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

Shortly After September 11, when Berlin curators announced plans for a blockbuster exhibition of art about the Red Army Faction, or RAF, alarms went off across Germany. Masterminded by women, the Rote Armee Fraktion had splintered off from the New Left in 1970, turning from protest to armed resistance. The group’s misguided take on Marxism and its flawed efforts to redress Nazi crimes devolved into a campaign of terror in the German Autumn of 1977. This season was darkened by hijackings and suicides, the proliferation of wanted posters, and the reinforcement of state surveillance. More than thirty years later, many asked whether the public was ready to revisit this explosive period. Memories of these events still trigger powerful reactions. Whereas the broadcast media first answered to the demand that the RAF “revolution” be televised, artists and writers from around the world have recoded this past episode and raised urgent questions about agency and art in a time of political violence. Many of these questions are inflected by gender.

The Red Army Faction rose up in the middle of the Cold War and fell soon After its end. Renouncing both parliamentary procedure and public protest, the RAF’s women and men wanted to advance social justice by any means necessary. They saw their interventions as acts of “emancipation and defense” against corrupt state powers.¹ At the start, the group was led by Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, and Andreas Baader. Two more “generations” of militants succeeded them, and many Germans—from both sides of the formerly divided country—assented to their ideals, if not their methods. Baader-Meinhof militancy veered into terrorism in the early 1970s. By 1998, when the group formally disbanded, they had killed thirty-four people.² This death toll is relatively low, but the Aftershocks of the RAF seem to have had an inordinately deep resonance. The German Autumn left its mark in public policy, law, and media, but it has had its longest half-life in the spheres of art, literature, and criticism.

In his study of revolutionary violence in the United States and West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, Jeremy Varon argues that the meaning of the German Autumn lies not in its “body count” or “roster of destruction,” but rather in how it functions “as a symptom of larger political, social, and historical tensions.”³ These lines of tension cut across sex and gender. Expanding the inquiry of Varon and other historians, the present book analyzes the literature and art that have appeared since the RAF’s rise and fall, seeking to measure the symbolic impact of leftist militancy and terror within contemporary culture. To this end, it examines the RAF’s claims for revolt and liberation, holding them up against shifts in socialist and feminist politics that have come about in the past several decades. Some of the writers and artists who emerged After 1977 offer insights about sexual equality that the RAF remained curiously blind to, despite the fact that its tactics were directed largely by women. Toward a critique of this cultural formation, I ask how literature and art might help us look beyond militancy to find new modes of resistance.

A rifle on a red star was the RAF’s iconic emblem. Its armed struggle, or bewaffneter Kampf, gave political praxis absolute priority, yet there was always a certain aesthetic or style to the organization.⁴ RAF communiqués craft ed a new subdialect of the German language; the group’s actions offered arresting photo opportunities and prime media feed. The RAF captured the attention of artists, writers, and critics, not only in Germany, but also abroad. Beginning with the militants’ ascendance in 1970 and continuing up to the present, central figures such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Guy Debord, and Slavoj Žižek have addressed the German armed struggle in their works. In a striking number of cases, these works focus on the women who led the RAF. Often at odds with militancy and terror, this art and writing seek out some lesson from the German Autumn, a surplus value that the RAF itself never realized.

As a series of events, the German Autumn occurred in September and October 1977. As a cultural moment, it has lasted far longer: we see elements of continuity that extend up into the present. More than a single episode, the German Autumn is a trope for Germany’s confrontation with political violence. The topics of militancy and terrorism and their rapport with culture must be understood within the larger historical framework of the twentieth century. The German Autumn took place in the shadow of the Holocaust, and much scholarship on the Far Left is concerned to analyze its relationship to fascism. As research moves forward, the picture of the past becomes clearer. It shows that many aesthetic responses to terrorism are attempts to come to terms with both the traumas of the German 1930s and 1940s and the limits on representation that were perceived to manifest as a result of the Holocaust.⁵ But when we concentrate only on the rhetorics of memory and forgetting, we can lose sight of the degree to which literature and art about the German Autumn are emphatically gendered. Again and again we see images of women in the work that responds to the RAF. Likewise, critical accounts of the armed struggle accentuate gender assignments and rely on genealogical conventions in their narration. We have come to know the RAF as a succession of three “generations,” we ask if members of the Far Left were “Hitler’s children,” and we call the German Autumn a “family history.”⁶ Artists and writers display a keen interest in the conflicts engendered within this domain.

Analyzing this formation, After the Red Army Faction draws from recent scholarship to open up a new line of investigation. Beyond the RAF’s militant aesthetic, beyond the historical repercussions of fascism, the cultural response to the German Autumn reveals aspects of gender and power that link German history to a number of contemporary antagonisms, both within Europe and outside it.

The first literary narratives and artworks that contemplated the Baader-Meinhof “phenomenon” were inflected by sexual politics. In the 1970s, when the RAF and other Far Left groups like the Revolutionary Cells and the June 2 Movement were parting ways from the more moderate New Left, German society was undergoing fundamental changes.⁷ New social movements came to the fore. The antinuclear Bürgerinitiativen and immigrant rights organizations established strong foundations for the Green Party to build upon, and German feminists broke new ground in public and private life. Men and women collaborated to realize this transformation, but the face of these changes was feminine. Marking a difference between Germany’s dark past and its possible futures, this fresh countenance promised, for many, a departure from the violence and authoritarianism that had characterized the nation for so long. It pointed to new techniques of power, new ways of making meaning.

