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

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

Meinhof demanded immediacy. Some of the artists and theorists engaged in the leftist reform of postwar German society took a more gradual approach, remembering the nation’s violence and envisioning a different future. Their thinking expanded upon modern theoretical impulses, such as those of the Frankfurt School and the women’s movement. The RAF’s imperatives, on the other hand, can be seen to have ceded to “the failure of the imagination” that Yvonne Rainer diagnosed in Journeys from Berlin/1971. Similarly, the narrow scope of the militants’ agenda can be seen as the nadir of the conditions that Habermas and Adorno were both analyzing in the 1960s and 1970s. The eruption of armed resistance reactivated debates about the relation between politics and culture. The exchanges that ensued, among theorists, writers, and artists, have striking relevance to postmilitant inquiry, both in Germany and abroad.

In the article “The Stage of Terror” in 1977 Habermas warned against the simultaneous consolidation of political and aesthetic forces in Western society.² In postwar Europe and especially in West Germany, politics was being reduced to administrative bureaucracy (entstaatlicht). This process, Habermas argued, operated within a circuit of “surreal side-effects”: the desublimation of art into mass culture, on the one hand, and into counterculture, on the other.³ If today we see this tendency in many aesthetic responses to leftist militancy and terror, its origins lead back to the RAF’s own conflation of style and strategy.

Used at the peak of the German Autumn, Habermas’s term Entstaatlichung correlated to several propositions in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970), particularly his elaboration of Entkunstung.⁴ An undoing of art’s autonomy, this “de-arting” or “de-aestheticization” was understood to be a component of the administered society that dominates in late capitalism. In “The Stage of Terror” Habermas aligned Adorno’s reflections on Entkunstung with his analysis of other signs of social disintegration, such as the cultural “decriminalization” of assaults on human life and the concomitant “aestheticization of violence.”⁵ Linking militancy back to surrealism, Habermas maintained that both the tactics of direct action and the psychology of terror were made possible through the compression of politics and culture that was taking place in the postwar public sphere. In other words, the dialectical mediation of opposites (subject and object, art and terror, perpetrator and victim) was giving way to a near-total “identity” between them.

But does Habermas’s argument still hold today? The examination of postmilitant culture in After the Red Army Faction opens a different perspective on the collapse of distinctions (Entdifferenzierung) that Habermas describes in his article. In the less critical examples of art and literature that have come in the RAF’s wake, we don’t see just the dubious attempt to give militancy and terrorism an aura of the beautiful or the sublime. We also see something peculiar to our time: the inability, in some instances, to perform the transformation of documentary material into cultural memory. This alters our relationship to the processes of Entkunstung and brings up a related question. If Adorno had lived to see postmilitant culture unfold over the past thirty or forty years in Germany, would he have observed an absolute aestheticization of politics? Probably not. More likely he would have remarked that artists and writers hadn’t aestheticized RAF politics enough. Take the example of Hans-Peter Feldmann’s series The Dead and the way it was curated in Regarding Terror. Considered from the position of critical theory, the project lacks the social and technical mediation necessary for approaching the order of the aesthetic. Stalled in a documentary mode, the Kunst-Werke enterprise returns to the past without really working it through.

In this book I’ve sought to analyze postmilitant art, literature, and criticism from the 1970s to the present. Although my methods come from literary and cultural studies, I have kept an eye on the published histories of the period. Depending on the time that a given artwork or text was produced, we see that the perspective on the German Autumn has shift ed, as if to recalibrate the narrative of the Far Left according to new coordinates. different events—the Tendenzwende, unification, and September 11, for example—have prompted artists and intellectuals to rethink the meaning of militancy, terrorism, and security. The Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek has reflected upon this continual recalibration. Her drama Ulrike Maria Stuart (2006), for example, illuminates the ways that Germans of different generations have different accounts of revolutionary violence and the state’s response to it. Jelinek imagines the relationship between Meinhof and Ensslin, and references Shakespeare and Marx, as well as Friedrich Schiller’s drama Maria Stuart (1800). The dialogues let citations from RAF women play against these textual references and become objects of a trenchant commentary on the illusions and delusions that have inspired many to revolt at inopportune moments.

