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

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

This recollection of the year 1968 prompts the narrator to ask a series of questions about why certain militant struggles failed, whether the proletariat still existed, and, if so, how it might be identified. Images of a lost Paris flicker across the screen—girls at the thresholds of forgotten cafés, night shots of Les Halles markets before their condemnation by Pompidou planners—while Debord reminds the viewer of the fate of les enragés and other’68ers: “Suicide carried off many.”³ But then the voice translates the film’s obscure title: we turn in the night, consumed by fire. Debord awakens desire for a turning, a return—out of the ashes, back to the impulses that propelled the SI and the RAF, as well as other avant-garde and vanguard movements of the time.

Debord wasn’t alone in linking the RAF to the Situationists. In recent years several scholars and artists have associated Debord’s “situations” with Baader-Meinhof strikes.⁴ Both the Situationists and the RAF worked to disrupt the complacencies of liberal democracy, sometimes taking similar approaches. They drew from the ideas of anarchism and Marxism and tested their powers in the modern cityscapes that postwar planners brought to life. The SI screened its aesthetic imagination onto Paris and other northern European cities; the RAF took refuge in the high-rises of Berlin, Frankfurt, and Hamburg in order to plot its terror on the German public. Members of each group were alert to the politics of the image. They worked both with and against the popular press and broadcast television. But whereas Debord critiqued the society of the spectacle—the condition in which capital accumulates and “becomes image”—the leaders of the RAF became fodder for the media machine, leaving a legacy heavy on style but light on political analysis.⁵

To compare the RAF and the SI, we need to discern the correspondences between their conceptual and tactical programs. To this end, this chapter explores the ways that the SI’s and the RAF’s different definitions of autonomy generated divergent modes of resistance. It examines key junctures in the history of each group, including the early impulses to set fire to European cities, the groups’ analyses of consumer society, the status of women within the SI and the RAF, and finally the modes by which each group disbanded and dissolved. Debord articulated an institutional critique of the culture industry and reactivated the modernist critical impulse. The RAF, meanwhile, rejected theoretical reflection in favor of direct actions that threatened to inflame anti-Semitism and neofascism. The German militants took what they considered to be a concrete and practical approach to revolution, but their attempts to gain autonomy ended, paradoxically, in the spectacle that Debord had already analyzed.

This comparison extends and supplements the objectives of chapter 2, as it analyzes the political and aesthetic tendencies that gave rise to the RAF and its cultural fallout. This chapter is an account of the “prehistory” of postmilitancy. As this story unfolds, we discern the RAF’s perspectives and blind spots.

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

At the time, a number of leftists were obsessed with the idea of riotous explosion. As Gerd Koenen argues, in the “red decade” of 1967–77, the image of buildings on fire became a militant zeitgeist that traveled from Los Angeles to Paris, and then alighted again and headed westward to Germany. The artist and activist Dieter Kunzelmann, discussed in chapter 2, was one of those who took note of the Watts uprising. Like Debord, Kunzelmann fixed on the picture of the flaming storefront window and incorporated it into a provocative leaflet he published with Berlin’s Kommune 1 (K1). The leaflet carried a situationist trace: before Kunzelmann’s expulsion from the SI, he edited the situationist journal Spur.¹³ Together with his housemates Rainer Langhans and Fritz Teufel, Kunzelmann used the K1 flyers as a medium to import the situationist dérive into the German alternative scene. Within a few weeks, Debord’s avant-garde strategies would combust with the most volatile strains of leftist militancy in Germany.

On its way from Los Angeles to Berlin, the spark of anarchy touched down in Brussels, where arson in a department store killed 253 people in 1967. When newspapers across the continent covered the fire, Langhans and Teufel diverted the media surge toward their own interests. Belgian investigators never established any political motivation for the event, but the communards reframed it as a protest against the war in Vietnam. The arson was intended, they suggested, to lift the spell of apathy that had settled on postwar Europe. Under the rubric “When Will Berlin’s Department Stores Burn?” Langhans and Teufel encouraged the Kommune 1 audience to at least imagine anarchy in the Federal Republic, if not necessarily to unleash it: “For the first time in a European metropolis, a burning department store with burning people inside is giving us that crackling Vietnam feeling … that feeling that we in Berlin have missed up to now.… Brussels has given us the only answer: burn, department store, burn!”¹⁴