With the postwar economic boom, German mass media flourished. Scores of brightly colored magazines and television programs widened the public arena and heightened the demand for news content. Titles like Stern, Bild, and Quick were available at every newsstand. In the 1970s circulation of Der Spiegel approached one million copies a week. With its self-proclaimed mission of intelligent, objective reporting, the newsmagazine positioned itself as a platform for a new society. Spiegel issues from the 1970s are filled with pictures of women—in the stories, in the advertisements, and especially on the covers. When RAF actions hit the headlines, the effect was sensational. Any photograph of the militants would draw a second look, but it was the women of the Far Left, especially Meinhof and Ensslin, whose images worked the deepest into the collective imagination.⁸ Mass media primed the public sphere for a convergence between two watchwords of German late modernity: the liberated woman and the terrorist. Writers and artists, in turn, have expressed their deep and lasting fascination with RAF women. “Say what you will,” the theorist Alain Badiou writes about Meinhof, she had “the passion of the illegal united with the ferocious.”⁹ But the most perceptive responses to the RAF don’t romanticize these figures or idealize their actions. Instead they put into relief the failures of leftist militancy in the 1970s and disclose the radical potential that RAF women actually forfeited.

The armed struggle was to be fought by the urban guerrilla, or Stadtguerilla, as Meinhof called it, borrowing the term from Latin American insurgents and pointedly leaving out any article—der, die, or das—that would designate a gender for the word in German.¹⁰ The RAF’s primary interests lay outside the scope of feminism, but Meinhof and the others knew that gender, too, could be used as a weapon. The first works of art and literature about the RAF accentuated the volatility of the urban guerrilla; they activated channels between gender and power that have yet to be fully examined.

More recently, artists and writers have tended to steer clear of the historical complexity of what has been called West Germany’s little cultural revolution. Many later renderings of the German Autumn play up the RAF’s “radical chic,” leveling crucial differences between aesthetics and politics, both within and surrounding the Far Left. Concomitant with these developments in art and literature, critics have begun to weigh the cultural significance of leftist militancy and terror in Germany. Some have linked the RAF’s direct actions to the impulses of the Situationists, surrealism, and Dada, venturing a parallel between terrorism and performance art. Others have contested these returns, warning against a mythology of militancy.

Debates about the aestheticization of politics were central to both critical theory and German self-understanding in the decades that immediately preceded and followed World War II.¹¹ Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht initiated this discussion; Theodor Adorno, Alexander Kluge, and Peter Weiss expanded upon their accounts of commitment, resistance, and reconciliation. How have these debates shift ed with the strikes of the Far Left in the 1970s and 1980s and, more recently, with the return of terrorism to European cities?

To answer this question, this book undertakes an analysis of postmilitant culture—the charged field of literature, art, and criticism that responds to militancy and political violence. In this case, the focus is on the response to the West German armed struggle. I am introducing the term “postmilitant” as a provisional tool. The prefix “post-” comes from the Latin for “After,” “behind,” or “beyond.” As I use it here, “post-” has two different meanings. In some cases it simply denotes the temporality of the writing and art that come After a militant intervention; in others it specifies a practice that seeks to redefine militancy and break its ties to terrorism. The strongest of the works examined here align with this latter tendency. This writing and art prompt us to think beyond the militant. They censure violence and reactivate the tensions between the aesthetic and the political, revealing the social forces that keep them engaged with each other.

The works I analyze are postmilitant, but they are not postpolitical. In fact some of them open channels for new forms of militancy, especially when it comes to feminism. With reference to earlier theories of postmodernism, these works might be considered examples of a resistant postmilitancy: instead of just reacting to militancy or repudiating it, this literature and art investigate its historical conditions of possibility. Thus, the language I’m introducing is not only provisional; it is also provocative, volatile. With this in mind I will aim to define my terms, first hypothetically in the book’s introduction, and then through application to the works I take up in each chapter. Tracing the cultural history of militancy and terrorism and envisioning the horizons of postmilitancy are prime topics for critical theory. This project refreshes the problem of politics and its aestheticization that Marxists first articulated.

