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

The German Autumn peaked with the RAF-backed abduction of Lufthansa Flight 181 in October 1977. Hijackers from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) overtook the plane and its ninety-one passengers and crew, detouring the Boeing 737 from Mallorca to Dubai and onward to Bahrain, Yemen, and finally to the runways of the airport in Mogadishu, Somalia. When negotiations between the PLO, the RAF, and West German security reached a stalemate, the terrorists shot one of the Lufthansa pilots and doused the passengers with alcohol, preparing them for immolation. Then they started a countdown to death.

Back in the Federal Republic, viewers sat riveted before their television sets, where history seemed to explode onto the screen. A series of images repeated over the five-day odyssey: maps of the Middle East and Africa, mug shots of militant women and men, diagrams of terrorist cell networks, and clips of the “Landshut” aircraft, stalled on the tarmac of distant airports. Across Europe, the German Autumn entered into the registers of collective memory as one of the most volatile outbreaks of political violence in the postwar period.

The events of October 1977 were particularly momentous for Germans. The targeting of a German plane and its fragile human cargo awakened a shared sense of victimization. For the first time since World War II, Germans found themselves able to speak about being the targets—not the perpetrators—of political violence.¹ But the divide between agents and victims was problematic for Germans, as it still is. Since Hitler, the nation has struggled with questions about agency, capitulation, and complicity in National Socialism. The eruption of the RAF just a generation After the Third Reich prompted some to speculate about an essentially “Germanic” inclination toward terror and domination.

The shock of the Landshut hijacking opened the floodgates for a series of transitions in West German society. The government capitalized upon the attack as an opportunity to roll back constitutional rights. Already in 1972, Chancellor Willy Brandt had passed the Radikalenerlass, or “antiradicals decree,” which banned suspected communists and militants from civil and public service occupations, such as teaching. This law impinged upon the freedoms of many citizens, not just those who sympathized with the Far Left.² The Federal Criminal Police expanded its powers and coordinated a systematic search for those aiding and abetting the RAF; this included border controls, wiretapping, house searches, and thousands of arrests. Many citizens who had nothing to do with the armed struggle got caught in this dragnet, and tensions rose, both within the state apparatus and among the German public. Computer profiling became common practice. It was a time when having long hair or wearing jeans was enough to attract police scrutiny.

In October 1977 an international counterterrorism unit finally gained control of the Landshut hijacking, rescuing the remaining passengers and crew, shooting dead one of the assailants, and apprehending the rest. News of the Stammheim deaths and Schleyer’s killing soon followed. Although the RAF’s second and third generations would continue their militant campaigns until the late 1990s, the Far Left’s most acute phase of violence was passing. As those right of center regrouped and set the stage for Helmut Kohl’s election in 1982, many on the Left found themselves disillusioned by both the ideals and agendas of 1968. The Federal Republic entered a Tendenzwende as it turned toward a phase of conservative consolidation.

This transition was clearly noted in German politics and culture of the 1980s. It shift ed the coordinates of national identity and motivated new inquiries into the topics of historical progress and the status of the individual subject within civil society. This discursive terrain has been closely surveyed within German Studies, but little attention has been given to the ways that these discussions influenced the cultural response to the German Autumn. A key moment of this transition was the Historikerstreit, a public dispute about the legacy of National Socialism. Jürgen Habermas’s contributions to this exchange deepened German—and European—self-understanding. He criticized the conservative propensity to relativize the crimes of the Third Reich, arguing that fascism was not simply a defense against a Soviet threat, but rather an expression of retrograde nationalism and capitalist crisis. For Habermas, there was no way to “normalize” German history; the postwar Republic had a responsibility to continually recall the lessons of its past.³

These claims aligned with a guiding thesis of Habermas’s scholarship: that modernity is an “incomplete project,” a mission that needs to be continued instead of rejected, as some critics have implied. His critique of the “postmodern condition” helped to disclose the connections and ruptures among German cultural currents that ranged from outmoded narratives of romance and heroism to aesthetic interventions pitched to investigate binary systems and decenter human subjectivity. Regarding the literature and cinema of the 1980s and early 1990s that treat the matter of terror, we see instances where the effects of postmodernism and postmilitancy overlapped and intersected. Comparing selected novels and films of this period, we can discern a restructuring of national identity that unfolded over the course of the Tendenzwende. Through this, we also gain a fuller understanding of the concept of postmilitant culture, its potential as well as its problems.

