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

1. Karrin Hanshew identifies the Red Army Faction’s self-justification for violence as both “emancipation and defense” and “self-emancipation and self-defense.” See Karrin Hanshew, “Daring More Democracy? Internal Security and the Social Democratic Fight Against West German Terrorism,” Central European History 43 (2010): 117–47, at 117; and Karrin Hanshew, Terror and Democracy in West Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3.

2. The Red Army Faction is alleged to have killed the following individuals: Norbert Schmidt, Herbert Schoner, Hans Eckhard, Paul Bloomquist, Clyde Bronner, Ronald Woodward, Charles Peck, Andreas von Mirbach, Heinz Hillegaart, Fritz Sippel, Siegfried Buback, Wolfgang Göbel, Georg Wurster, Jürgen Ponto, Heinz Marcisz, Reinhold Brändle, Helmut Ulmer, Roland Pieler, Arie Kranenburg, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, Hans-Wilhelm Hansen, Dionysius de Jong, Johannes Goemans, Edith Kletzhändler, Ernst Zimmermann, Edward Pimental, Rebecca Bristol, Frank Scarton, Karl Heinz Beckurts, Eckhard Groppler, Gerold von Braunmühl, Alfred Herrhausen, Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, and Michael Newrzella. These names are listed in several RAF studies, including Butz Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum: Die Geschichte der RAF (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2007), 844–46.

3. Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the 60s and 70s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 198.

4. Commentary on the RAF has questioned the extent to which any terrorist group could be described as properly “political.” Oskar Negt, for example, denounced RAF actions in the May offensive of 1972 as “unpolitical.” Negt, “Sozialistische Politik und Terrorismus,” in Keine Demokratie ohne Sozialismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), 439. More recently Jürgen Habermas spoke of the attacks in 2001 on the United States and argued that terrorist actions do not envision or advance a political agenda. See Jürgen Habermas, “Fundamentalism and Terror,” in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 25–84.

5. There is an immense literature on the problem of aesthetic representation After the Holocaust, which centers on Adorno’s inquiry into the possibility of art “after Auschwitz.” For a study of both Adorno’s reflections on the topic and the many subsequent references to (and misquotations of) his formulation, see Michael Rothberg, “After Adorno: Culture in the Wake of Catastrophe,” New German Critique 72 (Autumn 1997): 45–81.

On trauma and the limits of representation After the rise and fall of the RAF, Thomas Elsaesser has interpreted the autumn of 1977 as a mistaken attempt to master the shocks of Germany’s fascist past. Thomas Elsaesser, Terror und Trauma: Zur Gewalt des Vergangenen in der BRD (Berlin: Kadmos, 2007). A central essay of Terror und Trauma, “Antigone Agonistes,” created a watershed in postmilitant criticism with its complex analysis of the RAF’s assault on German cities, media, and minds: Thomas Elsaesser, “Antigone Agonistes: Urban Guerrilla or Guerrilla Urbanism? The RAF, Germany in Autumn and Death Game,” in Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity, ed. Michael Sorkin and Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1998), 267–302.

6. One of the earliest English-language accounts of the German Far Left is Jillian Becker, Hitler’s Children (London: Michael Joseph, 1977). Subsequent works that use the concept of generations within the RAF include Andreas Musolff, “Hitler’s Children Revisited: West German Terrorism and the Problem of Coming to Terms with the Nazi Past,” Terrorism and Political Violence 23 (2011): 60–71; Alexander Straßner, Die dritte Generation der “Roten Armee Fraktion”: Entstehung, Struktur, Funktionslogik und Zerfall einer terroristischen Organisation (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2003); Hans-Jürgen Wirth, Hitlers Enkel oder Kinder der Demokratie? Die 68er, die RAF und die Fischer-Debatte (Giessen: Psychosozial Verlag, 2001); and Tobias Wunschik, Baader-Meinhofs Kinder: Die zweite Generation der RAF (Opladen: Westdeustcher Verlag, 1997).

7. In studies of West German society from the 1970s to the 1990s, the term “Far Left” (die Links radikalen) is distinguished from “the Left” (die Linke). In chapter 1, I discuss in greater detail the different forms of leftist politics in postwar Germany.