Postmilitant culture has reached critical mass, extending across Europe and into the Americas. The French director Olivier Assayas stands out in this regard. His memoir Une adolescence dans l’après-Mai (first published in 2005 and later translated into English as A Post-May Adolescence in 2012) and his film Après-Mai (Something in the Air, 2012) both take stock of the melancholy that set in After the upheavals of 1968 in France.¹² Assayas’s internationally acclaimed television series and film Carlos (2010) dramatizes the life and times of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, or Carlos the Jackal, the polyglot Venezuelan militant who led the terrorist attack on OPEC leaders in Vienna in 1975. In the United States we have had American Pastoral (1997), Philip Roth’s novel that, in part, is a reconsideration of the Newark riots and the “sexual revolution,” and, more recently, Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (2013), a fictional account of an American woman who gets caught up in the late 1970s flash point between the New York art world and Italian operaismo.¹³ But the cultural productions that reflect upon the German armed struggle have attained an unparalleled degree of density. The RAF’s fallout has registered in novels, poetry, plays, dance pieces, music, exhibitions, films, and paintings.¹⁴ Joseph Beuys was one of the first to connect the Far Left to the contemporary art world. His artwork Dürer, ich führe persönlich Baader + Meinhof durch die Dokumenta V (Dürer, I will personally guide Baader + Meinhof through Documenta V) was on view at documenta in 1972. Since then, Gerhard Richter, Don DeLillo, and Fatih Akın have looked back at the margins of terror, drafting an outline of militancy that links the figures of RAF women to the contours of contemporary suicide bombers. Meanwhile, another wave of writers and artists has produced a hagiography of the German Autumn that risks collapsing politics into art, a danger that the Frankfurt School had already warned against when militancy began to ratchet up in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Baader-Meinhof group actually helped set the stage for this collapse, as they waged deadly maneuvers, disavowed German cultural and intellectual traditions, and severed ties with the new social movements. Left-oriented intellectuals, especially those working in the areas of critical theory and feminism, have developed sustained analyses of this predicament. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas were among the first to detect a lack of dialectical tension in the radicals’ agenda. In the 1960s, when RAF violence was still only a possibility, they thought back to the Third Reich’s corruption of cultural politics and called the new militancy “leftist fascism.”¹⁵ In October 1977, when RAF operations were reaching a fever pitch, Habermas published a prescient article that condemned both the theatrical terrorism of the Baader-Meinhof group and the state’s equally dramatic backlash.¹⁶ If the RAF was threatening to commandeer German society into a one-dimensional order of revolutionary violence, he argued, the best counterstrategy was not necessarily to heighten internal security, but rather to cultivate and differentiate distinct spheres of political and aesthetic autonomy.

Feminists worked out their own accounts of the Far Left. Given the prominence of women in the RAF—following Meinhof and Ensslin, dozens of young women joined their ranks—the West German women’s movement took an early and close interest in the group. So did government officials, the media, and, in due course, the academy. The German Federal Police estimated that women composed sixty percent of the RAF membership, a much-cited figure. Indeed, many of the wanted posters that were plastered about public spaces in the 1970s and 1980s showed more women’s photographs than men’s. But early reports of the “overrepresentation” of women in the armed struggle were countered by studies that have shown more complicated gender dynamics within the Far Left.¹⁷ Lebenslaufanalysen: Analysen zum Terrrorismus, a long-range investigation commissioned by the Ministry of the Interior, indicated that the majority of the militants were men.¹⁸ Recent studies suggest that the image of the “anarchist Amazon” or the “phallic woman” as the driving force of RAF terror was more a primal fantasy of magazine editors and television executives than it was something that social scientists could prove with numbers.¹⁹ However, criminologists demonstrated early on that women took on roles of greater leadership and risk within the Far Left, and historians have likewise established that Meinhof and Ensslin authored the definitive documents of the RAF’s first generation.

If in reality women made up only one-third of the Far Left, as Gerhard Schmidtchen maintained in Lebenslaufanalysen, we still have to ask why the image of the woman-guerrilla has loomed so large in the arts and media.²⁰ It wasn’t just the press that trained the public’s gaze onto women. The artists and writers who have made work on the RAF consistently position female figures at the forefront of the armed resistance. This possible “misrecognition” or “misprision” of German militancy tells us something that historical documents and statistics can’t fully convey. The protracted aesthetic response to the German Autumn has plotted out a terrain upon which gender relations continue to be negotiated.

In the 1970s links between RAF women and the second-wave feminist movement that was sweeping West Germany were held suspect. Some pointed out the perception of an equivalence within West German society—“Feminismus = Terrorismus”—and at least one federal official cautioned against a dangerous “excess of women’s emancipation.”²¹ This anxiety, noted in numerous accounts of the period, was met with a range of responses from women on the Left. Although a subset of them, notably the splinter group Rote Zora (Red Zora), recognized the legitimacy of political violence within a revolutionary program, most feminists publicly condemned it and strove to distinguish their agenda from the Far Left’s.²² They saw the armed struggle as an attempt to revalidate structures of domination and violent strategies that undermined the project of sexual equality.²³ In fact, looking back at the RAF years, several scholars have pointed out how, already by the mid-1970s, Far Left writings and actions had effectively disconnected from both the women’s movement and the class-based campaigns and other democratic initiatives that were transforming the Federal Republic.²⁴ When the RAF went underground and turned in upon itself, the militants lost any claim to actual social agency. Soon After, when authorities arrested the Baader-Meinhof leaders and incarcerated them at the Stammheim Prison in Stuttgart, a facility conceived and built to punish enemies of state, the RAF’s demise appeared to be all but inevitable.