F. C. Delius’s Windowseat at Mogadishu is a historical fiction about 1970s-era hijackings.⁴ The story splices together different accounts of the Mogadishu abduction to focus on the condition of the individual hostage. Delius’s novel draws upon airline culture—the strictures of seatbelts and tray tables, the wait to be relieved of remaining service items—to convey the scale of terror that develops when the indignities of long-haul travel metastasize into a death game. Together with Ein Held der inneren Sicherheit (A Hero of Internal Security, 1981) and Himmelfahrt eines Staatsfeindes (The Ascension of a Public Enemy, 1992), the novel is part of Delius’s trilogy Deutscher Herbst (German Autumn). The frameworks of restraint in Windowseat at Mogadishu might appear contiguous with the architectures of confinement that Margarethe von Trotta captured in Marianne and Juliane. But where von Trotta alludes to the dangerous notion that RAF militants were trapped in a situation comparable to that of the victims of German fascism, Delius’s voyeuristic angle into the Landshut hijacking appeals to a masochistic interest and leads the reader into a fog of misidentification wherein all Germans might cast themselves as “victims of history.” However, what that history is and who the real perpetrators were remain unclear in Delius’s writing.⁵

Like Marianne and Juliane, Windowseat at Mogadishu also illuminates the sexual politics that shaped postwar Germany. Delius designates the figure Andrea Boländer as the primary hostage; she is a young zoologist taking a holiday break from her boyfriend back home. Andrea recalls the main character of Heinrich Böll’s Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, 1974), but a sharper comparison can be drawn between Windowseat at Mogadishu and Dürrenmatt’s novel The Assignment.⁶ Dürrenmatt places at center stage a feminine figure called simply by her first initial, F.: a documentary filmmaker working in the Arab world, she drinks Campari in the morning, wears a long fur over her denim pantsuit, and breaks off from her crew to go it alone. Neither Delius nor Dürrenmatt explicitly names the RAF as actors in the terrorist scenarios they describe, but both novels are deeply imprinted by the blowback of the Far Left.

With their scenes of feminine victimization and defiance, Window Seat at Mogadishu and The Assignment variously engage and test the tropes of “woman,” “militant,” and “terrorist” that circulated and sometimes intersected in Western Europe in the 1970s and 80s.⁷ RAF members drew a lot of attention, but it wasn’t just the Far Left that was getting noticed; as the postwar economy flourished, professional women attained an exceptional degree of public prominence. They entered new areas of the workforce and called for constitutional reform, including expanded rights. The market catered to the demands of a changing world and launched advertising schemes that infused cityscapes with brighter colors and hypersexualized energies. The message of this media surge was mixed: the public was confronted with pictures of alluring, strong, and even threatening women, but at the same time it also witnessed a conservative uptick through headlines and articles that announced a “return to femininity.”⁸ The heightened presence of women—both real and represented—in the public sphere reshaped national identity. The Vaterland began to accommodate and enable feminine agency in unprecedented ways.

These social changes were attended by new formations in culture and critical thought. Postmodern aesthetics expanded into art, architecture, literature, and philosophy. Meanwhile, the waves of French structuralism and poststructuralism—initiated by thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Lacan—were starting to crest in the West German world of ideas. Habermas had already warned, very early on, against these tendencies. He doubted the capacity of these theories and practices to investigate structures of power, both material and discursive. Over and against them, he argued for the power of communicative action. In his Adorno Prize lecture from 1980, Habermas criticized both poststructuralist thought and the notion that postmodernism enabled a radical departure from modernity, calling it neoconservative and ahistorical.⁹ To his mind, this perspective could not contend with either the complexity of culture in late capitalism or the gains and losses of modernism itself.

The contexts of the Tendenzwende informed both Habermas’s thinking and the reception of his thought in German society. Countering the Left’s disillusionment After the German Autumn, Habermas recalled the emergence of the social movements of the 1960s and defended their emancipatory potential. As he saw it, the New Left’s incremental steps to open communication about democratic change advanced the Enlightenment project. The New Left also defied the problematic belief, held on the far end of the political spectrum, that by rejecting the traditions of Western rationality they would liberate themselves from domination.