8. Jamie Trnka surveys mass media representations of women and terrorist violence in West Germany in Trnka, “Frauen, die unzeitgemäß schreiben: Bekenntnisse, Geschichte(n) und die Politik der Terrorismusliteratur,” in Nachbilder der RAF, ed. Inge Stephan and Alexandra Tacke (Vienna: Böhlau, 2008), 216–31. Patricia Melzer examines early feminist responses to the representation of women in the RAF and the June 2 Movement, in West German mass media sources, especially selected issues of Der Spiegel that were published in 1977. Patricia Melzer, “‘Death in the Shape of a Young Girl’: Feminist Responses to Media Representations of Women Terrorists during the ‘German Autumn’ of 1977,” International Journal of Politics 11, no. 1 (March 2009): 35–62. Clare Bielby compares the “feminization” of terrorism in media coverage of the German Autumn both in the late 1970s and at the thirty-year anniversary, which was a prominent news item in print and broadcast reporting in 2007. See Clare Bielby, “Remembering the Red Army Faction,” Memory Studies 3, no. 2 (2010): 137–50.

9. Alain Badiou, Le Siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 179.

10. One example of Meinhof’s usage of the term is: “Stadtguerilla zielt darauf, den staatlichen Herrschaftsapparat an einzelnen Punkten zu destruieren, stellenweise außer Kraft zu setzen, den Mythos von der Allgegenwart des Systems und seiner Unverletzbarkeit zu zerstören.” Ulrike Meinhof, “Das Konzept Stadtguerilla,” in texte: der RAF (Malmö: Bo Cavefors, 1977), 357. The term also appears frequently in several of the RAF’s writings that have been collected and published as Rote Armee Fraktion: Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF, ed. Martin Hoffman (Berlin: ID-Verlag, 1997).

11. A key text on the aestheticization of politics, death, and violence is Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 217–52. English translations of the broader debates on this topic are collected in Perry Anderson, ed., Aesthetics and Politics (London: New Left Books, 1977); and Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Urizen Books, 1982).

12. Parts of Assayas’s memoir describe the influence that Guy Debord and the Situationist International had on him. Olivier Assayas, Une adolescence dans l’ après-Mai (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2005). Translated by Adrian Martin and Rachel Zerner as A Post-May Adolescence: Letter to Alice Debord (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

13. Philip Roth, American Pastoral (New York: Vintage, 1998); Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (New York: Scribner, 2013).

14. In the past few years, several overviews of this cultural formation have appeared. One recent example is the special issue of Seminar, which contains German and English contributions: Karin Bauer, ed., “Questioning the RAF: The Politics of Culture,” special issue, Seminar 47, no. 1 (February 2011). Other collections of essays on the RAF and culture include: Norman Ächtler and Carsten Gansel, eds., Ikonographie des Terrors? Formen ästhetischer Erinnerung an den Terrorismus in der Bundesrepublik, 1978–2008 (Heidelberg: Winter, 2010); Berendse and Cornils, Baader-Meinhof Returns; and Matteo Galli and Heinz-Peter Preusser, eds., Mythos Terrorismus: Vom Deutschen Herbst zum 11. September (Heidelberg: Winter, 2006).

There are several studies of the representation of terrorism in German literature, including the comprehensive study by Julian Preece, Baader-Meinhof and the Novel: Narratives of the Nation/Fantasies of the Revolution, 1970–2010 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); the short and dry book by Thomas Hecken, Avantgarde und Terrorismus: Rhetorik der Intensität und Programme der Revolte von den Futuristen bis zur RAF (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2006); and Thomas Hoeps, Arbeit am Widerspruch: “Terrorismus” in deutschen Romanen und Erzählungen, 1837–1992 (Dresden: Thelem Universitätsverlag, 2001). Gerrit-Jan Berendse, Schreiben im Terrordrom: Gewaltcodierung, kulturelle Erinnerung und das Bedingungsverhältnis zwischen Literatur und RAF-Terrorismus (Berlin: Edition Text + Kritik, 2005) is the most complete treatment to date of the relationship between RAF violence specifically and literary culture.

