliamentary Opposition) at the Free University in Berlin, Germany. Previous versions of this chapter were presented as guest lectures at New York University’s Deutsches Haus (2012), the CUNY Graduate Center (2012), the University of Antwerp (2010), and Temple University (2010); as papers at the German Studies Association (2010, 2007); and at “The Establishment Responds” conference, Heidelberg University (2007). I  thank Martin Klimke, Joachim Scharloth, and Kathrin Fahlenbrach for their invitation to present my work in the latter context. Unless otherwise indicated, translations throughout this chapter are my own.

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New York Times whose business-as-usual reportage in this era of planetary ecological crisis occasionally inflames my own heart to fantasies of arson. Be that as it may it’s a minor quibble with your text. Merely to say that I find “aboveground” language as often inflammatory as I find “New Left” underground rhetoric, as [would] W.C. Fields. —ALLEN S. GINSBERG, LETTER TO THOMAS FLEMING, JANUARY 30, 19701

The “long sixties” (roughly 1957–72) was at once responsible for the democratization of West Germany and simultaneously the implementation of its most repressive laws and agencies.2 While the 1962 Spiegel Affair, which led to a crisis in Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s government,3 is typically cited as leading to and marking the emergence of a new public sphere in West Germany, the relationship between the media and “1968” sealed a shift. Between 1967 and 1977, controversy existed in West Germany about the representation of social movements in corporate media in general and in print media published and owned by the Springer publication house in particular.4 At the beginning of this decade, on June 2, 1967, police officer

1

Cited by John McMillian, Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), 9–10. Original letter: PEN American Center Records, Rare Books and Special Collections Library, Princeton University. McMillian also cites The Nation editor and publisher Victor Navasky, who once made the point—“too easily forgotten” according to McMillian—that “it is part of the ideology of the center to deny that is has an ideology.” Victor Navasky, A Matter of Opinion (New York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 269. 2 The laws included the passage of the Notstandsgesetze (Emergency Laws, 1968)  and Die Grundsätze zur Frage der verfassungsfeindlichen Kräfte im öffentlichem Dienst (Basic Principles on the Question of Anti-Constitutional Personnel in the Public Service). These laws are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3. 3 Minister of Defense Franz Josef Strauss (CSU) had ordered the arrest of Conrad Ahlers, a journalist who had penned an article critical of the Bundeswehr (the German military) that appeared in Spiegel, as well as its editor, Rudolf Augstein, and two editors-in-chief and had had the offices of Spiegel and of numerous of its journalists searched. As a result of these actions, their motivations, and lying under oath, Strauss was forced to resign. 4 Many of these articles have been reprinted in the two-volume catalog accompanying the KunstWerke Museum’s exhibit on the RAF: Klaus Biesenbach (ed.), Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Die RAF (Berlin: Steidl/KW, 2005). On the issue of media representations of the student movements, see also Bernd Sösemann, “Die 68er Bewegung und die Massenmedien,” in Mediengeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, ed. Jürgen Wilke (Bonn:  Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 1999), 672–97; Wolfgang Kraushaar, “1968 und Massenmedien,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 41 (2001):  317–47; Stuart J. Hilwig, “The Revolt against the Establishment: Students Versus the Press in West Germany and Italy,” in 1968:  The World Transformed, ed. Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 1998),

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Karl-Heinz Kurras shot and killed student Benno Ohnesorg in West-Berlin during a demonstration against the Shah of Iran’s visit to West Germany and his regime’s repressive policies.5 At the end of this turbulent decade, the kidnapping and murder of industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer and the deaths of the Red Army Faction (RAF) cofounders Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe in Stammheim maximum security prison on October 18, 1977, marked the end of the RAF’s first generation and of its first wave of armed struggle. Although the events themselves fueled discussion, the representations of them in media did as well. As Todd Gitlin famously argued in The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left,6 the media played a decisive role in “framing” or shaping depictions of the New Left in the United States. In West Germany, the media of the Springer press, participating in a consensus-oriented framework, came under scrutiny by the federal government for its media monopoly and under criticism from student movements and intellectuals for its skewed depictions of them and their actions. Aware early on of the role the media played in shaping the reception of events, West German student activists and groups, such as Dieter Kunzelmann and Gruppe SPUR (SPUR Group), drawing on theories of the French Situationist International, for example, the concept of détournement, used the media in order to subvert (détourner) its message and relay an alternate one. In this way, the alternative media forms as much a history of the 1960s as the corporate media. Read together, they tell the story of competing narratives about 1960s politics. For this reason, this chapter considers both corporate and alternative media representations of student and social movements in the late 1960s.7 The discourse surrounding these representations resurfaced in debates about print media depictions of the RAF in the 1970s.8

321–49; Michael A. Schmidtke, “ ‘1968’ und die Massenmedien  – Momente europäischer Öffentlichkeit,” in Europäische Öffentlichkeit:  Transnationale Kommunikation seit dem 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Jörg Requate and Martin Schulze-Wessel (Frankfurt: Campus, 2002), 273–94. 5 Since the Shah of Iran was brought to power by the CIA-assisted toppling of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, the demonstrations expressed opposition not only to his regime’s repressive politics and actions but also to the international interests that were implicated in bringing him to power. 6 Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 7 As literary critic Morris Dickstein put it vis-à-vis the US context: “The history of the sixties was written as much in the Berkeley Barb as in the New York Times.” Cited by McMillian xiv. 8 Hanno Balz, Von Terroristen, Sympathisanten und dem starken Staat. Die öffentliche Debatte über die RAF in den 70er Jahren (Frankfurt:  Campus Verlag, 2008); “Throwing Bombs in the Consciousness of the Masses:  The Red Army Faction and Its Mediality,” in Media and Revolt: Strategies and Performances from the 1960s to the Present, ed. Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Erling Sivertsen, and Rolf Werenskjold (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 267–82.

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Student Protest Movements and Mass Media (1967–68) A cursory glance at a range of corporate print media’s coverage of events in 1967 shows articles and accompanying press photographs, frequently covering struggles the world over9: Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China10; riots against Franco’s dictatorship in Spain11; marches against General Suharto in Indonesia12; civil rights and black power movements in the United States13; struggles in Yemen related to Britain’s turnover of power; demonstrations in Warsaw, Poland14; uprisings in the buildup to Rafael Caldera’s election in Venezuela15; repression under José Sarney’s 9

The advent of television in private homes over the course of the 1950s and 1960s played a key role in bringing images of events taking place worldwide to viewers in West Germany. Most fiction films thematizing the Red Army Faction include sequences with viewers watching news on television, underscoring its role in shaping both the era’s politics and the responses of viewers to them. Cf. Uli Edel’s Baader Meinhof Complex (2008), Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation (1979), the codirected Germany in Autumn (1978), and Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975), to name only a few. 10 “Wer ist wer in China? Eine Übersicht über die derzeitige Machtkonstellation in Maos Kulturrevolution,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 23, 1967, 5; and “Mao Tse-Tungs Generalangriff auf die Partei – Eine dokumentarische Analyse,” FAZ, January 31, 1967, 11; Wolfgang Shamoni, “Die Roten Garden und die Minderheit,” Die Zeit, February 10, 1967, 28. Shamoni discusses not only the Cultural Revolution in China but also Chinese students in Paris; “Mao Bibel bald auch in deutscher Sprache,” Die Welt, March 11, 1967. The article states that a translation of Mao’s Little Red Book into German is underway; and the English, French, and Japanese editions of the book, which has become a bestseller, are currently out of print. “Die SED über China,” FAZ, April 18, 1967, 11; “Studieren in Peking,” FAZ, April 27, 1967, 24. 11 “Am Scheideweg zwischen Diktatur und Demokratie – Was steckt hinter der Unruhe in den Universitäten und Fabriken?,” Die Welt, February 2, 1967, 28; “Spanische Studenten werden von Militärgerichten abgeurteilt,” FAZ, February 23, 1967; Richard Aschenborn, “Franco bleibt hart gegen Studenten – nach der Universität von Madrid schließt nun auch die von Barcelona ihre Tore,” Sueddeutsche Zeitung, March 2, 1967, 29; “Studenten auf den Barrikaden  – Demonstrationen in Madrid für einen freien Studentenverband,” SZ, April 14, 1967. 12 “Die Studenten Indonesiens lächeln und marschieren,” Die Welt, February 2, 1967, 28; “VDS protestiert gegen indonesische Botschaft,” SZ, March 21, 1967, 68; “Studentenverband protestiert bei der indonesischen Botschaft,” SZ, March 22, 1967, 69. According to this article, “Der Verband deutscher Studentenschaften (VDS) hat bei der indonesischen Botschaft in Bonn gegen den angeblichen politischen Zwang protestiert, dem die rund 1200 indonesischen Studenten in der Bundesrepublik durch die Botschaft ausgesetzt sei. Die Botschaft hatte kürzlich die indonesischen Studenten ebenfalls schriftlich aufgefordert, ihre Haltung zum Kommunismus bekanntzugeben und Kommilitonen zu bespitzeln.” 13 “Schweigenmarsch gegen Terror,” FAZ, March 2, 1967, discusses the murder of African American civil rights activist Wharlest Jackson. “In einem Schweigemarsch haben am Dienstag 1600 Farbige in Natchez (Mississippi) gegen die Ermordung des farbigen Bürgerrechtkämpfers Wharlest Jackson protestiert.” “Er was das 83. Opfer der amerikansichen Bürgerrechtsbewegung seit 1951.” 14 “Sieben Fakultäten in Warschau geschlossen wurden,” SZ, April 1, 1967. 15 Günter Friedländer, “Spürbare Unruhe an den Universitäten – Politisierung der Studenten und veraltete Lehrmethoden schaffen Krisenherde in vielen Ländern” “der Marsch richte sich ‘nicht nur’ gegen den Krieg in Vietnam,” Die Welt, May 3, 1967.

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dictatorship in Brazil16; Zengakuren student uprisings in Tokyo, Japan17; student protests against the military coup in Greece18; and repression in Iran.19 Press coverage of domestic events regularly focused on and inflamed public sentiment against the social movements, especially in the buildup to the June 2, 1967, police killing of Benno Ohnesorg. Articles with inflammatory headlines insinuated that the demonstrations of the Socialist German Students’ Union (SDS, Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund),20 which had organized solely nonviolent direct actions, were bordering on legality. In the post-fascist era, Article 8 of the Western allied-drafted West German constitution or Basic Law (Grundgesetz) guaranteed that “all Germans shall have the right to assemble peacefully and unarmed without prior notification or permission.”21 Yet quoting politicians—often of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU, Christlich Demokratische Union)—in their headlines, the press and politicians used rhetoric that suggested more was at hand. Springer-owned Die Welt, for example, quoted CDU parliamentarian Berthold Martin, who stated the “SDS moves at the outer edges of the constitution”—without ever substantiating the assertion.22 Jürgen Wohlrabe, head of the West-Berlin Junge Union (the CDU-affiliated student group), demanded a parliamentary investigation be launched to “shed light on the events taking place at the Free University and to reveal the anti-democratic aims of the SDS.”23 In these ways, the media and conservative politicians put 16 “Die Unruhe geht von den Universitäten aus  – Polizei entdeckt revolutionäre Gruppen  – Agitation gegen den EWG-Beitritt,” Die Welt, February 10, 1967, 35. “In Sesto bei Bilbao fielen die ersten Warnschüsse gegen demonstrierende Arbeiter.” This article discusses the cooperation of workers and students. “Unruhe der Studenten greift um sich – Verkehr in Rio blockiert – Presse kritisiert die Polizei,” Die Welt, April 3, 1968. 17 “Studenten-Krawalle in Tokio,” FAZ, September 15, 1967, 214; “Studentenunruhen in Tokio,” SZ, September 15, 1967. 18 Karl Kerber, “Gründe und Hintergründe des Putsches  – Gab es eine unmittelbare kommunistische Gefahr in Griechenland?” FAZ, May 8, 1967. For then concurrent engagements with Greece, presenting how it was interwoven with anti-communist sentiments, see also Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s second feature film Katzelmacher (1969), in which a Greek guest worker arrives in a Munich apartment building and its residents unleash xenophobic and anti-communist sentiments, verbally and physically. 19 Hans Baumann, “Persien lebt nicht von Öl allein,” Die Welt, May 29, 1967, 5; “Kiesinger sagt dem Schah weiter Wirtschaftshilfe zu,” FAZ, May 29, 1967; Heinz Grossmann, “Die Jubelperser  – Neue Methoden, Meinungen zu behindern werden offenbar,” Die Zeit, June 30, 1967, 19; “Drohen Persern Repressalien im Iran? Beim Schahbesuch Vermerke in Pässe eingetragen,” Die Welt, July 14, 1967. “Die in der Bundesrepublik lebenden Perser, die die Regierung des Schahs ablehnen, müssen damit rechnen, daß sie bei ihrer Rückkehr nach Persien zur Rechenschaft gezogen werden.” 20 No relation to the US-based Students for a Democratic Society or SDS. 21 http://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/rechtsgrundlagen/grundgesetz/index.html. Last accessed July 12, 2012. 22 “Martin: SDS bewegt sich am Rande der Verfassung,” Die Welt, April 1, 1967. 23 “Junge Union fragt nach dem SDS,” FAZ, April 14, 1967.

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into question the constitutionality of nonviolent demonstrations, suggesting that it was not an Extraparliamentary Opposition (Außerparlamentarische Opposition or APO, as the loose cluster of social movements in late 1960s West Germany was known) but rather an anti-parliamentary opposition.24 These articles exemplified holdovers of the practice of “consensus journalism” dominant in West Germany in the 1950s. At the heart of consensus journalism, as historian Christina von Hodenberg argues, “lay the idea that the function of mass media was to foster social and political consensus. This consensus in turn was meant to stabilise the state, which was regarded as a value in itself. Since the media was to serve the interests of the state . . . ‘consensus journalists’ promoted broad co-operation with governmental institutions, shied away from conflict.”25 While the abovecited headlines did not shy away from conflict, indeed were often excoriating, they did exhibit a support for and a cozy relationship with the government. The media of the far right drew more intensely on anti-communist rhetoric, manifested, for example, in its frequent use of the word “red” in headlines. The tone found in headlines of 1960s West German print media underscored the deeply divided Cold War discourse. But the right-wing anti-communist rhetoric also had a tenor specific to German history. The tone harked back to the fascist era, which—since its outset—had witnessed considerable tensions between the communist and fascist parties.26 Additionally, the word “red” was often coupled with “terror.”27 As early as 24 Meike Vogel, “ ‘Außerparlamentarisch oder antiparlamentarisch’ Mediale Deutungen und Bennungskämpfe um die APO,” in Neue Politikgeschichte, ed. Ute Frevert and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2005), 140–65. 25 Christina von Hodenberg outlines that at press conferences throughout the 1950s, journalists shied away from asking challenging questions and that the chancellor rarely attended but that Chancellor “Adenauer’s ‘chats over tea’ (Teegespräche) or becoming a member of the Deutsche Pressclub, where high-ranking members of the Adenauer administration socialised with Bonn journalists” mattered. Christina von Hodenberg, “Mass Media and the Generation of Conflict:  West Germany’s Long Sixties and the Formation of a Critical Public Sphere,” Contemporary European History 15.3 (2006):  367–95. Here, 379–80. The relationship between the government and corporate media is examined in detail in Chapter 3, which focuses on Heinrich Böll’s novel The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1972) and the eponymous filmic adaptation of it, directed by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta. 26 For example, shortly after the founding of the Weimar Republic, right-wing Freikorps members assassinated Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, cofounders of the Spartakusbund (Spartacist League), a forerunner of the Communist Party of Germany. Thomas D. Grant, Stormtroopers and the Crisis in the Nazi Movement: Activism, Ideology and Dissolution (London: Routledge, 2004), 30–4; Richard Bessel, “Germany from War to Dictatorship,” in Twentieth-Century Germany:  Politics, Culture and Society, 1918–1990, ed. Mary Fulbrook (London:  Arnold, 2001), 11–35, here, esp. pp. 32–3; and Jill Stephenson, “The Rise of the Nazis:  Sonderweg or Spanner in the Works?,” Twentieth-Century Germany, 77–98, see esp. pp. 84–5. 27 The 1975 film The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum offers a sarcastic commentary on the media’s penchant for this coupling: while the main character, Katharina Blum, stands accused of aiding a terrorist, one of the main characters, Trude Blorna, is called “Trude the red” for her red hair but also to insinuate she is a communist or socialist.

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1965, the National-Zeitung, a right-wing extremist weekly newspaper, argued that “red students terrorized the Free University of Berlin.”28 A  year later, another National-Zeitung headline stated, “A Scandal for Berlin: Free University Allows Itself to Be Terrorized by Red Provos and Anarchists. Withdraw Funding for Pseudo-Academic Radicalinskis.”29 Bringing pre-fascist era revolutions and Cold War tensions together with the student movements, the subtitle called the student movement a “pure Bolshevik Terror.” The article argued that “today, a minority of more or less red-tinted students dominate most of their cohorts at the Free University.”30 In 1968, just a couple of months before the assassination attempt on SDS leader Rudi Dutschke, a National-Zeitung headline demanded “Break Dutschke’s Terror! Stop the Red Bandit!”31 A  debate surrounding this particular right-wing publication reemerged after the assassination attempt on Dutschke. Countless examples exist pointing to a fixation on the threat of communism often coupled with an accusation of terrorism. In the 1960s, but particularly after the events of June 2, 1967, and the attack on Dutschke on April 11, 1968, the corporate media of the Springer press became a central issue for leftist activists, forming the focal point of teach-ins, demonstrations, riots, and, eventually, a bomb attack. Although the reasons for criticism of the Springer press were numerous, two main concerns consistently reemerged and on the part of not only the students but also the West German government: (1) its monopoly, and (2) its accuracy or tone. During the 1960s, Springer held a monopoly on the West German print media.32 In 1967 and 1968, two commissions—the Michel Commission and the Günther Commission—were charged with investigating the West German media industry for monopoly. The Michel Commission assessed the competitiveness of print, radio, television, and film. According to

28

Gerd Hansen, “Rote Studenten terrorisieren die Freie Universität Berlin,” National-Zeitung, July 30, 1965, 7. 29 Felix M. Preuss, “Eine Schande für Berlin: Freie Universität läßt sich von roten Provos und Anarchisten terrorisieren. Stipendienentzug für pseudoakademische Radikalinskis,” NationalZeitung, December 30, 1966, 4. 30 Preuss 4. 31 “Brecht Dutschkes Terror! Stoppt die roten Banditen!” National-Zeitung, February 18, 1968, 1. 32 Von Hodenberg takes issue with the fixation on Springer, pointing out that Springer had a monopoly on the West-Berlin but not the West German market and thus was not representative of West Germany as a whole. While the Michel Commission supports the former argument, the fact that Springer’s monopoly led to two government commissions and that student protests against Springer were protracted days-long events, nationwide, and attended by tens of thousands makes Springer perhaps not “representative of West Germany as a whole” but certainly the predominant mass media which the government investigated and against which the student movements and competing media rallied. In short, no other prominent publication

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the findings of the 180-page Michel Commission, Springer publications accounted for close to 70 percent of the West-Berlin press and 30 percent of West Germany’s daily newspaper market.33 The Günther Commission was charged with investigating whether a concentration or monopoly threatened the freedom of opinion and press, guaranteed by the constitution in West Germany, and the economic survival of presses.34 At the time, Springer’s newspapers included, among others, the daily Die Welt and its Sunday edition, Die Welt am Sonntag; as well as the West-Berlin–based dailies BZ and Berliner Morgenpost, and the Sunday edition, BZ am Sonntag; and the nationally disseminated tabloid BILD and its Sunday edition, Bild am Sonntag. Springer was also trying to gain a foothold in television, which, among others, then journalist and future RAF member Ulrike Meinhof criticized in an article titled “Springer-Fernsehen,”35 published in the leftist journal konkret.36 As a result of the Günther Commission, Springer sold a third of its periodicals.37 Aside from the issue of the Springer press’s monopoly, critics also accused it of yellow journalism, charging it with providing one-sided, distorted, or flat out untruthful coverage. In conjunction with US Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s April 6, 1967 visit to West-Berlin, the Kommune 1 (K1) staged an action or Happening.38 The tone and the media’s mischaracterizing response was a foretaste of what was to be launched on activists soon thereafter. was similarly the focus of such government scrutiny, nationwide demonstrations, or criticism by public intellectuals. Von Hodenberg 386. 33 “Springer Berlin Monopol,” Die Zeit, April 26, 1968. 34 Peter J. Humphreys, “Press Concentration in Western Europe,” in Mass Media and Media Policy in Western Europe (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996), 66–110. Here, 95. See also Peter J. Humphreys, Media and Media Policy in West Germany: The Press and Broadcasting since 1945 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). 35 Ulrike Meinhof, “Springer-Fernsehen,” konkret 4 (1965):  3; reprinted in Deutschland Deutschland unter anderem (Berlin:  Wagenbach, 1995), 80–2. For more analysis of public television’s role in representing West Germany’s “1968,” see Todd Goehle, “Challenging Television’s Revolution: Media Representations of 1968 Protest in West German Television and Tabloids,” in Media and Revolt: Strategies and Performances from the 1960s to the Present, ed. Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Erling Siverts, and Rolf Werenskjold (New York:  Berghahn, 2014), 217–33. 36 According to Röhl, the paper was financed by East Germany until 1964, motivated in part by the 1956 ban of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD, Kommunistische Partei Deutschland) and an attempt to continue to reach sympathizers in West Germany. See also Klaus Rainer Röhl, Fünf Finger sind keine Faust (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1974). 37 Schlussbericht der Pressekommission des Bundestages, July 3, 1968. Writing about the US context, John McMillian remarks on a similar trend:  “by the early 1960s, newspaper ownerships, once diverse, had become highly concentrated, mainly because newspapers were such valuable properties . . . By 1962 twelve managements controlled one-third of the circulation of newspapers in the United States. Large cities that could earlier boast of having multiple newspapers began to have only one or two.” McMillian 8. 38 Dieter Kunzelmann, Leisten Sie keinen Widerstand! Bilder aus meinem Leben (Berlin: Transit, 1998), 63–5.

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Humphrey visited Schloß Charlottenburg, close to the K1’s residence. Meanwhile, the police raided the K1 building and arrested eleven, stating they feared an assassination attempt. While the Springer papers asserted “Assassination Attempt on Humphrey Foiled by Criminal Police”39 and that “An Attack Consisting of Bombs and Highly Explosive Chemicals”40 had been prepared, it quickly emerged that, in fact, the communards had nothing more than pudding cakes, consisting of flour and blancmange, to throw at Humphrey. The event became known as the “Pudding Bombing Assassination Attempt” (Pudding Bomben Attentat). That the “Pudding Bombing Assassination Attempt” revealed how the media helps to veil or fuel political power structures was not incidental. Dieter Kunzelmann, a cofounder of K1, was involved in the “Pudding Bombing.” His theories gleaned from the Paris-based Situationist International (SI) deeply influenced political actions in West-Berlin. In 1959, during the early days of the SI, Kunzelmann had hitchhiked to Paris, although at the time he did not yet meet with members of SI. In 1960, he hitchhiked to Munich where he became part of the Gruppe SPUR.41 The Munich artist group SPUR worked with the SI between 1958 and 1962, inspiring Kunzelmann’s attempt to bring political actions and theater together.42 In the fall of 1963, Kunzelmann cofounded the Subversive Aktion.43 The group had branches in various West German cities, including Munich, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Tübingen, and West-Berlin. Its members included numerous future SDS leaders, among others, Dutschke, Rodolphe Gasché, Günter Maschke,44 and Bernd Rabehl. In July of 1966, thirteen activists from Munich and West-Berlin, including Kunzelmann, Rabehl, Gretchen  Dutschke, and Rudi Dutschke, gathered in a villa on Lake Kochel, Bavaria, for a political strategizing meeting.45

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“Attentat auf Humphrey von Kripo vereitelt,” Berliner Morgenpost, April 6, 1967. “Mit Bomben und hochexplosiven Chemikalien, mit sprengstoffgefüllten Plastikbeuteln  – von den Terroristen ‘Mao-Cocktail’ genannt – und Steinen haben Berliner Extremisten einen Anschlag auf den Gast unserer Stadt vorbereitet.” Bild, April 6, 1967. 41 Kunzelmann 15–32. See also Aribert Reimann, Dieter Kunzelmann: Avantgardist, Protestler, Radikaler (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2009). 42 Mia Lee, “Umherschweifen und Spektakel: Die situationistische Tradition,” in Handbuch zur Kultur- und Mediengeschichte der Studentenbewegung, ed. Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (Stuttgart:  Verlag Metzler, 2007), 101–106; and Alexander Holmig, “Die aktionistischen Wurzeln der Studentenbewegung. Subversive Aktion, Kommune I und die Neudefinition der Politischen,” Handbuch zur Kultur- und Mediengeschichte der Studentenbewegung, 107–18. 43 For more about the Subversive Aktion, see Kunzelmann 25–44; Franck Böckelmann and Herbert Nagel, Subversive Aktion: Der Sinn der Organisation ist ihr Scheitern (Berlin:  Neue Kritik, 1976). 44 Günter Maschke was a member of the Tübingen Subversive Aktion and also married to RAF cofounder Gudrun Ensslin’s sister, Johanna. 45 The Kochel meeting formed the high point of collaborations among Dutschke, Kunzelmann, Rabehl, and others. The following year, in May of 1967, the SDS and the K1 split. 40

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The group decided to concentrate future actions in West-Berlin. The city rested at the Cold War front lines and was home to Springer media empire’s headquarters. “When I became aware of what possibilities would open themselves up, in the context of the hysteria around West-Berlin as a frontline city and the extraordinary media landscape,” Kunzelmann said, “[I realized] Berlin was ripe for a spectacle.”46 Additionally, he stated: The decision for Berlin came about because the city had proven itself through previous actions—for example the demonstration against Tchombé—to be an ideal paradise for provocateurs. In Berlin, the demonstration against Tchombé and the successful breakthrough of the police cordon and blockade at Schöneberg led to enormous headlines. The media’s resonance was excellent; the Springer press took the smallest leftist action as a reason for disruptive coverage and baiting.47 Discussing his work with SPUR, Kunzelmann continued, “For such [media] attentions, we had developed a certain sensitivity. The experiences of the SPUR trials had taught me how to use media, so that—despite its negatively tinted reportage—it helps to spread precisely those ideas that it actually wants to suppress or silence.”48 At the end of the summer of 1966, Kunzelmann moved to West-Berlin and cofounded Kommune 1. The media actions of K1 drew on the SI concept of détournement, in order to call attention to how the media helps to veil (or reveal) machinations of political power structures.49 One such spectacle was the aforementioned “Pudding Bombing.” Other actions included the July 6, 1967, trial of K1 cofounders Fritz Teufel and Rainer Langhans, who used the legal proceedings to put into question and mock the judicial system. (The use of performativity at legal proceedings would also mark the trials of the RAF’s first generation.) In these ways, the SI theories, which the SDS and K1 drew on, combined performance and actions to political ends, utilizing the media.50 Just a few months after the “Pudding Bombing Assassination Attempt,” events related to the June 2, 1967, demonstration against the Shah of Iran’s 46

Kunzelmann 49. Kunzelmann 49. 48 Kunzelmann 49. 49 For more on the SI theory of detournément, see Guy Debord, “Negation and Consumption in the Cultural Sphere,” in The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New  York:  Zone Books, 1995), 129–48. Originally published in 1968. See also Guy Debord, “A User’s Guide to Detournément,” in The Situationist Anthology, trans. Ken Knabb (New  York:  Bureau of Public Secrets, 2007), 14–20. See also “Definitions,” Internationale Situationniste 1 (June 1958), reprinted as “Definitions,” in The Situationist Anthology, 51–3. 50 Kathrin Fahlenbrach, “Die Studenten- und Jugendbewegung der 60er Jahre als Medienbewegung,” in Protestinszenierungen:  Visuelle Kommunikation und Kollektive Identitäten in Protestbewegungen (Wiesbaden:  Westdeutscher Verlag, 2002), esp. pp. 165–99 and 211–23. 47

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visit to West Germany and its press changed the course of the student movement.51 While the events related to June 2, 1967, politicized many students, the representations of the day’s events also drew heated criticism. Berliner Morgenpost called the demonstrators “Schooled Communist Street Fighters”52; Bild referred to them as “rowdies”53; and Die Welt said they shouted “Ho Ho Ho and threw bottles.” It was not only the inflammatory headlines and name-calling that frustrated. Other newspapers and newsmagazines criticized the biased tones but also revealed discrepancies in accounts of the day’s events. For example, a Stern article shored up the contradictions between police reports and eyewitness testimony:  “The Berlin police have made it known that a plain clothes police man’s life was threatened by at least ten rowdies with knives. In selfdefense he gave off two warning shots. In the process Benno Ohnesorg was injured.”54 Yet, the article continues, eyewitness reports tell a different story: the bricklayer Ulrich Jansen from Spandau reported to Stern, “I saw how the police stormed towards this rascal in the red shirt, Benno Ohnesorg, and beat him with clubs. The police held him and beat him . . . I can say that the shot was not fired in self-defense, since the police were all on top of him and he could not defend himself.”55 Beyond revealing the contradictions in the reportage of the event, Stern heaped criticism upon the role of the Springer press papers in creating the tense atmosphere. Stern magazine argued: The paper of Berlin’s secret ruler, Axel Cäsar Springer, played a considerable role in creating the poisoned atmosphere between the Berlin police and the protesting students. Welt, Bild, BZ and Morgenpost objected not only to the extremist but also the politically self-aware students with angry attacks. For months the papers have called the students rowdies, criminals and brothers seeking to get into brawls. And they demanded that the police treat the students more harshly in order to expunge the 51

For detailed accounts of the events related to the June 2, 1967, afternoon and evening protests, see Chapter 1. 52 “Geschulte kommunistische Straßenkämpfer,” Berliner Morgenpost, June 3, 1967. 53 “Radau-Universität: Soll es dabei bleiben? Nein! Jetzt wird aufgeräumt!” Bild, April 27, 1967. 54 “Der Tod eines Studenten,” Stern, June 13, 1967, 22–6. Here, 26. “Die Berliner Poliziei gab bekannt: Ein Kriminalbeamter sei von mindestens zehn Rowdys mit Messern lebensgefährlich bedroht worden und habe in Notwehr zwei Warnschüsse abgegeben. Dabei sei Benno Ohnesorg verletzt worden.” 55 “Der Tod eines Studenten” 26. “Maurer Ulrich Jansen aus Spandau berichtete dem Stern: ‘Ich habe gesehen, wie Polizisten auf diesen Bengel im roten Hemd, den Benno Ohnesorg, zustürmten und ihn beknüppelten. Er wurde von den Polizisten gehalten und dabei verprügelt . . . Ich kann aussagen, daß der Schuß nicht in Notwehr abgegeben wurde, da die Polizisten alle auf ihm drauf waren und er sich nicht wehren konnte.”

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disturbers of the peace. This wish has been fulfilled. In Berlin there is one student less: Benno Ohnesorg.56 After the attack on Dutschke, Spiegel published an article titled “One Bild Headline Is More Violence Than a Stone against a Police Officer’s Head,” which “examined . . . the role of the Springer Press before and after the attack on SDS Dutschke. For over two years, the Springer papers Bild, Welt, Hamburger Abendblatt, BZ and Berliner Morgenpost have demonized the restless students.”57 In these ways, publications such as Stern and Spiegel shared some of the students’ critiques:  both were critical of Springer coverage. Spiegel, Stern, and konkret also reflected a shift to zeitkritischer Journalismus (critical contemporary journalism), which developed in the late 1950s. The proponents of this form of journalism were socialized professionally in the postwar era. These journalists, Von Hodenberg states, “feared for the stability of the Federal Republic but they drew a very different conclusion” than the journalists participating in “consensus journalism.” They worried more about the prospects of West German democracy than about those of the West German state, and thus their main aim, she continues, “was to foster democratization by establishing a more participatory public sphere. They attacked the idea of a state beyond criticism, called for discussion and dissent and tried to get readers involved.”58 For this reason, “they treated the student protests of the late sixties with clear sympathy.” By the late 1960s, mass media publications such as Spiegel and Stern were thus also supporting the student movement due to a shift in journalistic practices in West Germany.59

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“Der Tod eines Studenten” 26. “An der vergifteten Atmosphäre zwischen Berliner Polizei und protestierenden Studenten haben die Zeitungen von Berlins heimlichen Herrscher, Axel Cäsar Springer, erheblichen Anteil. Welt, Bild, BZ und Morgenpost bedachten nicht nur die extremistischen, sondern auch die politisch selbstbewußten Berliner Studenten mit wütenden Attacken. Monatelang bezeichneten die Frontstadt-Blätter die Studenten als Rowdys, Kriminelle und Radaubrüder. Und sie forderten die Polizei auf, sie härter anzufassen und die Störenfriede auszumerzen. Dieser Wunsch ist in Erfüllung gegangen. In Berlin ist ein Student weniger—Benno Ohnesorg.” 57 “Eine Bild Schlagzeile ist mehr Gewalt als ein Stein am Polizisten-Kopf,” Spiegel, May 5, 1968. For another piece that engages critically with the prejudice-laden depictions of students and engaged their arguments, see also Spiegel, December 11, 1967, 51 and 52. 58 Von Hodenberg 382–3. 59 The shift in West Germany to critical contemporary journalism took place contemporaneous to the rise of New Journalism in the United States, exemplified in stylistic conventions such as subjective tone or shift in narrative point-of-view from one character to the next; a level of description or use of scenes more commonly associated with fiction; and intensive or what Thomas Wolfe called “saturation reporting.” The unabashed subjective tone both pushed back against the ostensible objectivity of journalism and allowed for participatory politics, or for journalists who participated in the events they covered. Writers affiliated with new journalism

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Many well-known leftist German intellectuals, too, publicly expressed their opposition to the reportage of the Springer press and in particular to that of the tabloid Bild. Later in 1967, the West German literary Group 47 (Gruppe 47) established an anti-Bild campaign under the banner “We do not work for the Springer papers.”60 Authors and intellectuals such as Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll, and Jürgen Habermas signed a statement, putting forth that they feared “freedom of expression is being curbed and injured” and “the basis of parliamentary democracy in Germany is being threatened” through the company’s monopoly of the market and its papers’ content. In 2006, Grass revisited the Springer boycott and stated that he would be willing to rescind his boycott, if the Springer press apologized for its earlier coverage of the demonstrations, the student movements, and the way it dealt with Heinrich Böll in 1972 after he published the article “Does Ulrike Meinhof Want a Pardon or Safe Passage?”61 In response to the skewed depictions of the protests, students planned a “Springer Tribunal” under the banner “Expropriate Springer” (Enteignet Springer), to be held on February 1, 1968, at the Technical University in West-Berlin but organized and prepared by the Critical University (Kritische Universität), which the students had self-organized and established in 1967. The working group organizing the Springer Tribunal included, among others, the SDS; the Republican Club (Der Republikanische Klub); Rudolf Augstein, editor of Spiegel; and Henri Nannen, editor of Stern. Together, they formed the “Institute for the Analysis of Media and the Public Sphere (Institut für Presseanalyse und Öffentlichkeitsforschung). The editors of Stern and Spiegel demanded that students soften their position; of course, Stern and Spiegel were not necessarily (only) interested in supporting the students’ agenda and politics but also saw the collaboration as an opportunity to gain an edge on Springer’s monopoly.62 The students refused to back down include Truman Capote, Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and Thomas Wolfe. 60 Heinz Grossmann and Oskar Negt, Die Auferstehung der Gewalt, Springerblockade und politische Reaktion in der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt:  Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1968), esp. 30–3. 61 Chapter 3 examines Heinrich Böll and the Springer press. Heinrich Böll, “Will Ulrike Meinhof Gnade oder freies Geleit?” Spiegel, January 10, 1972. Reprinted in Heinrich Böll: Freies Geleit für Ulrike Meinhof. Ein Artikel und seine Folgen, ed. Frank Grützbach (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1972), 27–33. Mathias Döpfner, then head of Springer, met with Günter Grass for a debate about the subject. “Wir Deutschen sind unberechenbar,” Spiegel, June 19, 2006, 156–63. The exchange has been republished:  Günter Grass, Mathias Döpfner, and Manfred Bissinger von Steidl, Die Springer Kontroverse. Ein Streitgespräch über Deutschland (Berlin: Steidl, 2006). 62 Gerhard Bauß, “Die Kampagne gegen die Springer-Presse,” in Die Studentenbewegung der sechziger Jahre in der Bundesrepublik und Westberlin (Cologne: Pahl—Rugenstein, 1977), 71– 111. Here, I take issue with Christina von Hodenberg’s argument that the relationship between the student movements and the media in 1968 was not one of enmity, as she does, (1)  by

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from their conditions. Stern and Spiegel withdrew their support and the conference took place without them.63 While Springer formed the main target for critique, both due to its monopoly and bias, some also criticized Stern and Spiegel. In her article “Expropriate Springer!” (Enteignet Springer!) published in konkret, Meinhof argued: Springer is not alone in being responsible for the uniformity in the thinking of Germans:  the shift to the right of the SPD, the banning of the KPD, the Anti-Communism, the NATO faithfulness, the Vietnam complicity . . . That Spiegel found not one critical word to say about Iran on the occasion of the Shah’s visit . . . is not simply Springer’s fault.64 In a previous issue of konkret, Meinhof, Klaus Rainer Röhl, and Jürgen Holtkamp had coauthored a four-page “political fiction” or press parody, in which Spiegel editor Augstein sells his newsmagazine to Springer.65 In a subsequent article published in konkret, Meinhof analyzed Spiegel’s coverage of the June 2, 1967, attack on Ohnesorg quoting its editor Augstein in its title, “ ‘Water Cannons—Also Against Women. Student and Media’: A Polemic against Rudolf Augstein and the Underwriting Banks.”66 In “Expropriate Springer!,” Meinhof states that the campaign against the Springer press is a valuable goal but also a symptom of a larger desire for democratic rights, reflected in an independent media, and thus only the first arguing that the 45ers at the helm of Spiegel and Stern were supportive, and (2) by following ‘68er’s future trajectories. To be sure, some editors and journalists at these two weeklies were undoubtedly sympathetic and expressed it in their articles. One should not, however, overlook the economic interests that also fueled these newsmagazines’ support of the students. To argue that future trajectories underscore that the relationship in 1968 was not one of enmity also overlooks the possibility that it might be precisely as a result of a relationship of enmity that some former activists were motivated to pursue journalism, that is, in order to change the institution. 63 Gretchen Dutschke, Wir hatten ein barbarisches, schönes Leben:  Rudi Dutschke, eine Biographie (Cologne:  Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1996), 174–6. Gretchen Dutschke states that the Springer Hearing was originally planned for February 9–11, 1968. According to Hodenberg, “The editor-in-chief of Spiegel, Rudolf Augstein, originally supported the students’ 1968 ‘Springer Hearing,’ but pulled back after the rioting” (389, footnote 103). 64 Ulrike Meinhof, “Enteignet Springer!” konkret 9 (1967):  2–3. Here, 2. Reprinted in Ulrike Meinhof, Die Würde des Menschen ist antastbar (Berlin:  Wagenbach, 2004), 104–107. “Springer ist nicht alleine schuld am Einheitsdenken der Deutschen; Dem Rechtsruck der SPD, dem KPD-Verbot, dem Anti-Kommunismus, der Nato-Treue, der Vietnam-Komplizenschaft . . . Daß der Spiegel kein kritisches Wort über Persien zum Schahbesuch fand . . . ist nicht einfach Springers Schuld.” 65 “Political Fiction: Spiegel an Springer verkauft,” konkret 6 (1967): 48–52. 66 Ulrike Meinhof, “ ‘Wasserwerfer—auch gegen Frauen. Student und Presse’:  Eine Polemik gegen Rudolf Augstein und Konsorten,” konkret 4 (1968): 36–40. Reprinted in Ulrike Meinhof, Deutschland, Deutschland unter anderm (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1995), 130–7.

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step in securing them: “The demand to expropriate Springer press is already a symptom of a newly emerging democratic consciousness. So that it can spread, Springer must be expropriated.”67 Both konkret and the Berliner Extra Dienst supported the “Expropriate Springer!” Campaign.68 The battle for a more democratic consciousness formed the (historical) backdrop to the protestors’ insistence not only on their right to demonstrate but also on their right to a less monopolized and biased and instead more independent media. At the Springer Hearing, attended by 1,750 people, professors, students, and journalists presented research documenting how corporate media had consistently depicted the social movements in a skewed light.69 The WestBerlin Republican Club shared the culmination of a year’s work, over the course of which a working group had analyzed how Springer shaped public opinion. It provided numerous analyses and made policy recommendations to reestablish freedom of the press in West-Berlin.70 In addition to the panels, a three-minute film titled How to Make a Molotov Cocktail (Herstellung eines Molotow-Cocktails, 1968) was screened. The film showed how to build a Molotov cocktail and then cut to Springer buildings as targets in its closing sequence. At the time of the screening, its director remained anonymous. It was directed and produced by Holger Meins, then a student at the newly established Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb, German Film and Television Academy Berlin) and subsequently, as of October 1970, a member of the RAF.71 The night after the conference, students smashed the windows of numerous Springer offices in West-Berlin by throwing rocks wrapped in leaflets that read “Expropriate Springer!” The debates about the media’s representations of the leftist student activists continued to rage and escalated the following year, as a result not of media coverage subsequent to an event but the media’s role in leading to an event. On April 11, 1968, Josef Bachmann attempted to assassinate 67

Meinhof, “Enteignet Springer!” 2.  “Die Forderung, Springer zu enteignen, ist bereits ein Symptom für ein neu entstehendes demokratisches Bewußtsein. Damit es sich ausbreiten kann, muß Springer enteignet werden.” 68 The Berliner Extra Dienst was cofounded by Carl Guggomos, a former journalist at Spiegel, and Walter Barthel. The paper had a pro-Moscow and pro-GDR position. After reunification, it emerged that both Guggomos and Barthel had worked as informants for East Germany’s Ministry of State Security. 69 See also Hans Dieter Müller, Der Springer Konzern. Eine kritische Studie (Munich:  Piper, 1968); Bernd Jansen and Arno Klönne (eds), Imperium Springer. Macht und Manipulation (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1968); and Jürgen Alberts, Massenpresse als Ideologiefabrik. Am Beispiel “Bild” (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1972). Müller’s study includes an analysis of examples from Bild-Zeitung, see p. 332–372. 70 Republikanischer Club (ed.), Springer enteignen? Materialien zur Diskussion (Berlin:  Republikanischer Club, 1967). The fifty-two-page brochure formed the basis for the presentation at the Springer Tribunal. 71 Gerd Conradt, Starbuck. Holger Meins. Ein Porträt als Zeitbild (Berlin:  Espresso Verlag, 2001), 72–3.

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FIGURE 2.1 National-Zeitung, March 22, 1968, Archive of Hamburg Institute for Social Research.

SDS leader Rudi Dutschke. Just days before, Springer’s Bild had called for people to “seize” the “gangleaders” of the left and Bachmann later admitted when he was on trial that he did not know Dutschke but had read about him in Bild and was led to act by the papers: “I have taken my daily information from the Bild-Zeitung.”72 Additionally, Bachmann was carrying a copy of the right-wing paper National-Zeitung with images of Dutschke and the headline:  “Stoppt Dutschke Jetzt! Sonst gibt es Bürgerkrieg” (“Stop Dutschke Now! Otherwise there will be a civil war!”) (see Figure 2.1). When he was on trial, Bachmann admitted that he only knew Dutschke through the papers:  “Judge:  You knew him [Dutschke]? Bachmann:  One knows him from the images.”73 Filmmaker Helke  Sander comments on the effect of the shooting:  “While it had been important previously to prove a connection between the Springer publishing house and economic interests . . . that could explain why every form of resistance and alternative media had to be defamed, this relationship—through the attack on Dutschke, whose attacker

72

“Siebzig Prozent reiben sich die Hände,” Spiegel, March 10, 1969, 78. “Siebzig Prozent reiben sich die Hände.” “Richter:  Sie kannten ihn [Dutschke]? Bachmann: Man kennt ihn von Bildern.”

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admitted that he was inspired to act by the Springer Press—suddenly became all too obvious.”74 The responses to the attack on Dutschke were immediate. Roughly 2,500 persons blockaded the streets in front of the Springer’s West-Berlin headquarters—located on Kochstrasse right next to the Berlin Wall—and demonstrated against the publisher across West Germany over the long Easter holiday weekend in riots that resulted in 400 injured and 2 dead. Over the course of the weekend, 20,000 demonstrated and 60,000 police officers were deployed in West-Berlin. Across West Germany, an estimated 300,000 participated in the demonstrations in front of Springer offices and publishing plants, including in Cologne, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Munich.75 Bommi Baumann, a future member of the June 2 Movement, said about the attack:  “The bullet was turned just as much against you; that was the first time that they fully shot at you.”76 Students impeded the distribution of Bild nationwide. With the slogan “Bild shot, too” (Bild schoß mit!), the student movement accused the Springer press of being implicated in the attempted murder. Within two days, intellectuals such as Theodor W.  Adorno, Heinrich Böll, Golo Mann, and Alexander Mitscherlich responded to the attack on Dutschke and its relationship to the media by penning and publishing the “Declaration of a Murder: The Statement of the Fourteen” (Erklärung zum Mordanschlag: Die Erklärung der Vierzehn). It stated: For the second time within one year, bloody violence has struck the students . . . The alliance of thoughtless consumer journalism and a resurging nationalist ideology—which for years has been denigrating the democratically engaged students and intellectuals as a “leftist mob,” a “puss-oozing boil,” “academic deadbeats,” “a gang,” “mental halfwits,” “neurotics,” “whiners,” and “windbags”—threatens to destroy the self-image of Germans in a world of peaceful understanding . . . The undersigned therefore demand a public debate about the Springer corporation, its political and economic presuppositions and its practice of manipulation through the media.77

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Sander. http://www.helke-sander.de/Inhalt/Filme/Brecht_die_Macht.html. Last accessed August 13, 2007. “War es vorher darum gegangen, eine Interessenidentiät zwischen Springerpresse und Wirtschaftsinteressen zu beweisen . . . die auch erklären sollte, warum jede Art von Widerstand und Gegenöffentlichkeit diffamiert werden musste, so war dieser Zusammenhang durch das Attentat auf Rudi Dutschke, dessen Attentäter ja zugab, durch die Springerpresse zu dieser Tat angeregt worden zu sein, nun plötzlich allzu klar.” 75 Wolfgang Kraushaar, 1968: Das Jahr, das alles verändert hat (Munich: Piper, 1998), 108. 76 Bommi Baumann, Wie alles anfing (Berlin: Trikont, 1980), 38. 77 Theodor W. Adorno, Hans Paul Bahrdt, Heinrich Böll, Peter Brückner, Ludwig von Friedeburg, Walter Jens, Eugen Kogon, Golo Mann, Alexander Mitscherlich, Hans Dieter Müller, Heinrich Popitz, Helge Pross, Helmut Ridder, and Hans-Günther Zmarzik, “Die Erklärung der Vierzehn,”

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Not only students but also writers, academics, and intellectuals supported the call for less hostile depictions of the protest movements in the corporate media and particularly in the media of the Springer press. Golo Mann published a separate article titled “Danger for Freedom?,” in which he asserted that in just a few years Springer’s monopoly had become a central problem of the Federal Republic of Germany that needed to be addressed.78 If Ohnesorg’s shooting had marked the initial radicalization for many students, the attack on Dutschke sealed the transition. In a coauthored article, published in konkret in June 1968, Dutschke, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Bahman Nirumand, referencing also the killing of an AP photographer at a demonstration in Munich subsequent to the attack on Dutschke, summed up the tumultuous events and Springer’s role in them in the following way: It is necessary, to answer a few very simple questions. Who shot on June 2? We did not shoot the Shah, but rather Benno Ohnesorg was shot by the police. Who presented the students to millions of readers as “hooligans,” “disturbers of the peace,” “red fascists,” “SA,” as “political laze abouts,” and encouraged that one did not only rely on the police to do the dirty work? We did not call up the people to violence, but instead Springer did. Who raised the Springer baiting to the level of a citizens’ obligation to be carried out [at the demonstrations] in front of the Schöneberg City Hall? We did not call our opponents public enemy number one, Schütz and Sickert did. Who fueled the hatred of the population so long, until one believed that an attack on Rudi Dutschke would make him the savior of the people? . . . As long as Springer is allowed to continue to spread its murderous baiting, which has already resulted in two murder attacks, as long as the political parties continue to stand behind Springer, we will continue to act in self-defense.79

Die Zeit, April 19, 1968. Reprinted in Grossmann and Negt 30. “Zum zweitenmal innerhalb eines Jahres hat blutige Gewalt die Studenten getroffen . . . Das Bündnis von bedenklosem Konsumjournalismus und wiederauflebender nationalistischer Ideologie, das die demokratisch engagierten Studenten und Intellektuellen seit Jahren als ‘Linksmob,’ ‘Eiterbeule,’ ‘Akademische Gammler,’ ‘Pöbel,’ ‘geistige Halbstarke,’ ‘Neurotiker,’ ‘Schreier’ und ‘Schwätzer’ verunglimpft, droht das Selbstverständnis der Deutschen in einer Welt der friedlichen Verständigung . . . zu zerstören . . . Die Unterzeichnenden fordern darum, endlich in die öffentiche Diskussion über den Springer-Konzern, seine politischen und wirtschaftlichen Voraussetzungen und seine Praktiken der publizistischen Manipulation einzutreten.” 78 Golo Mann, “Gefahr für die Freiheit?” Die Zeit, April 19, 1968, 28. 79 Oskar Negt, “Rechtsordnung, Öffentlichkeit und Gewalt,” Achtundsechzig (Göttingen: Steidl, 1995), 49–134; here, 61; emphasis in the original. “Es ist nötig, ein paar ganz einfache Fragen zu beantworten. Wer hat am 2. Juni geschossen? Nicht wir haben den Schah erschossen, sondern Benno Ohnesorg ist von der Polizei erschossen worden. Wer hat die Studenten Millionen von Lesern als Krawallmacher, Störenfriede, rote Faschisten, SA-Herren, als Polit-Gammler

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Weaving together the escalation of violence and the baiting of the media, they clearly laid responsibility for the escalation of events to the point of violence at the feet of the Springer press. Oskar Negt, reflecting on the events of 1968 decades later, assessed the focus on the Springer publications as follows: City councilor Walter Möller, definitely a critically thinking Social Democrat, finds—in response to the questions that he is asked about the lawfulness of the Springer Press’s practice of baiting the students—only ever the same answer:  The State exists in order to protect the proper functioning of existing businesses. Whether Springer was summoning up a vigilante justice towards the students in an explicit or implicit manner, was not up to the city representatives to judge. When asked for his personal opinion, he said, it played no role in this case. But precisely this issue was the decisive factor for all those who had demonstrated over that Easter 1968 weekend.80 As outlined above, Negt believed that the state had to protect the people. But, he argues, the demonstrations sought to express the inverse: that people ever more tangibly and palpably felt themselves to be merely an accessory to the institutions. The Springer demonstrations in West-Berlin were instrumental in radicalizing Meinhof. In response to them, she wrote an article entitled “From Protest to Resistance,” published in konkret in May of 1968, in which she first explicitly argues that if peaceful demonstrations have been met with state repression and police violence, it is justifiable to resist and defend oneself using violence. She opened with a quotation from the Black

hingestellt und dazu aufgefordert, die Drecksarbeit nicht von der Polizei allein machen zu lassen? Nicht wir haben zur Gewalt gegen Menschen aufgerufen, sondern Springer. Wer hat vor dem Schöneberger Rathaus die Springerhetze zur Bürgerpflicht erhoben? Nicht wir haben unsere Gegner zum Volksfeind Nummer 1 erklären lassen, sondern Schütz und Sickert. Wer hat den Haß der Bevölkerung so lange geschürt, bis einer glaubte, ein Attentat auf Rudi Dutschke würde ihn zum Retter des Volkes machen? . . . Solange Springer seine Mordhetze, die schon zwei Mordanschläge zur Folge hatte, weiterverbreiten darf, solange die Parteien sich hinter Springer stellen, handeln wir in Notwehr.” 80 Oskar Negt, “Rechtsordnung, Öffentlichkeit und Gewalt,” in Achtundsechzig (Göttingen:  Steidl, 1995), 49–134. Here, 61. “Stadtrat Walter Möller, ein durchaus kritisch denkender Sozialdemokrat, findet auf die Fragen, die ihm über die Zulässigkeit der in der Springer-Press praktizierten Verhetzung der Studenten gestellt werden, immer nur dieselbe Antwortformel:  Der Staat sei dazu da, die Funktionsfähigkeit des eingerichteten Gewerbebetriebes zu sichern. Ob in der Springer-Press versteckt oder offen zur Selbstjustiz gegenüber Demonstranten aufgefordert werde, stehe nicht in der Beurteilungskompetenz städtischer Behörden. Nach seiner persönlichen Meinung gefragt, meint er, sie spiele in diesem Fall keine Rolle. Gerade sie ist jedoch für alle, die Ostern 1968 demonstrierten, von entscheidender Bedeutung.”

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Power movement, which she repeated at article’s close, stating, “Protest is when I say this or that does not suit me. Resistance is when I ensure that that, which does not suit me, no longer occurs.”81 Meinhof called attention to the “hypocrisy” of those who, from a position of political power, condemn the throwing of stones or arson but condemn neither the Springer publishing house’s baiting, nor the bombs on Vietnam, nor the terror in Iran, nor the torture in South Africa, those who could really bring about the Springer’s Expropriation but instead form a Grand Coalition, who could reveal the truth about Bild and BZ in the mass media but instead spread half-lies about students, their engagement for nonviolence is hypocritical, they measure with two different measuring sticks.82 If the Easter demonstrations subsequent to the right-wing attack on Dutschke led to the radicalization of some activists in the social movements, such as Ensslin or Meinhof, it also marked the culmination of a particularly turbulent and violent spring, and a transition point for the broader left.

Student Protest Movements and Leftist Media In order to counter the skewed depictions not only of the student protest movement but also of its politics and to provide a forum in which politics were discussed differently, the student and social movements organized alternative media, which drew on an earlier history of leftist communiqués and leaflets.83 These publications included the radical papers Linkeck (1967–69), Charly Kaputt! (1968–69), Radikalinski (1968), and Agit 883 (1969–72), as well as the socialist and communist papers Berliner ExtraDienst (1967) and Rote Presse Korrespondenz (RPK, 1970–75). A  shift

81 Ulrike Meinhof, “Vom Protest zum Widerstand,” konkret 5 (1968):  5. Reprinted in Die Würde des Menschen ist antastbar (Berlin:  Wagenbach, 1988), 138–41. Here, 138 and 140. Published in English, “From Protest to Resistance,” in Everybody Talks about the Weather . . . We Don’t (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), 239–43. 82 Meinhof,“Vom Protest zum Widerstand,” 139.“Diejenigen, die von politischen Machtpositionen aus Steinwürfe und Brandstiftung hier verurteilen, nicht aber die Hetze des Hauses Springer, nicht die Bomben auf Vietnam, nicht Terror in Persien, nicht Folter in Südafrika, diejenigen, die die Enteignung Springers tatsächlich betreiben könnten, stattdessen grosse Koalition machen, die in den Massenmedien Halbwahrheiten über die Studenten verbreiten, deren Engagement für Gewahltlosigkeit ist heuchlerisch, sie messen mit zweierlei Maß.” 83 For a survey of the radical leftist papers, see also Holger Jenrich, Anarchistische Press in Deutschland, 1945–1985 (Grafenau/Dörffingen:  Trotzdem Verlag, 1988); Bernd Drücke, Zwischen Schreibtisch und Strassenschlacht? Anarchismus und libertäre Presse in Ost- und Westdeutschland (Ulm: Klemm und Oelschläger, 1998), esp. 84–94.

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from linotype and letterpress printing to offset printing in the mid-1960s allowed alternative media to proliferate, quickly and more affordably.84 Radical papers not only provided a countermodel to the corporate media but also created a counterforum for leftists, allowing them to gather, educate, politicize, and organize. Finally, they reveal the internal preoccupations and development of the late 1960s social movements. The subsequent analysis focuses on Agit 883 for a variety of reasons. First, unlike some of the other aforementioned leftist publications, its existence from 1969 to 1972 spanned from the waning days of the student movement and the extraparliamentary opposition to the movement’s split into various factions, including Marxist-Leninist and underground armed struggle groups.85 Second, in content, Agit 883 not only offered a counterweight to the corporate media but also sought to explain the reasons for the students’ demonstrations. Third, in addition to its coverage of international and domestic politics, the paper participated in a sustained discussion of violence in light of the June 2, 1967, shooting of Ohnesorg and the April 11, 1968, attempted assassination of Dutschke. Fourth, the RAF’s founding communiqué was published in Agit 883 and some members of Agit 883 collective editorial board subsequently joined the RAF.86 Already before the events of June 2, 1967, Dirk Schneider and Karl Ultsch, who were both journalism students at the Free University Berlin, had organized a “Committee for Publicity Work” and written two concept papers calling for the establishment of a critical newspaper.87 To this end, they established a working group and rented an office for what eventually became Agit 883. The first issue of the paper was published on February 13, 1969, amid a flurry of other leftist publications that suddenly appeared. The two early concept papers for Agit 883, dating back to June 1967 and November 1967, laid out the reasons for an alternative paper: on the one hand, the paper sought to challenge the monopoly of the corporate media, and, on the other hand, it sought to offer an alternative media.88 “It does not suffice,” Agit 883 argued, “to demand that Springer be expropriated. The monopoly of the press in Berlin and the concomitant deliberate manipulation

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As John McMillian puts it, “All one needed was a competent typist, a pair of scissors and a jar of rubber cement with which to paste copy onto a backing sheet” (6). 85 For the splintering of the extraparliamentary opposition into various factions, see the end of Chapter 1, p. 56. 86 Holger Meins, for example, formed part of Agit 883’s editorial board, published the RAF’s founding statement in Agit 883, and then went underground and joined the RAF in October 1970. 87 Rotaprint 25, eds, Agit 883:  Bewegung, Revolte, Underground in Westberlin, 1969–1972 (Hamburg: Assoziation A, 2006), 29. 88 The two concept papers are included, in pdf format, on a CD accompanying the book, Rotaprint 25, eds, Agit 883:  Bewegung, Revolte, Underground in Westberlin, 1969–1972 (Hamburg: Assoziation A, 2006).

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of public opinion embodies only one of the factors that characterize the situation in Berlin.”89 A counternarrative must be offered, the editors stated. “The expression of protests, of agitating struggles,” the paper continued, “must also be followed up with an action that tests our notion of a good newspaper in practice.”90 In form, then, Agit 883 sought to test out what it would mean to create “a good newspaper” and to provide a counterweight to the corporate media’s narrative. In content, Agit 883 sought to explain the motives behind students’ demonstrations. “This turbulent summer,” the paper stated, “was the expression of a well-grounded discontent and a determined opposition, which necessarily needs a public articulation.”91 Coverage of the protests was not lacking, but “all reports of the mass media, all discussions, particularly after June 2, have not brought about for the broad public a clarification on decisive questions of the students’ position.”92 Little about the actions, the paper continued, has become clear for “the man on the street” (Der Mann auf der Straße, meaning the general public); it stated, “If we do not succeed in communicating alternatives to current problems to many, then our activities and all of our actions will have been for nought.”93 The paper thus sought to reveal the motivations behind the students’ actions and to reveal them to a broader public. Previous attempts had been made to explain these actions in various media, such as leaflets, flyers, press releases, and communiqués. As Agit 883 put it in its first concept paper:  “The students have expressed themselves in sporadic leaflets, press releases and street discussions. This has been a weak and, in the last instance, perhaps ineffective effort.”94 To counteract the ephemeral nature of these publications, the editorial board sought to

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Rotaprint 25, Agit 883. Concept Paper 1, June 1967, page 2. “Es ist nicht damit getan, die Enteignung Springers zu fordern, der durch die weitgehende Monopolisierung der Presse in Berlin und der damit ermöglichten bewußten Manipulierung der öffentlichen Meinung nur einen der Faktoren verkörpert, die die Situation in Berlin kennzeichnen.” Translation my own. 90 Rotaprint 25, Agit 883. Concept Paper 1, June 1967, page  2. “Der Ausdrucksform des Protestes, des agitatorischen Kampfes muß auch eine Aktion folgen, die unsere Vorstellungen von einer guten Zeitung praktisch erprobt.” Translation my own. 91 Rotaprint 25, Agit 883. Concept Paper 1, page 1. “Dieser unruhige Sommer in Berlin war der Ausdruck eines begründeten Unbehagens und einer entschiedenen Opposition, der einer publizistischen Artikulation der Studenten notwendig bedarf.” Translation my own. 92 Rotaprint 25,Agit 883.Concept Paper 1,page 2.“Alle Berichte der Massenkommunikationsmittel, alle Diskussionen, insbesondere nach dem 2. Juni, haben in den entscheidenden Fragen für die breite Öffentlichkeit eine Klärung der studentischen Position nicht gebracht.” Emphasis added. Translation my own. 93 Rotaprint 25, Agit 883. Concept Paper 1, page 2. “Wenn es uns nicht gelingt, zu aktuellen Problemen unsere Alternativen Vielen klarzumachen, dann werden unsere Aktionen und aller Einsatz ohne Wirkung sein.” Translation my own. 94 Rotaprint 25, Agit 883. Concept Paper 1, page  2. “Die Studenten selbst haben sich bisher in sporadischen Flugblattaktionen, durch Presseerklärungen und in Strassendiskussionen

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produce a regularly disseminated alternative paper. The stated goal was a monthly publication. Agit 883 met and exceeded it: with only few exceptions, Agit 883 was published and distributed weekly from 1969 to 1972. Laying out the concerns of the students, Agit 883’s first concept paper stated that the problem was not whether or not demonstrations were covered, but why the students demonstrated. “The students in Berlin have protested against the actions of political leaders, which they deem to be undemocratic or inhumane. They showed through their unequivocal positions what they thought about the war in Vietnam or the Shah of Iran’s method of rule.”95 The source of contention was not whether or not Vietnam or the Shah’s visit was reported on, but rather why students protested against (West German involvement in) the Vietnam War or the Shah of Iran’s visit to West-Berlin. The paper sought to address these omissions. To some extent, the range of topics on which Agit 883 intended to focus was to provide a glimpse into the motives behind the demonstrations and a counterweight to the Springer media. In its first concept paper, Agit 883 stated that it welcomed articles that undertook the following:  (1) fought regressions to fascistic forms of society; (2) fought bureaucracy and “The Establishment”; (3)  recognized nonviolent direct action; (4)  fought the repression of minorities (the paper listed communists, students, Jews, blacks, guest workers); (5) worked against militarism; (6) worked against the Emergency Laws; (7)  worked for economic rights in general and for workers’ rights in particular; (8) thematized sexuality, gender, and women’s rights; (9) discussed the relationship between West and East Germany; (10) reported on international events and explained the causes behind them; and (11) provided information about countries in which democracy and human rights were being violated (mentioned were Greece, Iran, Vietnam, Bolivia, Angola, South Africa).96 Subsequent editions engaged many of these topics. To this end, Agit 883 succeeded in providing an alternative press that counteracted the distorted representations of student movements and their politics in the Springer media. Agit 883 also participated in a sustained discussion of violence.97 A variety of factors contributed to this discussion. Locally, these experiences included the violence of the cheering pro-Shah Persians (Jubelperser), who geäußert. Das ist ein schwacher, in letzten Endes vielleicht wirkungsloser Aufwand gewesen.” Translation my own. 95 Rotaprint 25, Agit 883. Concept Paper 1, page 1: “Die Studenten haben in Berlin gegen die Handlungen politischer Führer demonstriert, die sie für undemokratisch oder unmenschlich halten. Sie zeigten durch Formen eindeutiger Stellungnahme, wie sie über den Krieg in Vietnam oder die Regierungsform des persischen Shahs denken.” Translation my own. 96 Rotaprint 25, Agit 883. Concept Paper 1, pages 3–4. 97 For a consideration of how the United States’ New Left became increasingly militant around the same time, see also Todd Gitlin, “Inflating Rhetoric and Militancy,” in The Whole World Is Watching, 180–204. In the United States, too, militancy increased between 1965 and 1970.