When Kommune 1 circulated the leaflet, none of the members felt moved to act, choosing instead to devote themselves to other concerns. However, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, who had close contacts with K1, were alert to the incendiary rhetoric. Less than two weeks After the leaflet’s publication, they traveled from Frankfurt to Berlin and told the commune of their plans to “play with fire” in German department stores.¹⁵ On the way back, they equipped themselves with homemade explosives and detonators. Baader and Ensslin cruised the Zeil, Frankfurt’s main shopping venue. Near closing time, when the crowds had thinned, they left bombs in two department stores, the Kaufhaus Schneider and the Kaufh of. At midnight, as planned, the bombs detonated, engulfing the showrooms in flames. The next day, the fire headlined in local papers. Although the arson endangered several individuals in the vicinity of the stores, no one, in the end, was injured. Insurance companies covered the costs of repair: DM 282,339 for the Kaufh aus Schneider; DM 390,865 for the Kaufhof.

Within days, Ensslin and Baader were tracked down and arrested, and their hearing was set for October 1968. Before their trial an important precedent was set when a Frankfurt court considered the cases of Langhans and Teufel, who were suspected of provoking the criminal activity of Baader and Ensslin. The jury had to decide whether the K1 leaflet was an expression of artistic freedom or a blueprint for terrorism. The investigators took up a central question. How, the courts asked, do we distinguish between aesthetic performance and acts of terror? Their response traced out a network that links the historical avant-garde with postwar militancy.

To deliberate the Langhans-Teufel case, the judge convened a board of university professors and asked them to analyze the K1 publications, placing emphasis on the leaflet “When Will Berlin’s Department Stores Burn?” The panel’s assessment placed the text within a broad intellectual field that encompassed Germany’s great thinkers as well as some of the most advanced tendencies in continental philosophy. The experts began by engaging two discourses: Schiller’s and Kant’s classical definitions of beauty, on one side, and Sartre’s arguments for critical social engagement, on the other. They surveyed Kant’s Critique of Judgment, presenting his concept of art as “purposive without purpose,” and contrasted it to Sartre’s existentialist insistence on the fundamentally political nature of all cultural production.¹⁶

Once they established this distinction, the experts tried to assess the aesthetic merit of the K1 articles and determine the extent to which they might have provoked Baader and Ensslin. They prefaced their excursus with a pointed question about the text’s seriousness, or Ernsthaftigkeit.¹⁷ Taking the panel’s query as their cue, Langhans and Teufel interrupted the proceedings with an outcry. “Anyone who feels he’s been provoked to arson is a fool,” they quipped. “And certainly this court has distinguished itself in that regard.”¹⁸ The parodic interjection presaged the most telling moment of the trial, as the experts shift ed their deliberations from the wide frame of aesthetic theory to the particular legacy of surrealism. The panel endeavored to tease out the connections between K1’s individual article and avant-garde practices. This move would eventually exculpate Langhans and Teufel.

The experts designated the K1 leaflet as a “surrealist document”—a call for literary interpretation, not a terrorist instruction sheet. When the judge asked them to substantiate their claim, the panelists offered a definition of surrealism—in their words, an influential, Paris-based movement with unique stylistic devices (Stilmitteln)—and explained that, among other rhetorical instruments, the surrealists’ primary strategy was “the provocative call for acts of violence.”¹⁹ To distinguish provocation from prescription, Jacob Taubes, the Free University professor of hermeneutics and Judaic studies, paraphrased the writer Raymond Queneau’s conceptual program for surrealism: “Among all conditions, the surrealist revolution does not want to change material, visible relations. Much more than this, it wants to set into play the thinking of every single individual.”²⁰

Ultimately, the panel convinced the judge that “When Will Berlin’s Department Stores Burn?” posed no material threat to the public. Langhans and Teufel were dismissed, but their case functioned to extend the influence of the avant-garde into the postwar order. Before the conclusion of the trial, the experts read out a passage from the “Second Surrealist Manifesto” (1930), emphasizing what is perhaps André Breton’s most infamous mandate: “The simplest surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd, with his belly at barrel level.”²¹ The citation of the manifesto in the austere quarters of the Frankfurt court triggered a minor convulsion of subversive energies, as the captive audience heard Breton’s challenge and gasped. There, if nowhere else, art had been forced into life. Kommune 1 had channeled the surrealist impulse; soon, the RAF would recharge it as militancy and political violence.