Precisely at this time, sexual politics emerged as a major concern for the German Left. The year 1977 didn’t just mark the first breakdown of the armed struggle. It also ushered in a set of texts that enlivened feminist politics and critique: several journals devoted special issues to gender and sexuality, Klaus Theweleit’s classic Männerphantasien (Male Fantasies) appeared, and Alice Schwarzer launched the successful feminist magazine Emma. Lines of feminist inquiry that originated at this time thread through postmilitant culture, intertwining in key works of art and literature. As my readings demonstrate, the terror and counterterror of the German Autumn became a crucible within which to test out new sexual sensibilities. The RAF was not a women’s movement, but it is remarkable how many artists and writers have recast the group’s legacy within a feminist imaginary.

Such reflections on the RAF differ from the way that critical theorists have regarded leftist militancy. Whereas the Frankfurt School saw the Baader-Meinhof group as a symptom of the collapse between the political and the aesthetic, German feminists perceived in the RAF program a blindness to the social hierarchies that were enacted in everyday life. Doubts about the place of militancy within these three orders—the political, the aesthetic, and the social—remain unreconciled. The writing and art that respond to the German Autumn are poised to investigate this aporia, but some of the weaker and more reactionary examples of postmilitant culture repeat the RAF’s conceptual errors and elide historical contexts that are crucial to a leftist analysis. This tendency finds several mistaken expressions. They range widely from feature films that depict the RAF as the “rock band” that Germany never had, to fictions that construe the entire nation as victims of the Far Left, and on to serial routines in documentary replication. Indeed, much of the cultural response to the German Autumn seems to sustain the condition that Don DeLillo has described in which “the more clearly we see terror, the less impact we feel from art.”²⁵

To challenge this anti-aesthetic, the sharpest minds of postmilitancy aim to open up the space between art and politics in order to reveal the social dynamics that figure within, dynamics that are often emphatically gendered. Drawing from their incisive works, this study aims to amplify and analyze the dissonance between the RAF’s attack and its long decay in cultural productions. What comes forth is the difference between the reality of the German Autumn—both the political violence and the early representations of it—and the aesthetic treatment that has become such a dominant practice today.

Other interventions staged by the group fall outside of this scope. Ulrike Meinhof’s extensive reportage and essay writing, which were central to the RAF’s identity and agenda, are more accurately deemed militant, not terrorist. Likewise, the hunger strikes staged by incarcerated members while in solitary confinement at Stammheim. These moves signaled the group’s rigor and self-sacrifice. RAF members understood themselves to be militants, guerrillas, revolutionaries. It was the media and government that called them criminals, terrorists, and, on occasion, feminists.²⁸

Compared to terrorism, the meaning of militancy is perhaps more difficult to pin down. In this project I use the term to refer to individuals or groups engaged in acts of political resistance, both symbolic and armed. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “militancy” as “having a combative attitude in support of a cause.”²⁹ Documents of the United Nations and the Geneva Conventions distinguish militant from terrorist actions in several regards. For example, the 1987 UN General Assembly Resolution on Terrorism, which remains a standard reference for international policy, protects the militant defense of the right to “self-determination, freedom, and independence,” particularly “peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation or other forms of colonial domination.”³⁰ Despite their currency and salience, a literature review shows that the terms “militant” and “militancy” have received little analysis. The history of this concept invites our attention.³¹

The etymology of “militancy” and its German cognate (die) Militanz reaches back through the Middle French militaire and into its classical origins. From Latin we have militaris, meaning “of soldiers” or “of war,” and miles, which is “soldier.” Miles probably relates to the ancient Etruscan word meaning “one who marches in a troop,” and so is understood to derive from the Greek homilos—“crowd” or “throng”—and ultimately from the Sanskrit mela, “assembly.” In English and German the concept attains some frequency in ecclesiastical writings around the time of the Reformation, for example, in the expression ecclesia militans (church militant, streitende Kirche), which refers to the battles waged by Christians against earthly sins. Then, as the languages modernize, the term shifts into a more general understanding, connoting extremism, aggression, and revolutionary violence. By the late nineteenth century, militancy will be associated with nihilism and bolshevism. Sergei Nechaev’s Revolutionary Catechism (1869) becomes an influence, first for Lenin, and then later for the Black Panther Party.³² Just After the turn of the twentieth century, Emmeline Pankhurst will describe the British Women’s Social and Political Union as a “militant suffrage organization.”³³ In 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. will call the American civil rights movement a “new militancy” in his speech at the March on Washington.³⁴ Against reform and gradualism, activists like these were attuned to “the fierce urgency of Now.”³⁵

In the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), during the process of postwar reconstruction, the principle of militancy was invoked for a broader range of political ends. It was not only actors on the Far Left (die Linksradikalen) who saw the potential of militancy, but also liberals and conservatives who were working to establish and maintain stable institutions in the new state. Aware of the vulnerability of the Weimar system and fully committed against any recurrence of fascism, they framed the constitution of 1949 to uphold and protect the republic as a wehrhafte and streitbare Demokratie: in other words, a fortified, uncompromising, and militant democracy.³⁶ This legislation would be brought to crisis in the so-called leaden times that surrounded the German Autumn, when the nation found itself caught in the crossfire between two strains of militancy: on one side, defenders of the constitution; on the other, the urban guerrillas of the RAF. Within the Left as well, quarrels arose in the 1970s about where to draw the line between militancy and terrorism. Closer examination of these conflicts comes in the rest of this book, but for this introductory reflection on the language of militancy, I want to note its web of associations in contemporary German society.