Ulrike Maria Stuart targets both the New Left circles in which Jelinek herself first emerged as well as some of the cultural producers of what has been described as our “postideological present”: those who strive to capitalize on the phenomenon of revolution.⁶ Here the attempt to commodify militancy through the fashion campaigns of “Prada Meinhof” comes to mind, but we could also extend this analysis to aspects of Regarding Terror as well as some of the literary fiction that has sought to appropriate the Far Left’s allure. In Ulrike Maria Stuart, Jelinek suggests that the current fixation on the RAF was produced by a longing for a time when the struggle for social change was more straightforward—or at least when it was mistakenly imagined to be so, as Meinhof’s and Ensslin’s progressively reductive writings demonstrate. This skepticism about the nostalgic wish for “the good fight” is of a piece with Yvonne Rainer’s handling of Meinhof’s last letters from Stammheim in Journeys from Berlin.

The Germanist Karin Bauer argues that Jelinek’s play doesn’t just show what she calls the “futility” of leftist engagement, “but also the ridiculous ‘despair over futility,’ a despair that has left the younger generation cynical and empty.”⁷ Bauer identifies Meinhof’s daughter, Bettina Röhl, as an embodiment of this cynicism, but we also see this outlook in some of the less critical or even reactionary works of postmilitant culture and media.⁸ Against such examples, in this book I have attempted to convey a more attenuated view of the radical ideals that have motivated various factions of the Left since the late 1960s. Comparing documentary accounts of the German Autumn to their cultural representations, we see that many primary objectives of the Left are still very much worth fighting for. Sexual equality is just one example of this. If Jelinek and Röhl despair over the futility of the RAF, the most critical and resistant works examined in the previous chapters seek to redeem something from the wreckage of the Far Left. This undertaking continues to inflect the latest waves of postmilitant thought. Fatih Akın’s recent cinema, for instance, brings this tendency to light.

The RAF announced its dissolution on April 20, 1998; in their eight-page communiqué the group wrote that “the urban guerrilla, in the form of the RAF, is history.”⁹ The statement lists the names of twenty-six dead, all fallen members of the RAF, the June 2 Movement, and the Revolutionary Cells. None of the thirty-four victims of RAF violence is noted. Although the statement begins by marking the passing of the Far Left, it ends with a citation from Rosa Luxemburg that looks forward to an authentically radical future—one that the armed struggle could never realize. The first line is authored by the RAF, the rest come from Luxemburg’s last writings, published in the Spartacist paper Die Rote Fahne on January 14, 1919, the day before her execution by the Freikorps.

This RAF communiqué marked the end of the group’s militant and terrorist campaigns. But in 2007, near the much-discussed thirtieth anniversary of the German Autumn, Wolfgang Kraushaar maintained that “the RAF will never be history.”¹¹ Indeed, the proliferation of work on and about German revolutionary violence shows how deeply and painfully some have experienced it.

Within the scope of postmilitant culture, the complex relationship between history and memory has particular relevance to film. As I have noted, Thomas Elsaesser sees a parallel in the structures of cinema and psychological trauma.¹² In Johan Grimonprez’s Dial History, as in Volker Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita and other films that respond to the rise and fall of the RAF, we see the terror of the German Autumn repeatedly replayed in the present, as if to remaster a traumatic event. Surveying the subgenre of postmilitant cinema in Germany, we see how the image of RAF violence has shift ed over time, as have representations of the Left as a whole. Whereas an early project like Marianne and Juliane dramatized the debates between direct action and broad-based activism, later films like Uli Edel’s Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008) patch together a thin pastiche of postwar militancy.

Apropos of the trend to flatten out the history of the protest movements, in 2007 the screenwriter and director Fatih Akın commented upon the perception that German society, thirty years After the German Autumn, had become depoliticized. “The Left,” he noted, “functions today as nothing more than a caricature.”¹³ In the interview Akın’s regret about this predicament echoes the despair I observe in Jelinek’s play, but in fact his own cinematic explorations of cultural politics—particularly in Auf der anderen Seite/Yaşamın Kıyısında (The Edge of Heaven, 2007)—suggest that the prospects for real democracy are just beginning to come into view in Europe, now that the dangers of revolutionary violence have abated there. The narratives of Akın’s closely plotted film shuttle back and forth between Germany and Turkey, linking two generations into a matrix of love, death, and militancy. The RAF doesn’t figure explicitly in The Edge of Heaven, but the film nevertheless opens up an important new chapter of postmilitant culture, as it expands upon several themes that have emerged in the response to the German Autumn. Akın seeks out convergences and ruptures between the orders of the aesthetic, the political, and the social, devoting special attention to the matter of women’s agency. The film is an uneven work, at turns both affirmative and critical. Conceived at a remove—both spatial and temporal—from the German Autumn, The Edge of Heaven can serve as a lens through which to look back at the trajectory of postmilitant culture.