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some students alleged were SAVAK agents, at the June 2 demonstrations; the fatal police shooting of Ohnesorg; the acquittal of the guilty officer, Kurras; and the admitted intentional use of violence against demonstrators, which the West-Berlin Police Chief Duensing called the “liver sausage” strategy, stating when “the left end stinks,” we “have to cut into the middle to take off the end.”98 Reflecting on 1968 and the question of violence, Negt states that the question of violence then suddenly became the dominant topic of public debates is not a result of theoretical speculation of a few revolutionary cadres as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung already reckons in 1967; much more so, the discourse of violence developed first and foremost in response to the increasingly harsh experiences at the demonstrations when confronted with the violent reactions of the existing state apparatus, which elicited surprise and shock.99 The April 11, 1968, right-wing attack of Bachmann on Dutschke, inflamed by both corporate and right-wing media, only increased concerns. In April 1968, newspapers returned their focus to international events with articles about the continued unrests in Spain; in Italy; at the Greek consulate in West Germany; in the United Kingdom; in Brazil; in Beirut, Lebanon; in Copenhagen, Denmark; in Moscow due to tensions between students from Nigeria and from Biafra; and in the United States due to the assassination of MLK. Internationally, violence was increasing as well.100 As mentioned in Chapter  1, 1968 marked one of the most turbulent years. These events were heavily mediated, that is, heavily covered by the media. On January 5, uprisings began in Prague that were to continue until August 21 and go down in the history books as the Prague Spring. On January 30, the Việt Cộng unleashed the Tet Offensive against the US military in Vietnam and on January 31, they attacked the US embassy in Saigon. On February 1, South Vietnamese police chief Nguyễn Ngọc Loan shot Việt Cộng soldier Nguyễn Văn Lém, an event captured by photojournalist Eddie Adams in a photograph that quickly circulated around the world (see Figure 2.2). 98

“Nicht zu fett,” Spiegel, July 7, 1967; “Kurras und die Folgen,” Sueddeutsche Zeitung, November 24, 1967. 99 Negt 50. “Daß die Gewaltfrage dann plötzlich zum alles beherrschenden Thema der öffentlichen Auseinandersetzungen wird, ist keine Folge theoretischer Spekulationen irgendwelcher revolutionärer Kader, wie die “Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung” schon 1967 vermutet; vielmehr entwickelt sich der Gewaltsdiskurs erst im Zuge immer härterer Erlebnisse der Demonstrationen mit Gewaltreaktionen des bestehenden Staatsapparates, die Verblüffung und Betroffenheit hervorrufen.” 100 For an overview of the events of 1968, see Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, 1968:  Eine Zeitreise (Frankfurt:  Suhrkamp, 2008); Susan Watkins and Tariq Ali, 1968:  Marching in the Streets (New York: Free Press, 1998).

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FIGURE 2.2 Eddie Adams, “Saigon Execution,” February 1, 1968, Associated Press. South Vietnamese General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan chief of the National Police, fires his pistol into the head of suspected Việt Cộng officer Nguyễn Văn Lém (also known as Bay Lop) on a Saigon street, early in the Tet Offensive. (AP Photo/Eddie Adams.)

In March, student demonstrations rocked Warsaw University. On April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated. On April 6, a police shootout with members of the Black Panthers in Oakland, California, resulted in the death of 16-year-old Bobby Hutton. From April 23 to 30, students occupied an administrative building at Columbia University to protest the Vietnam War. In May, students and worker uprisings in France nearly toppled the French government. On June 5, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. On October 2, the police shooting of student demonstrators in La Plaza de las Tres Culturas, mentioned in Chapter 1, resulted in hundreds dead in what became known as the Tlatelolco massacre. Finally, on October 5, police attacks on demonstrators in Derry, North Ireland, marked the beginning of The Troubles. The violent events of 1968 were heavily mediated: television newscasts, more commonly color televisions in the late 1960s, brought vivid and gruesome images into West German living rooms.101 To a large extent, the 101

In the 1960s, the evening news, when the news was relegated to an evening newshour with an established anchor, had the greatest impact. This format continued into the 1980s. Television

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Vietnam War was the first televised war. Newsreels from the Second World War had still been shown in movie theaters.102 As televisions became common in people’s homes during the 1960s, the news and events worldwide entered their homes.103 Films of the late 1960s also aestheticized violence. In 1965, Viva Maria!—directed by Louis Malle—was released in West Germany.104 In the film, shot and set in Mexico, Maria (Brigitte Bardot), the daughter of an Irish terrorist, meets a woman also named Maria (Jeanne Moreau), a circus performer. The two Marias soon meet Florès, a revolutionary, and agree to continue his cause, against an unnamed dictator, capitalism, and the church, after he is fatally shot. The film was a box office hit. A  year later, Gilles Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers brought viewers a film that incorporated clips from documentaries and reenactments shot in Algeria and France, for a glimpse of the ongoing Algerian War.105 In 1967, Bonnie and Clyde—a docudrama directed by Arthur Penn—was released, romanticizing violence that was used in the early twentieth century, that is, depression era United States, to political ends.106 Both feature films provide fictionalized renditions of actual events. In 1968, Lindsay Anderson’s If . . . tells the history of Mick, an alienated student at an English boy’s school, who goes on a shooting rampage on graduation day.107 Finally, in 1969, quickly came to dominate over radio and print as the top choice for consumption of news coverage. In 1980, cable news came into existence with the establishment of CNN and created a twenty-four-hour news cycle. In the 1990s, the internet brought an even wider access, temporally and spatially. For more about the history of television in West Germany, see Knut Hickethier, Geschichte des deutschen Fernsehens (Munich:  Metzler, 1998). For more specifically about public television’s role in representing West Germany’s “1968,” see Todd Goehle, “Challenging Television’s Revolution: Media Representations of 1968 Protest in West German Television and Tabloids,” in Media and Revolt: Strategies and Performances from the 1960s to the Present, ed. Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Erling Siverts, and Rolf Werenskjold (New York:  Berghahn, 2014), 217–33; and Meike Vogel, Unruhe im Fernsehen. Protestbewegung und öffentlich-rechtliche Berichterstattung in den 1960er Jahren (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010). 102 Die Deutsche Wochenschau (The German Newsweekly), a series of German newsreels produced and screened by the Nazi regime from 1939 to 1945. For more information, see Nazi Newsreels in Occupied Europe, 1939–1945, ed. David Culbert, special issue of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 24.1 (2004). 103 Films about the RAF underscore the preoccupation with newscasts on television. The majority of them include sequences showing people watching newscasts. The depiction of media in the early years of the RAF forms the focus of Chapter 3. See also Gitlin. By contrast, the real violence of war is now rarely depicted on television and journalists are usually embedded with military when covering wars. 104 Louis Malle, dir., Viva Maria!, Nouvelles Editions de Films, 1965. Released in West Germany on February 16, 1966. Volker Schlöndorff worked as an assisant director on the film. 105 Gilles Pontecorvo, dir., Battle of Algiers. Released in West Germany on August 14, 1970. 106 Arthur Penn, dir., Bonnie and Clyde, Warner Brothers, 1967. Released in West Germany on December 19, 1967. 107 Lindsay Anderson, dir., If . . ., Memorial Enterprises, 1968. Released in West Germany on September 12, 1969.

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The Wild Bunch, a brutally violent film about an aging outlaw gang, was released.108 Spanning a range of countries and eras, each of these films, most of which were box office hits, thematize violence. They influenced West German films produced at the time, for example, by students of the dffb and the Hochschule für Film- und Fernsehen Munich (HFF, University of Film and Television Munich). They also serve as an index of the era’s preoccupation with violence. In contrast to the starkly bifurcated nature of later debates about the use of violence, between 1967 and 1970 the question was openly discussed in leftist publications with a spectrum of positions represented. The quick evolution of the discourse on the left vis-à-vis violence can be traced in Meinhof’s writings. In “From Protest to Resistance,” which she penned in response to the attack on Dutschke and the Easter demonstrations, she states: Now that it has become evident that methods other than demonstrations, Springer hearings and protests are available, methods different from those that failed because they could not prevent the attack on Rudi Dutschke; now that the shackles of common decency have been sprung, we can and must discuss violence and counter-violence anew and from the very beginning . . . Counter-violence runs the risk of turning into violence, when the police brutality determines the parameters of action.109 Here, Meinhof first discusses police violence at length and the need for the left to consider counter-violence as a response. Later that same year, after the trial of Baader, Ensslin, Thorwald Proll, and Horst Söhnlein for setting a department store on fire, Meinhof wrote in the article “Setting Fire to Department Stores”:  “The law that gets broken through arson does not protect people but rather property. Those who profit from speculation on property—not those who are victims of this speculation—are protected by the laws.”110 This article documents that 108

Sam Peckinpah, dir., The Wild Bunch, Warner Brothers, 1969. Released in West Germany on October 3, 1969. 109 Meinhof, “Vom Protest zum Widerstand,” konkret 5 (1968): 5. “Nun, nachdem gezeigt worden ist, daß andere Mittel als nur Demonstrationen, Springer-Hearing, Protestveranstaltungen zur Verfügung stehen, andere als die, die versagt haben, weil sie den Anschlag auf Rudi Dutschke nicht verhindern konnten, nun, da die Fesseln von Sitte und Anstand gesprengt worden sind, kann und muß neu und von vorne über Gewalt und Gegengewalt diskutiert werden . . . Gegengewalt läuft Gefahr, zu Gewalt zu werden, wo die Brutalität der Polizei das Gesetz des Handelns bestimmt.” Reprinted in Die Würde des Menschen ist antastbar, 138–41. Here, 140. Translated as “From Protest to Resistance,” in Everybody Talks about the Weather, 239–43. Here, 242. Translated modified. 110 Meinhof, “Warenbrandhausstiftung,” konkret 14 (1968):  5. Reprinted in Die Würde des Menschen ist antastbar, 153–6. Here, 155. Translated as “Setting Fire to Department Stores,” in Everybody Talks about the Weather, 244–8. Here, 246.

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Meinhof’s discussion of violence had developed from a position inquiring into the use of violence in response to police violence—or “Counterviolence” (Gegengewalt) as she called it111—to a position that distinguished between violence against people and property and put into question laws that protect profit motives. The arson attack on two department stores—Schneider and Kaufhof—in Frankfurt took place on April 2, 1968, just over a week prior to the attack on Dutschke. A year earlier on May 22, 1967, a department store had burned down in Bruxelles, killing hundreds. The K1 responded on May 24, 1967, with flyers that asked: “a burning department store with burning people conveys for the first time in a European city the crackling Vietnam feeling (to be there and to be burning as well), which we in Berlin have until now missed . . . When will the department stores burn in Berlin?”112 On June 6, 1967, Rainer Langhans and Fritz Teufel of the K1 were brought to trial for their inflammatory leaflet.113 The charges were eventually dropped. As a result of this action and diverging political positions, the SDS and the K1 split in May 1967.114 Baader, Ensslin, Thorwald Proll, and Horst Söhnlein carried out an arson attack the following year. No one was hurt and the arsonists were arrested within two days. At their trial, which began on October 14, 1968, Baader cited Stokely Carmichael and Herbert Marcuse, stating he believed “that for repressed and violated minorities a natural right to resistance exists, to use methods outside the law, as soon as the legal methods prove themselves to be inadequate.”115 Söhnlein in his statement put into question the legal system and asked whose interests it protects: “We Will Not Defend Ourselves to [or before] Such a Justice System!”116 On October 31, 1968, the judge sentenced the defendants to three years in prison. The defendants started to serve their

111

Walter Benjamin in his “Critique of Violence” advocated the legitimate use of counterviolence (Gegengewalt). Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1999), 277–300. 112 Peter Mosler, Was wir wollten. Was wir wurden (Hamburg:  Rowohlt, 1993), 55. “Ein brennendes Kaufhaus mit brennenden Menschen vermittelte zum erstenmal in einer europäischen Hauptstadt jenes knisternde Vietnamgefühl (dabeizusein und mitzubrennen), dass wir in Berlin bisher noch missen müssen . . . Wann brennen die Kaufhäuser in Berlin?” 113 For more information about the trial, see Rainer Langhans and Fritz Teufel, Klau mich (Frankfurt: Edition Voltaire, 1968). 114 For an analysis of how these arson attacks touch on the lineage between the Situationists, the K1 and the RAF, see also Charity Scribner, “Buildings on Fire: The Situationist International and the Red Army Faction,” Grey Room 25 (Winter 2007): 30–55. 115 Reinhard Rauball, Aktuelle Dokumente: Die Baader-Meinhof Gruppe (Berlin:  De Gruyter, 1972), 191:  “Aber ich glaube, daß es für unterdrückte und überwältigte Minderheiten ein ‘Naturrecht’ auf Widerstand gibt, außergesetzliche Mittel anzuwenden, sobald die gesetzlichen sich als unzulänglich herausgestellt haben.” 116 Horst Söhnlein, “Vor dieser Justiz verteidigen wir uns nicht! Schlußwort im Frankfurter Kaufhausprozeß,” in Thorwald Proll and Daniel Dubbe, Wir kamen vom anderen Stern: Über 1968, Andreas Baader und ein Kaufhaus. (Hamburg:  Edition Nautilus, 2003), 105–16. In

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sentences but appealed the court’s decision. On June 13, 1969, they were released under an amnesty for political prisoners. Their appeal was denied on November 12, 1969, and the arsonists were ordered to return to jail to serve the remainder of their sentences. Söhnlein alone served his sentence. Proll turned himself in. Baader and Ensslin went underground. To some extent, Meinhof’s transition in her thinking about the relationship between Springer’s media coverage and the escalating violence, evident in the movement in her writing from “From Protest to Resistance” to “Setting Fire to Department Stores,” is echoed in the coauthored article titled “Violence” (Gewalt), published in konkret in June 1968. In it, Dutschke, Enzenberger, and Nirumand argue that “our nonviolent direct actions were a delight for Springer, a horror for the citizen and a nuisance for workers. Only since we have begun, however cautiously, to speak the language of the system have we made ourselves understandable to workers and a danger to Springer: this language is violence.”117 “Violence,” they continued, “is integral to capitalism, just as the police officer is integral to private property, and as long as capitalism exists, violence will not disappear.”118 They elaborated, “this violence, which daily mutilates and suppresses us, our generation and our society manifests itself reluctantly and only in exceptional cases through the use of baton and pistol. Its usual and everyday violation takes place through the ‘independent’ newspapers, the ‘value free’ sciences, and a ‘humane’ culture, in ‘friendly’ company environments, through the church, fashion and sports.”119 Referencing Walter Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence” (Zur Kritik der Gewalt), they argued that one must distinguish between “mittelbarer” (mediated or latent) violence and “unmittelbarer” (immediate or manifest) violence: Mediated violence, or latent violence (Benjamin), is the best guarantee that arguments, to which one wants to reduce us, can in this society only English, “Faced with this Justice System, We Can’t Be Bothered to Defend Ourselves,” in The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History, vol. 1. Projectiles for the People, ed. J. Smith and André Moncourt (Oakland: PM Press, 2009), 66–78. 117 Rudi Dutschke, Bahman Nirumand, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Gewalt,” konkret 6 (June 1968): 24–8, continued on page 35. Here, 25. “Unsere gewaltfreien direkten Aktionen waren Springer eine Lust, dem Bürger ein Greuel und den Arbeitern ein Ärgernis. Erst seit wir zaghaft beginnen, die Sprache des Systems selber zu sprechen, werden wir den Arbeitern verständlich und Springer eine Gefahr: diese Sprache ist die Gewalt.” 118 Dutschke, Nirumand, and Enzensberger 24–8. Here 26. “Gewalt gehört zum Kapitalismus wie der Polizist zum Privateigentum, und solange es den Kapitalismus gibt, wird die Gewalt nicht verschwinden.” 119 Dutschke, Nirumand, and Enzensberger 24–8, Here 26. “Die Gewalt, die uns, unsere Generation und unsere Gesellschaft täglich verstümmelt und unterdrückt, äußert sich nur ungern und in Ausnahmefällen mit Knüppel und Pistole. Ihre normale und alltägliche Vergewaltigung veranstaltet sie in ‘unabhängigen’ Zeitungen, ‘wertfreien’ Wissenschaften, einer ‘humanen’ Kultur, in ‘freundlichen’ Betriebsklimata, in Kirche, Mode und Sport.”

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function as pure fools. Punctually implemented violence alone still seems capable of making visible the excess of mediated violence, in order to begin the struggle for a society, in which violence does not have to be the necessary basis of society.120 When Benjamin discussed mediated violence—of which Dutschke, Enzensberger, and Nirumand stated there was such an excess—he was discussing military violence.121 In his 1921  “Critique of Violence” essay, Benjamin sought to offer a critique (Kritik) of violence.122 As Derrida later underscored in “Force of Law,” this “critique” was to be understood not merely as a “criticism” of violence, but rather as an attempt, drawing on Kant’s use of Kritik, to discern, to consider, to determine, to decide, in this case, what constitutes violence.123 Or, as Beatrice Hanssen put it, it was an attempt “to establish a typology of different manifestations of violence that discriminated the secular from the theological, the legal from the illegal, law-preserving from law-positing force.”124 The German word Gewalt denotes both “power” and “violence.”125 Benjamin sought, in his essay, among other things, to discern how violence was used to constitute power.

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Dutschke, Nirumand, and Enzensberger 24–8, Here 26  “Die mittelbare Gewalt, die ‘verwaltete Gewalt’ (Benjamin), ist der beste Garant dafür, daß Argumente, auf die man uns beschränken möchte, in dieser Gesellschaft nur die Funktion des reinen Toren haben können. Punktuell eingesetzte Gewalt scheint allein noch fähig, das Übermaß mittelbarer Gewalt sichtbar zu machen um den Kampf für eine Gesellschaft zu beginnen, in der die Gewalt nicht mehr die notwendige Basis des sozialen Lebens sein muß.” 121 On the role Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” played for the 1960s student movements, see also Negt 80. 122 Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections (New  York:  Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1999), 277–300. 123 Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New  York:  Routledge, 1992), 3–67. As Beatrice Hanssen reminds:  “The term critique has had a history marked by as many vicissitudes as the geneaology of modernity. Its intellectual span runs from Kant’s inaugural, monumental project to overcome philosophical dogmatism and skepticism, Hegel’s turn to intersubjectivity and immanent critique, and Marx’s ideology critique, to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.” Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory (New York: Routledge, 2000), 4. For a history of the concept of “critique,” see also Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study of the Foundation of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia UP, 1986). 124 Hanssen 4. 125 Judith Butler, “Critique, Coercion and Sacred Life in Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence,’ ” in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, ed. Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (New  York:  Fordham UP, 2006), 201–19; Werner Hamacher, “Afformative, Strike: Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence,’ ” in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (New York: Routledge, 1994), 110–38. See also Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York:  Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), where Arendt discusses the difference between Gewalt (violence) and Macht (power) at length. Arendt,

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Benjamin engaged here with Max Weber’s postulation that the modern liberal state possesses “a monopoly on the legitimate use of force” (Monopol legitimen physischen Zwanges).126 Articulated in “Politics as a Vocation,” a talk Weber gave in Berlin in January 1919, during the German Revolution that led to the establishment of the Weimar Republic, Weber’s concept of the “state’s monopoly on violence” (Staatsgewaltsmonopol) wound up being pivotal for political philosophy. “Every state is founded on force (Gewalt),” stated Weber, “as Trotsky once said at Brest-Litovsk. That is indeed correct,” Weber continued, if there existed only social formations in which violence was unknown as a means, then the concept of “state” would have disappeared, then that condition would have arisen which one would define, in this particular sense of the word, as “anarchy.” Violence is, of course, not the normal or sole means used by the state. There is no question of that. But it is the means specific to the state. At the present moment, the relation between the state and violence is a particularly intimate one . . . Nowadays, by contrast, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a certain territory.127 Both Weber’s and Benjamin’s considerations—written within two years of one another—were shaped by the crisis of parliamentary democracy that kicked off the Weimar Republic. Dutschke, Enzensberger, and Nirumand continued their discussion of violence, citing Frankfurt School critical theorist Herbert Marcuse’s 1965  “Repressive Tolerance” essay. “Therewith a secondary distinction is given,” they argued, “the difference between suppressing (repressive) and liberatory (emancipatory) violence.”128 In his essay, Marcuse started with a discussion of violence:  “The elimination of violence and the reduction of suppression to the extent required for protecting man and animals from cruelty and aggression are preconditions for the creation of a humane society.”129 The problem, Marcuse continued, is that seeking to make sense of the widespread violence that marked the late 1960s, devoted this book-length study to the subject and argued that it would be a mistake to believe that it was restricted to a small minority of militants and extremists. She explored the theory of violence in history, drawing, among others, on Max Weber, as well as manifestations of it in the late 1960s. 126 Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures:  Science as a Vocation, Politics as a Vocation, ed. David S. Owen, Tracy B. Strong, and Rodney Livingstone (New York: Hackett, 2004). 127 Weber 32–93; emphases in the original. Weber:  Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1994), 309–69. Here, 310. 128 Dutschke, Nirumand, and Enzensberger 24–8. Here 26. “Damit ist schon eine zweite Unterscheidung gegeben, die nämlich zwischen unterdrückender (repressiver) und befreiender (emanzipierender) Gewalt.” 129 Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in Critique of Pure Tolerance, Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 81–117. Here, 82.

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such a society does not yet exist; progress toward it is perhaps more than before arrested by violence and suppression on a global scale. As deterrents against nuclear war, as police action against subversion, as technical aid in the fight against imperialism and communism, as methods of pacification in neo-colonial massacres, violence and suppression are promulgated, practiced and defended by democratic and authoritarian governments alike, and the people subjected to these governments are educated to sustain such practices as necessary for the preservation of the status quo.130 Sustaining suppressive violence practiced and rationalized by one’s government Marcuse termed repressive tolerance—repressive, in that it was designed to preserve the status quo of power relations, such as colonialism, imperialism. Stating that “advanced democratic societies, which have undermined the basis of economic and political liberalism, have also altered the liberal function of tolerance,” Marcuse argued for a “liberating tolerance,” one that does not support “historical violence emanating from among ruling classes.”131 Outlining a history whereby “imperialist wars and the liquidation of Spartacus in Germany in 1919, Fascism and Nazism did not break but rather tightened suppression,” Marcuse argued that a “liberating tolerance would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.”132 These aspects of Marcuse’s argument—the legitimated use of violence, so long as it sought to fight back against “inequality and discrimination”—deeply influenced the late 1960s New Left as evidenced in the coauthors’ arguments presented in the Kursbuch article. They at once condemned and supported violence, stating, “Violence is only justified insofar as it serves to abolish violence, insofar as this violence is used for repression.”133 In contrast to Marcuse’s attempt to disambiguate left-wing from rightwing violence, second generation critical theorist Jürgen Habermas combined the terms, when—at a conference on the “University and Democracy” held on June 9, 1967, in Hannover, just a week after the fatal shooting of Ohnesorg and on the eve of his burial in Hannover—Habermas warned against what he perceived to be the student movement’s “leftist fascism.”134 Although Habermas had supported the student movements from 1965 130

Marcuse 82. Marcuse 108. 132 Marcuse 108. 133 Dutschke, Nirumand, and Enzensberger 24–8, Here 26  “Gewalt ist immer nur dann gerechtfertigt, wenn sie der Abschaffung der Gewalt, soweit sie Unterdrücking ist, dient.” 134 Jürgen Habermas, “‘Kongreß ‘Hochschule und Demokratie,” in Kleine politische Schriften IX (Frankfurt:  Suhrkamp, 2001), 205–16; and “Diskussion über die ‘Tätigkeit der Regelverletzung’ und ‘linken Faschismus’ (9 June 1967),” Kleine politische Schriften, 241, 245. See also Jürgen Habermas, “ ‘Etikett des linken Faschismus’ vom 13. Mai 1968,” in APO: Die außerparlamentarische Opposition in Quellen und Dokumenten, 1960–1970, ed. Karl Otto (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1987), 249–58. 131

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to 1967, he was increasingly concerned about the use of violence and the presence of authoritarianism among left-wing social movements. During the heated German Autumn of 1977, Habermas stated that his use of the term was an overreaction. In the meantime, it had unleashed furious debates and continues to do so. In response, Oskar Negt—who like Habermas studied with Theodor W. Adorno in Frankfurt, and was an assistant of Habermas’s at the University of Hannover—published the article “Studentischer Protest—Liberalismus— ‘Linksfaschismus’ ” in Kursbuch in June 1968,135 and together with Wolfgang Abendroth published Die Linke antwortet Jürgen Habermas in 1968, an edited volume that included articles protesting Habermas’s term from various angles.136 In his contribution to the volume, Negt argued that “ ‘Left Fascism’ is a projection of the fascistic tendencies immanent to the system onto fringe groups against which it is easy to discriminate.”137 And, Negt concluded, “whoever leaves securing of freedom up to the state, falls victim to a fatal illusion: the belief in the capability of a democracy to exist without democrats.”138

Conclusions In West Germany, as the media shifted from the “consensus journalism” dominant in West Germany in the 1950s to the zeitkritischer Journalismus (critical contemporary journalism) of the late 1960s, articles started questioning an assumed consensus with the government as well as representations of social movements. This critical engagement, evidenced in articles published in Spiegel and Stern, focus in particular on print media of the Spring publication house:  its inflammatory headlines and yellow journalism. At the time, Springer was also under public scrutiny and government investigation for its media monopoly. The alliance between critical journalism and student movements unleashed the first widespread debate since the Spiegel Affair of 1962 about the role of media in the fledgling democracy of post-fascist era West Germany.

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Oskar Negt, “Studentischer Protest – Liberalismus – ‘Linksfaschismus,’” Kursbuch 13 (June 1968): 179–89. 136 Wolfgang Abendroth and Oskar Negt, Die Linke antwortet Jürgen Habermas (Bonn: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1968). 137 Negt 189. “Der ‘Linksfaschismus’ ist die Projektion der systemimmanenten Faschisierungstendenzen auf leicht diskriminierbare Randgruppen.” On “leftist fascism,” see also Negt 82. 138 Negt 189. “Wer die Sicherung der Freiheit dem Staat . . . überläßt, ist Opfer einer fatalen Illusion: er glaubt an die Existenzfähigkeit einer Demokratie ohne Demokraten.”

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In the late 1960s, student and social movements launched a range of small press publications, including Linkeck, Charly Kaputt!, and Agit 883, to provide a journalistic countermodel that captured and represented the social movements’ interests in content and in tone. This radical press, as well as other papers, such as konkret and Kursbuch that had been in existence since the late 1950s and mid-1960s, “detourned” the corporate media’s hegemonic (political) messages in order to relay instead the political preoccupations of the movements, regularly dwelling on the international events discussed in Chapter 1. They created a countercultural community and helped to shape the politics of late 1960s New Left in West Germany. The alternative imprints also documented shifts in the social movements, for example, in their debates about violence, regularly engaged by the late 1960s and in particular between 1968 and 1970, as evidenced by the number of articles devoted exclusively to the topic. This new preoccupation resulted as much from the violence unleashed on the social movements, for example, by the fatal shooting of Benno Ohnesorg or the assassination attempt on Dutschke, as it did from the increased level of violence internationally (be it the assassination of Lumumba, Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy, Fred Hampton, or Bobby Hutton, or the Tlatelolco massacre, to name only a few examples), their depiction on television and in newspapers, as well as shifting domestic West German politics and strategies. Considering the dynamic radical press reframes the political preoccupations of the student and social movements and allows the debates around violence—for and against, why, what kind—that took place in the student and social movements in the late 1960s and dominated a certain sector of the left in the 1970s to come to the fore, from within. These debates are pivotal to consider, in order to grapple with the subsequent violence unleashed over the 1970s. In 1969, violent attacks began as a number of leftist terrorist organizations came into existence, including the Tupamaros West-Berlin, the Red Army Faction, and the June 2 Movement. Best-known and longest lasting of these groups was the Red Army Faction. As mentioned, it was founded by a statement published in Agit 883 in 1970. In 1972, after its May Offensive, which consisted of a string of five bomb attacks carried out in a short period of days across West Germany, including the May 19, 1972, bombing of the Hamburg offices of Springer, West Germany’s security apparatus increased its search for members of the group, the public submitted a greater number of tips, and most of its first generation was arrested. Over the course of the 1970s, literature—such as Böll’s novel—and films took up the emergent discourse, outlined in this chapter, that questioned the relationship among institutions of power, such as the political establishment, the legal system, and corporate media. Meanwhile, the actions of the Red Army Faction’s first and second generation, between the May Offensive of 1972 and the German Autumn of 1977, continued to dominate the

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headlines, which often used inflammatory headlines, echoing the tone of the late 1960s Springer press. Between 1970 and 1977, the state, which sought to protect itself against terrorist attacks, was concerned about the vantage point from which journalists wrote about the group, most notably between 1972 and 1977 when key members of the RAF’s first generation were imprisoned at Stammheim maximum security prison. As Chapter 3 will delineate in further detail, in keeping with the bifurcating discourse of the era, some journalists argued that the corporate media colluded with the state. Inversely, equally in keeping with the era’s polarizing rhetoric, the state argued that journalists were often sympathizers with the terrorists. The polarizing tendencies already manifest in the late 1960s media, discussed in this chapter, continued to develop over the course of the 1970s, in media as well as in literature and film. Engaging the news reportage, they became symptomatic of the era’s attempt to negotiate anew fundamental questions about the role of media as well as political and legal institutions in a new democracy, in light of the shakeup of 1968, as will be discussed in Chapter 3. That is, if terrorism constituted the key protracted political event of 1970s West Germany, the questions raised by attempts to grapple with it—politically and legally but also in media—were fundamental to West Germany’s first endeavor to redefine itself since 1968. Thus, contrary to what has often been argued as the “failure” of 1968, it was a victory. The events of the year 1968 shifted what was discussed, how, and by whom. And for that reason, the questions raised by the media’s depictions of the RAF over the course of the 1970s can only be considered in light of the wagers of “1968”—understood as the long 1960s (1957–72).

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3 How Violence Comes about and to What It Can Lead: The RAF, Surveillance, and the German Autumn in Cinema, 1966–78

If the decade of “the long sixties” (1957–72) marks one of the most incredible historical ruptures worldwide with changes demanded at work, the university, school, and home, the decade of “the long seventies” (1967–82) showed a retreat to the domestic sphere and was a watershed for the rise in security discourse, both as a result of the laws passed and surveillance apparatuses implemented.1 Near the outset of this long decade, This chapter was generously funded by grants from the DAAD (June–July 2006); the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin (2006– 2007); and the Fulbright Commission (2007–2008), which funded archival research at the Center for Contemporary German Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb), and the Volker Schlöndorff Archiv, Deutsche Filmarchiv, Frankfurt am Main. Additionally, this chapter draws on an interview I conducted with Volker Schlöndorff on June 18, 2007, at his home in Potsdam, Germany. Previous versions of this chapter were presented as guest lectures at Temple University (2010) and the Wentworth Institute of Technology (2010), and as papers at the German Studies Association (2007, 2009); the Modern Languages Association (2007); and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (2010). I  thank Richard Langston and Brad Prager for exchanges that helped to shape this chapter. Unless otherwise indicated, translations throughout this chapter are my own. 1 This periodization for the long 1970s begins with the events surrounding the June 2, 1967, demonstration discussed in Chapter  1 and ends in 1982, politically, with the concession of

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in 1969, the Social Democratic Party (SPD, Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) was in power under Chancellor Willy Brandt (1969–74), followed by Helmut Schmidt (SPD, 1974–82); by the long decade’s end, the chancellorship returned to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU, Christlich Demokratische Union). While West Germany’s political and legal systems sought to counteract terrorism by ratifying legislation and developing security systems,2 cinematic representations of terrorism focused mainly on two issues. First, at the beginning of the long 1970s, students of the then newly established German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb, Deutsche Film- and Fernsehakademie Berlin) picked up on the late 1960s discourse about the consistently hostile depictions of the student movements in media, especially of the Springer press, discussed in Chapter  2, and engaged it in their films. Second and subsequently, 1970s New German Cinema—coupling this concern with the ratification of the numerous repressive laws and increased security apparatuses of the state— noted the heightened surveillance and atmosphere of fear, and questioned the relationship among institutions of power, such as mechanisms of governance, juridical institutions, and corporate media.3 The laws that were passed over the course of the 1970s had created an increasingly tense political environment. On May 30, 1968, the Emergency Laws (Notstandsgesetze), a stipulation of the occupying Western Allies after the Second World War and first drafted in 1958, were ratified.4 Initially, the

power by Helmut Schmidt (SPD) to Helmut Kohl (CDU), and filmically, with Fassbinder’s death, which is often used to mark the end of New German Cinema. 2 See Joachim Foschepoth, Überwachtes Deutschland:  Post- und Telefonüberwachung in der alten Bundesrepublik (Göttingen:  Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2013); Karrin Hanshew, Terror and Democracy in West Germany (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 2012); Mary Nolan, “Pushing the Defensive Wall of the State Forward:  Terrorism and Civil  Liberties in  Germany,” New German Critique 39.3 (Fall 2012):  109–33; Stephan Scheiper, Innere Sicherheit: Politische Anti-Terror Konzepte in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland während der 1970er Jahre (Paderborn:  Schöningh, 2010); Achim Saupe, “Von ‘Ruhe und Ordnung’ zur ‘inneren Sicherheit.’ Eine Historisierung gesellschaftlicher Dispositive,” Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, On-line Ausgabe 7.2 (2010); Klaus Weinhauer, “Terrorismus in der Bundesrepublik der siebziger Jahre: Aspekte einer Sozialund Kulturgeschichte der inneren Sicherheit,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 34 (2004). 3 For studies by historians of how fear and surveillance were naturalized in the United States, see Philip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (Oxford:  Oxford UP, 2008); Stephen Paul Miller, The Seventies Now:  Culture as Surveillance (Durham: Duke UP, 1999); Lester D. Friedman (ed.), American Cinema of the 1970s: Themes and Variations (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2007); Christian Parenti, The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America, From Slavery to the War on Terror (New York: Basic Books, 2003); Stephen Paul Miller, The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance (Durham: Duke UP, 1999); David Lyon, The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 4 For more about the Emergency Laws, see Nick Thomas, “Conspiracies and CounterConspiracies,” in Protest Movements in 1960s West Germany: A Social History of Dissent and Democracy (New York: Berg, 2003), 87–105 and 183–97. See esp. 87–93.

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SPD had taken a firm stance against the proposed laws. But, as argued in Chapter  1, in the 1959 Godesberg Program and onward over the course of the 1960s, the SPD’s politics slid across the political spectrum to the right. By 1966 the SPD changed its political course to such an extent that it formed a Grand Coalition with the conservative CDU and signed off on the laws. Social movements had consistently protested the ratification since they allowed the suspension of civil liberties, permitting the government to intercept personal mail or telephone communications when a state of emergency was declared. Yet as historian Josef Foschepoth argues in Überwachtes Deutschland (Surveilled Germany), this type of interception of communications had taken place in West Germany since its founding, at the insistence of the occupying allied forces, in particular, the United States and the United Kingdom.5 Additional new legislation placed civil servants under particular scrutiny. On January 28, 1972, the West German government passed the “Basic Principles on the Question of Anti-Constitutional Personnel in the Public Service” (Die Grundsätze zur Frage der verfassungsfeindlichen Kräfte im öffentlichem Dienst), known as the “Anti-Radical Decree” (Radikalenerlass) in common parlance and as the “Career Ban” (Berufsverbot) by its critics.6 This law allowed firing of civil servants who expressed opinions deemed to stand in opposition to the West German constitution (to be verfassungswidrig), which, as a direct consequence of the fascist era, states explicitly that one cannot threaten the existence of the state as a democracy. Moreover, indicative of the new Cold War era, membership in a political party, such as the German Communist Party (DKP, Deutsche Kommunistische Partei), reestablished in 1968, constituted grounds for a questionable allegiance to the constitution.7 As a result of this law, which is still in effect in some German states, intelligence agencies checked the political beliefs of “about 3.5 million persons” and passed “on the names of 35,000 suspect applicants to hiring authorities, who barred approximately 2,250 applicants for political reasons. In addition, 2000 to 2100 public servants were subject to disciplinary proceedings, and 256 were dismissed.”8

5

Foschepoth; “Deutschland wird Angriffsziel der US-Dienste bleiben,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 11, 2014. 6 “Der ‘Radikalenerlaß,’ ” Ministerialblatt Nordrhein-Westfalen, 1972, 342; reprinted in Eckart Conze and Gabriele Metzler (eds), 50 Jahre Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Daten und Dokumente (Munich:  C.H. Beck, 2001), 65. See also Jack Zipes, “From Berufsverbot to Terrorism,” Telos 34 (Winter 1977–78): 136–47. Here, 137. 7 See also Michael Meissner and Frans Tooten (eds), Staatsschutz und Berufsverbote in der BRD (Hamburg: Attica-Verlag, 1977). 8 Gerard Braunthal, Political Loyalty and Public Service in West Germany: The 1972 Decree against Radicals and Its Consequences (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), ix. See also Hans Haacke’s installation, reviewed by Raimund Hoghe, “Feldforschung,” Die Zeit, May 19, 1978. Hans Haacke – Wirklich. Werke, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, November 18,

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The ratification of the Emergency Laws in 1968 and the Professional Ban in 1972 kicked off a decade of heightened state security.9 This state of security was also in evidence in the ramped up federal agencies. The Federal Criminal Office (BKA, Bundeskriminalamt) tripled its staff. Over the course of the 1970s, the BKA’s efforts to combat terrorism were centralized and expanded considerably under Horst Herold, who directed the agency from 1971 to 1981 and was the main figure associated with the state’s security efforts.10 In 1971, the taskforce on terrorism (Sonderkommission Terrorismus) was set up.11 Alfred Klaus played a key role in its founding and its focus on the Red Army Faction (RAF). He was known for visiting the family of the Red Army Faction members, in order to get a sense of their familial background. In 1972 Herold, nicknamed “Commissar Computer,” consolidated and computerized criminal technology and research, establishing a database, the INPOL (information system of the police), which located the data dragnet (Rasterfahndung) at the BKA. The database permitted gathered data to be sorted for specific clues found in relationship to RAF members—for example, the tendency to use a fake name on leases or to pay rent and utility bills in cash rather than through a bank transfer—against the patterns of other people in an attempt to filter and track down further members. In 1975, a bureau dedicated to fighting terrorism was established within the BKA and headed by Gerhard Boeden. Additionally, the elite counterterrorism taskforce unit, the GSG 9 (Grenzschutzgruppe 9 or Border Protection Group 9), was set up in response to the hostage crisis at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, in which eight members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September12 took eleven

2006–January 14, 2007. Matthias Flügge und Robert Fleck (eds), Hans Haacke  – Wirklich. Werke 1959–2006 (Berlin:  Akademie der Künste, 2006). See also the fictional segment from Germany in Autumn (1978) directed by Alexander Kluge, which focuses on the plight of history teacher Gabi Teichert, who reappears in his subsequent film Die Patriotin (The Patriot, 1979). Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: History as Film (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard UP, 1992), 27, 110–11. 9 See also Margit Mayer, “The German October of 1977,” New German Critique 13 (Winter 1978): 155–63. 10 Herold appears in the following fictional feature films:  Baader Meinhof Complex (2008), Baader (2002), and the made-for-television docudrama Todesspiel (1997). On Herold and Baader, see also Dorothea Hauser, Baader und Herold. Beschreibung eines Kampfes (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1998). 11 See Sie nannten ihn ‘Familienbulle’:  Aus dem Leben eines Kriminalbeamten. Dir. Renate Stegmüller, Bayrischer Rundfunk, 1999, made-for-television documentary; and Alfred Klaus and Gabriele Droste, Sie nannten mich Familienbulle: Meine Jahre als Sonderermittler gegen die RAF (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 2008). He also played a role in Heinrich Breloer’s made-for-television docudrama Todesspiel (Death Game 1997). 12 The group was named after events of September 1970, when the army of King Hussein of Jordan “attacked the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) headquarters in Amman [, Jordan,] killing three to five thousand guerrillas and capturing four camps in ten days.”

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Israeli athletes hostage. They demanded that 234 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel as well as Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof, and others, such as Okamoto Kozo (Japanese Red Army),13 be freed.14 In the ensuing standoff with the West German police, all eleven hostages, one police officer, and five of the eight terrorists were killed.15 In response, the West German Ministry of the Interior not only established the GSG 9 but also “triggered the British and the French to establish elite counterterrorism teams of their own.”16 The GSG 9, still extant, trains specifically to fight terrorism, disarm bombs, and free hostages; and it can, with permission of the host country, be deployed in other countries. Over the course of the 1970s, the GSG 9 would play a crucial role in the increasing number of hijackings and hostage crises, for example, in the liberation of hostages from the Lufthansa jet “Landshut” hijacked by RAF terrorists to Mogadishu in 1977 during the events of “German Autumn.” Not only the Professional Ban but also numerous laws ratified in the decade between 1967 and 1977 increased federal scrutiny of political views, in particular those deemed to be seditious. In 1976, Section 88a of the Criminal Code was passed, making it a crime to challenge or advocate a challenge to the West German constitution, since it established and guaranteed the democratic order. In October of 1976, Section 129 of the Criminal Code, which banned forming, promoting, or participating in a criminal organization, was expanded to Section 129a, making it a crime to form, support, or promote a domestic terrorist organization.17 And in 1976, Section 130a of the Criminal Code was passed, making it a crime to write, publish, or distribute texts advocating violence. Taken together, these laws created and added to the starkly bifurcated political climate characterizing 1970s West Germany.18 In light of the terrorist

Kay Schiller and Christopher Young, The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 194. 13 The collaboration among various terrorist groups in the 1970s has received relatively short shrift in studies of them, as each is studied vis-à-vis its domestic historical and political context. The recent docudrama Carlos (2010), directed by Olivier Assayas, by contrast, engages intensely the international interplay, and—crucially—its crumbling. 14 Schiller and Young 196. 15 The operations were named Operation Ikrit and Biram, “after two villages from which the Palestinians had been expelled in 1948 to make room for Jewish settlements.” Schiller and Young 194. 16 Schiller and Young 207. 17 In the post-9/11 context, the law has been expanded to include also Section 129b, which makes it a crime to promote, support, or participate in foreign terrorist organizations. 18 On the increasingly polarized political spectrum, see also Karrin Hanshew, Terror and Democracy in West Germany (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge UP, 2012); Gerd Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt: Unsere kleine deutsche Kulturrevolution, 1967–1977, 5th ed. (Berlin:  Fischer, 2011); and Massimiliano Livi, Daniel Schmidt, and Michael Sturm (eds), Die 1970er Jahre als schwarzes Jahrzehnt (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2010).

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attacks that took place during this decade, some believed the best way to protect the democracy was to turn to an increasingly authoritarian government, continuing the concept of a “militant democracy” (streitbare Demokratie), which the CDU championed between 1949 and 1969.19 For others, the laws passed did not strengthen but rather undermined the democracy and the civil liberties it should accord its residents. Justified or not, the laws and the ramped up security apparatus—which included increased police sweeps, street roadblocks for identification paper checks and car searches, police presence on public transportation, as well as federal information-gathering and storing in a centralized databank—led to an increasingly tense atmosphere in West Germany over the course of the 1970s. As Jeremy Varon argues in Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction and the Revolutionary Violence of the 1960s and the 1970s, “What people remember about the era is typically not only the pervasive fear of terrorist violence but also the tremendous constriction of thought and feeling caused by heightened demands for loyalty to the state, enforced, in part, by repression.”20 Cinema of what I  am calling “the long seventies” (1967–82) shows visible signs of this constriction and fear,21 and a shift in debates around terrorism. In the late 1960s, early films of the dffb picked up on discourses discussed in Chapter 2 and focused on the corporate media’s depiction of student movements. By the early 1970s, New German Cinema films marked the change in politics and discourse: while they still considered the role of media, a new preoccupation with surveillance mechanisms, a heightened state of security, and its effects on personal lives had come to the fore. As will be discussed subsequently, these twin considerations of media and surveillance manifest thematically and aesthetically in the mid-decade film, directed by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975). Toward the end of this decade, Germany in Autumn (1978), created by eleven New German Cinema directors, traced the impact of the decade’s repression on media and on personal lives.

dffb Films of the Late 1960s: Protest Movements and Media Coverage In the late 1960s, as the social movements were approaching their peak, the German Film and Television Academy Berlin, or dffb, was established 19

Hanshew 38. Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction and the Revolutionary Violence of the 1960s and the 1970s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 254. 21 A filmography of many of the films up to 1997 can be found in Petra Kraus, Natalie Lettenwitsch, Ursula Saekel, Brigitte Bruns, and Matthias Mersch (eds), Deutschland im Herbst: Terrorismus und Film (Munich: Münchner Filmzentrum, 1997), 118–33. 20

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in 1966 in West-Berlin at the front lines of the uprisings.22 As a result, students of the early dffb often engaged its main preoccupations, focusing, among other things, on the 1960s consistently hostile depictions of social movements in corporate media, especially of the Springer press. Not only did the students concentrate on the uprisings thematically, they also acted in solidarity.23 When the Emergency Laws were passed, students occupied the dffb from May 30 to June 10, 1968, renaming it the Dziga Vertov School. These students were expelled on November 18, 1968, for trespassing and occupying the school.24 According to one account, a higher court later dismissed the decision and reinstituted the students’ right to attend the dffb.25 The dffb was founded, in part, in response to the Oberhausen Manifesto, an appeal put forward by twenty-six directors on February 28, 1962, that demanded, not explicitly but de facto, a radical revamping of the West German television and film industry, its funding mechanisms, as well as the establishment of schools.26 In 1962, Oberhausen signatories Alexander Kluge and Detten Schleiermacher, together with Edgar Reitz, cofounded West Germany’s first film school, the Ulm Institute for Film Design (Institut für Filmgestaltung Ulm) at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (School of Design Ulm). As Eric Rentschler, writing about the Oberhausen Manifesto on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, pointed out, “Despite substantial 22

See also Christina Gerhardt, “1968 and the Early Cinema of the dffb,” in 1968 and West German Cinema, ed. Christina Gerhardt, special issue of The Sixties 10 (2017): 26–44; Volker Pantenburg, “Die Rote Fahne:  Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, 1966–1968,” in Handbuch zur Kultur- und Mediengeschichte der Studentenbewegung, ed. Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (Stuttgart:  Metzler, 2007), 199–206; and Karl-Heinz Stenz, Kampfplatz Kamera. Die filmkulturelle Bedeutung der filmstudierenden ‘68er Generation: Am Beispiel der Protestaktivitäten an der neu gegründeten Deutschen Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb) (Munich: GRIN Verlag, 2008). 23 See also Tilman Baumgärtel, “Die Rolle der DFFB-Studenten bei der Revolte von 1967/ 68. Ein Rückblick anläßlich des 30. Jahrestages der Gründung der Deutschen Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin,” Junge Welt, September 27, 1996, and October 2, 1996. 24 The number of students expelled varies from seventeen to nineteen. Baumgärtel puts the number at seventeen; newspaper accounts of 1968 put the number at eighteen; and Pantenburg puts the number at nineteen, relying on the official dffb publication “10 Years dffb” according to which fourteen students who started in 1966 and five who started in 1967 were expelled. See Tilman Baumgärtel, Harun Farocki:  Werkmonografie eines Autorenfilmers (Berlin:  bbooks, 1998), 56–78; Werner Kließ, “Eindruck willkürlicher Maßnahmen: Die Krise der Filmund Fernsehakademie,” Film 1 (1969):  1; and Hans Helmut Prinzler (ed.), 10 Jahre DFFB (Berlin: DFFB, 1976), esp. pp. 57–120. 25 Film Portal, “Holger Meins,” http://www.filmportal.de/node/240917/gallery/. Last accessed February 2, 2018. 26 “Oberhausen Manifesto,” in West German Filmmakers on Film, ed. Eric Rentschler (New  York:  Holmes and Meier, 1988), 2.  On the working conditions of filmmakers, see the various documents by New German Cinema directors in Rentschler, “The Price of Survival:  Institutional Challenges,” in West German Filmmakers on Film, 9–38. On the history of these and other film schools in Germany, see Peter C. Slansky, Filmhochschulen in Deutschland. Geschichte – Typologie – Architektur (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2011).

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opposition, the initiative proved a valuable catalyst with significant and lasting results, including, but not limited to the founding of film academies in Ulm, West Berlin and Munich.”27 The University of Television and Film in Munich (hff, Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München), which was established on July 19, 1966, officially opened on November 6, 1967.28 While the social movements of the late 1960s discussed in Chapter 1 have become canonical for histories of the era, and New German Cinema has become memorialized as the best-known post–Second World War West German school of filmmaking, and across the border in France, the earlier French New Wave films directed by Jean-Luc Godard and the subsequent Left Bank cinema of Chris Marker and Agnès Varda is tied inextricably to the social movements, West Germany’s connection to its own period of experimental or avant-garde filmmaking has been radically overlooked.29 Yet it is manifest in the early work of the dffb, where experiments with form and engagement with politics converged. Revisiting them, on the one hand, provides a new angle on the political preoccupations of the time, and, on the other hand, contributes a new reading to West German film history of the 1960s.30 On September 17, 1966, West-Berlin mayor Willy Brandt and founding codirectors Erwin Leiser and Heinz Rathsack cut the ribbon, thereby officially opening the dffb. Of over 800 applicants, 35 were selected for the dffb’s inaugural class.31 It included Jörg-Michael Baldenius, Johannes Beringer, Hartmut Bitomsky, Karl Dieter Briel, Gerd Conradt, Lutz Eisholz, Harun Farocki, Bernd Fielder, Wolf Gremm, Frank Grützbach, Thomas Hartwig, Holger Meins, Hans-Rüdiger Minow, Thomas Mitscherlich, Wolfgang Petersen, Helke Sander, Daniel Schmid, Gerry Schumm, Irena Vrkljan, Max Wilutzki, and Christian Ziewer.32 Fassbinder, whose work will 27 Eric Rentschler, “Declaration of Independents,” Artforum (2012):  273–9. See also Eric Rentschler, West German Film in the Course of Time: Reflections on the Twenty Years since Oberhausen (Bedford Hills: Redgrave, 1984). 28 That the establishment of these three schools did not resolve issues raised by the Oberhausen Manifesto is made explicit in the Mannheim Declaration (1967), which opens thus:  “six years have passed since the Oberhausen Declaration. The renewal of [West] German film has not yet taken place.” The Mannheim Declaration criticizes the film funding law (FFG, Filmförderungsgesetz) implemented in 1967 and viewed as “a victory of the old guard” as it was “based solely on economic not artistic criteria.” Rentschler, West German Filmmakers on Film 4. 29 Cf. Lisa Haegele, “Beyond the Left: Violence and the Politics of Affect in Roland Klick’s Bübchen” and Randall Halle, “XScreen 1968:  Material Film Aesthetics and Radical Cinema Politics,” in 1968 and West German Cinema, ed. Christina Gerhardt, special issue of The Sixties 10 (2017). 30 Cf. Celluloid Revolts: German Screen Cultures and the Long Sixties, eds. Christina Gerhardt and Marco Abel (Rochester: Camden House, 2019). 31 Günther Peter Straschek, Wider das Kino (Frankfurt a.M.:  Suhrkamp, 1974), 357. See also the official dffb historiography, which lists thirty-five original students:  http://www.dffb.de/ html/de/akademie/die_dffb. Last accessed January 19, 2015. 32 Julia Knight underscores the important opportunity that the schools offered women to work together rather than in isolation within a male-dominated profession and cites Helke Sander, Cristina Perincioli, Gisela Tuchtenhagen, Gardi Depe, Barbara Kasper, and Marianne Lüdcke

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be discussed in greater detail further on in this chapter, was turned down in 1966 with the assessment that he “lacked the requisite training/Knowledge Films: insufficient.”33 His subsequent application in 1967 was also rejected. Accepted students of the early dffb included future RAF member Holger Meins and future June 2 Movement member Philip Werner Sauber. Along with Hartmut Bitomsky, Harun Farocki was among the dffb’s first generation’s best-known directors. Farocki remained affiliated with the school, influential in his own right and through his work with the contemporary Berlin School director, Christian Petzold, up to his death in 2014.34 Although many of Farocki’s early films of the late 1960s thematically relate directly to the social movements, his first film, Zwei Wege (Two Ways or Two Paths, 1966), produced for German television, engages conceptually with the late 1960s discourse about how to read corporate media depictions of the student uprisings. Farocki’s film, stylistically, offers two ways to interpret—in this case, an image or an oil painting—through its use of closeups, “breaking down the image with the camera,” as Tilman Baumgärtel described the film on Farocki’s website.35 While the film dovetails with Farocki’s later oeuvre—for example, as Baumgärtel states, Farocki would return to questions of how to read images in his later essay films of the 1980s, Wie man sieht (How One Sees, 1986) and Bilder der Welt (Images of the World, 1988)—it also illuminates the era’s preoccupation with competing narratives about then occurring events. Vitally, Farocki’s film underscores the importance of aesthetics or form, in tandem with thematics, which informs the subsequent dffb films discussed. One of his best-known films of the era, Die Worte des Vorsitzenden (The Words of the Chairman, 1967), consists of quotations from Mao’s Little Red Book.36 Pages from the book are torn out and while Helke Sander (off screen) reads quotations from Marshal Lin Biao’s introduction, the pages are folded as early attendees of the dffb. Julia Knight, “The Absent Directors,” in Women and the New German Cinema (New York: Verso, 1992), 1–21. Here, 9. 33 Hans-Helmut Prinzler, “Fassbinder in der Aufnahmeprüfung der DFFB,” in Rainer Werner Fassbinder Werkschau, ed. Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation (Berlin: Argon, 1992), 75. He was “nicht genügend vorgebildet/Kenntnisse Filme: nicht ausreichend”; translation my own. 34 Farocki worked on all of Petzold’s six feature-length films (produced up to Farocki’s death) as script collaborator, consultant, cowriter, or dramaturg:  Barbara, 2012:  Jerichow, 2008; Yella, 2007; Ghosts, 2005; Wolfsburg, 2003; The State I am In, 2000. Farocki also coauthored the screenplay with Petzold for Phoenix (2014), directed by Petzold. 35 Zwei Wege (Two Paths), dir. Harun Farocki; cinematographer, Horst Kandeler; 1966, 16 mm, b/w, 3 mins. Commissioned by Sender Freies Berlin (SFB). See also: http://www.farocki-film.de/. Last accessed January 18, 2015. Tilman Baumgärtel, “Zwei Wege,” Farocki Film. 36 Die Worte des Vorsitzenden (The Words of the Chairman), dir. Harun Farocki, 16 mm, b/w, silent, 3 mins. For the role of Mao’s Little Red Book in both West and East Germany, see also Quinn Slobodian, “Badge Books and Brand Books:  The Mao Bible in East and West Germany,” in Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History, ed. Alexander C. Cook (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2014), 206–24.

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into little paper airplanes, affixed to a pin, and launched. They land in the soup plates of two persons seated at a white tablecloth draped and well-set table. The two people wear the paper bags over their heads, mentioned in Chapter 1, adorned with the images of the Shah of Iran and his wife, and worn by students at the June 2, 1967, demonstrations (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2). The film was created in October 1967, after the June 2, 1967, demonstrations, which Farocki, writing about the film on his website, states he had missed, as he had just departed on a ship bound for Venezuela, in one of the numerous signs of the movement’s international ties.37 The idea for this film, he states, came to him aboard the ship. In the film, he writes, the words metaphorically become weapons. The film was screened regularly at teach-ins in West-Berlin in the late 1960s and garnered intense if not necessarily uniform responses.38 It aired on June 27, 1969, on the West German television channel ZDF. Helke Sander’s film Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure (Break or Stop the Power of the Manipulators, 1968),39 funded by Suomen Mainos-Televisio (Finnish television),40 is one of the first dffb films to show the preoccupation with Springer’s media coverage.41 The black-and-white 16-mm film was shot 37 Farocki writes of the trip himself on his official site, http://www.harunfarocki.de/films/1960s/ 1967/the-words-of-the-chairman.html/. Last accessed February 2, 2018. Thomas Mitscherlich, son of Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, was production assistant; Christiane Schily, wife of Otto Schily, who would represent Gudrun Ensslin, at her arson trial in 1968 and from 1975 to 1977, was one of the actors. 38 About its reception Kreimeier wrote: “Der Film wurde auf den Teach-ins im Audimax der Freien Universität teils mit donnerndem Applaus, teils mit ohrenbetäubenden Pfeifkonzerten überschüttet. Er provoziert unmittelbare, spontane Reaktionen; erst mit dem Fortgang der Linienkämpfe und der ideologischen Verhärtungen breitete sich das Schweigen, die eisige Ablehnung aus. Farocki war 1967/68 ein Dadaist des Maoismus.” Klaus Kreimeier, “Papier - Schere - Stein. Farockis frühe Filme,” in Der Ärger mit den Bildern. Die Filme von Harun Farocki, ed. Rolf Aurich and Ulrich Kriest (Konstanz: UVK Verlag, 1998), 27–45. 39 Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure (Stop the Power of the Manipulators), dir. Helke Sander; assistant dir. Harun Farocki; cinematographer, Skip Norman; sound, Ulrich Knaudt, 1968, 16 mm, b/w, 43 mins. Archive of the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, Germany. 40 She studied theatre in Hamburg from 1957 to 1958. In 1959, Sander married Finnish author Markku Lahtela and they had a son. Starting in 1962, Sander lived and worked in Finland, initially in theatre, producing about four to five pieces annually. From 1964 onward, she directed programs for Finnish television and directed theatre pieces performed on Suomen MainosTelevisio. In 1965, she returned to West-Berlin. And in 1966, she began her studies at the dffb. 41 According to Sander’s website, the film never aired in Finland due to pressure from the Springer Verlag. Sander would become known especially for her feminist filmmaking. Her first dffb four-minute short Subjektitüde (1966) already focused on sexism. In 1968 Sander cofounded the Aktionsrat zu Befreiung der Frauen (Action Committee for the Liberation of Women) and participated in an action at an SDS conference, in which she denounced the sexism of male SDS. As she did so, she was yelled at in an attempt to shut her up and or down. In 1974, she founded Frauen and Film (women and cinema), one of the first feminist film journals in Europe. For more about her political work and her early dffb cinema, see also Christina Gerhardt, “Helke Sander’s dffb Cinema and West Germany’s Feminist Movement,” in Celluloid Revolt: German Screen Cultures and the Long Sixties, ed. Christina Gerhardt and Marco Abel (Rochester: Camden House, 2019).

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between December 1967 and February 1968, thus after the fatal shooting of Ohnesorg and during the Springer Tribunal. The film sought, as she put it, “to communicate to people for whom the argumentation of the extraparliamentary opposition (Außerparlamentarische Opposition or APO) was foreign. The realization that what was in the papers is not only ‘information’ but that it also edits, comments on, distorts and can serve particular interests really hit me hard back then.”42 To illustrate the influence, one shot shows all riders of a West-Berlin train reading Springer press papers. In order to show what Sander deemed to be the nexus of corporate media, economic interests, and politics, she uses quotations from Springer-owned newspapers to constitute the dialogue of two men, who are representatives of West German companies. The film shows the two men riding in the back of a car, being chauffeured along the Autobahn to West-Berlin to negotiate the political preconditions for saving the West-Berlin economy.43 As she explains: The feature film type of sequences shows the strongly stylized communication between readers of the [Springer-owned] Welt, in other words the manipulators, and the BILD readers, the manipulated . . . Representatives of West German companies, who had gathered together in a working group focused on saving the [West] Berlin economy, made its rescue contingent on political conditions . . . Company men . . . announce these pre-conditions by speaking in actual quotes from the Welt papers.44 The difference between Welt and BILD readers, which Sander mentions and would be known to audiences of the time in West Germany, consisted of the fact that Welt was read predominately by the wealthy and the bourgeoisie (the “manipulators” as Sander puts it) and Bild was read mostly by the working class. A subsequent dffb production, Ernst-Ulrich Knaudt’s 35-minute thesis or graduation film Unsere Steine (Our Stones, February 1968), shot in blackand-white and 16 mm, is even more provocative in its suggestions of what 42 For the quotation: “Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure,” Helke Sander. http://www.helkesander.de/filme/brecht-die-macht-der-manipulateure/. Last accessed February 4, 2013. See also Marc Silberman, “An Interview with Helke Sander,” Jumpcut 29 (February 1984): 59, http:// www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC29folder/HellkeSander.html. Last accessed January 18, 2015. 43 See also Thomas Elsaesser, “ ‘It Started with These Images’—Some Notes on Political FilmMaking after Brecht in Germany: Helke Sander and Harun Farocki,” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 7 (Fall 1985): 95–120. 44 “Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure,” Helke Sander, http://www.helke-sander.de/filme/brechtdie-macht-der-manipulateure/. Last accessed February 4, 2013. “Die spielfilmartigen Sequenzen zeigen die stark stilisierte Kommunikation zwischen Welt-Lesern, den Manipulateuren, und den Bild-Lesern, den Manipulierten . . . Vertreter westdeutscher Konzerne, die sich damals zu einem Arbeitskreis zur Rettung der Berliner Wirtschaft zusammengeschlossen hatten, knüpften diese Rettung an politische Bedingungen . . . Konzernherren . . . machen diese Bedingungen klar, indem sie in Originalzitaten aus der Welt reden.”

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shape the direction actions against the Springer press might take, showing rocks being thrown at the Springer-owned daily the Berliner Morgenpost.45 To explain the action, the shot cuts to stills of newspaper headlines from another Springer-owned West-Berlin daily, BZ, and its coverage of demonstrations and the later disproven police allegations against the demonstrators.46 The film opens with a black screen and Sander’s voiceover narration, stating that “the tradition of all dead beings weighs like a nightmare on mind of the living.” The opening visuals consist of footage of US soldiers deplaning (presumably in Vietnam); then, the film cuts to a panning shot of the bodies of dead Vietnamese, mostly children, lined up on the ground. Finally, it cuts to a headline: “This is how America defends our freedom.” A media closeup shot shows a stream of newspapers, as at a contemporary newspaper printing press, gliding up the screen so quickly, they blur. Later, a long tracking shot shows a woman reading the Springer-owned daily the Berliner Morgenpost. The film cuts to a slow vertical pan down the photojournalist Eddie Adams’s well-known and oft-reprinted photo “Saigon Execution,” from February 1, 1968, showing South Vietnamese police chief Nguyễn Ngọc Loan holding a gun to the head of Việt Cộng soldier Nguyễn Văn Lém (see Figure 2.2). The film cuts back to the woman, who wraps the paper around a cobblestone and throws it. An inter-title reads “Steine” (Stones). Found footage shows masses of bombs being dropped from military planes. The film cuts to a handheld camera in a high angle close-up shot, showing a cobblestone sidewalk. The person holding the camera begins to run, thus speeding up the movement across the cobblestones, until they, too, blur. The ground floor of the West-Berlin office of the Springer press is shown with the name of one of its papers, Berliner Morgenpost, illuminated in neon letters. Displayed against the window are copies of the press’s newspapers. The camera zooms in to the front page of one issue of Berliner Morgenpost taped to the window; the headline reads:  “Vietnam:  Worum es wirklicht geht” (Vietnam:  what it is really about). The film cuts to a window (no newspapers); behind the window, the black-and-white photo, included in Sander’s previously discussed film, shows US Vice President Humphrey and Axel Springer. A  projectile hits and cracks the window; the sound of shattering glass can be heard. The film cuts back to the wobbly handheld camera, and the legs and feet, of a person, running across the cobblestones. It cuts back to the window cracking and the photo in the background. Four more times the film cuts back and forth between the broken window with

45

Unsere Steine (Our Stones), dir. Ernst-Ulrich Knaudt, 1968, 16 mm, b/w, 35 mins, Archive of the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, Germany. 46 See Chapter 2 for a more detailed discussion of the allegations and the role the media played in disseminating the false information, which they never corrected or retracted.