The historical avant-garde cast a long shadow on the RAF, particularly in its early years. Key members of the group were active in the visual and performing arts, creating a counterculture that linked German cities. In Munich Andreas Baader belonged to Fassbinder’s circle of filmmakers and admirers, and Horst Söhnlein directed the Action-Theater.²³ Holger Meins studied at the Berlin film academy.²⁴ In 1968, After laying their department store bombs, Ensslin and Baader spent the evening at Frankfurt’s Club Voltaire, a locale that associated itself with the Dadaists’ Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. As the RAF developed, however, it made concerted efforts to distinguish itself as a militant vanguard with an agenda separate from the artistic avant-garde. A few minutes After the bombs went off in the Frankfurt department stores, a woman, possibly Ensslin, telephoned the German Press Agency to make this distinction clear. Not wanting the act to be seen as “a mere happening,” she called the fires “a political act of revenge.”²⁵

How do the department store bombings in Frankfurt figure into the relationship between the SI and the RAF? When Ensslin and Baader targeted the Frankfurt Zeil, they distorted the situationist strategies of Kommune 1 and turned them into a program of vanguard militarization. This statement is accurate, yet it suggests that the SI limited its agenda to aesthetics while the RAF’s motivations were purely political. In fact, the two groups operated on both levels. Aesthetic and political drives influenced them at different times and in different ways. Although the SI made its most significant interventions in the fields of visual culture and critical theory, Debord in particular tended to privilege the group’s political identity over and against its aesthetic inclinations. At moments when the SI came to crisis, Debord would reach, rhetorically, for his revolver, first reiterating the movement’s political premises, and then dramatically expelling offensive members from the group’s inner circle.

The SI reinvented and fortified itself through such rejections.²⁶ The group studiously avoided defining the term “Situationism,” but such acts of exclusion nonetheless articulated a negative aesthetic with a force to match any manifesto. These moves also changed the situationist rhetoric, such that it approached the militant tenor of the RAF’s later communiqués. At the start, the Situationists saw architecture and city planning as the prime instruments for channeling radical desire. But artists and architects were the first to be forced out of the SI. Simon Sadler argues that Debord and the other “hard-liners” eventually turned away from material questions of “spatial location and decor” and concerned themselves more with formal and conceptual matters. Soon they came to regard “the situation” itself as pure “revolutionary consciousness.”²⁷ In contrast, RAF insiders chose more brutal methods of expulsion: for example, when the militant Ingeborg Barz tried to defect from the group in 1972, Baader allegedly shot her.

The SI distanced itself from terrorist actions, affirming in a statement from 1964 that it would “only organize the detonation” of social unrest. “The free explosion,” the group asserted, “must escape us and any other control forever.”²⁸ But as the art historian Tom McDonough has demonstrated, this stance didn’t mean that the Situationists simply privileged thought over practice.²⁹ Rather, they resisted the conditions of the Far Left—the obsession with operational details, the need for secrecy—and strove to balance their means and ends.³⁰ In this regard, the SI anticipated the stance of a critical postmilitancy, in that it oriented itself toward the public interest. Although its membership dwindled, it always remained “above ground,” as have the contemporary thinkers, activists, and artists who have descended from the group. Several issues of the SI, including the one that contained the essay about Watts, evince the group’s interest in the social repercussions of their initiatives. More recently, Retort, a California collective that works with situationist theory, has emphasized that they still heed Debord’s warnings against the “narrowness and secretiveness” of political vanguards. In Afflicted Powers (2005), Retort reviews the vanguard ideals that linked the RAF with Lenin, Blanqui, Mao, and “the words and actions of bin Laden,” acknowledging them as at once “understandable” and “disastrous.”³¹ Rejecting terror as a political means, Retort has maintained that “the society of the spectacle” cannot be destroyed “by producing the spectacle of destruction.”³² From this renewed Debordian perspective, one perceives an antinomy: the RAF’s underground operations contradicted SI principles, but the deed that triggered the group’s formation—Baader and Ensslin’s crude reenactment of the Watts riots—was a pointed response to the Situationists’ provocation.