Although Habermas wrote relatively little about the women’s movement, it is clear that German feminists in the 1980s doing their own work to recalibrate their initiatives in a changed political climate. As Dagmar Herzog has demonstrated, the Tendenzwende presented a paradox of postwar morality. For example, the Kohl government dialed back the clock on “sex-affirmative” curricula in the state schools, but at the same time sexual liberalization continued apace.¹⁰ Feminists were actively involved in these transitions. On the one hand, they were attuned to the poststructuralist theoretical investigations of sex and gender; on the other, they fought—in very material ways—to fend off the incursions of Kohl’s conservatism. Meanwhile, the continuing threat of the Far Left posed a unique challenge for some sectors of the women’s movement. Now that Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin had become household names, the task of differentiating radical feminism from leftist militancy had become more complicated.

Windowseat at Mogadishu and The Assignment are part of this cultural moment, as they present female protagonists who are caught up between agency and objectification. Their heroines alternate between victim and perpetrator positions, embodying at once the recent memories of the “liberated woman,” the urban guerrilla, and the vulnerable hostage. The intersecting tropes of women, militants, and terrorists that appear in these two novels mirror back a facet of the West German public sphere in the 1970s and 1980s. Reinforcement of internal security measures made it impossible to forget the looming danger of the armed struggle, especially the disquieting photos of young women who were enemies of state. At the same time, the media became saturated with images of women doing things they had never done before, including taking power. The parallel campaigns—most-wanted notices and commercial publicity—led some to infer that if feminists were not exactly outlaws, they were nonetheless a distinct threat. As Alice Schwarzer contended in an editorial for Emma at the height of the German Autumn, the media’s alarm about women militants was really a reaction to their anxiety about the Frauenbewegung.¹¹ Women’s full participation in public life was taken as an attack on traditional values.

It wasn’t just conservatives who saw it this way. Margarete Mitscherlich, the psychoanalyst who coauthored the influential study of postwar German society, Die Unfähigkeit zu Trauern (The Inability to Mourn, 1967), published a report on gender and terrorism in 1978 that portrayed women as irrational, weak, and fanatical. Incapable of reflecting on the repercussions of their actions, the female subjects were seen as more likely than men to act violently once they had stepped away from the bonds of home and family.¹² Most importantly, as the Germanist Sarah Colvin has demonstrated, Mitscherlich’s study maintained that the feminist movement was “exacerbating the problem,” since “emancipation leads women to identify and compete with men, reaching for weapons as phallic symbols.”¹³

It was a combination of these developments that configured women like Meinhof and Ensslin as militant sex bombs, dissidents who challenged bourgeois femininity in the interests of the anti-imperialist struggle.¹⁴ In war-torn Germany, the deutsche Frau had been imagined as a “pale mother” to the nation; in the first postwar decades, she kept to the church, the kitchen, and the kindergarten.¹⁵ With the rise of the RAF, this woman was suddenly armed and dangerous. In the Tendenzwende gender identity was being fundamentally renegotiated. We see this process unfold in Windowseat at Mogadishu and The Assignment.

Delius, a German, and Dürrenmatt, a Swiss, play off both mainstream and countercultural profiles of modern women and make extended references to the Far Left in their novels. But whereas Delius’s main character, Andrea, endures the trial of terrorism to emerge redeemed as a “natural” woman, Dürrenmatt’s protagonist, F., enters deeply into historical conflicts that resist reconciliation. Although she is taken hostage and threatened with rape, her fearlessness actually matches that of the militant women who stole the limelight during the RAF years. As the narrative proceeds, F.’s investigation sets off a series of mistakes and missed encounters that eludes any standard definition of the woman, the militant, or the terrorist. While Dürrenmatt ventures into poststructuralist experiment in his tale of abduction, Delius sticks to the standards of bestselling fiction. Why do both authors assign their hostages the feminine gender?

Anxieties of perception charge The Assignment, and a number of disciplinary forces emerge to brook them. Fundamentalism and digital surveillance are two such regimes that Dürrenmatt invokes. Each of the novel’s twenty-four chapters is composed as a single, breathless, and, at times, beautiful sentence, but this rigorous form (actually it’s a novella) is no guarantee for literary self-sufficiency. Dürrenmatt puts totalization and fragmentation into traction, using the condition of the hostage to examine the construction of the contemporary subject. Unlike most of his other writing, in this case the subject is markedly femininized. As several scholars have noted, Dürrenmatt conceived this novel as an attempt to complete or at least respond to Ingeborg Bachmann’s unfinished manuscript for Der Fall Franza (The Book of Franza, 1973), a postmodern investigation of nationalism and the “gender war.”¹⁶ In order to tell his story, Dürrenmatt’s protagonist necessarily had to be a woman.