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the photo in the background and the running across the cobblestones. To explain the action, after the first two cross-cuts between cobblestones and broken window, the montage includes newspaper images of Vietnamese who have been beaten or found footage of them being physically abused, faces bloodied and bruised. Then, the film cuts to a long shot of the WestBerlin headquarters of the Springer offices where smoke, as if from a fire burning but off-screen, blows across the screen’s bottom third. Knaudt’s film connects political events (Vietnam War) and press coverage (Springer) and the action taken. Together, these films criticize the role of the Springer press in legitimating the violence of wars waged. Farocki’s 17-minute short film Ihre Zeitungen (Their Newspapers, February 1968), shot on black-and-white and in 16  mm, also focuses on the 1968 student campaign against the Springer press.47 The film opens with three fast cuts, showing three Springer papers respectively—Berliner Morgenpost, B.Z., and Bildzeitung. It continues with three fast jump cuts, showing a man reading two different editions of B.Z. and one of the Bildzeitung. Meanwhile, in an auditory approximation of the jump cut, a male voiceover says “as news,” a female voiceover says “as mutilated news,” and a male voice continues “Vietnam arrives in Berlin.” Toward the film’s end, members of a collective wrap cobblestones in newspapers. “The stones,” a voiceover states, “weigh down the paper. The paper dictates [to the stone] the direction to take.” In other words, the stones are directed toward the newspapers’  presses. Then, one hears the sounds of windows shattering off-screen. The film ends. Thomas Elsaesser refers to this film as “among the most notorious of these instructional shorts” of Farocki’s oeuvre at the time.48 Finally, Farocki’s Drei Schüsse auf Rudi (Three Shots on Rudi, 1968), a four-minute black-and-white 16-mm short, picks up on this discourse surrounding the Springer press more concretely, outlining its role in leading to the assassination attempt on SDS leader Rudi Dutschke, by focusing on its tabloid BILD.49 A  balloon caption reads, “Students protesting against mass murder in Vietnam.” Then, an arrow points; a new caption appears, stating “BILD speaks of rowdies and ring-leaders.” The short film progresses like a flowchart until at the end only two circles remain. Farocki slips off 47

Ihre Zeitungen (Their Newspapers), dir. Harun Farocki; assistant dir. Helke Sander; cinematographer, Skip Norman; sound, Ulrich Knaudt, 1968, 16 mm, b/w, 17 mins. Archive of Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, Germany. 48 Thomas Elsaesser, “Harun Farocki:  Filmmaker, Artist, Media Theorist,” in Harun Farocki:  Working on the Sight-Lines, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam:  Amsterdam UP, 2004), 11–40. Here, 38, fn 10. 49 Drei Schüsse auf Rudi (Three Shots on Rudi); dir. Harun Farocki; cinematographer, Skip Norman; sound, Ulrich Knaudt, 1968, 16 mm, b/w, silent, 4 mins. Presumed lost. Description based closely on the one provided at Harun Farocki’s website: http://www.farocki-film.de/. Last accessed January 18, 2015.

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FIGURE 3.1 Kurt Hilliges, “Dutschke Assassination Attempt,” April 11, 1968, Associated Press. (AP Photo/Kurt Hilliges.)

his shoes, leaves them in the circles, and exits the frame. The two shoes left in the frame reference the widely circulated photograph after the 1968 assassination attempt on Dutschke, where—after Dutschke had been shot and taken to the hospital—his bicycle and two shoes, lying on the sidewalk, encircled by chalk as part of the investigation of the crime scene, were all that remained for press photographers (see Figure 3.1). By moving from the headlines to an image of Dutschke’s shoes, Farocki’s short film suggestively links the inflammatory rhetoric of the Springer press with the assassination attempt on Dutschke. As Josef Bachmann revealed when on trial for the attempted assassination, he had “taken [his] daily

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information from the Bild-Zeitung.”50 This recitation of iconic media images already evident in Farocki’s contemporaneously produced film would return in subsequent cinematic engagements with the era.51 The actions depicted dovetail with real-life events. As discussed in Chapter 2, after the attack on Dutschke, about 2,500 persons laid siege to the publisher’s offices in West-Berlin, criticizing its use of yellow journalism to foment public opposition against the social movements.52 About 300,000 participated in demonstrations in front of Springer offices nationwide, and solidarity demonstrations took place at West German embassies around the world. In these ways, pervasive concern about the (Springer) press coverage of social movements was evident in films produced concurrent to the uprisings by students of the dffb in the late 1960s. The late 1960s dffb films also underscore the reality of the international scope for the political preoccupations of the era’s West German social movements outlined in Chapter  1.53 They reference the ongoing selfliberation wars, for example, in Algeria54; the writings of revolutionary leaders in other countries, such as of Lin Piao55; the US War on Vietnam56; and the effects of napalm.57 The films also manifest a concern with domestic 50

“Siebzig Prozent reiben sich die Hände,” Spiegel, March 10, 1969, 78. For a detailed discussion of the role of the media in the assassination attempt, see Chapter 2, pages 79–80.  51 The Oscar-nominated Baader Meinhof Complex (2008), among other films about the era, depicts the assassination attempt on Dutschke by lingering on this image as well. 52 For a longer discussion of yellow journalism—the inaccurate and often inflammatory media—in this instance covering the late 1960s student demonstrations in West Germany, see Chapter 2. 53 See also, Christina Gerhardt, “Internationalism and the Early Student Films of the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb),” in 1968 and Global Cinema, ed. Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2018), 96–116. 54 A passing reference is made to the war in Algeria in Der Wahlhelfer (The Campaign Helper), dir. Harun Farocki; cinematographer, Thomas Hartwig, 1967, 16 mm, b/w, 14 mins. Archive of the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, Germany. 55 Die Worte des Vorsitzenden (The Words of the Chairman) is based on Mao’s Little Red Book, which includes an introduction by Marshal Lin Piao, in which words are weapons, dir. Harun Farocki; assistant dir. Helke Sander; cinematographer, Holger Meins, 1967, 16, mm, 3 mins. Archive of the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, Germany. 56 White Christmas, dir. Harun Farocki; assistant dir. Harun Farocki; cinematographer, Skip Norman; music, Bing Crosby, 1968, 16 mm, b/w, 3 mins. Archive of the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, Germany; Nicht löschbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire), dir. Harun Farocki; assistant dir. Helke Sander; cinematographer, Gerd Conradt; sound, Ulrich Knaudt, 1969, 16  mm, b/w, 25 mins. Archive of the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, Germany. De Opresso Liber, dir. Carlos Bustamente, 1968, 16 mm, b/w, 5 mins. 57 In Inextinguishable Fire, Farocki presents starkly the effects of napalm on the skin: the film ends with Farocki extinguishing a cigarette on his arm, and stating that while the average temperature of a cigarette is 500 degrees, napalm’s average temperature is 3,000 degrees. Nicht löschbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire), dir. Harun Farocki; assistant dir. Helke Sander; cinematographer, Gerd Conradt; sound, Ulrich Knaudt, 1969, 16 mm, b/w, 25 mins. Archive of the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, Germany.

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social justice, for example, for the homeless58 and for workers.59 Over the course of the 1970s, however, the cinematic focus on international solidarity still so prevalent in the late 1960s dffb films would narrow in geographic scope to the domestic context.

Bringing the War Home: The Return to the Domestic Landscape Three main factors shifted the focus to the domestic context over the course of the 1970s. First, in the late 1960s and early 1970s the number of armed struggle groups that sprang into existence in West Germany grew, as did their inland actions. Second, as the attacks increased in frequency and persisted, the West German government took measures to counteract them, which brought the national landscape to the fore. Third, after the majority of the Red Army Faction’s first generation was arrested in 1972, subsequent RAF actions concentrated on imprisoned members—on freeing them and on their prison conditions—again preserving the focus on the domestic context. Between 1969 and 1972 numerous armed struggle groups were founded in West Germany. According to police data, at least forty-seven “terror acts,” including arson attacks, bank robberies, and bomb attacks, took place between November 1969 and May 1972.60 In the fall of 1969, Dieter Kunzelmann cofounded the Tupamaros West-Berlin, in another sign of the global influences, named after the Tupamaros, an armed struggle group in Uruguay.61 The Tupamaros West-Berlin was the first armed struggle group 58

Oskar Langenfeld. 12 Mal, dir. Holger Meins; cinematographer, Gerd Conradt, 1966, 16 mm, b/w, 13 mins. Archive of the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, Germany. Also available on as an extra disc accompanying the documentary Starbuck Holger Meins, dir. Gerd Conradt, 2002. Hartmut Jahn Productions. Distributor: Neue Visionen. 59 Die Teilung aller Tage (The Division of all Days), dir. Hartmut Bitomsky and Harun Farocki; assistant dir., Petra Milhoffer and Ingrid Oppermann; cinematographers, Carlos Bustamante and Adolf Winckelmann, 1970, 16 mm, b/w, 65 mins. 60 Walter Althammer, Gegen den Terror (Bonn:  Bonn Aktuell, 1978), 41–65. A  similar albeit higher uptick in groups and attacks took place in the United States around 1969 and 1970. Jeremy Varon, in laying out the history of the Weather Underground, states that in the United States, “though no fully reliable figures exist, one estimate counts as many as 2800 such attacks between January 1969 and April 1970 alone.” Varon 3. 61 The Tupamaros Uruguay was founded in 1965, to address deteriorating economic conditions resulting in part from external attempts to privatize Uruguayan industry. Many of its participants had been sugarworkers and members of the Union de Trabajadores Azucareros de Argitas, the union for sugarworkers. They argued for a self-reliant economy and the redistribution of funds to workers, as well as cooperatively run factories, free healthcare, and education. For more information about the group, see Alain Labrousse, Tupamaros: Urban Guerrillas in Uruguay, trans. Dinah Livingstone (London: Penguin, 1970). For a documentary about a former member, comparing her experiences to those of a former member of the June 2 Movement, see Greater Freedom, Lesser Freedom, dir. Kristina Konrad, 2000, Froschfilm. For an analysis of the film,

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in West Germany “to seek military training at an Al Fatah camp in Jordan in October of 1969.”62 The Tupamaros West-Berlin, the Tupamaros Munich, the Black Rats (Schwarze Ratten), Berlin Blues (Berliner Blues), and the Central Council of the Hash Rebels (Zentralrat der umherschweifenden Haschrebellen) was a loose conglomeration of groups whose memberships sometimes overlapped.63 On November 9, 1969, a member of the Tupamaros West-Berlin planted a bomb in the Jewish Community Center (Jüdisches Gemeindehaus) in West-Berlin.64 Kunzelmann was arrested on July 19, 1970, and the group disbanded shortly thereafter. Meanwhile, on May 14, 1970, Andreas Baader was sprung from jail through the assistance of Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, Irene Goergens, and Ingrid Schubert as well as a male accomplice. Shortly thereafter, on June 5, 1970, agit 883 published a communiqué announcing the formation of the Red Army Faction. The persons involved with Baader’s freeing traveled to Jordan, where they met up with a second group from West-Berlin, staying from June to August of 1970 in order to train in guerrilla warfare at a PLO Al Fatah camp. Shortly thereafter, on September 29, 1970, three banks were simultaneously raided in West-Berlin. In October of 1970, Brigitte Asdonk, Irene Goergens, Horst Mahler, and Ingrid Schubert were arrested in WestBerlin. The bank heists continued nonetheless with a further spate of raids in early 1971. In fact, the actions of the RAF’s first generation would continue

see Christina Gerhardt, “Narrating Terrorism:  Kristina Konrad’s Greater Freedom, Lesser Freedom,” in Questioning the RAF: The Politics of Culture, ed. Karin Bauer, special issue of Seminar 47.1 (2011): 64–80. 62 Dorothea Hauser, “Terrorism,” in 1968 in Europe:  A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977, ed. Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (New  York:  Palgrave MacMillian, 2008), 269–80. Here, 271–2. See also Gerhard Seyfried, Der schwarze Stern der Tupamaros (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2004); Aribert Reimann, Dieter Kunzelmann. Avandgardist, Protestler, Radikaler (Göttingen:  Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2009); and Wolfgang Kraushaar, “Die Tupamaros West-Berlin,” Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus, vol. 1, ed. Wolfgang Kraushaar (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006), 512–30. 63 Günter Langer, “Der Berliner ‘Blues’:  Tupamaros und umherschweifende Haschrebellen zwischen Wahnsinn und Verstand,” in Che Schah Shit: Die sechziger Jahre zwischen Cocktail und Molotow (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1988), 195–203; also published in Heiss und Kalt, Die Jahre 1945–1969, ed. Eckhard Siepmann (Berlin: Espresso Verlag, 1993), 649–54. 64 See Wolfgang Kraushaar, Die Bombe im Jüdischen Gemeindehaus (Hamburg:  Hamburger Edition, 2005). The anti-Semitic tendencies of some among the New Left are a vital topic for a book-length study in English. On this topic, see also Wolfgang Kraushaar, Wann endlich beginnt bei Euch der Kampf gegen die heilige Kuh Israel? München 1970:  Über die antisemitischen Wurzeln des deutschen Terrorismus (Reinbek:  Rowohlt, 2013); and “Antizionismus als Trojanisches Pferd:  Zur antisemitischen Dimension in den Kooperationen von Tupamaros West-Berlin, RAF und RZ mit den Palästinensern,” in Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus, vol. 1, ed. Wolfgang Kraushaar (Hamburg:  Hamburger Edition, 2006), 676–95. Kraushaar’s volumes unleashed a heated debate. For one very critical review of his 2013 study, see, for example, Willi Winkler, “Möglicherweise: Die Linken und der Antisemitismus,” Sueddeutsche Zeitung, February 24, 2013.

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relatively unstopped until shortly after its May Offensive in 1972. The Red Army Faction disbanded in 1998. In 1972, the June 2 Movement (J2M, Bewegung 2.  Juni), the second largest and best-known West German terrorist group, was cofounded.65 It dissolved in 1980. At this time, the J2M’s members were either in prison, gave up armed struggle, went underground in other countries, or joined the RAF or armed struggle groups in the Middle East.66 The two other groups active beginning in the 1970s were the Revolutionary Cells (Revolutionäre Zellen) and its sister group, the Red Zora (Rote Zora), which consisted exclusively of women. Little was known about the group for a long time, as its members lived aboveground, that is, holding down day jobs and carrying out actions after hours, in the evenings or on the weekends.67 In 1973, the Revolutionary Cells carried out its first attacks against the ITT corporation in Nuremberg and in West-Berlin in response to the coup in Chile. In 1975, the Red Zora planted a bomb in a federal court in Karlsruhe. Both continued to carry out attacks over the 1970s and 1980s. The Revolutionary Cells’ last action was carried out in 1993; and the Red Zora’s last attack took place in 1995. In 1998, Hans-Joachim Klein, a former member of the RZ, was arrested and first details of the RZ emerged.68 In tandem with the upsurge of bank holdups and bomb attacks, the corporate media’s coverage continued its tendency of yellow journalism,

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For more information on the June 2 Movement, see Der Blues:  Gesammelte Texte der Bewegung 2. Juni (Dortmund: Schwarzer Stern, 2001); Ralf Reinders and Ronald Fritzsch, Die Bewegung 2. Juni. Gespräche über Haschrebellen, Lorenzentführung, Knast (Berlin: ID Verlag, 1995); Gabriele Rollnik and Daniel Dubbe, Keine Angst vor Niemand. Über die Siebziger, die Bewegung 2. Juni und die RAF (Berlin:  Edition Nautilus, 1994); Inge Viett, Nie war ich furchtloser. Autobiographie (Berlin: Edition Nautilus, 1997); and Inge Viett, Einsprüche. Briefe aus dem Gefängnis (Berlin: Edition Nautilus, 1996). 66 For more on its dissolution, see Reinders and Fritzsch, as well as Viett. In these volumes, former members take stock of the group, its missions, their failure or success, and reasons to continue or stop, offering an insight from within. The story of survival—for example, of imprisonment or through exile—is as important for a retrospective history of the era, its groups, and their members as is the narrative of those who died. 67 For more information about both the Revolutionäre Zellen and the Rote Zora, see also Die Früchte des Zorns. Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der Revolutionären Zellen und der Roten Zora (Berlin: ID Achiv, 1993). 68 Klein had been a member of the RZ since 1974 and, as will be discussed in Chapter 4, was involved in the 1975 attack on the OPEC meeting that took place in Vienna. In 1977, he went underground in France, sending his revolver to Spiegel with a letter announcing that he was ceasing involvement in terrorist acts. See Hans-Joachim Klein, “Ich habe genug angestellt,” Spiegel, May 9, 1977, http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-40915611.html. Last accessed August 3, 2012. See also Hans-Joachim Klein, Rückkehr in die Menschlichkeit. Appell eines ausgestiegenen Terroristen (Reinbek:  Rowohlt, 1980); Memoirs of an International Terrorist: Conversations with Hans Joachim Klein (Minneapolis: Soil of Liberty, 1978); and My Life as a Terrorist:  The Story of Hans-Joachim Klein. dir. Alexander Oey, Hessischer Rundfunk, 2006.

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already apparent in the late 1960s. Particularly the Springer publications often held the Red Army Faction responsible for actions, even when evidence for the claim was missing. For example, on December 22, 1971, a police officer was fatally shot in a bank holdup. The next day, Springer’s Bild Zeitung claimed “Baader Meinhof Continues to Murder! Bank Raid:  Policeman Shot.”69 Although police stated that they had no evidence as to who was responsible for the bank raid or shooting at the time, the headline squarely laid the blame at the feet of the RAF. As Stefan Aust put it, “The precipitate haste with which the Baader Meinhof group was increasingly being held responsible for anything and everything signaled a further intensification of the internal political climate.”70 Attempting to open up a dialogue about the media’s tone and its role in fostering tensions, Böll published the article “Does Meinhof Want Clemency or Safe Conduct?” on January 10, 1972.71 In it, he criticized the depiction of attacks by the media, particularly of the Springer press, citing instances where its papers blamed the RAF when investigations had not yet established who the culprit was. Furthermore, Böll argued that Bild’s coverage was summoning up a Lynchjustiz (mob mentality or lynch law). His article began thus: “While the police investigates, has hunches, combines, Bild is already considerably further along:  Bild knows.”72 He asked in his article, as he would also do in his subsequent novel The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, “Who will hold Bild to account, when the suppositions turn out to be unfounded? Will Bild repudiate its claims, will it correct itself?”73 And while he criticized what he deemed to be the hopelessness of the RAF’s approach, given its numbers and the backlash, he underscored that every single member involved with the RAF at the time had participated in social work projects.74 A fair trial, he argued, had to be offered, “otherwise not only she and the rest of her group will be lost, it will also continue to stink in 69

“Baader Meinhof Gang Strikes Again! Bank Raid: Policeman Shot,” Bild-Zeitung, December 22, 1971. 70 Stefan Aust, Baader Meinhof Complex: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. (Oxford:  Oxford UP, 2009), 147. 71 Heinrich Böll, “Will Ulrike Meinhof Gnade oder freies Geleit?” Spiegel, January 10, 1972, 54– 6. Reprinted in Heinrich Böll: Freies Geleit für Ulrike Meinhof. Ein Artikel und seine Folgen, ed. Frank Grützbach (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1972). Also available online:  http:// www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-43019376.html. Last accessed July 31, 2012. 72 Böll. “Wo die Polizeibehörden ermitteln, vermuten, kombinieren, ist Bild schon bedeutend weiter: Bild weiß.” 73 Böll. “Wer zieht Bild zur Rechenschaft, wenn die Vermutungen . . . sich als unzutreffend herausstellen? Wird Bild dementieren, sich korrigieren?” 74 Böll. “Es ist inzwischen ein Krieg von 6 [the number of members Böll stated, one could suppose, the group had shrunk down to] gegen 60,000,000 [Böll’s estimation of West Germany’s population at the time]. Ein sinnloser Krieg, nicht nur nach meiner Meinung, nicht nur generell, auch im Sinne des publizierten Konzeptes . . . alle Mitglieder der Gruppe um Ulrike Meinhof, alle, [haben] praktische Sozialarbeit getan und Einblick in die Verhältnisse genommen.”

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the German media and in the German legal history.”75 His article unleashed a furious response. Diether Posser, SPD Minister for Federal Affairs in North Rhine-Westphalia, said that “[Böll’s] argument is not just exaggerated, but harmful.”76 A few months after the publication of Böll’s article, the RAF carried out its May Offensive of 1972, which marked a turning point. The May Offensive consisted of a series of bomb attacks carried out throughout West Germany in two weeks: on May 11 on a US military base in Frankfurt am Main; on May 12 on an Augsburg police station and on the headquarters of the Bavarian Federal Police in Munich; on May 16 in Karlsruhe on the car of a judge who had signed most of the arrest warrants for the RAF’s first generation; on May 19 on the Hamburg offices of the Springer press; and on May 24 on a US army base in Heidelberg. These actions resulted in one dead and thirteen injured at the military base in Frankfurt; one injured at the Augsburg police station and five injured at the Munich police headquarters respectively; the injury of the judge’s wife in Karlsruhe; seventeen injured at the Springer offices in Hamburg; and three dead and five wounded at the US army base in Heidelberg. The police consequently increased its clampdown, setting up checkpoints on roads nationwide. Due to the bloodshed, the regular and inconvenient roadblocks, as well as the heightened atmosphere of paranoia and requests by police for residents to be on the lookout, the public began to provide more tips and leads about suspicious behavior to the police. Additionally, the BKA had established the database for dragnet searches. As a result, most of the RAF’s first generation was arrested in late May and early June of 1972. Baader, Meins, and Raspe were arrested on June 1, 1972, in Frankfurt am Main. Ensslin was arrested on June 7 in Hamburg, and Meinhof was arrested on June 15 in Hannover. Public sentiment toward the Red Army Faction shifted dramatically after the May Offensive. A survey conducted in 1971 prior to the attacks by the Allensbacher Institute of Public Opinion (Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach) and titled “Baader-Meinhof: Criminals or Heroes?” yielded the following results. One in five deemed the motive for the RAF’s actions to be political rather than criminal. One in twenty indicated a willingness to harbor or house a wanted RAF member for a night. One in four West German citizens under the age of 30 expressed certain sympathies for the RAF. The institute concluded that “their survey had established the existence of ‘an unfavorable social and political climate for the police hunt.’ ”77 According to

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Böll. “Dieser Prozeß muß stattfinden, sonst ist nicht nur sie und der Rest ihrer Gruppe verloren, es wird auch weiter stinken in der deutschen Publizistik, es wird weiter stinken in der deutschen Rechtsgeschichte.” 76 Diether Posser, “Diese Praxis ist verheerend,” Spiegel, January 24, 1972, http://www.spiegel. de/spiegel/print/d-43019977.html. Last accessed August 1, 2012. 77 Aust 119.

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Aust, the RAF drew on this survey’s results repeatedly even years later in the Stammheim Trials, when Baader said it proved how widespread the RAF’s ideas were among the population.78 Yet after the 1972 May Offensive, this support plummeted. Böll had penned his article in support of Meinhof’s safe conduct just months prior to the offensive. During the clampdown on the RAF and on the basis of allegations that Böll was an RAF sympathizer, his house was searched in June 1972.79

Surveillance Mechanisms in The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum In response, Böll, who had just won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972, wrote The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, or: How Violence Comes about and to What It Can Lead (Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, oder: Wie Gewalt entstehen und wohin sie führen kann, 1974) to show how ordinary citizens can come under suspicion and be demonized by the state and the media.80 Not only Böll but also Schlöndorff and Von Trotta—who codirected a filmic version of the novel released in 197581—were labeled sympathizers. While Böll explicitly names the Bild-Zeitung in the epigraph to his story, Schlöndorff and Von Trotta—under threat of legal action from Springer— had to agree not to mention the tabloid in their film.82 Schlöndorff and Von Trotta did, however, close their film with an ironic epigraph: “People and plot are fictional. Similarities with certain journalistic practices are neither intended nor accidental but rather unavoidable.”83 Böll’s novel, and the literary adaptation of it, pick up on and further the debates about media’s representations of terrorism, analyzing how these depictions harass an 78

Aust 119. For articles documenting these allegations, see Heinrich Böll: Freies Geleit für Ulrike Meinhof. Ein Artikel und seine Folgen, ed. Frank Grützbach (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1972). 80 Böll had explored the thematics of an unjust trial in an earlier satirical story, “Das Ende einer Dienstfahrt,” in Heinrich Böll Werke, Romane und Erzählungen, 1961–1971, vol. 3, ed. Bernd Balzer (Cologne:  Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1977), 412–591. Shortly after the novel The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Böll had written a satire on the German security service: “Berichte zur Gesinnungslage der Nation,” in Heinrich Böll Werke, Romane und Erzählungen, 1974– 1985, vol. 4, ed. Bernd Balzer (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1977), 117–46. 81 Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum), dir. Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, Bioskop, WDR, DVD, 1975, Criterion Collection, 2003. 82 David Head, “ ‘Der Autor muss respektiert werden’  – Schlöndorff/Trotta’s Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum and Brecht’s Critique of Film Adaptation,” German Life and Letters 32.3 (April 1979):  248–62. Here, 262. See also Hans-Bernhard Moeller and George Lellis, Volker Schlöndorff’s Cinema:  Adaptation, Politics and the “Movie-Appropriate” (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2002), 131. 83 “Personen und Handlung sind frei erfunden. Ähnlichkeiten mit gewissen journalistischen Praktiken sind weder beabsichtigt, noch zufällig, sondern unvermeidlich.” 79

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innocent woman.84 But the filmic version, in keeping with the decade’s new concerns, shifts the focus to dwell on surveillance. The main character, Katharina Blum (played by Angela Winkler), works as a housekeeper, tending to keep a low profile and mostly to herself. The film is set in Cologne, during Carnival season.85 At a Weiberfastnacht (Fat Thursday) party, she meets Ludwig Götten (Jürgen Prochnow) and takes him home with her. He leaves the next day. Apparently unbeknownst to Katharina, the police are on the hunt for Ludwig. Heavily armed police storm Katharina’s apartment building and arrest her. Over a period of days, she is interrogated at the local police station. Journalist Werner Tötges (Dieter Laser), as a result of his connection to the police chief, Commissioner Erwin Beizmenne (Mario Adorf), is privy to the investigation and reveals its details to the public in the tabloid press. Eventually, Werner Tötges arranges to interview Katharina Blum at her apartment. Shortly after he arrives and launches into a ten-minute monologue,86 extolling the benefits of what his press coverage has brought her, he proposes they have intercourse. Blum, who has been sitting silently throughout, fatally shoots him. The next sequence shows her in a jail cell. The film, in contrast to the novel, closes with Tötges’ funeral and an address in which the speaker states the shots fired hit not only Tötges but also the freedom of the press and democracy in general. The talk serves as a rallying call to uphold journalistic rights, without engaging or putting into question the dubious methods used to gather information or his ethical violations. While Böll’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum focuses on recording, through transcriptions of interrogation reports by the police, a lawyer and a federal prosecutor, Schlöndorff and Von Trotta translate the novel’s

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The film focuses in particular on the tabloid media, also known in German as Regenbogenpresse. For a critique of the Springer Press and its tabloids, see also the work of Günter Wallraff, and his Anti-Bild Trilogie, a trilogy of books he published taking on precisely the practices that Böll’s novel and the filmic adaptation of it criticized. In 1977, Wallraff worked undercover at the Springer-owned Bild-Zeitung for four months. His resulting book revealed the everyday practices of journalists at Bild-Zeitung, which included methods of dubious ethics to elicit information and sloppy fact-checking. Günter Wallraff, Der Aufmacher. Der Mann, der bei “Bild” Hans Esser war (Cologne:  Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1977). It was followed by the publication Zeugen der Anklage. Die Bild-Beschreibung wird fortgesetzt (1979), in which others who had been targeted by Bild-Zeitung told their stories. In 1981, Wallraff published Bildstörung. Das Bild-Handbuch bis zum Bildausfall, which provided legal tips to those who had been targeted by Bild-Zeitung, so that they could seek recourse. 85 For more on the carnival aspect of the film, see Alexandra Seibel, “The Carnival of Repression: German Left-Wing Politics and the Lost Honor of Katharina Blum,” in Literature and Film:  A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, ed. Robert Stam and Alessandro Raengo (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 148–64; and Roger Hillman, “From Carnival to Masquerade:  Bakhtin, H.  Mann, Böll,” Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik 18.1 (1986): 110–24. 86 See the meme “mansplaining” for more.

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techniques into its own filmic idiom,87 calling attention, for example, to recording and monitoring by camera.88 In this way, the film participates in the most dominant discourse related to the RAF of 1970s West Germany not only about the media’s representations but also about the increasing and asymmetrical surveillance, whereby the state had a monopoly on data gathering, storing, and sorting.89 The opening shot immediately establishes a preoccupation with surveillance. The film stock shifts between color and black-and-white stock. Each stock is associated with a different point of view: one with surveiller, the other with the surveilled. An inter-title reads: “Wednesday, February 5, 1975.” Then, in color stock the establishing shot shows a ferry crossing a river (the Rhine), while ominous music composed for the film by HeinzWerner Henze plays offscreen.90 The film cuts to a medium shot of a man standing on the boat’s upper ledge, his eyes scanning the distant shore. Later, the viewer learns that this man’s name is Ludwig Götten and that the police are on the search for him. He picks up his duffle bag and exits the frame. The

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As Schlöndorff put it in a 1975 interview about the film, “A book is one thing, a film another. With the transition into another medium comes a change in the material . . . For me film is a realistic medium . . . To film realistically means to make dense, to abstract, and even to manufacture a certain artificiality—a film reality.” Thomas Thieringer, “Interview with Volker Schlöndorff,” Frakfurter Rundschau, February 7, 1975. 88 As William Sewell points out, Böll’s novel focuses on journalistic writing: the narrator refers to the text as a “Bericht,” which could be translated as account, record, or report, and reveals the report’s sources, including the mentioned transcriptions of interrogation reports. The reader is thereby given the sense that they receive a reliable narrative. Additionally, the grammatical structures of Böll’s story—which include the use of the passive voice, impersonal constructions, and reported speech—linger on gathering evidence through written documentation and suggest the narrator’s distance from the material: he appears to be merely transmitting it. The text’s reliability is, however, put into question and destabilized early on; and the narrator’s credibility as an unbiased conduit of information is as well. Cf. Johanna Knoll, “Fiktion eines Berichts:  Narrative Reflexe sozialgeschichtlicher Konstellationen in Heinrich Bölls Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum,” Jahrbuch für Germanistik 35.2 (2003):  101–17; and William Sewell, “ ‘Konduktion und Niveauunterschiede’:  The Structure of Böll’s ‘Katharina Blum,’ ” Monatshefte 74.2 (Summer 1982):  167–78. Böll’s play with “objective reportage” draws on a literary predecessor:  Friedrich Schiller’s story “Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre—ein wahrer Bericht,” originally published in 1786. Schiller’s piece is based on a true story about Christian Wolf, a man in financial need whose rival suitor, Robert, an aristocrat, takes advantage of Wolf’s economic precarity and of biases built into the legal system, in order to ensure his financial ruin and imprisonment. The story engages class politics, related biases, and their manifestation in legal and penal institutions. 89 On the surveillance industry, see also Die dritte Generation (The Third Generation), dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Filmverlag der Autoren, 1979, which will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4. 90 For more on the role of music in the film, see William R. and Joan Magretta, “Story and Discourse:  Schlöndorff and von Trotta’s Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (1975),” in Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation, ed. Andrew Horton and Joan Magretta (New York: Ungar, 1981), 278–94, esp. pp. 284–5.

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focus adjusts to a second man in the background on a ledge, filming with a handheld camera (see Figure 3.2). He slowly turns, panning the area with his camera, until he eventually faces the viewer, still filming (see Figure 3.3). The film cuts to his point-of-view, to black-and-white stock, and to a shot showing a target cross (+)  in the middle, framed by a hyphenated border (see Figure 3.4). The target cross suggests, as film scholar Lester Friedman

FIGURE 3.2 The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, dir. Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, 1975. Screenshot.

FIGURE 3.3 The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, dir. Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, 1975. Screenshot.

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FIGURE 3.4 The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, dir. Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, 1975. Screenshot.

puts it, “the crosshairs of a rifle scope.”91 It frames and follows Götten as he walks with his bag and descends the staircase from the ledge. Sharing the point of view shot of the second man, the audience surveils the first man in a medium close-up shot that zooms in to a close-up shot of the first man, with the sound of 16 mm film being shot. Bearing affinity to the opening sequence of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum but with a crucial twist that delineates differences in discourses on filmic surveillance of the 1970s and the early twenty-first century, Michael Haneke’s more recent Caché (Hidden, 2005), too, opens with a shot thematizing surveillance. Carsten Strathausen, in an article on “Surveillance” in contemporary cinema, writes: The viewer sees what seems to be a traditional establishing shot: a static frame showing a city street and houses in the background, overlaid with the film’s opening credits. Two minutes into the film, the image suddenly begins to blur, while two off-screen voices anxiously comment on what now appears as fast-forwarded footage rushing past our eyes . . . What at first sight appeared to be a traditional (nondiegetic) establishing shot suddenly turns out to be—or rather, has been all along—a video recording

91

Lester D. Friedman, “Cinematic Techniques in The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum,” Literature and Film Quarterly 7.3 (1979): 244–52. Here, 247.

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taken by a hidden camera stationed in front of the protagonists’ house. We, the viewers of Haneke’s film, are watching this tape at precisely the same time as they do—a fact we do not realize until the couple fastforwards the image on their home VCR.92 Caché, like The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, opens by calling the viewer’s attention to surveillance through filming. But Katharina Blum provides a framing shot, showing both the surveilled and the surveiller, and then aligning the viewer’s point of view with surveillance. The more recent Caché does not provide the framing shot. Instead, it opens by positioning the viewer, unbeknownst to them, with the stalker.93 Then, when the film clip blurs, the audience’s point of view has been aligned with that of the couple sitting on the sofa, replaying the tape, discussing it. The two opening sequences contrast: while The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum opens with a traditional establishing shot to zoom in on surveillance, Caché opens with surveillance and then zooms out to show that we had been aligned with surveiller, here stalker, and then surveilled. Why the difference? Each film examines surveillance in a manner that underscores the preoccupations of its historical, political, and technological context. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum dwells not only on surveillance but also on the asymmetrical gaze:  from the outset the film calls attention both to observation and to the fact that information gathering rests in the hands of the police, who then abuse it, by passing on tips to the media. Haneke’s Caché, by contrast, emphasizes instead that surveillance—aided immensely by the increased affordability and thus proliferation of cameras and taping capabilities—has become accessible to and manipulable by all.94 92

Carsten Strathausen, “Surveillance,” in Berlin School Glossary: An ABC of the New Wave in German Cinema, ed. Roger F. Cook, Lutz Koepnick, Kristin Kopp, and Brad Prager (Chicago: Intellect Books, 2013), 255–62. Here, 255–6. 93 As Strathausen puts it, the opening sequence in Caché leads the viewer to consider that what they are seeing is not filmed by an extradiegetic camera “whose presence we, the viewers, necessarily take for granted and are supposed to forget.” Strathausen 255. Furthermore, as Strathausen puts it: “Haneke’s film not only thematizes surveillance within the narrative but literally uses it as a lens to observe and examine cinematic spectatorship in general” (256). 94 Eric Rentschler calls attention to the importance of Michael Klier’s Der Riese (The Giant, 1984), an eighty-one-minute video film that consists “of surveillance camera footage shot in various West German cities over the course of three years: streets, traffic intersections, airports, banks, department stores, villas and doctors’ offices.” Rentschler continues on to discuss the function of surveillance cameras in Berlin School cinema as “not only . . . an object of critique and dystopia.” The inclusion of it here also calls attention, Rentschler—quoting Marta Gili—underscores, to the importance of “a certain detached alertness, the act of carefully watching, listening, and registering events and their context without intervening in them.” See his article on cinematic precursors of the Berlin School of filmmaking:  Eric Rentschler, “Predecessors,” in Berlin School Glossary 213–21. Here, 217–18. See also Eric Rentschler, “The Surveillance Camera’s Quarry in Hochhäusler’s Eine Minute Dunkel,” German Studies

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Furthermore, Haneke’s film shifts surveillance from state surveillance to its abuse by someone who problematically attempts to take justice into his own hands. In The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, surveillance cameras are also thematized early on in a sequence where the film cuts to black-andwhite film with no diegetic sound at all, typical of such footage. Henze’s composition plays nondiegetically. A long shot in a parking garage shows Katharina and Ludwig, the surveilled man, who closes the doors of a Porsche. They walk arm in arm across the parking garage to exit it. The film cuts to a high angle shot, suggesting another surveillance camera or a cut from one surveillance camera to the next, and a different location, now the lobby of Katharina’s apartment. This sense is heightened by the still lacking diegetic sound and a black-and-white and very grainy film stock. The shot follows Katharina and Ludwig entering her building, calling for the elevator, waiting, embracing, and entering the elevator (see Figure 3.5). The elevator doors close. Within the first ten minutes, the film has thus thematized numerous surveillance techniques, from filming, to tailing in a car, to tapping phones, to monitoring by surveillance cameras. “Suspense,” as Moeller and Lellis put it, “reigns everywhere, from the police surveillance at the outset

FIGURE 3.5 The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, dir. Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, 1975. Screenshot.

Review 36.3 (2013):  635–64. See also Marta Gili, “From Observation to Surveillance,” in Exposed:  Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera since 1870, ed. Sandra S. Phillips (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Yale UP, 2010), 241.

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to . . . the two car chases on dark and wet roads or the undercover agent costumed as a sheik.”95 Additionally, the film dwells on surveillance through the gaze. Throughout the interrogation sequences, the film emphasizes the gaze: who looks at whom and how. In one scene, Katharina is surrounded by six male interrogators.96 So many men are crowded into the medium shot that the ones standing on the left and right edges are cut out of the frame. Not only the crammed conditions but also the shot’s composition underscores the power relations: while Katharina is seated, all the men are standing. They tower over her authoritatively or menacingly. Katharina is crowded spatially and by the gaze cast upon her. While Katharina is looking at Beizmenne, he and four of the five other men watch her, their gaze weighing heavily on her. Since the men are positioned across from viewer, the viewer experiences Katharina’s vantage-point and the effect of being so heavily scrutinized. Then, in a reverse shot, the viewer’s point of view is positioned alongside and experiencing the perspective of the policemen and lawyers, closing the circle and gazing upon Katharina Blum. The same year that The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum premiered, 1975, Laura Mulvey published her influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in which she dwelled on “the male gaze,” a concept that predated her essay but which it launched as a focal point in feminist film studies.97 Relatedly, just two years prior, in 1973, Lacan published The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychoanalyse) in the original French.98 He discussed the gaze, and, among other things, the anxious state that results from being placed under scrutiny. It was the intended effect on Katharina Blum. Yet to the great frustration of Commissioner Beizmenne, she remains oblivious, aloof, or defiant to it. Foucault underscored the power dynamics at play vis-à-vis the gaze in the medical context in The Birth of the Clinic, first published in the English translation in 1973,99 and in penal institutions in Discipline and Punish, first published in French in 1975, most famously through the concept of the panoptical gaze, whereby the scrutiny that the state had previously applied to its subjects shifted to a self-regulatory

95 Hans-Bernhard Moeller and George Lellis, “The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum,” Volker Schlöndorff’s Cinema: Adaptation, Politics and the “Movie-Appropriate” (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2002), 128–43. Here, 133. 96 On this issue, see also Moeller and Lellis 128–43, esp. 136–9. 97 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18. 98 Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire. Livre XI. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychoanalyse (Paris:  Le Seuil, 1973); in English:  The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978). 99 Michel Foucault, Naissance de la clinique (Paris:  Presses Universitaires de France, 1963); in English: The Birth of the Clinic (New York: Pantheon, 1973).

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gaze.100 These texts, which were contemporaneous to the film, theorized the gaze and its relationship to power dynamics, to the state, to cinema, and to gender. Each one informs The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. In another sequence, the composition of the shot forces the viewer to gaze at Katharina in an intrusive and obtrusive manner. Shortly after the police break-in, Federal Prosecutor Hach commands her to get dressed and not to make a spectacle of herself. (She is wearing a very short white bathrobe.) Katharina retorts that she is at home:  the police are the ones who have invaded her space; she has not invaded theirs. The camera follows her in a panning shot, as she goes to her bathroom to get dressed. A female officer accompanies her. In a medium close-up shot, as Katharina proceeds to close the door, the officer prevents her, telling her it must remain open. The film then cuts to a wide-angle shot filmed directly across from the bathroom, showing Katharina proceeding to get dressed with the bathroom door wide open. She takes off her robe and stands naked, facing the camera. The wide-angle shot allows the viewer to see the numerous police officers, who move between the camera and Katharina, searching her apartment for evidence. The shot could draw on the viewers’ empathy, as Katharina is forced to undress in front of the officers, all of whom, except for the woman who accompanied her, are male. Or it could put the viewer in a voyeuristic position, watching her undress. These types of shots continue throughout the film, forcing the viewer to consider the act of surveillance by keeping someone under one’s gaze. Heavily gendered dynamics permeate the interactions between Katharina and the police, and between her and the media. The tabloid press seeks to humiliate Katharina. She is nicknamed “the nun” at the beginning of the film for apparently not being in a relationship with a man and rejecting advances. After her night with Ludwig Götten, the pendulum sways to the opposite extreme, as Beizmenne suggests she has loose morals. The framing of her sexuality is intertwined with a casting of her political persuasions as dubious. In this way, Böll as well as Schlöndorff and Von Trotta encourage the reader or viewer to consider how the media, police, and legal institutions engage gender with regard to terrorism.101 Over the course of the 1970s and

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Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir:  Naissance de la prison (Paris:  Gallimard, 1975); in English: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1975). 101 Linda Williams called attention, early on, to the relationship between surveillance mechanisms and a scientia sexualis. Discussing Foucault’s History of Sexuality, she writes, “In the optical inventions of the late nineteenth century—cameras, magic lanterns, zoetropes, Kinetographs, Kinetoscopes, and the early precursors of movies as we know them today—we can see a powerful manifestation of both the surveillance mechanisms described by Foucault and this scientia sexualis.” Linda Williams, “Prehistory: The ‘Frenzy of the Visible,’ ” in Hard Core:  Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1989), 34–57. Here, 35. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) also considers surveillance mechanisms. For a discussion of its gendered terms, see Kaja Silverman, “The Fantasy of the Maternal Voice:  Paranoia and Compensation,” in The Acoustic Mirror:  The

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1980s, gendered readings of terrorism would not only come to the forefront but also be pivotal, as the media grappled with the disproportionately high number of women involved in the RAF.102 Often, the press depicted women terrorists as “socially, sexually and psychologically deviant.”103 By 1982, two-thirds of the RAF were women. Marking a transition that would manifest in numerous films of late 1970s New German Cinema, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum also underscores how these surveillance mechanisms create a paranoid atmosphere. In one scene, Katharina Blum is ushered from her cell into the hallway while men behind a gate whistle at her as she passes. She continues into a room, clinically tiled in white, to await her interrogation. She stands in the room alone. A medium shot follows her. Through a side door, a woman enters. She looks at Katharina. Their eyes lock. Katharina recognizes her and greets her. The woman cuts across the room without saying a word and is ushered into a side room by a man. Moments later, another man enters the room through yet an additional door. He, too, looks at Katharina. She greets him as well. He also utters not a sound and leaves the room through a side door joining the previous persons. The scene is reminiscent of Orson Welles’s The Trial (1962) in which gazes exchanged and the way gazes—without words being spoken—weigh on the protagonist, Joseph K., raise questions about his guilt. At a brittle moment in The Trial, the attention shifts from his crime, to his response, to the accusation of being guilty. In The Trial, Joseph K., in a subsequent scene examines his face, as Katharina does, too, after an

Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington:  Indiana UP, 1988), 72–100, esp. pp. 87–98. I thank Quinn Slobodian for our illuminating discussion of surveillance and gender in cinema. 102 On women and terrorism, see, in particular, the series in Spiegel:  “Frauen im Untergrund:  ‘Etwas Irrationales,” Der Spiegel, August 8, 1977, 22–33. For detailed discussions of women in the RAF and their representation in media, see Charity Scribner, After the Red Army Faction:  Gender, Culture and Militancy (New  York:  Columbia UP, 2015); Patricia Melzer, Death in the Shape of a Young Girl:  Women’s Political Violence in the Red Army Faction (New  York:  New  York UP, 2015); Clare Bielby, Violent Women in Print:  Representations in the West German Print Media of the 1960s and 1970s (Rochester: Camden House, 2012); “Remembering the Red Army Faction,” Memory Studies 3.2 (2010):  137–50; 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 Feminist Journal of Politics 11.1 (March 2009):  35–61; Clare Bielby “Attacking the Body Politic: The Terroristin in 1970s German Media,” Reconstruction 7.1 (2007):  1–31; and Bettina T. Becker, “Women, Violence, Nation: Representations of Female Insurgency in Fiction and Public Discourse in the 1970s and 1980s,” Women in German Yearbook 16 (2000): 207–20. 103 Jamie Trnka, “Beyond Victims and Perpetrators: Women Terrorists Tell Their Own Stories,” in Defending the Homeland:  Historical Perspectives on Radicalism, Terrorism and State Responses, ed. C. Belmont Keeney and Melinda M. Hicks (Charleston:  West Virginia UP, 2007), 133–55.

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interrogation, to see if her face has changed or if the guilt the law is looking for is inscribed upon it.104 In these ways, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum persistently considers surveillance and a variety of mechanisms, such as being followed, observed, filmed, and having one’s phone tapped. Moreover, the film’s bifocal vision— both through the alternating film stocks and points of view—keep the viewer mindful of the constructed nature of seeing, of what is seen and how, and of narratives, such as the narrative of a police investigation or of media coverage. Throughout the film Katharina Blum is presented as a woman who had harbored a wanted anarchist, who is involved with a “Bande.”105 Toward the end of the film, it emerges that Ludwig Götten is wanted for deserting the military. Given the discrepancy between the narrative provided by the media and the truth behind both Katharina Blum’s action and Ludwig Götten’s crime, the film’s ending underscores both the fallibility and the pliability of surveillance. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum criticizes the police and the media for subjecting innocent civilians to surveillance and manipulating the narrative ostensibly gleaned from it to their own agendas. It provides an indictment of the corporate media’s methods and its coverage during the 1970s—for the way it painted a narrative and attempted to shape and control reality. As William and Joan Magretta state, the film “reveals the witch-hunt mentality in contemporary [West] Germany, the pervasive fear of terrorism which is used to justify the violation of civil liberties.”106 Furthermore, the film criticizes the collaboration between the criminal justice system, especially law enforcement police, and corporate media. As Jack Zipes puts it in his 1977 article about The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum: The purpose of making Katharina Blum then was to reach a wide audience through an American distributor and to raise the consciousness of this audience so that it would become more critical of political repression. In other words, Schlöndorff [and Von Trotta] saw in the material of Böll’s novel a vehicle to delineate the political reality of the Bundesrepublik more clearly for a popular audience that might be moved to think more critically about its situation vis-à-vis violence and repression.107 104

This gesture has a long tradition in crime films:  Fritz Lang’s M (1931), in which the serial child murderer Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) examines his face, forms one of the earliest and best-known examples. 105 The RAF was called the “Baader-Meinhof Bande” or criminal gang by its opponents, and the “Baader Meinhof Gruppe” or group by those labeled as its sympathizers. Of course, it selfdeclared name was the “Rote Armee Fraktion” (Red Army Faction). 106 William R. and Joan Magretta, “Story and Discourse: Schlöndorff and von Trotta’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975),” in Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation, ed. Andrew Horton and Joan Magretta (New York: Ungar, 1981), 278–94. Here, 279. 107 Jack Zipes, “The Political Dimensions of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum,” New German Critique 12 (1977): 75–84. Here, 81.

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In these ways, the film pushes to the fore a reconsideration of the relationship among institutions of power, such as mechanisms of governance, juridical institutions, and corporate media.

Prison Conditions: Isolation Tracts, Hunger Strikes, and Stammheim (1972–77) Over the course of the 1970s, as a result of the arrest of the majority of the RAF’s first generation by 1972—and concurrent to the writing and production of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum—prison conditions became the new focal point of the RAF’s second generation. The RAF argued that its members were being punished unjustly and singled out for particularly harsh treatment because they were political prisoners. Some of the RAF's first generation was kept in solitary confinement. Prisoners on the floors above and below the floor of the inmates’ cells were moved, so that those imprisoned were so isolated, they could not hear the voices of other people. Their cells were stark white. Flickering fluorescent lights shone most hours of the day. Prisoners were also permitted only rare contact with their lawyers. The negative impacts of solitary confinement, as psychiatrist Stuart Grassian has outlined,108 were known, as experiments with solitary confinement in Germany date back to the nineteenth century. The United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan E.  Méndez says, “solitary confinement can amount to torture . . . [and it] should be banned in most cases.”109 The RAF’s attorneys and Rote Hilfe (Red Aid)—a legal organization reestablished in 1970 with independent chapters in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich, and West-Berlin, in order to provide legal aid to leftists110—published

108 Cf. Stuart Grassian, “Psychiatric Effects of Solitary Confinement,” Washington University Journal of Law and Policy 22.1 (2006):  325–83; Craig Haney, Reforming Punishment: Psychological Limits to the Pains of Imprisonment (Washington DC: APA, 2006); Terry Kupers, “Solitary Confinement and Mental Health,” Keynote Speech, Strategic Convening on Solitary Confinement and Human Rights, Midwest Coalition on Humanities Rights, Chicago, Illinois, November 9, 2012. I thank Scott Fleming for discussions about solitary confinement. 109 “Solitary Confinement Should Be Banned in Most Cases,” UN News Centre. October 18, 2011, https://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=40097. Last accessed February 2, 2018. 110 Rote Hilfe named itself after Rote Hilfe Deutschlands, a legal aid organization in existence during the Weimar Republic and beyond from 1924 to 1936, providing aid to leftists and the KPD. Its first head was Wilhelm Pieck, later the first and only president of East Germany. After Pieck, the Rote Hilfe was led by socialist, peace activist, and feminist Clara Zetkin, who, along with others, proposed an International Women’s Day in 1910. It is now celebrated on March 8. The Rote Hilfe declared March 18, the date of the Paris Commune, the International Day of Support for Political Prisoners. See also Sabine Hering and Kurt Schilde (eds), Die Rote

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documents outlining the prison conditions.111 Some volunteers for Rote Hilfe, such as Angelika Speitel,112 Volker Speitel, and Hans-Joachim Klein, went on join the Red Army Faction. RAF members who were subjected to solitary confinement included Astrid Proll, Ulrike Meinhof, and Margrit Schiller, among others. Astrid Proll was arrested on May 6, 1971, for her role in springing Baader from jail a year earlier. Initially, she was held in a regular cell and prison in Bonn. Then, from 1971 to 1972, she spent five months in almost complete isolation in CologneOssendorf prison. As Proll describes it: I was taken to an empty wing, a dead wing, where I was the only prisoner. Ulrike Meinhof later called it the “Silent Wing.” The shocking experience was that I could not hear any noises apart from the ones that I generated myself. Nothing. Absolute silence. I  went through states of excitement, I was haunted by visual and acoustic hallucinations. There were extreme disturbances of concentration and attacks of weakness. I had no idea how long this would go on for. I was terrified that I would go mad.113 The prison conditions in which she was held were so severe, they rendered her unfit to stand trial. Subsequently, she was transferred to the psychiatric wing of the hospital. Having served part of her sentence, she was released on February 1, 1974, on the grounds of poor health. Although she was supposed to report to the police, as Proll put it, “I knew that I had to get out. I could not have stood any more of those prison conditions, so I escaped from the clinic and went underground.”114 She went underground in the United Kingdom in April 1974 and lived there until 1978.115 Hilfe  – Die Geschichte der internationalen kommunistischen “Wohlfahrtsorganisation” und ihre sozialistischen Aktivitäten in Deutschland (1921–1941) (Bonn: VS-Verlag, 2003). 111 Vorbereitung der RAF Prozesse durch Presse, Polizei und Justiz, ed. Rote Hilfe (Berlin: Rote Hilfe, 1972); Sjef Teuns, Jürgen Seifert, and Christoph Sigrist, Folter in der BRD: Zur Situation der politischen Gefangenen, Kursbuch 32 (Berlin:  Rotbuch Verlag, 1973); and Henning Spangenberg, “Isolationsfolter in westdeutschen Gefängnissen,” in “Sie würden uns gerne im Knast begraben . . .”:  Beiträge zur Solidarität mit den politischen Gefangenen in der BRD und Westberlin (Berlin: Wohltat, 1977). 112 Angelika Speitel worked in the office of lawyer Klaus Croissant. She assisted in relaying communications between the imprisoned and free members of the RAF. She went underground in 1974 and became a member of the RAF’s second generation. She is suspected of involvement in the murder of Jürgen Ponto of 1977 and the Hans-Martin Schleyer kidnapping. 113 Astrid Proll, Pictures on the Run, 1967–1977 (New York: Scalo Press, 1998), 11. See also Ulrike Edschmid, Frau mit Waffe; Zwei Geschichten aus terroristischen Zeiten (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), 143–7. 114 Interview with Eileen MacDonald, “German Women and Violence,” in Shoot the Women First (New York: Random House, 1991), 197–230. For the interview, see pp. 206–19. Here, 213. 115 Astrid Proll (ed.), Goodbye to London:  Radical Art and Politics in the 1970s (London:  Ostfildern, Hanjte and Cantz, 2010). The volume provides an excellent overview of the main political and cultural developments in 1970s London, including IRA bombings, high

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Ulrike Meinhof was arrested on June 15, 1972, and likewise imprisoned in solitary confinement in Cologne-Ossendorf from June 16, 1972, to February 9, 1973, eventually in the same cell in which Proll had been held. Although the time the two women spent at the prison overlapped, they were kept completely separated from one another. Meinhof’s “Brief einer Gefangenen aus dem toten Trakt” (Letter from the Death Tract) was smuggled out of prison and described the prison conditions and their effects.116 As Meinhof put it in the letter, solitary confinement gives one “the feeling that time and space are interlocked” or indistinguishable, which left her feeling “raw aggression, for which there is no outlet.”117 The letter generated sympathy for her situation and work increased to improve the conditions of political prisoners. Second generation RAF member Margrit Schiller, who had previously studied psychology, had been part of the Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK, Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv) from its founding on February 12, 1971, until its closure in July of 1971118 and then joined the RAF. She writes in her autobiography that she had read Meinhof’s aforementioned letter on solitary confinement119 and was also familiar with the techniques from Philip Agee’s Inside the Company: CIA Diary.120 In 1974, she was arrested and imprisoned in solitary confinement. In her memoir, she writes about how solitary confinement made it difficult for her to “distinguish internal and external reality.”121 It also had lingering physical repercussions.122 Most autobiographies written by former members who were imprisoned discuss the prison conditions and attempts to address them. They often discuss, too, attempts to make other prisoners aware of the treatment of political

unemployment, racism and racially motivated attacks, the squatters’ movement, the gay and lesbian movement, and Asian immigrant uprisings against their employers to protest labor code violations and low wages. 116 Ulrike Meinhof, “Brief einer Gefangenen aus dem toten Trakt,” reprinted in taz-Journal 1 (1997). Published in German in Peter Brückner, Ulrike Meinhof und die deutschen Verhältnisse (Berlin:  Wagenbach, 1976), 152–4; and in English Everybody Talks about the Weather . . . We Don’t:  The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof, ed. Karin Bauer, trans. Luise von Flotow (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), 78–9. 117 Meinhof 153; In English, 79. 118 See Chapter 1, page 53, footnote 218 for a longer discussion of the SPK. 119 Margrit Schiller, Es war ein harter Kampf um meine Erinnerung. Ein Lebensbericht aus der RAF (Hamburg:  Konkret, 1999), 95. Published in English as Margrit Schiller, Remembering Armed Struggle: Life in Baader Meinhof (London: Zisane Press, 2009). 120 Schiller 135; Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (New York: Penguin, 1975). 121 Margrit Schiller, “Im Toten Trakt,” “Hungerstreik und Tod,” and “Sensorische Deprivation,” in Es war ein harter Kampf um meine Erinnerung 135–42, 143–56, and 157–64. For the impact of solitary confinement, see esp. 152–4. 122 Margrit Schiller, So siehst Du gar nicht aus: Eine autobiographische Erzählung über Exil in Kuba und Uruguay (Berlin: Assoziation A, 2011).

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prisoners, as well as, inversely, the awareness of and solidarity with prisoners that imprisoned RAF members developed.123 To protest the prison conditions, imprisoned RAF members staged hunger strikes, carrying out five between 1973 and 1977.124 The first hunger strike began on January 17, 1973, and lasted until February 16, 1973. The forty political prisoners who participated demanded the isolation tracts cease and that they be treated equal to other prisoners (Normalvollzug). From February 2 to 9, 1973, seven of their lawyers also went on hunger strikes in solidarity. As a result of the hunger strike, two prisoners were moved out of solitary confinement. The second hunger strike, with eighty prisoners participating, began on May 8, 1973, and lasted until June 29, 1973. During this hunger strike, prisoners were force-fed for the first time. The third hunger strike, with forty prisoners participating, began on September 13, 1974, and lasted until February 5, 1975. During this period, on November 9, 1974, Holger Meins died as a result of the hunger strikes and force-feeding.125 A photo of the skeletal Meins, who was over six feet tall but weighed only 86 pounds at the time of his death, circulated after his death and roused sympathies.126 In order to ensure that members of the RAF and other armed struggle groups would not break out of jail, as some had after Baader’s 1970 springing,127 a new wing of the Stuttgart-Stammheim maximum security prison was built to house the terrorists along with an adjacent trial room, in 1975, the year that The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum was released. The prison exhibited the extent to which West Germany’s security apparatus had grown since the beginning of the decade. Both the grounds surrounding the building and the courtyard for the imprisoned RAF were covered with steel netting to avoid attempts to free them via helicopter. The trial room

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Cf. Birgit Hogefeld, Ein ganz normales Verfahren . . . Prozeßerklärungen, Briefe und Texte zur Geschichte der RAF (Berlin: Edition ID Archiv, 1996); Oliver Tolmein, RAF – Das war für uns Befreiung: Ein Gespräch mit Irmgard Möller über bewaffneten Kampf, Knast und die Linke (Hamburg: Konkret, 2002); Inge Viett, Nie war ich furchtloser. Autobiographie (Berlin: Edition Nautilus, 1997); and Inge Viett, Einsprüche. Briefe aus dem Gefängnis (Berlin:  Edition Nautilus, 1996). 124 On demands for a reform of prison conditions, see in particular the RAF’s declarations related to their hunger strikes, especially their first hunger strike in 1973:  “HungerstreikErklärung vom 8.5. 1973,” in Rote Armee Fraktion: Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF (Berlin:  ID-Verlag, 1997), 187–90. Imprisoned RAF members would stage ten hunger strikes before the group formally dissolved in 1998. 125 See also the documentary about Holger Meins’s life and death: Es stirbt allerdings ein Jeder (Everybody Must Die, 1975), dir. Renate Sami, with contributions by dffb classmates Hartmut Bitomsky, Gerd Conradt, and Harun Farocki, among others; as well as Gerd Conradt, Starbuck Holger Meins. Ein Porträt als Zeitbild (Berlin: Espresso Verlag, 2001); Starbuck Holger Meins. Ein Porträt als Zeitbild, dir. Gerd Conradt, Hartmut Jahn Filmproduktion, 2001. 126 At Meins’s funeral, Dutschke famously raised his fist and said, “Holger, der Kampf geht weiter” (Holger, the struggles continues). See Conradt, Starbuck Holger Meins. 127 For example, Inge Viett, on June 20, 1973; Till Meyer, on November 11, 1973.

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consisted of a windowless room with concrete walls. In addition to the 400 police officers that patrolled the building, during the trial, 100 GSG 9 units were added. BKA agents were stationed in the front of the court area. When the trial was in session, airplanes were not allowed to fly while inversely helicopters to patrol did fly overhead.128 Some members of the RAF—men and women—were housed together on the seventh floor of Stammheim. Since the section for RAF inmates was separated off from the prison’s other sections, RAF prisoners could open their cell doors, creating a communal space.129 The state and others strongly disagreed with the RAF’s assertions that its members were suffering abuse in the prisons. They pointed to the special privileges allotted to its members: they were allowed to have both genders housed together, to create a communal space during the day, to have large quantities of books and magazines,130 record players and records, radios—all privileges not accorded to other prisoners. On May 21, 1965, their trial began. The defendants were Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, Meins, and Raspe, accused of four accounts of murder and fiftyfour attempts of attempted murder mostly related to the events of the May Offensive. They were also charged with being in possession of explosives endangering the lives of others, and of establishing a domestic terrorist organization. Meins died before the trial began. Rather than trial by jury, Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, and Raspe were tried by five judges appointed by the state and led by Dr. Theodor Prinzing.131 The trial lasted 192 trial days, spanning almost two years, ending on April 28, 1977. During the trial’s span, on May 9, 1976, Meinhof was found dead, hanging from her cell window.132 Meanwhile, outside the prison confines, attacks continued to be carried out 128 In the Baader Meinhof Complex, Meinhof and Ensslin try to have a conversation in the fenced in rooftop of the prison but the swirling helicopters make it virtually impossible for them to be audible to one another. The heavy scrutiny of them, while they are fighting, leads Ensslin to lose her temper and run around the rooftop yelling at the helicopter overhead, which, of course, cannot hear her. 129 See also, Todesspiel (Death Game), dir. Heinrich Breloer, Arthaus Filmverleih, 1977; and Stammheim, dir. Reinhard Hauff, Bioskop, 1986. 130 According to Aust, Baader had over 974 books; Jan-Carl Raspe had 550 books; and Gudrun Ensslin had 450 books in her cell on September 5, 1977. Stefan Aust, Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 311. 131 For a detailed study of the trial, see Pieter H. Bakker-Schut, Stammheim. Der Prozeß gegen die Rote Armee Fraktion (Kiel:  Neuer Malik Verlag, 1986); Kurt Oesterle, Stammheim: Der Vollzugsbeamte Horst Bubeck [sic]  und die RAF-Häftlinge (Tübingen:  Klöpfer und Meyer, 2007); Christopher R. Tenfelde, Die Rote Armee Fraktion und die Strafjustiz:  Anti-Terror Gesetze und ihre Umsetzung am Beispiel des Stammheim Prozesses (Osnabrück:  Jonscher, 2009), as well as the docudrama Stammheim, dir. Reinhard Hauff; screenplay, Stefan Aust, Bioskop, Thalia. 1986. 132 See also Karin Bauer, “In Search of Meinhof,” in Everybody Talks about the Weather . . . We Don’t: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof, edited and introduced by Karin Bauer (New York: Seven Stories, 2008), 12–100.

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by the RAF’s second generation. On April 7, 1977, RAF members killed the West German Federal Prosecutor Siegfried Buback and his chauffeur. Security measures for journalists to access the trials and cover them were extreme and showed the extent to which West Germany’s security apparatus had grown since the beginning of the decade.133 Media not only had to be accredited, they had to pass a total of four security checkpoints while they were driving: their car was photographed and their license plate taken down. Once inside, they had to undress and allow for a full body and cavity search. They were allowed to enter with only a notebook and a pencil. Their identification cards were held by security while they were in attendance. On April 28, 1977, Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe were given three life sentences plus fifteen years for four murders, thirty-four attempted murders, and six bombings. On July 30, 1977, Jürgen Ponto, chief executive officer of the Dresdner Bank, was killed by three members of the RAF, including Susanne Albrecht, whose sister was Ponto’s godchild. It was a botched kidnapping that would have been used in an attempt to demand the release of the first generation. Against this backdrop, the German Autumn unfolded a few months later in 1977.