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

And yet, Meinhof noted, a progressive potential remained in Baader and Ensslin’s intervention. It didn’t consist in the destruction of commodities, but rather in the criminal nature of their acts, that is, in legal violation. The law they broke did not protect people; it was framed to protect property.³⁵ Drawing on André Gorz’s “Toward a Strategy of the Workers’ Movement in Neocapitalism,” Meinhof asked how legislation might be changed to defend individuals against the forces of capitalist accumulation and the “barbaric consequences” of the postwar market. Diverging from the political-economic analysis of the essay, Meinhof’s final two points intersected with a situationist agenda. Like the editors of the SI, she expressed a keen interest in the Watts uprising, seeing the Los Angeles case as a precursor to the Frankfurt department store arson. To Meinhof, both events illuminated the promise of militancy. Whoever sets buildings on fire and then plunders them, she maintained, learns that “the system” won’t fall apart when he or she takes what is needed to get by. The looter can learn that capitalism is rotten when it withholds life’s necessities. In conclusion, Meinhof brought this parallel to bear on the statement of Fritz Teufel at a 1968 SDS conference: “It is always better to burn a department store than to run one.”³⁶

A materialist premise subtends both Meinhof’s essay and the SI issue on the spectacle-commodity economy. To Meinhof, the people of Watts stole basic necessities: food, clothing, household things. Conversely, whatever Baader and Ensslin could have managed to steal would have been idle and sundry, the sort of commodities targeted by the Situationists in their journal. Yet, as Meinhof remarked in a parenthetical aside, there was one important exception: dishwashers.³⁷ Demonstrating her early interest in sexual politics, she argued that a substantial portion of working, married women in West Germany didn’t have the dishwashers they needed. Not only the expense prohibited the purchase of these appliances, but, speaking practically, the sheer weight did. This, Meinhof suggested, kept the Frankfurt militants from hauling off the dishwashers and delivering them to working wives. The message of the department store fires wouldn’t carry far enough, Meinhof concluded, because it limited the public’s focus to the order of the spectacle economy. In the end, the matter of real needs remained repressed.

Consciousness of these needs, Meinhof argued, betokened a sea change in modern culture—one that feminists would soon bring about. Indeed, the question of gender offers a useful point of comparison between the RAF and the SI. Meinhof’s konkret article, written two years before the RAF’s formation, emphasizes sexual politics in a way that later would not compute with the Baader-Meinhof program. In its subsequent turn from protest to resistance, the RAF shut down the conversation about sex and power. None of its communiqués addresses the gender issues that were so central to debates within the Left. And yet the RAF, unlike most other militant organizations, was mostly led by women. Things were quite different among the Situationists. Michèle Bernstein, Debord’s wife, was one of the very few women to collaborate with the group or contribute texts to the Situationist International. The journal frequently featured photos of scantily clad women that had been taken from advertisements and reworked. Although some critics have pointed to this as proof that the Situationists treated women as sex objects, the art historian Kelly Baum maintains that these images were actually a platform “from which the Situationists launched their rebuke to capitalism and the spectacle.”³⁸ The selection, reinscription, and placement of found photographs in the journal do suggest that Debord and his associates meant to critique them. Still, the internal dynamics of the SI appear to have reproduced the gender biases that inflected other radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The RAF, with its many women members, was a remarkable exception to this trend.

But back to the Watts riots and household appliances. The Situationists developed a more conceptual critique of the uprising, taking up not the dishwasher, but rather the air conditioner as their prime example.³⁹ To the Situationists, the Watts rioters brought about “the first rebellion in history to justify itself with the argument that there was no air conditioning during a heat wave.”⁴⁰ The larceny of such modern conveniences proved the point of the situationist agenda. “Comfort,” they wrote, “will never be comfortable enough for those who seek what is not on the market.”⁴¹ Watts residents rebelled against the subordination of consumers to commodity values; they refuted the market’s oppressive rationality. The theft of appliances by people whose homes weren’t properly electrified, the SI maintained, rendered “the best image of the lie of affluence, transformed into a truth in play.”⁴² If looted, merchandise can be subverted and refunctioned. Purchased with legal tender, it is fetishized as a status symbol.