The Assignment starts out with a mystery: the body of a European woman named Tina von Lambert is found raped and murdered at the ruins of the Al-Hakim monument in an unspecified but presumably North African or Middle Eastern country called M. The desert location evokes the foreign terrains visited by German militants, such as Yemen and Jordan, where they trained with Fatah guerrillas. F. is assigned to make a documentary on von Lambert’s life and death. She learns that another woman, the journalist Jytte Sørensen , has also been raped and murdered, and that F. herself is next in line. As the plot progresses, the fictive mode travels from the novelistic toward the experimental, often frustrating expectation. In search of clues, F. interviews officials implicated in the two murders and moves ever deeper into the desert to find the site of the crime. When she gets there, intelligence agents take her hostage.

Dürrenmatt’s novel departs from “the assignment” of solving Tina von Lambert’s murder and considers larger questions about language, history, and power. Windowseat at Mogadishu, meanwhile, takes a different tack. Delius’s novel is one long claim of damages. Much of the language follows the formulas of the Victims’ Compensation Law of 1976.¹⁷ “Bodily Injuries,” “Place of Incident,” “Possible Relationship to Perpetrator”—each of these blanks on the claim form solicits Andrea’s memory of the hijacking.¹⁸ At first she resists the questionnaire’s demands for proof and substantiation. Merely reading the document, Andrea finds, returns her to the confines of the hijacked plane. It summons forth the sights, sounds, and sensations that she wanted to forget: the “dark, black face” of Jassid, her captor, and the painful swelling of her bound hands.¹⁹ But then she gives in and inventories her injuries. Checking each limb, testing each memory, she makes herself whole again over the course of Delius’s story. The survey becomes more than an expository device for the novel: it documents Andrea’s recollection, delivering her out of the state of emergency and toward resolution, precisely the kind of closure that Dürrenmatt resists in The Assignment.

Nearing disaster, her body manifests itself as a locus of resistance. It demands to be recognized, even as it sheds and heaves in cycles of collapse and recovery. Here, two-thirds of the way through the novel, Andrea names herself for the first time since entering the letters into the blanks on the claim form.

The Germanist Franz Futterknecht views the hijacking in Delius’s novel not as an incident of bodily harm, but rather as the advent of Andrea’s subjective rehabilitation.²¹ Perhaps the truth of such a violent event is more complicated. The incident renews Andrea’s self-recognition, but it also measures the value of her life to both the hijackers and the federal authorities that would make claims on her. When the terrorists give their ultimatum, Andrea realizes that, while she may serve as a pawn in their scheme, her physical body remains a singular asset.²² Only alive does she have any negotiable value, as she and the other passengers embody the hijackers’ Kapital.²³ Against Futterknecht’s interpretation, this reading opens a new angle onto Andrea’s literary desire, voiced at the end of the novel, to write something about her ordeal, an article, a book, anything that would move beyond the bounds of the claim form that trains our focus on her body and obliterates her conscience, her doubts.

To see this possibility, however, we must read Windowseat at Mogadishu against the grain; we must bring Delius’s drive toward the biological essence of the “eternal feminine” into contradiction with the possibility of Andrea’s literary potential. Here, The Assignment provides counterpoint. Dürrenmatt takes us even further from Futterknecht’s assertion of the stabilized subject. The anxieties of his novel sometimes register as a thunderous shudder and other times figure in textual detail. An excerpt from Kierkegaard that appears twice in the novel—first as the epigraph, and then reformulated in the body of the book—conveys this dissonance. F. discovers the Kierkegaard citation midway through her investigation; she finds it written on a discarded piece of paper in a hotel room where von Lambert once stayed. Parenthetical notes in Danish punctuate Dürrenmatt’s German, emphasizing the provisional nature of F.’s reading: “What should come, what should strange times (fremtiden) bring? I do not know, I have no presentiment. When a black widow (edderkop ?) plunges down from a fixed point to its consequences, it constantly sees an empty space (tomt rum ?) before it, in which it cannot find a firm foothold (fodfaeste ?), no matter how it kicks about.”²⁴ Recognizing her own predicament in the message, F. is overcome by a wave of terror. The “strange times” that she glosses from the excerpt derive from Kierkegaard’s reflections about the future in Either/Or (1843), the influential discourse on the aesthetic and ethical “stages” of existence.²⁵ Here, for Kierkegaard, the future is a moment both unknowable and still profoundly determined. “Thus is it with me,” F. continues: “before me perpetually an empty space (tomt rum ?), what drives me forward is a consequence that lies behind (bag) me. This life is backward (bagvendt) and puzzling (raedsomt ?), intolerable.”²⁶