Meinhof’s “Concept of the Urban Guerrilla” declares the futility of the European moral tradition. Against this, The Edge of Heaven reactivates the ethical inquiries that connect Eastern and Western civilizations. The scriptures of Judeo-Christianity and Islam, particularly the story of Abraham/ Ibrahim’s sacrifice of his child, stand as intertexts to the screenplay, as do several works of German and Turkish literature and philosophy. The character Nejat Aksu, the son of a guest worker and a professor of German literature, travels to Turkey in search of a young woman, Ayten Öztürk. Following Ayten’s mother’s last wish, Nejat wants to bring the daughter money for her university studies. But she is no longer in Turkey. As the story progresses, we see that Ayten, a leftist militant, has fled to Germany not only to escape arrest by counterterrorism agents, but also to find her mother. In Hamburg Ayten falls in love with a young woman, Lotte Staub, but is soon deported and incarcerated in Turkey. Nejat and Ayten’s missed encounters establish a pattern for the rest of the film: the narrative is propelled by bodies in motion, people moving from one side to another. Literally translated, the film’s title, Auf der anderen Seite, means “on the other side.” Lotte and her own mother, both Germans, are pulled into the orbit of these two Turks; they make separate trips from Bremen to Istanbul in an attempt to negotiate for Ayten’s free dom. Lifelines cross and new correspondences arise among the main characters, delivering a promise of transformation, emancipation, and even enlightenment.

In an earlier scene that establishes Susanne’s character, she wonders aloud if the need for armed resistance might disappear with the unification of European states, especially the proposed inclusion of Turkey as a member. Susanne embodies the spirit of consensus—and even compromise—that comes to dominate The Edge of Heaven. The distance between her views and the passions of Ayten’s commitment can be sensed in the scene when, After reasoning that economic development and constitutional procedure will eventually settle political conflict among Europeans and their neighbors, Ayten snaps back at Susanne, “Fuck the European Union!” Significantly, this exchange is conducted in English, as are several other key dialogues in the film. English, for Akın’s cinema, serves as a mediating lingua franca; here it is the idiom of Ayten and Lotte’s love. In The Edge of Heaven, German and Turkish are just two of the things that the characters must put aside—at least provisionally—to cross over to another state of mind, or, to borrow from the film’s title, to go to “the other side.”

Although The Edge of Heaven refers to the German armed struggle only in passing, many elements of Akın’s cinematic aesthetic are deeply informed by the RAF story. There are numerous examples of this. Nejat’s commentary on Goethe was derived from notes that Akın took during a lecture at the University of Hamburg by Jan Philipp Reemtsma, the philanthropist and Germanist who publicly criticized the Kunst-Werke’s program for Regarding Terror.¹⁵ Ayten and Lotte’s homosexuality parallels the love relationship at the center of Volker Schlöndorff’s The Legend of Rita. As in Marianne and Juliane, Akın scripts an exchange of clothing and the passing of a handwritten note during a prison visit. And the scene in which Susanne and Ayten speak across a prison’s glass partition is indebted to von Trotta’s iconic representation of penitentiary space. Facing each other in the visiting area, the women’s features are mirrored in the pane that separates them. Both cameras—Akın’s and von Trotta’s—show a blurred montage of two faces. Further, Akın borrows from the cinema of Fassbinder. Susanne is played by Hanna Schygulla, a collaborator in many of Fassbinder’s best-known films. In recent years Schygulla has had only a few roles. Her reappearance as a lead actor in The Edge of Heaven recalls Fassbinder’s prime, when he directed her in a number of projects, including Die dritte Generation (The Third Generation, 1979), his farce on infighting among leftist radicals. Most of Akın’s films nod to the auteurs who defined the New German Cinema from the 1960s until the 1980s. The Edge of Heaven indicates how deeply this body of work was informed by the German Autumn and how its confrontation with the problem of representing militancy and political violence remains urgent for Akın’s own generation.