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

In their own ways, both the SI and the RAF warned against the lure of the spectacle. But a striking contrast lay in their different relationships to the mass media. Especially in the 1970s, the RAF’s principal interlocutors were news editors and producers. Meinhof, Baader, and Ensslin played to media outlets, prefacing their acts of subterfuge with telephone calls to news bureaus. When the RAF’s second generation, still at large, resorted to kidnapping, it mobilized new technologies to pull off its plans. For example, the Baader-Meinhof group made media history in the fall of 1977 when it forced Hanns-Martin Schleyer to give testimony on a videotape they recorded in the so-called people’s prison. Turning on the camera, they opened a new aperture for terrorism. In the RAF’s video production, the hostage Schleyer sits before the group’s rifle-and-red-star insignia, atoning for his Nazi past and pleading for government negotiation with the militants. The tape became a key tool in the RAF’s discursive apparatus.

The Situationists, by contrast, resisted mediatization, aiming instead at its negation. A line from Debord’s In girum imus seems to address the RAF tactic of playing to the press: “this society signs a sort of peace treaty with its most outspoken enemies by giving them a spot in its spectacle.”⁴⁴ Caught in the spotlight of the German media, the RAF lost some of its sharp edges. If television and tabloids didn’t exactly domesticate the armed struggle, they lent a kind of consumable glamour to the movement. Both the women and the men of the RAF and Kommune 1 attracted the camera’s eye: a recurring series of photos in Bild and Der Spiegel showed some of the more photogenic upstarts loping around with their long, loose hair and, at times, short skirts. Baader gave the opposition a distinctive look. Something of a dandy, he made his mark, according to RAF chroniclers, by insisting on wearing self-tailored velvet trousers during training with the PLO in Yemen while the other comrades wore camouflage.⁴⁵ Such theatrical trappings trademarked the movement. When RAF leaders died in the prime of life, a tragic allure was imparted to their legacy. Today, the more reactionary examples of postmilitant culture seem pitched to capitalize on this.⁴⁶ Together with the proliferation of mainstream films about German militancy—from Starbuck: Holger Meins (2002), to Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (The Edukators, 2004), to The Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008)—this pop culture tendency connotes a reappropriation of the RAF agenda. But it was the RAF itself, through its self-styling, that first played into this spectacular co-optation.

Debord located the danger of the spectacle not only in society at large but also in his own films. Key interventions—such as the inclusion in In girum imus of a photo captioned “age forty-five” that shows the filmmaker looking bloated and worn out—seem intended to neutralize and even deeroticize the cinematic space. An essay by Asger Jorn positions Debord’s scenarios beyond the circuits of the culture industry, in which fame and careerism obscure aesthetic process and distort political salience.⁴⁷ These remarks square with an early statement Vaneigem made at an SI conference in 1961. The imperative was not, he insisted, to elaborate the spectacle of refusal, but rather to refuse the spectacle itself.⁴⁸ In resistance to the aestheticization of politics, Debord responded to Vaneigem’s challenge in his film work.

Debord’s work interrogated the notion of the individual subject and aimed to deflect the aura that surrounded cinema auteurs in the 1960s and 1970s. Such a critique marked another point of divergence from the RAF and its circles of sympathizers, because the armed struggle in Germany invited heroization. With few models of rebellion in the postwar period—no James Dean, no Led Zeppelin—radical Germans looked westward for subversive impulses, to France, Britain, and the United States. The emergence of the RAF, in all its fury, gave them more familiar profiles of autonomy and provided a focal point for the militant democratization and denazification that many youths took as their cause.

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

The SI and the RAF both argued for autonomy, but they understood its principles differently. Aligning with the surrealist and Dadaist trajectories of the historical avant-garde, the Situationists called for the supersession of art. They departed from universal aesthetic principles and sought to release art practice from the boundaries of the atelier, the salon, and the museum. The German New Left, meanwhile, redefined the notion of autonomy in the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing from Marcuse’s critique of the “one-dimensional” thought that was determined by postwar affluence and the strictures of “administrative society,” dissidents sought to reclaim parts of German cities and turn them into autonomous zones. The Autonomen wanted to make their squats into sites for the “great refusal” that Marcuse described.⁴⁹ In his writings, Marcuse exposed structures of imperialist domination and colonialist repression, and called for a moral and cultural critique. To some extent, his concept of refusal seems to have converged with (or at least echoed) the Situationists’ call, in 1961, to “refuse the spectacle.” But the RAF and other factions of the Far Left yearned for revolution and sought out direct and often vulgar applications of Marcuse’s Marxist vision, enlisting themselves in street battles as if to defend democracy on an international scale. The RAF stood on the front lines of the antitheoretical vanguard, first conflating its struggle with national liberation movements (in Vietnam, in the Palestinian territories), and then entirely dispensing with the question of how and when a revolutionary subject could be identified and defined.