As the novel proceeds, F. realizes that her fate is contingent upon a matrix of historical discord. Past conflicts stipulate a radically insecure Aftermath, impelling Dürrenmatt’s world toward alienation and existential angst. Against the warnings of a secret service officer, F. leaves the monitoring station that is both controlled by war veterans and protected by the rule of law. She traces von Lambert’s and Sørensen’s footsteps and senses danger, yet she cannot resist the pull of her obscure destiny. As explosions and crashing noises bear down upon her, F. recalls the insight of an old colleague: what constitutes the individual is nothing more than “a countless chain of selves emerging from the future.”²⁷ Avoiding the essentialism of Windowseat at Mogadishu, Dürrenmatt does not reify the human subject in his account of terror.²⁸ He destabilizes this subject and concludes the novel with a postmodern ending, mixing different styles and finishing with the flourish of a media spectacle. A rapacious attacker reels off Homeric pentameter and takes hold of F. Once she throws off his embrace, tanks arrive on the scene and the story whites out in the flare of camera flashes. Dürrenmatt’s concluding scene recalls the liberation of the Landshut craft, when a special unit of antiterrorism forces stormed the plane and the international media swept in to capture the event.

In the beginning of The Assignment, F. sets out to shoot a film that will be a “total portrait” of the world, but over the course of the novel, such attempts at documentary objectivity devolve into a system of “ruthless observation” (unbarmherzige Beobachtung)²⁹ that crushes subjective identity, reducing idiosyncrasy to standard iteration. Departing from her assignment “to document,” F. puts herself on a path from which there is no return to the certainties of realism—no stable subject, no total portrait. In Windowseat at Mogadishu, meanwhile, Delius relies heavily on documentary frameworks to organize his narrative. Andrea reconstructs herself as she completes the claim form. By filling in the blanks, she answers back to the federal inquiry and confers legitimacy to it. With reference to Althusser, we can see the report as an ideological apparatus: it reinforces the citizenship of the subjects of political violence, reconsolidating the German state.³⁰ The narrator’s bureaucratic duty becomes an exercise in normalization.

In the first pages of the novel, Andrea takes a somewhat cynical stance toward the compensation application, but as the story develops, this skepticism dissipates. Delius’s lack of cynicism sets Windowseat at Mogadishu apart from an earlier German novel that used a government document as its template: Ernst von Salomon’s Der Fragebogen (The Questionnaire), published in 1951.³¹ Interned by U.S. forces in 1945 and 1946, von Salomon, a prominent screenwriter in the 1930s and 1940s, based this work on the Allied Powers’ “131 Fragen der Entnazifizierungsbehörden,” a survey issued to German nationals suspected of Nazi collaboration. The Questionnaire offered a derisive overview of the country’s recent history, asking whether the U.S. government was eligible to propagate democracy abroad, given its own will to power. It’s easy to see the novel as an attempt to disassociate von Salomon from the crimes of Nazism, and one could even read it as a collective apologia for all Germans, but at least its cynicism helped to investigate the extent to which administrative taskmastering could really work through the traumas of fascism, or whether it would merely contain and preserve them for future retrieval.³²

Von Salomon’s challenge to the Allied survey in The Questionnaire aligns, notably, with several points in Habermas’s reflections on German history in the lecture “Keine Normalisierung der Vergangenheit” (“No Normalization of the Past”), delivered in 1985 in the midst of the Historikerstreit. Here Habermas countered the “normalizing” arguments, advanced by some public intellectuals, that National Socialists were justified in their “defense” against the perceived threat of bolshevism. According to Ernst Nolte, a prominent voice in the debates, the atrocities of the Third Reich could have erupted anywhere; they were not unique to Germany. As Nolte notoriously argued in the Frankfurter Allgemeine in 1986, the Holocaust itself was an understandable, if terrible, overreaction to geopolitical crisis.³³ In Windowseat at Mogadishu, Delius avoids the relativism that Habermas criticized, but the literary substance of the novel nonetheless corresponds with the “normalizing” direction of Nolte’s historical interpretation.³⁴ Through Andrea’s account, Delius sketches out possible correspondences between German anti-Semitism and its counterpart in Fatah, but the overarching mission of the novel is to restore the protagonist to postwar normalcy.