Any good account of the aesthetic response to the armed struggle needs to recall Fassbinder’s remark at the release of The Third Generation: “I don’t throw bombs, I make movies.”¹⁶ Often cited, this assertion resonates strongest when set within the larger context of postmilitant culture. Fassbinder was one of the first artists to answer back to the militant wager of the Far Left. As we see in his contribution to Germany in Autumn, he was greatly troubled by the casualties of homegrown terror—the deaths of the RAF’s victims, as well as the state’s backlash against the broader opposition. Fassbinder’s own body manifests this anguish in the film, as it mediates between the terrorist attacks and the cultural effects that were just beginning to ensue. This segment also appears to challenge a position that Meinhof assumed in “The Concept of the Urban Guerrilla.” The RAF defined its mission in this 1971 communiqué as “that praxis which … draws a clear line between itself and the enemy.”¹⁷ Enforcing this Maoist division, the militants blocked themselves off from what Meinhof once claimed was the RAF’s constituency: the working class, third-world revolutionaries, and women. Fassbinder, in contradistinction, transgressed every limit he encountered. Like Rainer’s open-ended Journeys from Berlin/1971, Fassbinder’s film work occupies the resistant end of the postmilitant spectrum. Here the aesthetic choices militate against the rapid consumption and superficial closure of the culture industry.

Fassbinder deployed his films as stealth weapons in the postwar cultural revolution. As we have seen, Meinhof and Ensslin had once sought to skillfully engage German media and reform national power structures from within, but as the RAF hit the headlines, the group put action before words and started reducing its arsenal of tactics to bank heists, abductions, and killings. In “The Concept of the Urban Guerrilla,” the RAF proclaims its “immunity” to the mainstream press, but in reality the group would act out each role—“anti-Semite-criminal-subhuman-murderer-arsonist”—that the reporters scripted for them.¹⁸ Although Meinhof and the others continued to write and disseminate their ideas as communiqués, their texts became more schematic and fragmented as the RAF turned to direct action.

This primacy of physical and material actions was influenced by the international insurrections against imperialism of the time. RAF members weren’t the only Germans attuned to these strategies. Already in 1967 Rudi Dutschke urged his peers to talk less and do more, invoking the struggles of revolutionaries in Southeast Asia and Latin America and calling for a new mode of “sensuous” knowledge or experience (sinnliche Erfahrung) in the struggle against Germany’s old guard.¹⁹ As factions of the New Left radicalized into the Far Left, they wanted to match the gestures of anti-imperialist insurgents, putting their own bodies in the line of fire. By 1969, when the Brazilian militant Carlos Marighella published the Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, Meinhof became convinced that even the bourgeois enclaves of German cities could be made into sites of resistance. It was effectively a question of mobilizing bodies of the middle class—by force, if necessary.

Whereas RAF praxis aimed to ground itself in the physical and the material, in some works of postmilitant culture we see representations of revolutionary violence that register more as surface or image. The photocopies in Feldmann’s The Dead are a good example of this, but this effect is also articulated as a longer process in Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 series, especially the three images of Meinhof’s head. Richter’s technique of photopainting blurs the indexical traces of the real body, the body in pain, and renders a product that tends toward dematerialization. Against this, what stands out, for example, in Fassbinder’s self-portrait in Germany in Autumn, as well as the choreography of Johann Kresnik’s Ulrike Meinhof, is an extension of the lived, material realities that shaped the experiences of militants, their sympathizers, and their victims. We see this materiality in Akın’s cinema as well: his direction goes further than the “allegorical sensuality” for which feminists once criticized Alexander Kluge.²⁰ As in Fassbinder’s work, in The Edge of Heaven the sensual becomes sexual as the protagonists find the fullest expression of their agency and desire.

Fassbinder, like Kresnik, Rainer, and several other artists and writers I have discussed, aimed to resist the collapse of aesthetics and politics that Habermas warned against in “The Stage of Terror.” Their works variously illuminate the social and technical forces that mediate between those two ends. Charged by gender issues, these artists and writers give critical leverage to postmilitant inquiry. As I argue, German feminism has been one of the most important social forces to mediate the impact of leftist militancy and terrorism. Some feminists have aimed to situate their agenda outside the institutions of democracy, much as the RAF tried to do. But the women’s movement as a whole has sought to enable equality in both the public and private spheres—it has opened channels for women to move from margin to center. As a result, the feminist mediation of the Far Left is complex. Although the earliest forays of the Frauenbewegung of the 1960s cleared the way for women like Meinhof and Ensslin to take power—at least within their own small faction—since the 1970s feminists have voiced the keenest criticism of RAF terror. In an editorial in Emma from 1977, the writer Alice Schwarzer astutely asked why the RAF’s leaders would want to increase the marginalization they already faced as women by going underground, dropping out, or giving in to suicide.²¹ With its mapping of counterpublic forces, Journeys from Berlin /1971 frames the same questions in cinematic terms. Following the logic of Schwarzer and Rainer, many would look forward to the day when all women could experience freedom without having to take up arms first.²² There are other ways to be militant.