This collapse of critical autonomy within the RAF aligned the Far Left of the 1960s and 1970s with the right-wing nationalists of the Third Reich. Habermas was one of the first to warn about the similarity between the “anti-imperialists” and the Nazis. When a youth demonstration in 1967 escalated to armed violence, Habermas published a series of articles denouncing the German dissidents’ facile equation of local and international antagonisms. Although he shared their outrage at any use of repression “in the name of freedom,” he warned against the radicals’ “emotional identification” with other oppressed groups, including “the blacks in urban slums.” As Habermas explained in his essay “Die Scheinrevolution und ihre Kinder” (“The Pretend Revolution and Its Children”), the situations in Southeast Asia, California, and West Germany were as “incomparable” as the problems that each posed and the tactics that each demanded.⁵⁰ Some of the extraparliamentary opposition was alert to this criticism. Others, especially those who formed into militant groups like the RAF and the June 2 Movement, rallied around this distorted sense of internationalism.⁵¹ In a prescient essay of 1968—published two years before the RAF came into formal existence—Habermas diagnosed the increasingly brutal uprisings of students and other radicals as “masochistic.” Condemning their attempts to trigger state violence, he denounced the militants’ agenda, seeing in it the potential for “leftist fascism.”⁵²

Although Marcuse, among Frankfurt School thinkers, was the closest ally of the New Left, he concurred that West Germany didn’t present the objective conditions for social revolution. Indeed, the RAF and other extremists seemed to confuse regression with revolution, blindly demanding the priority of action over theoretical elaboration. This slant, Adorno maintained in an exchange with Marcuse, did, in fact, portend an eruption of neofascist violence on the Left. Denying that the radicals could somehow fast-forward West Germany to a more democratic state, he identified parallels between the Far Left of the 1960s and the Nazis of the 1930s. Both movements stifled debate and insisted upon technocratic formalism, and—yet more alarming—the young radicals’ pro-Palestinian agenda was approaching anti-Semitism. Dieter Kunzelmann’s staged attack on Berlin’s Jewish Community Center in 1969 (discussed in chapter 2) is a prime example of this. For Adorno, leftist militancy was “mixed with a dram of madness,” in which “the totalitarian” resided not simply as a repercussion, but in its very telos.⁵³ Habermas would complement this proposition by arguing that the radicals’ strident insistence on political objectives over and against aesthetic ones augured an anticultural backlash (Kulturstürmerei) of the most dangerous kind.⁵⁴

Whether or not all of the militants harbored authoritarian tendencies, extremists like the RAF inadvertently provoked a conservative turn in West German law and prompted an increase of repressive mechanisms, including the reinforcement of the penal system. The Situationists, meanwhile, grew increasingly concerned with their critique of the built environment. Vaneigem once claimed that there was “no such thing as Situationism,” not even a situationist work of art. This statement had rhetorical force when he made it in 1961, and, in retrospect, the dematerialized condition of the SI seems to express the clearest truth about the group’s project. If the situationist legacy seems transitory, ephemeral, and contingent, RAF actions, on the other hand, broke German law and transgressed the internalized boundaries of the middle classes. As a result, their political interventions can be more substantively documented than those of the SI. The least we can say about the RAF is that it left Germany with a hulking paradox: Stammheim endures as the most concrete precipitate of its actions.