Repression, Fear, and Paranoia in Germany in Autumn While The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum takes stock of the relationship between the judicial wing and corporate media, as well as the surveillance mechanisms implemented at the outset of the 1970s, Germany in Autumn, which premiered soon after the events that became known as the German Autumn of 1977 and helped to coin the very term, manifests palpably the effects of a decade of repression on media, professional and personal lives, best understood in light of the laws passed and security apparatuses brought into play.134 Germany in Autumn also seeks to offer a counter-narrative 133

See also Ulf G. Stuberger, Die Tage von Stammheim:  Als Augenzeuge beim RAF Prozess (Munich: Herbig, 2007). Stuberger was the only journalist who covered the trial in its entirety in the courtroom. As a result, he landed between the two fronts: while the state assumed he was a sympathizer, the RAF placed him on their hit list. Although he lived under heavy security protection, Stuberger eventually left West Germany to escape the heavy surveillance coming at him from both sides. 134 As Fassbinder, speaking about the film in an interview in spring of 1978, put it:  “When we all sat down together back then, one of the reasons why we said we had to make the film was that something had to be done to combat the fear. We felt that ordinary people, who don’t have any means of production and possibly have even more fears than we do, shouldn’t let themselves be intimidated by the feeling prevailing in [West] Germany at the time, that criticism in any form was unwelcome and must be crushed. To make sure that didn’t happen and because we had the means of production at our disposal, we wanted to

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to the one propagated by the corporate media, which, at the time, had voluntarily self-imposed a news blackout on events related to the German Autumn.135 Thomas Elsaesser, describing the film and the era, wrote the film is “broadly illustrating the climate of fear, paranoia and near civil war which characterized those months of extreme tension, testing West Germany’s pluralist democracy to the breaking point.”136 The omnibus film was directed by eleven filmmakers, mostly associated with New German Cinema: Alf Brustellin, Hans Peter Cloos, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, Maximiliane Mainka, Edgar Reitz, Katja Rupé, Volker Schlöndorff, Peter Schubert, and Bernhard Sinkel.137 Additionally, it involved Böll, who authored the segment directed by Schlöndorff.138 Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus carefully edited nine state very clearly: People can and should and must go on talking, no matter what happens.” Rainer Werner Fassbinder, “Für uns Paradiesvögel wird es enger:  Aus einem Gespräch mit Renate Klett über die politische Entwicklung und Deutschland im Herbst,” in Die Anarchie der Phantasie: Gespräche und Interviews (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1986), 90–4. Here, 93. See English translation: “ ‘The Walls are closing in on us birds of Paradise’: From a Conversation with Renate Klett about Political Developments and Germany in Autumn,” in The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays and Notes, ed. Michael Töteberg and Leo A. Lensing, trans. Krishna Winston (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 134–8. Here, 137. 135 Bespeaking the vexed issues of the German film subsidy system and its relationship to content given the political climate, Germany in Autumn received no government subsidies or support from television stations. Instead, “Rudolf Augstein, editor of Der Spiegel and chief creditor of the Filmverlag [der Autoren], put up the sum of DM 500,000 for the project. (The film actually remained within budget limits, partly owing to the fact that most of the actors and collaborators gave up their honoraria.)” 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. Here, 45. For the Filmverlag’s role in the production of Germany in Autumn, see the interview with Theo Hinz, Filmfaust 7 (March 1978): 16–17. 136 Thomas Elsaesser, “Germany in Autumn and Everyday Fascism,” in Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity and Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 1996), 69–71. Here, 69. Fassbinder’s earlier science fiction film Die Welt am Draht (The World on a Wire, 1973) already depicted a world filled with paranoia and surveillance, with surveillance technology and reality as a simulation. On this film, see also Brad Prager, “Through the Looking Glass: Fassbinder’s World on a Wire,” in A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ed. Brigitte Peucker (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 245–66. 137 Germany in Autumn, dir. Alf Brustellin, Hans Peter Cloos, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, Maximiliane Mainka, Edgar Reitz, Katja Rupé, Volker Schlöndorff, Peter Schubert, and Bernhard Sinkel. Filmverlag der Autoren, US Distributor: New Line Cinemas. 1979. The number of directors cited varies, typically ranging between nine and eleven. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus is usually listed as one of the film’s directors, although she was its editor. Heinrich Böll is sometimes listed as a director although he authored the screenplay but did not direct a segment. Schlöndorff did. Katja Rupé is usually listed as one of the film’s directors, authoring and directing the segment she contributed. She is, however, better known as an actor. Germany in Autumn forms her sole credit as director and screenplay author. 138 The genesis of the project is complex and reveals its collaborative nature. In an interview Theo Hinz said, “The movie actually happened by accident. In the fall of 1977, Schlöndorff had

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hours of material down to the two-hour film. Mainka-Jellinghaus and Kluge are responsible for the montage structure.139 Created in a mere four weeks and in the immediate aftermath of the events depicted, with Fassbinder beginning shooting on October 22, 1977, and Kluge on October 25, 1977, the film responded to events when they had not yet settled into history.140 It premiered within six months on March 3, 1978, at the Berlin International

submitted Knife in Hand [sic, Head], a project by Reinhard Hauff to the Film and Television Commission. But WDR asked Bioskop to withdraw the film, because ‘under the circumstances,’ it would be unwise to make a movie in which a police officer misbehaves. ‘Shit’ I  thought, ‘News blackout, film censorship—the damage that will do!’ . . . I  told Schlöndorff, who was working on The Tin Drum, ‘Now is the time to make a movie about the whole situation, something like The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum . . .’ But Schlöndorff couldn’t do it. And the others, including Rainer, were also otherwise engaged. Then Schlöndorff and I  had the idea of doing something collective, calling together all the authors and directors we knew in Munich. If this was to be a collective effort, we had to move fast . . . So I phoned around to ask who might be available. The next day, we met and agreed that whoever was interested could participate. Present were Rainer, Sinkel, Brustelli[n], Steinbach, Kluge and Schlöndorff, who had brought Katja Rupé. By then Schleyer had been found. A memorial service had been scheduled in Stuttgart for the coming Friday; the Stammheim terrorists were to be buried in Stuttgart later the following week. Both events were to be documented. There was no way we could wait for a written script.” Theo Hinz, Chaos as Usual; Conversations about Rainer Werner Fassbinder (New  York:  Applause, 1997), 131–6. Here, 133. According to Hansen, “The idea of a project was initially suggested to Volker Schlöndorff by Theo Hinz, then newly appointed head of the Filmverlag der Autoren” - a distribution organization founded in 1971 by a group of filmmakers to help self-distribute their films, and from February 1977, partly owned by Der Spiegel. Hansen 45. According to Rentschler, the omnibus film was the first of three projects initiated by Kluge. The other two projects include Der Kandidat (The Candidate, 1980), a film critical of conservative politician Franz Josef Strauss released a few months prior to the federal elections of 1980; and Krieg und Frieden (War and Peace, 1982), a film about the growing antiwar movement in West Germany, included segments contributed by Kluge, Schlöndorff, Aust, and Helke Sander. The former project was viewed as a continuation and collaborated on by Aust, Alexander von Eschwege, and Schlöndorff. Rentschler, “Declaration of Independents,” 420. According to Richard Langston: “It was Kluge who was the arbiter of any and all collaboration. And it was Kluge’s montage that ultimately makes the film one with his stamp all over it. What’s more, the problem with German history, the drive to be a patriot, was a theme that Kluge was already working on in 1978 for Die Patriotin, so the history work in Germany in Autumn had also been on Kluge’s mind presumably before Schlöndorff’s suggestion.” Richard Langston, letter to the author, December 21, 2014. 139 “Für diese Montage zeichnet kein einzelner Filmer, sondern Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus.” Alf Brustellin, Edgar Reitz, Volker Schlöndorff, and Bernhard Sinkel, “ ‘Deutschland im Herbst’ oder ‘Modell Deutschland’?” Filmfaust 7 (March 1978): 3–14. Here, 9. 140 Rentschler states: “The filmmakers framed the project as instant history, a seizing hold of memories as they flashed by in a catastrophic moment in time.” Eric Rentschler, “Life with Fassbinder: The Politics of Fear and Pain,” Discourse: Berkeley Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 6 (Fall 1983):  75–90. Here, 76. See also p.  88, footnote 11, where Rentschler cites Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York:  Schocken, 1968), 253–64. “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” Here, Benjamin 255.

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Film Festival, where it won the Special Recognition Award.141 Rentschler calls Germany in Autumn a “demonstration of group solidarity that was perhaps New German Cinema’s finest hour.”142 Germany in Autumn thus at once served as a contemporary witness to the events depicted and shaped the discourse surrounding them.143 The events known collectively as the “German Autumn” began on September 5, 1977.144 The RAF attempted to pressure the West German government to release ten RAF members imprisoned at Stammheim and two Palestinians imprisoned in Turkey, by kidnapping Hanns-Martin Schleyer, president of the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations (Bundesvereinigung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbände), the Federation of [West] German Industry (Bundesverband der deutschen Industrie), and the Daimler-Benz corporation, as well as a former member of the Hitler Youth and the Nazi shield squadron (SS, Schutzstaffel). Chancellor Helmut Schmidt took a hard line and decided not to give in to the RAF’s conditions. Furthermore, a media news blackout, an act of self-censorship, took effect on September 8, 1977. Then, working together with the RAF, four members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)—Wabil Harb, Hind Alameh, Zohair Akache, and Suhaila Andrawes Sayeh—hijacked the “Landshut,” a Lufthansa jet that had departed the Mediterranean island of Palma de Mallorca with eighty-six passengers (mostly West German vacationers) and five crew bound for Munich, West Germany, on October 13, 1977. After numerous stops, in Rome, Italy; Larnaca, Cyprus; Manama, Bahrain—and even more denied landings—in Beirut, Lebanon; Damascus, Syria; Baghdad, Iraq; Kuwait City, Kuwait; Dubai, United Arab Emirates; and Aden, South Yemen—the hijackers and their hostages landed in Mogadishu, Somalia, on October 17, 1977.145 The West German special counterterrorism taskforce

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According to Hansen, the directors debated “whether to make a six-hour film which would search for the roots of the present situation in the ruins of German history or whether to seize the opportunity and, in Fassbinder’s words, to ‘react promptly and directly.’ ” Hansen 45. See also Alf Brustellin et al., “ ‘Deutschland im Herbst’ oder ‘Modell Deutschland’?” Filmfaust 7 (March 1978):  3–14; Alexander Kluge, Die Patriotin (Frankfurt am Main:  zweitausendeins, 1979), 20–3. 142 Rentschler, “Declaration of Independents,” 420. 143 The term “contemporary witness” (Zeitzeuge), of course, typically refers to individuals rather than to cultural documents that witness a particular moment. 144 For a book-length collection of documents focused on events surrounding the “German Autumn,” see Tatjana Botzat, Elisabeth Kiderlen, and Frank Wolff, Ein deutscher Herbst: Zustände-Dokumente, Berichte, Kommentare (Frankfurt: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1978). 145 See also Roland Suso Richter’s made-for-television drama Mogadischu (2008), which focused attention on the hijacking. In Mogadischu, Nadja Uhl played Gabriele Dillmann, a flight attendant on the “Landshut,” awarded the West German Federal Cross of Merit for her heroic and compassionate actions during the hijacking. Concurrently, Uhl played second generation RAF member and leader Brigitte Mohnhaupt in the Baader Meinhof Complex (2008), as segments of the films were filmed during the same time frame in Morocco.

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GSG 9 sneaked up on and stormed the plane, freeing the hostages, all of whom survived. The pilot, Jürgen Schumann, was murdered by the hijackers. Only one of the terrorists, Suhaila Andrawes Sayeh, survived the shootout. The German Autumn ended on October 18, 1977, when Baader, Ensslin, Raspe, and Irmgard Möller were found dead or dying in their cells at Stammheim maximum security prison, and Schleyer was shot, his body left in the trunk of a car in Mulhouse, France, near the border to Switzerland and West Germany, and the vehicle’s location phoned in to the German News Agency (dpa, Deutsche Presse Agentur). Engaging these events, Germany in Autumn, shot in 35 mm, opens and closes with two funerals:  it opens with documentary footage of HannsMartin Schleyer’s state funeral on Tuesday, October 25, 1977, shot on site by directors including Schlöndorff and Kluge, and closes with documentary footage of the burial of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe on Thursday, October 27, 1977.146 Between these opening and closing segments the film includes fourteen sequences, ranging from fifteen to thirty minutes in length. The film vividly conveys the impact of the repressive laws and surveillance apparatuses on West Germany’s public and private spheres throughout, by weaving together narratives about political events with ones about personal lives. After the opening sequence, presenting Schleyer’s state funeral, Fassbinder’s long sequence and Kluge’s sequences, both discussed at greater length below, follow. Cloos and Rupé contributed a segment in which a female pianist lets an injured man who seeks help into her apartment but is also fearful that he is a terrorist.147 Although different stylistically and thematically from the earlier The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, this sequence, too, comments on the public’s predominant fear of terrorists and of being labeled a sympathizer. Sinkel and Brustellin contributed a pastiche, held together by the figure Franziska Busch, who, among other things, saves a woman being physically assaulted in a parking garage, while on a non-diegetic track singer-songwriter-poet Wolf Biermann, in exile from East Germany, sings a ballad and wonders what happened to a dream for a better world. Busch subsequently watches a television program in which actor Helmut Griem interviews former RAF member Horst Mahler, incarcerated in West-Berlin Moabit prison and declaring 1945, 1967, and 1977 as caesuras in German history. The film’s three most often discussed segments are the ones directed 146

Other films that also include documentary footage of the funerals of Schleyer or of the RAF members are Stammheim (1986), Black Box BRD (2001), and Starbuck Holger Meins (2002). 147 Hansen referred to the sequence as a “rather embarrassing sketch—with ‘Tatort’ touch.” Hansen 49. Ruth McCormick, in her review of the film, calls it “a slapstick story of paranoia.” Ruth McCormick, “Film Review:  Germany in Autumn,” Cineaste 9.3 (Spring 1979):  53–4. Here, 53. The sequence echoes the plot of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum somewhat in that Katharina Blum, too, takes home someone the viewer might suspect to be a terrorist, as a result of the suspicious atmosphere created by the film’s suggestive opening sequence about the man’s identity.

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by Kluge, Fassbinder, and Schlöndorff, who are also the three best-known directors affiliated with the project. Kluge’s sequence focuses on the impact of the era’s repression on professional lives. Kluge combines documentary footage of Schleyer’s funeral with the story of Gabi Teichert, a schoolteacher, digging for German history, figuratively and literally, with a spade in a snow-covered German forest. She would reappear in his subsequent Die Patriotin (The Patriot, 1979).148 The sequence written by Böll and directed by Schlöndorff shows a television board discussing whether or not to air a production of Sophocles’ Antigone.149 As Thomas Elsaesser put it, “Sophocles’ Antigone has a long and involuted history in Germany,” including G. W. Hegel’s commentaries on it in Phenomenology of Spirit and Friedrich Hölderlin’s German translation of the tragedy.150 The issue of proper burial was a sensitive topic at the time as the question of where to bury Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe loomed. Ensslin’s sister sought proper burial for the three. The problem was resolved when Stuttgart’s then mayor, Manfred Rommel—son of Second World War Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, the “desert fox,” who was forced to commit suicide in 1944 for his role in the plot against Hitler and whose state funeral is shown, too, in Kluge’s sequence—granted them burial in the cemetery Stuttgart-Dornhalden, insisting that they be given a proper burial regardless of their political actions. Newsreel footage from the Nazi era weekly newscast (Wochenschau) included in Germany in Autumn announces the death of Rommel. Fassbinder offered an aggressive and exhibitionist twenty-six-minute sequence, edited down from an original thirty-seven minutes. Rentschler encapsulated both the sequence and responses to it as follows: Shameless exhibitionism that goes so far as to make one’s bodily and emotional disfunctions [sic] into objects of spectacle; narcissism raised to and transformed into a “higher form of political commitment”; or, the recording of private fears evoked by a public crisis as a historical document; or . . . a carefully-staged fiction, scripted, composed, and choreographed, meant not as a self-portrait of its director / lead role, but instead as the enactment of a predicament experienced by many West German intellectuals at the time; these are some of the ways previous

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Die Patriotin (The Patriot), dir. Alexander Kluge. Kairos Film/ZDF, 1978. See also Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim for a renewed engagement with Antigone and the implications of her claim also for feminism and sexual politics. Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia UP, 2000). 150 Thomas Elsaesser, “Antigone Agonistes: Urban Guerilla or Guerilla Urbanism? The Red Army Faction, Germany in Autumn and Death Game,” Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity (New York: Verso, 1999), 267–302; esp. 272–3. 149

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commentators have understood the Fassbinder-sequence in Deutschland im Herbst/Germany in Autumn (1978).151 Fassbinder’s contribution exhibits most clearly the atmosphere of paranoia and anxiety. In contrast to the majority of Germany in Autumn with the exception of Kluge’s footage, Fassbinder’s segment was shot immediately after the events of German Autumn, that is, within a week of the events. Additionally, and again forming a stark contrast to most of the other sequences, it is mostly shot inside, in Fassbinder’s dimly lit Munich apartment, with “careful framing, subtle high contrast lighting, and deepfocus compositions” adding to the sense of claustrophobia.152 Contributing to the blend of fact and fiction that permeates the film, he plays the lead protagonist; his real-life mother, Lilo Pompeit, appears as his mother; and his real-life lover, Armin Meier, as his partner.153 Rentschler cites a critic, who asks, “Is Fassbinder still Fassbinder, when he plays the lead role in a film about himself?”154 One could ask the same questions about the figure of his mother and lover in this sequence. The densely packed segment features Fassbinder at work, in arguments with his lover, and in a heated debate with his mother. “It’s me Fassbinder,” Fassbinder states, opening the sequence, as he speaks into the telephone. In his conversation, he is second-guessing an interview he did and attempting, unsuccessfully, to have the last part edited out. In the interview he had denounced the institution of marriage as artificial.155 151

Rentschler, “Life with Fassbinder,” 75–90. Here, 75. Reprinted as the epilogue of West German Film in the Course of Time:  Reflections on the Twenty Years since Oberhausen (Bedford Hills: Redgrave, 1984), 191–202. 152 Rentschler, “Life with Fassbinder,” 76. Of course, the settings for Fassbinder’s films, given his penchant for melodramas, frequently feature interiors but rarely to this extent. Fassbinder’s earlier The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), set entirely in the protagonist’s claustrophobic apartment, would be the exception. 153 In 1978, Fassbinder split with Armin Meier. Meier committed suicide the same year. Fassbinder’s A Year with Thirteen Moons (1978) attempted to work through the relationship and Meier’s suicide. 154 Rentschler, “Life with Fassbinder,” 76. 155 As Fassbinder mentioned in an interview, he planned to make a film with Kluge and Wolfgang Berndt subsequent to Germany in Autumn devoted to the topic of marriage. “I wanted to make a film with Kluge and Wolfgang Berndt on The Marriages of Our Parents, and the Filmverlag people were giving us funny looks. Well, that didn’t bother me, but Kluge and Berndt got depressed right away. And I can’t maintain enough euphoria for the three of us, it’s hard enough to keep up my own. So that’s what did in the project: the way they looked at us—‘ummm, is that really such an important subject . . .’ A funny look, a head cocked to the side, did in the whole project.” Rainer Werner Fassbinder, “This is the only way we can do film here: by making them without worrying about losing money: A Conversation with Wolfram Schütte about The Third Generation, Cinema, Politics and a Strategy against Resignation,” in The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes, ed. Michael Töteberg and Leo A. Lensing, trans. Krishna Winston (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992), 31–40. Here, 33.

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The phone conversation takes places shortly after Fassbinder’s return from a work trip to Paris. Upon entering the apartment, he gruffly greets his partner, Armin, demanding that he make him coffee. (The remainder of the sequence echoes this tendency:  return home or wake up, grab phone, demand something from Armin.) A short while later, Fassbinder calls Ingrid Caven, to whom he was married from 1970 to 1972. At the time they shot this segment for Germany in Autumn, the two still shared an apartment, whenever he was in Paris.156 They discuss the news of the hijacking and the latest developments related to it, the GSG 9 storming. Fassbinder’s sequence trembles with the events related to the German Autumn. The sequence cuts to a conversation between Fassbinder and his mother, where his authoritarian tendency manifests as well. Discussing the climate of political hysteria, she cautions against talking about the terrorist attacks. She mentions that she had a debate with someone about Böll’s writings. When she sought to protect Böll, her friend labeled her a sympathizer. Fassbinder’s mother states that the whole atmosphere of hysteria, “reminds of the Nazi times when one remained silent.” The analogy made between the Nazi era and state repression in the 1970s hangs in the air. Then, the sequence cuts back to a scene in which Fassbinder again bosses around his lover, Armin. While criticizing the authoritarianism of the state, Fassbinder depicts (his) personal relationships as saturated with power plays. To wit, Fassbinder had often thematized power dynamics in relationships in his prior melodramas; here, however, he uses himself as the authoritarian example.157 Remarkably, even though the images associated with the events were already and would become even more iconic, Fassbinder shows not one image related to the German Autumn. Instead, the German Autumn haunts by dint of its suggestion and its very (visual) absence. Instead, the events infiltrate and saturate his private sphere through sound: the radio, which is shown and mentioned but never heard, and through exchanges with others. The sound of news, broadcast through radio or television, permeates homes in numerous other previous and subsequent films Fassbinder directed, weaving together the public and private sphere. Notable examples include the opening sequence of Mother Küsters’ Trip to Heaven (1975) and The Third Generation (1979), which will be discussed in Chapter 4, as well as The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979). Here, however, Fassbinder regularly 156

Katja Nicodemus, “Man kann uns nicht einfach ausradieren,” Die Zeit, May 28, 2007, http://www.zeit.de/2007/22/Caven-Interview. Last accessed January 20, 2015. Translated and reprinted as “No Morals without Style:  Interview with Ingrid Caven,” Sign and Sight, May 31, 2007, http://www.signandsight.com/features/1372.html. Last accessed January 20, 2015. 157 Most of Fassbinder’s films show the societal factors that create these dynamics and how they impact personal and work relationships, and particularly those that rest at their juncture. This thematic preoccupation manifests starting with his very first films: Der Stadtstreicher (The City Tramp, 1966); Das kleine Chaos (The Little Chaos, 1966); and in particular, Liebe ist kälter als der Tod (Love Is Colder Than Death, 1969).

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mentions radio and television but neither is heard. Rather, their appearance manifests through their absence. The haunting effect of events related to the German Autumn has already begun, as the sequence focuses intently not on the events themselves but on their impact.158 Thus, the sequence shows palpably an arc that reaches from the surveillance mechanisms implemented at the beginning of the decade and mentioned at the outset of this chapter to the atmosphere that they had created by the decade’s end. To counter this atmosphere of fear and restriction, which included the self-imposed media blackout during the events of the German Autumn, the film underscored the importance of and contributed to the creation or continuation of a public sphere—in content and form. As Rentschler put it, “Working together with Fassbinder, Reitz, Schlöndorff, and others, Kluge sought to record ‘images of our own country’ that the media, blacked out and skittish during this crisis, refused to show, providing alternative information in the hope of restoring an endangered public sphere.”159 This very public sphere is, as Kluge famously argued vis-à-vis film,160 collaboratively generated by the filmmaker, the film, and the audience; or as Kluge put it: “it is the spectator who actually produces the film, as the film on screen sets in motion the film in the mind of the spectator.”161 Miriam Hansen, in her analysis of how the film—and in particular Kluge’s contribution—works to create a public sphere, described it thusly: Film production is a collaborative project and therefore requires an assessment of the scope of collective experience, of the specific constellation of cinema audience and public sphere. The degree to which a filmmaker seeks and stimulates the co-operation of the film in the mind of the spectator, according to Kluge, determines the measure of “Öffentlichkeit” [public sphere] generated in the process and thus the potential role of the cinema in the transformation of the public sphere.162 158

To be sure, Fassbinder’s sequence fixates on him. The exchanges with his partner or with his mother, between which the clips cut back and forth, pinpoint him as the common denominator and center of attention. It could be said that this sequence evidences a cinematic turn to the new subjectivity. Yet as Fassbinder put it in an interview about his contribution, he produced his sequence in the immediate aftermath, and undoubtedly also focused on himself, to capture the impact of the events. For more on the “new subjectivity” in literature and film, see also Sabine von Dirke, “All Power to the Imagination!”: The West German Counterculture from the Student Movement to the Greens (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 1997); Rick McCormick, Politics of the Self: Feminism and the Postmodern in West German Literature and Film (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991). 159 Rentschler, “Declaration of Independents,” 420. 160 See also Alexander Kluge, “On Film and the Public Sphere,” trans. Thomas Y. Levin and Miriam B. Hansen, New German Critique 24–25 (Fall/Winter 1981–82): 206–20. 161 Michael Dost, Florian Hopf, and Alexander Kluge, Filmwirtschaft in der BRD und in Europa: Götterdämmerung in Raten (Munich: Hanser, 1973), 67. 162 Hansen 39–40.

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The coauthoring of this public sphere, be it among the filmmakers involved with the project or between the filmmaker and the audience, drew on and propagated a spirit of collaboration that also informed events ranging from the collective living experiments of 1967 and 1968, experienced by everyone from Dutschke to Fassbinder, and from the Kommune 1 to Subversive Aktion, to the reading groups mentioned in Chapter 1. As Nora Alter points out, it also shaped the earlier collaborative French film Loin du Vietnam (1967), which in turn influenced Germany in Autumn.163 For Kluge, the collective spirit had already found its theoretical articulation in Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung. Zur Organizationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit (1972), which he coauthored with Oskar Negt.164 In this study, they present a concept drawn from Marx of the collective worker (Gesamtarbeiter),165 which Negt and Kluge felt needed to be wholly reinvented and reapplied. It also informed Kluge’s notion of cooperative cinema (Kooperationskino) and the idea Schlöndorff, Herzog, and Peter Fleischmann had for a long range project, expressed in 1969 and bearing the title Über Deutschland (About Germany). The planned project was to be carried out over a few years and include “roughly 100 short and medium-length documentaries.”166 Germany in Autumn exemplifies clearly this theoretical argument, so important to their theory, that is, how collaborative work—Zusammenarbeit—can contribute to the creation of a public sphere. Yet the creation of a public sphere rested not solely on the way a project was created but also on its content or structure. Numerous sequences, and certainly the assemblage of sequences, blur the boundaries between genres. Germany in Autumn combines documentary footage with fictional sequences.167 This blend of genres, later often appearing in the form of 163 Nora Alter, “Framing Terrorism:  Beyond the Borders,” in Projecting History:  German Nonfiction Cinema, 1967–2000 (Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 2002), 43–75, esp.  54–8. Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam), dir. Jean-Luc Godard, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles, US Distributor:  New  Yorker Films, 1967. Another important but underexamined collectively produced film of and on the era is the Mexican experimental collective documentary El Grito (1968) about the events related to the Tlatlelco Massacre. 164 Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung: Zur Organisationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit (Frankfurt am Main:  Suhrkamp, 1972); in English:  Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Assenka Oksiloff and Peter Labanyo (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 165 See Karl Marx, “The Division of Labour and Manufacture,” Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990), 455–91, esp. 468–70. 166 Rentschler, “Life with Fassbinder,” 81. 167 See also Hansen 50; Timothy Corrigan, New German Film:  The Displaced Image (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983), 12; Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat, 26; Nora Alter, “Crisis as Film: Germany in Autumn.” Literarisches Krisenbewusstsein: Ein Perzeptions- und Produktionsmuster im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Keith Bullivant and Bernhard Spies (Munich: Iudicium, 2001), 195–215. Here, 199.

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docudrama, would become a hallmark of films about the Red Army Faction. But in this collective project, the unique aims of blurring genres were influenced intently by Kluge, whose tone impacted the overall work. As Hansen points out, “The conventional division of labor between fiction and non-fiction genres, according to Kluge, disregards the ‘coexistence of fact and desire in the human mind’ or—to externalize the perspective— the painful discrepancy between the schemes of history and the ‘stories’ of human life.”168 Debates about the ratio of documentary footage to fictional material took place among the collective.169 Ultimately, a decision was made to combine and blur the two genres. As the film did so, it also blurred eras or temporal frameworks. Writing about the film, Anton Kaes wrote, “Germany in Autumn consciously sought to counter the collective amnesia by relating images from the present to the past.”170 As Alter puts it, referring to Sinkel’s take, this “mix of perspectives did not just seek to relate the diversified experience of Fall ‘77 but also to interrogate what the film as film could or could not address—the limits of representation.”171 The film was intent on creating an open, unresolved tenor around the events depicted, so that the contradictions and tension were presented—for discussion. In the decades that followed, numerous other films depicted the events of the German Autumn, and did so in various genres, often blending documentary and drama.172 The West German made-for-television Todesspiel (Death Game, 1997), a two-part docudrama directed by Heinrich Breloer, blends documentary footage with reenactments to tell the story of Schleyer’s kidnapping in part one, and of the hijacking of the “Landshut” and of the death of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe in part two.173 Yet these two films 168

Hansen 49. See also the interview with some of the film’s directors: Alf Brustellin et al., “ ‘Deutschland im Herbst’ oder ‘Modell Deutschland’?” Filmfaust 7 (March 1978):  3–14; “Deutschland im Herbst:  Worin liegt die Parteilichkeit des Films?” Ästhetik und Kommunikation 32 (June 1978):  124; Alexander Kluge, Die Patriotin (Frankfurt am Main:  Zweitausendeins, 1979), 20–37; and Alf Brustellin, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, and Bernhard Sinkel, “Germany in Autumn:  What Is the Film’s Bias?” in West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices, ed. Eric Rentschler (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988), 132–3. 170 Anton Kaes, “Images of History,” in From Hitler to Heimat, 1–35. Here, 27. 171 Alter, Literarisches Krisenbewusstsein, 201. 172 See also Das Schleyerband, dir. Klaus von Bruch, self-distributed, 1978; and the made-fortelevision Auf Leben und Tod, dir. Hans Helderberg, SWF, 1979. A  two-hour compilation of television news footage, press conferences, and interviews during and about the events of German Autumn combined with clips from popular culture, including a commercial for lipstick, a space shuttle launch, disco shows, and John Lennon’s song “Working Class Hero.” 173 Todesspiel, dir. Heinrich Breloer. Arthaus Filmverleih. 1997. See also Heinrich Breloer, Todesspiel:  Von der Schleyer Entführung bis Mogadischu. Eine dokumentarische Erzählung (Cologne:  Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1997). More recent engagements with the topic include Roland Suso Richter’s made-for-television drama Mogadischu (2008), which focused attention on the hijacking. Over the course of the 1970s, directly related to the upsurge in terrorist attacks, hijackings increased. The cultural mediations—in documentaries, docudramas, and 169

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contrast starkly. While Germany in Autumn conveys well the atmosphere of fear and silence that characterized the era, as Jamie Trnka put it, in Death Game “the blacklisting of alleged radicals from public sector jobs, the continued state surveillance activities and the fear of speaking openly about the events of 1977 . . . are strikingly absent.”174 In sum, Germany in Autumn conveys how the laws ratified and surveillance mechanisms implemented at the outset of the decade had created a paranoid atmosphere of fear and constriction by the decade’s end. As Jan Dawson put it in a review of the film from 1978, One should not underestimate the fact that—in the present climate of hysteria, repression and self-censorship—terrorism and its relatively private consequences is becoming a taboo subject, and one which it takes a political courage merely to name . . . The film serves to alert foreign audiences to the prevalence of fear and self-censorship in “everyday” German life, eroding the unconscious even of the free thinkers.175 In so doing, Germany in Autumn also marks a visceral transition in West German history, whereby the Nazi era as a site of trauma has been joined by events related to the German Autumn, which manifested as its own new site of trauma. To be sure, the film still contrasts two generations or historical periods with one another: the Nazi era and the 68ers. Emblematic of this contrast are the sequences in which Fassbinder debates with his mother, Lilo Pompeit.176 She calls for “an authoritarian ruler who is very good and very nice and orderly.” It also shows in the contrast between the opening and the closing sequences or funerals. For example, the opening funeral features the era’s leading political and economic figures, who also held key appointments during the Nazi era. As Martin Blumenthal-Barby puts it:

fictional features films, as well as video art, music, and literature—of hijackings is vast. For a book-length study, see Annette Vowinckel, Flugzeugentführungen:  Eine Kulturgeschichte (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011). 174 Jamie Trnka, “ ‘The Struggle Is Over, the Wounds are Open’: Cinematic Tropes, History and the RAF in Recent German Film,” New German Critique 101 (Summer 2007):  1–26. Here, 8. On Breloer’s Death Game, see also Thomas Elsaesser, “Antigone Agonistes,” esp. 267–72. 175 Jan Dawson, “Germany in Autumn,” Take One 6.12 (November 1978): 14–15 and 44–5. Here, 15. 176 Lilo Pompeit starred in many of Fassbinder’s films. She has twenty-four credits, including Veronika Voss, Lili Marleen, Berlin Alexanderplatz, The Third Generation, The Marriage of Maria Braun, In a Year of Thirteen Moons, Despair, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, Effi Briest, Fox and His Friends, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, The Merchant of Four Seasons, Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, and Gods of the Plague.

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Kurt Georg Kiesinger, who had joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and worked in the German Foreign Ministry’s radio propaganda department. Other political and industrial elites of West Germany follow [Friedrich Karl] Flick, [Herbert] Quandt, [Hans Karl] Filbinger and [Eberhard] von Brauchitsch, who are known to [West] German audience[s] for having paved [the way for] or accompanied the Nazis’s route to power, and who also gained prominence after the war in the context of West Germany’s foundation and economic rise.177 Blumenthal-Barby also calls attention to the flags of the company ESSO fluttering over the funeral of Schleyer, who had held a position in the similar sounding SS (the Nazi Schutzstaffel, shield squadron). The closing sequence shows the funeral of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe. Subsequent films, from the 1980s to the present, as the next chapter will discuss in further detail, marked this transition of historical focus as they looked back at this decade as its own site of trauma. Eric Santner, referencing this moment in Kaes’s study, states: In his study of German films of the seventies and eighties dealing with fascism and the postwar era, Kaes positions Deutschland im Herbst at the turning point in the preoccupations of New German Cinema toward memory and mourning, noting that Kluge, Schlöndorff, Fassbinder, Sinkel and Reitz, all of whom contributed to the film, went on to make major films dealing with recent Germany history.178 Kaes points out that “it is no accident that Germany in Autumn inspired several projects concerned with ‘the images of our country,’ ” and discusses these films, which include Kluge’s Die Patriotin (The Patriot, 1979); Fassbinder’s FRG Trilogy, consisting of The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Lola (1981), and Veronika Voss (1982); Reitz’s Heimat (begun in 1979); Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum (1979); and Sinkel’s Sins of the Fathers (1986, begun in 1979).179 While they are about recent history, each exhibits the aftershocks of the Nazi era. Subsequent films, as will be discussed in Chapter 4, would begin to look back at the red decade as its own site of trauma.

177 Martin Blumenthal-Barby, “The Return of the Human:  Germany in Autumn,” in Inconceivable Effects: Ethics through Twentieth Century German Literature (Ithaca:  Cornell UP, 2013), 122–50. Here, 122. Published previously as “Germany in Autumn: The Return of the Human,” Discourse:  Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 29.1 (Winter 2007): 140–65. 178 Eric Santner, Mourning, Memory and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993), 177, footnote 8; emphasis added. 179 Kaes 27.

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Conclusions Over the course of the 1970s, film began to question the relationship between the corporate media and law enforcement as a direct result of the upsurge in laws passed ostensibly to clamp down on radical leftists, as well as of security apparatuses implemented and of the media’s role in fomenting a witch-hunt atmosphere. This cinematic critique of the corporate media manifests not only in Schlöndorff and Von Trotta’s discussed The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum but also in Fassbinder’s Mutter Küsters’ Fahrt zum Himmel (Mother Küsters’ Trip to Heaven); Von Trotta’s Das zweite Erwachen der Christa Klages (The Second Awakening of Christa Klages, 1978); Reinhard Hauff’s Messer im Kopf (Knife in the Head, 1978)  and Stammheim (1986). Countering the corporate media for how it depicted terrorism, these films produced a public sphere that grappled with the pivotal topics of the decade engaged in this chapter: surveillance and repression. Films of the 1970s, predominantly directed by New German Cinema filmmakers, also unleashed a new debate about the permissible extent of the state’s curtailment of civil liberties and engaged a broader swatch of the left and their motivations for action. Hauff’s Knife in the Head, for example, presents a woman who works in a youth center. At the time, social movements, including future members of the RAF, focused on improving conditions at group homes and juvenile detention centers.180 The social movements criticized the authoritarian methods extant in them. Economic disparity was criticized as well, as activists worked to ensure that those who were economically disadvantaged were not abused, and that, inversely, their needs, in terms of housing, food, and education, were met.181 Baader and Ensslin had been working with youth, as part of the Extraparliamentary Opposition’s Group Home Campaign (Heimkampagne) in 1969, while they awaited the outcome of an appeal of their sentence for the arson attack 180

For this reason, Nora Alter opens her chapter on Germany in Autumn appropriately enough with Erich Fried’s poem “Heime”: “Heim für Schwererziehbare / Altersheim / Fürsorgeheim / Niflheim / Stadelheim / Stammheim / Unheimlich / was alles / Heim heißt.” Nora Alter, “Crisis as Film:  Germany in Autumn,” in Literarisches Krisenbewusstsein, 195–215. Here, 195. She also states that “it is this duality, or ambiguity, of violence which leads Elsaesser to conclude that, instead of representing merely a return of the uncanny (Unheimlichkeit) terrorism thrives on a collective experience of vicarious pleasure (Klammheimlichkeit).” Alter 206. 181 See also Wolfgang Post, Erziehung im Heim. Perspektiven der Heimerziehung im System der Jugendhilfe (Landsberg: Beltz Juventa, 2002); Markus Köster, “Holt die Kinder aus den Heimen! Veränderungen im öffentlichen Umgang mit Jugendlichen in den 1960er Jahren am Beispiel der Heimerziehung,” in Demokratisierung und gesellschaftlicher Aufbruch. Die sechziger Jahre als Wendezeit der Bundesrepublik, ed. Matthias Frese and Julia Paulus (Paderborn:  Schöningh, 2005), 667–81; Klaus Lehning, Aus der Geschichte lernen – die Heimerziehung in den 50er und 60er Jahren, die Heimkampagne und die Heimreform (Kassel: Spiegelbuchverlag, 2006); Marita Schlölzel-Klamp and Thomas Köhler-Saretzki, Das blinde Auge des Staates: Die Heimkampagne von 1969 und die Forderungen der ehemaligen Heimkinder (Leipzig: Klinkhardt Julius, 2010).

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on the Frankfurt department store in April 1968.182 It was initiated and organized by the SDS and its main two campaigns were located in Frankfurt and West-Berlin.183 Right before Meinhof went underground, she had been working on the screenplay of Bambule, a made-for-television film criticizing the authoritarian methods operative at a juvenile detention center for girls in West-Berlin.184 Airing of the film, originally scheduled for May 24, 1970, was cancelled after she assisted in springing Baader from jail on May 14, 1970.185 Von Trotta’s The Second Awakening of Christa Klages, too, underscores the attention given by social movements of the late 1960s and 1970s to those under 18 but focuses on a daycare center: in her film three people rob banks in order to help a daycare center in dire financial straits, as will be discussed in Chapter 4. The availability of and access to daycare centers was one of numerous concerns of the women’s movement during the 1970s.186 To be sure, the 1970s was the decade in which West Germany witnessed the greatest increase in violence in the post–Second World War era unleashed by the state as well as the terrorists, each of which often carried out actions in tandem with other international entities. By the end of the 1970s, public sentiment and even the opinions of much of the left had shifted intensely. Although the Allensbacher Institute survey cited at the outset still showed that in 1971, a startling 20 percent deemed the RAF’s actions to be political rather than criminal and a surprising 25 percent of those under 30 indicated sympathies for the RAF, by the decade’s end this support had plummeted. Nevertheless, a critique of the state’s repressive measures also loomed large. While Germany in Autumn opens with the statement, “When brutality reaches a certain point, it doesn’t matter who started it—it only must stop,” as articulated by Frau Wilde, a woman with five children, buried in the rubble in April 1945 after an [Allied] bomb attack, thus opening with a consideration of the trauma suffered as a result of the Second World War, it

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Astrid and Thorwald Proll had been active in the movement as well. Future RAF member Peter-Jürgen Boock was one of a number of youth who revolted in a group home and then fled, finding refuge in Frankfurt with students. 183 The Georg-von-Rauch Haus and the Tommy-Weisbecker Haus in Berlin are both projects that emerged out of this initiative. The Georg-von-Rauch Haus, established in 1971, is a selforganized collective household that still offers housing for youth, as well as shelter for the homeless. The Georg-von-Rauch Haus focuses in particular on meeting the needs of youth who have economic need. The Tommy-Weisbecker Haus, established in 1973, is a self-organized collective household that offers housing for youth. Both are named after radical leftists of the late 1960s killed by police. Tommy Weisbecker was a member of the June 2 Movement. See Chapter 2 for more information. 184 Ulrike Marie Meinhof, Bambule—Fürsorge—Sorge für wen? (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1974). 185 The film eventually aired on May 24, 1994. 186 For more information, see Christina Gerhardt, “Helke Sander’s dffb Cinema and West Germany’s Feminist Movement,” in Celluloid Revolt: German Screen Cultures and the Long Sixties, ed. Christina Gerhardt and Marco Abel (Rochester: Camden House, 2019).

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closes with the same statement yet unattributed this time, calling attention to the reappearance of violence, to a connection between fascism and the German Autumn, but also to a desire for it to cease. By the decades’ end, the actions of the Red Army Faction were criticized, if they had not been so previously, as vanguardist and misguided, even by others on the left. Thomas Elsaesser calls Germany in Autumn a film of “collective mourning.”187 Cinematic mediations of the group conveyed this critique poignantly. Fassbinder’s Die dritte Generation (The Third Generation, 1979)—a farce in the style of Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967)—dwells both on the ratcheted up security systems and on the media. The opening sequence presents a business that funds terrorists, in order to boost sales of its security systems. The terrorists—depicted in the film as a group of bourgeois friends who take up armed struggle out of boredom— fixate mostly on seeing themselves on television. The film was released shortly after the German Autumn. As shall be discussed in Chapter  4, its farcical tone closes the decade’s paranoid atmosphere by shifting a critical focus onto the RAF. If the media’s collusion with the police and legal system, as well as surveillance mechanisms and the paranoid atmosphere they created, formed the focal points of 1970s cinematic engagements with the RAF, the 1980s turned to an engagement with political alternatives, as the fault lines along which the movement had split in 1970 and its outcomes were considered in films of the new decade, such as Margarethe von Trotta’s Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne and Juliane, 1982).

187

Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989), 260.

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4 Diverging Trajectories: The RAF and Political Alternatives in New German Cinema, 1972–82

While West Germany experienced an increasingly tense atmosphere as a result of the repressive laws and surveillance mechanisms implemented in the 1970s, during the same decade the nation also witnessed an upsurge in labor, women’s and environmental movements, often with very successful outcomes in the struggles—at least in the short term. Due to the ramped up security apparatus described in Chapter  3, the majority of the first generation of the Red Army Faction (RAF) was imprisoned or dead by the decade’s end. New members of the RAF, the so-called second generation after the imprisonment of the majority of the first generation by 1972, were often politicized decidedly less by the international solidarity with Third World self-determination and self-liberation struggles or the Vietnam War,

This chapter was generously funded by an appointment as visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Minda de Ginzburg Center for European Studies (2008) and at Columbia University (2008–10). Previous versions of this chapter were presented as guest lectures at the University of California at Davis summer program in Berlin (2011), and at Rice University (2010), and as conference papers at the German Studies Association (2009), the Women in German conference (2007), and the Modern Languages Association conference (2005). I thank Sabine Hake, Leo Goldsmith, Glenn Man, Jason Middleton, Quinn Slobodian, Eric Thau, and J. M. Tyree for their useful feedback on earlier versions of this chapter. Unless otherwise indicated, translations throughout this chapter are my own.

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which ended with the Fall of Saigon in 1975,1 and radicalized more by the domestic political landscape and, in particular, prisoner solidarity work. Issues revolving around prison conditions became a focal point. Journalists depicted the conditions, while intellectuals wrote letters and imprisoned members carried out hunger strikes to protest them. Internationally, too, the sense of Third World solidarity that had loomed large in the 1950s and 1960s dissipated in the 1970s for various reasons. As historian Vijay Prashad argues: By the 1970s, the new nations were no longer new. Their failures were legion. Popular demands for land, bread and peace had been ignored on behalf of the needs of the dominant classes. Internecine warfare, a failure to control the prices of primary commodities, an inability to overcome the suffocation of finance capital, and more led to a crisis in the budgets of much of the Third World. Borrowings from commercial banks could only come if the states agreed to “structural adjustment” packages from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.2 The Bretton Woods system implemented after the Second World War started to unravel in 1971 when the exchange rate of the dollar was no longer based on gold, to which the dollar was pegged, and to which other currencies, in turn, were fixed.3 As the afterglow of the successful self-liberation and self-determination struggles wore off, developing countries, many of them formerly involved with the Non-Aligned Movement, put forward the New International Economic Order (NIEO)4 through the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 1974. NIEO sought to rebalance the scales, particularly in terms of trade and development, in favor of the Third World. Among other things, NIEO sought to control international corporations operating within a country, to nationalize industries, and to secure equitable remuneration for raw materials acquired. Inversely, developed nations looked for new ways to secure financial returns as colonization had come to an end. Under Robert McNamara, former US

1

Although the war officially ended in 1975 as troops were withdrawn, the United States continued its involvement in Vietnam politically and economically. Cf. Edwin A. Martini, Invisible Enemies:  War on Vietnam, 1975–2000 (Amherst:  University of Massachusetts Press, 2007). 2 Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007), xviii. 3 As David Harvey puts it, “Even before the Arab-Israeli War and the Oil Embargo of 1973, the Bretton Woods system [. . .] had fallen into disarray.” David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), 12. See also Anselm Doering-Manteuffel and Lutz Raphael, Nach dem Boom: Perspektive auf die Zeitgeschichte seit 1970 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2008). 4 http://www.un-documents.net/s6r3201.htm. Last accessed August 4, 2012.

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secretary of defense during the Vietnam War (1961–68) and then head of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981, the World Bank increased its loans to developing nations. The funds were provided to developing nations only if they agreed to the conditions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank’s structural adjustment programs, which, among other things, attempted to privatize previously public services.5 In response to the collapse of the exchange rate in 1971, the 1973 oil crisis, and the resulting recession,6 developed nations met in 1975 to form what was then the G6. The original group included France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with Canada joining the following year. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was informed by a new policy of détente while Richard Nixon was president (1969–74) and Leonid Brezhnev was general secretary of the Central Committee (1964–82). The two nations signed the first of two Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) on May 26, 1972, intended to halt the development of strategic ballistic missile launchers. The second agreement, SALT II, was signed by Brezhnev and President Jimmy Carter at the end of the decade on June 18, 1979. Nixon also had an historic meeting with Mao Tse Tung in 1972. A similar policy of détente took place between West and East Germany as a result of the Ostpolitik (new Eastern policy), initiated by Willy Brandt (Social Democratic Party, SPD, Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands), chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1969 to 1974, and implemented by him and Willi Stoph, prime minister of the German Democratic Republic from 1964 to 1973. Domestically, as mentioned at the end of Chapter 1, with the disintegration of the extraparliamentary opposition in 1970, the late 1960s social movements split along different fault lines, with the K Groups (communist groups), which were predominantly Marxist-Leninist, being the most numerous.7 As historian Jeremy Varon put it, “Leftists flocked in droves between 1969 and 1973 into the rapidly proliferating Marxist-Leninist groups.”8 Many of them went door to door or into the factories to organize.9 Additionally, according to sociologist George Katsiaficas, as the 1968 social movements shifted to 1980s autonomous movements: “in . . . Italian and German social movements, the autonomous

5 See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007); and Naomi Klein, Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2008). 6 See also Rüdiger Graf, Öl und Souveränität: Petroknowledge und Energiepolitik in den USA und Westeuropa in den 1970er Jahren (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014). 7 See Chapter 1, page 56–57, for a more detailed discussion about this split in the late 1960s. 8 Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home:  The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction and the Revolutionary Violence of the 1960s and the 1970s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 67. 9 Cf. Gerd Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt: Unsere kleine deutsche Kulturrevolution, 1967–1977, 5th ed. (Berlin: Fischer, 2011).

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women’s movement in each country was vital to subsequent formations.”10 Katsiaficas also cites the importance of the continued nonviolent direction actions over the 1970s against nuclear energy and weapons, a movement that, as outlined in Chapter 1, had been active since 1957, which pointed to the failure of West Germany’s representative democracy and created a sustained leftist lineage from the late 1950s on. The 1970s was the decade that sowed the seeds for the establishment of the West German Green Party in 1980— a key domestic and (international) development.11 Disenchantment with the CDU and also the SPD for supporting NATO and nuclear weapons led to the founding of the Green Party, which—at the time—was both anti-military and pro-environment.12 This chapter focuses on two of the paths, other than terrorism, that social movements pursued over the course of the 1970s and that New German Cinema, looking at terrorism and the decade, also engaged—labor struggles and the women’s movement. It considers these alternative paths in the following films—in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Mutter Küsters’ Fahrt zum Himmel (Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, 1975)13; in Margarethe von Trotta’s Das zweite Erwachen der Christa Klages (The Second Awakening of Christa Klages, 1978)14; and in Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne and Juliane, 1981) respectively.15 Each of these three films engages terrorism and another prevalent 1970s political movement prevalent on parallel tracks, as it were. Thus, read together, these three films delineate political shifts that took place in West Germany over the course of the 1970s and each does so from the ground up, that is, from the vantage point of social movements. In so doing, the films illustrate both the trajectory of terrorism and of alternative political movements as they evolved over the 1970s. Often, studies of the 1960s in West Germany end with the dissolution of the Ausserparlamentarische Opposition (APO, Extraparliamentary Opposition). But social movements 10

George Katsiaficas, “From 1968 to Autonomy,” in The Subversion of Politics:  European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1997), 1–17. Here, 7. 11 For a critical history of the environmental movement in Germany, see Franz Uekötter, The Greenest Nation? A  New History of German Environmentalism (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2014). 12 To the great chagrin of its earlier supports, the Green Party later reneged on its previous pacifist position when it opted in 1999 to bomb Yugoslavia during the Balkan War. 13 Mutter Küsters’ Fahrt zum Himmel (Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, 1975), dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder; production company, Filmverlag der Autoren; distributor, New  Yorker Films. New ending shot and added in November of 1975. 14 Das zweite Erwachen der Christa Klages (The Second Awakening of Christa Klages, 1978), dir. Margarethe von Trotta; production company, Bioskop Film/Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR); distributor, Filmverlag der Autoren/New Line Cinema. 15 Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne and Juliane, 1981), dir. Margarethe von Trotta; production company, Bioskop Film/Sender Freies Berlin; distributor, Filmverlag der Autoren/ New Yorker Films.

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of course continued after the dissolution of the APO, albeit in variegated forms. Inversely, studies of 1970s terrorist groups active in West Germany often read them in isolation from other contemporaneous social movements. But these movements existed not only concurrently to one another, they were often in conversation, whether in solidarity or in opposition. Moreover, the era’s films took precisely this approach, comparing the movements that used militant violence with those that did not or pursued other strategies. Both the labor and the feminist movements were pivotal to West German 1970s politics. They existed parallel to the RAF and other militant groups and were also thematized by the era’s films, by New German Cinema auteurs, but have been occluded from contemporary films looking back on the decade, thus revising perceptions of the era through contemporary cinematic narratives. What follows revisits these earlier films and these social movements, returning them to the historical and cultural narratives about the era.

Labor Politics: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven In Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven Fassbinder picked up on factors similar to the ones motivating Schlöndorff and Von Trotta’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975), discussed in Chapter 3, dwelling on how the media skews, sensationalizes, and even invents stories. But Fassbinder adds a twist.16 Both in The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum and in Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, the eponymous main characters become the victim of the media, whose journalists have no scruples. Yet in Fassbinder’s film, Mother Küsters’s daughter, Corinna (Ingrid Caven), inversely openly uses the media and a journalist in order to further her career. In Fassbinder’s films, the main characters often, most famously in The Marriage of Maria Braun, use personal relations for financial gain, as Fassbinder shows how the personal is not only political but also financial. Yet Fassbinder not only criticizes personal attempts to exploit Mother Küsters’s story for individual gain, he also dwells on how political movements do the same. By focusing intensely on the labor politics and on political organizing of the 1970s, Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven provides a counternarrative to the prevalent historical and cinematic accounts of West Germany’s long 1960s, which, as mentioned in Chapter 1, often overlooked the intense uptick in worker strikes.17 The strikes were widespread. In 16

See also Christina Gerhardt, “Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975) in a Genealogy of the Arbeiterfilme,” Film Criticism 41.1 (February 2017), http://dx.doi.org/ 10.3998/fc.13761232.0041.109. 17 Italy experienced the most strikes in Western Europe between 1958 and 1968, followed by the United Kingdom. Gerd-Rainer Horn, “Arbeiter und ‘1968’ in Europa: Ein Überblick,” in 1968

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France there were nationwide strikes, which documentaries by Chris Marker and the société pour le lancement des oeuvres nouvelles (SLON, the group to launch new works), a workers’ film collective, played a vital role in capturing and sharing with social movements throughout the country and beyond.18 Likewise, in West Germany, in September 1969, there were widespread strikes, in particular in the metal industry. It was, however, the 1970s that witnessed the most intense decade of labor organizing in Italy, the United Kingdom, France, and West Germany.19 Both West German nationals and guest workers were key members of these strikes. West Germany had begun ratifying bilateral guest-worker agreements with other nations starting in 1961.20 Fassbinder featured guest workers in two films:  Katzelmacher (1969), in which he played the protagonist, Jorgos, a Greek guest worker; and Angst essen Seelen auf (Ali, Fear Eats the Soul, 1974), in which one of the two main characters is Ali, a Moroccan guest worker. As to the relationship among the social movements, guest workers, and strikes, as Katsiaficas lays out: Hundreds of activists went into [West] German factories to organize, and in 1969 and again in 1973 (coincidentally, also when Italian labor unrest peaked), waves of wildcat strikes rolled through industry. Along with [West] German laborers, these struggles involved immigrant Turkish workers in automobile plants, women working on assembly lines . . . In 1970, negotiated wage increases averaged 10.6 percent, the highest in the history of the FRG. In 1973, 275,000 workers in at least 335 factories struck for better working conditions and higher wages . . . Only after numerous police attacks, headlines in Der Spiegel blaming a Turkish

und die Arbeiter:  Studien zum ‘proletarischen Mai’ in Europa, ed. Bernd Gehrke and GerdRainer Horn (Hamburg: VSA, 2007), 27–52. Here, 38. 18 Kristin Ross, May ‘68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 32–3. 19 Andrei S. Markovits and Christpher S. Allen, “Power and Dissent: The Trade Unions in the Federal Republic of Germany,” West European Politics 3.2 (1980): 68–86; Andrei S. Markovits, The Politics of the West German Trade Unions: Strategies of Representation in Growth and Crisis (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge UP, 1986), 202–36; Horn, “Arbeiter und ‘1968’” 38; Antonio Negri et al., “Do You Remember Revolution?,” in Revolution Retrieved (London: Red Notes, 1988), 229–43; Reprinted as Lucio Castellano et al., “Do You Remember Revolution?,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 225–36. 20 In 1955, West Germany signed a bilateral guest-worker agreement with Italy. It was followed by a series of bilateral guest-worker agreements:  Greece and Spain, 1960; Turkey, 1961; Portugal, 1964; Tunisia and Morocco, 1965; and Yugoslavia, 1968. Karl-Heinz Meier-Braun, Deutschland, Einwanderungsland (Frankfurt:  Suhrkamp, 2002), 36. Parallel agreements were signed on the other side of the wall in East Germany. See also Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling, and Anton Kaes, Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration, 1955–2005 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

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invasion for the unrest and mammoth wage increases (totaling almost 30 per cent from 1969 to 1973) did things quiet down. Hundreds of radical activists were quickly dismissed from their union positions and lost their jobs . . . As economic crisis set in during the mid-1970s, however, [West] German unions were able to discipline the workforce and win it Europe’s highest standard of living.21 The years 1971 and 1973 saw widespread strikes again, in particular, in the metal and chemical industries, the latter striking for the first time in half a century.22 Starting in the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, labor was engaged in West German cultural media:  in literature (Literatur der Arbeitswelt, literature of the working world)23; in reportage (Wallraff, Runge)24; and in cinema in the genre of Arbeiterfilme (workers’ films).25 Beginning in the 1970s, directors, many of whom had studied at the Deutsche Filmund Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb, German Film and Television Academy

21

George Katsiaficas, “Sources of Autonomous Politics in Germany,” in The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1997), 59–105. Here, 62. 22 On the chemical industries, see Katsiaficas 62. 23 One pivotal group that grappled with the issues effecting workers was the Gruppe 61, cofounded in 1961 by the Dortmund librarian Fritz Hüser and union organizer Walter Köpper. See also Fritz Hüser and Max van der Grün, Aus der Welt der Arbeit. Almanach der Gruppe 61 und ihrer Gäste (Berlin:  Neuwied, 1966); and the novels of this era by Christian Geissler and Friedrich Christian Delius. 24 On the reportage, see, for example, Hans-Günter Wallraff, Wir brauchen Dich: Als Arbeiter in deutschen Industriebetrieben: Ford – Köln, Siemens – München, Blohm & Voß – Bremen, Benteler  – Schloß Neuhaus, Thyssen  – Duisburg (Berlin:  Aufbau Verlag, 1968). It was first published as a series of articles in the union publication Metall, and then as a volume in 1966. Subsequent to the volume’s publication, Wallraff joined the Gruppe 61. He continued his work, going into various institutions, under cover and undetected, and publishing 13 unerwünschte Reportagen (1969) and Flucht vor den Heimen (1970), which grappled with group homes, as Meinhof’s Bambule, which she was working on at the same time, also did. He is best known for his so-called Anti-Bild Trilogie, which revealed the corrupt practices of the Springerowned tabloid. For reportage on workers’ lives, see also Erika Runge’s Bottroper Protokolle (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968). Runge’s protocols conveyed the daily lives of workers based on interviews she conducted. She later confessed that she revised the contents of the interviews, unleashing a furious debate about her book. 25 On the Arbeiterfilme (workers’ films), see Richard Collins and Vincent Porter, “Westdeutscher Rundfunk and the Arbeiterfilm (1967–1977),” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 5.2 (1980):  233–51; Richard Collins and Vincent Porter, WDR and the Arbeiterfilm (London: BFI, 1981); Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick:  Rutgers UP, 1989), 171–6; Katie Trumpener, “Reconstructing the New German Cinema: Social Subjects and Critical Documentaries,” German Politics and Society 18 (Fall 1989): 37–53; Julia Knight, Women and the New German Cinema (New York: Verso, 1992), 60; and Ian Aitken, European Film Theory and Cinema (Bloomington:  Indiana UP, 2001), esp. 215–18.

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Berlin), were producing workers’ films.26 Christian Geissler, who focused on documenting workers’ lives, taught at the dffb between 1972 and 1974.27 Additionally, in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), the site of numerous labor strikes in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) subsidized the production of workers’ films beginning in 1967 and until the political climate shifted to the right in 1978 after the election of Johannes Rau as prime minister of NRW—he was a member of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party of Germany), although at the more conservative end of the spectrum— and the films were canceled.28 Workers’ films were produced at the WDR during the time West German screenwriter, producer, and author Peter Märtesheimer was editor (1964–74). Additionally, the group Arbeit und Film (Work and Film), founded in 1974 in Frankfurt am Main by Enzio Edschmid and in existence until 1984, went into factories with cameras and taught workers to use cameras in order to document their working conditions and uprisings. New German Cinema, by contrast, engaged labor issues decidedly less, with Fassbinder being an anomaly. Between 1972 and 1973, his five-part workers’ film Acht Stunden sind kein Tag (Eight Hours Are Not a Day), on which he worked with Märtesheimer, screened on the WDR.29 As Brad Prager argues, Fassbinder’s intention was decidedly not to

26

See, for example, the early short documentaries, such as Mietersolidarität (Renter Solidarity, 1969), dir. Max Willutzki, as well as Der gekaufte Traum (The Purchased Dream, 1974–77), dir. Helga Reidemeister, dffb; and the trilogy directed by Christian Ziewer:  Liebe Mutter, mir geht es gut (Dear Mother, I Am Fine, 1972), WDR, Basis Filmverleih; Schneeglöckchen blühn im September (Snowdrops Bloom in September, 1974), Basis Filmverleih; and Der aufrechte Gang (The Upright Walk, 1976), WDR, Basis Filmverleih. Other worker films produced during the era include Rote Fahnen sieht man besser (Red Flags Are More Visible, 1971), dir. Theo Gallehr and Rolf Schübel, Rolf Schübel Filmproduktion; Die Wollands (The Wollands, 1972), dir. Ingo Kratisch and Marianne Lüdcke; and Der lange Jammer (The Long Lament, 1973), dir. Max Willutzki, Basis Filmverleih. 27 On the workers’ films produced at the dffb, see also Fabian Tietke, “A Laboratory for Political Film:  The Formative Years of the German Film and Television Academy and Participatory Filmmaking from Workerism to Feminism,” in Celluloid Revolt:  German Screen Cultures and the Long Sixties, ed. Christina Gerhardt and Marco Abel (Rochester:  Camden House, 2019). On workers’ films produced during the era in Italy and Spain, see Pablo La ParraPérez, “Workers Interrupting the Factory: Helena Lumbrera’s Militant Factory Films between Italy and Spain (1968-1978),” in 1968 and Global Cinema, ed. Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2018), 363–84. 28 See, for example, Lohn und Liebe (Wages and Love, 1973), dir. Marianne Lüdcke and Ingo Kratisch, WDR. 29 Acht Stunden sind kein Tag (Eight Hours Are Not a Day, 1972), dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, WDR. It was originally intended to be an eight-part film. See also Manuel Alvarado, “Eight Hours Are Not a Day,” in Fassbinder, ed. Tony Rayns (London:  BFI, 1980), 70–8. Alvarado underscores that trade unions and political parties play less of a role in the made-for-television series, and that the film, instead, shifts the focus to workers as subjects (not objects) and as

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render workers’ lives mimetically or “simply to mirror perceived reality.”30 Fassbinder came under intense criticism for “sugar coating” workers’ lives. In Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven Fassbinder revisited workers’ conditions but included a focus on the political parties absent from Eight Hours Are Not a Day. In fact, Fassbinder focuses on two of the different political fault lines along which the New Left had split by 1970:  communists pursuing political organizing and anarchists pursuing militant action.31 Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven provides a contemporary take on the Weimar era workers’ film directed by Phil “Piel” Jutzi’s Mutter Krausen’s Fahrt ins Glück (Mother Krause’s Journey to Happiness, 1929) but with key revisions politically and aesthetically.32 In Jutzi’s film, the main character, Mother Krause, a widow, lives in a tenement apartment in Berlin in close quarters with her son and daughter; as well as a lodger, who is also a pimp and a thief; his lover, who is a prostitute; and the prostitute’s child. Mother Krause earns money by delivering newspapers. Her son, Paul, is an unemployed alcoholic and occasional rag-picker, who relies on Mother Krause for money. Her daughter, Erna, meets a young communist, Max. The film shows communism. Unfortunately, its benefits arrive too late:  Mother Krause despondently commits suicide by turning on the gas in her apartment.33 The film closes with Erna and Max at a Communist Party march. Released at the outset of the Weimar era’s final turbulent years (1929–33), which witnessed, after the Great Depression, an upsurge in tensions between right-wing and left-wing politics, often manifesting in fatal street-fights and assassinations, the film depicts Communism—through the young couple, Max and Erna—as a salvaging force. Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, by contrast, places agency and hope on Mother Küsters and casts a critical eye on the communist party and on anarchist militant action, as well as on Mother Küsters’s daughter, Corinna, and son, Ernst (Armin Meier). The film depicts the political coming of age of Emma Küsters (Brigitte Mira), as she tries to understand what led her husband to commit a crime (murder); the media’s representations of it; and the actions suggested by people of various political persuasions—from communist organizers to anarchist activists. agents of change in their lives. The series also engages other oppressed groups, such as women and older persons. Here, 72. For the issues surrounding its production, see also Brad Prager, “Through the Looking Glass: Fassbinder’s World on a Wire,” in A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ed. Brigitte Peucker (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 245–66, esp. 245–6. 30 Prager 246. 31 Mutter Küsters’ Fahrt zum Himmel. 32 Mutter Krausen’s Fahrt ins Glück (Mother Krause’s Journey to Happiness, 1929), dir. Phil “Piel” Jutzi, Prometheus Film Verleih; distributor, Filmmuseum Munich. In 1980, Fassbinder would provide a contemporary take on another film directed by Phil Jutzi, Berlin, Alexanderplatz (1931), in his fourteen-part made-for-television series, which is almost sixteen hours long. 33 Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun both revisits and reworks this ending.