This complex history makes the German encounter with militancy particularly interesting for the fields of critical theory and cultural studies. As the second part of this book will demonstrate, it also establishes a productive tension from which the question of postmilitancy can be launched. Militant, which occurs as both a noun and an adjective in German, as in English, is often underwritten by a sense of struggle for justice and equality. Common examples of its usage are militantes Auftreten (a militant stance or attitude) and militante Gruppen (militant groups). Together with its many synonyms—gewalttätig (violent), kampfbereit (ready to fight), and rabiat (raving, furious)—militant appears frequently in German literature and the popular press.

References to the concept of militancy function in various ways; depending on the speaker’s stance, they can connote solidarity or condemnation. Some of these references function reflexively, signifying the politics of the speaker who invokes it. For instance, an Israeli national who identifies him-or herself as “militantly pro-Palestinian” might refuse to do military service. Pejorative examples of the term are more common. When a misogynist calls feminists “militant,” this reflects his (or her) own disregard for women’s rights. Meanwhile it has become the practice of some news organizations to report on “militancy” rather than “terrorism” in order to present an objective account of an incident. Thus Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American targeted by the American CIA for his alleged involvement in al-Qaeda and killed in a drone strike in 2011, is described by the Reuters Agency as “a militant,” not a terrorist.³⁷ The Berlin-based tageszeitung, similarly, has called Hamas a militant organization.³⁸

Moving from the present back into the German literary tradition, we see the considerable extent to which writers have drawn upon the lexicon of militancy in their descriptions of women and feminine characters.³⁹ A line of filiation runs from Jordanes’s history of the Goths, De origine actibusque Getarum (circa 551 a. d.), to contemporary novels and films, and includes the stories of Judith beheading Holofernes, the spear-wielding Valkyrie Brünnhilde, and dramas by major authors like Schiller, Hebbel, and Brecht. Among the warrior women who animate the literary imagination, it is Heinrich von Kleist’s tragic heroine Penthesilea who most forcefully prefigures the representation of RAF women. She is the protagonist of his play from 1808 that dramatizes the battle of the sexes, a play that serves as an allegory of the conflict between the French Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Penthesilea, a daughter of Mars, drops down from the heavens “clad for war” (kampfgerüstet).⁴⁰ Kleist’s Amazon queen storms wildly across the landscape of the Iliad in pursuit of Achilles, who is both her enemy and her true love. She is an arsenal of passion and destruction. Penthesilea flies as if “shot straight from an iron bow”;⁴¹ when Odysseus addresses her, she retorts that he will have her “arrows for reply.”⁴² Historians have shown that Kleist’s writing was informed by his interest in militancy and a historical conscience that contrasted with the pacifism of Goethe and many of his other contemporaries.⁴³ Indeed, a subversive impulse courses through Penthesilea and keeps the narrative clear of any final resolution.

In an essay from 1987, the writer Christa Wolf aptly called Penthesilea the “militant feminine” heroine of this Romantic tragedy, but Kleist becomes our contemporary when we see the whole drama as an early example of postmilitant literature.⁴⁴ Like Michael Kohlhaas (1811), Kleist’s novella about an extreme quest for justice, Penthesilea continues to resound with its clanging, dissonant chords. The drama draws the reader into the force field of its characters’ actions and speech, letting us thrill at the Amazonian battle cry. But Kleist also marks out the deadlocks of Penthesilea’s fury, for he shows that the queen is actually denied real agency, since her only option is to fight a perpetual war. “What choice has she,” Odysseus asks in the first scene, “except to side with one against the other?”⁴⁵ In the last pages of the play, Penthesilea has vanquished Achilles, but she doesn’t know what to live for. Although her bow is “victorious,” when a princess asks her what she has done, she has “no answer” and stares out “as if upon an empty page.”⁴⁶ Penthesilea fuses her quiver of arrows into a single dagger, plunges it into her breast, and dies, leaving the others to contemplate her actions. Kleist envisions a stage of postmilitant inquiry: he moves us beyond Penthesilea’s own impasse by producing a radically open-ended work. Presenting us with a blank page, he gives the reader the choice—and the responsibility—to determine the play’s meaning. More than two hundred years later, its enigmas still inspire heated contests of interpretation. To this extent Penthesilea is an early paradigm of postmilitant literature: it enters the reader into the tempest of revolutionary violence, yet also points toward other modes of resistance, both political and aesthetic.

After the Red Army Faction uses critical theory to analyze postmilitant writing and art since the 1970s. Each of the works that I examine connects to the legacy of militancy that I have surveyed above, but the individual writers and artists take different directions from this point. As my readings will show, my thinking about postmilitancy operates in two dimensions, descriptively and normatively. Coverage of the RAF in the media and documentaries, for example, has relayed countless images of the German confrontation with militant and terrorist actions. Although some of the literature and art that I examine adds little beyond this—merely cataloguing the German Autumn as a series of events—other examples transform the residues of these events into something else: a site for assessment and reflection. As my analyses of these works unfold, I get traction from their insights. Through them I develop a concept of a critical postmilitancy that might travel further than the study of the German 1970s to find as-yet-untested means of resistance.