At the time of the Emma editorial, Joschka Fischer based his criticism of the RAF on similar grounds. His rejection of revolutionary violence in Autonomie was fundamentally informed by the theory and practice of the women’s movement, as he himself stated. His appeal to his comrades on the Far Left to “cross over” and stand by the feminists strikes the same chord as Fassbinder’s radical rule-breaking in Germany in Autumn. The RAF stopped short of such traversals. Turning inward, its members compounded the isolation that the state was forcing upon them. Ensslin, with her partial knowledge of guerrilla tactics and Maoist thought, swore to “draw the battle line, each and every minute.”²³ Journalists and scholars observed this intransigence already before the German Autumn. In 1978 the sociologist Marlis Dürkop published a study of women terrorists that analyzed the potential of crossing “the threshold of political abstinence.”²⁴ Terrorism, she maintained, was not the only way to promote social change. Entering into the public sphere with great collective force, these women could generate a new order of politics.

Despite this commentary and scholarship, it has remained for artists and writers to really convey the lessons of the armed struggle across Germany and past its borders. Fatih Akın, in The Edge of Heaven, draws on the tradition of German postwar cinema to show us the value of moving to the other side, or die andere Seite. Fischer, Schwarzer, and Dürkop, among others, saw this back in the 1970s, but it is only through the waxing of postmilitant culture that these lessons fully register. As The Edge of Heaven transposes the critiques of von Trotta, Schlöndorff, and Fassbinder into different aesthetic and geopolitical contexts, it transcends some of the limits of the German case and shows contemporary viewers something we can take away: the power of dialectical mediation, as Adorno would have put it. In the postmilitant moment we can recognize and respect difference, but still move from side to side in order to form strategic alliances. Looking again into the German literary tradition—not back to Goethe’s European landscape, but eastward, for a moment, to Kleist’s Trojan tragedy, Penthesilea—these works indicate that we have more choices than “to side with one against the other.”²⁵

The legacy of German militancy has several contrasting aspects: conservative, liberal, and radical. The terrorism of the RAF and other groups prompted the Federal Republic to restrict constitutional rights—not only of the activists themselves, but also of large sectors of the Left. Indeed it is this aspect that makes the German Autumn so compelling for those studying the U.S.-led “war on terror.” As Germans work to make sense of the armed struggle, through research, investigative reporting, and cultural production, they are coming to discern a certain codependency between terrorism and the state. In fact the government’s response to the RAF threat may have exacerbated the situation. The German Autumn showed the precarious position that a democracy assumes when it uses force to discipline and punish its political enemies.

While the chancellery became more conservative in the 1970s and 1980s, civil society grew more liberal. Interestingly, the Far Left played a part in this. Its violent interventions intensified Germans’ concerns about the fascist past and the threat of neofascism. The militants also sparked debates about a number of issues, including the Federal Republic’s penal systems, its capacity for democratic discourse, and its allegiance to U.S. economic and NATO military objectives. Beyond this, RAF women, in particular, made the sexual politics of postwar Germany impossible to ignore. Forming a vanguard front of the Far Left, Meinhof and Ensslin expanded the means by which women could act in the public sphere. This is a delicate and difficult point. Even if it wasn’t their intention, the RAF women’s deadly commitment to militancy helped to widen the space for political action, not only for feminists but also for those active in the social movements that were emerging at the time. It is hard to imagine, for instance, how the Green Party would have gained legitimacy in the 1980s without the challenges to the state’s monopoly on violence that were first launched by the Far Left in the late 1960s and contested in the national media from the 1970s onward. In The Edge of Heaven, Akın takes up the dynamic relationship between militancy and democracy and lets it play out between two generations: Ayten’s subversive acts unleash a chain of events that unsettle Susanne’s convictions and reveal new ways of seeing.