15. Jürgen Habermas variously explicates and qualifies the concept of “leftist fascism” in “Kongreß ‘Hochschule und Demokratie’” and “Diskussion über die ‘Tätigkeit der Regelverletzung’ und ‘linken Faschismus’ (9 June 1967),” in Jürgen Habermas, Kleine politische Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981), 205–16, 241, 245; and Habermas, “‘Etikett des linken Faschismus’ vom 13. Mai 1968,” in APO: Die außerparlamentarische Opposition in Quellen und Dokumenten, 1960–70, ed. Karl A. Otto (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1987), 249–58. For an overview of the discussion of fascism and the New Left, see Iring Fetscher and Günter Rohrmoser, eds., “Der Faschismus-Vorwurf,” in Ideologien und Strategien: Analysen zum Terrorismus 1 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1981), 185–203.

16. Jürgen Habermas, “Die Bühne des Terrors: Ein Brief an Kurt Sontheimer,” Merkur 31, no. 353 (October 1977): 944–59.

17. One of the first studies to observe the “overrepresentation” of women in the German Far Left is by the American military analysts Charles A. Russell and Bowman H. Miller. They noted that women planned and executed most of the actions perpetrated by the RAF and other groups in the armed struggle. See Charles A. Russell and Bowman H. Miller, “Profile of a Terrorist,” Terrorism 1, no. 1 (1977): 17–34, esp. 21–23. In the late 1970s and early 1980s a number of social scientists and criminologists began to study the central role of women in West Germany’s homegrown terrorism. Examples of the scholarship include Marlis Dürkop, “Frauen als Terroristinnen: Zur Besinnung auf das soziologische Paradigma,” Kriminologisches Journal 10 (1978): 264–80; Susanne von Paczensky, ed., Frauen und Terror: Versuche, die Beteiligung von Frauen an Gewalttaten zu erklären (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1978); Ilse Korte-Pucklitsch, “Warum werden Frauen zu Terroristen? Versuch einer Analyse,” Vorgänge: Zeitschrift für Gesellschaft spolitik 4/5 (1979): 121–28; and Werner Jubelius, “Frauen und Terror: Erklärungen, Scheinerklärungen, Diffamierungen,” Kriminalistik 35 (1981): 247–55. A more recent investigation of women’s participation in the Far Left is Gisela Diewald-Kerkmann, “Bewaffnete Frauen im Untergrund: Zum Anteil von Frauen in der RAF und der Bewegung 2. Juni,” in Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus, ed. Wolfgang Kraushaar (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006), 657–75.

18. Analysen zum Terrorismus is a series of studies on terrorism and security, with a rotating editorship. Here I reference an article in the second volume: Lieselotte Süllwold, “Stationen in der Entwicklung von Terroristen: Psychologische Aspekte biographischer Daten,” in Lebenslaufanalysen: Analysen zum Terrorismus 2, ed. Herbert Jäger, Gerhard Schmidtchen, and Lieselotte Süllwold (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1981), 106.

19. For example, Alan Rosenfeld, “‘Anarchist Amazons’: The Gendering of Radicalism in 1970s West Germany,” Contemporary European History 19, no. 4 (2010): 351–74, at 352; and Dorothea Hauser, Baader und Herold: Beschreibung eines Kampfes (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2007), 16.

20. Gerhard Schmidtchen, “Terroristische Karrieren: Soziologische Analyse anhand von Fahndungsunterlagen und Prozessakten,” in Jäger, Schmidtchen, and Süllwold, Lebenslaufanalysen: Analysen zum Terrorismus 2, 23; cited in Rosenfeld, “Anarchist Amazons,” 357.

21. Christina Thürmer-Rohr describes the public perception of the equivalence between feminism and terrorism in “Erfahrungen mit Gewalt,” in Paczensky, Frauen und Terror, 87–97, at 95. The remark about terrorism being the product of an “Exzeß der Befreiung der Frau” is attributed to Günther Nollert, President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. It was first quoted in Dick Schubert, “Die Frauen waren die Seele der Gruppe,” Christ und Welt (June 23, 1972), and was cited in Der Spiegel 33 (1977): 23. For a reflection on Nollau’s concerns, see Gisela Diewald-Kerkmann, Frauen, Terrorismus und Justiz: Prozesse gegen weibliche Mitglieder der RAF und der Bewegung 2. Juni (Dusseldorf: Droste, 2009), 138–39.