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Stylistically, Jutzi’s Mother Krause’s Journey to Happiness is recognized for how it combined “proletarian melodrama, Soviet montage” techniques and documentary footage.34 The use of melodrama tempers the stark documentary footage of everyday life of the Weimar era working class. As Marc Silberman puts it, Mother Krause’s Journey to Happiness relies on “conventional narrative and visual structures aimed at awakening empathy in the spectator through pathos.”35 In this way, it contrasted with contemporaneous Weimar era workers’ films, such as Kuhle Wampe, which, as Theodore Rippey puts it, “modeled a pattern of constructive, analytical engagement with the present.”36 Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven would build on the combination of conventions associated with melodrama and workers’ films in Mother Krause’s  Journey to Happiness, tap into visual stylistics associated with (Sirkean) melodrama, and focus on the working class. A subtle stylistic progression also exists from Jutzi’s Mother Krause’s to Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters via Sirk’s oft-overlooked first feature film April, April! (1935). Katie Trumpener, focusing on one sequence of Sirk’s April, April!, discusses how “throughout much of this sequence the camera works to dismember, isolate, and dissect the servants’ bodies, reducing them metonymically to their ‘functional’ parts. This old operation . . . turns the servants into ‘hands.’ ”37 This reduction, she argues, contrasts with earlier depictions of the masses: The iconographic representation of these bodies occupies a middle ground between the “mass ornament” and the “new masses,” between the comically ubiquitous chores-lines of servants in Ernst Lubitsch’s Oyster Princess/Die Austernprinzessin (1919) and the comically massed employees in Three from the Gas Station, between the anonymous, synchronized mass body of the Tiller Girls and the Busby Berkeley spectacular of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will Triumph des Willens (1936), and the suffering, marching proletarian bodies portrayed in Piel Jutzi’s Mother Krause’s Journey to Happiness/Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Gluck (1929) as in Slatan Dudow’s Kuhle Wampe (1932).38

34

Jan-Christopher Horak, “Mother Krause’s Trip to Happiness:  Kino-Culture in Weimar Germany, Part 2,” Jumpcut 27 (July 1982): 55–6. 35 Marc Silberman, “Political Cinema as Oppositional Practice,” in The German Cinema Book, ed. Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, and Deniz Göktürk (London: BFI, 2002), 165–72. 36 Theodore F. Rippey, “Kuhle Wampe and the Problems of Corporal Culture,” Cinema Journal 47.1 (Fall 2007): 3–25. Here, 15. 37 Katie Trumpener, “The René Clair Moment and the Overlap of Films of the 1930s: Detlef Sierck’s April, April,” Film Criticism 23.2–3 (winter/spring 1999): 33–45. Here, 37. 38 Trumpener 37.

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Sirk’s April, April!, by contrast, focuses not on the masses but specifically, metonymically, on the body parts. Fassbinder continues this metonymic shift from the masses, by opening Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven similarly by focusing on labor and on hands. In Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters, however, as we shall see, his focus on the body parts depicts a shift in labor that took place between the Weimar era and the 1970s. Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven opens with a focus both on manual labor and on the media. While the diegetic sound focuses on noise stemming from the assembly of sockets as jazz music plays in the background (on what is later shown to be the radio),39 the film’s establishing shot—rather than provide an extreme long shot or long shot, often outdoors, to show the film’s setting or provide context for the viewer before slowly zooming in to the main protagonists and action—consists of a high angle, extreme close-up shot of a woman’s hands assembling two parts to create sockets (see Figure 4.1). She picks the parts up from an implied off-screen pile on the right, assembles them, and slides them offscreen to the left. Moving the sockets across the screen, the way she does, invokes an assembly line. The sequence cuts to an extreme close-up of male hands flipping the sockets over and tightening

FIGURE 4.1 Fordist Production, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975. Screenshot. 39

As numerous scholars have pointed out, the “melos” of melodrama, the melody or song, that is, with which the genre (or mode) originated, is typically lacking in Fassbinder’s melodramas, with song reduced to a minimum. While, as Eric Thau put it, “Frank Skinner provided an overdone score for All That Heaven Allows,” Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven includes just a few songs. Eric Thau, “All That Melodrama Allows,” in World Cinema’s ‘Dialogues’ with Hollywood, ed. Paul Cooke (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 187–200. Here, 193.

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FIGURE 4.2 Fordist Production, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975. Screenshot.

screws to hold them together (Figure 4.2). The sequence cuts to a medium close-up shot, first of Mother Küsters’s face, then of her son Ernst. Each person is shown from the side, as the film’s opening sequence sparingly shows its characters from the front. Since shot-reverse-shots establish intimacy between the characters, which the viewer is allowed to enter surreptitiously, their lack adds to the film’s distancing devices and suggests a lack of intimacy between the characters. Mother Küsters, now stirring a red soup pot, bemoans that the number of sockets they have assembled this week (1,500) is less than last week (1,600). “Well, one becomes older and slower,” she says. Thus far, the opening sequence, through its invocation of an assembly line and reference to mass production, suggests a Fordist model of production. The film also depicts another form of labor. Mother Küsters gets up to stir the soup pot (see Figure 4.3). Her meddlesome daughter-in-law, Helene (Irm Hermann)—shown in a medium close-up from the front, first behind Küsters and then alone, grating vegetables—tells Mother Küsters not to add meat to the soup, as meat is contaminated by chemicals and therefore unhealthy. Ernst remains silent, staying out of the discussion.40 The next shots 40

Throughout, the film depicts the authoritarianism that Fassbinder often located in petit bourgeois environments, here through Ernst and Helene’s relationship. Of course, authoritarianism manifests intensely in Fassbinder’s contribution to Germany in Autumn as well. While it could be read as one of the societal structures against which the late 1960s and 1970s social, feminist, and gay rights movements were agitating, Fassbinder consistently also pinpoints individuals’ roles in reproducing it.

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FIGURE 4.3 Hausarbeit (Housework), Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975. Screenshot.

again show close-ups of the assembly of the sockets (Heimarbeit) and Helene grating vegetables for dinner (Hausarbeit). In these ways, by depicting the home-working (Heimarbeit) and multitasking, these shots invoke a moment of transition from Fordist mass production to feminized post-Fordist labor. By showing the women carrying out the labor of the housework, the film also engages Hausarbeit (housework) then much under discussion in both labor and feminist circles through the Wages for Housework campaign.41 By not only including but also opening his film with women’s labor, rather than (male) factory work, Fassbinder makes a key and novel contribution to the genre of melodrama, on the one hand, and

41

Over the course of the 1970s, feminists demanded wages for housework or that housework be shared equally by men and women. Cf. Alice Schwarzer, Frauenarbeit  – Frauenbefreiung (Frankfurt am Main:  Suhrkamp, 1973); Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Bristol:  Falling Wall Press, 1975); Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici, Counter-Planning from the Kitchen:  Wages for Housework:  A Perspective on Capital and the Left (New  York:  Wages for Housework Committee, 1976); Gisela Bock, “Wages for Housework as a Perspective of the Women’s Movement,” in German Feminism: Readings in Politics and Literature, ed. Edith Hoshino Altbach, Jeanette Clausen, Dagmar Schultz, and Naomi Stephan (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), 246–50.

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to workers’ films, on the other hand: he focuses not only on class politics but also on feminist politics, on women, and on their typically unpaid and unrecognized housework or house labor. Only after an extreme close-up of a ticking clock and a radio—zooming in to the location of its old-fashioned European radio’s front panel, while a radio bulletin interrupts with a newsflash—does the camera zoom out slightly, to provide some context:  Mother Küsters and her son Ernst assemble electrical plugs on the kitchen table (to earn extra money). The radio bulletin announces: “at a chemical plant near Frankfurt, a mentally deranged worker beat his personnel manager to death and then committed suicide at one of the machines in the production hall. It remains unclear how it could have come to this gruesome act. As the criminal police stated, the investigations have not yet been concluded.” While Fassbinder opens with the sound associated with melodrama, song, it is not the sweeping melodrama of Sirk’s cinema; instead he reworks sound to focus instead on media, here, radio, as its source, and also news.42 He would expand the inclusion of news, blaring on the radio or television, in The Third Generation to such an extent that the cacophony of noise in that film makes it virtually impossible to discern or concentrate on the dialogue.43 Again in The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), media features prominently to highlight historical and political events of the day, when the news broadcast plays on the radio during a family gathering or the 1954 World Cup soccer match plays on the television in the closing sequence. In Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, the news focuses on labor. The choice of a chemical plant is not incidental, nor is the location. In 1971, chemical workers, bound together by the Industriegewerkschaft Chemie-Papier-Keramik (IG CPK, the Industrial Union for Chemical, Paper and Ceramics Workers), went on strike for twelve weeks to negotiate better working conditions and wage increases. In 1973, conditions changed intensely for workers in West Germany as a result of global economic shifts. Guest workers, especially of Turkish heritage, were often used as scapegoats. In July of 1973, Der Spiegel ran a headline announcing “Die Türken kommen, rette sich, wer kann” (The Turks are Coming, Save Themselves, Whoever Can).44 In August, Turkish employees went on strike 42

By contrast, sweeping song is already present in Sirk’s first melodrama, Schlußakkord (Final Accord, 1936), directed under the name Detlef Sierck. This early film already shows stylistic features that would come to be associated with Sirk’s melodramas of the 1950s, such as the use of music. 43 This barrage of media also intends to comment on the media fixation of the RAF’s second generation. 44 “Die Türken kommen – rette sich, wer kann,” Der Spiegel, July 30, 1973, http://www.spiegel. de/spiegel/print/d-41955159.html. Last accessed April 21, 2015.

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for a week at a Cologne Ford factory. As a result, a media debate ensued about foreign workers, both how politicized they were and how their presence impacted other workers—by, so the argument went, leading both to increased competition for jobs and to a politicization of the workplace. In October, the world oil crisis began. By the end of the year, West Germany had decided to stop recruiting foreign workers and workers’ uprisings had been, by and large, curtailed. Fassbinder’s film engages the 1973 economic crisis and the stress that it unleashed on workers. In Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, after the news bulletin, the regular program, playing jazz, resumes. Emma Küsters looks at the clock, wonders aloud where “father” could be, since it is already well past 6:00 pm.45 Her son reassures her that “father” will show up, since he has always done so thus far. The doorbell rings and a coworker tells Mother Küsters that her husband, Hermann, has beaten the boss’s son to death, stating he must have heard about the planned mass layoffs.46 A media frenzy ensues as journalists swarm the Küsters’ apartment. After a journalist—Niemeyer (Gottfried John), in whom Emma had trusted—writes a sensationalistic article about her husband, alleging that he was authoritarian, violent, and an alcoholic, she vows to correct the record about what led her husband to commit the murder. The film then presents various forms of Emma Küster’s political engagement. Initially, she is involved with the German Communist Party. Fassbinder was one of the few well-known directors to thematize the communist party, which, as mentioned in Chapter  1, was banned in 1956 as the Communist Party of Germany (KPD, Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands),47 and reestablished in 1968 as the German Communist Party (DKP, Deutsche Kommunistische Partei).48 In Fassbinder’s film, the

45

Of course, in Sirk’s melodramas, also known as women’s films, the husbands are often lacking, since the female protagonist is typically a widow, or, in the case of Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce (1945), separated and then divorced. In the more contemporary melodrama, Far From Heaven (2002), Todd Haynes reinserts the father figure, to consider suppressed male homosexuality in the 1950s, and his tardy arrival for dinner or absence at the dinner table often figures prominently. In Carol (2015), it is the mother who is late or absent, made possible by class privilege, shifting the focus to female same-sex relationships of the 1950s. 46 The film slips between whether Mother Küsters’s husband killed his boss or the boss’s son. The radio broadcast states it is the boss; in two other sequences, it is stated that her husband killed the boss’s son. 47 Patrick Major, The Death of the KPD: Communism and Anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945–1956 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998), 15–16, 292–3. 48 See also Andrei S. Markovits and Philip Gorski, “Deutsche Kommunistische Partei (DKP),” in The German Left: Red, Green and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993), 60–1.

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communists Frau Thälmann (Margit Carstensen) and Herr Thälmann (Karlheinz Böhm)—in a clear reference to Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the Communist Party of Germany from 1925 up until he was arrested in 1933 and then executed in 1944 in Buchenwald by the Nazis for his political beliefs—are depicted as an upper middle class couple, who live in a well-appointed home that Frau Thälmann inherited.49 Through the figure of the Thälmanns, Fassbinder at once cites communist history and figures but also criticizes contemporary articulations of communist politics. The couple heard about Mother Küsters’s case, attended her husband’s funeral, and gave Mother Küsters their contact information. Over the course of her conversations with them, Emma Küsters begins to consider anew the political and economic factors that motivated her husband to carry out the act, eventually agreeing to speak about her husband at a communist political rally. Buoyed initially by their interest in her situation and their accessibility and warmth, Emma is soon frustrated by the sluggish pace at which things are happening. Here, the film’s narrative contrasts clearly with Jutzi’s Mother Krause’s Journey to Happiness, in which communism is shown as a source of hope, if not for Mother Krause, then for her daughter, that is, the next generation. An anarchist named Horst Knab (Matthias Fuchs) lingers outside the lecture hall after Mother Küsters’s talk and introduces himself to her. Frau Küsters, he says, “needs to carry out an action, to wake the public from its sleep.” When Frau Küsters shares this exchange with the communists, they reply:  “He is one of those who wants to destroy things instead of build them up. We cannot even talk with that kind anymore.” The indictment can be read as an expression of a broader sentiment of the era, even among leftists as the film was released during the height of West German terrorism, between the Red Army Faction’s 1972 May Offensive, the subsequent arrest of its first generation, and the German Autumn of 1977. Yet the film outraged others on the left, who criticized Fassbinder for the film’s depictions of both communists and anarchists.50 According to film scholar Todd Rayns, “Turned down by the 1975 Berlin [Film] Festival, and disrupted by left-wing protests at its ‘fringe’ screening in the Berlin Forum, the original version of RWF’s film (with its overtly tragic ending) created more furore [sic] than any of his previous films.”51

49 The actors also played a couple in Fassbinder’s previous made-for-television film Martha (1974), WDR. 50 “Fassbinder made himself many enemies among [West] German left when he seemed to be saying in film such as Fox or Mother Küsters that left-wing politics and capitalism are not so different when it comes to emotional exploitation.” Thomas Elsaesser, “A Cinema of Vicious Circles (and Afterword),” in Fassbinder, ed. Todd Rayns (London: bfi, 1980), 24–53. Here, 39. 51 Todd Rayns, “Documentation,” in Fassbinder, ed. Todd Rayns (London: bfi, 1980), 102–22. Here, 112.

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Meanwhile, the journalist Niemeyer and Corinna begin a relationship. In a typical Fassbinder scenario, where the personal and the professional (or financial gain) are enmeshed, Niemeyer uses Corinna to gain access to Mother Küsters, facilitating his coverage of the story and his career; Corinna, inversely, uses the relationship and Niemeyer’s media coverage of the murder, no matter how defaming to her father and her family, to boost her career as a singer.52 In this way, Fassbinder personalizes or interiorizes what are ideological conflicts, reframing the class conflict in personal terms. After his exposure during the winter of 1970–71 to the films of Douglas Sirk, Fassbinder’s films, as is oft noted, show their influence, evidenced by Fassbinder’s tendency to draw on melodrama, be it construed as a genre or a mode.53 While the influence of Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955) on Fassbinder’s Angst Essen Seelen Auf (Ali:  Fear Eats the Soul, 1974)54 or on The Bitter Tears of Petra van Kant (1972)55 has been noted, the impact of Sirk’s melodramas on Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven is less often discussed. Yet Mother Küsters both draws on and revises the genre or mode of melodrama, by focusing specifically on the working class and on economic politics that impact it.56 52

See also Elsaesser for how “Fassbinder’s melodramas drew from Sirkean classicism . . . [to question how] identity and subjectivity could be tied to class, money and social status, besides being oedipal dramas of patriarchy.” Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 1996), 74–5. 53 See Fassbinder’s own discussion of six Douglas Sirk films: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, “Imitation of Life: On the Films of Douglas Sirk,” in The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes, ed. Michael Töteberg and Leo A. Lensing, trans. Krishna Winston (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins UP, 1992), 77–89. For analyses of Fassbinder’s use of Sirk, see Judith Mayne, “Fassbinder and Spectatorship,” New German Critique 12 (Fall 1977): 61–74; Andrew Sarris, “Fassbinder and Sirk: The Ties That Unbind,” The Village Voice, September 30, 1980, 37–8; Timothy Corrigan, New German Film: The Displaced Image (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984); James Franklin, New German Cinema (London:  Twayne, 1983), 130; Eric Rentschler, West German Film in the Course of Time: Reflections on the Twenty Years since Oberhausen (Bedford Hills: Redgrave, 1984); Elsaesser, New German Cinema, 138, 210, 299; Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany; Eric Rentschler, “Douglas Sirk Revisited:  The Limits and Possibilities of Artistic Agency,” New German Critique 95 (Spring 2005):  149–63; and numerous articles in Brigitte Peucker (ed.), A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). 54 See, for example, Thau 187–200, esp. 191–4; Salomé Aguilera Svirsky, “The Price of Heaven: Remaking Politics in All That Heaven Allows, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and Far from Heaven,” Cinema Journal 47.3 (Spring 2008): 90–121. 55 Ruth Perlmutter, “Real Feelings, Hollywood Melodrama and The Bitters Tears of Petra von Kant,” Minnesota Review 32 (Fall 1989): 79–98. 56 Of course, some film scholars, such as Linda Williams, have contested melodrama as a genre, referring to it instead as a “mode.” Cf. Linda Williams, “Film Bodies:  Gender, Genre and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44.4 (Summer 1991):  2–13; reprinted in Film Genre Reader II, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 140–58; and Linda Williams, “The American Melodramatic Mode,” in Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton:  Princeton UP, 2002), 10–44. I  thank Nicholas Baer for illuminating discussions of melodrama.

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Mother Küsters exhibits the impact of Sirk’s oeuvre—with a Fassbinderian twist. While the opening shots of Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows depict a New England town in vivid Technicolor and using a craning shot, Fassbinder shows a series of postcard-like stills (no craning shot) of a village near Frankfurt am Main in saturated color. Like Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind (1956), Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters, too, intensely uses mirrors as distancing devices. In Sirk’s melodrama, the viewer is first introduced to the daughter and son of the main character, Cary Scott (Jane Wyman), as they appear in a mirror at her vanity table. As has been noted, her children and their initial appearance in the mirror reflect society’s gaze on Cary and her unfolding relationship with her gardener, Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson). In Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters, the mirrors typically appear in conjunction with Corinna: she and the journalist Niemeyer hold eye contact through the car’s rear view mirror (as she sits in the rear seat, he is driving), after Mother Küsters and Niemeyer pick her up from the airport. Then, the threesome has lunch, during which Corinna briefly leaves the table, to make a phone call, and again to check her face in the mirror. Here, the mirror, rather than reflecting back the constricting upper social class, as it does in Sirk, out of which the main characters try to break, depicts the aspiration toward that class, on the part of some characters. As Elsaesser points out, “Fassbinder’s use of mirror shots or internal framing is a typical feature of much ‘self-reflexive’ cinema, in the tradition of European auteurs, from Bergman to Visconti, or Godard to Almodovar. It is also common in the work of Europe’s preferred American auteurs, such as Nicholas Ray, Orson Welles, Joseph Losey, as well as emigré directors like Sirk and Fritz Lang.”57 Yet while Sirk uses mirrors to depict the stifling corset of 1950s upper class politics on women, Fassbinder uses them to show a fixation on upward mobility. Like Sirk, Fassbinder uses mise-en-scène throughout to express characters’ internalized repression, that is, the interiorization or sublimation of the dramatic conflict into décor, color, gesture, and composition. Yet while Sirk often includes class politics, that is, by depicting both wealthy and working class figures and relations between them, Fassbinder often shifts the entire focus specifically onto the working class in his melodramas and in Mother Küsters in particular. Additionally, in Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven Fassbinder underscores and heightens thematics often touched on by the melodrama genre but with two decided shifts that again bespeak class politics. After the opening sequence set in the kitchen, many of the sequences that take place at Mother Küsters’s home are shot in the hallway. The hallway and characters in it are typically shown with a doorway appearing within the frame of another doorway, that is, another frame (see Figure 4.4). Or the camera is placed to

57

Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany, 58.

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FIGURE 4.4 Framing, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975. Screenshot.

the right or left of the hallway, close to the wall, and a row of open doors is shown (see Figures 4.5, 4.6 and 4.7). Seeing all these frames within frames or open doorways, typically in the hallway, gives the viewer the uncanny feeling of being simultaneously trapped and not yet settled. Elsaesser calls these types of shots Fassbinder’s “obsessive framing shots.”58 Eric Thau describes the effect of Fassbinder’s framing in Katzelmacher as follows: “Throughout the film, Fassbinder will emulate Sirk’s limiting frames, creating boxes and prisons from which his lead characters must find some escape.”59 But in Mother Küsters two crucial shifts take place. Whereas in Sirk’s melodramas the framing focuses on the constricting environment of 1950s upper middle class society for women, in Fassbinder’s melodrama it focuses on the working class and, interestingly enough, shows disintegration. The aforementioned sequences in the hallway, all featuring frames within framing or open doors, show, at first, Corinna moving in; then Ernst and Helene heading out on vacation, and then moving out:  Helene cites being pregnant and needing calm. Then, Corinna moves out and in 58

Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany, 58. Thau 192.

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FIGURE 4.5 Framing, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975. Screenshot.

FIGURE 4.6 Framing, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975. Screenshot.

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FIGURE 4.7 Framing, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975. Screenshot.

with the journalist Niemeyer. In this way, the film depicts the unraveling of a working class family. Both children are depicted as selfish:  Ernst as a result of obeying his domineering wife, and Corinna as a result of her lust for fame.60 Neither considers or tends to Mother Küsters’s mourning. The framing heightens both the melodrama and the claustrophobia, as had already similarly been the case in Fassbinder’s earlier Petra von Kant (1972) and would subsequently be the case in his dark satire The Third Generation (1979), but here focuses on a working class family’s unraveling due to the era’s economics. Mother Küsters, increasingly politicized, decides to take action. She visits her husband’s former employer and demands he pay out her husband’s pension to her. His former boss tells her that she is not entitled to it, since her husband did not die as a result of a work accident but rather committed a crime, and a murder at that. Frustrated, Mother Küsters proposes to the

60

This motif of the selfish child who exasperates and sometimes causes the trying situation of the (often single) mother also forms a focal point of classic melodramas. Cf. Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce; Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows; Written on the Wind; Imitation of Life; as well as Haynes’s Far from Heaven.

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communists that she go to the factories and discuss the matter with workers. The communists confirm their commitment to her but state that they are busy with the upcoming elections and ask for her patience. The anarchist activist stops by Mother Küsters’s apartment and tells her that all political parties are bourgeois and cannot risk taking action. What she needs to do, instead, he proposes, is to take action, to bring national attention to the issue. He convinces her to participate in a sit-in at the offices of the newspaper responsible for the slanted coverage. Two different versions of the ending ensue: one produced for the German market and another for the US market. In the closing sequence included in the version produced for the West German market, Mother Küsters, together with the anarchist and two other activists, heads to the offices of the corporate paper’s editor and demands that he acknowledge the article’s skewed vantage point, stating the group will occupy the space until the paper prints an official apology. Then, to Mother Küsters’s horror, the other activists brandish a handgun and a rifle; state they are taking the editor and journalist Niemeyer hostage; and demand the release of all political prisoners to honor Hermann Küsters. They demand that a vehicle drive up to take them and the hostages to the airport; that no police be present within a 200-hundred-meter radius; and that an airplane be made available to allow them to escape. In an ensuing shootout, not shown but narrated on screen, Mother Küsters, the editor, and Knab die.61 This version was met with the aforementioned criticism when it premiered at the Berlin Forum in 1975. By contrast, the version of the film released in the United States closes with a sequence in which the editor condescendingly replies that he will not take the sit-in of the anarchist and his companions seriously and walks away. A string of employees ignore them and step over them one by one to go home at the end of the work day, so the activists eventually give up on their sit-in and they, too, leave. Eventually, only Mother Küsters remains. A security guard arrives and tells her she must leave as he has to lock up. She is welcome to come back the next day and every day after that but she must leave at night. He states he has to go home to cook up Himmel und Erde (Heaven and Earth, a traditional German dish popular in the Rhineland) with blood sausage, mashed potatoes, and applesauce. He reveals that his wife passed away a number of years ago. Mother Küster decides to join him for dinner at his home, suggesting a new beginning.62 While the happy ending can be read as Fassbinder’s nod to the wishes of a US audience for 61

Vis-à-vis the violence not shown, Thomas Elsaesser writes:  “As a storyteller, Fassbinder felt so self-assured that, in the manner of classical tragedy, the dramatic framing events (the husband’s initial suicide and the final showdown) happen off-stage.” Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany, 284. 62 Stanley Kaufmann, “Further Fassbinder,” New Republic (June 4, 1977): 22–3.

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such a conclusion, the new relationship with a security guard, the invitation to dine on blood sausage, and the invocation of the dishes’ name Heaven and Earth are each highly symbolic and ironic. Fassbinder’s film and oeuvre can be read as part of the genealogy of Arbeiterfilme, not only looking back to the Weimar era but forward to the contemporary German cinema’s Berlin School. Christian Petzold, the best-known director associated with the contemporary Berlin School, often revisits, as film scholar Jaimey Fisher has pointed out, Fassbinder’s work: specifically, Petzold’s oeuvre engaged Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), Fear Eats the Soul (1974), and The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979).63 As film scholar Marco Abel has argued, the cinema of the Berlin School and of Petzold, in particular, can be read for its engagement with post-1989 neoliberal economic policies and the films’ preoccupation with the impact of these policies on employment and employees. Arguably, all of Petzold’s films set in post-1989 Germany grapple with the issue of precarious labor.64 Given, then, Petzold’s focus on work and on Fassbinder’s melodramas that touch on the same topic, one could read Fassbinder’s oeuvre as part of a cinematic genealogy engaging work from the Arbeiterfilme of the Weimar era to the contemporary Berlin School. Throughout, Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters shows the opportunistic machinations not only of corporate but also of political left-wing media, picking up on concerns related to media discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. The film also considers some of the political movements, such as communist groups (K-Gruppen) into which the extraparliamentary opposition split in 1970, discussed at the end of Chapter  1. Yet the film draws on and revises stylistics associated with Sirk’s melodrama—such as mirrors or framing as distancing devices, or the melos, melody, or song associated with melodrama—to shift the focus decidedly to the working class and labor struggles. It also considers how political movements did or did not engage labor struggles. In these ways, Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven contributes both to genre studies and to narratives about the 1970s, by depicting the decade’s workers’ struggles and its range of political movements, spanning from militant anarchists to the German Communist Party.

63

Jaimey Fisher, Christian Petzold (Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 2013), 118, 126, 128, 136, 167. See also Gerd Gemünden, “Introduction:  The Dreileben Experiment,” German Studies Review 36.3 (October 2013): 603–606. 64 Cf. Marco Abel, The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School (Rochester:  Camden House, 2013), 2; Hester Baer, “Affectless Economies: The Berlin School and Neoliberalism,” Discourse 35.1 (Winter 2013):  72–100; Anke Biendarra, “Ghostly Business: Place, Space and Gender in Christian Petzold’s Yella,” Seminar 47.4 (September 2011): 465–78; Marco Abel, “The Cinema of Identification Gets on My Nerves: Interview with Christian Petzold,” Cineaste 33.3 (2008). www.cineaste.com/articles/an-interview-with-christian-petzold.htm.

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Feminism: Margarethe von Trotta’s Das zweite Erwachen Christa Klages Aside from labor politics, New German Cinema of the 1970s, which considered the different political lines along which the 1968 social movements had split, also focused on the women’s movement.65 Margarethe von Trotta’s The Second Awakening of Christa Klages and Marianne and Juliane both examine issues of key concern to 1970s feminism. In The Second Awakening of Christa Klages the main character, Christa Klages, co-organizes and runs a cooperative daycare center. When the center winds up in dire financial straits, she robs banks with two other people in order to secure funds for it. As Barbara Koenig Quart points out: von Trotta bestows on her an anti-social action of a forgivable sort, for an end hard to fault. It is even compatible in an odd way with traditional maternal female roles, since Christa commits this criminal act in [sic] behalf of children, to protect them . . . Christa is further concerned with the most powerless, the foreigners, the children of welfare families, children who would end in institutions otherwise.66 Cooperative childcare had been a central issue of the feminist social movements since the late 1960s when, in West-Berlin, Helke Sander focused on the issue, among others, both in her dffb thesis film, Kinder sind keine Rinder/ Children Are Not Cattle (1969) and in her political work to cofound childcare cooperatives.67

65

For a study of women and New German Cinema, see Julia Knight, Women and the New German Cinema (New York: Verso, 1992). 66 Barbara Koenig Quart, “Christa Klages:  Other Central Notes Sounded,” in Women Directors:  A New Cinema (New  York:  Praeger, 1988), 99. Ulrike Meinhof, similarly, was concerned with girls who were placed in group homes. It was the subject of her screenplay for Bambule, on which she was working when the meeting with Baader in 1970 to spring him from jail went awry, she went underground, and the film was pulled from its scheduled airing on television. She—and Gudrun Ensslin who had also worked, along with Baader, with youth— ended up coming under harsh criticism for her ostensible concern for the welfare of youth, given that she—like Ensslin, who left her son, Felix Ensslin, with her erstwhile husband—gave up communication with her twin daughters when she went underground. For a discussion specifically of how their motherhood was engaged, see Patricia Melzer, “ ‘Between a Rock and a Hard Place’: The ‘Betrayal’ of Motherhood among the Women of the RAF and Movement 2nd June,” in Death in the Shape of a Young Girl: Women’s Political Violence in the Red Army Faction (New York: New York UP, 2015), 73–108. 67 See also Christina Gerhardt, “Helke Sander’s dffb Films and West Germany’s Feminist Movement,” in Celluloid Revolt: German Screen Cultures and the Long Sixties, ed. Christina Gerhardt and Marco Abel (Rochester: Camden House, 2019).

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Von Trotta’s subsequent Marianne and Juliane also considers the 1970s women’s movement and armed struggle but takes a different tack. The main characters, sisters, take two different paths:  Marianne, modeled on Red Army Faction (RAF) cofounder Gudrun Ensslin, joins a terrorist group and goes underground to fight for the anti-imperialist cause, while her sister, Juliane, based on Christian Ensslin,68 focuses on women’s rights. The thematic focus of Von Trotta’s films dovetails with one of the predominant political concerns of the 1970s. Already in the late 1960s, women demanded that their male comrades address their sexism and lack of solidarity with feminist issues. In January of 1968, Helke Sander and others cofounded the Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frauen (Action Committee for the Liberation of Women) in West-Berlin at a meeting attended by roughly 100 women and a few men. It met regularly to establish Kinderläden (self-organized daycare centers). Sander participated in the twenty-third SDS Delegate Convention that took place September 12–13, 1968, at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. On September 13, she gave a talk on behalf of the Action Committee for the Liberation of Women in which she denounced the sexism of male members of the SDS.69 “We note,” she stated, “that the SDS by dint of its organizational structure mirrors societal relationships.”70 The private sphere, she argued, has been excluded, and issues related to it deemed taboo. This relegation impeded an acknowledgment, assessment, and redress of the mechanisms by which women are exploited. Thus, it was the order of the day to undo this separation of the political and the private spheres. In particular, she demanded that the SDS do the following: (1) engage how people have been or are brought up vis-à-vis feminism; (2) secure funding for the cooperative childcare centers; (3) politicize private life; (4) expand, if the model of daycare centers seemed feasible, the focus to schools; and (5) carry out theoretical work related to feminism.71 Sander asked the SDS to support the women’s political agenda, declaring “the private is political” and demanding that the separation of the “political” and the “private” spheres cease. She criticized that women were tasked with tending to housework and to childrearing, which prevented them from participating as equals in other forms of work or in political organizing. As she spoke, some audience members vocally expressed support, while others yelled at her in an attempt to shut her up. At the end of her speech,

68

Von Trotta made the film in consultation with Christian Ensslin, to whom it is dedicated. Helke Sander, “Rede des Aktionsrates zur Befreiung der Frauen bei der 23. Delegiertenkonferenz des SDS im September 1968 in Frankfurt,” Frauenjahrbuch 1 (Frankfurt:  Roter Stern, 1975): 10–15. 70 Sander 10. 71 Ute Kätzel (ed.), Die 68erinnen. Porträt einer rebellischen Frauengeneration (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2008), 166. 69

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she mentioned the Kinderläden and the shift away from the original focus of women’s and children’s liberation and demanded to discuss the issue. “Comrades,” she concluded, “if you are not ready for this discussion, which must be carried out and focus on the content, then we must unfortunately take note that the SDS is nothing more than an overly inflated counterrevolutionary yeasted dough.”72 Hans Jürgen Krahl, next SDS representative to speak, did not honor Sander’s request. When he attempted to move on to another point, without acknowledging or addressing the grievances laid out, demands made, and solutions proposed, Sigrid Rüger—a student at the Free University of Berlin and also among the leadership of the SDS—threw tomatoes at him, which went down in the history books as the Tomatenwurf (tomato toss). Historical accounts typically date the beginning of West Germany’s second wave feminist to this action. The event brought the Action Council for the Liberation of Women to nationwide attention. In response to this event, women began self-organizing autonomous Weiberräte (women’s councils) nationwide.73 Konkret editor and future RAF member Ulrike Meinhof, who was to leave both her editorship and her marriage soon after, both for reasons related to sexism, penned an article on the events published in konkret in 1968.74 When the extraparliamentary opposition disintegrated along various fault lines in 1970, different political strands came to the forefront, and one such swatch of the social movement to intensify was the feminist movement. Although the West German constitution guaranteed equality between the sexes, the reality was different. Over the course of the 1970s, feminists in West Germany and elsewhere demanded wages for housework or that housework be shared equally by men and women; the establishment of more cooperative childcare facilities and funds to be able to afford sending children to them; and the abolishment of the abortion ban. By 1971, the second wave feminists’ campaign to abolish §218, the law banning abortion in West Germany, was in full force. That summer, on June 6, 1971, public pressure increased when the title page of Stern magazine read “Wir haben abgetrieben” (We have had an abortion) and showed 28 prominent women on the cover, who publicly declared they had had an abortion and broken the law. Inside the magazine, another 374 women admitted the same. The campaign was modeled on an action organized by

72

Sander 15. Melzer, Death in the Shape of a Young Girl, 59. 74 Ulrike Meinhof, “Die Frauen im SDS oder In eigner Sache,” konkret 12 (1968); reprinted in Die Würde des Menschen ist antastbar (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 1980), 149–52; published in English as “Women in the SDS: Acting on Their Own Behalf (1968),” in Everybody Talks about the Weather . . . We Don’t: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof, ed. Karin Bauer, trans. Luise von Flotow (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), 209–13. 73

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le mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF, movement for the liberation of women) that had taken place in France two months earlier: on April 5, 1971, in the French Nouvel Observateur, 343 women declared “Je me suis fait avorter” (I have had an abortion). Alice Schwarzer, who was a freelance journalist in Paris between 1970 and 1974, active with the MLF and also studying at Paris Vincennes, with Michel Foucault, among others, brought the action to West Germany. Subsequently, in 1977, she cofounded the feminist West German paper Emma. Momentum continued to build as the first Bundesfrauenkongress (national women’s congress) brought together about 450 women for two days, March 11 to 12, 1972, in Frankfurt am Main. There were four working groups focused on the following topics:  women’s self-organization; the situation of working women; the function of the family in society; and abortion.75 Building on the Stern publicity stunt, on March 11, 1974, 329 doctors admitted that they, too, had broken the law by carrying out abortions and declared their solidarity with women organizing a demonstration.76 On April 26, 1974, the West German Bundestag (federal parliament or lower house of parliament) narrowly passed a law with a 247 to 233 vote, permitting abortions in the first trimester. Feminists celebrated the victory. On June 21, 1974, with a vote of 5 to 3, the West German Supreme Court suspended the law. On February 25, 1975, it struck down the law, declaring it unconstitutional and arguing that a fetus had a right to life on the basis of human rights and that the law had to be rewritten. In response, women involved with the Revolutionary Cells, later to split off as the autonomous women’s only Red Zora, bombed the West German Supreme Court on March 4, 1975.77 The Bundestag (federal council or upper house of parliament) rewrote the law and in 1976, a new version of it passed that permitted abortion on the following grounds: criminal, that is, if the pregnancy resulted from rape; medical, that is, if medical reasons advised against the pregnancy; or social, that is, if social or economic reasons argued against it. It required a counseling session with a doctor, not the doctor who would perform the abortion, and a three-day wait between this session and the abortion.78 Although these political issues concerned feminists and female filmmakers, for a variety of reasons, mainly associated with film funding, 75

“Die Jahre 1971 bis 1975: So fing es an,” Emma, May 1, 2001. Last accessed April 30, 2015. “Ärzte bekennen sich zur Abtreibung,” Spiegel 11, March 11, 1974. Last accessed April 30, 2015. 77 “Aktion gegen das Bundesverfassungsgericht,” Die Früchte des Zorns: Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der Revolutionären Zellen und der Roten Zora (Berlin:  Edition ID-Archiv, 1993), 122–4. 78 Myra Marx Ferree, William A. Gamson, and Juergen Gerhards, “Historical Context,” in Shaping Abortion Discourse: Democracy and the Public Sphere in Germany and the United States (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2002), 35. 76

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it took a while until female directors associated with New German Cinema produced feature films and much longer for film scholarship to include their work.79 In the 1960s, the following female directors produced feature length films but were notable early exceptions: May Spils, Zur Sache Schätzchen (Go to It, Baby, 1967); and Ula Stöckl, Neun Leben hat die Katze (Nine Lives Has the Cat, 1968), a film featuring “four female characters, each of whom offers a possible role model.”80 Despite the lag in scholarship to recognize women directors, the 1970s was a decade full of developments for feminist filmmakers in West Germany. In 1973 Helke Sander and Claudia von Alemann cofounded the International Women’s Film Seminar in WestBerlin. In 1974 in West-Berlin Sander founded the first feminist journal in Europe, Frauen and Film (Women and Film); it exists to the present day. The same year, director Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Unter der Strasse liegt der Strand (Beneath the Pavement Lies the Beach, 1974) premiered. In the film a couple active in the social movements work to gather support for the abortion bill. Amid this work and long conversations about their past, they discover they are unexpectedly pregnant, reframing their political work

79

Cf. Helke Sander, “Men Are Responsible That Women Become Their Enemies:  Tale of Rejection (1980)” and “Feminism and Film (1977),” in West German Filmmakers on Film, ed. Eric Rentschler (New  York:  Holmes and Meier, 1988), 25–30 and 75–81, respectively, as well as Margarethe von Trotta, “Female Film Aesthetic,” 89. As a case in point, the first volume devoted to the topic, Julia Knight’s, was not published until 1992, about ten years after books on New German Cinema started appearing, and it was not published by an academic press. Julia Knight’s Women and the New German Cinema (New York: Verso, 1992). In her introduction, Knight cites John Sandford’s The New German Cinema (1980) and Timothy Corrigan’s New German Film (1983), both of which exclude women’s filmmaking. Knight points out that although James Franklin’s New German Cinema (1983) and Hans Helmut Prinzler and Hans Günther Pflaum’s Cinema in the Federal Republic of Germany (1983) mention women filmmakers, both list merely the most prominent women filmmakers:  in Franklin’s volume the “discussion of women filmmakers is confined to two brief pages in his introduction” and in Prinzler and Pflaum, “the main discussion of women directors is left to three short pages at the very end of their introductory survey” (Knight 15). This situation, Knight states, began to change in the mid-1980s. Elsaesser devotes sections to “Cinema as Self-Experience: The Woman’s Film” and another to “Women at Work,” in his New German Cinema:  A History (New Brunswick:  Rutgers UP, 1989). See also Gender and German Cinema:  Feminist Interventions, vol. II:  German Film History/German History as Film, ed. Sandra Frieden, Richard W.  McCormick, Vibeke R.  Petersen, and Laurie Melissa Vogelsang (Providence: Berg, 1993). 80 Julia Knight’s Women and the New German Cinema (New York:  Verso, 1992), 9. See also Christina Gerhardt, “Slow Violence:  On Liberated Women in an Un-Liberated Society:  Ula Stöckl’s Neun Leben hat die Katze/The Cat Has Nine Lives (1968),” in The Limits of Emancipation:  Thinking Gender and Violence Post-1968, ed. Sarah Colvin and Katharina Karcher (New  York:  Routledge, 2019). Stöckl’s film and the others cited in this paragraph screened as part of the German Film Institute, 2008, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, which focused on 1968 in West German cinema. I  thank Tony Kaes and Rick Rentschler for the invaluable service they provide to the field of German film studies by offering the German Film Institute and for this summer seminar in particular.

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in personal terms.81 The late 1970s were also a watershed as the era saw the premieres of Helke Sander’s Die allzeitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit— Redupers (All Around Reduced Personality); and Ulrike Ottinger’s Madame X—Eine absolute Herrscherin (Madame X—An Absolute Ruler), both in 1978. In 1977, Von Trotta—who had previously acted in the films of Fassbinder and of Schlöndorff, written the screenplay for Schlöndorff’s Die Moral der Ruth Halbfass (A Free Woman, 1972), and coauthored with Schlöndorff the screenplay for The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum—directed The Second Awakening of Christa Klages. It was one of the most successful solo directed debut films by a West German director and one of the most successful films of New German Cinema—aside from The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, which Von Trotta codirected, and Germany in Autumn—to engage terrorism in West Germany. In The Second Awakening of Christa Klages—based on a true story of the Munich Kinderladen teacher Margit Czenski—the eponymous main character robs a bank in order to help fund a cooperative childcare center in financial need.82 She had helped to cofound the childcare center, which accepts children regardless of their or their parents’ legal status in the country or their ability to pay. Her daughter attends the center as well. When the cooperative childcare center cannot pay its rent, the landlord threatens to evict it. The new tenant is waiting in the wings: a pornography shop. Jenifer Ward reads the film as a companion piece to Germany in Autumn, but, as she puts it, it is much more “a document of feminist history grounded in a specific historical, national context, but also in a context of international theorizing about women’s morality.”83 In the film, the bank robbery is not the central point. “Far more important,” Ward argues, “are Christa’s motives for this deed, which are portrayed as honorable . . . the negative portrayal of the State . . . [and] Perhaps most important of all, the extent to which she ultimately ‘radicalizes’ those around her, a process that is represented sympathetically by von Trotta.”84 To be sure, in the film Christa does radicalize all those 81

Soon thereafter Sanders-Brahms’s films Shirin’s Hochzeit (Shirin’s Wedding, 1975)  and Deutschland, Bleiche Mutter (Germany Pale Mother, 1980) premiered. 82 On April 13, 1971, Czenski and two accomplices robbed a Munich bank. One of the accomplices was Rolf Heißler. He was married to a second generation RAF member Brigitte Mohnhaupt from 1968 to 1972. After the bank robbery, he was sentenced to six years. He was released as a result of the June 2 Movement’s 1975 kidnapping of Peter Lorenz, which they used to negotiate for the release of prisoners. “Sog. Bank-Lady,” January 9, 1978, http:// www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-40693720.html. Last accessed April 30, 2015. See also Knight 86. Judith Robertson, “Teaching in Your Dreams: Screen-Play Pedagogy and Margarethe von Trotta’s The Second Awakening of Christa Klages,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 13.2 (Fall 2004): 74–92. 83 Jenifer K. Ward, “Enacting the Different Voice: Christa Klages and Feminist History,” Women in German Yearbook 11 (1995): 49–65. 84 Ward 52.

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around her, in particular the other two women: Ingrid, Christa’s childhood friend; and Lena, who Christa held briefly, when holding up the bank, and who is now on a personal investigation to find out who the bank robber is. The film is a daring solo-directed debut film engaging as it does both terrorism and feminism. Yet the manner in which it depicts both is undoubtedly responsible for its success. As Knight points out, censorship in the era gave rise to what Jan Dawson described as a “passion . . . for oblique approaches and microcosmic case histories” or the use of a personal story to tell a political story, of which Knight says both The Second Awakening of Christa Klages and Marianne and Juliane are emblematic.85 The bank heist is shown briefly at the outset and not, as Siew Jin Ooi has underscored, as the film’s dénouement.86 Instead, the film focuses on the transformations of the three women.87 Most of all, as Ooi underscores, the gestures of solidarity mark the second awakening, not only of Christa Klages but also of each of the three women. Reading Trotta’s subsequent Marianne and Juliane together with her previous film Christa Klages restores the importance of feminism to narratives about the 1970s and compares or contrasts it, as a political approach, to armed struggle, much as Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven returns workers to the era and compares communist party politics with militant anarchist action (in a veiled reference to the RAF). These films explore the various trajectories of politics subsequent to the dissolution of the APO in 1970. By implicitly locating the RAF in this span of political possibilities, these films convey a broader image of the era’s leftist political range than most contemporary films about the RAF do.

Feminism and Terrorism in Margarethe von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane In Marianne and Juliane, the last film, after The Second Awakening of Christa Klages and Sisters, or the Balance of Happiness (1979), of her socalled sisters trilogy, Von Trotta shows her abiding interest in 1970s West German feminism and terrorism. Additionally, the film—through its two main characters—examines the impact of the fascist era and the Holocaust on so-called 68ers in West Germany. But Marianne and Juliane also adds a new motif, subtly suggested throughout but very apparent by the film’s 85

Jan Dawson, “The Sacred Terror: Shadows of Terrorism in the New German Cinema,” Sight & Sound 48.4 (1979): 243–63. Here, 243. 86 Siew Jin Ooi, “Changing Identity: Margarethe von Trotta’s The Second Awakening of Christa Klages,” in Women Filmmakers: Refocusing, ed. Jacqueline Levitin, Judith Plessis, and Valérie Raoul (New York: Routledge, 2003), 84–96. 87 See both Ward and Ooi for analyses of the trajectories of the three women in Margarethe von Trotta’s Das zweite Erwachen der Christa Klages.

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end: it considered not only how the Nazi era had impacted West Germany’s generation of 1968, as it grappled with questions about their parents’ passive or active role in it, but also how the generation of 1968 and, more so, of 1970s terrorism, impacted yet another generation articulated in the film by the attack on Marianne’s son, Jan. Contemporary German cinema of the Berlin School in particular, Christian Petzold’s The State I am In (2000), as will be discussed in the closing section of this chapter, would pick up this issue again. Von Trotta’s twin focus on feminism and terrorism in the 1970s marked Marianne and Juliane as a film that engaged with concurrent politics of the film’s previous decade. But the film also presents an intergenerational story responding to historical events of three generations. That is, its engagement with generational responses to the historical eras of the Nazi era and the Holocaust, on the one hand, and to the 1968 social movements and 1970s terrorism, on the other hand, indicated that it was already looking ahead to consider the impact of the 1970s, although it premiered only one year into the 1980s. New German Cinema—as Eric Rentschler argued just a few years after Von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane premiered—shows an abiding interest in the relationship between personal history and historical events:  “The relation of individual history to a more encompassing—and mostly unwritten and repressed—general history:  this point of focus remains a consistent perspective at hand in West German films, a body of work very concerned with the question of historical memory, with the trauma of an as yet unassimilated past.”88 To be sure, as Susan E.  Linville put it in “Retrieving History:  Margarethe von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane,” Von Trotta’s films offer a critique of those who deem a separation between personal and general history possible: Pastor Klein, the publicly antifascist exemplar in Marianne and Juliane; Wolfgang, Juliane’s leftist companion; Hans, the antinuclear activist in Sheer Madness; and Leo Jogiches, Luxemburg’s lover and political ally in Rosa Luxemburg; these are only the more obvious instances of liberals and leftists whom von Trotta indicts for refusing to see that the historical and political are indivisible from the personal.89 The imbrication of personal and what Rentschler calls “general history” forms the locus, too, of Von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane. Although most film scholars have noted the presence of individual history in Von Trotta’s films, its value for revealing general history escapes some, who deride Marianne and Juliane for its emphasis on the personal. 88

Eric Rentschler, West German Film in the Course of Time (New York: Redgrave, 1984), 13. Susan E. Linville, “Retrieving History:  Margarethe von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane,” PMLA 106.3 (May 1991): 446–58. Here, 446. 89

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For example, Thomas Elsaesser states that “personalizing conflicts as von Trotta does always entails a reduction of the political and the social to psychological categories.”90 I  would argue the opposite:  precisely by dint of its focus on the personal and on familial history—in this case, mainly of the two sisters, Marianne and Juliane, but also their parents and Juliane’s son—the film reveals what Rentschler called “general history.” In Von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane, familial relations comprise the following constellations: the sisters Marianne and Juliane; Juliane and her partner, Wolfgang; their parents; and Marianne and her son, Jan. Each relationship articulates political positions and dimensions. Juliane never had a child, does not want to marry her partner, and devotes most of her time to working on a feminist journal, loosely based on EMMA, the West German feminist magazine91 and to challenging §218, which banned abortion in West Germany. Paragraph 218 was a contentious issue in the 1970s and figures in many films dating back to the late 1960s, including Ulrich Schamoni’s Es (1966) and Edgar Reitz’s Mahlzeiten (1967). In Marianne and Juliane, Juliane’s younger sister, Marianne, by contrast, has joined a terrorist group and gone underground.92 Juliane’s world is suddenly upended when Marianne’s partner stops by to drop off and leave their son, Jan, in Juliane’s care. From the outset, Von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane presents itself as a meditation on history and memory. While the opening credits play over a medium close-up shot, showing a view out of a closed window,93 the viewer hears footsteps, as someone paces back and forth in a room, seemingly lost in thought. The camera slowly zooms out as Juliane enters the frame, pensively walking to and fro. Behind her, binders line bookshelves, labeled with years ranging from 1968 to 1980. The camera pans, following her gaze, to a photo of her sister, Marianne, hanging on the wall. Toward its end, the film returns to this scene. Here, the film cuts to a scene in the past, to Marianne’s partner, Werner, dropping off their son, Jan, with Juliane. As

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Thomas Elsaesser, “Mother Courage and Divided Daughters,” Monthly Film Bulletin (July 1983): 176–8. Here, 177; emphasis added. 91 Christiane Ensslin—along with Alice Schwarzer, Angelika Wittlich, and Sabine Schruff—was one of the cofounders of EMMA, first published on January 26, 1977:  Schwarzer as editor, Wittlich and Schruff as journalists, and Ensslin as editorial staff. 92 See also Gudrun Ensslin, “Zieht den Trennungsstrich, jede Minute”: Briefe an ihre Schwester Christiane und ihren Bruder Gottfried aus dem Gefängnis, 1972–1973, ed. Christiane Ensslin und Gottfried Ensslin (Hamburg: Konkret, 2005). 93 On the film’s use of the windows, see also Charity Scribner, “Controlled Spaces: The Built Environment of Margarethe von Trotta’s The German Sisters,” in Cities in Transition:  The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis, ed. Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson (London:  Wallflower Press, 2008), 141–55. Scribner’s article examines the film’s use of architectural and geographic spaces.

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the viewer eventually learns, Juliane is—in the opening sequence—grappling with the questions of how and why her sister died. To answer the question, the film provides two temporal trajectories. One spools back to answer Juliane’s question about how her sister died: it reveals the history of events spanning from Marianne’s decision to go underground, to her time in prison, including her hunger strike and death. The other trajectory consists of flashbacks to Marianne and Juliane’s childhood and their family life, moves through their adolescence and their adulthood, as Juliane tries to retrace events in their life. By beginning the film with a framing narrative, showing Juliane trying to resolve the mystery leading to and surrounding her sister’s death, the film encourages the viewer to consider the relationship between the two unfolding chronological trajectories. How do events of Marianne and Juliane’s childhood relate to Marianne’s death? Not only the relationship between general history and family history but also the static setting—which opens and closes in Juliane’s home office and to some extent hinges on her home—takes center-stage in Marianne and Juliane. Poignant scenes of movement contrast with the static space of Juliane’s home. In the film’s first sequences, Jan—who subsequently disappears from the narrative until nearer the film’s end—is shown twice in short succession seated backward and looking out of windows. As his father drives him to Juliane’s to drop him off, Jan is looking out the back window of the car, at the history he is leaving behind. Soon thereafter, in another sequence, a high angle shot shows train tracks moving past and then zooms out to show Jan, again seated backward, looking out a train window at the tracks fading into the distance, as Juliane sits down next to him and—pointedly not looking out the window—asks him if he remembers his mother. These early sequences contrast Juliane’s static home space and Jan in motion. Furthermore, they also train the viewer early on to consider the relationship among history, camera angle, and point of view. Temporality and vantage point are key to these opening sequences. While what Jan sees may be nothing more than the road behind the car or the tracks behind the train, unburdened with further meaning, by the film’s end, the history he has left behind—that is, his father and mother—will have become deeply laden with meaning and a determinant for his future life. Similarly, Marianne and Juliane’s childhood might have been experienced, at the time, looking forward, as lacking bigger meaning. Looking backward as Juliane does, however, its influences on each of their future political trajectories become manifest. In fact, it is what the opening shot signals to the viewer that Juliane is seeking out. It is the film’s central focus. Thus, these early sequences make the viewer aware of how Juliane and Jan see what is in front of them differently—Jan looks out the window and does not consider his past; inversely, Juliane does not look out the window but does consider the past. Furthermore, the sequence’s shots and points of view also suggest how what they see (and the viewer sees) changes over time: Jan does not consider

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his past, but Juliane is looking back on her and her sister’s life history, which had once added up day to day without deeper registration, suggesting that Jan might do the same one day. As Karen Beckman argues, this “series of events . . . are still in flux” still open to negotiation and re-negotiation.94 The viewer is trained to be mindful of the construction of history at the outset of the film, as it is about to present—but also to construct a narrative about—history. Between these two sequences of Jan, Marianne visits Juliane to tell her that she is going underground:  discussions about contemporary politics, differing political priorities, and how to organize, in order to achieve political goals, erupt between the two sisters. Marianne challenges Juliane, stating she’s not doing enough politically, since she’s not engaging in armed struggle. Juliane tells Marianne that her partner Werner has committed suicide and dropped off their child in her care, forcing upon her the very lifestyle she never wanted. She tells Marianne that she already fulfilled her duties to mother when she was a child, raising her younger siblings when they were growing up. This scene serves to show the political positions of the two women as adults. The scene also underscores their shared personal history and their symbiotic relationship. In this exchange, the two women alternately look at one another and then down. Between them rest two cups of coffee. A closeup shows Marianne looking down. The film cuts to a high angle close-up shot of the wrinkled skin of heated milk floating inside the top of their two untouched cups. The film uses a shot-reverse-shot to show the two sisters looking at one another. They smile and break into a gentle laugh. The film cuts to a high angle close-up shot of two mugs of hot chocolate with wrinkled skin of scalded milk floating on top. It zooms out to a medium close-up shot, showing Marianne and Juliane as children, hands clasped in front of them in prayer on the dinner table, the mugs in front of them. They look at one another and smile. The camera zooms out further to a medium long-shot showing their parents on the right and left edge of the breakfast table and of the frame, their father saying a morning prayer. Through their laughter the film suggests that without communicating it verbally, they both remember this prior moment in their shared personal history. In these discussions the sisters not only engage contemporary politics but also look back at memories of their youth and what shaped each to become who she is today. One such poignant memory involves a screening of Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955), one of the first documentaries about the Holocaust, combining black-and-white footage shot in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek in 1955; photographs taken by the SS in Auschwitz in 94

Karen Beckman, “Terrorism, Feminism, Sisters and Twins: Building Relations in the Wake of the World Trade Center Attacks,” Special Issue: On 9/11, Grey Room 7 (Spring 2002): 24–39. Here, 33.

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194495; footage of the Westerbork internment camp in the Netherlands taken by detainees; stock from French, Soviet, and Polish newsreels; and photographs from various archives, including the Jewish Historical Institute in Poland.96 Writer and Holocaust survivor Jean Caryol—who joined the French resistance in 1941 after the German invasion of France and was arrested and sent to the Gusel-Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria in 1943—wrote the narration, read by Michel Bouquet. Composer Hanns Eisler provided the film’s score.97 The film was produced as part of “Resistance, Liberation, Deportation,” an exhibit organized by historians Henri Michel and Olga Wormser-Migot, and held in 1954–55 to honor the French Resistance and celebrate the ten-year anniversary of France’s liberation. Starting in the early 1960s, Night and Fog was used by teachers and professors in West Germany to teach students about the Nazi era and the Holocaust. In Von Trotta’s film, Marianne and Juliane see Night and Fog in such a screening, but one that takes place in a youth center not at school and has been organized by their father. The scene begins with a flashback to Marianne’s and Juliane’s adolescence, and an establishing shot, taken from the back of a dimly lit room. The viewer sees a movie screen and the backs of the audience’s heads, as they watch a film. The film within the film shows a high angle tracking shot of a concentration camp accompanied by a voice-over stating, “By 1945 the camps were becoming increasingly full.” As Night and Fog plays, a reverse-shot shows and then pans the audience of schoolchildren. The film cuts to a shot of Marianne and Juliane’s father, watching the audience’s responses to the film, as the voice-over states that officers claimed to be innocent. A few shots further on, Night and Fog fills the screen; the viewer no longer sees it from behind the heads of the audience. “The crematorium,” the voice-over continues, “is no longer in use. The Nazi methods are out of fashion. This landscape, the landscape of nine million dead.” Toward the end of the screening, first Marianne and then Juliane get up and walk out as Marianne is overcome with nausea. By presenting the screening of Night and Fog and from a variety of vantage points, the film calls attention to the relationship between historical events and familial history. The viewer sees the sisters’ father screening the film and watching the audience’s response; the sisters watching and responding to the

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Later published by Peter Hellman, The Auschwitz Album (New York: Random House, 1981). See also Richard Raskin, Alain Resnais’s Nuit et Brouillard: On the Making, Reception and Functions of a Major Documentary Film (Aarhus:  Aarhus UP, 1987); Ewout van der Knaap, Uncovering the Holocaust: The International Reception of Night and Fog (London: Wallflower Press, 2006); Sylvie Lindeperg, Nuit et Brouillard: Un film dans l’histoire (Paris: Edition Odile Jacob, 2007). 97 The text for the West German edition was written by Paul Celan and read by Kurt Glass. 96

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film; and the film itself as it fills the screen, and the viewer becomes part of the audience. The screening of Night and Fog dovetails with the film’s German title, “die bleierne Zeit” (the leaden times), which underscores the trajectory of the leaden years that started in the Nazi era and continued through the post–Second World War Adenauer years to the late 1960s. The film’s title references Hölderlin’s poem “The Path Into the Country”: Komm! ins Offene, Freund! zwar glänzt ein Weniges heute Nur herunter und eng schließet der Himmel uns ein. Trüb ists heut, es schlummern die Gäng und die Gassen und fast will Mir es scheinen, es sei, als in der bleiernen Zeit. Come! Into the open, friend! Though little shines down today And the heavens enclose us tightly It is dark and dreary today, the paths and lanes slumber, and almost It appears to me, it were, as in a leaden time.98 Pointing to the heaviness of the 1950s—not only to the 1970s as the title is sometimes misread—that is, to the lead blanket of silence over the Nazi era, the film’s title calls attention to the rigid social structures at home, at work, and at the university that social movements of the late 1960s sought to call into question and to change. By showing their father screening Night and Fog, the film combines family history and general history. Both the general history and the familial history sketched out in Marianne and Juliane impact their future political development, albeit in different ways. While Juliane decides not to marry or have children, and to work for a feminist publication and abortion rights, Marianne joins a left-wing terrorist group and goes underground. Juliane is deeply aware of how her childhood motivated her future political work, as she makes clear in her statement to Marianne about why she decided not to be a mother. Juliane elaborates her thoughts about the relationship between personal and political history explicitly when she visits Marianne in prison. Juliane has written an article about Marianne. Marianne accuses Juliane of having sold out, of having marketed her as every other bourgeois journalist would, arguing “you cannot write about me from the vantage-point of our personal history. My history begins with the others.” Juliane retorts:  “What is our childhood if not reality? Besides which I  don’t think we can ever free ourselves from our personal history.” Believing that personal history shapes

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Margarethe von Trotta, Marianne and Juliane, commentary. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Der Gang aufs Land,” Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 2,  ed. Friedrich Beissner (Stuttgart:  Cotta. 1951), 87–89; translation my own.

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political action, Juliane revisits their childhood, in an attempt to understand how their familial history shaped Marianne. While these sequences dwell on the relationship between the generation of the Nazi era and that of the late 1960s and 1970s, the film’s ending considers the effects of social and armed struggle movement of the 1970s on the subsequent generation through the figure of Jan. Toward the end of the film, Jan, who has been adopted by a couple because Juliane does not want to take on the role of mother, is brutally attacked by others who tell him that his mother is a terrorist who set off bombs.99 Juliane takes Jan in and offers to tell him about his mother in the film’s closing scene. In this way, the film considers not only 1970s terrorism and feminism through the two main characters, the sisters Marianne and Juliane, but also the impact of the 1970s terrorism on the subsequent generation.

Ghosts: Christian Petzold’s The State I Am In Petzold’s The State I  Am In (2000) shifts the site of intergenerational trauma: while Von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane dwells on the impact of the Nazi era on the 1968ers, The State I Am In focuses on the impact of 1970s terrorism on the next generation.100 The State I Am In focuses on the narrow confines of one family’s life. The viewer encounters a family that lives underground. The parents—Clara and Hans—have given up armed struggle but are on the run from the police for actions undertaken around twenty years ago. They are on the run from their past, although trapped by it. Unfortunately, their 15-year-old daughter Jeanne is as well. In this way, Petzold, too, uses a family story and combines it with a political story to thematize 1970s terrorism.101 Unlike Marianne and Juliane, however, with its main setting in the static environment of Juliane’s home, The State I Am In takes place mainly

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This part of the film, too, is based on actual events. Gudrun Ensslin’s son, Felix—whose father Bernward Vesper committed suicide on May 15, 1971, when Ensslin was underground—was orphaned and later attacked for his mother’s actions when he was a child. 100 See also Stefanie Hofer, “ ‘Memory Talk’: Terrorism, Trauma and Generational Struggle in Petzold’s The State I Am In and Von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane,” Film Criticism 34.1 (Fall 2009): 36–57. 101 In an interview, Petzold, discussing the role of the family in this film, said, “What I liked about the film was that the terrorist family in the film is a model family. . . . It is as if the people who ended up in the transit spaces of international terrorism wanted to maintain, like immigrants, something that really does not exist anymore.” Another example of terrorists, who live mostly in transit and move transnationally, yet nonetheless seek to maintain a family are Illich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, and Magdalena Kopp. For more information, see the docudrama Carlos, dir. Olivier Assayas, IFC Films 2010; and the autobiography Magdalena Kopp, Die Terrorjahre: Mein Leben an der Seite von Carlos (Munich: Random House, 2007).