I begin by recounting the development of the armed struggle in Germany After World War II, especially the “red decade” that spanned from the public protests of the late 1960s to the events of 1977.⁴⁷ An overview of the RAF’s origins and a summary of the factors that precipitated the German Autumn relate the armed struggle to several historical transitions. They include the nation’s entry into a postwar democratic system, Germans’ attempts to grapple with their history of violence, and the emergence of the new social movements. The evolution of German radicalism was guided by a range of intersecting discourses, such as public policy, popular media, and intellectual life. Each of these is recalled here.

Most publications on the RAF narrate the German Autumn and its aftermath as part of the larger continuum of European postwar history. Yet the proliferation of art and literature about the RAF merits closer attention. This book posits postmilitancy as a crucial turn in late modernity, a subject unto itself. Theorizing the postmilitant moment produces a new model of inquiry, one that could be deployed in the analysis of other conflicts, from the geopolitical, to the ideological, to the sexual. What might the cultural remains of a radical intervention tell us about the historical situation from which it sprang? Postmilitancy has emerged in other times and places: in North America in response to the challenges of radical feminism and black nationalism; in Europe, where the campaigns of revolutionary and separatist movements like the Red Brigades and the Irish Republican Army have wound down; and today in parts of the world under the sway of militant Islam, where some scholars detect the first allusions to a turn toward diplomatic and even humanitarian concerns.⁴⁸ But the culture that has followed upon the German Autumn provides the most compelling test case.

The failures of political extremism offer lessons for contemporary theory and practice. Historians have laid the groundwork for this analysis, documenting the interaction between the RAF and state powers from the 1970s to the 1990s. Yet a deeper meaning of this interchange can be grasped by examining the literary and artistic response to the German Autumn. Chapter 1 begins this investigation by acknowledging the distinctively cultural momentum that obtained within the RAF itself.⁴⁹ Members of the group gave short shrift to any but the most patently political matters, but their interventions always carried an aestheticized trace. This militant aesthetic has been variously condensed, expanded, and reformulated by the art and literature that have followed in its wake. In a number of recent instances, we see attempts to recapture the RAF “look” or style that make scant effort to complicate or contest the group’s claims. Fixating on the surface images of the Far Left—especially shots of the erstwhile “guerrilla girl”—these productions are often emptied of historical content.

Chapter 1 explores how this rehashing of the German encounter with militancy and terror differs from the operations of two early and well-known works, the film Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn) from 1978 and Gerhard Richter’s cycle of paintings titled 18. Oktober 1977 (October 18, 1977) from 1988. Germany in Autumn was produced by a collective for national television soon After the hostage crisis in 1977. Using a range of experimental techniques, the film conveys many of the lived, material realities that surrounded the RAF. Its complex inquiry is at once historical and compositional. The public exhibition of October 18, 1977, ten years later, reawakened controversy about how the RAF and its victims should be remembered. The paintings are based on archival photographs of the militants’ central cadre, especially Meinhof and Ensslin. Despite the fact that Germany in Autumn and October 18, 1977 were produced by artists not usually associated with feminism, both attest to the sexual politics that operated within and around the Far Left. Whereas the Richter paintings heighten the ethical tensions of postmilitant culture, asking how to represent terror and trauma, the film project brings the historical contexts of the RAF—particularly the women’s movement of the 1970s—into sharp focus. Together, these two examples establish a framework through which to assess the range of postmilitant expressions, from the reactionary to the resistant.⁵⁰

This book discloses a jagged arc that spans four decades. The chapters move from the Cold War, to unification, and into the present coordinates of transnational terror. The examples I select don’t cover all of the responses to the RAF. Rather, they represent major currents in postmilitant writing and art. My analysis draws on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, revised and refined in the late 1960s, when the Far Left was just beginning to militarize, and then it teases out the strands that have shot through radical subculture and its bodies of reception, testing the resistance of “oppositional art” to the culture industry. These strands extend temporally and spatially, back to the French Revolution, across Germany, and into other parts of the world. Grasping them requires careful analysis, archival retrieval, and historicization.

If the German Far Left seemed to point the way toward a new mode of politically motivated violence, some of its roots reached down into two of the darkest sources of Europe’s twentieth century, National Socialism and Stalinism. The RAF’s first generation, born during and shortly After the Third Reich, aimed to confront the latent authoritarianism that they perceived in German society. In the FRG this generation’s adolescence seemed riven with contradiction. They learned of war crimes from tribunal reporting at Nuremburg, Frankfurt, and Jerusalem. They watched the first documentaries about German atrocities, but at the same time they saw many Nazi functionaries reinvent themselves as government officials and free-market entrepreneurs. One of the RAF’s initial impulses was to use direct action to accelerate and expedite the process of denazification. Through its vendetta against the surviving agents of Hitler’s regime, the group wanted to disrupt the continuities between Germany’s past and present—whatever the price. The retaliatory will that motivated the Far Left went into overdrive within a matter of months, however, and some of the founding actions of the armed struggle actually resumed the direction of Hitler’s plans. In the late 1960s, for example, leftist militants organized a series of attacks on Berlin’s small, surviving Jewish community. Similarly, Ulrike Meinhof commended the assassination of Israeli athletes by agents of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) at the Munich Olympics in 1972.⁵¹ Although some commentators have tried to interpret these facts as a challenge to Israeli expansionism and the hegemony of the Western nation-state, the pattern of racist violence that ran through the RAF and its milieu—only recently deciphered—demands closer scrutiny.