22. Rote Zora was one of the smallest subfactions of the left wing in West Germany. Active from 1977 to 1995, the all-female group grew out of (and effectively broke off from) the Revolutionären Zellen (Revolutionary Cells), mentioned in the introduction. Rote Zora was allegedly responsible for a series of nonlethal bomb attacks on German institutions and concerns, including the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, several “sex shops” in Cologne, and the Institute for Human Genetics at the University of Muenster. Communiqués released by the group indicate that its actions were aimed to destroy property, but never harm human or animal subjects. Rote Zora affirmed its links to the women’s movement and described its agenda as a militant and feminist attack on patriarchy, particularly on the restriction of reproductive rights, sex trafficking, and genetic engineering (which was perceived as a threat to women). Two useful publications that document the group’s ideology and actions are “Interview mit der Roten Zora,” Emma (June 1984): 598–605; and Die Früchte des Zorns: Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der Revolutionären Zellen und der Roten Zora (Berlin: Edition IDArchiv, 1993), esp. 594–633. The filmmaker Olivier Ressler produced a short documentary film about Rote Zora (of the same title, in 2000), but unlike the RAF, the group has received relatively little critical attention, whether from artists or scholars. For an example of a more general statement of feminist support for the armed struggle, see the article “Frauen und Gewalt oder Gewalt und Frauen,” Dokumentation zur Situation in der BRD und zum Verhältnis BRD-Schweiz (Berlin: Clip-Archiv, Freie Universität, 1977), 31–34, cited in Melzer, “Death in the Shape of a Young Girl,” 48–49.

23. The feminist critiques of the armed struggle are discussed in Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 229, 236–37.

24. See, for example, Negt, “Sozialistische Politik und Terrorismus,” 434–45. For an analysis of the multiple divisions between the RAF and other leftist initiatives, see Varon, Bringing the War Home, 212–14, 228–29.

25. Don DeLillo, Mao II (New York: Penguin, 1991), 157.

26. As the political scientist Audrey Kurth Cronin has argued, the definition of “terrorism” resists consensus because of its subjective character. Terrorism is “intended to be a matter of perception and is thus seen differently by different observers and at different points in history.” Audrey Kurth Cronin, How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 6–7. Recent articles that analyze the problem of defining “terrorism” include Eva Herschinger, “A Battlefield of Meanings: The Struggle for an Identity in the UN Debates on a Definition of International Terrorism,” Terrorism and Political Violence 25, no. 2 (2013): 183–201; and James Khalil, “Know Your Enemy: On the Futility of Distinguishing Between Terrorists and Insurgents,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 36, no. 5 (2013): 419–30. A foundational reflection on the use and abuse of “terrorism studies” is Marie Breen Smyth et al., “Critical Terrorism Studies: An Introduction,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 1, no. 1 (2008): 1–4.

In the German sphere, Peter Waldmann’s definition of “terrorism” from 1998 might be seen as a response to the German Autumn of 1977; he defines terrorist acts as “planmäßig vorbereitete, schockierende Gewaltanschläge gegen eine politische Ordnung aus dem Untergrund. Sie sollen allgemeine Unsicherheit und Schrecken, daneben aber auch Sympathie und Unterstützungsbereitschaft erzeugen.” Peter Waldmann, Terrorismus: Provokation der Macht (Munich: Murrman, 1998), 10.

27. The political scientist Edward Newman expands this concept of terrorism. He argues that terrorist acts may also be perpetrated without regard for—or without explicitly targeting—civilians. His observation that terrorism can also convey an intention “to exert influence and change upon third parties” is thus germane to analyses of the RAF and its cooperation with other armed resistance movements. See Edward Newman, “Weak States, State Failure, and Terrorism,” Terrorism and Political Violence 19, no. 4 (December 2007): 463–88, at 472.

28. How militant and terrorist organizations see themselves often differs from the way that scholars see them. Organizations such as the RAF have been categorized according to a number of factors, including motives, targets, demands, organizational structure, operative methods, and arenas of action. Gregory D. Miller presents a four-part model to describe terrorism that includes nationalseparatist, revolutionary, reactionary, and religious terrorism. As revolutionary terrorists, the RAF sought to use violence “as a catalyst for societal change.” Miller observes that most terrorist organizations that promoted a Marxist-Leninist ideology (the RAF, the Italian Red Brigades, and the Japanese Red Army, for example) have declined since the Cold War. Some Far Left groups continue in this campaign today, particularly in Latin America and Asia, such as the Shining Path in Peru, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and the Revolutionary Left (Devrimci Sol) in Turkey. These organizations want “dramatic change,” not only in particular governments, but “in society itself.” Gregory D. Miller, “Confronting Terrorisms: Group Motivation and Successful State Policies,” Terrorism and Political Violence 19, no. 3 (2007): 331–50, at 335.