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on the road. The plot echoes Sidney Lumet’s Running on Empty (1988), in which Arthur and Annie Pope are on the run from the FBI with their son Danny for having blown up a napalm lab in 1971 to protest the USVietnam War.102 The main characters in Running on Empty are loosely modeled on former Weather Underground members Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers.103 This “on the road” setting of Petzold’s The State I Am In is not, however, to be understood in the classic 1960s sense of the road movie where cars embody the freedom of vehicles promised by automobilism. In the epic 1960s road movies, such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969), characters were on the road, free from obligations, invoking contemporary literature, such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957). Petzold has referred to his relationship to genre cinema as follows: “I have the feeling I make films in the cemetery of genre cinema.”104 That is, he revisits but revises genre cinema. Petzold’s fixation on cars and mobility four decades later exhibits the incessant need to be traveling. Protagonists (and viewers) are trapped in a constant mobility, narratologically, economically, and emotionally—on “a road to nowhere” as the Talking Heads once stated.105 As Lutz Koepnick puts it: Consider what can be understood as the signature shot of Christian Petzold’s “Ghost-Trilogy,” namely those extended close-ups of car drivers shown either from the vehicle’s rear or its passenger seat, the camera absolutely static, its subject gazing forward, traffic and landscape passing by, left and right, while no meaningful acts of communication really add much to our understanding of these protagonists’ thoughts, visions, memories, or anxieties. Frequently used in particular in Ghosts, Petzold’s prolonged back-and side-seat shots no doubt challenge dominant cinematic expectations as the camera avoids privileging anyone’s gaze, frustrates any spectatorial desire for visual reciprocity, and, in so doing, sidesteps how narrative cinema tends to create empathy and identification by organizing its material along a teleological trajectory.106 102

Running on Empty, dir. Sidney Lumet, Lorimar Film, 1988. See also Bill Ayers’s memoir, Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days:  Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist (Boston:  Beacon, 2001). For another account of living underground during the 1970s, see also Diana Block, Arm the Spirit: A Women’s Journey Underground and Back (Oakland:  AK Press, 2009). 104 Marco Abel, “The Cinema of Identification Gets on My Nerves: An Interview with Christian Petzold,” Cineaste 33.3 (Summer 2008). 105 Talking Heads, “On a Road to Nowhere,” Little Creatures, 1985. 106 Lutz Koepnick, “Cars . . .,” in Berlin School Glossary: An ABC of the New Wave in German Cinema, ed. Roger F. Cook, Lutz Koepnick, Kristin Kopp, and Brad Prager (New York: Intellect, 2013), 75–82. 103

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Thus, even if the family is—as in The State I Am In—on the road, movement in Petzold’s films functions otherwise.107 Mobility, in Petzold’s films, has a particular post-Wende cinematic inflection. As film scholar Marco Abel argues: Petzold’s cinema is about the possibility and demand for mobility in postwall Germany. This issue has been of central concern to the country’s public sphere since the mid-1990s, as evidenced by the fact that two of the last three German Presidents explicitly admonished German citizens to become more mobile in order to improve the country’s ability to compete in the changed world order dominated by post-Cold War, neoliberal finance capital market economics. In short . . . Petzold’s cinema is of great interest precisely because it engages post-wall Germany on the level of the country’s own socio-political terms.108 The mobile setting of The State I Am In, in contrast to the static setting of Marianne and Juliane, can thus be read as illustrative of post-reunification mobility not only within Germany but also transnationally and globally.109 This mobility is not necessarily liberating, as it was in 1960s road movies. Instead, in the neoliberal era, constant mobility becomes delimiting.110 As Petzold puts it: In the 1950s these transitional spaces were rendered in hedonistic terms, with teenagers driving in Nicholas Ray’s films: driving, drive-in movies, sex in cars, etc. And I  thought, when I  began the film, right now this 107

On how space and mobility functions in this film, see also Christina Gerhardt, “Space, Motion and Sound:  The Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Christian Petzold,” in Space, ed. Katy Hardy, special issue of Wide Screen 7.1 (2018). 108 Abel. See also Marco Abel, “Imagining Germany:  The (Political) Cinema of Christian Petzold,” in The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and Its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager (Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 2010), 258–84. 109 For an analysis of how Petzold’s film contrasts concepts of Germany as a nation with earlier considerations of the same, see Stefanie Hofer, “ ‘. . . von der Unmöglichkeit der Gegenwart’: Geschlecht, Generation und Nation in Petzolds Die innere Sicherheit und SanderBrahms’ Deutschland, bleiche Mutter,” German Life and Letters 62.2 (April 2009):  174–89. For a comparative reading of mobility in the films of Petzold and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, see Christina Gerhardt, “Space, Motion and Sound: The Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Christian Petzold,” in Cinema and the Production of Space, ed. Katy Hardy, special Issue of Wide Screen 7.1 (2018). 110 On the reconfiguration of space in Petzold’s films, see also Jaimey Fisher, “Globalization as Uneven Development: The ‘Creative’ Destruction of Place and Fantasy in Christian Petzold’s Ghost Trilogy,” Seminar 47.4 (November 2011): 447–64; and Andrew Webber, “Topographical Turns:  Recasting Berlin in Christian Petzold’s Gespenster,” in Debating German Cultural Identity Since 1989, ed. Anne Fuchs, Kathleen Chakraborty-James, and Linda Shortt (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011), 67–81.

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mythos is in the process of dissolution: people are no longer on the road in order to find themselves but because they cannot find an exit.111 In The State I Am in, the film’s opening sequence sets the family into motion, as they flee a break-in to their vacation rental in Portugal, which leads to a police visit. They head to Germany in an attempt to secure money. Petzold’s film thusly fixates on mobility from the outset. Yet the main characters and the viewer wind up not liberated by but trapped in their car on the road. The time on the road, at rest areas, or in airports form part of what Petzold calls transitional spaces and deems to be a hallmark of postreunification Germany and of globalization. As Petzold puts it, “I am interested in transitional spaces. Modern capitalism has created them.”112 Elsewhere, he elaborates: “I am interested in the mobile immobilities, the so-called transit zones, these no-places: that’s where something modern is happening.”113 In an interview with the LA Weekly, Petzold said that he once read a sociological study by Mark Augé titled Non-Places. It points out, Petzold said, that “when you are driving on highways . . . you see signs of something very famous, or very old or ruins, but you never see them. You are going down the highway and nothing changes. This for me is a picture of modern loneliness.”114 By dint of The State I Am In’s mise-en-scène on the road, which reworks road movies, Petzold film underscores an aspect of life in Germany post-reunification. Stylistically, what Petzold has termed “mobile immobilities” is marked not only by being constantly in movement, on the highway, but also by a static filming of that movement. In The State I Am In, for all the film’s emphasis on constant mobility of a family either on the run or prepared to be on the run again or awaiting what they need to move on, the film, stylistically, remains static. It features long takes, little action, and few quick cross-cuts. Petzold’s focus on what happens in the “mobile immobility” of these transit spaces dovetails with fellow Berlin School filmmaker Angela Schanalec’s film Orly (2010), in which enigmatic intimate moments emerge from time spent both in one place yet in transit, also caught in long, dwelling takes. In The State I Am In, the family’s life underground leads them to live in the shadows, between life and death: they never really interact with humans, are not taken note of, or prefer not to be noticed.115 It has been described by 111

Abel, Cineaste. Abel, Cineaste. 113 Abel, Cineaste; emphasis added. 114 Scott Foundes, “ ‘Uneasy Riders’ Petzold’s Postindustrialist Road Movies,” LA Weekly, May 13, 2009, 1. 115 For a sustained engagement with surveillance, self-surveillance, technological and otherwise, in this film and in Petzold’s Ghost Trilogy in general, see Jennifer Hosek’s “Geographies of Power and Surveillance:” Christian Petzold’s Gespenster Trilogy,” in The Place of Politics in German Film, ed. Martin Blumenthal-Barby (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2014), 205–22. 112

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some, including Petzold, as ghostly, a theme his subsequent films would take up.116 In Gespenster (Ghosts, 2005), the main character exists in a realm between life and death. And in Yella (2007), the main character may already have died at the beginning of the film. As a result, these three films have also been called his Ghost Trilogy. The State I  Am In, the first film of what became his Ghost Trilogy, thematizes the Red Army Faction. Although the group is never mentioned by name, coded references to the RAF abound and the DVD features the RAF logo on the back. The family uses a copy of Melville’s Moby Dick, which Ensslin read and drew on to give the RAF members code names in Stammheim, in order to signal to a former cohort that they have arrived in Germany. Another former cohort whom they visit is named Klaus, who mentions that he has sold his publishing house, seemingly a reference to leftist publisher Klaus Wagenbach, who was sentenced to prison for nine months in 1974 for publishing the RAF manifesto “On Armed Struggle in Western Europe” in 1971. “The Red Army Faction phantom,” in Petzold’s assessment, has not lost its virulence since the autumn of 1977. But he believes the story needs to be handled differently in order to make it productive in a contemporary context. Thus, in The State I Am In, he presents the generation of the RAF as parents, as Von Trotta did, but the parents in The State I Am In appear to be ten years older than Marianne and Werner were and their child has grown up. Furthermore, the film’s narrative is as much about Jeanne’s challenges as it is about her parents’. In this way, the film’s familial narrative has progressed temporally from Von Trotta’s:  the parents are middle-aged; their child is an adolescent. It is not merely, however, a temporal shift forward. Instead, new questions about history emerge through the relationship between the two generations. It begs the question: how does each one see the history of the RAF? Framing the narrative this way allows Petzold’s film to explore some tricky questions that rarely get asked vis-à-vis the RAF: specifically, where do they wind up one generation further on? Typically, in the few instances when this issue is raised, the leftists of the 1968 generation who became prominent 116

Critics have frequently referred to the RAF as ghosts that haunt Germany. Cf. Svea Bräunert, Gespenstergeschichten: Der linke Terrorismus der RAF und die Künste (Berlin: Kadmos, 2015); Klaus Theweleit’s Ghosts:  Drei leicht inkorrekte Vorträge (Frankfurt:  Stroemfeld, 1998). Of course, the term overlaps with Petzold’s ghost trilogy. Cf. Chris Homewood, “The Return of ‘Undead’ History: The West German Terrorist as Vampire and the Problem of ‘Normalizing’ the Past in Margarethe von Trotta’s Die bleierne Zeit (1981) and Christian Petzold’s Die innere Sicherheit (2001),” in German Culture, Politics and Literature into the Twenty-First Century:  Beyond Normalization, ed. Stuart Taberner and Paul Cooke (Rochester:  Camden House, 2006), 121–36; Jens Hinrichsen, “Im Zwischenbereich. Christian Petzolds GespensterTrilogie:  Passagen in Schattenzonen deutscher Realität,” Film-Dienst 60.19 (September 13, 2007): 6–8.

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politicians, such as Joschka Fischer, Otto Schily, or Hans-Christian Ströbele, or those who became affiliated with the  right-wing, such as Horst Mahler, are evoked. (The film’s release happened to coincide with the publication of a photo of Joschka Fischer—who was vice chancellor and foreign minister at the time the photos were released—and Hans-Joachim Klein—who would join the Revolutionary Cells soon after the photo was taken—physically assaulting a police officer on April 7, 1973.117) The reference to figures, such as Fischer, functions, on the one hand, to underscore the remarkable rise to political positions and to persons, such as Mahler, on the other hand, to underscore an adherence to extremist ideologies, whether left-wing or right-wing.118 Rarely, however, does the question get raised of where former members of the RAF are now. Those who did not die, those who served time and were released, those who are not in prison and underground, where are they now? What are they doing? How do they relate to their past actions? How do they relate to political organizing now, if at all? The State I Am In offers one potential answer.119 Additionally, the film examines the effects of living underground on the next generation. Having grown up on the run, Jeanne has never regularly attended school. Not only because the family continually moves but also to protect the family’s secrets, Jeanne is not allowed to develop close relations with peers. The film’s German title “Die Innere Sicherheit” (the inner security) is a double or triple entendre. Typically, the term refers to security within a state or country.120 (The English title The State I Am In explicitly refers to the state.) In the context of the film, “Innere Sicherheit” (inner security) can also be read as a need to preserve a sense of security within the family. (In this instance, “state” could be read as a condition of 117

Bettina Röhl, the daughter of RAF cofounder Ulrike Meinhof, published the photos. Jochen Kummer, “Der Fischer und die Frau,” Die Welt am Sonntag, January 14, 2001, http://www. welt.de/print-wams/article608540/Der_Fischer_und_die_Frau.html. Last accessed October 5, 2009. 118 For a reading of the publication of the Joschka Fischer photos together with Marianne and Juliane, see James M. Skidmore, “Intellectualism and Emotionalism in von Trotta’s Die bleierne Zeit,” German Studies Review 25.3 (October 2002): 551–67. 119 Kristina Konrad’s documentary Greater Freedom, Lesser Freedom (2000) is the only other film to grapple with this issue. She presents the life of Inge Viett, former member of the June 2 Movement. On this documentary, see also Christina Gerhardt, “Narrating Terrorism: Kristina Konrad’s Greater Freedom, Lesser Freedom,” in Questioning the RAF: The Politics of Culture, ed. Karin Bauer, special issue of Seminar 47.1 (2011): 64–80. The Legend of Rita, a fictional feature film directed by Volker Schlöndorff, although loosely based on Viett’s life as well, does not show her serving a prison sentence in Germany after reunification. In The Legend of Rita, the main character is fatally shot at the film’s end. Schlöndorff argued that it made for a more dramatic ending. Volker Schlöndorff, personal interview, Potsdam, Germany, September 6, 2007. See also Inge Viett, Einsprüche! Briefe aus dem Gefängnis (Hamburg:  Edition Nautilus, 1996). 120 Hans-Jürgen Lange und Matthias Gasch, Wörterbuch zur Inneren Sicherheit (Opladen:  VS Verlag, 2006).

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security.) Finally, the expression could be read as a personal need to preserve security as an individual. Over the course of the film, tensions between these various registers of security appear. The tension between the need to maintain security within a country and the family’s need to maintain security as former members of a terrorist group is most obvious. The film, however, also thematizes the tensions between the needs of the family and of Jeanne as an individual. One scene provides a glimpse into an adolescent’s life that Jeanne, always on the run with her family, does not have. As her parents meet with a former cohort, Achim, at his sprawling countryside home, Jeanne wanders upstairs. Achim’s daughter, Paulina, is listening to American hiphop, which her boyfriend recorded for her. She sports a tight-fitting grey t-shirt emblazoned with Diego Maradona, the Argentinian soccer player who rose to international fame in the late 1980s. Jeanne, by contrast, is wearing an oversized yellow children’s sweatshirt with a cartoon image of a bumblebee on a leaf, underscoring that her parents have not yet recognized her adolescence. The two adolescents smoke a cigarette together and hardly talk, listening to the music, until Jeanne’s mother arrives and summons her to leave. As the family departs, Paulina looks out from her balcony window at Jeanne and Jeanne looks back at her. Although sparse in dialogue, the scene articulates well the dissonance between Jeanne and her peers, as well as between Jeanne and her parents. Finally, like von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane, Petzold’s The State I Am In cites Night and Fog, but imbeds it in a very different context. Jeanne is sent out to buy groceries; the parents stay at their hideout, fearing recognition. Increasingly curious about the world outside of her family’s tight sphere, she uses the time outside the hideout to explore. She wanders into a music shop and listens to and steals CD’s. She hangs out near a school, listens to the newly acquired music on headphones, and smokes cigarettes.121 A student, assuming she is a fellow student at the school, asks her for a cigarette and if she is going to the film screening, too. Yes, Jeanne answers, and follows her into the school. The next sequence opens with a shot that shows a dimly lit room from an oblique angle. The class watches the screen and the teacher seated in the back of the room looks out across it, registering less the response of the class and seeming to peer into the set’s camera. The shot cuts to Night and Fog, which now fills the entire screen. It shows the film’s closing sequences, clips in faded color from the 1955 filming of Auschwitz in ruins. The clip picks up where the citation of the film in Von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane left 121 In The State I  Am In, like in Fassbinder’s filmmaking, the use of music is sparse. In fact, despite all the opportunities to listen to music in the car, while the family is on the road, it appears mostly when Jeanne meets other teenagers or listens to it on her headphones, thereby becoming a symbol of her (desire for) freedom.

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off, as the voice-over says, “The crematorium is no longer in use. The Nazi methods are out of fashion. This landscape, the landscape of nine million dead.” And it looks forward from history, as the voice-over continues: Who among us keeps watch here and warns us when the new executioners come? Do they really have a different face than we do? Somewhere there are still Kapos who were lucky. Prominent figures for whom a use was found again. Denunciators whose identities remained unrevealed. Are there still those people who never wanted to believe it and then only from time to time? And then there is us, who believe in an upstanding and morally correct way—when we see these ruins—the mass graves are forever buried under them. We, who act as though we reaped new hope; who act as though it all only belonged to one time and one country; we, who look askance and disregard the things next to us, who do not hear that the scream does not fall silent. In this way, the film’s closing sequences underscore the importance of continued vigilance against future executioners. Around the time Resnais was producing Night and Fog, the Algerian War had just begun and he was concerned that human rights were being violated there.122 While Von Trotta looks back on history, showing clips from Night and Fog that present corpses at a camp and Nazi denials of guilt, Petzold picks up where Von Trotta left off, and looks forward, citing Night and Fog’s closing sequence, which includes a reminder to be vigilant in the present era, to consider that the executioner might come anew. Moreover, Von Trotta’s reference to the film focuses on Marianne and Juliane, that is, on the effects of learning about the Nazi era and the Holocaust on what would become the generation of 1968. Petzold’s The State I  Am In, by contrast, shows Jeanne watching the film, focusing more attention on how the decisions of the generation of 1968 and of the RAF influenced a subsequent generation. Jeanne’s parents might have sought to learn from the Nazi era and to regard the suffering around them and to challenge what they deemed to be its sources, but the consequences of their actions, as in Von Trotta’s films, do not seem thought through. In Marianne and Juliane, Marianne and Werner had a child, Jan, whom they wind up foisting on Juliane, who never wanted to be a mother. So, too, in The State I  Am In, the viewer wonders whether Hans and Clara considered the impact of their life on their offspring. At times, they seem unaware of its effects and of Jeanne’s needs. Toward the end of the film, after her parents have interrogated or berated her throughout for any contact—no matter how brief—with other people 122

Richard Raskin, Alain Resnais’s Nuit et Brouillard: On the Making, Reception and Functions of a Major Documentary Film (Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 1987), 83.

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and she has learned not to talk or reveal anything, her father says to her, “You are so strange.” “Strange?” she asks, puzzled. “How so?” “You are so cagey and uncommunicative,” he responds. It seems as though Hans has never considered that their lifelong training of Jeanne to mistrust strangers, to regard everyone as strangers, and never to provide any information has left her shut down and distant from people in general, including him. The familial narrative ends when the family winds up in a car accident as they are about to flee the country. The sole survivor is Jeanne. Has she just been freed from her family history by which they and she were trapped? Or is she now moving on with her history, but alone, as Jan was at the end of Marianne and Juliane? To be sure, their survival, and as children, contrasts sharply with the ending of Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita (2000), released the same year as Petzold’s The State I  Am In. In The Legend of Rita, the main character—a former terrorist member—is fatally shot at the former border between East and West Germany, just after the fall of the wall. Thus, the viewer never learns how she negotiates her past. Both Marianne and Juliane and The State I  Am In open the door for a consideration of this story, yet from a different vantage point: that of the surviving, now parentless child. Picking up on and continuing thematics present in Von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane, Petzold’s The State I Am In utilizes familial spaces to articulate politics and general history. By focusing on Jeanne, the daughter of two former terrorists, Petzold’s The State I Am In examines the legacy of 1968 and the impact of the 1970s terrorism on a subsequent generation. The film also considers what happens to the generation of 1968 and of the RAF as they reach middle age, a focus underscored by the publication of photos of Joschka Fischer rioting in 1973. In these ways, The State I Am In seeks to work through the past not of the Nazi era but of the late 1960s and 1970s.

Conclusions In the 1970s, after the dissolution of the SDS and the extraparliamentary opposition, films associated with New German Cinema began to grapple with the uptick in labor struggles and the women’s movements, often comparing them to the path of armed struggle, as the films engaged in this chapter—Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven and Von Trotta’s The Second Awakening of Christa Klages and Marianne and Juliane—show. Countering a narrative that the dissolution of the SDS and the APO marked the end of 1968, or that 1968 had to lead to a violent trajectory, these films present its continuation through the trajectories of political movements, both nonviolent and violent, during the 1970s. Near the decade’s end, the events associated with the German Autumn of 1977 marked a decisive turning point, both politically and culturally, in

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the cultural memory of the RAF. Whereas previously, outside factors—such as the media, the government, and laws—had formed the focus of West German cultural mediations engaging domestic terrorism, after the German Autumn, both political alternatives to the RAF, discussed in this chapter, and the limitations of the RAF’s politics, as will be discussed in the next chapter, became the focal point of cinematic depictions of the group. Additionally, Marianne and Juliane, aside from its focus on 1970s feminism, opened up a discourse revisited by contemporary cinema that grappled with the topic and its legacy for the present era. As discussed, Marianne and Juliane, only briefly, through the figure of Marianne’s son, Jan, touches on the subsequent generation and the possible effects of terrorism. The State I  Am In, produced two decades later—after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the RAF—shows the former terrorists as middle-aged parents on the run with their adolescent daughter. Since they lead an underground existence and live parallel to society, their life contrasts sharply with the lives of former comrades as meetings with them make clear. The money they once stole from a bank is in a currency no longer in use, as Hans states when he digs it up and hands it to his daughter Jeanne, stating “History Lesson. This money will not be accepted by any bank any more.” Two reasons could account for this fact. The money’s currency, the West German Deutsch Mark, will no longer be in use, as the Euro will become the official currency on January 1, 2002. Or perhaps no bank will accept the money because it was stolen and could be tracked. In this and other ways, The State I Am In looks back at the history of terrorism in the 1970s and considers the present-day position of former terrorists. Furthermore, through the character of Jeanne, it also focuses on the subsequent generation and how it grapples with coming of age in light of 1970s terrorism. The two films depict historical shifts in post–Second World War West German and post-Wall German history and politics and each era’s respective preoccupations with the previous era. The State I  Am In presents new vantage points, those of former RAF members, now middle aged and looking back on the history, or those of surviving family members. As Katja Nicodemus put it in her review of The Baader Meinhof Complex, discussing also recent RAF films more generally:  “Images that once seemed fixed in their frames are now being reassessed and shaken loose. The iconography of the German Autumn is beginning to shift. And in due course, so too will its cinematic depiction.”123 I would agree with Nicodemus’s assessment of RAF iconography and argue that Petzold’s The State I Am In revisits the RAF and contributes a new chapter to the cultural memory of the Red Army Faction, one that considers its impact on subsequent generations. In this book’s analysis of the cultural memory of terrorism, the end of New German 123

Katja Nicodemus, “Death Wish: The Baader Meinhof Complex,” Film Comment (September– October 2009): 55–9.

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Cinema, often demarcated by Fassbinder’s death in 1982, also marks the end of what one could term the first generation of the cultural memory of the RAF. That is, after Von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane, despite the anniversaries that recognize the ten years that have passed since the events associated with June 2, 1967, and of the German Autumn of 1977, it would nonetheless be almost two decades before the RAF would manifest anew in cinema, starting with Petzold’s The State I Am In and Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita. As will be discussed in the final two chapters, this return of the RAF in media would span the new century’s first decade. Since the films and art produced during this time no longer dovetailed with the political developments depicted, that is, they did not intervene in the discourse surrounding contemporaneous events but rather looked back, they form a new era in the cultural memory of the RAF. This period is marked much more by the stakes of cultural narratives told about political events looking back upon them. As the next chapter, which focuses on Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita, will illustrate, inclusion and omission play as vital a role as rendition in producing this cultural memory of the RAF.

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5 Terrorism and the Cold War: The RAF and East Germany’s Ministry of State Security, 1982–90

If, over the course of the 1970s, in cinematic representations of the Red Army Faction (RAF) the international context receded to the background, in reality it continued to form a pivotal part of the group’s actions. The RAF focused on freeing the first generation, most of which had been imprisoned since 1972, and on bringing attention to the prison conditions. Films of the 1970s New German Cinema, too, concentrated on the domestic landscape, presenting, on the one hand, the effects of the repressive laws and surveillance Research for this chapter was supported by an appointment as a postdoctoral fellow at the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin (2006–2007) and as a summer fellow at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (Center for Contemporary Research), Potsdam (2009), which funded research carried out at the Volker Schlöndorff Archiv, Deutsche Filmarchiv, Frankfurt am Main. Additionally, this chapter draws on an interview I  conducted with Volker Schlöndorff on September 6, 2007, at his home, and an interview that I conducted with Inge Viett on September 12, 2007. Previous versions were presented as guest lectures at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam (2010); Rice University (2010); Wellesley College (2010); Haverford College (2009); the University of California at Santa Cruz (2008); Columbia University (2007); the University of California at Los Angeles (2007); the Freie Universität (2007); and the Humboldt University in Berlin (2006); and as conference papers at the German Studies Association (2006, 2009). I  thank the 2006–2007 cohort of fellows of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies; and Hanno Balz, Rob Eshelman, Jaimey Fisher, Brad Prager, and Yves Winter for their useful feedback on earlier versions of this chapter or conversations that contributed to its arguments. Unless otherwise indicated, translations throughout this chapter are my own.

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systems implemented over the course of the decade, discussed in Chapter 3, and, on the other hand, the alternative political trajectories of other leftists, discussed in Chapter  4, as they focused on labor struggles and women’s rights as well as on other methods of political organizing, be it through nonviolent direct action, such as protests, demonstrations, and sit-ins; or through political parties and the “long march through the institutions,” ballot initiatives, and legislative reform. Nonetheless, the international relations of the Red Army Faction or other West German terrorist organizations had not ceased to exist. On April 24, 1975, six members of the RAF’s second generation,1 referring to themselves as Kommando Holger Meins, seized the West German embassy in Stockholm, Sweden. The group took Ambassador Dietrich Stoecher and twelve other embassy employees hostage, demanding that twentysix imprisoned RAF members be freed, and threatening that the building would be blown up if their demands were not met. They also stipulated that police maintain a distance. When police disregarded the latter condition, West German military attaché Baron Andreas von Mirbach, and economic attaché Heinz Hillegaart were assassinated. The West German government was keen to avoid a continuation of these tactics. Peter Lorenz (CDU), candidate for mayor of West-Berlin, had just been kidnapped two months prior by the June 2 Movement, which successfully negotiated the release of six imprisoned RAF members.2 Many of those released subsequently rejoined armed struggle groups and carried out further actions.3 Thus, the government of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (SPD), to the great chagrin of the Swedish government, refused to negotiate with the terrorists involved in the Stockholm siege. Subsequently, a series of violent explosions shook the building as a result of a grenade dropped by RAF member Ulrich Wessel. The explosion killed him and the fire it set off inflicted serious burn wounds on RAF member Siegfried Hausner. After the explosion and fire, police stormed the embassy and arrested the terrorists and flew them to West Germany. 1

The six RAF members were Karl-Heinz Dellwo, Siegfried Hausner, Hanna Krabbe, Bernd Rössner, Lutz Taufer, and Ulrich Wessel. See also Karl-Heinz Dellwo, Das Projektil sind wir: Der Aufbruch einer Generation, die RAF und die Kritik der Waffen (Hamburg: Nautilus, 2007). Karl-Heinz Dellwo, Lutz Taufer, and Knut Folkers were among those who declared a moratorium on violence in 1992, which helped bring about the end of the RAF. Rössner was released in 1994; Dellwo and Taufer in 1995; and Krabbe in 1996. Taufer moved to Uruguay and then Brazil, returning to Germany in 2012. Lutz Taufer, Über Grenzen: Vom Untergrund in die Favela (Berlin: Assoziation A, 2017). 2 Ralf Reinders and Ronald Fritzsch, “Die Lorenzentführung,” Die Bewegung 2. Juni. Gespräche über Haschrebellen, Lorenzentführung, Knast (Berlin:  ID Verlag, 1995), 61–114; Inge Viett, Nie war ich furchtloser (Berlin: Nautilus, 1997), 124–41. 3 The members whose release was demanded included the following persons:  Horst Mahler, who turned down his release; Verena Becker, Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, Ingrid Siepmann, Rolf Heißler, and Rolf Pohle. The following June 2 Movement members were sentenced for the action: Ralf Reinders, Ronald Fritzsch, Gerald Klöpper, Andreas Vogel, and Till Meyer.

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Hausner eventually received treatment but died. The four surviving arrested terrorists were given life sentences on July 20, 1977.4 In 1975 another action took place that underscored that West German groups were not only active outside their homeland but also collaborating with terrorist organizations from other countries. On December 21, 1975, six militants attacked the meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in Vienna, Austria, where eleven oil ministers were in attendance, and took seventy persons hostage.5 The terrorists included Illich Ramírez Sanchez, better known as “Carlos the Jackal”; Hans-Joachim Klein, involved with the Revolutionary Cells6; Gabriele “Nada” KröcherTiedemann, involved with the June 2 Movement7; and three others. The militants demanded an airplane be made available to them, so they could fly out with their hostages and ransom money, which the Austrian government granted. Three persons died at the OPEC summit: an Austrian police office, an Iraqi security officer, and Yusuf al-Azmarly, a Libyan delegate. Two people were killed by Kröcher-Tiedemann who had been released after the Lorenz kidnapping. The terrorists then took forty-two hostages and flew to Algeria. Eventually, all remaining hostages were released.8 The following year, the West German terrorist groups carried out yet another action that underscored their international relations. On June 27, 1976, two members of the Revolutionary Cells and two of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked an Air France airplane

4 See also the made-for-television documentary Stockholm 75 (2003), dir. David Aronowitsch, Hysteria Films. 5 Ralf Reinders and Ronald Fritzsch, Die Bewegung 2. Juni; Der Blues: Gesammelte Texte der Bewegung 2. Juni (Dortmund: Schwarzer Stern, 2001), 177. 6 Klein had been a member of the RZ since 1974. In 1977, he went underground in France, sending his revolver to Spiegel with a letter announcing that he was ceasing involvement in terrorist acts. See Hans-Joachim Klein, “Ich habe genug angestellt,” Spiegel, May 9, 1977, http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-40915611.html. See also Hans-Joachim Klein, Rückkehr in die Menschlichkeit. Appell eines ausgestiegenen Terroristen, Nachwort von Daniel CohnBendit (Reinbek:  Rowohlt, 1980); Memoirs of an International Terrorist: Conversations with Hans Joachim Klein (Minneapolis: Soil of Liberty, 1978); and My Life as a Terrorist: The Story of Hans-Joachim Klein, dir. Alexander Oey, Hessischer Rundfunk, 2006. In 1998, Klein was arrested and first details about the RZ were revealed. For more information about both the Revolutionäre Zellen and the Rote Zora, see also Die Früchte des Zorns. Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der Revolutionären Zellen und der Roten Zora (Berlin: ID Achiv, 1993). 7 See also Peter Hein, Stadtguerilla, bewaffneter Kampf in der BRD und Westberlin:  Eine Bibliographie; mit den ersten programmatischen Erklärungen und Interviews der Gruppen:  RAF, Bewegung 2.  Juni, Revolutionäre Zellen und Rote Zora (Berlin:  Edition ID Archiv, 1993); Gabriele Rollnik and Daniel Dubbe, Keine Angst vor Niemand. Über die Siebziger, die Bewegung 2. Juni und die RAF (Berlin:  Edition Nautilus, 1994); Reinders and Fritzsch, Die Bewegung 2. Juni. 8 On the fears that this attack unleashed about the international relations of West German terrorist groups, see also “Kontakt mit Kadern,” Spiegel, January 5, 1976, http://www.spiegel. de/spiegel/print/d-41330837.html.

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flying from Tel Aviv with an intended destination of Paris and carrying 248 passengers. They diverted the plane, after stops in Athens, Greece, and Benghazi, Libya, to Entebbe, Uganda; held the passengers hostage; and demanded $5 million as ransom and the release of 53 Palestinian and proPalestinian militants, 40 of whom were jailed in Israel and 13 of whom were in four additional countries. Upon arrival in Entebbe, passengers were divided into Israelis and non-Israelis. Thereafter, 105 of them, mainly Israelis, were held hostage. Two members of the Revolutionary Cells, Wilfried Böse and Brigitte Kuhlmann, were involved. On July 4, 1976, Israeli Defense Forces stormed the plane and Böse and Kuhlmann as well as the PFLP members were shot and killed.9 On November 9, 1977, the June 2 Movement carried out an action in a foreign but this time neighboring country, kidnapping the Austrian industrialist Walter Palmers in Vienna, Austria. They demanded a ransom of 31  million Austrian schillings. The demand was met and Palmers was released after four days. Two members of the June 2 Movement were arrested in late November and later sentenced.10 As these four attacks show, the three main terrorist groups active in West Germany during the 1970s—the Red Army Faction, Revolutionary Cells, and June 2 Movement—all worked together with other international terrorist organizations. Collaborations mainly took place with the PFLPExternal Operations (PFLP-EO), itself having ramped up its activity when Wadi Haddad decided to go against the PFLP and to continue to carry out international attacks. The PFLP-EO also coordinated attacks with the Japanese Red Army (JRA).11 9

The hijacking appears in a number of docudramas, including Victory at Entebbe (1976), dir. Marvin Chomsky, ABC (original airing)/Warner (distribution); Raid on Entebbe (1976), dir. Irvin Kershner, NBC (original airing)/Thorn EMI Video (distribution); Mivtsa Yonatan (1978, Operation Thunderbolt), dir. Menahem Golan, MGM/UA. This event also appears in Carlos (2010), dir. Olivier Assayas. See also Annette Vowinckel, “Der kurze Weg nach Entebbe oder die Verlängerung der deutschen Geschichte in den Nahen Osten,” Zeithistorische Forschung 1.2 (2004):  236–54, http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/16126041-Vowinckel-22004; and Wolfgang Kraushaar, ‘Wann endlich beginnt bei Euch der Kampf gegen die heilige Kuh Israel?’ München 1970:  Über die antisemitischen Wurzeln des deutschen Terrorismus (Hamburg: Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, 2011). As Charity Scribner has argued, the anti-Semitism of some among the 1960s social movements and 1970s armed struggle groups has, until recently, been overlooked by scholarship on the era. Charity Scribner, After the Red Army Faction: Gender, Culture and Militancy (New York: Columbia UP, 2015), 54–6 and 68. 10 Gabriele Rollnik and Daniel Dubbe, Keine Angst vor Niemand. Über die Siebziger, die Bewegung 2. Juni und die RAF (Berlin: Edition Nautilus, 1994), 75–9. 11 In 1972, the Japanese Red Army and the PFLP carried out an attack at Ben Gurion International Airport, then named the Lod Airport. The groups killed twenty persons in what has since been referred to as the Lod Airport massacre. For more information about the PFLP, Wadi Haddad, and the response of Israel and in particular of Mossad, its intelligence wing, see also Aaron Klein, Striking Back:  The 1972 Munich Olympics and Israel’s Deadly Response (New York: Random House, 2007).

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The JRA carried out two attacks in Western Europe during the 1970s. On July 20, 1973, it hijacked a Japan Airlines flight scheduled to fly from Amsterdam to Tokyo, and diverted it, landing in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. It demanded the release of Kozo Okamoto, who, along with two other members of the JRA, had been involved in the May 30, 1972, attack at the Lod Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel, and was imprisoned in Israel. When the Israeli government refused to meet the demand, the hijackers flew on, eventually landing in Benghazi, Libya. There, the JRA released the crew and passengers and the airplane was blown up. On September 13, 1974, the JRA stormed the French consulate in The Hague, Netherlands. French Ambassador Jacques Senard and ten others were taken hostage. The JRA then demanded the release of its imprisoned member Yatsuka Furuya; a ransom of $300,000; and that an airplane be made available. The monies and an airplane were made available; and Yatsuka Furuya was released. The terrorists and their hostages flew to Syria, where they set their hostages free.12 Finally, the hijacking that formed part of the events of the German Autumn in 1977 was coordinated with the PFLP, and thus also forms part of the international collaboration among terrorists during the 1970s. From 1985 to 1987, the Red Army Faction also coordinated attacks with the Action Directe of France, which was active from 1979 to 1987.13 While New German Cinema of this decade engaged domestic concerns related to or debates set off by the RAF, as discussed in Chapter 3, and explored alternative political paths taken domestically, as discussed in Chapter 4, it did not focus on the international context substantively. After the end of New German Cinema—generally dated to 1982, the year of Fassbinder’s death, and the year after Margarethe von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane (1981), discussed in Chapter  4—cinematic engagements with the RAF, too, more or less ended until a resurgence in films about the group began in 2000. Only with rare exception did films produced for cinematic release—in contrast to made-for-television films, which were therefore also more likely be films known exclusively to a domestic audience—between 1982 and 2000 engage the topic of the RAF. Yet after the German Autumn of 1977, attacks continued until the group disbanded in 1998. After the détente in the Cold War during the 1970s— between the United States and China after Nixon met with Mao Tse Tung in Beijing in February of 1972, and between the United States and the Soviet Union after Nixon met with Brezhnev in Moscow in May of 1972, and 12

William Farrell, Blood and Rage: The Story of the Japanese Red Army (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1990), 162. The recent docudrama Carlos engages these events. Carlos (2010), dir. Olivier Assayas, IFC Films, Criterion. 13 For more information, see also Michael Y. Dartnell, Action Directe: Ultra-Left Terrorism in France, 1979–1987 (New York: Routledge, 1995).

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paralleled by the policy of Ostpolitik between West and East Germany—the Cold War witnessed a new escalation in the 1980s, especially between 1979 and 1985. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher (Conservative Party) was elected prime minister of the United Kingdom; in 1980, Ronald Reagan (Republican) was elected president of the United States; and in 1982, Helmut Kohl (CDU) was elected chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. But the shift in policy started already under President Jimmy Carter (Democrat). As a result of the 1979 invasion by the Soviet Union (SU) of Afghanistan, Carter announced a boycott of the US participation in the 1980 Olympics, which Moscow was hosting. The Soviet Union responded by boycotting participation in the 1984 Olympics, which Los Angeles was hosting. Over the course of the 1980s, as the SU-Afghanistan War raged, the United States increased pressure by using military force as part of the Reagan Doctrine and Operation Cyclone. Reagan announced that the Pershing missiles stationed in West Germany in the 1960s would be replaced with new Pershing II missiles in 1983. As a result of this escalation in the Cold War after 1979, the RAF’s attacks mainly focused on US military bases and on NATO during the first half of the 1980s. These attacks included bombings of US military bases, such as on the US Air Force base in Ramstein, headquarters for the US Air Force in Europe, on August 31, 1981; and on the US Air Base in Frankfurt on August 8, 1985, which included the murder of US soldier Edward Pimental. Additionally, the RAF attacked NATO sites and carried out assassination attempts, such as on General Alexander Haig, supreme allied commander of Europe, that is, of NATO, on June 25, 1979, and on Frederick Kroesen, commander of NATO’s Central Army Group, on September 15, 1981. During the latter half of the 1980s, the RAF also attacked West German diplomats and business figures. These attacks include the assassination of the West German diplomat Gerold von Braunmühl on October 10, 1986; the attempted assassination of West German minister of economics Hans Tietmeyer on September 20, 1988; the assassination of Alfred Herrhausen, head of the Board of Directors of Deutsche Bank, on November 30, 198914; and last, after reunification on April 1, 1991, the assassination of Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, head of Treuhand, which privatized entities previously collectively held in the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany), such as companies and houses. The RAF also carried out sniper attacks and were involved in shootouts with the police or border guards. On April 10, 1992, the RAF published a statement declaring that it would henceforth stop its escalation.15 Then, on April 20, 1998, the RAF 14

On this assassination and the shooting of RAF member Wolfgang Grams, see Andres Veiel’s documentary Black Box BRD (2000). For a fictional rendition, see also Christoph Hein, In seiner frühen Kindheit ein Garten (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005). 15 “An alle, die auf der Suche nach Wegen sind, wie menschenwürdiges Leben hier und weltweit an ganz konkreten Fragen organisiert und durchgesetzt werden kann,” Rote Armee

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announced its dissolution.16 It remains unclear to what extent the East German government was involved in the attacks, particularly of the second and third generation.17 While it falls outside the scope of this study to engage the topic, it forms an important question to consider also vis-à-vis Volker Schlöndorff’s Die Stille nach dem Schuss (The Legend of Rita, 2000), which will be discussed in this chapter. As to the films, how does one account for a gap of almost twenty years without a major cinematic production about the group, despite its continued attacks? How does one account for a resurgence in films engaging the RAF starting in 2000? How do the films released beginning in 2000 differ from the previously discussed films of New German Cinema? In content? In form? What role does the lapsed time play? In interventions in the discourses about the era, looking back? The answers to these questions mark a decisive caesura in historical and cinematic narratives about the Red Army Faction, that is, in the cultural memory of the Red Army Faction. In terms of film history, pivotal shifts took place in the film industry concurrent to the history of the RAF’s first generation, that is, between 1970 and 1977. On April 18, 1971, thirteen directors cofounded Filmverlag der Autoren, a film distribution company, to finance and distribute their films after continual frustrations with the commercial orientation of the state-funded system. It limited, they argued, both the political content and the aesthetic form of their work. In 1974, the year Fassbinder joined, the Filmverlag focused predominately on funding and distributing three types of films: debut films; foreign films, which were often experimental; and New German Cinema. Filmverlag der Autoren distributed films discussed in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, such as Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975), Von Trotta’s Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1978) and Marianne and Juliane (1981), and the collectively directed Germany in Autumn (1978). In February of 1977, Rudolf Augstein, publisher of the newsweekly Der Spiegel, joined the board, buying 55 percent of the company’s shares. During his tenure, in what became referred to as the “Augstein era,” films produced by Filmverlag were to be commercially viable and less political. As a result of Augstein’s appointment, numerous members, Fassbinder among them, left the Filmverlag. Indicative of the new direction were comedies such as Fraktion:  Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF (Berlin:  ID-Verlag, 1997), 410-–4. Here, 412. 16 “Die Stadtguerrilla in Form der RAF ist nun Geschichte,” Reuters, April 20, 1998. 17 On the second and third generation, see also Tobias Wunschik, Baader-Meinhofs Kinder. Die Zweite Generation der RAF (Opladen:  Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997); “Aufstieg und Zerfall. Die zweite Generation der RAF,” in Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus, ed. Wolfgang Kraushaar, vol. 2 (Hamburg:  Hamburger Edition, 2006), 472–88; Tobias Wunschik and Alexander Straßner, Die dritte Generation der Roten Armee Fraktion (Wiesbaden:  VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2005).

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Theo gegen den Rest der Welt (Theo against the Rest of the World, 1980), directed by Peter Bringmann; and Doris Dörrie’s Männer . . . (Men . . ., 1985). Wim Wenders wound up so frustrated with changes in the company that, embroiled in a contentious lawsuit over Paris, Texas (1985), he penned an article titled “The Filmverlag against the Authors” (1985).18 Augstein sold his shares in 1986. Another factor added to changes in the West German film industry. In the 1980s, many influential directors, such as Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz, turned to television. In 1984, the first part of Reitz’s eleven part madefor-television series Heimat—Eine deutsche Chronik (Heimat—A Chronicle of Germany) aired. It eventually formed part of Reitz’s Heimat Trilogy. In 1987, Kluge founded the Development Company for Television Program (DCTP), which produces made-for-television films as well as investigatory segments in cooperation with various venues. During the 1980s and 1990s, only two pivotal films were produced about the RAF:  Stammheim (1986), directed by Reinhard Hauff; and the madefor-television Todesspiel (Death Game, 1997), directed by Heinrich Breloer. Stefan Aust wrote the screenplay for Stammheim. The film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival on January 30, 1986, and screened at six other film festivals, including the Toronto International Film Festival. It was picked up for distribution in West Germany by Future Film, which Theo Hinz had founded after leaving Filmverlag der Autoren. But the film was not picked up for US distribution and thus did not have a broad US audience. Death Game was a made-for-television docudrama funded by the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR, West German Broadcast Network) and likewise not picked up for US distribution. Thus, unlike the aforementioned and subsequent films, these two films did not have a broader impact on the discourse surrounding the RAF or on the cultural memory of the RAF during the 1980s and 1990s, especially outside of West Germany. Historical reasons account for and contribute to the twenty-year gap in films produced about the RAF as well. Many members of the first generation, especially the figures that were, and still are, so iconically associated with the group, such as Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, and Meins, were no longer alive. After the events associated with the German Autumn, less was known about the members of the second and third generation. Finally, by the late 1980s, events associated with reunification took center stage.

18

Wim Wenders, “The Filmverlag against the Authors (1985),” in West German Filmmakers on Film, ed. Eric Rentschler (New York:  Holmes and Meier, 1988), 36–8. “For an account of the Filmverlag der Autoren in the mideighties,” Rentschler writes, “see two articles by Helmut H. Diederichs, ‘ “Der ungeliebte Mäzen: Der “‘Filmverlag der Autoren”‘ seit der Übernahme durch Rudolf Augstein,’ ” epd Film (September 1985)  22–26; and “ ‘“Futura Filmverlag”‘  – Augstein hat verkauft epd Film’ (October 1985): 9.” Rentschler 38. See also Joe Hembus, Der deutsche Film kann gar nicht besser sein (Munich: Rogner and Bernhard, 1981), 254.

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Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita can be read as taking the first steps in what marks a new chapter in the cultural memory of the RAF. Schlöndorff’s films of the New German Cinema era—from The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975),19 codirected with Von Trotta, to his contribution to Germany in Autumn20—show an abiding interest in the RAF. In The Legend of Rita, Schlöndorff returned to the subject of the RAF but from two new angles, which would become hallmarks in subsequent cinematic representations of the Red Army Faction: his film marked a temporal and geographic shift. Previously, all films that had engaged the subject of terrorism or debates set off by or related to it—regardless of whether the films were fictional features, documentaries, or docudramas—had intervened in debates contemporaneous to the film. By contrast, Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita and all subsequent films looked back on what, at that point, had become an historical era. This fact resulted in part from the Red Army Faction’s dissolution in 1998. That is, subsequent films would de facto have to look back on the era, since they would all be released after the RAF disbanded. In addition to this temporal shift evidenced by Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita and subsequent films, the newer films also manifest a spatial shift, considering the West German terrorism of the 1970s and its international relations. Recent films about terrorism of the 1970s consider the global framework and relationships to a much greater extent—be they films by German directors and focused mostly but not exclusively on West Germany, such as the Oscar-nominated docudrama Baader Meinhof Complex (2008), directed by Uli Edel,21 or Christian Petzold’s fictional feature Die innere Sicherheit (The State I  Am In, 2000)22; or by international directors, such the French madefor-television biopic Carlos (2010), directed by Olivier Assayas23 and

19

Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, 1975), dirs Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, Bioskop, Criterion Collection. 20 Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn, 1978), dirs Alf Brustellin, Hans Peter Cloos, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, Maximiliane Mainka, Edgar Reitz, Katja Rupé, Volker Schlöndorff, Peter Schubert, and Bernhard Sinkel. Filmverlag der Autoren; US Distributor: New Line Cinemas. 21 Baader Meinhof Complex (2008), dir. Uli Edel. Constantin. Baader Meinhof Complex includes numerous sequences that engage the international framework of terrorism during the 1970s and 1980s, including meetings in Baghdad, Iraq; and Aden, South Yemen. See also Christina Gerhardt, “The Baader Meinhof Complex,” Film Quarterly 63.2 (Winter 2009–10): 60–1. 22 Die innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In, 2000), dir. Christian Petzold, Arte. See Chapter 4 for a more detailed analysis of this film. At the beginning of the film, the protagonists, who—it is implied—were involved with terrorism in West Germany, are on the run in Portugal in the 1990s, intending to head to Brazil, plans that are foiled when their passports and money are stolen and they are forced to return to Germany to ask for help from former comrades. 23 Carlos (2010), dir. Olivier Assayas, IFC Films. Carlos moves through too many geographic spaces to tally up but they include Paris, France; The Hague, Netherlands; Amman, Jordan; Beirut, Lebanon; and Tripoli, Libya. On the contributions this film makes to revising narratives

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the Japanese docudrama United Red Army (2008), directed by Koji Wakamatsu.24 Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita marks a first step in this direction by considering East Germany. Well before Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Oscar award–winning Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006),25 The Legend of Rita sought to provide a candid look not only at East Germany but also at the Ministry of State Security (known in common parlance as the “Stasi”).26 Thus, in contrast to Schlöndorff’s earlier two films that engage the subject of terrorism and intervened in contemporary debates about politics and media representations, The Legend of Rita looks back on history and begins to consider the international relationships. Yet it does so by focusing most intently on West and East Germany, in stark contrast to other contemporary films about 1970s terrorism. Thematically, Schlöndorff weaves together a narrative about two of its more ideologically driven elements:  the RAF for former West Germany and the Stasi for former East Germany. Stylistically, The Legend of Rita offers a postreunification collaborative effort that contrasts starkly both with previous and contemporary films about the RAF.

Schlöndorff ’s The Legend of Rita: Reunifying East and West German History In its stylistics, the film exhibits what Lutz Koepnick, writing about postreunification cinema, dubbed Germany’s “heritage cinema.”27 Koepnick adapted the term “heritage cinema” from British cinema and applied it to postreunification German cinema’s depictions of earlier historical eras, focusing in his article specifically on depictions of the Holocaust. In British cinema the term “heritage cinema” originally referred to late-twentieth-century period pieces or historical films set in pre–Second World War England, dating back decades and centuries; depicting the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie; showing stately homes and the British or colonial countryside; and often adapting classic British literature ranging from Shakespearean tragedies

about armed struggle groups active in the 1970s and 1980s, cf. Christina Gerhardt, “Carlos,” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 4.2 (December 2011): 201–204. 24 United Red Army (2008), dir. Koji Wakamatsu, Lorber Films. The United Red Army is set in locations ranging from Japan to the Middle East. 25 Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006), dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Arte. 26 Die Stille nach dem Schuss (The Legend of Rita, 2000), dir. Volker Schlöndorff, Arte/ Babelsberg Film. US. Distribution: Kino Video. 27 Lutz Koepnick, “Heritage Cinema and the Holocaust in the 1990s,” New German Critique 87 (2002): 47–82.

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to Jane Austen novels.28 “Easy to digest,” Koepnick writes, “the heritage film envisions history, including its violent struggles and repressions, from a consensus oriented perspective, one that can gratify diverse audiences and offers something to everyone.”29 The Legend of Rita, as will be discussed in what follows, fulfills this definition of heritage film, presenting both the RAF and the Stasi in an “easy to digest” style. Furthermore, Koepnick, by defining heritage cinema as predicated on a “consensus oriented perspective,” argues that heritage films participate in what Eric Rentschler just prior had called the German “cinema of consensus.” Rentschler states, “Quite empathically, the most prominent directors of the post-wall era aim to please, which is to say that they consciously solicit a new German consensus.”30 Postreunification German heritage cinema tended to depict in historical dramas one of the three dominant historical and political events that took place in Germany in the twentieth century (1) the Nazi era and the Holocaust; (2) West Germany and terrorism; and (3) East Germany and its Ministry of State Security.31 The Legend of Rita can be read as an example of a heritage film that seeks to produce consensus, as Eric Rentschler put it. It is unique in being a post-wall West-East German collaboration; in being a film that looks back on West Germany of the 1970s and East Germany of the 1980s; and in trying to appeal to both West and East Germans. Schlöndorff’s return to the subject of the RAF in The Legend of Rita marks at once a thematic continuity with and also a stylistic shift from his earlier New German Cinema. Thematically, Schlöndorff continues his focus on the RAF.32 Stylistically, as will be discussed in great detail, Schlöndorff opts for techniques associated with heritage cinema. Additionally, Schlöndorff’s film offers a temporal and spatial shift, concentrating on an aspect of the RAF’s history and one that has hitherto been underrepresented in recent films on the RAF33 and underexamined by RAF scholars as well: in October of 1980 28 Andrew Higson, “Re-presenting the National Past:  Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film,” in Fires Were Started:  British Cinema and Thatcherism (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 109–29; and Andrew Higson, “The Heritage Film and British Cinema,” in Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, ed. Andrew Higson (London:  Cassell, 1996), 232–48; and Richard Dyer, “Heritage Cinema in Europe,” in Encyclopedia of European Cinema, ed. Ginette Vincendeau (New York: Facts on File, 1995). 29 Koepnick 47–82. Here, 78. 30 Eric Rentschler, “From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus,” in Cinema and Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (London:  Routledge, 2000), 260– 77. Here, 264. 31 Eric Rentschler, “The Lives of Others: A History of Heritage and the Rhetoric of Consensus,” in The Lives of Others and Contemporary German Film:  A Companion, ed. Paul Cooke (Walter de Gruyter, 2013), 241–60. 32 See also Hans-Bernhard Moeller and George Lellis, “The Legend of Rita and ‘The Perfect Soldier’ ”, in Volker Schlöndorff’s Cinema: Adaptation, Politics and the “Movie-Appropriate” (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2002), 309–18. 33 Films about the RAF released after 2000 all focus on West Germany. These post-reunification films include the documentaries Black Box BRD (2001) by Andres Veiel, and Starbuck

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the East German Ministry of State Security took in eight members of the RAF’s “second generation” and two more between 1980 and 1982.34 They were given new identities and life histories. The Stasi’s word for a fabricated past identity was Legende, hence the word “legend” in the English title of Schlöndorff’s film. In an apparent contradiction of terms that was telling of post-reunification dynamics, the newly established German state forced the former East German Ministry of State Security to “extradite” these ten persons.35 Many of the former RAF members subsequently served prison sentences in the reunified Germany. The majority of Schlöndorff’s film is set in former East Germany and is thus as much about conceptualizations of former East Germany and the Stasi as it is about West Germany and the Red Army Faction. The film opens with a bank robbery, which introduces the group’s core members and their actions. Later, the main character, Rita Vogt, is detained for carrying a loaded gun as she travels across the border from East Germany to West Germany through former East Berlin’s Schönefeld airport. In the interview room, her troubles are compounded: a man who tells her he is named Erwin Hull says he knows she is the wanted terrorist Rita Vogt, not the person named on her false passport. Erwin does not arrest Rita for carrying the loaded gun or for being a wanted terrorist. Instead he tells her that she may cross the border whenever she wants so long as the East German government is informed. Subsequently, Rita and cohorts break her partner, Andi, a member of the group, out of prison; during this episode, a lawyer is shot and later dies. The group travels to East Germany and meets with Erwin, enlisting his help to hide the group for a bit, so that they can avoid arrest by the police for springing someone out of jail and killing a lawyer. The group begins a life on the run, traveling to Beirut for training and then to Paris, where Rita is chased and cornered by a police officer, whom she shoots and kills. The group travels back to East Germany to see if the Ministry of State Security can help them travel undetected to Angola, Mozambique, or Lebanon, each of which was involved in a civil war at the time that had begun in 1975 in Angola and Lebanon and in 1977 in Mozambique. They are told they can remain in East Germany— provided with new identities under assumed names and provided they do Holger Meins (2002) by Gerd Conradt; as well as the fictional feature film Baader (2002) by Christoph Roth. 34 For a detailed account, see Michael Müller and Andreas Kanonenberg, Die RAF-StasiConnection (Berlin:  Rowohlt, 1992). See also Tobias Wunschik, “Das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit und der Terrorismus in Deutschland,” in Diktaturen in Europa im 20. Jahrhundert – Der Fall DDR, ed. Heiner Timmermann (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1996), 289–302; John Schmeidel, “My Enemy’s Enemy: Twenty Years of Cooperation between West Germany’s Red Army Faction and the GDR Ministry of State Security,” Intelligence and National Security 8.4 (October 1993): 59–72. 35 People can only be extradited from one country to another country, not within a country.

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not undertake any terrorist activity or have any contact with one another— or travel to Beirut, Lebanon. Rita alone chooses to remain in East Germany; the rest of the group travels to Beirut. These scenarios form the backdrop to the film’s central focus: Rita’s life in East Germany. She works first in a textile factory, where she befriends Tatjana, a young alcoholic woman, on whom coworkers relentlessly pick. While the two visit Tatjana’s family, a West German newscast on television announces that Rita’s former boyfriend, Andi, and his new partner, have been shot and killed at the French-German border.36 The police reiterate that they are still on the lookout for Rita and her former cohorts, revealing information about a scar she has. This scar leads to her identification at work. She notifies the Ministry of State Security that she has concerns about her detection and Erwin consequently moves her to a new location under a new name. There she meets a young man, Jochen, who eventually proposes to her. She accepts and soon thereafter becomes pregnant. They intend to move to Moscow, since Jochen has been offered a job transfer. Rita meets with and asks permission from her Stasi liaison, Erwin, to move to Moscow. He denies her permission to move and tells her she does not need to keep the child. Rita reveals her prior identity as a terrorist to her fiancé to explain why she cannot go with him. He is mortified to learn that she participated in armed struggle and leaves her.37 Toward the end of the film, Germany is reunified. The new German government asks to have Rita extradited. Erwin refuses to participate and drives Rita to a highway on-ramp where she can try to escape. She catches a ride with a motorcyclist and then steals his motorcycle when they stop at a rest area, speeds through a border control, and is fatally shot. Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita not only brings together former West and East German history—the RAF and the Stasi—thematically, it was also collaboratively produced by former West and East Germans. For example, the screenplay for The Legend of Rita was officially coauthored. Yet as Schlöndorff puts it in an interview with Cineaste: “this is really Kohlhaase’s screenplay.”38 Wolfgang Kohlhaase is a veteran screenwriter of the East German Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA, the East German stateowned film studio), who has worked with many of East Germany’s bestknown directors, such as Gerhard Klein on Berlin—Ecke Schönhauser 36

West German news, esp. ARD, could be received in most of East Germany, except for a region in the northeast, near Greifswald, and in the southeast, near Dresden, which was dubbed “Tal der Ahnungslosen” (the valley of the clueless). 37 In reality, former RAF member Susanne Albrecht, one of the three women on whom the figure of Rita is based, her husband Claus Becker, and their child did move to the Soviet Union, where Becker, who was a physicist, took up a position at a research institution in Dubna close to Moscow. 38 Gary Crowdus and Richard Porton, “Coming to Terms with the German Past: An Interview with Volker Schlöndorff,” Cineaste 26.2 (2001): 18–23. Here, page 21.

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(Berlin, Schönhauser Corner, 1957)39; Konrad Wolf on Solo Sunny (1979),40 which he also codirected; as well as Frank Beyer on Der Aufenthalt (Held for Questioning, 1983); and, more recently, with Andreas Dresen, who grew up in East Germany, on Sommer vorm Balkon (Summer in Berlin, 2005). From 1992 to 1997 Schlöndorff worked as head of the Filmstudio Babelsberg (now Studio Babelsberg), which replaced the DEFA studio in former East Germany, but Schlöndorff and Kohlhaase had met earlier in 1990 and began work on the project immediately. Shortly after reunification, both had read in the newspapers that the Stasi had given asylum to ten former West German terrorists.41 Kohlhaase started interviewing some of these former RAF members, such as Susanne Albrecht, Silke Maier-Witt, and Inge Viett, who had been given asylum in East Germany. By 1992, they had finished the screenplay, but it was not released until 1999 because, according to Schlöndorff, “no one wanted to hear about East Germany anymore.”42 Since the early 1990s, when the film was placed on hold, interest not only in the RAF but also in East Germany had grown, and it had grown not only domestically in Germany but also internationally, to which the widespread popularity of films such as Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin! (2003) and Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others, which won the 2006 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film, attests. In The Legend of Rita Schlöndorff drew on the expertise of various former members of East German production crews, in order to depict former East Germany in an historically authentic manner through various techniques typically associated with heritage cinema, in terms of how lighting, props, and music were used. While it could be argued that the attention paid to authenticity or creating a realism effect manifesting in The Legend of Rita reworks and comments on GDR socialist or DEFA realism in the hands of screenwriter Kohlhaase, who was associated with the tradition of DEFA realism and its highpoint through work with filmmakers such as Gerhard Klein,43 it can also be said to take up the heritage film, familiar from British cinema studies. Andrew Higson has argued, “The narratives of these films are typically slow moving and episodic . . . The concern for character, place, atmosphere and milieu tends to be more pronounced than dramatic, goal-directed action.”44 Techniques 39

Kohlhaase authored the screenplays of six films directed by Gerhard Klein. Kohlhaase authored the screenplays of four films directed by Konrad Wolf. Konrad Wolf’s brother, Markus Wolf, was the head of East Germany’s Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA, the Ministry for Reconnaissance), the foreign intelligence service, from 1952 to 1986. 41 See the special report “Eine perverse Kombination – Terroristen-Hort DDR: Stasi & RAF,” Spiegel 25, June 18, 1990, 97–103. 42 Crowdus and Porton 20. 43 See also Brigitta Wagner (ed.), DEFA after East Germany (Rochester: Camden House, 2014); Daniela Berghahn, “German Cinema Today,” in Hollywood Behind the Wall: The Cinema of East Germany (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005), 212–56. 44 Andrew Higson, “The Heritage Film and British Cinema,” in Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, ed. Andrew Higson (London: Cassell, 1996), 232–48. 40

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mentioned by Higson that play a key role in heritage films and in creating the sense of place and atmosphere include how character, lighting, and props are used. To be sure, these three aspects of mise-en-scène contribute intently to The Legend of Rita’s depiction of East Germany. Schlöndorff’s casting could be read for its attempts to create an aura of historical authenticity traditionally associated with heritage cinema. For example, although Schlöndorff had worked with established and wellknown German actors, in The Legend of Rita he preferred to use actors who had not previously worked in films. Bibiana Beglau, who plays the main character, had never acted in a film before but solely in theater, which is where Schlöndorff first encountered her. Similarly, Nadja Uhl, who plays the supporting role of Tatjana, had never appeared previously in a film produced for cinematic release but solely in theater or made-for-television productions.45 Additionally, Schlöndorff states, “all of the West German parts are played by former West Germans and the East German parts are played by former East Germans.”46 He said that it was not a deliberate decision in the casting but when people came to audition for parts, it turned out that way. Schlöndorff accounts for this, stating that “East Germans know how to produce the dialectics and body language of East Germans better and that West Germans know how to produce the dialectics and the body language of West Germans better.”47 In addition to the casting, natural lighting plays a key role in heritage cinema and in The Legend of Rita, conveying vividly life in former East Germany. As Schlöndorff said, “I wanted him [Höfer] to do the lighting because I  didn’t want again this Cold War lighting where everything is grey. I  did not want to embellish it but to give it an authentic feeling.”48 Accordingly, the lighting was natural in many sequences. The sets created by production designer Susanne Hopf also sought to create an historically accurate semblance typical of East Germany during the 1980s.49 The opening shots of the Stasi office—where Rita’s Stasi contact, Erwin Hull, and his boss, known simply as “Genosse General” (comrade 45

As mentioned in Chapter 3, Nadja Uhl came to greater attention in 2008, when she played second generation RAF member and leader Brigitte Mohnhaupt in Uli Edel’s Oscar and Globe Award nominated Baader Meinhof Complex (2008) and flight attendant Gabriele Dillmann, who had worked on the hijacked “Landshut,” in Roland Suso Richter’s made-for-television drama Mogadischu (2008), which focused attention on the hijacking. 46 Crowdus and Porton 20. 47 Crowdus and Porton 20. Martin Wuttke, who plays what Schlöndorff calls the “secret main character,” forms the exception to both: he had performed in films previously and despite being a former West German is cast in the role of a former East German. 48 Schlöndorff, The Legend of Rita, audio commentary. 49 See also Susanne Hopf’s coauthored book about Plattenbau, pre-fab concrete slab architecture, a style common in and commonly associated with East Germany between the 1950s and 1970s, but also, it must be said, commonly used in West Germany in the post–Second World War reconstruction efforts. Susanne Hopf and Natalja Meier, Plattenbau privat: 60 Interieurs (Berlin:  Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2011). Hopf was also the production designer for

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general), meet—offer the viewers their first sustained glimpse of East Germany in the film. The colors of the Stasi office are muted: Erwin and the general wear brown suits with tan shirts and brown ties. The curtains are yellow-brown, blending in with the pale brown wood paneling. The entire scene contrasts sharply with the style and coloration of the terrorists, who are initially shown mainly clad in jeans and red t-shirts with black sweaters or jackets; later on, Andi is typically shown in suits. Shortly after this meeting in the Stasi office, the film cuts to a scene showing a barbecue that Erwin has organized to discuss the conditions under which the terrorists could be given asylum in East Germany. In this scene, earth tones predominate: olive greens, yellows, tans, and faded lighter browns.50 Similarly, Hopf’s choice of props also strives to convey an authentic aura of East Germany. At the barbecue, the visiting West German guerrillas are offered Radeberger beer from Saxony, Thuringian Bratwurst (sausage), and, beforehand, a shot of vodka. Later, after Rita has moved to East Germany, she shops at a grocery where shelves are filled with standard local staples, such as cabbage, eggs, and vodka. She spends her last savings from West Germany on a Trabant car. In a closing scene, she is smoking East German Club cigarettes. Underscoring the role of the artistic designer for a film, Kohlhaase says: “I repeat, the artistic direction is the most important factor; this goes both for the whole film and the individual scene.”51 Aside from the aforementioned elements, mostly associated with miseen-scène, the film’s on-screen music appears sparingly. As Schlöndorff put it, “No violins for the love scenes and no drums for the chase scene.”52 During the opening bank robbery scene, a non-diegetical whimsical background rendition of the “Internationale” plays as though from a wind-up music box. As the group is planning to spring Andi from prison, the Rolling Stones’s “Street Fighting Man” plays. Aside from this song, most of the music is onscreen. The source of the jazz that accompanies Rita as she snakes down the streets of Paris on a motorcycle turns out—once she’s returned to the group’s apartment—to be someone playing saxophone as he leans out of his neighboring rooftop apartment’s window. In another sequence, Erwin and his assistant sing songs for the terrorist group after many rounds of vodka one night. They are the songs, Erwin says, Sommer vorm Balkon (2005), a film set in Berlin just after reunification, which Dresen directed, for which Kohlhaase wrote the screenplay and in which Uhl starred. 50 In an interview, Henckel von Donnersmarck, who grew up in former West Germany, was asked about how he managed to capture former East Germany so realistically in The Lives of Others. He replied that the film’s use of colors and in particular the decision not to use reds or blues but rather browns was decisive. The Lives of Others (2006), dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Arte, DVD Interview. 51 Wolfgang Kohlhaase, “DEFA:  A Personal View,” in DEFA:  East German Cinema, 1946– 1992, ed. Seán Allan and John Sandford (New York: Berghahn, 1999), 117–30. Here, 130. 52 Schlöndorff, The Legend of Rita, audio commentary.