The RAF’s complex of investments in and aversions to fascism still needs elucidating, but the group’s encounter with state socialism—both its ideology and its implementation—is being discerned with greater accuracy. The militants’ sense of solidarity with communist regimes was more than philosophical; it was also pragmatic. Backed by the Soviet Union, East German intelligence supported cells of the West German Far Left, enabling contact with Middle Eastern representatives and then providing secret asylum to RAF members who wanted to “drop out” of the armed struggle. When the Soviet Bloc disintegrated, some of the group’s backing gave way, and it wasn’t long before the RAF disbanded.

Recently available documents from the Stasi archives have renewed interest in the militants who lived under assumed identities in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) during its final decade. After 1989 most of the RAF dropouts were arrested and sentenced for constitutional offenses. In the early 2000s, a series of appeals for their release created tension within the Left. Most commentary on these proceedings has been pitched to either condemn or celebrate RAF militants without reflecting on the larger implications of armed resistance or the state’s repressive means of counterterrorism. But well before the status of these prisoners achieved such primacy, a number of writers and artists were exploring the topics of revolutionary violence and social rehabilitation. Novels by Judith Kuckart (1990) and Christoph Hein (2005), as well as Volker Schlöndorff’s widely released films on militancy and its place in postwar Germany, compose intricate portraits of intelligence and deceit. Chapter 2 compares these fictional works with archival documentation of Far Left attacks. It rewinds the Baader-Meinhof narrative from the present, back to the group’s previous complicity with both state socialist regimes and global terrorist networks, and finally down to its criminal origins. A gulf opens up between the backstories of the RAF and the fictional accounts that followed them. Into this space drift the ghosts of Marx and Mao, which seem to tell us as much about the current nostalgia for socialist ideals as they do about the RAF’s destructive role in the Cold War.⁵²

Investigating the Far Left’s associations with fascist and totalitarian forces, we come upon a paradox. Just as scholars are fitting together crucial pieces of European political history, some writers and artists are misremembering the RAF’s relationship to the neo-avant-garde. One example of this occurs in the various attempts to align the RAF with the Situationist International (SI), the Paris-based group of artists and activists led by Guy Debord. Some have suggested that the RAF can only be comprehended as a consequence of Debord’s work, a premise that depoliticizes situationist strategy and invests the German armed struggle with a visual acuity it never would have laid claim to. The problem of how to distinguish vanguard politics from neo-avant-garde aesthetics, prefigured in Frankfurt School debates and revealed in the desire to retrospectively conjoin the RAF and the SI, serves as a touchstone for this study. Chapter 3 identifies the points of contact between the Situationists and the German Far Left, but it also discloses important differences between them, which have generally gone undiscussed. Recalling a range of sources, from Meinhof’s journalism on gender and consumer society to Debord’s writing on the commodity fetish, this section also reflects upon the status of women within the SI and the RAF.

Part 2 moves from the cultural history surrounding the RAF to the phases in postmilitant art and literature that succeeded the German Autumn. Chapter 4 examines Margarethe von Trotta’s film Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne and Juliane, 1981). Based on the lives of Gudrun Ensslin and her sister Christiane, it explores the strains between the personal and the political that ran through the Left in the late 1970s and 1980s. Von Trotta structures the narrative with carefully composed shots that direct the viewers’ gaze onto the thresholds between public spaces and internal enclosures. Laying bare the architectures of restraint, from bourgeois homes to stark prison compounds, she demonstrates an awareness of the built environment that parallels that of the Situationists. But the stories she tells sketch out a different perspective or “elevation” on radical politics.

Marianne and Juliane depicts the feminine face of the social forces that were changing West Germany in the 1970s. The two sisters who lead the story, one a feminist journalist and the other an urban guerrilla, traverse the divide between the public programs of the Frauenbewegung and the RAF’s underground machinations. Revealing the broader social frameworks that coexisted with the RAF, von Trotta explores issues of sexuality, labor, and militancy that were fiercely debated in the years of the RAF’s first generation. While extremists wrought havoc in West Germany, reformers in the new social movements advanced the process of democratization. They secured rights and freedoms for women, homosexuals, and immigrants, implemented policies to protect the environment, and organized nationwide protests against nuclear proliferation.