For wider discussions of the problems of distinguishing terrorism, militancy, and political violence, see Andrew H. Kydd and Barbara F. Walter, “The Strategies of Terrorism,” International Security 31 (Summer 2006): 49–79; Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 1–41; Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 21; and Jutta Bakonyi, “Terrorismus, Krieg und andere Gewaltphänomene der Moderne,” in Terrorismus und Krieg: Bedeutung und Konsequenzen des 11. September, Arbeitspapier Nr. 4/2001 Forschungsstelle Kriege, Rüstung und Entwicklung, ed. Jutta Bakonyi (Hamburg: Universität Hamburg, IPW 2001), 5–20.

29. “militant, adj. and n.” OED Online. March 2014, www.oed.com.central.ezproxy.cuny.edu:2048/view/Entry/118418.

30. United Nations, Resolution on Terrorism: A/RES/42/159, 7 December 1987 (New York: United Nations, 1987).

31. Two models for this enterprise are Leonard Weinberg, “The Challenges of Conceptualizing Terrorism,” Terrorism and Political Violence 16, no. 4 (2004): 777–94; and Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

32. Sergei Nechaev, The Revolutionary Catechism, www.spunk.org/library/places/russia/sp000116.txt. Although the pamphlet doesn’t use the terms “militancy” or “terror,” Nechaev does give a portrait of a “revolutionary,” who “has no attachments, … no name”; he is “prepared destroy himself” and obliterate everything that stands in his way.

33. Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story (New York: Source Book Press, 1970), 37. Ewa Płonowska Ziarek has recently demonstrated that Pankhurst made compelling claims about the term “militancy,” as she argued before a jury that it need not be interpreted to mean “only violence” and that “‘militancy’ itself,” when closely considered, “becomes militant, indeterminate, giving rise to new conflicting interpretations.” Cited in Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of M odernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 33–34.

34. Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World, ed. James M. Washington (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 103. Steve D’Arcy discusses King’s use of the term “militancy” within a broader political and philosophical reflection on the concept in his forthcoming study “‘Languages of the Unheard’: Why Militant Protest Is Good for Democracy,” working paper.

35. King Jr., “1963 speech,” in I Have a Dream, 103. Since the 1960s critics in the Anglo-American and French spheres have continued to draw on a similar resource of significance in their writings. See, for example, Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” October 51 (Winter 1989): 3–18; Alain Badiou, Philosophy for Militants [La relation énigmatique entre philosophie et politique], trans. Bruno Bosteels (New York: Verso, 2012); Faisal Devji, Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

36. As Hanshew explains, early debates on the objectives of militant democracy in the postwar period were elaborated in works such as Karl Lowenstein, “Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights, I and II,” American Political Science Review 31 (June 1937): 417–32 and 638–58; and Karl Mannheim, Diagnosis of Our Time: Wartime Essays of a Sociologist (London: Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1943). See the discussion in Hanshew, Terror and Democracy, 34–35. Alexander S. Kirschner considers Germany’s wehrhafte Demokratie in his study of political violence. See Alexander S. Kirschner, A Theory of Militant Democracy: The Ethics of Combatting Political Extremism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). For a foundational analysis of the concept of militant democracy, see Markus Thiel, ed., Wehrhafte Demokratie: Beiträge über die Regelungen zum Schutz der freiheitlichen demokratischen Grundordnung (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003).

37. Mark Hosenball, “Secret Panel Can Put Americans on Kill List,” uk.reuters.com, October 5, 2011, www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/05/us-cia-killlist-idUSTRE79475C20111005.

38. Suzanne Knaul, “Anerkennung von Palästina durch die UN: Fatah und Hamas nähern sich an,” taz.de, November 30, 2012, www.taz.de/!106633/.