The RAF’s dissolution—After nearly thirty years of existence—was predicated by fragmentation. Well before the moment it formally disbanded, the group found itself marginalized. The first generation of the RAF had been dead for two decades. Nine core members were still doing time in German prisons, and the RAF-Aussteiger who had hidden in the GDR were being arraigned; but many other RAF members remained active and at large well into the 1990s. In the first decade of postcommunist unification, the RAF issued communiqués justifying the movement’s continued existence. Then, in 1998, when it finally released to Reuters a statement of dissolution, the RAF articulated a partial self-critique. Although the authors tried to justify their attempts in the 1970s and 1980s to free RAF prisoners from what they considered state torture, they conceded that most members had lost sight of the “social-revolutionary dimension” of their struggle and had become mired in internal difficulties. In trying to reject West Germany’s liberal democracy, the RAF had broken off its relationship to society as a whole. Soon its energies were exclusively directed toward tactical violence. The matter of addressing larger political and cultural processes—which, the group admitted, should have been the precondition for any “new revolutionary project”—fell by the wayside.⁵⁷

Setting the end point of urban-guerrilla history, the authors of the RAF’s final communiqué gained a belated purchase on German militancy. What the statement brought into view was that RAF members had wagered their lives and those of their victims before developing a viable social alternative to West Germany’s Gewaltmonopol, or exclusive right to wield violence. Instead of undertaking the protracted labor of looking for “new ideas for the process of liberation,” they accelerated a violent implosion.⁵⁸ Seeking to subvert authority, the RAF increased the intensity of its attacks, but did not attend to the hegemonic consensus between the state and the society. Instead, this enormous and complex task was left to the new social movements, including the Frauenbewegung. Without revolutionary consciousness in the general public, the RAF’s historical effect could only be self-limiting.

How to compare the ends of the RAF to those of the SI, each movement’s goals and the cultural and political significance of their dissolution? A death toll of the German armed struggle can be counted up, but the broader social impact of the Far Left defies precise calculation. The repercussions of the RAF are both material and discursive. Thomas Elsaesser has asked whether we can argue that “despite its very real victims,” the armed struggle that gripped the FRG in the 1970s was “essentially symbolic.”⁵⁹ Indeed, to a considerable extent, the meaning of German militancy was inflected and disseminated by the reactions of the government and media. Responding to the RAF’s provocations, West German society helped generate the symbolism of the movement. To extend and develop Elsaesser’s question, we could ask whether the RAF exploited the conditions of spectacle society or, instead, inadvertently reinforced them.

For the Situationists, to commit symbolic violence is to refunction the spectacle, so that it breaks the circuits of commodifıcation. As a result, sites of political contestation once suppressed or obscured by systems of domination are disclosed. Some RAF actions worked along these lines, but many of its assaults backfired. Not only did they give German authorities the grounds to tighten controls, these maneuvers served as prime media feed. When the militants lost interest in journalistic agitations and spontaneous acts of civil disobedience, they resorted to violence and played into the hands of their opponents. Setting fire to the Frankfurt department stores, the future founders of the RAF entered themselves into the media spectacle of terrorism.

In their hopes for global revolution, radicals of the 1960s and 1970s sought to link subversive energies from city to city. But the Watts riots disclosed the differences between the European vanguard and avant-garde factions. From the flames of Los Angeles, the Situationists gleaned that social change had ignited and would transform the world. Having met its mandate, the SI could dissolve. But the RAF derived another lesson from Watts: it tried to advance cultural revolution from underground, but ended up burying it instead.

Traces of the RAF persist in a wide range of material substrates, from the lightweight cotton of fashionable T-shirts to the reinforced concrete of Stammheim. But the SI, in contradistinction, is everywhere and no where at once.⁶⁰ The group seems to have fulfilled the prescriptions they made from their earliest appearances to their final statement of dissolution. Debord’s prohibition against the screening of his films made Situationism clandestine and inaccessible. And yet the obscurity of these vestiges is off set by an aura that surrounds the SI legacy. In the wake of Debord’s suicide, many have received and relayed the situationist current. Today the movement’s concepts and practices are open to contest and further elaboration, as seen in the work of visual artists such as Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, and Thomas Hirschhorn, as well as in the initiatives of the Retort group. The RAF, meanwhile, ended at a deadlock. Lacking a coherent program, the group failed to advance any progressive transformations or to secure connections to other social movements. Thus, much of the postmilitant culture that has followed in its Aftermath can only mimic these postures. The RAF was neither reformist nor revolutionary; first it imploded into narcissistic self-sacrifice, and then it returned in collective memory as a style, not a stratagem. In order to avoid just mimicking those postures, postmilitant critique needs to disclose their flaws.