When I was twelve I traveled from the United States to Germany for the first time. I spent the summer in Hamburg, where I lived with the wonderful Ruhnau family and trained with a gymnastics team. While preparing for the trip, I overheard my grandfather talk about the angry youths who lived in European cities, and how they would shoot businessmen, like him, in the knees. He probably meant the German Red Army Faction or the Italian Red Brigades.
I didn’t recall this remark until years later, in 1987, when I was studying abroad at Heidelberg University. I was well aware of anti-American sentiment among certain sectors of the student body. Some of the biggest U.S. army installations at the time were close by in Mannheim, and the streets were often occupied by people protesting the arms race. One night I saw an early performance of Johann Kresnik’s Tanztheaterstück Ulrike Meinhof. More than the choreography and staging, what made the biggest impression on me was the scene that unfolded After the curtains closed. As the audience spilled out from the theater and onto the open square, we encountered groups of activists handing out pamphlets and selling books about the RAF—many with illustrations. The pictures that stayed with me the longest were those of Ulrike Meinhof.
Who was this woman, and what do her pictures mean to those of us who study German culture and history? I returned to this question in graduate school at Columbia, where I had the occasion to cross over from comparative literature and write my first paper in art history—on Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 paintings and Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s book Mausoleum. My dissertation and first years of teaching took me in other directions, but two things brought me back to the topics of militancy, terrorism, and their representation. One was the attack on the World Trade Center, which I experienced from the safe distance of 125th Street in Manhattan, while on a brief trip away from my postdoc apartment in Berlin. The other was feminism, my thoughts about feminism and resistance. My first book, which I had set out to write about gender and socialism, evolved into a project about collective memory. I wanted to write another book in the field of cultural studies that would put women in the middle of the picture.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology I taught Plotting Terror in European Culture, and in working with my students I came see to how prominently women figured in the art, literature, and film that responded to the RAF’s rise and fall. That course became a foundation for this book. After the Red Army Faction has been nearly ten years in the making. Besides the students who took Plotting Terror for the first two semesters I taught it, I have many individuals and institutions to thank for enlivening my research. I’d like to mention them here.
A number of sponsors have funded my work. I received much-needed grants from the Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York, the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, and the Class of 1954 Career Development Professorship at MIT. My research was advanced through participation in several CUNY programs: the Center for the Humanities, the Faculty Fellows Publication Program, the Faculty Scholars Publication Workshop, and especially the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, where Ruthie Gilmore, David Harvey, and Peter Hitchcock gave me a chance to discuss this project with other like-minded scholars. Earlier on I benefited from access to the archival resources at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, and I wrote early chapter drafts on these documents while working as a visiting professor at Balliol College, Oxford, in 2006.
I appreciate the cooperation of several artists and writers: Thilo Beu, Johan Grimonprez, Alexander Kluge, Gerhard Richter, and Margarethe von Trotta. Yvonne Rainer kindly extended to me the rights to use video stills from her film Journeys from Berlin/1971 and to quote at length from the screenplay. For aid in coordinating permissions to cite and reproduce the works that enrich my book, I acknowledge the archive of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, the Goethe Institute-New York, the Alliance Française-New York, the Marian Goodman Gallery, and the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation.
My colleagues and students continue to be the greatest inspiration. Thanks to the Department of Writing and Literature at LaGuardia Community College, the Department of Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center, and to the Program in Foreign Languages and Literatures at MIT. From these different “homes” and from my travels I’ve had the good fortune to meet the many people who have read and commented on different parts of the manuscript that became this book. They are Nora Alter, Karen Bauer, Benjamin Buchloh, Sarah Colvin, Isabelle de Courtivron, Ed Dimendberg, Thomas Elsaesser, Tina Gerhardt, Paul Greenberg, Karrin Hanshew, Ursula Heise, Andreas Huyssen, Eric Kligerman, Hans Kundnani, Esther Leslie, Laura Liu, Samantha Majic, Tom McDonough, Leith Passmore, Julian Preece, Ute Staiger, Henriette Steiner, Despina Stratigakos, Margaret Sundell, Edward Baron Turk, Sabine von Dirke, Andrew Webber, John Zilcosky, and Slavoj Žižek. Thinking through their comments—along with the invaluable reports a received from anonymous reviewers at the Columbia University Press—I was able to deepen my grasp of the book’s material and sharpen my arguments.