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that inspired East Germans after the war and among them is “Partisanen von Amur,” a Russian revolutionary song from 1920. Songs performed by East German pop favorites, such as singer Frank Schöbel and the band Silly, either play out of Tatjana’s radio in her apartment or are performed by bands at work parties that Rita attends. And Sting’s “If you love somebody, set them free” plays as Rita and her partner, Jochen, leave a festival. The music, which not only comes from the West but from a British singer, may seem to be an anomaly in a film so dedicated to authentically depicting East Germany, yet the lyric was scrawled on the Western side of the Berlin Wall.53 In sum, the music, both its sparseness as well as its on-screen source, adds to the film’s realism: it is typical for the period depicted and parallels rather than contradicts the action. The music also brings in irony, particularly through its use of national anthems. The non-diegetic harpsichord music heard during the bank robbery returns much later in the film, when Rita spots a friend and former member of the terrorist group in East Germany, singing in a choir. Her friend is now a wife and a mother. When Rita reads this nuclear family as an indication of happiness and congratulates her friend, saying “Schön, dass es dir gut geht” (“Nice to see that you are doing well”), her friend immediately disabuses her of this reading, saying, “Wie kommst du darauf” (“What gives you that idea?”). As she goes off with her husband, the unmistakable notes of “Auferstanden aus Ruinen” (Risen from the Ruins), the GDR national anthem composed by Hanns Eisler and with the lyrics written by Johannes R.  Becher, can be heard. Toward the end of the film, we hear the West German national anthem, the “Deutschlandlied” (Song of Germany), now the anthem of the reunified Germany, penned by August Heinrich Hoffmann von Hallersleben and composed by Josef Haydn. It appears twice:  first, diegetically, accompanying the speech delivered in favor of reunification in 1989 by former chancellor Willy Brandt (SPD); and second, as Rita approaches the border, it appears non-diegetically and is barely audible. Both national anthems appear ironically: while the GDR national anthem appears in tandem with her friend’s disabuse of Rita’s optimistic reading of her life, unified Germany’s national anthem is heard moments before Rita is going to be shot crossing the border. Finally, in addition to the mise-en-scène and sound, which shows affinity to the hallmarks of heritage cinema, the use of the handheld camera lends the film a realistic effect.54 Frequently associated with “cinéma vérité,” the

53 See Jennifer Marston William, “When West Meets East and Decides to Stay: Shared Historical Experience in Volker Schlöndorff’s Die Stille nach dem Schuss,” German Studies Review 28.1 (2005): 127–40. Here, 131. 54 Kohlhaase has also worked frequently with former East German director Andreas Dresen on films such as Raus aus der Haut (1997) and Sommer vorm Balkon (2005), which show daily life in East Germany prior to and after reunification, respectively.

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handheld camera, which includes on-screen sound, offers a “fly on the wall” perspective. Andreas Höfer, the film’s director of photography, is known for his use of the handheld camera. The Legend of Rita features its use beginning with its opening shot, showing Rita and her cohorts holding up a bank. It circles around the various characters, creating the effect that one is also moving around in the chaotic bank holdup and in a fast-moving and changing, stressful situation. As Rita and Andi leave the bank with their loot, the cameraman, walking backwards in front of them, catches them in a medium shot. Using the handheld camera here gives the effect that the viewer is walking down the street with them and looking back at them. As the police sirens come closer, Andi, Rita, and also the camera spin around in a wobbly shot, catching the police car speeding by. Taken together, the choice of actors, the particulars of the film’s miseen-scène—the way it uses lighting, colors, and props—on-screen music and handheld camera all work together to portray East Germany “realistically.” Film critics who reviewed The Legend of Rita seemed to concur on this issue. Christina White, in her review of the film for Cineaste, stated “Kohlhaase’s insider view of the GDR wins out as witty and pointed.”55 Maria Garcia, reviewing the film for Film Journal International, wrote that “Hopf’s art direction gives the netherworld behind the Iron Curtain a presence it’s never had before. From the spray paint that identifies Tatjana’s apartment door, to the open, sunlit exteriors of Rita’s summer on the Baltic Sea, we can imagine life there.”56 Yet the attempt to reconstruct an accurate representation of the former East with such great attention paid to “authenticity” underscores the film’s lack of deeper engagement with life in former East Germany. As Roland Barthes, writing about literature, notes, when apparently irrelevant items, such as props, are used to denote reality, they intend to produce an atmosphere of reality.57 Heritage cinema is subject to similar pitfalls. As Ginette Vincendeau has argued in Film/Literature/Heritage, “Heritage cinema’s elaborate aesthetics owe more to nostalgia than to historical accuracy.”58 The evocation of nostalgia raises questions about the use of nostalgia or Ostalgie in films about East Germany: does a film about the former East always need to include Spreewald Pickles? Relatedly, is this, ironically, all we understand about the former East, its products?59 To

55

Christina White, “The Legends of Rita,” Cineaste 26.1 (2000): 54. Maria Garcia, “The Legend of Rita,” Film Journal International, November 1, 2004. 57 Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1989), 141–8. 58 See also Ginette Vincendeau (ed.), Film/Literature/Heritage (London: BFI, 2001). 59 On this question, see also Roger F. Cook, “Goodbye Lenin!:  Free-Market Nostalgia for Socialist Consumerism,” Seminar 43.2 (2007): 206–19. 56

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be sure, Schlöndorff’s film seems more preoccupied with its nostalgia or “Ostalgie” than with historical accuracy. Schlöndorff applies a similar approach to the characterization of the terrorist group modeled loosely on the RAF. The group only appears in the first third of the film, which provides the background to Rita’s time in East Germany. The opening credits are interspersed with panning shots of a room while, as mentioned, the Rolling Stones’s 1968 “Street Fighting Man”—arguably the band’s most intentionally political song, written about Tariq Ali and after Mick Jagger attended a March 1968 antiwar rally in London—plays in the background. The shots pan the rooms, showing books on a shelf—Marx’s writings; Che’s Guerrilla Warfare (1961); Mao Tse Tung’s Little Red Book (1966); a poster of Jimi Hendrix; a poster of Viva Maria, the 1965 Louise Malle film, starring Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau as two women who become revolutionaries, on which Schlöndorff worked as assistant director; an album of the West German political band Ton Scheibe Scherben (1970–85); a copy of the leftist radical journal Bug Info and also of Spiegel, open to the well-known image of photographer Jürgen Henschel, discussed in Chapter 1, showing Benno Ohnesorg shot with a woman, Erika S., holding his head; and in the background, on the table on which the magazines lie, rests an overflowing ashtray. Yet if Schlöndorff’s stylistics succeed—by dint of its realism effect, its translation of social and political conflicts into dramatized and psychological or personal ones—in bringing the thematics of the RAF and the Stasi to a broader audience, just what type of history does his version of realism, in fact, offer the viewer? As film critic Christina White argues, “There’s a lot to tell, and the film comes off (perhaps inevitably) more like two stories in one and lopsided at that. Kohlhaase’s insider view of the GDR wins out as witty and pointed while the history of terrorism in the West gets slighted with a rather serious omission.”60 Indeed, the film’s engagement with terrorism did receive relative short shrift. The lack of substantive engagement with the RAF or the history of terrorism in West Germany might stem from the fact that Schlöndorff was not interested in sketching out this swatch of history in any detail. As he put it in an interview: When Wolfgang Kohlhaase and I  first discussed this project back in 1990, I said, “Look, as far as terrorism is concerned, I’ve already given [delivered] that at the office”—with Katharina Blum and Germany in Autumn and Stammheim and Marianne and Juliane, which I produced— ”so I don’t want to go back to that.” We agreed that it should be about

60

White 54.

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life in the DDR [GDR] and closing a chapter on terrorism rather than reopening it.61 Thus, the majority of the film focuses on Rita’s life in East Germany and the first third serves merely as an introduction to Rita, presenting her previous history as a terrorist. It is clear that the film’s main interest lies with her life in East Germany.62 To be sure, The Legend of Rita reveals little about the first generation of the Red Army Faction. The early sequences of the film, including the bank robbery, prison escapes, and border crossings, are filmed with quick crosscuts, not allowing the audience to engage much with the characters. For all the realism present throughout the remainder of the film, strange bell music plays in the opening sequence as the group holds up the bank. The music gives the illusion that this is child’s play or a child’s game and not a serious interaction with potentially deadly consequences for both the group and the bank’s employees and customers. Is it Schlöndorff’s comment on how the group did not take the potential consequences of its actions seriously? Is it a comment on how easy its early days actually were? Or is it a Bonnie and Clyde rendition of the group, that is, a dressing up of terrorism as fun, easy, and playful, in the early days, for viewers to consume and enjoy? Rita’s voice-over for the sequence narrates “Politik war Krieg, überall auf der Welt” (politics was war, all over the world). But the film does not elaborate, by mentioning the liberation struggles being waged in Vietnam, Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Nicaragua, or numerous other countries at the time.63 The film does mention the group’s desire to emigrate to Angola, Mozambique, or Lebanon but it does not mention why these countries are of interest specifically. Often, too, critics complain that the terrorists are depicted through clichés, for example, when there is dissent among the group in Paris, one of its male leaders seeks to shut it down by shouting, “Are you with the pigs or with the humans?” Thus, the earlier segments of the film that focus on the leftist group before Rita goes underground in East Germany convey images of a group dominated by its sexist and bullying male leaders. Undoubtedly, this dynamic existed. But it played an important role in illustrating the difference between the groups. Herein, an interesting conversation could begin about what role sexism and patriarchy played in the dynamics of the groups and also in their attempts to overcome it.64 The point in considering what types of images the film provides about the RAF is not to ascertain their historical accuracy. As Rentschler argued 61

Crowdus and Porton 19. Petzold’s The State I Am in (2000) similarly uses the 1970s terrorism as a backdrop for the story, set in the 1990s, of a family on the run. 63 In her autobiography Viett, by contrast, does. Viett 79. 64 On this topic, cf. Patricia Melzer, Death in the Shape of a Young Girl:  Women’s Political Violence in the Red Army Faction (New York: New York UP, 2015). 62

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persuasively in his article on the “Rhetoric of Consensus,” there are many histories. The point, instead, is to raise this question in order to ask the viewer to consider what narratives emerge about the era and what narratives or aspects of the era, story, or history are blocked from view or are left out altogether. To consider why one narrative might predominate or be left out. To consider what this contributes to or erases from historical narratives. To do so is to be mindful of each text’s contribution to the cultural memory of the RAF.

Constructing Narratives— Viett’s Never Was I More Fearless A contrast in narratives about the RAF appears when one compares Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita with Inge Viett’s autobiography Nie war ich furchtloser (Never Was I More Fearless, 1998). Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita is based on the life of Viett and to a lesser extent also on the life of Susanne Albrecht and Silke Maier-Witt. Viett was a member of the group June 2 Movement from 1972 to its dissolution in 1980. She was involved in the kidnapping of Peter Lorenz in 1975. After the group’s dissolution, she joined the Red Army Faction in 1980 and then grappled with whether or not to continue armed struggle; if so, how; or, if not, how to step out. As she was weighing her options, the issues related to them were compounded: in 1981, Viett shot at a police officer, who was pursuing her in Paris, wounding him to such an extent that he became a paraplegic. Soon thereafter, in 1982, she moved to East Germany. After reunification, she was extradited and sentenced to thirteen years in prison in the newly unified Germany. She was released in 1997 after serving seven years. Right after Schlöndorff and screenplay author Kohlhaase started working on the script, in 1990, Kohlhaase starting conducting interviews regularly with Viett, Albrecht, and Maier-Witt, while they were still in prison. Schlöndorff based the film so closely on her life that Viett sued him for claiming it was fiction. In The Legend of Rita, Rita, like Inge Viett, shoots a police officer in Paris and a year later moves to East Germany. Like Viett, Rita was to be extradited after reunification. Yet unlike Viett, Rita speeds across a border checkpoint and is shot dead by the border patrol, never serving a sentence as her real-life counterpart did. Specifically, Viett sued Schlöndorff for copyright infringement, since she had just published her autobiography Nie war ich furchtloser, which tells a remarkably different story. The two eventually settled out of court.65

65

Archival research carried out in the Sammlung Volker Schlöndorff, Deutsches Filminstitut, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Interview conducted with Inge Viett on September 12, 2007, in Berlin, Germany. See also Inge Viett, “Kasperletheater im Niemandsland,” konkret 4 (2000).

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In her autobiography, Viett tells of her journey into an underground life of armed struggle. Viett was born in 1944. Her autobiography begins with the immediate post–Second World War context. She was one of seven children. Viett, her siblings, and their mother were homeless. There was no work and not enough food. As a result, her mother put her in foster care.66 The foster family in which Viett grew up were farmers living in the country. A benefit of living with them was access to food, which was sparse in the immediate post–Second World War context and which living on a farm provided; the downsides were the dynamics of this particular family, whose treatment of her ranged from negligence to physical abuse. When she was still fairly young, she took on a part-time job, delivering newspapers to people living in the countryside surrounding the village in which grew up. Their residences were, given the rural setting, spaced far apart. On one such run, a neighboring farmer raped her in a field. As she recounts this experience in a documentary, she talks about being “fair game,” as a young woman, an orphan, and a ward of the state.67 In these ways, Viett’s autobiography and the documentary about her life discuss her childhood and the background to her subsequent politicization. Both the Second World War and her class background impacted her life directly. She talks about the precarious situation it put her in, as she was physically, emotionally, and psychologically abused. In the documentary, she says it was the rape and her experience of sexism, in addition to economic disparity, that led to her politicization and radicalization. Her story is thus one of economic hardship and of growing awareness of class politics. It is also a story about gender politics—about how being young, a woman, and working class made her more vulnerable, about power dynamics related to rape and about her coming out. According to Ralf Reinders, former member of the June 2 Movement, it was the armed struggle group with the most working class members.68 Reinders also underscores that the group had an even number of men and women in it but that the women had a decisive leadership role.69 Why do these aspects matter? To be sure, they counter the hegemonic narrative about armed struggle groups 66

Viett 17. Grosse Freiheit, Kleine Freiheit (Greater Freedom, Lesser Freedom, 2000), dir. Kristina Konrad, Frosch Film. See also Christina Gerhardt, “Narrating Terrorism:  Kristina Konrad’s Grosse Freiheit, kleine Freiheit (2000),” in Questioning the RAF: The Politics of Culture, Special issue, ed. Karin Bauer. Seminar 47.1 (2011):  64–80. Precisely this issue, of how adolescent girls from financially challenged backgrounds were often abused, emotionally, physically, or sexually, was to be the focus on Meinhof’s Bambule, the made-for-television film on which she was working when the action that took place on May 14, 1970, to spring Baader from jail went awry and she went underground, leading the program to be pulled. 68 Reinders and Fritzsch, Die Bewegung 2. Juni. 69 Reinders and Fritzsch, Die Bewegung 2. Juni. 67

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as consisting predominantly of middle class people.70 Differences between the various armed struggle groups operative in West Germany existed. Additionally, in both her autobiography and the documentary about her, Viett provides an historical context, mentioning at once the economic hardship suffered after the Second World War, while West Germany was trying to rebuild, and also the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, as well as the ongoing self-liberation and self-determination wars being waged in Vietnam, Angola, and, later, Nicaragua. Schlöndorff’s film, by contrast, gives the viewer a pat “Es war Krieg überall” (“War was going on everywhere”). While Viett’s rape and coming out form part of her politicization through sexual politics and the power dynamics inherent to them, in Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita, the main character’s sexuality is, by contrast, depicted very differently. Rita arrives in East Germany with Andi, the leader of the gang, whose name and its affinity to Andreas (Baader) is hard to overlook, and later, when asked by Erwin how she became involved with political action states it was a result of her relationship with Andi. By contrast, for Viett, it was rape, sexism, classism, and homophobia that led to her politicization—not a relationship with a man. Additionally, while Viett came out, in Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita, deepening ties between Rita and Tatjana are only suggested, in passing, and only after one too many rounds of vodka have been consumed. Depicted thus, the real role that sexism and homophobia can play in politicizing women is hardly engaged or touched. After her ambiguous relationship with Tatjana, Rita begins a relationship with Jochen, they become engaged, she becomes pregnant, and the film suggests that she will settle down at last. Yet this happiness, too, will be taken from her, as a greater puppet master, the Stasi agent Erwin Hull, controls what she can and cannot do, and suggests she not keep the child and indicates she cannot move with Jochen to Moscow, where he has accepted a new job.71 When I interviewed Schlöndorff about this film and asked why the main character was a woman and not a man, he said it was sexier to have the main character be a woman. Schlöndorff added that women “do not have any experience with violence.” Unfortunately, his proclamation, when contrasted with Viett’s own coming of age story, which includes sexual violation or violence, could not differ more starkly. To overlook this crucial part of Viett’s autobiography is to overlook or disavow a pivotal experience in her

70

The same is said about the Weather Underground. Some former members, such as Scott Braley, contest the veracity of the claim and express frustration with the idea. Cf. Dan Berger, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (Oakland:  AK Press, 2006). 71 Of course, by the film’s end even the Stasi agent Erwin Hull will realize that there is yet another greater puppet master.

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life, one that she says shaped her politicization. It is also a position that, given statistics, disavows the prevalence of sexual violation.72 To disregard these facts is to disregard the role that male violence plays in shaping and deforming women’s lives, on the one hand, but also, on the other hand, in leading them to political action.73 Of course it also overlooks or erases the very culpability of men for these actions. When I  asked Schlöndorff why he chose to have Rita fatally shot at the end, he replied that it makes for a more dramatic ending. Elisabeth Bronfen, in Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, brought attention to the proliferation of dead female bodies in art, literature, and philosophy between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, arguing that to depict women’s bodies disproportionately this way, in contrast to men’s bodies, suggests that they are disposable.74 Schlöndorff also argued that this ending fit with his intention to have the film function as a requiem for the left. That is, he argued that with the withering of the GDR both the dream of a socialist alternative state and the revolutionary aspiration of bringing about an alternative through armed struggle had died. He added that most 68ers or those involved with armed struggle are not alive anymore. To be sure, while numerous members of the RAF and other armed struggle groups died in shootouts or in prison, through hunger strikes or suicides or other unexplained circumstances, numerous members, in particular those that Kohlhaase interviewed for the film, are still alive. In fact, many of them have published autobiographies, letters, or interviews about this time of their lives. Aside from providing a vivid sense of life in West-Berlin in the late 1960s with reference to the demonstrations, the SDS, the attempts to reform university life, the actions of Kommune 1, and the founding not only of the 72

According to a 1998 study conducted in the United States, 17  percent of women have experienced rape. National Institute of Justice and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Prevalence, Incidence and Consequences of Violence Against Women Survey,” 1998. Most sexual assaults take place not at the hands of strangers, not to discount its reality, but domestically and at the hands of family members and partners. Eighty percent of victims are under 30 and 44 percent are under 18. US Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sex Offenses and Offenders (1997). Of those under 18 or juveniles, 93  percent know their attackers. Only 7 percent do not know their attackers. US Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement (2000). 73 See also the Rape, Abuse, Incest National Network (RAINN) for statistics on the effects of sexual assault in leading women to have a higher likelihood of suffering depression or posttraumatic stress disorder; to abuse alcohol or drugs; or to commit suicide. https://www.rainn. org/effects-sexual-violence. Last accessed February 4, 2018. 74 Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body:  Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York:  Routledge, 1992). Similar arguments have been made vis-à-vis the disposability of black bodies, male and female, in cinema by numerous scholars. The literature is vast. Cf. Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke UP, 2014); Abdul R. JanMohamed, The Death-Bound Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death (Durham: Duke UP, 2005); Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11–40.

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RAF but also of the armed struggle group June 2 Movement, Viett’s autobiography also conveys a sense of her political coming of age and of the political concerns of the time, subjects that are left entirely untouched by Schlöndorff’s film. Viett says the focus was on a need for “a change in relationships, in which humans are a product or a ware, an object of foreign profit, it was about keeping people down and the exploitation of poor countries by the rich capitalist states, about the unconditional solidarity with the self-liberation movements in Africa, Latin America and Asia.”75 And, she continues: Not only we, the generation after the war in West Germany, thought this way, the youth of almost all capitalist countries in the world thought this way. Everywhere they stood up and rebelled against the war, against repression, paternalism, exploitation of the weak by the strong, of the poor by the rich. We saw ourselves as part of a worldwide revolutionary movement with enormous chances to cut off the future of imperialism.76 This sense of international solidarity permeates Viett’s descriptions of her political work throughout her autobiography. As she puts it, “With passionate sympathy we watched The Battle of Algiers; the victory of the Việt Cộng, the fall of Saigon and the victory of the Sandinistas were highpoints.”77 Further on, she says, every political action that is taken in West-Berlin “connects us with revolutionaries in the whole world, with the Việt Cộng in the jungle, with the murdered Che Guevara, with the Tupamaros in Uruguay, with the fighting African revolutionaries in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Namibia and South Africa.”78 Her sense of solidarity is also part of her political coming of age. She travels to Africa and referring to poverty, she realizes that “we are brought up in the west with the impression that this is an individual fate resulting simply from being strong or not strong . . . These 75

Viett 70–1. “Jetzt ging es um die Veränderung dieser Verhältnisse, in denen der Mensch eine Ware ist, ein Objekt fremden Profits, es ging um die Niederhaltung und Ausbeutung der armen Länder durch die reichen kapitalistschen Staaten, um die bedingungslose Solidarität mit den Befreiungsbewegungen in Afrika, Lateinamerika und Asien.” 76 Viett 71. “So dachten nicht nur wir, die Nachkriegsgeneration der BRD, so dachte die Jugend fast aller kapitalistischer Staaten in der Welt. Überall standen sie auf und rebellierten gegen den Krieg, gegen Unterdrückung, Bevormundung, Ausbeutung der Schwachen durch die Starken, der Armen durch die Reichen. Wir sahen uns als eine weltweite revolutionäre Bewegung mit der großen Chance, dem Imperialismus die Zukunft abzuschneiden.” 77 Viett 79. “Mit leidenschaftlicher Anteilnahme haben wir uns ‘Die Schlacht um Algier’ angesehen; der Sieg des Việt Cộng, der Fall von Saigon und der Sieg der Sandinisten waren Höhepünkte.” 78 Viett 84. “Verbindet uns mit den Revolutionären in der ganzen Welt, mit dem Việt Cộng im Dschungel, mit dem ermordeten Che Guevara, mit den Tupamaros in Uruguay, mit den kämpfenden afrikanischen Revolutionären in Angola, Mosambik, Guinea-Bissau, Namibia und Südafrika.”

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were actually the results of hundreds of years of systematic, thieving greed for ownership and power stemming from the ‘civilized’ western World.”79 As she puts it, “When I later read Fanon, I immediately understood.”80 In these ways, her autobiography reveals details of a sense of solidarity with movements taking place internationally, that this sense of solidarity was not only hers but also one that was commonplace in the movement at the time, and names particular struggles that people active in the movement sought to support. While Viett mentions the Sandinistas as one of countless movements solidarity actions were being organized around, the film shows Rita depositing 10 Marks in the collection tray for Nicaragua. The autobiography’s depiction of solidarity with the Sandinistas as one struggle of many, a struggle of action, and of a self-organized movement could not differ from more starkly from Schlöndorff’s understanding of solidarity as expressed through financial contribution (rather than action), through support of Nicaragua (rather than of the Sandinistas), this support of Nicaragua in East Germany as an articulation of communist affinity (rather than Viett’s understanding of it as a sign of solidarity with peoples’ struggles against imperialism and for self-determination), and the way it appears in the film as an illustration of the dissonance between the East German government’s espoused policy and its reality, shown by Rita’s contribution being depicted as naive in contrast to that of her knowing East German counterparts. Viett also mentions the political influences on her thinking. Discussing her work in the groups Rote Hilfe (Red Aid) and Schwarze Hilfe (the German equivalent of the American Black Cross), two organizations that provide solidarity organizing for prisoners, she disambiguates between communist and anarchist influences. Many of the second generation of the RAF, such as Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Susanne Albrecht, and Peter-Jürgen Boock, were active in the Rote Hilfe before going underground. Between 1970 and 1990 about 100 members of the Rote Hilfe were sentenced for aiding the RAF, a crime punishable under Section 129b of German law, which was passed in 1976 and outlawed forming, promoting, or supporting a terrorist organization. Schwarze Hilfe is usually defined as an anarchist prisoner solidarity organization, which Viett both confirms and corrects: “We were generally called anarchists. But that is actually wrong. I only remember one guy who occupied himself with anarchist theory.”81 She further mentions the thinkers whose writings were particularly influential:  “Those of us

79 Viett 78. “Wir werden im Westen groß mit der Vorstellung, daß dies ein individuelles Schicksal der Tüchtigen oder eben der Untüchtigen ist . . . das waren Ergebnisse einer jahrhundertalten räuberischen Besitz- und Machtgier der ‘zivilisierten’ westlichen Welt.” 80 Viett 79. “Als ich später Fanon las, habe ich sofort verstanden.” 81 Viett 86. “Wir wurden allgemein Anarchisten genannt, aber das ist eigentlich falsch. Ich erinnere mich nur an einen, der sich mit anarchistischer Theorie beschäftigte.”

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who were in the Black Cross did not hassle one another about who could be a revolutionary role model or not. All were entitled: Rosa Luxemburg, Thomas Müntzer, Schinderhannes, Robin Hood, Durruti, Bakunin, Malcolm X, Marighella, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse Tung.”82 In this way, Viett’s presentation of her political thinking shows not only self-determination struggles that were taking place worldwide, which people active in the late 1960s and early 1970s movements discussed and sought to fight in solidarity with, as presented in detail in Chapter 1 of this book, she also includes names of thinkers that were read. She readily admits “our sympathy and solidarity with the ‘third world’ was definitely very romantic back then, but it was also just, necessary, exemplary and full of hope.”83 In sum, Viett’s autobiography provides an entirely different picture of her personal life and the forces that led to her decision to go underground than Schlöndorff’s film. This decision was informed by political struggles taking place in West-Berlin and also around the world. It is informed by political texts written in the late 1960s and also by others that dated back decades if not centuries. Again, these texts were about and from struggles around the world. The image that emerges from the autobiography then is very different from the film, which begins with the quick cross-cutting shots of the bank robbery and soon thereafter shows scenes of the sexist bullying often associated with the RAF. The last scenes of the terrorist group together discussing and considering the possibility of life in East Germany with the members of the Ministry of State Security shows most of the group welldressed and more concerned with stylish looks and the ability to continue life this way than with the possibility of living in a socialist country. In this scene, Schlöndorff plays on stereotypes both of the RAF, as a group concerned more with fast cars and nice clothes, and of East Germany, as a country giving its citizens limited access to either one. These starkly contrasting depictions raise questions about how the RAF remembered. How do depictions of the group differ? What do the differences contribute to the cultural memory of the RAF? Schlöndorff’s statement disregards the many different paths terrorists who were active in the 1970s have taken since. Of those who did not die, some continued armed struggle in Europe; some went underground and continued armed struggle in other countries; and some, like Viett, decided to step out of armed struggle. Some former members served time and were released.

82 Viett 86. “Wir in der Schwarzen Hilfe kriegten uns nicht über revolutionäre Vorbilder und politische Linien in die Haare. Alle waren berechtigt:  Rosa Luxemburg, Thomas Müntzer, Schinderhannes, Robin Hood, Durruti, Bakunin, Malcolm X, Mariguella [sic], Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Ho Tschi Min, Mao Tse Tung.” 83 Viett 79. “Unsere Zuneigung und Solidarität zur ‘Dritten Welt’ war damals gewiß auch sehr romantisch, aber sie war gerecht, notwendig, beispielgebend und hoffnungsvoll.”

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Of those who were released and are alive now, some are politically active.84 Their varied stories provide a much richer narrative: about what motivated former members to join, what motivated their subsequent paths, whether they ceased armed struggle as it was still continuing or due to imprisonment, and what they pursued after armed struggle and imprisonment. Although The Legend of Rita focuses on terrorists who decided to cease their participation in armed struggle, nowhere in the film are the reasons for this decision explored at length. A  substantive engagement with this question and also where the former terrorists are at now could offer narratives about where their differing political trajectories have led. While Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita closes the chapter on the left, the narratives of 68ers, terrorists, and the GDR continue. They inform today’s Germany and its politics. The flashes of lessons from the era, be they successes or failures, or—more often—some of each, inform today, be it the government, society, or the left. Seeing the ruptures and continuities between then and now reveals the lessons of history, gleaned from the missteps both of the state and of the left. The Legend of Rita can be read critically as a heritage film that seeks to produce consensus:  a post-wall West-East German collaboration, the film looks back on West Germany of the 1970s and East Germany of the 1980s and tries to appeal to both West and East Germans. One component of this consensus-building process is the music, mentioned above, which underscores references to both West and East Germany. The music not only adds to the film’s sense of realism, it also works to bring the two halves of the film together and to build consensus. As Koepnick puts it, music functions to articulate “prosthetic aspirations.” Koepnick states that in heritage films “radios, record players . . . as mass cultural technologies . . . directly act on emotions, recall forgotten pasts and help envision utopian futures.”85 The on-screen music in The Legend of Rita can be read in this light. Additionally, as Koepnick puts it, “popular music sutures what is different into a unified whole.”86 To be sure, the music helps to recall the past of 1970s West Germany and 1980s East Germany, bringing them up the moment at which the separate histories intersect in unified Germany. In at least two instances, however, the music is not on-screen and underscores poignantly the film’s larger thematics. And these, I would argue, 84

Brigitte Asdonk, who was arrested in 1970 and released from prison in 1982, is active in anti-gentrification work in Berlin. Margrit Schiller, who was arrested in 1971 and released from prison in 1976, moved first to Cuba in 1985, then to Uruguay in 1993, and then back to Germany in 2003, works for immigrants’ rights. Karl-Heinz Dellwo, who was arrested in 1975 and released from prison in 1996, founded the Laika Verlag publishing company in 2010. Lutz Taufer, who was arrested in 1975 and released from prison in 1995, works on development aid with a German nonprofit organization. 85 Koepnick 78. 86 Koepnick 68.

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are not typical of heritage film, at least in the sense defined by Koepnick above: to envision a utopian future. Early on in the film, during the bank robbery, the “Internationale” plays. The music highlights the optimistic, political agenda of the early years, underscored by Rita’s voice-over, stating, “Das waren die heiteren Jahre, Tatjana” (Those were the happy years, Tatjana). During the closing scenes, while the fall of the Berlin Wall is shown on the television in the background as Rita writes her last letter to Tatjana, a harpsichord plays the German national anthem. It emphasizes the capitulation of socialism to capitalism in the newly reunified Germany. As Schlöndorff announces at the very end of the film’s audio commentary, “The film is a requiem.” But a requiem for what exactly? In an interview I conducted with Schlöndorff, he elaborated, saying that the film is a requiem both for the end of the GDR as an alternative political-economic system, and for the end of leftist agitation for political change that began with the political idealism of the 1960s student movement and ended with the 1970s armed struggle.87 While Rita had to die because, as Schlöndorff put it, “it creates a more heroic end,”88 her death also stands in allegorically to mark the end not only of the GDR but also of leftist agitation from the student movements to terrorism. The Internationale and the German national anthems played at the opening and the closing of the film underscore this thematic trajectory. Thus, while one may agree with Jennifer Marston William’s assertion that The Legend of Rita “attempts a German-German historical configuration that recognizes East and West as separate entities but with a common past,” as its content and stylistics underscore, her assertion that the film “marks a significant step toward a post-Wall German cinema that neither favors nor marginalizes a particular side of Germany’s history, East or West” overlooks an important historical fact pivotal to the film’s interests:  It is impossible because, according to Schlöndorff, history has already decided in favor of the West and his film focuses and closes on this note.89 Furthermore, while The Legend of Rita is a unique post-Wende collaboration, looking back at the history of both countries, it only looks forward to a capitalist neoliberal democracy. Stefanie Hofer argues that the film symbolizes “the political search for an identity among German leftists, who must re-evaluate their own history and above all its most radical mistakes—the RAF terrorism and the SED dictatorship—after re-unification.”90 To be sure, the past of

87

Volker Schlöndorff, personal interview, Potsdam, Germany, September 6, 2007. Volker Schlöndorff, personal interview. 89 Jennifer Marston William, “When West Meets and Decides to Stay:  Shared Historical Experience in Volker Schlöndorff’s Die Stille nach dem Schuss,” German Studies Review 28.1 (2005): 127–40. Here, 128. 90 Stefanie Hofer, “Das Ende der Generationseinheit von ‘68:  Volker Schlöndorffs Die Stille nach dem Schuß,” Seminar 41.2 (May 2005):  125–48. “die politische Identitätssuche der 88

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both the RAF and the GDR or SED dictatorship should be and are being revisited, and Schlöndorff’s film contributes to a reevaluation of both. In this regard, The Legend of Rita can be viewed as a heritage film but not about two nations—West and East Germany—but rather about two entities related to them: the RAF for West Germany and the Stasi for East Germany; the former, Schlöndorff argues, sought to offer a critique of capitalism and the latter a counter-model to it. Yet, in the end, Schlöndorff’s attempts to depict East Germany and the Stasi, West Germany and the RAF realistically leave much to be desired. He succeeds in sharing the veneer of daily life in East Germany, mainly through the aforementioned techniques:  use of handheld camera and onscreen music, as well as choice of lighting, color, and actors. But the depictions often rest more on clichés rather than on in-depth explorations of either the RAF or the Stasi. To some extent, this lack results from Schlöndorff’s attempt to have authenticity— such as in the casting of East Germans as East German in terms of the actors, or in the attention paid to detail in the accurate East German lighting, set design, and props—convey the reality effect he so strongly desires. But realism cannot only come about solely as a result of staging and cinematography. It must be worked out as a result of a systematic exploration of the historical thematics, which the film does not deliver. As Corrigan, talking about Schlöndorff’s earlier films but in a manner very applicable to The Legend of Rita, says, “As a realism engaged with history, these films may indeed have little trouble finding an audience, yet the final question remains whether this kind of aesthetic moves an audience merely to accept history as a reality or to engage it as a horizon that can and should be changed.”91 Thus, Schlöndorff’s intense focus on delivering realism ultimately fails to a large extent because he is too focused on delivering its hull and not enough on its kernel.

Conclusions Both Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita, discussed in this chapter, and Petzold’s The State I Am In, discussed in Chapter 4, films that premiered within seven months of one another, return to the topic of the Red Army Faction and shift depictions of the group, temporally and spatially.92 The films consider deutschen Linken, die nach der Wende ihre eigene Geschichte und vor allem ihre radikalsten Verfehlungen—den RAF-Terrorismus und die SED-Diktatur—neu bewerten muss.” Here, 126. 91 Timothy Corrigan, New German Film:  The Displaced Image (Austin:  University of Texas Press, 1983), 72. 92 Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival on February 16, 2000, and at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2000. Petzold’s The State I Am In premiered at the Venice International Film Festival on September 1, 2000, and subsequently screened at the Berlin International Film Festival on February 11, 2001.

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former members of the RAF in the 1980s and in East Germany, and in the 1990s and traveling back to reunified Germany, respectively. In these ways, each film considers life for former members of the group and each one does so while the group was still in existence—it dissolved in 1998. Additionally, each film considers the lives of former members in exile in East Germany or on the run, in Portugal and attempting to head to Brazil, and then forced to return to Germany. While these depictions thus expand the temporal and spatial framework of the cultural memory of the Red Army Faction, they also leave key topics unengaged. To be sure, it is not their task to engage all issues related to the group. It is, however, the precise project of this study to consider how the stories told and untold shape narratives about the RAF, that is, the cultural memory of the group. Petzold’s The State I Am In shifts the narratives about the RAF forward by picking up the thread from Margarethe von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane, arguably the last New German Cinema film to engage the group, which considers the impact of the trauma of the Nazi era on the generation of 1968, and considers instead, the impact the era of terrorism had on yet another generation. It is at once one of the thematic threads of Petzold’s film and also not concluded by the film’s end, where the parents of the main character, Jeanne, die in a car accident and she survives. Her future is thus open-ended. Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita, by contrast, closes with Rita’s death. And, as mentioned, her death was intended to stand in for the death of both the RAF and East Germany. Thus, Schlöndorff’s film, in many ways, seeks to engage, consider, and close discussion of the topic. Yet what was the relationship between the RAF and East Germany? During the 1980s? Not only for those former members who renounced terrorism and moved to East Germany, but also for those who remained in West Germany and continued? Moving out one concentric circle—considering how Carlos, by contrast, engages the topic—how did Eastern European nations engage various terrorist groups in the 1970s and 1980s? In focusing so intently on Rita living underground in East Germany in the 1980s or a family on the run in reunified Germany of the 1990s, both films eclipse intensely the external political context laid out at the beginning of this chapter. That is, they prevent a consideration of the shift in the political factors, such as the détente in the Cold War in the 1970s and its intensification in the first half of the 1980s. In this way, they foreclose an engagement with the RAF’s attacks and their motivations in the 1980s and 1990s. The story of the RAF thus becomes one associated with their emergence out of the late 1960s social movements and associated with events of the 1970s. But the remainder of their story, and its contexts, is eclipsed. It prevents an assessment of shifts from the social movements and their alliances with struggles going on worldwide, from self-liberation and self-determination wars in Africa and Southeast

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Asia in the 1950s and 1960s, to the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement, the African Organization of Unity, and the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, to their evolution in the 1970s and 1980s. Sleuthing out what happened precisely in this shift from these movements to new configurations, such as the New International Economic Order (NIEO) put forward through the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 1974, as well as the backlash that emerged through new developments at the World Bank under Henry Kissinger (1968–81), at the International Monetary Fund, and through the creation of the G6 in 1975 would create a continuity in terms of the larger narrative thread from 1968 to 1998, the year of the RAF’s dissolution. Such a focus would allow for a consideration of the missteps not only of the groups but also of the solidarity alliances, that is, the groups and the countries with which they worked, seeking to push back against colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, and, of course, of the forces working against them.

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6 Terrorism and Memory: Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 (1989) and the KunstWerke Exhibit (2005)

Since 1989, two art exhibits have revisited the Red Army Faction (RAF) and received widespread attention:  Gerhard Richter’s series of fifteen oil paintings titled October 18, 1977, first exhibited in 19891; and the 2005 Kunst-Werke exhibit in Berlin, Zur Vorstellung des Terror:  Die RAF (Imagining Terror: The RAF).2 Both of these exhibits rest at the intersection

Research for this chapter was supported by a DAAD summer seminar at Cornell University (2008); the National Endowment of Humanities, Hawaii State Council Summer Research Award (2013); and the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Summer Research Funding (2014). Previous versions were presented as guest lectures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2007); and as conference papers at Cardiff University (2005) and the German Studies Association (2005). I thank the following persons for discussions of Gerhard Richter’s paintings that proved fruitful to me in writing this article:  Rob Eshelman, Susan Laikin Funkenstein, Jaimey Hamilton Faris, Jennifer Kapczynski, Kaja Silverman, Pepper Stetler, and Jeremy Varon. Unless otherwise indicated, translations throughout this chapter are my own. 1 Gerhard Richter, October 18, 1977, 1989, New  York Museum of Modern Art, New  York. First exhibited at Museum Haus Esters Krefeld, Krefeld, Germany, February 12–April 4, 1989. 2 I discuss different possible readings and translations of the exhibit title further on. Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Die RAF, Kunst-Werke Museum, Berlin, Germany, January 29–May 16, 2005. The exhibit’s original title Mythos RAF lent itself to different interpretations, as a result of which it was intensely debated and eventually abandoned. While the curators argued that the exhibit was intended to examine critically both the reality and the myth of the RAF,

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of narratives about the Red Army Faction in print media and in art, picking up on issues engaged in Chapters 2 and 3, but moving the temporal framework forward and engaging the discourse that manifested in 1989 and 2005, respectively. While the Kunst-Werke exhibit unleashed a heated debate well in advance of its opening in 2005,3 the first exhibit of Richter’s cycle appeared, as Richter scholar Robert Storr put it, “on the walls of Haus Esters without warning and without fanfare.”4 But immediately after the opening of the Richter exhibit a furor of criticism ensued. The fearful tone of the critics’ responses reveals the still unhealed trauma suffered by West German society as a result of the RAF’s decadelong campaign of armed struggle and the severity—unprecedented in the post-fascist era democratic West Germany—of the state’s response, both discussed in Chapter 3. The enduring presence of the trauma unleashed in the 1970s is exemplified not only by the discussions after the first exhibition of Richter’s paintings in 1989 but also by the vehemence of the debates in 2005 pre-empting the opening of the Kunst-Werke RAF exhibit in Berlin. Whereas previous scholarship relates Richter’s cycle to his images of the Holocaust,5 this chapter considers the content of this cycle and terrorism of the 1970s as its distinct site of trauma. Echoing historical studies of the Red Army Faction, which argue that the RAF was a uniquely postfascist phenomenon working through the past of its parents’ generation,6 previous art criticism claims that Richter was coming to terms with the fascist Germany he witnessed as a child. That is, the historical studies claim that the RAF’s actions stemmed from their feelings of guilt for their parents’ active or passive participation in the fascist era. The scholarship

many of the exhibit’s critics read its original title as an indication of how the exhibit trivialized the RAF or even helped to turn it into a pop icon, thereby disregarding or downplaying its fatal repercussions. 3 For a discussion of the debate surrounding the Kunst-Werke exhibit, and the functions some critics ascribed to history and to art exhibits, cf. Joachim Baur, “Geschichtsbeschreibung im Feuilleton: Anmerkungen zur Debatte um ‘Mythos RAF,’ ” in Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Die RAF, ed. Klaus Biesenbach (Berlin: Steidl, 2005), 241–4. Here, 243. 4 For the critics’ reception of Richter’s paintings when they were first exhibited, both in Krefeld and on their subsequent two year tour, see Robert Storr, “Introduction:  Sudden Recall,” in Gerhard Richter, October 18, 1977 (New York:  The Museum of Modern Art, 2000), 27–39. Here, 29. 5 Cf. Kaja Silverman, “Photography by Other Means,” in Flesh of My Flesh (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009), 168-222; and Eric Kligerman, “Transgenerational Hauntings:  Screening the Holocaust in Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 Cycle,” in History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism, ed. Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Ingo Cornils (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 40-63. 6 Cf. Jillian Becker, Hitler’s Children:  The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang (Philadelphia:  Lippincott, 1977); and Gerd Koenen, Vesper, Ensslin, Baader. Urszenen des deutschen Terrorismus (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 2003). Despite their widely varying political ideologies, Becker and Koenen agree that the RAF was a response to Nazi era fascism.

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on Richter’s cycle, which reads his interest in the RAF in tandem with the Holocaust, repeats this tendency. Yet Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, known for his polemic stances, goes so far as to argue that the trauma unleashed by the 1970s is more repressed than that unleashed by the fascist era: “Richter’s cycle October 18, 1977 points to an era of the [West] German post-war history, which, paradoxically has blocked itself in the collective memory work more than the reference, partially stemming from the Kiefer-fallout and by now also having become a fashionable ‘artistic’ point, to the German Hitler fascism and it repression in post-war West Germany.”7 This chapter continues this line of thought, focusing on the 1970s as its own distinct site of trauma exemplified by both Richter’s October 18, 1977 and the KunstWerke exhibit.8 Drawing on Dominick LaCapra’s concept of trauma, as put forth in History in Transit:  Experience, Identity, Critical Theory,9 the following investigates the representations of the RAF as narrative retellings that attempt to work through the trauma of the 1970s.10 As LaCapra puts

7 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,“Gerhard Richter; 18. Oktober, 1977,” in Gerhard Richter: 18. Oktober, 1977 (Cologne:  Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 1989), 55–9. Here, 58. “Richters Bildgruppe 18. Oktober 1977 verweist auf eine Episode deutscher Nachkriegsgeschichte, der sich die kollektive Gedächtnisarbeit paradoxerweise mehr versperrt hat als die zum Teil aus dem Kiefer-Fallout erwachsene, inzwischen schon modische ‘künstlerische’ Referenz auf die Geschichte des deutschen Hitler-Faschismus und dessen Verdrängung in der Bundesrepublik der Nachkriegszeit.” See also his slightly revised version of this article published in English: “A Note on Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977,” October 48 (Spring 1989): 88–109. See also Gerhard Richter, “Interview with Benjamin Buchloh,” in Gerhard Richter: Paintings, ed. Terry A. Neff (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 15–29; Birgit Pelzer, “The Tragic Desire,” Parkett 35 (1993): 58–72; and Stefan Germer, “Unbidden Memories,” in Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977, ed. Gerhard Storck (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1989), 7–9. 8 Jeremy Varon, in contrast to other historians, sees the RAF as working through the trauma of the German Nazi past but also deems the 1970s through the actions of the RAF and the state’s repressive responses as its own site of trauma. On the former, cf. Jeremy Varon, “Deadly Abstractions: The Red Army Faction and the Politics of Murder,” in Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, The Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), esp. pp. 244–53. On the latter, the 1970s as its own site of trauma, correspondence with the author, June 5, 2006. 9 Dominick LaCapra, “Trauma Studies:  Its Critics and Vicissitudes,” in History in Transit: Experience, Identity or Critical Theory (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004), 106–43. 10 Jeremy Varon and Sabine von Dirke each brought the concept of “trauma” together with RAF studies at the Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism conference at Cardiff University in 2006. In a talk Von Dirke delivered, she drew on the concept of trauma as Dominick LaCapra develops it in History in Transit, focusing particular attention on his appropriation of Benjamin, whereby trauma as experience is Erlebnis rather than Erfahrung. Although LaCapra develops the concept in relationship to the Holocaust and while the source, type, and range of trauma unleashed by the Nazi regime and the Holocaust are obviously incomparable to the trauma unleashed by either the Red Army Faction or the Federal Republic of Germany in its response, I do think it useful to consider the trauma that this combination of events, responses, and counterresponses put into motion in the 1970s. Sabine von Dirke, “The RAF as Historical Trauma and Pop Icon in Literature since the 1980s,” in History and

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it in his discussion of working through trauma, “Narration . . . plays an important role here, especially in engaging other forms such as the lyric or essay as well as performative modes including ritual, song and dance.”11 In other words, re-presentations of the RAF, be they art in the Kunst-Werke exhibit or the paintings in the Gerhard Richter cycle, could be read for their attempts to work through the trauma of 1970s. What follows considers Richter’s reference to the historical context of the 1970s and aspects of his painting’s stylistics—use of blurriness, gray tones, and mass media images—in order to consider how they engage historical and cultural memory. In analyzing both the era to which the images refer as well as the medium out of which they are lifted, that is, the mass media, this chapter seeks to answer the following questions. What role does citing mass media play in the paintings? What effect does relocating them in the context of painting have? What role does the use of images that are part of the public sphere and of public memory play? And how are these source materials transformed when they are painted over or blurred?

Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977— Mass Media Revisited Gerhard Richter’s series of fifteen oil paintings titled October 18, 1977 depict cofounders of the RAF Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Ulrike Meinhof. The date from which the cycle takes its name marked the end of the German Autumn discussed in Chapter  3, as Baader and Ensslin were found dead in their cells at Stammheim maximum security prison. Baader died from a bullet wound to the head. Ensslin died by hanging. Meinhof died by hanging a year earlier on May 9, 1976. Richter does not depict two further episodes that occurred on October 18, 1977, at Stammheim prison. RAF member Jan-Carl Raspe was found in his cell near death from a bullet wound to the head. He was hospitalized and died the following day. Irmgard Möller was found in her cell suffering from four stab wounds. She survived. The cause of the deaths of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe as well as of Meinhof remains a source of debate. The state ruled the deaths were suicides. Some RAF members, too, argue that they were suicides.12 Others allege that they

Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism, ed. Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Ingo Cornils (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 105–25. 11 LaCapra 118. 12 Margrit Schiller alleges that Meinhof’s death was a suicide. See Margrit Schiller, “Es war ein harter Kampf um meine Erinnerung”:  Ein Lebensbericht aus der RAF (Hamburg:  Konkret, 1999), 87. Irmgard Möller—the sole survivor of the October 18, 1977, Stammheim deaths— asserts that the deaths of others that night were suicides. Irmgard Möller, “ ‘Wir meinten es

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were murders. The question remains unresolved.13 Originally, Richter had also intended to include in the series a painting of Holger Meins, who died after a hunger strike on November 9, 1974. This painting was eventually left out altogether. Thus, while the cycle’s date refers to the deaths at Stammheim, it neither references all of that night’s events nor does it focus on that night’s events exclusively. In this way, the dissonance between the title of Richter’s cycle and the cycle’s content already places it within a larger temporal framework. His paintings seem to suggest an analysis of the group and of October 18, 1977, within the context of the 1970s, since the paintings refer to events beginning with 1970 and spanning to 1977. The paintings in the cycle have no fixed installation order.14 Yet presented in the order in which the events depicted occurred, they include, first, Jugendbildnis (Youth Portrait), a portrait of Ulrike Meinhof based on a photograph taken around 1970 and intended for publicity purposes around the time that Meinhof’s film Bambule was scheduled for release and shortly before she helped Baader escape from jail on May 14, 1970.15 A few days after this breakout, the Red Army Faction was established. Two subsequent paintings, Festnahme 1 (Arrest 1)  and Festnahme 2 (Arrest 2), show the arrests of Baader, Meins, and Raspe in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, on June 1, 1972. Three images—Gegenüberstellung 1, 2, and 3 (Confrontation 1, 2, and 3)—depict Ensslin. They are based on photographs from June or July 1972—taken when Ensslin was being escorted to a police lineup. Three further paintings—each titled simply Tote (Dead)—show Meinhof laid out, after she was found hanging by a strip of towel in her cell. The paintings of Meinhof are based on close-up headshots. The next paintings relate more directly to the events of October 18, 1977. Erhängte (Hanged), based on a photograph taken by the public prosecutor’s office, shows Ensslin still hanging in her prison cell. Four paintings relate to Baader:  Zelle (Cell) depicts Baader’s prison cell at the time of his death; Plattenspieler (Record Player) shows the record player in which Baader allegedly hid the pistol with which he supposedly shot himself; and Erschossener 1 and 2 (Man Shot Down 1 and 2)  depict the corpse of Baader still lying in his prison cell. Finally, Beerdigung (Funeral) shows the funeral of Baader, Ensslin, and

ernst’: Gespräch mit Irmgard Möller über Entstehung, Bedeutung und Fehler der RAF,” Die Beute 9 (January 1996). 13 On the results of the official investigation into Ulrike Meinhof’s death, see Bericht der Internationalen Untersuchungskommission:  Der Tod Ulrike Meinhofs (Münster:  Unrast Verlag, 2001). On investigations into the October 18, 1977, deaths, see also Karl-Heinz Weidenhammer, Selbstmord oder Mord/Das Todesvermittlungsverfahren, Baader/Ensslin/ Raspe (Kiel: Neuer Malik, 1988). 14 Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter:  October 18, 1977 (New  York:  Museum of Modern Art, 2000) 28. 15 Storr, Gerhard Richter, 106.

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Raspe on October 27, 1977, at the Dornhalde Cemetery in Stuttgart, West Germany.16 Most of the paintings in Richter’s cycle are based on photographs that were printed in mass media in the 1970s. Of the images listed above, the following were published in Stern magazine: Arrest 1 and Arrest 2, published June 8, 1972; Dead, which is a triptych in Richter’s cycle, was based on one photograph, published on June 16, 1972. Finally, Cell and Record Player, as well as the photograph that forms the basis for Man Shot Down 1 and 2, were all published on October 30, 1980. In the 1970s, as discussed in Chapter  2, controversy existed about the representation of the RAF in corporate media in general and in particular in media published and owned by the Springer publication house, such as Bild-Zeitung.17 Additionally, as discussed in Chapter  3, the relationship among institutions of power, such as mechanisms of governance, juridical institutions, and corporate media, was also questioned by literature and film of the 1970s, such as Heinrich Böll’s novel The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1974)18 and the adaptation of it codirected by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta (1975),19 as well as in scenes from Germany in Autumn (1978) that were directed by Böll and Schlöndorff and show a discussion among the executives of a television station about whether or not to air a performance of Sophocles’ Antigone.20 Richter picks up on the discourse put forward to Böll’s novel and the adaptation of it, by referencing anew the depiction of the RAF in popular media of the 1970s. Like Schlöndorff’s later film The Legend of Rita (2000),21 discussed in Chapter 5, Richter’s paintings do not intervene in a contemporary discourse but rather look back on the events, the era, and the mass media’s depictions of them. In an interview with Richter conducted in 1984, Wolfgang Pehnt observes: “In your paintings you conduct a dialogue with mass media, such as photography and advertising, and they do contain 16

Many sources mistakenly state that they are buried in Waldfriedhof in Stuttgart, which is much larger; it is the second largest cemetery in Stuttgart. The Dornhaldenfriedhof is directly adjacent to the larger Waldfriedhof and was established in 1974. They are buried in section 99. 17 Many of these articles have been reprinted in the two-volume catalog accompanying the Kunst-Werke Museum’s exhibit on the RAF. Klaus Biesenbach (ed.), Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Die RAF (Berlin: Steidl/KW, 2005). 18 Heinrich Böll, Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, oder Wie Gewalt entstehen und wohin sie führen kann (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1974). 19 Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, 1975), dirs Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, Bioskop, Criterion Collection. 20 Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn, 1978), dirs Alf Brustellin, Hans Peter Cloos, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, Maximiliane Mainka, Edgar Reitz, Katja Rupé, Volker Schlöndorff, Peter Schubert, and Bernhard Sinkel, Filmverlag der Autoren; US distributor: New Line Cinemas. 21 Die Stille nach dem Schuss (The Legend of Rita, 2000), dir. Volker Schlöndorff, Arte/ Babelsberg Film; US distribution: Kino Video.

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something like a critique of the packaged culture in which we live.”22 Richter responded: When I  painted from those banal, everyday photographs, I  was really trying to bring out the quality—i.e., the message—of those photographs, and to show what gets overlooked by definition, whenever we look at small photographs. People don’t look on them as art; but as soon as they are transposed into art they take on a dignity of their own, and people take note of them. That was the trick, the concern I had in using those photographs.23 The photographs, Richter states, had to be suspended from mass media and recontextualized as art, in order to arrest the development of their message and propose a new form of gaze. The shift in form and context forces the viewer, Richter argues, to reassess the image’s content.24 Or, as he puts it: “As a painting, it changes both its meaning and its information content.”25 This statement begs the question: how do viewers read the photographs in their original contexts? How do they get read when they appear again as (high) art? Richter creates repaintings in order to suggest a different kind of gaze or different ways of seeing, as John Berger put it.26 To be sure, it is a gaze marked by what Peter Osborne calls a “moment of reflection,” that is, a gaze usually reserved for regarding paintings.27 Richter himself in the quotation cited above emphasizes different forms of looking: “I was really trying . . . to show what gets overlooked by definition, whenever we look at small photographs. People don’t look on them as art; but as soon as they are transposed into art . . . people take note of them.”28 When Richter turns the images originally printed in the West German weekly news magazine  Stern into paintings, he plays with viewing habits associated with different contexts. He slows down the gaze. He leads it to linger and examine, and reexamine. Don DeLillo’s short story “BaaderMeinhof” dwells on and conveys precisely this aspect of Richter’s paintings.29 In DeLillo’s short story, a young woman returns again and again to the New York Museum of Modern Art where the Richter cycle is on permanent display

22

Obrist, Gerhard Richter:  The Daily Practice of Painting, Writing 1962–1993 (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1995), 117. 23 Obrist, Gerhard Richter, 117. 24 See also Gerhard Richter, “Gerhard Richter: 18. Oktober, 1977,” Interview with Jan ThornPrikker, Parkett 19 (1989): 124–65. 25 Obrist, Gerhard Richter, 31. 26 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (New York: Penguin, 1977). 27 Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (New York: Verso, 2013), 94. 28 Obrist, Gerhard Richter, 117. 29 Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof,” New  Yorker, April 1, 2002, 78–82. Don DeLillo has considered terrorism in other works. See Don DeLillo’s Mao II (New York:  Penguin, 1992).

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(although not always the complete cycle), seeking to discern the meaning of the paintings.30 The gaze tarries, attempting to decipher the paintings. Richter repaints events that had taken place well over a decade earlier. The time lag between the original events (1977), his photo-paintings (1989), and the viewing of the paintings is considerable. Thus, his paintings also present a meditation on memory. The photo-paintings recall the image not present and only hazily available in our memory. As Gertrud Koch puts it, “What characterizes these paintings is their reference to the temporality of our imaginations, the haziness of our memory, its vagueness, the sinking into amnesia, the disappearance and blurring.”31 The potential disjuncture between the photo-paintings before the viewer and the images the viewer remembers underscores the lack of precision not only of Richter’s paintings but also of recollections or of visual memory. Not only the memory of images but also the narrative of the events might be blurry. To be sure, the events that the paintings depict are vital to Richter in this cycle. When Jan Thorn Prikker interviews Richter and asks him, “So how significant are the things represented in your pictures?” Richter replies, “Highly significant, definitely.”32 The paintings dwell on what it means to remember and to engage history. Prikker states, “Recalling that is the concept that underlies these pictures. What can one profitably remember about the RAF?” Richter responds: “It can give us new insights. And it can also be the attempt to console—that is, to give a meaning. It’s also about the fact that we can’t simply discard and forget a story like that; we must try to find a different way of dealing with it—appropriately.”33 Here, Richter touches on the indelible impressions that the trauma of RAF’s 1970s terrorist acts have made. He does not recommend a form of recognition, that is, a stance on the RAF, but rather that the memory of them, which viewers cannot forget and have not forgotten anyway, is engaged. The very form of his paintings, which shuns passivity and keeps the gaze wandering, suggests that we remember the historical event as well and that we continue working through. In this way, Richter implicitly participates in the debates about whether or not to represent the RAF unleashed by the Kunst-Werke exhibit and mentioned at the outset: for Richter, rather than repress the events or representations of them, it seems vital not only to reflect on the events of this traumatic decade but also to consider and reconsider the events in a manner that encourages looking and looking again. For him it is not a question of whether or not one should represent the

The title itself refers to art, in particular Andy Warhol’s series of silkscreen prints depicting Mao Tse Tung. The series appears on some versions of the cover. 30 On the role of gender in DeLillo’s short story as well as Richter’s cycle, see also Karin L. Crawford, “Gender and Terror in Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 and Don DeLillo’s ‘Baader-Meinhof,’ ” New German Critique 107 (Summer 2009): 207–30. 31 Getrud Koch, “Sequence of Time,” Parkett 35 (March 1993): 76–9. 32 Obrist, Gerhard Richter, 57. 33 Obrist, Gerhard Richter, 57.

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RAF. In fact, his paintings suggest that his stance is the very opposite of the stance held by critics of the Kunst-Werke exhibit, which will be discussed subsequently: to him a reengagement with the trauma of the 1970s is vital. When Adorno, referencing the Nazi era and the Holocaust, asked in 1959, “What Does Working through the Past Mean?” he, too, suggested one must not seek closure or mastery over traumatic events of the past, since precisely the concept of “mastery” was fallacious and repeated the very structure that lay at the heart of the traumatic events.34 Adorno challenged the prevalent notion of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (mastery of the past),35 by contrasting it with and suggesting the term Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit (working up the past),36 which not only underscored the difficulty involved in working through trauma but also emphasized the process of working through rather than the goal of mastery, which was implicated in leading to the very events being engaged. As LaCapra argues in History in Transit, narrative retellings—whether these retellings take place in literature, film, or art—are instrumental in working through the past. LaCapra, like Adorno, stresses the process of working through rather than the closure. As LaCapra puts it: “Hence, at least as I am using the term, working through does not mean total redemption of the past or healing its traumatic wounds . . . any notion of full redemption or salvation with respect to it [trauma] is dubious.”37 Richter’s paintings seem to suggest a similar engagement with or working through of the trauma of the 1970s and of the events surrounding October 18, 1977. As mentioned, the paintings are marked by a considerable degree of blurriness, to which critics call attention time and time again. In fact, it is such a signature style of Richter’s paintings that it led Sanford Schwartz to refer to Richter as “The Master of the Blur.”38 The atmospheric quality of Richter’s October 18, 1977 cycle of fifteen oil paintings results from three particular techniques. First, Richter blurs the original photograph by rephotographing it, so that the details of the new image are much less distinct than the original.39 So while the original source images of the cycle are often in focus,

34 Theodor W. Adorno, “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?” trans. Henry W. Pickford, in Can One Live After Auschwitz?:  A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 3–18. 35 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working through the Past,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York:  Columbia UP, 2005), 89–103, esp. p. 343, footnote 1. 36 The concept of Aufarbeitung (working up) is related to but not precisely the same as the Freudian term Durcharbeitung (working through). 37 LaCapra, History in Transit, 119. I thank Dominick LaCapra for the discussion of this term and the limitations and the possibilities of its use in other contexts when I was in residence at Cornell University in the summer of 2008. 38 Sanford Schwartz, “The Master of the Blur,” New  York Review of Books 49.6 (April 11, 2002): 16–18. 39 Storr, Gerhard Richter, 100.

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the templates for Richter’s paintings have already been rephotographed and blurred. The reprocessed images on which the cycle is based can be found in Richter’s Atlas, an ongoing compendium of over 4,000 found, original, and reproduced photographs grouped together in over 600 panels.40 Richter has been indexing photographs since 1962, when he started to compile Atlas. As the tome reveals, Richter does not simply cut and paste original photographs into the book. Instead, he frequently rephotographs and reprocesses source images, making them much blurrier than their original counterparts. See, for example, the original photograph, rephotographed blurry photograph (top left two images on Atlas Sheet 470), and the painting Cell (Figures 6.1, 6.2 and

FIGURE 6.1 “Cell,” original photo, Stern, 1980. 40

Gerhard Richter, Atlas of the Photographs, Collages and Sketches (New York: DAP, 1997).

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FIGURE 6. 2 Gerhard Richter, Cell, painting, 1989. © Gerhard Richter 2017 (12092017).

6.3, respectively). Through this technique of rephotographing and reprocessing source images, the photographs that form the basis for the October 18, 1977 series, as the pages in Atlas show, are already abstractions of the images originally printed in the media. Second, Richter blurred the images by repainting the photographs, which some scholars have referred to as over-painting, un-painting, or de-painting.41

41

Storr, Gerhard Richter, 110.

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FIGURE 6. 3 Gerhard Richter, Atlas Sheet 470, Atlas, 51.7 cm × 66.7 cm, 1989. © Gerhard Richter 2017 (12092017).

As Storr explains, “The techniques employed to achieve these nuances and to give the paintings their muffled feel—feathering the edges of the shapes, dragging brushes or squeegees across the still wet surface of the canvas— are a kind erasure.”42 Consequently, the original source photographs and repainted version of them transmit very different information or transmit information very differently. For example, the photos published in Stern magazine (Figure  6.4), which form the basis for Arrest 1 and Arrest 2 (Figures 6.5 and 6.6), clearly show a stark white building on the left and cars parked in a parking lot on the right. Andreas Baader stands in front of an artillery tank in the middle of the photograph on which Arrest 1 is based. In the second photograph on which Arrest 2 is based, the tank has receded toward the upper edge of the photograph. In the middle of the photograph, Holger Meins is undressing as police asked him to do, so that they could rest assured that he was indeed unarmed. While the original photographs transmit this information clearly, the viewer of Richter’s repaintings of them struggles to make out what is happening, looking again and again for the arrest, as he or she strives to reconcile the title of the painting with an action in the painting. 42

Storr, Gerhard Richter, 110.