When we read Windowseat at Mogadishu and The Assignment in relation to the Historikerstreit—both novels were published in the middle of the controversy—important differences between the two texts become apparent. In their reflections on militancy and terrorism, Delius and Dürrenmatt touch on questions about the representation of the subjects and objects of violence, questions that recharge the problems of national identity. After the traumas of the Holocaust, After the social changes of second-wave feminism, how might language reconstruct the subject? How might writers challenge conventions of literary characterization? Windowseat at Mogadishu and The Assignment both consider the status of the political hostage, but their narrative strategies take them to diverging ends. Delius follows the formulas of docudrama without establishing the cynical distancing of von Salomon’s Questionnaire. Dürrenmatt, meanwhile, exhausts the limits of realism.

To a great degree, this differential is determined by the authors’ presentation of their protagonists. After being liberated by the German unit, Andrea recounts the traumas of the German Autumn and, through this task, bolsters her identity; the claim form simultaneously interpellates her into the Federal Republic and grounds her in her physiology. In contradistinction, Dürrenmatt’s heroine is progressively decentered and deracinated. Although F. is identified as a German national, her character is influenced by the figure of Jytte Sørensen, a Dane. The novel refracts the stable subject into multiple images, leaving the narrator unnamed but for the initial F. Read through the critical lens of Althusser’s or especially Lacan’s work, the letter that stands for her name carries a series of associations: Frau, fraulich, feminin. From these associations, other poststructuralist propositions could be deduced, such as Lacan’s provocative expression la femme n’existe pas or the multiple pronouncements of the “death of the author.” But even without pursuing this theoretical trajectory, it’s clear that Dürrenmatt’s decision to unname his narrator militates against the assumption of a solid identity, whether personal or political. Thus, within the novel’s logic, there is no woman, no authentic document. No normalization of the past.

As the historian Atina Grossman has argued, documentation of sexual assault was sometimes deployed to confirm Germans’ self-identification as the objects of abuse. The term Missbrauch (abuse, especially sexual abuse), which frequently appeared in testimonies, seemed to extend out from the individual rape accounts and into an experience of collective, national subjugation. It conveyed the problematic notion, as Grossman puts it, of “all the ways in which the German Volk as a whole had been woefully abused—by the Nazis, by Hitler, who reneged on his promises of national renewal and led them into a war that could not be won, by the losses on the front and the Allied bombing raids, and then by defeat, occupation, and a denazification that was generally perceived as arbitrary and unfair.”³⁷ In other words, these revelations worked in two ways: they documented the disgrace of German women, yet they also constituted these women as subjects of a victim-nation. Their accounts emerged in force at the same time that Windowseat at Mogadishu and The Assignment were published, but a close analysis of the matter of documenting the rapes did not follow for several years. These intersecting debates about the representation of violence against women sharpened questions that are salient to the examination of aesthetic treatments of militancy and terror during the Tendenzwende.

Around 1987 Helke Sander, the filmmaker and cofounder of the Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frauen (Action Committee on the Liberation of Women, an important constituent of the APO), began making a documentary about the rape of German women. Released in 1992, BeFreier und BeFreite (Liberators Take Liberties: War, Rapes, Children) was credited with sparking discussion of the sexual politics of World War II and its Aftermath, but, at the same time, it also became the object of intense scrutiny by scholars who detected several flaws: the film’s “revisionist” and “militant” focus on the German experience, its near exclusion of atrocities delivered upon Jews and other victims of National Socialism, its lack of self-reflection, and its problematic incorporation of documentary evidence.³⁸ The film provoked a new round of debates in Germany and abroad; in 1995 the American journal October published a special issue in response, “Berlin 1945: War and Rape.”

The style of Liberators Take Liberties has been compared to that of the film Germany in Autumn (1978).³⁹ It juxtaposes archival material with several staged interviews and draws upon the myths of Antigone and Penthesilea. But unlike the more intersubjective compositional strategies we have seen in Alexander Kluge’s work, Liberators is presented as a monologic lesson. In it, Sander endeavors to count and measure the damages inflicted upon German women by Soviet soldiers. Her empiricist slant parallels Delius’s proclivity for closure and completion in Windowseat at Mogadishu. Comparing Sander and Delius, we strike upon another parallel. Both narratives constitute German identity in opposition to an “Other.” For Sander, the Other is the Soviet Red Army; for Delius, it’s the Red Army Faction.