Others have enabled the production of this project in different ways, both in its conception and with a range of practical matters. I’m grateful for the assistance of Jörn Ahrens, Eduardo Cadava, Sorin Cucu, Steve d’Arcy, Brent Edwards, Geoff Eley, Konstanze Ell, Felix Ensslin, Bettina Funcke, Anke Geertsma, Cigdem Göymen, Dagmar Herzog, Richard Huff-man, John Hutnyk, Farideh Koohi-Kamali, Phillip Khoury, Carrie Lambert, Anahit Martirosjan, Christine Marx, Helke Sander, Alex Star, Katie Trumpener, Jamie Trnka, Greg Wilpert, Hannah Winarsky, and Rebecca Wittmann. Here Markus Müller stands out for giving me access to research files at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin and responding to an ongoing series of emails. I am also indebted to an inner circle of family, friends, and associates who have supported me over the years that I worked on this book. They are my parents, Simone Burgos, Angelica Emmanuel, Hillary Grill, Angela Le, LaRose Parris, Harlan Protass, Steve Silber, and the staff of Clayman and Rosenberg. Special mention goes to my son, Simon, for his excellent company in the last months of revising the manuscript and for teaching me how to do new things with my computer keyboard.
I have presented some of the concepts contained here as works-in-progress at several venues: Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts in New York, the 2011 and 2014 Annual Conferences of the American Comparative Literature Association, the 92 Street Y-Tribeca, the Centro Cívico de San Francisco/Arteleku in Bilbao, the Consortium for Intellectual and Cultural History at the CUNY Graduate Center, the Department of Art History at Northwestern University, the Matadero in Madrid, MIT, and the University of Cambridge.
Earlier versions of the material in this book have appeared in the following publications: “From Document to Documenta: A German Return to Truth and Reconciliation,” Rethinking Marxism 16, no. 1 (January 2004): 49–56; “Buildings on Fire: The Situationist International and the Red Army Faction,” Grey Room 26, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 30–55; “Controlled Space: The Built Environment of Margarethe von Trotta’s The German Sisters ,” in Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis, ed. Emma Wilson and Andrew Webber (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), 141–55; “Engendering the Subject of Terror: Friedrich Christian Delius and Friedrich Dürrenmatt in the Mid-1980s,” in Baader-Meinhof Returns: History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism, ed. Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Ingo Cornils (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 125–36; and “Paradise for Provocation: Plotting Berlin’s Political Underground,” in Memory Culture and the Contemporary City: Building Sites, ed. Ute Staiger, Henriette Steiner, and Andrew Webber (London: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2009), 161–80. My gratitude to the editors who helped me to shape these pieces of writing and to the publishers who granted me permission to use some of the ideas and language from these essays in After the Red Army Faction.
For the last year I have had the pleasure of working with my editors at the Columbia University Press. Wendy Lochner has been a tremendous source of expertise and enthusiasm, and Christine Dunbar, Anne McCoy, Kathryn Jorge, Robert Demke, and Lisa DeBoer have guided me steadily through the final phases of preparing the manuscript. I credit my research assistants for working into the night to put the notes and bibliography into proper order. They are Noel Duan, Agata Kasprzyk, Leah Light, Michael Lubing, and Thomas Ribitzky.
Lastly, I’d like to recognize three friends: Jeremy Varon, for sparking my thoughts on militancy and sharing with me a box of his files on the RAF, and Dalton Conley and Jackie Stevens, for listening to me talk about this project over the years and helping me find a way to make it public. Completing this book would have been impossible without their intelligence and commitment.