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FIGURE 6.4 Stern, original photo, June 8, 1972.

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FIGURE 6.5 Gerhard Richter, Arrest 1, painting, 92 cm × 126 cm, 1988. © Gerhard Richter 2017 (12092017).

FIGURE 6.6 Gerhard Richter, Arrest 2, painting, 92 cm × 126 cm, 1988. © Gerhard Richter 2017 (12092017).

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Discernable in the two paintings is the gray hull of a building on the left and, upon closer inspection, parked cars on the right. The framing of the image leads one to seek out the action in the center of the painting. But it is not clear what, if anything, is going on there. It might be conjectured, after careful scrutiny, that the dark mass that rests in the middle of Arrest 1 and toward the top of Arrest 2 is a tank. But Baader’s figure is barely noticeable. In Arrest 2, in which the tank has receded to the upper edge of the painting, it remains entirely unclear whether an arrest is taking place in the center of the image or not. A  dark splotch of an amorphous shape looms in the middle. Is it a shadow? Is it a bleeding body on the ground? It is this qualitative difference between the photographs that appear in the newsmagazines and the images that appear in Richter’s oil paintings that led Sanford Schwartz to call Richter “The Master of the Blur.” In contrast to earlier films discussed in Chapter 3, rather than taking a decided stance in the debate surrounding the mass media’s representations of the RAF and by the Springer publishing house in particular, Richter steps back and questions how media’s narratives shift over time, articulating ambiguities and irresolvable complexities by dint of his very stylistics. Third, Richter’s photo-paintings use a grisaille range of gray tones. In his monograph on Richter’s October 18, 1977 cycle, Storr tells us that “Richter has lopped off the top of his gray scale and sometimes the bottom as well, leaving himself a grisaille range of ashen, slate or anthracite tones.”43 That is, the extreme contrasts of black and white have been avoided. For example, the building, which is stark white in the photograph, appears gray in the painting, and the parked cars, which are either deep black or bright white in the original photo, are also gray in the painting. Taken together, these techniques mute and obscure the original image. Additionally, these three techniques that obfuscate—the blurring through rephotographing and through painting over the photographs with oil paints, as well as the exclusive use of gray tones—lead viewers to look and look again at Richter’s October 18, 1977 cycle, in much the way that DeLillo describes it in his short story. Richter’s fascination with repainting photographs builds on his belief that photographs and paintings are qualitatively different and are regarded differently. As he writes on the topic in his notes in a rich passage from 1964–65: A photograph is taken in order to inform. What matters to the photographer and to the viewer is the result, the legible information, the fact captured in an image. Alternatively, the photograph can be regarded as a picture, in which case the information conveyed changes radically.

43

Storr, Gerhard Richter, 112.

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However, because it is very hard to turn a photograph into a picture simply by declaring it to be one, I have made a painted copy.44 In other words, to Richter a photograph’s content, when packaged in mass media, “changes radically”; it is not scrutinized as closely. And simply calling a photograph a picture, without lifting it out of its context and placing it in one that viewers implicitly knew they were to read differently, was not enough. Therefore, Richter decided to paint a copy or repaint the photographs. In sum, Richter’s repaintings lead the viewer to reflect on the differences that exist between photography and painting, on each form, on the way it is regarded, and thus, on how the message of each medium is constructed differently. In addition, as mentioned, by relocating images from mass media in the context of art, something Richter had also done previously in his pop art exhibits,45 that is, by turning the photos from newsmagazines into oil paintings, each receives a qualitatively different gaze. Richter had been repainting photographs since 1962. Many of his early exhibits show this technique, such as his 1966 paintings Acht Lernschwestern (The Eight Students), portraits based on images of eight women mass murdered by Richard Speck in Chicago, and culminating with his 1972 exhibit 48 Portraits, which were images of public figures, such as writers, composers, scientists, and politicians. Subsequently, for the remainder of the 1970s, Richter produced abstract paintings:  Grey paintings, Color Charts, and Abstract Paintings.46 These abstractions allowed him to focus on techniques that would inform October 18, 1977. While Richter had already been experimenting with techniques of blurring as early as his 1966 Eight Student Nurses, the abstract paintings of the 1970s permitted him to concentrate both on blurring and on the chromatic ranges of grey. What he learned about these two techniques in his abstract paintings would be evident when, in the late 1980s, he returned to repainting photographs and to creating photopaintings, which build on the portraits and the grey abstract paintings. While critics generally recognize this aspect of Richter’s photo-paintings, that is, how the photo-paintings suggest one reconsider photography and painting, they usually overlook the source form: mass media. For example, Osborne argues that “the purpose of these paintings [is] the interrogation of the photograph as a cultural form.”47 Furthermore, Osborne contends 44

Obrist, Gerhard Richter, 31. Life with Pop—A Demonstration for the Capitalist Realism, Möbelhaus Berges, Düsseldorf, Germany, June 1–July 1, 1963. Obrist, Gerhard Richter, 18–21. 46 Although these stylistics came to dominate in the 1970s, Richter was already at work on the Color Charts as early as 1966 and on the Grey paintings as early as 1968. He began painting Abstract Paintings in 1976. Obrist, Gerhard Richter, 274–7. 47 Peter Osborne, “Painting Negation:  Gerhard Richter’s Negatives,” October 62 (Autumn 1992): 102–13. Here, 107. 45

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that repainting photographs, a signature style of Richter’s, encourages a reconsideration of both the medium of photography as well as of painting: “Photo-painting is as an affirmation of photography by painting. Yet it is also . . . an affirmation of painting in the face of photography.”48 To be sure, Richter’s repaintings do lead the viewer to reconsider each medium, however, they also suggest a reexamination of images widely disseminated in popular print media. That is, photo-paintings of images from magazines and newspapers, such as the aforementioned Eight Student Nurses (1966) and the 48 Portraits (1972) as well as the October 18, 1977 cycle, encourage viewers to re-revaluate the very form of mass media. Thus, while Osborne states that “photo-painting acts to add a moment of reflection, of historical and presentational self-consciousness, to the experience of the photographic image,”49 it also adds a moment of reflection not only to photographs but also to those images usually flipped through rather quickly—the photographs of mass media. Richter’s October 18, 1977 cycle rests precisely at the intersection of the original event, the memory of it, and its representation in the mass media, which creates such a challenge for the viewer in attempts to decipher the images. The blur that characterizes Richter’s paintings and seems, on the one hand, to hinder a reading of them becomes, on the other hand, precisely the technique through which Richter reminds of the complexities involved in historical narratives and cultural representations of them. Furthermore, most studies of Richter’s cycle, seeking to ascertain his stance on the RAF, miss the fact that his photo-paintings do not propose a particular political stance on the group and its actions but instead a politics of reading. They lead the viewer to revisit the events of the era and their representations, thereby suggesting a reconsideration of and participation in the construction of historical and cultural memory.

Imaging Terror: The Debate around the 2005 Kunst-Werke Exhibit The exhibit, Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Die RAF (Regarding Terror: The RAF) was on display from January 29 to May 16, 2005, at the Kunst-Werke Museum, in  Berlin, Germany.50 Even prior to the exhibit’s opening, the

48

Osborne, “Painting Negation,” 107. Osborne, “Painting Negation,” 107. 50 Literally translated the exhibit’s title could be rendered as “to imagine” the terror. Yet the exhibit’s title was rendered in English as Regarding Terror: The RAF Exhibition. Between June 26 and August 28, 2005, the exhibit was on display at the Neue Galerie in Graz, Austria. 49

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announced plans for it unleashed a furious debate. This heated response to the very idea of a planned exhibit and the criticism’s fearful tone revealed the as yet unhealed trauma suffered by civilians as a result of the RAF’s decades long campaign of armed struggle. Some critics were decidedly partisan while others attempted to maintain a neutral tone. Some critics advocated more exhibits in order to make the RAF and its role in German history the subject of debate; inversely, other critics were outraged by the very idea of an exhibit about the RAF, arguing that the group should not be mythologized or glorified. The response to the very idea of the exhibit, both in its furor and in its content, bespoke that 1970s terrorism was a site of trauma. The proposed exhibit touched a raw nerve related to a range of pivotal topics including, among other things, the concept of democracy, the permissible extent of state surveillance, and the acceptable extent to which civil liberties could be reined in, in order to preserve a democracy. To be sure, when these debates originally played out in the wake of the repressive shifts that took place over the course of the 1970s, discussed in Chapter  3, they grappled with questions that were fundamental to the fledgling republic’s attempts to define itself anew as a democracy in the post-fascist era. As the debates resurfaced in response to the Kunst-Werke exhibit, they raised new questions about looking back on the historical and cultural memory of the Red Army Faction and about the very representability of the RAF. The heated debate in the media had already been unleashed well in advance of the opening of the Kunst-Werke exhibit. News about the intended exhibit and its working title “Mythos RAF” leaked to the press. The controversy began with an article published on July 22, 2003, in the Bild newspaper. As cultural historian Joachim Baur puts it  tells us in his article, “Geschichtsbeschreibung im Feuilleton: Anmerkungen zur Debatte um ‘Mythos RAF’ ” (Describing History in the Culture Pages: Notes to the Debate surrounding Regarding Terror): “The controversy was essentially a media debate. All the large and important German newspapers discussed the topic, some with reference to and criticism of articles in other papers.”51 The extent of reportage was enormous: by September 30, 2003, 531 articles had appeared about the exhibit in German papers, of which 150 had appeared within the first three days of the initial Bild article. Most of the discussion did not revolve around the content of the exhibit but rather around the very fact that an exhibit about the RAF was being 51

Joachim Baur, “Geschichtsbeschreibung im Feuilleton: Anmerkungen zur Debatte um ‘Mythos RAF,’ ” in Zur Vorstellung des Terrors:  Die RAF Ausstellung, vol. 2, ed. Klaus Biesenbach (Berlin: Steidl/KW, 2005), 241–4. “Die Kontroverse war im wesentlichen eine medial Debatte. Alle großen deutschen Zeitungen diskutierten das Thema, teils in Bezug zu und Kritik an Artikeln anderer Blätter.”

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organized. Outrage was expressed about the fact that while public monies had once been used in order to combat the RAF, now public monies— of the Hausstadtkulturfond (City of Berlin, cultural funds) to the tune of 100,000 Euros—were being used to sponsor the exhibit. In response, the exhibit’s organizers took an unusual step on January 12, 2004, and withdrew their request for public funds. Prominent works of contemporary art were donated and auctioned off, raising 250,000 Euros and funding the exhibition. Other critics and journalists questioned how the surviving family members of the RAF’s victims might feel about such an exhibit. For example, on July 23, 2003, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported: “Hergard Rohwedder and Hanns-Eberhard Schleyer, surviving family members of victims of the Red Army Faction (RAF), have requested politicians and publicists to take a position opposing an exhibit about the RAF. They fear it would ‘build a legend and glorify’ the terror.”52 From the beginning, the question of how the victims of the RAF were represented in the exhibit and whether or not surviving family members had been contacted played an important role in the controversies. Another article from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung stated:  “An exhibit planned for this fall about the Red Army Faction is already creating a storm among the survivors of the victims. They take offense, that in the original concept, the tasteless question of the ‘ideas and ideals’ of the RAF—that is their legacy—was posed.”53 Representatives of the Kunst-Werke Museum emphasized that they in no way intended to downplay the crimes of the RAF. According to Beate Barner, then communications director at the Kunst-Werke Museum, “Already in June [2003] it was decided that relatives of and survivors of the RAF would be informed about the concept for the exhibit.”54 The Kunst-Werke was quick to point out the discrepancy between the intentions of the exhibit, as demonstrated by its planned content, and

52 “20 Angehörige kritisieren RAF-Ausstellung,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 23, 2003, 5.  “Hergard Rohwedder und Hanns-Eberhard Schleyer, Hinterbliebene von Opfern der Roten Armee Fraktion (RAF), haben Politiker und Publizisten gebeten, sich gegen eine Ausstellung über die RAF zu engagieren. Sie fürchten eine ‘Legendenbildung und Glorifizierung’ des Terrors.” 53 “Opferperspektive,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 23, 2003, 8.  “Eine für diesen Herbst geplante Ausstellung über die Rote Armee Fraktion sorgt schon jetzt für Wirbel bei den Hinterbliebenen der Opfer. Sie nehmen Anstoß daran, dass im ursprünglichen Konzept die geschmacklose Frage nach ‘Ideen und Idealen’ der RAF—also nach ihrem Vermächtnis— gestellt worden sei.” 54 Vera Gaserow, “Die ‘Rote Armee Fraktion’ beschäftigt plötzlich wieder die Politik,” Frankfurter Rundschau, July 24, 2003, 1. “Bereits im Juni [2003] habe man darüber hinaus beschlossen, Angehörige und Opfer der RAF über das Ausstellungskonzept zu informieren.”

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the focus of the discussions. As Barner put it in an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung on July 23, 2003:  “The organizers of the planned exhibit in Berlin about the Red Army Faction (RAF) have dealt with the accusation that they are trying to trivialize or downplay the history of the terror group. It [the exhibit] is about a ‘critical analysis’ and in no way intends to idealize or make a banality out of the RAF.”55 In fact, the organizers of the exhibit hoped to engage and problematize the very myth of the RAF, hence the exhibit’s original, albeit vehemently criticized, title: “Mythos RAF.” Curators intended to achieve this goal by exhibiting political-historical documentation of the RAF together with RAF symbols in pop culture and fashion. As Barner explained, “By connecting political-historical documentation with art, the exhibit wanted to problematize precisely the frivolous ‘aesthetic appropriation’ of the RAF symbols in fashion and pop culture.”56 On the one hand, the exhibit included reprints of articles from the era, ranging from Springer publications, such as Bild, to other West German newsmagazines and newspapers, such as Stern, Spiegel, Süddeutsche Zeitung, to the East German paper of the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED) Neues Deutschland. On the other hand, the exhibit brought together roughly 100 pieces of art of various media that in some way engage with the RAF, ranging from works in Richter’s aforementioned Atlas to art by Joseph Beuys, Wolf Vostell, Johannes Kahrs, Astrid Klein, Klaus Staeck, and Katharina Sieverding. The exhibit also included other media:  Bruce La Bruce’s film Raspberry Reich (2004) and a reproduction of the cover of Erin Cosgrove’s romance novel, Die Baader-Meinhof Affäre: Ein romantisches Manifest (The Baader Meinhof Affair:  A Romantic Manifesto, 2003).57 It included magazine covers from QUICK and Dennis Adams’s photograph of the Eric Clapton album, There’s One in Every Crowd, as it was found on Baader’s record player in his cell at Stammheim after his death. Hans-Peter Feldmann’s series of photographs, Die Toten (The Dead)—documenting the deceased,

55 Interview with Beate Barner, “Veranstalter verteidigt RAF-Austellung,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 23, 2003, 2. “Die Veranstalter einer geplanten Ausstellung über die Rote Armee-Fraktion (RAF) in Berlin sind dem Vorwurf entgegengetreten, die Geschichte der Terrorgruppe verharmlosen zu wollen. Es gehe um eine ‘kritische Analyse’ und in keiner Weise um die Idealisierung oder Banalisierung der RAF.” 56 Vera Gaserow, “Die ‘Rote Armee Fraktion’ beschäftigt plötzlich wieder die Politik,” Frankfurter Rundschau, July 24, 2003, 1. “Durch eine Verbindung von politisch-historicher Dokumentation und einem künstlerischen Teil wollte man gerade die leichtfertige, ‘ästhetische Aneignung’ der RAF-Symbole in Mode und Popkultur problematisieren.” 57 For a book-length analysis of the RAF in literature, see Julian Preece, Baader-Meinhof and the Novel:  Narratives of the Nation/Fantasies of the Revolution, 1970–2010 (New  York: Palgrave, 2012).

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both former RAF members and the RAF’s victims—formed the exhibit’s centerpiece.58 Additionally, the exhibit included images that placed the RAF in the context of pop culture and fashion, such as Hans Neihus’s Hollywood Boulevard, a star for Holger Meins on Hollywood boulevard; Scott King’s Mona Meinhof, a rendition of Ulrike Meinhof as the Mona Lisa; and Scott King and Matt Worley’s Prada Meinhof, a collaborative advertisement, published in the Autumn and Winter 1999 edition of Crash. As Klaus Biesenbach, then director of the Kunst-Werke Museum, who came up with the concept of the exhibit, says in the introduction to its monograph: The RAF exhibit counters a certain over-information and re-privatization of the media images, which were overly in demand, through the art. And the exhibit tries to offer again a visual witnessing that can be remembered by the visitor of the exhibit. It illuminates the first generation of the RAF as an object of an image, citation and reference machine, which seems to have a very high level of attention, in our post-modern media shaped world but one that was not questioned or critically engaged . . . The space between and intersection between history and art allows it to be described as Imagining the RAF.59 Biesenbach was keenly aware that the works he was pulling together for this exhibit were two very different types of works: ones that were in the public domain and, inversely, ones had that may never have been seen by the public. In combining these works—the media reportage and the art—he sought to open up a space for a discussion of the relationship between history and its representation, between media and art, that is, for a consideration of cultural memory. Indeed, he wanted to create a space to discuss how art and media create history, by presenting (vorstellen) the RAF, and discussing how these re-presentations lead the viewer to imagine them (sich vorstellen). In the eyes of many critics, however, the exhibit was reduced to the visuals, sorely lacking the requisite contextualizing information to allow for

58

See also Dieter Roelstraete, “Hans-Peter Feldmann: Art In and Out of the Age of Terror: On Hans-Peter Feldmann’s Die Toten,” Afterall 17 (Spring 2008): 62–70. 59 Klaus Biesenbach, “Einleitung,” in Zur Vorstellung des Terrors:  Die RAF Ausstellung (Berlin:  Steidl Verlag, 2005), 11–15. Here, 13. “Die RAF-Ausstellung setzt in einer Art Überinformation und Reprivatisierung den überbeanspruchten Bildern der Medien die Kunst entgegen und versucht wieder eine erinnerbare Augenzeugenschaft für den Ausstellungsbesucher anzubieten. Sie beleuchtet die erste Generation der RAF als Gegenstand einer Bilder-, Zitier- und Referenzmaschine, die in der postmodernen mediengeprägten Welt eine hohe, unhinterfragte Aufmerksamkeit innezuhaben scheint . . . Der Zwischenraum und die Schnittstelle zwischen Historie und Kunst lässt sich als das beschreiben, was im Weiteren als die ‘Vorstellung’ der RAF bezeichnet wird.”

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an understanding of the history. Mattias Reichelt, for example writes: “Instead of creating an explosive exhibit, . . . the RAF exhibit reduces the thematics to the image of the RAF in the media and in art. The originally planned and necessarily accompanying program consisting of lectures and debates was totally dispensed with.”60 Thomas Loy, by contrast, writing in the Tagesspiegel, states, “It is calm in the RAF exhibit—one week after its opening. The visitors have a lot of work to do:  they are learning.”61 Butz Peters, author of Tödlicher Irrtum: Die Geschichte der RAF (Deadly Mistake, the History of the RAF),62 too, was very critical about the lack of historical information that viewers of the exhibit received, stating, “Without a question, the exhibit is an artistic achievement . . . But it does not really draw close to the era of the West German terror. Mystification, aestheticization and false claims are not appropriate means. Whoever wants to see not only artistic interpretations . . . does not get their money’s worth.”63 Bettina Röhl, daughter of Ulrike Meinhof, stated that the exhibit was in poor taste and did not take into consideration the victims. After the opening of the exhibition, Röhl criticized it for its content, calling it “trivial and not very intellectual” (“belanglos und wenig intellektuell”), arguing that it did not contextualize the RAF enough to allow for a discussion of the terrorist group that could lead also to a reconsideration of the historical context in which it was embedded. She pointed out that the texts that the RAF read and discussed were not found anywhere. In an interview with the newspaper taz, she said, I concede that the RAF, the supporters of the RAF, the 68ers and the whole generation tried to be intellectual, to have values, to be leftists. It was, after all, about justice and “revolution.” For that the generation of 68 and most of all the RAF icons had mistaken concepts. But in any event, the problem is that none of all this exists in the exhibition. One only sees bits and pieces there. The true stories are not told.64 60

Matthias Reichelt, “Niemandem weh tun. Nichts genaues weiß man nicht,” Junge Welt, January 31, 2005. “Anstatt jedoch eine brisante Ausstellung zusammenzustellen, wurde bei der . . . RAF-Ausstellung das Thema auf das Bild der RAF in den Medien und in der Kunst reduziert. Auf das ursprünglich geplante und notwendige Begleitprogramm aus Vorträgen und Debatten wurde völlig verzichtet.” 61 Thomas Loy, “Kunst, Kampf, Konzentration,” Tagesspiegel, February 6, 2005, 10. “Es ist ruhig in der RAF-Ausstellung—eine Woche nach Eröffnung. Die Besucher haben zu tun:  sie lernen.” 62 Butz Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum: Die Geschichte der RAF (Berlin: Argon, 2004). 63 Butz Peters, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 7, 2005, 33. “Fraglos ist die Ausstellung ein Kunstereignis . . . Eine wirkliche Annäherung an die Zeit des bundesdeutschen Terrors bietet sie aber nicht. Mystifizierung, Ästhetisierung und falsche Behauptungen im Ausstellungskatalog sind keine geeigneten Mittel. Wer nicht nur künstlerische Interpretationen zum Thema sehen . . . will, kommt nicht auf seine Kosten.” 64 Bettina Röhl, “Über diese Ausstellung lacht sich die RAF tot,” taz. Die tageszeitung, February 7, 2005. “Ich gestehe der RAF, den Anhängern der RAF, den 68ern und der ganzen Generation

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She pointed out that the exhibit mythologized the RAF, leaving out “die wahren Geschichten” (the true stories) about the internal squabbles and tensions. In sum, while the two main stylistics of Richter’s paintings—the use of blurriness created through the techniques of rephotographing and repainting, and the use of mass media images originally found in newsmagazines— force questions about historical memory to the fore, the vehement debates that predated the Kunst-Werke exhibit’s opening reveal the unresolved and traumatic legacy of the Red Army Faction. Rather than suggesting an exhibit be shut down for its content, or reducing art and history to specific tasks, a study of the RAF, based on a combination of historical analysis and textual interpretation, be it of art, media, or film, could open onto pivotal questions related to West Germany’s fledgling democracy. The Red Army Faction repeatedly reappears in cultural mediations, I  contend, because the group and the state’s response raise concerns fundamental to postwar West German history and its attempt to establish a democracy but also to democracies, writ large.

zu, dass sie gerungen haben um Intellekt, um Werte, Linkssein. Es ging ja mal um Gerechtigkeit und ‘Revolution.’ Dafür haben die 68er und erst recht ihre RAF-Ikonen verfehlte Konzepte gehabt. Aber immerhin. Das Problem ist: All das gibt’s in dieser Ausstellung nicht. Da sieht man nur Fratzen. Die wahren Geschichten werden nicht erzählt.”

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Epilogue: Critique of Violence: The Politics of Solidarity

In the audio commentary accompanying The Legend of Rita (2000) Schlöndorff states that the film provides a requiem. When I interviewed him in 2007, I asked him to elaborate: “A requiem for what?” For the end of the left, he said, after 1968 and the Red Army Faction (RAF), and of socialism after East Germany and reunification. The era, he suggested, is over, and so are its politics. But is it? Is any era ever truly over? What are the politics of narrating it? As over? As continuing on? What are the legacies of 1968 and of 1970s terrorism? In West Germany? Internationally? As Quinn Slobodian argues, “The collaboration between West German and Third World students barely exists in the cultural and scholarly memory of 1968, and New Left internationalism is most often seen as a form of narcissism.”1 Yet, as Slobodian points out, the Third World national liberation and self-determination movements influenced social movements in West Germany and, inversely, the uprisings taking place in West Germany and in other First World nations impacted Third World movements. Kristin Ross opens her study on May ’68 and Its Afterlives, a rumination on hegemonic narratives about ‘68 in France, with an account of a sociologist who stated:  “But nothing happened in France in ’68.”2 As Ross’s book reveals, however, much happened in France in 1968, and much of it has been occluded from view, particularly the role of workers’ strikes throughout France over the course of the 1960s and the role of Algerians fighting for independence and the violent backlash unleashed on them both in Algeria and in Paris, France. These two population groups 1 Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham: Duke UP, 2012), 228. 2 Kristin Ross, May ‘68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 19. He argued for an assessment of Prague instead.

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and the politics of solidarity, Ross points out, have been excised from the imaginary vis-à-vis May ‘68. Returning Algerians and workers’ uprisings to narratives about the 1960s is crucial both to include working class and anticolonial struggles and also to include the politics of solidarity in accounts of 1968. To be sure, the identification with the Third World included, but was not and should not be reduced to, militancy. In fact, the question of violence typically appeared first as a result of a critical assessment of the violence inherent to colonialism and imperialism, as Chapter  1 presents. Based on work with people from countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, members of social movements in West Germany observed connections or patterns of colonization and imperialism  among nations in the Third World. Reading the writings from and about Third World social movements also provided political models beyond the logic of the Cold War binary, a dichotomy stringently felt in West Germany, as the country was rent asunder by it and rested at its frontlines. Additionally, many of these social movements suggested forms of democracy that were built from the ground up at a time when leftists of a broad spectrum in West Germany—including but not limited to pacifists, workers and trade unionists, teachers, nurses, theologians—did not feel represented by their government. This sentiment stemmed from the Christian Democratic Union’s 1955 decision to join NATO and its 1957 decision to rearm and develop and use nuclear energy and weapons, as well as the 1959 decision of the Social Party of Germany (SPD) to renege on its representation of the working class and to support, instead, free market policies—both explicitly outlined in its Godesberg Program. The 1956 ban on the Communist Party of Germany; the 1961 split of the SPD and the SDS, its youth organization; and the 1964 establishment of the right-wing National Democratic Party added to the frustrations with the democratic system, articulated through electoral politics. As a result of these factors, in West Germany social movements grew over the course of the 1950s and 1960s and the era pushed to the fore the notion of democracy expressed by voting with your feet rather than solely at the ballot box. Furthermore, the 1968 actions were by no means the highpoint of leftist mobilization. Its growth continued in the 1970s and focused even more on the political concerns of the working class and of labor, of people of color, of feminists, and of gays and lesbians. In West Germany, the violence associated with its “1968” began a year earlier when police officer Karl-Heinz Kurras fatally shot nonviolent demonstrator Benno Ohnesorg on June 2, 1967. This fatal shooting and the subsequent acquittal of Kurras politicized and radicalized many on the left. In West Germany, as in the United States, asking “who shot first?” is an important question for understanding the turbulent and indeed violent era. Activists in the social movements had already read about the armed struggle movements that were proliferating

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in other countries. Although they were discussing theories of violence, they had hitherto not taken violent action. In fact, thus far, their understanding of violence was of actions undertaken during colonialism and subsequent national liberation struggles and by imperialism. More recent scholarship—such as the work by Ross and Slobodian—has underscored how the international solidarity among social movements of the late 1960s has been whitewashed. The solidarity alliances were real and powerful. Books from the era, be they political treatises, theater dramas, or autobiographies, reveal as much. Interviews with activists involved in movements at the time confirm the prevalence of solidarity alliances. One reason the solidarity alliances might have been eclipsed from historical narratives about the late 1960s is because of the perceived or real threat that they posed to existing power structures. A brief excursus about the Black Panther Party serves to illustrate this point. In the United States a whole slew of other organizations drew inspiration from and modeled themselves on the Black Panther Party:  the American Indian Movement, a Native American advocacy group; the Brown Berets, a Chicano rights group; I  Wor Kuen, an Asian American rights group; the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican nationalist group; and the Young Patriots, a group organizing for the rights of the poor and working class.3 Many of these organizations came together to form the Rainbow Coalition, through organizing efforts of Fred Hampton, Black Panther Party; Jose Cha-Cha Jimenez, Young Lords; and members of the Young Patriots Organization. One of the Black Panther Party platforms that inspired was its now oft-forgotten ten-point program:  it was nonviolent and promulgated selforganizing in the community in the face of a history of discrimination and gross government negligence. The ten-point program included, among other things, the popular Breakfast Program, which sought to address childhood poverty and hunger. This type of self-organizing was inspirational for other groups. They understood well the struggle for economic justice, employment, housing, education, and fair treatment by police and the justice system. They also understood that when their rights, although guaranteed by the constitution, are not met, it had to be pointed out and that they unfortunately had to selforganize in order to ensure their basic rights and needs were met. The Black Panther Party was established in Oakland in 1966. Police violence counted among numerous factors that led to its establishment. On

3

For the politics of solidarity among the Black Panther Party, Chicanos, and Japanese Americans and other groups in the 1960s and 1970s, cf. Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation (Philadelphia:  Temple UP, 2015); Amy Sonnie and James Tracy, Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power:  Community Organizing in Radical Times (New  York:  Melville, 2011); Darrel Enck-Wanzer, The Young Lords: A Reader (New York: New York UP, 2010); and Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

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September 27, 1966, at four in the afternoon, police officer Alvin Johnson fatally shot 16-year-old unarmed African American Matthew Johnson (no relation) in Hunter’s Point, San Francisco, calling wider attention to the ongoing violence African Americans faced at the hands of police.4 Uprisings ensued from September 27 to October 3, 1966, in neighborhoods throughout San Francisco, including the Bayview, the Fillmore, and the Haight. In response, the city of San Francisco imposed a curfew on predominantly African American neighborhoods, such as the Bayview Hunter’s Point and the Fillmore in an attempt to end the protests. To be sure, the decision to establish the Black Panther Party did include a decision to openly and legally arm themselves:  but it was made on the basis of self-defense and in addition to numerous other programs adopted to address the needs of African Americans. Any discussion or exploration of violence associated with terrorist groups of the 1970s must include a consideration of the preceding violence to which they were responding. Doing so does not condone the violence of 1970s terrorism. It does, however, do the very necessary work of contextualizing it. In 1956, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) was established to disrupt the Communist Party.5 Puerto Rican independence groups had been under surveillance since June 1, 1962; and an additional program monitored the activities related to Castro’s July 26 Movement, which had overthrown the US-backed Fulgencio Batista dictatorship in Cuba, as of June 2, 1961, if not earlier, given the April 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion.6 On August 25, 1967, a new COINTELPRO program was implemented, according to FBI documents, in order to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of the Black nationalists.”7 In 1968, J. Edgar Hoover, director of the US Federal Bureau of Intelligence, proclaimed that the Black Panther Party posed “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”8 Henceforth, the activities of the COINTELPRO program focused intensely on the Black Panther Party. They also focused on five other groups: “The Communist Party, the Socialist

4

Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 38–9. 5 Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts, Subject (COINTELPRO), https://vault.fbi.gov/ cointel-pro. Last accessed July 4, 2017. 6 Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts, Subject (COINTELPRO), Puerto Rican Groups, Section 1 (1–86) 105-93124; and Cuba, 105–99938, page 60. 7 Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts, Subject (COINTELPRO), Black Extremist, 100448006, Section 1. Source: https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro. Last accessed July 4, 2017. 8 Robert Brisbane, Black Activism: Racial Revolution in the United States, 1954–1970 (Valley Forge, PA: Hudson Press, 1974), 182. See also Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas (eds), Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy (New York: Routledge, 2001).

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Workers’ Party; White Hate Groups; Black Hate Groups; and the New Left.”9 The COINTELPRO programs officially ended in 1971. Hoover’s statement and the groups targeted suggest a fear of the Black Panther Party, its model of self-organizing, the way its model spread like wildfire to other groups, and the growing success not only of each of the movements named but also of their solidarity. It might also account for the resistance to narratives of solidarity around 1968. The analysis that pinpointed a lineage from anticolonialism to anti-imperialism, exemplified by the shift from the Indo-China Wars to the Vietnam War, and that argued instead for self-liberation and self-determination, was heartening—and threatening. To be sure, real problems existed among leftists despite the politics of solidarity espoused. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz—active in struggles related to the rights of the working class, women, indigenous peoples, and anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles—has argued, during the late 1960s and 1970s, she often felt movements were addressing one political topic or another but rarely their nexus.10 Seldom, that is, did a movement bring the topics together in analysis or in action. While feminists, as mentioned in Chapter 4, pointed out to their leftist male counterparts that their voices and concerns were not reflected or heard in political platforms, feminism itself was subsequently criticized, rightly so, for its predominant focus on the concerns of white, middle class, heterosexual women. Bringing the politics of solidarity to the forefront undoes a systemic whitewashing of its existence from the politics of the 1960s, both in terms of who initiated and in terms of issues addressed. Aside from correcting historical narratives, it also intends to highlight one reason why it was often left out: it was perceived to be a threat. Returning it to the narrative allows one to ask: Was it successful? The answer, as ever, is yes and no. Highlighting the politics of solidarity, as a perceived threat, also raises the issue of state violence. A  discussion of the violence of armed struggle groups active in the 1960s must, if it is to counter the reductive imagery, consider its contexts, that is, its origins. In many Third World countries, armed struggle was waged against colonial and authoritarian regimes. In the United States, the politics of solidarity sought to allow first for selfprotection against systemic racism, against blacks and people of color, and the consequences of racism, that is, challenges in ensuring basic needs could be met, such as physical safety and health, housing, food, employment, and

9

Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts, Subject (COINTELPRO), Black Extremist, 100448006, Section 1. Source: https://vault.fbi.=gov/cointel-pro. Last accessed July 4, 2017. 10 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Outlaw Woman:  A Memoir of the War Years, 1960–1975 (Oklahoma:  Oklahoma UP, 2014). See also her introduction to Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times (New York: Melville, 2011), xiii.

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education. Similar struggles, as outlined in Chapter  1, were underway in West Germany. Such an analysis does not undo the violence of the RAF or other armed struggle groups active in West Germany. It does, however, imbed their actions in a greater historical and political context. Many issues to which the groups active in the 1960s called attention—racism, police violence, poverty, hunger, unemployment, housing crises, sexism, growing inequality—persist as inequities. The politics of solidarity matters for two reasons. First, it pinpoints the ability for political movements to dream up another society and to take steps to create it. Second, it pinpoints the awareness among broad swatches of society of the inequity of the status quo, of the misery it has created, of the fact that this suffering is shared, and of the commitment to working together to create an alternative. There are, in fact, numerous alternatives. In West Germany, as argued in Chapter  1, social movements drew connections between the self-liberation and self-determination struggles taking place in southeast Asia and Africa; the military and economic structures that made these wars possible; and West Germany’s complicity in them. After the Second World War and the Holocaust, a new generation was keen to avoid similar such actions, be they war or war crimes. As the movements and demonstrations grew during the 1960s, participants in the actions called out the media’s depictions of them, which often included yellow journalism and false or skewed accounts. Social movements also challenged corporate media monopolies. The era’s corporate media witnessed a shift from consensus-oriented media to contemporary critical journalism, which challenged its government and its policies, believing that this position—rather than a cozy, unquestioning one with government— fostered a democracy. In West Germany, New German Cinema, as I argue in this book, picked up on and engaged this discourse, questioning the relationship among institutions of power, such as mechanisms of governance, juridical institutions, and corporate media. The 1970s was also a watershed for the rise in security discourse, both as a result of the laws passed and surveillance apparatuses implemented.11 They were intended to protect the fledgling democracy after its authoritarian dictatorship. But debate was vehement about their effects on civil liberties. They created an environment of paranoia and fear, which numerous New German Cinema films of the decade depicted. These debates—about the political and economic factors motivating wars, the position of the media and the role of journalists within and vis-à-vis a democracy, and the extent to which surveillance should be 11

It might be more correct to state that the surveillance was not new but rather made public for the first time. For a book-length study of surveillance in West Germany from its founding to its dissolution, see Josef Foschepoth, Überwachtes Deutschland: Post- und Telefonüberwachung in der alten Bundesrepublik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2012).

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permissible—remain pivotal to this day in Germany, the United States, and beyond. New laws and surveillance mechanisms are frequently discussed and implemented, in Germany, in the United States,  and elsewhere, with similar discussions about civil liberties. The earlier era discussed in this book might shed light on these related contemporary debates. Over the course of the 1970s, after the imprisonment of most of the RAF’s first generation in 1972, the situation and treatment of political prisoners, as mentioned in Chapter  3, also became a major preoccupation of social movements. The condition of their imprisonment, which often included solitary confinement, formed a new focal point. In many instances, it, too, led to solidarity with other political prisoners and an awareness of prison conditions more generally and for a movement that worked for reform and for prison abolition.12 Additionally, New German Cinema grappled with two aspects of 1970s political organizing related to leftist social movements:  labor organizing and feminism. The films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Margarethe von Trotta discussed in Chapter 4 explore these alternative political trajectories together with armed struggle. Focusing on them returns labor politics and feminism to narratives about social movements of the 1960s and explores their continuation in the 1970s. These films counter Schlöndorff’s reduction of the legacy of 1968 to terrorism and his argument that the politics of 1968 ended with the decade of the 1970s. Implicitly, he argues for the trajectory from 1968 to terrorism, as many historians have also done, rather than for a narrative that captures the wide array of paths social movements took after they splintered between 1968 and 1970. By dint of this narrowed focus, he erases from view the numerous other political movements that emerged out of 1968, explored by New German Cinema and in this study, and whose legacy continues to this day. These movements stood in conversations with the Red Army Faction, whether they overlapped in some politics or were critical of the group, and they provided alternatives for political organizing and action. The politics of the RAF’s representation, and of representation in general, remain fraught, not, to be sure, for any reason related to an imperative of verisimilitude but rather because what is brought to or occluded from view about this historical era is intricately and inextricably interwoven with the politics of historical narratives writ large. The issue is not about getting it

12

On demands for a reform of prison conditions, see in particular the RAF’s declarations related to their hunger strikes, especially their first hunger strike in 1973:  “Hungerstreik-Erklärung vom 8.5. 1973,” in Rote Armee Fraktion:  Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF (Berlin:  ID-Verlag, 1997), 187–90. See also the autobiographies of former imprisoned RAF members mentioned in Chapter 3; and the collection of photographs by former RAF member Eva Haule, Porträts Gefangener Frauen (Wasserburg: Verein zur Förderung der sozialpolitischen Arbeit, 2005).

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exactly right. But telling a version of the story begs the question about what one wants to know about the era and its politics. The 1960s was a period of intense grappling with the legacies of colonization and of imperialism. The challenge to the status quo was immense. The alternatives put forward were as well. If 1968 and 1970s terrorism continue to hold a grasp on historical and cultural memory, as the vehement debate unleashed by the Kunst-Werke exhibit in 2005 discussed in Chapter 6 shows, it is, I contend, because the era’s politics of solidarity remains both a threat and an inspiration. One can discuss, and numerous historians have, the positive societal transformations to which it led. What the 1960s showed is that a government is not needed for people to self-organize against inequity. In fact, the era showed  that change tends to follow on the heels of peoples’s self-organized movements. A government can be used to ensure rights but if it does not work to this end, there are numerous alternatives. The politics of solidarity, whether through political organizing or everyday gestures of mutual aid, counteract systems predicated on plundering the many for the few.

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Winkler, Willi. “Möglicherweise: Die Linken und der Antisemitismus.” Sueddeutsche Zeitung, February 24, 2013. “Wir Deutschen sind unberechenbar.” Spiegel, June 19, 2006, 156–63. Wittmann, Rebecca. Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005. Wittner, Lawrence. Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. Die Wollands (The Wollands). Dir. Ingo Kratisch and Marianne Lüdcke. 1972. Die Worte des Vorsitzenden (The Words of the Chairman). Dir. Harun Farocki. 16 mm. 3 mins. 1967. Archive of the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, Germany. Wunschik, Tobias. “Aufstieg und Zerfall. Die zweite Generation der RAF.” Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus. Ed. Wolfgang Kraushaar. Vol. 2. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006. 472–88. Wunschik, Tobias. Baader-Meinhofs Kinder. Die Zweite Generation der RAF. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997. Wunschik, Tobias. “Das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit und der Terrorismus in Deutschland.” Diktaturen in Europa im 20. Jahrhundert – Der Fall DDR. Ed. Heiner Timmermann. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1996. 289–302. Wunschik, Tobias and Alexander Straßner. Die dritte Generation der Roten Armee Fraktion. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2005. X, Malcolm. Schwarze Gewalt: Reden. Berlin: Edition Voltaire, 1968. X, Malcolm. Der schwarze Tribun: Eine Autobiographie. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1966. Yacef, Saadi. Souvenirs de la Bataille d’Alger. Paris: R. Julliard, 1962. A Year with Thirteen Moons. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Filmverlag der Autoren. 1978. Young, Marilyn B. The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990. New York: Harpers, 1991. Zipes, Jack. “From Berufsverbot to Terrorism.” Telos 34 (Winter 1977–78): 136–47. Zipes, Jack. “The Political Dimensions of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum.” New German Critique 12 (1977): 75–84. Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Die RAF, Kunst-Werke Museum. Berlin, Germany. January 29–May 16, 2005. Zwei Wege (Two Paths). Dir. Harun Farocki. Cinematographer: Horst Kandeler. 1966. Das zweite Erwachen der Christa Klages (The Second Awakening of Christa Klages). Dir. Margarethe von Trotta. Production Company: Bioskop Film/ Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR). Distributor: Filmverlag der Autoren/New Line Cinema. 1978.

300

301

INDEX

Abendroth, Wolfgang 39, 97 abortion ban in West Germany 8, 62, 178–9, 180–1, 184, 188 Action Council for the Liberation of Women 178 Action Directe 10, 205 Adenauer, Konrad 4, 17, 20–2, 66, 188 Adorno, Theodor W. 16, 81, 97, 241 African National Congress (ANC) 31–2 Agit 883, 4, 5, 56, 81, 117, 84–100 Albrecht, Susanne 11, 137, 214, 221, 226 Algerian War 1, 15, 27–30, 36, 39, 90, 115, 196, 220, 258 Angola 29, 30, 33, 87, 212, 220, 223, 225 anti-colonial 16, 36, 59, 63, 232 anti-communism 70, 78, 87, 96 anti-imperialism 8, 16, 30, 36, 40, 46, 58, 59, 63, 96, 225, 226, 232 anti-Semitism 87 apartheid 29, 31–32 APO (Ausserparlamentarische Opposition / Extraparliamentary Opposition) 7, 18, 24, 37, 50, 51, 56, 70, 85, 111, 155–7, 175, 182, 197 arson 48–9, 66, 84, 91, 92, 116, 150 assassination: attempted of Dutschke 49–51, 71, 85, 98, 113–4 of Alfred Herrhausen 206 attempted of Hans Tietmeyer 206 attempted, of Alexander Haig 206 attempted, of Frederick Kroesen 206 of Bobby Hutton 98 of Detlev Karsten Rohwedder 206 of Fred Hampton 98

of Gerold von Braunmühl 206 of Martin Luther King, Jr. 98 of Patrice Lumumba 33 pudding, of Vice-President Humphrey 73 of Robert F. Kennedy 98 Assayas, Olivier 10, 13, 209 Association of German Student Organizations (VDS) 25, 28 asylum seekers 4, 26, 28 Augstein, Rudolf 77–8, 207–8 Auschwitz 18, 186, 195 Auschwitz Trials 18 Aust, Stefan 12, 119, 121, 208 authoritarianism 24, 31, 42, 53, 59, 96, 97, 106, 144, 148, 150, 151, 167, 188, 261, 262 Baader, Andreas 48, 52–6, 67, 91–3, 105, 117, 120–121, 133, 135–7, 141, 142, 147, 149, 150, 151, 208, 223, 236–7, 239, 244, 247, 252 Baader Meinhof Complex (Edel) 3, 198, 209 Bachmann, Joseph 49, 51, 79–80, 88, 114 Bambule (Meinhof) 53, 55, 151, 237 Bandung 4, 32–3, 154, 232 Basic Principles on the Question of Anti-Constitutional Personnel in the Public Service 6, 66, 103–5 The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo) 27, 90 Baumann, Michael “Bommi,” 55, 81 Benjamin, Walter 3, 92–5 Berlin School 9, 109, 175, 183, 192 Berliner Extra Dienst (newspaper) 79, 84

302

302

INDEX

Berufsverbot (Professional or Work Ban) 6, 66, 103–5 Biafra 30, 88 Bitomsky, Harmut 108–9 Black Panthers 89, 259–61 Black Power 68 Black September 6, 104 Bloch, Ernst 47 Bolivia 53, 87 Böll, Heinrich 6, 77, 81, 98, 119–22, 138, 144 bombing 1, 8, 48, 71, 73–4, 98, 105, 116, 117, 118, 120, 137, 189, 206 of Germany in Second World War 151 of North Vietnam 84, 112 nuclear bombing 65 Bonnie and Clyde (Penn) 90, 190, 220 Brandt, Willy 102, 108, 155, 217 Brazil 69, 88, 231 Bretton Woods 32, 154 Buback, Siegfried 137 Bürgerinitiativen (citizen’s action groups) 62 Cabral, Amílcar 58 Carlos (Assayas) 10, 13, 203, 209, 231 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 16, 42, 134 Césaire, Aimé 34 Chile 33, 118 China 32, 35–36, 59, 65, 68, 205, 261 Christian Democratic Union (CDU) 20, 22, 23–4, 37, 51, 69, 102–103, 106, 156, 202, 206 CISNU 39–40 civil liberties 14, 63, 103, 106, 131, 150, 250, 262, 263 Civil Rights Movement 68, 223 Cold War 3, 4, 10, 16, 19, 20, 32, 35, 59, 65, 70, 71, 74, 103, 155, 191, 201, 205–6, 215, 231, 258 collective filmmaking 137–52, 158, 207 colonialism 25, 27, 31, 35, 61, 96, 232, 258, 259 communism 19, 32, 35, 56, 57, 59, 63, 71, 96, 161, 168, 226

Communist Party of Germany (KPD) 7, 20, 24, 37, 78, 167 Confederation of Iranian Students National Union (CISNU) 39–40 Congo 28, 33–4, 39 Conradt, Gerd 108 consensus-oriented media, consensus journalism 4, 67, 70, 76, 97, 262 corporate media 3–6, 29, 49, 51, 66–67, 71, 79, 82, 85–6, 98–9, 102, 106–16, 118, 121–32, 150, 157, 167, 169–170, 174–5, 198, 238–55, 262 critical contemporary media 4–5, 76, 97 Cuban Revolution 16, 59. See also Guevara, Ernesto “Che” cultural memory 2–3, 9–11, 198–9, 207–9, 221, 227, 231, 236, 249, 250, 253, 264 Deathgame (Breloer) 9, 147–8, 208 Debray, Régis 53, 58, 61 democracy 2–3, 13–4, 63, 76–7, 87, 95–7, 99, 103, 106, 122, 138, 156, 229, 250, 255, 258, 262–3 denazification 3, 16–18, 24, 63 détourner, détournement 5, 67, 74, 98 dffb. See German Film and Television Academy Berlin dissidents 4, 39–41, 44 docudrama 90, 146–7, 209–10 documentary 28, 34, 141, 142, 146, 147, 162, 222–3 domino theory 35, 90 Dutschke, Rudi 47, 49, 60–1, 62, 71, 73, 76, 80–82, 85, 88, 91, 92, 93, 98, 113–15, 146 Dutschke-Klotz, Gretchen 47, 57, 73 East Germany. See German Democratic Republic Easter March Movement 23, 37 economic miracle 19 education reform 24–5, 53, 62, 150, 177, 188, 224, 259, 262 Egypt 32, 33

303

INDEX

Eight Hours Are Not a Day (Fassbinder) 7, 160–161 Emergency Laws 47, 50–1, 63, 87, 102–3, 104, 107 Ensslin, Gudrun 8, 23, 46, 48, 52–5, 67, 84, 91, 93, 105, 117, 120, 136–7, 141, 142, 147, 149, 150, 177–89, 193, 208, 236–7 environment 62, 66, 153, 156 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 18, 29, 82, 93–5 Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (APO) 7, 18, 24, 37, 50, 51, 56, 70, 85, 111, 155–7, 175, 182, 197 Fanon, Frantz 15, 27, 30, 58, 226 Farocki, Harun 9, 38, 108–10, 113–15 Their Newspapers 113 Three Shots on Rudi 113 Two Paths 109 White Christmas 38 The Words of the Chairman 109–10 fascism 2, 10, 16, 19, 63, 70, 96, 103, 144, 148, 149, 151–2, 182–3, 235 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 7, 9, 56, 108, 137–52, 157–75, 181, 182, 197, 199, 205, 207, 263 Federal Office of Criminal Investigation (BKA) 17, 104, 120, 136 Feltrinelli, Giangiacomo 47 feminism 5, 7–8, 9, 61, 87, 151, 153–89, 197–9, 222–3, 258, 261, 263 Filmverlag der Autoren 207–8 First World 13, 26, 42, 61, 63, 257 Foucault, Michel 128–9, 179 France 14, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 35–6, 37, 40, 48, 51, 89, 108, 141, 155, 158, 179, 187, 205, 257–8 free market 19–20, 22, 32, 258 gaze 126, 128–9, 130, 170, 184, 190, 239–40, 248 German Autumn 6–8, 12, 97, 98, 101, 105, 137–52, 168, 193, 197–9, 205, 208, 236–49

303

German Communist Party (DKP) 56, 103, 167 German Democratic Republic 3, 10, 31, 52, 59, 87, 141, 155, 197, 201–32 German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb) 9, 38, 79, 91, 102, 106–16, 159–60, 176 Germany in Autumn 6–7, 8, 106, 137–52, 181, 207, 209, 219, 238 Ghana 32, 58 Godard, Jean-Luc 108, 152, 170 Godesberg Program 20, 22, 23, 103, 258 Grand Coalition (of CDU and SPD) 20, 24, 51, 84, 103 Greece 69, 87, 158, 204 Green Party, Germany 62, 156 group homes 52–3, 150 GSG 9 (Border Protection Group 9) 6–7, 104–5, 136, 141, 144 guest workers 4, 5, 19, 26, 87, 158, 166 Guevara, Ernsto “Che” 16, 34, 58, 59, 60–1, 63, 219, 225, 227 Günther Commission 5, 71–2 Habermas, Jürgen 77, 96–7 Hash Rebels 54–6, 117 Henze, Hans Werner 47, 123, 127 heritage cinema 10, 210–1, 214–15, 217–18 Herold, Horst 104 hijacking 1, 6, 105, 140–1, 144, 147, 203, 205 Hồ, Chí Minh 35, 38, 57, 58, 227 Holocaust 8, 10, 182–3, 186–187, 196, 210, 211, 234, 235, 241, 262 homeless 116, 222 hunger strikes 132–7, 154, 185, 224, 237 IG Metall 50 imperialism 25, 33, 34, 35, 46, 96, 225, 226, 232, 258, 259, 264 India 32, 40 Indonesia 32, 68 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 154–5, 232

304

304

INDEX

Iran 28, 39–43, 67, 69, 74, 78, 84, 87, 110 Italy 27, 51, 54, 88, 155, 158 Japan 10, 37, 69, 155, 205 Japanese Red Army 10, 105, 204, 205, 210 Jordan 56, 117 Jubelperser (pro-Shah Persians) 43–4, 87 judicial system 17, 74, 92, 98, 102, 137, 152, 198 June 2, 1967 protests 11, 39–46, 66, 69, 71, 74–75, 78, 85, 87, 101, 110, 199, 258 June 2 Movement 11, 46, 55, 62, 81, 98, 109, 118, 202, 203–4, 221–2, 225 Katzelmacher (Fassbinder) 158, 171 kidnappings 1, 6, 67, 137, 140, 147, 203, 204, 221 K-groups (K-Gruppen) 56–7, 61, 155, 175 Kiesinger, Kurt 17, 149 Kinderläden (cooperative childcare or daycare centers) 7, 8, 151, 176–82 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 48, 89, 98 Klein, Hans-Joachim 118, 133, 194, 203 Kluge, Alexander 107, 137–52, 208, 209, 238 Knaudt, Ernst-Ulrich 111–13; Our Stones 111 Knife in the Head (Hauff) 138, 150 Kohlhaase, Wolfgang 213–32 Kommune 1 (K1) 54, 72–3, 74, 92, 146, 224 konkret (magazine) 38, 49, 53, 72, 76, 78–79, 82–3, 93, 98, 178 Kunst-Werke 1, 11, 233–6, 249–55, 264 Kunzelmann, Dieter 5, 54, 67, 73–4, 116–17 Kurras, Karl-Heinz 45, 65–7, 87–8, 258 Kursbuch (magazine) 18, 30, 96–7 labor. See workers legal system 6, 69, 74, 92, 94, 98–9, 102, 120, 129, 132, 152, 179, 226

The Legend of Rita (Schlöndorff) 9–11, 197, 199, 201–32, 238, 257 Leiser, Erwin 108 Linke, Georg 55 Lönnendonker, Siegward and Tilman Fichter 24, 56 Lorenz, Peter 202–3, 221 The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (Schlöndorff and Von Trotta) 6–7, 106, 121–32, 135, 137, 141, 150, 157, 181, 209, 219, 238 Lumumba, Patrice 33–4, 39, 98 Mahler, Horst 48, 117, 141, 194 Maier-Witt, Silke 11, 214, 221 Mainka-Jellinghaus, Beate 138–9 Malcolm X 31, 58, 227 Mandela, Nelson 32 Mao, Tse Tung 57, 58, 59, 61, 63, 68, 109, 155, 205, 219, 227 Marcuse, Herbert 47, 92, 95, 96 Marianne and Juliane (Von Trotta) 7, 8, 9, 152, 176, 177, 182–9, 191, 195–9, 205, 207, 219, 231 Marker, Chris 108, 158 Marshall Plan 19 Märtesheimer, Peter 160 Marxist-Leninist groups 56–7, 61, 85, 155 May Offensive 98, 118, 120–1, 136, 168 media monopoly 4–5, 63, 67, 71–2, 77–8, 82, 85, 97 Meinhof, Ulrike 22, 23, 38, 41, 49, 50, 52–5, 72, 77, 78, 83–4, 91, 92, 93, 105, 117, 119, 120, 121, 133–4, 136, 151, 178, 208, 236–49, 253, 254 Meins, Holger 79, 108, 109, 120, 135, 136, 202, 208, 237, 244, 253 melodrama 7, 144, 162–75 Mexico City, Tlatelolco Massacre 52, 89, 98 Michel Commission 5, 71–2 militant democracy (streitbare Demokratie) 106 Ministry of State Security (Stasi) 10, 201–32

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INDEX

Möller, Irmgard 141, 236 montage 113, 139, 162 Morocco 30, 158 Mossadegh, Mohammad 41–2, 44 Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (Fassbinder) 7, 56–7, 144, 157–75, 182, 197, 207 National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) 20, 24 National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF). See Việt Cộng National Socialism; 8, 9, 10, 16–18, 96, 140, 142, 144, 148–9, 168, 182–3, 186–9, 196–7, 211, 231, 241 Negt, Oskar 83, 88, 97, 146 New International Economic Order (NIEO) 32, 154, 232 New Left 4, 5, 20, 30, 33, 34, 65, 66, 67, 96, 98, 161, 257, 261 Nicaragua 220, 223, 225, 226 Nigeria 30, 88 Night and Fog (Resnais) 8, 186–8, 195–6 Nirumand, Bahman 41–2, 82, 93, 95 Nkrumah, Kwame 32, 58 Non-Aligned Movement 4, 32–3, 154, 232 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 3, 20–4, 29–30, 37, 78, 156, 206, 258 nuclear energy and nuclear weapons: protests against 3, 20–4, 37, 96, 156, 183 Oberhausen Manifesto 107 October 18, 1977 (paintings) 233–49 Ohnesorg, Benno 44–6, 49, 67, 69, 75–76, 78, 82, 85, 87, 96, 98, 111, 219, 258 Olympics 1972; 6, 52, 104–5, 104, 112, 206 Organization of African Unity (OAU) 31–2 Organization of African-American Unity (OAAU) 31 Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia Africa and Latin American (OSPAAAL) 33

305

Pahlavi, Shah Mohammad Reza 39–44, 46, 67, 74, 78, 82, 87, 110 Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) 33, 117 Paragraph 218 (abortion ban in West Germany) 8, 62, 178–9, 180–1, 184, 188 Petzold, Christian 9, 109, 175, 183, 189–99, 209, 230–1 police violence 31, 43–6, 49, 52, 66–7, 69, 75, 82–3, 88–9, 91–2, 112, 258, 260, 262 political prisoners 52, 93, 132–7, 174, 263 Pontecorvo, Gillo 27, 90 Ponto, Jürgen 137 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) 6, 140–1, 203–4, 205 Portugal 29, 30, 35, 192, 231 Prague Spring 51–2, 88 print media 4, 6, 65–99, 233–55 prison conditions 116, 132–7, 154, 201, 263 Proll, Astrid 53–4, 133–4 Proll, Thorwald 48, 52–3, 91, 92, 93 public sphere 5, 66, 76, 141, 145–7, 150, 191, 236 Pudding Bombing Assassination Attempt 73–4 Rabehl, Bernd 34, 73 racism 25, 31–2, 87, 261–2 Radikalenerlass (Anti-Radical Decree) 6, 66, 103–5 radio 17, 27, 53, 71, 136, 144–5, 149, 163, 166, 217, 228 Raspe, Jan-Carl 67, 120, 136–7, 141, 142, 147, 149, 236–8 Rathsack, Heinz 108 rearmament 5, 20–24, 37, 87, 156, 258 Red Aid (Rote Hilfe) 132–3, 226–7 Red Zora (Rote Zora) 62, 118, 179 reenactments 90, 147 refugees 4, 14, 26, 28 Reinders, Ralf 46, 55, 222 Reitz, Edgar 107, 137–52, 184, 208 Resnais, Alain 8, 186, 196

306

306

INDEX

Revolutionary Cells (Revolutionäre Zellen) 62, 118, 179, 194, 203–4 Richter, Gerhard 11, 233–49 right-wing politics 20, 49, 51, 70, 71, 80, 84, 88, 161, 194, 258 Said, Edward 15 Salvatore, Gaston 60–61 Sander, Helke 80, 108–12, 176–178, 180–1 SAVAK 43–44, 88 Schengen Agreement 14 Schiller, Margrit 133–5 Schleiermacher, Detten 107 Schleyer, Hanns-Martin 6–7, 67, 140–2, 147, 149 Schlöndorff, Volker 6, 7, 9–10, 11, 29, 106, 121–32, 137–52, 157, 181, 197, 199, 201–32, 238, 257, 263 Schmidt, Helmut 23, 102, 140, 202 Schneider, Peter 56 Schubert, Ingrid 55, 117 SDS, see Socialist German Students’ Union The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (Von Trotta) 7–8, 150, 151, 156, 176–82, 197 Second World War, see also National Socialism, fascism, Holocaust: 11, 90, 102, 142, 154, 222–3 Section 88a 6, 105 Section 129b 6, 105, 226 Section 130a 105 self-determination 4, 13, 15, 30, 31, 33, 35, 59, 63, 153, 154, 223, 226, 227, 231, 257, 261, 262 self-liberation 4, 13, 15, 30, 33, 34, 35, 63, 153, 154, 223, 231, 257, 261, 262 Shield Squadron (SS) 6, 17–18, 140, 149 Sirk, Douglas 7, 162, 163, 166, 169–71, 175 Situationist International 5, 54, 67, 73–4 Social Democratic Party, (SPD) 20, 22, 24–5, 37, 51, 61, 78, 102–3, 120, 155, 156, 160, 258

socialism 32, 229, 257 Socialist German Students’ Union (SDS) 7, 18, 20, 22–3, 25, 29, 34, 36–7, 39–40, 46–7, 50, 51, 52, 56–7, 60, 61, 69, 71, 73, 74, 76, 77, 80, 92, 113, 151, 177–8, 197, 224, 258 Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK) 134 Söhnlein, Horst 48, 52–3, 91–3 solidarity 2–3, 13, 16, 25, 27, 29–32, 50, 63, 107, 115, 116, 135, 140, 153, 154, 157, 177, 179, 182, 225–7, 257–64; see also Algeria, Congo, Vietnam solitary confinement 132–7, 263 South Africa 29, 31–3, 84, 87, 225 Soviet Union 19, 32, 35–6, 42, 51, 59, 155, 205–6 Spiegel, Der (magazine): 5, 66, 76–8, 97, 158, 166, 207, 219, 233–55 Spiegel Affair 66, 97 Springer press 4, 5, 49–50, 66–100, 102, 107–16, 119, 120–32, 238, 247, 252 SPUR 5, 54, 67, 73–4 Stammheim (prison) 7, 8, 67, 99, 121, 135–6, 140, 141, 193, 236–7, 252 Stammheim (Hauff) 9, 146, 150, 208, 219 Starbuck Holger Meins (Conradt) 79 n.71, 116 n.58, 135 n.125, 135 n.126, 141 n.146, 211 n.33 The State I Am in 9, 183, 189–99, 209, 230, 231 Stern (magazine) 5, 75–8, 97, 178–9, 233–55 Stop the Power of the Manipulators 110–11 strikes 7, 25, 27, 48, 50–1, 157–60, 166–167, 257–8 Struggle against Atomic Death 21–2 Subversive Aktion 54, 73, 146 Suharto 68 Sukarno 32 surveillance 3, 6, 13, 14, 101–52, 153, 201, 250, 260, 262–3 Syria 33, 56, 140, 205

307

INDEX

television 27, 29, 38, 55, 63, 71–2, 89–90, 98, 107, 109, 110, 141, 142, 144–5, 152, 154, 166, 208, 213, 229, 238 The Third Generation 144, 152, 166, 173 Third World 3, 4, 12–13, 24–8, 32, 34, 48, 61, 63, 153–4, 227, 257–8, 261. See also, anti-imperial, selfliberation and self-determination trade unions 22, 23, 47, 50, 159, 166. See also workers trauma 1–2, 3, 8, 9, 11, 148–149, 151, 183, 189, 196–8, 231, 234–6, 240–241, 250–5 Tricontinental Conference 4, 33 Troubles, The 89 Truman Doctrine 19 Tshombe 34, 74 Tunisia 30–1 Tupamaros 54 n.228, 116 n.61, 225 Tupamaros West-Berlin 54, 98, 116–17 Ulm Institute for Film Design 107–8 underground media 5, 67, 84–100, 175 United Kingdom 42, 88, 103, 133, 155, 158, 206 United States 4, 13, 14, 19, 26, 31, 32, 35, 36, 40, 42, 46, 48, 67, 68, 88, 90, 103, 155, 174, 205, 206, 259, 261, 263 University of Television and Film in Munich 108 Uruguay 25, 116, 225 Varda, Agnès 108 VDS. See Association of German Student Organizations Venezuela 68, 110 Vesper, Bernward 57 n.243, 189 n.99 Việt Cộng 16, 36, 46, 48, 59, 88, 225 Vietnam War 16, 35–9, 46–7, 78, 84, 87, 90, 112, 113, 115, 153, 155, 190, 220, 223, 261

307

Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal, also known as the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal 39 Viett, Inge 11, 201–2, 221–32 violence 2, 3, 5, 6, 38, 46, 49, 51, 53, 61, 76, 81, 82, 83, 85, 87–98, 105, 106, 113, 121, 131, 151–152, 157, 174 n.61, 197–8, 221–4, 258, 259, 260, 261–2 Viva Maria!, 90, 219 Võ, Nguyên Giáp 58 Von Rauch, Georg 151 n 183 Von Trotta, Margarethe 6, 7, 8, 9, 106, 121–32, 150, 151, 152, 156, 157, 176–89, 193, 195, 196, 197, 199, 205, 207, 209, 231, 238, 263 Wagenbach, Klaus 55, 57, 193 Wages for Housework 7, 8, 165–166, 165 n.41, 178 Wallraff, Günter 7, 122 n.84, 159 Walser, Martin 18 Warsaw Pact 52 Weber, Max 3, 95 Weiss, Peter 36, 38, 39, 47 Without Me (Ohne Mich) campaign 21 Women’s Movement 5, 7–8, 9, 61, 87, 151, 153–89, 197–9, 222–3, 258, 261, 263 workers 5, 7, 8, 9, 19, 20, 22, 25, 27, 28, 48, 50–1, 52, 56, 87, 93, 116, 146, 153–199, 257–8, 263 workers’ films (Arbeiterfilme) 7, 159–99 World Bank 154–5, 232 yellow journalism 72, 84, 97, 115, 118, 262 Yemen 68, 140 Young Socialists (Jusos, Jungsozialistischen) 56 Yugoslavia 32, 59

308