In an essay on Liberators Take Liberties, Sander insists that she wanted to stick with “hard facts”; indeed, much of the documentary is devoted to demography and statistical analysis.⁴⁰ This empirical emphasis, however, obscures fundamental issues. Sander doesn’t pose questions about the Eastern Front, for example, whether German soldiers raped the women among their enemies, or whether the German victims’ complicity in Nazism might shade our interpretation of the events. The film’s narrator estimates that 1.9 million women were raped by Red Army troops. This large figure is a plausible estimate of the casualties. But Sander’s fixation on the reckoning of this number presents ethical problems that the film doesn’t address.

Shortly After the first screenings of Liberators, Grossman wrote a review that criticized the documentary’s myopic focus on data. In an article for the journal frauen und film, Grossman emphasized the importance of statistical accuracy, but at the same time she acknowledged that historians would probably never manage to calculate exact numbers for the rapes.⁴¹ Sander’s “noncontextualized” pursuit of “real information,” she maintained, actually distorts the representation of the rapes. Further, Sander’s “focus on numbers” stages a contest for “the status of victim,” one that puts Jews in contest with women.⁴² Watching Liberators, the viewer must concentrate on what Sander calls the “gender war” between Russian men and German women, and so loses sight of the larger conflicts and ideologies that fueled German fascism.

The critiques of dehistoricization and empiricism in Sander’s documentary—well known to Germanists in the early 1990s—can be brought to bear on Windowseat at Mogadishu. If Sander wants to count up the victims of war rape, Delius seeks narrative control by naming the victims of terrorism. The formulas of his novel feminize the status of the victim, quite like the calculus of Sander’s documentary. Delius’s account of the German Autumn also plays into a peculiar vindication that Grossman identified in Liberators: his dramatization of Far Left hijackings depicts the victim as at once violated and confirmed.⁴³ For Sander and Delius, it seems, the best vehicle for this double operation is the body of a woman. Completing the federal claim form, Delius suggests, Andrea enters her full name into the official record and so takes the first steps toward overcoming her ordeal.

Against the neat closure of Delius’s historical fiction, Dürrenmatt pursues an open inquiry. Abstracting and erasing temporal and spatial coordinates, he unfolds multiple sites for the reader to participate in the text’s meaning. The literary critic Margaret Scanlan maintains that The Assignment refutes two key oppositions: first between self and other, and then between democracy and terror.⁴⁴ The novel explores the limited capacity of literary realism to either secure individual subjectivity or convey the full force of global antagonisms. Dürrenmatt breaks down the smooth narrative arc that obtains in much postmilitant literary fiction. A closer look at the handling of gender in The Assignment, however, casts doubt on Scanlan’s interpretation of the novel. In fact, it shows a key parallel with Delius’s postmilitancy.

The open inquiry that shapes The Assignment aligns with literary strategies that developed in postmodern writing in the 1980s. It also leads us to ask how the concept of postmilitant culture that I’m testing in this book might correspond to the concept of the postmodern. The postmodern is perhaps best defined in relation to its precursor, the modern. Within literature either it can denote the end of modernism or, alternatively, it can signal an interrogation of the devices of authorship, structure, and narration that are central to the modern. Postmilitancy relates to militancy in a similar way. To lay it out as an analogy, modern is to postmodern as militant is to postmilitant. This analogy is relational. In other words, I am not positing a link between the modern and the militant, nor between the postmodern and the postmilitant. Rather, what matters is the way that the latter terms respond to their precursors.

If there is a spectrum of postmodern culture, ranging from the affirmative to the critical, in the case of postmilitancy we see a comparably wide range of positions. Reading The Assignment and Windowseat at Mogadishu, it becomes evident that neither of the two novels achieves a critical postmilitancy. Delius’s inclination toward closure demarcates the “before and After” of the German Autumn. Dürrenmatt, on the other hand, uses several postmodernist strategies, but only to intensify the prevalent fascination with violence and terror. In the conclusion of The Assignment we will see that this fascination bears a misogynist charge that is at odds with the sharpest insights of postmilitant thought.

The Assignment takes a postmodern perspective that can be clearly distinguished from the realism of Windowseat at Mogadishu. Delius’s Andrea Boländer follows the directions of the claim form, and so formats herself as a new, feminine subject of the state. Dürrenmatt’s narrator, meanwhile, offers a fragmented account of transnational militancy and terror; the narrative voice resists the reconciliation of documentary form. The postmodern and poststructuralist devices of The Assignment convey the shocks of both guerrilla warfare and the government’s backlash against it. Despite these differences, both novels nevertheless betoken the conservatism that Habermas criticized in his reflections on the postmodern condition. A comparison of the ways the two works conclude makes this manifest.