The social order in the FRG was changing in the 1970s and 1980s. To be certain, this was not as a direct result of the RAF or the incipient cultural response to it, but rather it was because the first generations of postwar citizens were coming of age and beginning to take real power within a democratic framework. In 1983, for example, the Green Party won seats in the Bundestag; it had been founded in the late 1970s by Petra Kelly, Rudi Dutschke, and other New Left leaders. Women like Kelly entered the public sphere with unprecedented strength and gained top positions in the government and national media. But the RAF, by this time, was fighting another battle. Larger questions of social justice fell to the wayside as the group imploded. With an increasingly myopic view, the RAF and its circle of advocates came to see themselves not just as targets of the postwar police state, but as victims of German history as a whole. They called Stammheim another Auschwitz, betraying the sort of ethical amnesia that would severely compromise the militants’ mission.

In the decade After the German Autumn, disquiet arose as to who were the agents of German violence and who were its real objects. Within a few years of the Stammheim deaths, West Germany entered a period of relatively conservative consolidation—the Tendenzwende that started in the late 1970s. The Left seemed largely exhausted, but the RAF threat persisted, as many members remained at large. Public intellectuals disputed whether any German could really be a “victim” of modern history, or whether the past could ever be “normalized.” Habermas had a prominent voice, especially in debates about fascism; his interrelated critique of postmodernism is a primary reference for this part of the book. In the 1980s and into the 1990s we see instances where the effects of postmodernism and postmilitancy overlapped and intersected. Taking into account selected novels and films, we can see a restructuring of national identity that happened over the course of this period. Through this analysis, we also gain a deeper understanding of the concept of postmilitancy, its potential as well as its problems.

To this end, chapter 5 compares novels about terrorism that two authors, Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Friedrich Christian Delius, wrote during the Tendenzwende. I use this comparison as a testing ground upon which to consider the terms “postmodern” and “postmilitant.” How might a postmilitant inquiry expand our analysis of the history and culture of postmodernity? How, in turn, are some of the main topics of discourse about the postmodern, such as identity, enlightenment, and emancipation, configured within the fields of postmilitant art and writing? Explicating the relations between these two concepts is an objective of this chapter.

In the 1980s the difficult matter of wartime rapes emerged as a contested site for the discussion of modernity and identity, both national and sexual. For the first time, Germans spoke openly about their victimization by “liberating” Soviet forces during the 1940s. It became possible to picture twentieth-century Germany under two sieges, first by the Russian Red Army, later by the Red Army Faction. Reading Der Auftrag (The Assignment, 1986) and Mogadischu Fensterplatz (Windowseat at Mogadishu, 1987) with regard to this precarious perspective, we observe that each novel “takes” a woman hostage and threatens her with both political and sexual violence. Delius’s and Dürrenmatt’s writing forms a unique optic through which to examine problems of embodiment and agency in continental thought at the time when the wave of postmodernism crested in Western Europe.

The best artistic medium for plotting the body in space and time is dance. In the 1980s, modern dance and performance art were at the cutting edge of German culture. Eventually the RAF story worked its way into these forms: Johann Kresnik’s choreography for the Tanztheaterstück titled Ulrike Meinhof provided a counterpoint to the postwar media surge. Playing off of familiar photographs of the German Far Left, Kresnik’s dancers reflect upon the articulation and disciplining of the militant body. Chapter 6 compares the representation of Meinhof’s body in Kresnik’s Tanztheaterstück to that of another other prominent leftist, Joschka Fischer, once a prominent member of the Extraparliamentary Opposition (Außerparlamentarische Opposition, or APO) and then later Germany’s Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor. Ulrike Meinhof was continuously restaged from 1987 until 2010. This long run allowed the choreography to mirror changes in the Left’s self-identity, especially during the years when the two Germanys became one. What put some leftists on the path to suicide and self-destruction while others rose to power? Juxtaposing images of Meinhof and Fischer, we see that feminism played an important role in this historical moment. Archival records from the mid-1970s show Fischer joining feminists in their censure of armed resistance and urging his comrades to relinquish the tools of violence. If Fischer’s political acumen has consolidated him into a model of restraint and “normalcy,” the fragmented images of Meinhof’s body reflect the “shattered,” discontinuous state of contemporary Germany that the historians Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer have described.

If we consider Ulrike Meinhof together with Marianne and Juliane, The Assignment, and Windowseat at Mogadishu, a cultural and political anatomy of the militant body comes into view. Each of these works reveals the important context that feminism provided for the rise—and reception—of the RAF. The gendered traits of this corpus betoken the complex interplay between art and theory, performance and terrorism. Sexual politics are disclosed as a mediating force in the cultural response to revolutionary violence. This observation enables a critique of the most provocative postmilitant event to date, the exhibition Zur Vorstellung des Terrors (Regarding Terror), held at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin in 2005. The Kunst-Werke curators set out to demonstrate how forcefully the media has shaped the RAF legacy. Indeed, many of the artworks they selected lay plain their indebtedness to news sources, especially stock photographs of Meinhof and Ensslin. Chapter 7 analyzes this mediatized condition, moving beyond the apparently mechanical reproduction of RAF imagery that typified Regarding Terror, both in the curatorial propositions of the show and in some of the individual works chosen for it. Drawing upon internal records from the Kunst-Werke, I argue that the social impulses that motivated key artists included in the exhibition were all but eclipsed by the curators’ decision to highlight the power of the media.