The Assignment is a dynamic exploration of literary and linguistic conventions, yet it configures a suspect sexual politics. Like the memoirs that Sander explores in Liberators, Dürrenmatt stages a rape that enacts the violation and confirmation of the novel’s victim. In a concluding chapter of The Assignment, F. reviews archival footage of a scene in which a beastly “creature” ravages and murders Sørensen. To describe the assailant, Dürrenmatt uses language similar to that of the war rape accounts that were circulating in the 1980s. Not unlike a soldier from the Bolshevik “hordes,” Dürrenmatt’s foreign rapist doesn’t speak, but just moans; his face is “greedy, fleshy, vacant.”⁴⁵ He abuses and then kills off his victim, but in the end the woman is sanctified, elevated by the crime. Sørensen’s dead body lies “among the holy men.”⁴⁶ Here the opposing categories of victim and perpetrator are reinscribed, as is the opposition between Self (German, Westerner) and Other. Scanlan’s premise about the suspension of such dichotomies doesn’t hold, especially when it comes down to gender in The Assignment. Although Dürrenmatt refuses to name and number the figures of terrorism, he nonetheless describes victims that are as categorically feminine as those of Delius’s literary imagination. The deconstructive operations of The Assignment are undermined by the novel’s own reinscription of traditional gender roles.

The conclusion of Windowseat at Mogadishu depends, to a great degree, on this same constitutive opposition. Moreover, it draws upon sexual difference to secure the national identity that is central to the narrative. The terrorist attack heightens Andrea’s sense of herself as both a woman and, importantly, a German. After security forces take command of the hijackers, Andrea flees from the plane and runs across the fields surrounding the Mogadishu airport. She wants to escape from the terrorists, but finds herself quickly surrounded by military personnel and photographers. To Andrea, these men look no different than Jassid, the head hijacker. Deflecting them, she runs away and asks herself if “now maybe all men look like him, like Jassid.”⁴⁷ Over the course of the novel, Delius attempts to portray Andrea as a modern, autonomous woman, but this reductive divide between masculine and feminine ontology places Windowseat at Mogadishu on the side of conservatism.

The feminine subjectivity that Delius constructs does not function to investigate gender roles. Instead it becomes a means through which to heighten the political tensions that run through the narrative. As the novel ends, Andrea steels herself against “Jassid and all the Jassidpeople.”⁴⁸ The precarious position of the woman hostage opens out onto a world of historical conflict. Seen “through Western eyes,” as Edward Said argued in an article in 1980, such a portrayal of helplessness makes this world only more “vulnerable to military aggression.”⁴⁹ Delius’s sexual binary mirrors another dyad, between Europe and its Others, especially Africa and Asia.

The characterization of the female hostage in both Windowseat at Mogadishu and The Assignment is a telling sign of the Tendenzwende. As if to ward off the danger of the RAF’s militant women, Delius and Dürrenmatt move their female protagonists back to the side of the victim and permit the reader to imagine a society newly fortified against the threat of militancy and terror, both foreign and domestic. In their conclusions, the novels present the two main tendencies of the postmodern that Habermas described in his lecture in 1980. Delius uses posttraumatic recovery in a troubled attempt to normalize the German past. Dürrenmatt, on the other hand, enjoins the reader in a literary venture set to decenter the grand narratives of modernity. There is one narrative that he leaves intact, however: male dominance. The conclusion of The Assignment presents an unambiguous stroke of misogyny. Describing the attack on Sørensen, the narrator notes that the woman “had wanted it all, her rape and her death.”⁵⁰ The last shot of Sørensen shows her face “twisted [in a] grimace of lust.”⁵¹ The pornographic tone of this scene—unusual for Dürrenmatt’s writing—works a reactionary effect. Subjugating and victimizing the woman, the scene also calls out for her protection. Although Dürrenmatt steers clear of the nationalistic paternalism evident in Windowseat at Mogadishu, he nonetheless shares Delius’s blindness to the prospect that the woman could deflect an attack (or instigate her own assault, as women on the Far Left did many times). The authors’ shared interest in the figure of the new German woman, evidenced in their depictions of Andrea and F., stops at the surface. Women’s truly radical potential—one of the lessons of the RAF’s emergence—doesn’t factor into either narrative.