39. Examples of this scholarship include Sarah Colvin and Helen Watanabe-O’Kelley, Women and Death 2: Warlike Women in the German Literary and Cultural Imagination since 1500 (Rochester: Camden House, 2009); Sonja Hilzinger, Gewalt und Gerechtigkeit: Auf den Schlachthöfen der Geschichte: Jeanne d’Arc und ihre modernen Gefährtinnen (Berlin: Matthes und Seitz, 2012); and Diana Reese, Reproducing Enlightenment: Paradoxes in the Life of the Body Politic: Literature and Philosophy around 1800 (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), esp. 123–63.

40. Heinrich von Kleist, Penthesilea: A Tragic Drama, trans. Joel Agee (New York: Harper Collins, 1998), 6. von Kleist, Penthesilea: Ein Trauerspiel, in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Roland Reuß and Peter Staengle (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2010), 1:376.

41. von Kleist, Penthesilea: A Tragic Drama, 20.

43. Kleist draft ed sections of Penthesilea from the cell of a French prison, where he was held as a suspect for espionage. While a youth in Brandenburg, he kept a close watch of Robespierre and the Jacobins to the west. Later, he took an interest in guerrilla fighters who were caught in the crossfire between Prussian and French forces and sympathized with their actions of grassroots resistance. See Jost Hermand, “Kleist’s Penthesilea: Battleground of Gendered Discourses,” in A Companion to the Works of Heinrich von Kleist, ed. Bernd Fischer (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 2003), 55; as well as Peter Horn, Positionen I: Heinrich von Kleist (Cape Town: Cape Town University Press, 1982), 105.

44. Christa Wolf, “Laudatio auf Thomas Brasch aus Anlaß der Verleihung des Kleist-Preises,” in Christa Wolf: Ein Arbeitsbuch: Studien, Dokumente, Bibliographie, ed. Angela Drescher (Berlin: Aufb au, 1989), 437–44, at 443.

45. von Kleist, Penthesilea: A Tragic Drama, trans. Agee, 6. The translator Joel Agee emphasizes the lack of choice in his translation of “Sie muß zu Einer der Parthein sich schlagen” (Kleist, Penthesilea: Ein Trauerspiel, 376).

46. von Kleist, Penthesilea: A Tragic Drama, 129.

47. The years from 1967 to 1977 are referred to as “the red decade” in Gerd Koenen, Das rote Jahrzent: Unsere kleine deutsche Kulturrevolution (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2001). Koenen’s book is one of several that have established the subfield of “RAF Studies” in contemporary German history. One of the first and best-known works on the RAF is Stefan Aust’s investigative account Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex, which appeared in 1985, but was expanded, revised, annotated, and translated for ever larger print runs in 1987, 1997, and 2008. See Stefan Aust, Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex (Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe, 1997); and the English translation, Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon, trans. Anthea Bell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). More recent historical overviews of the RAF and leftist terrorism in Germany include Klaus Weinhauer, Jörg Requate, and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, Terrorismus in der Bundesrepublik: Medien, Staat und Subkultur in den 1970er Jahren (Frankfurt: Campus, 2006); and the more popularly oriented book by Willi Winkler, Die Geschichte der RAF (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2007).

48. Postmilitant perspectives have also emerged in Italy, Ireland, and Spain, as well as Turkey, places where Far Left and separatist movements have begun to wind down. Examples of scholarship on this tendency include Sotera Fornaro, L’ora di Antigone dal nazismo algi “anni di piombo” (Tübingen: Narr, 2012); Michael Storey, Representing the Troubles in Irish Short Fiction (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 2004); and Josetxo Beriain, “Los ídolos de la tribu en el nacionalismo vasco,” in Relatos de nación: La construcción de las identidades nacionales en el mundo hispánico, ed. Francisco Colom-González (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2005), 477–505.

As to the question of postmilitant Islam, I’m thinking of Faisal Devji’s work, mentioned above, which assesses al-Qaeda’s potential to shift from direct actions toward humanitarian concerns. For a reflection on “amilitancy,” a concept that might be productively compared to postmilitancy, see Nicholas Thoburn, “What Is a Militant?,” in Deleuze and Politics, ed. Ian Buchanan and Nicholas Thoburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 109–20, at 114. Moving from scholarship into popular culture, a postmilitant perspective can be discerned in the curating of Gerçeklik Terörü/Reality Terror at Depo, a space for contemporary culture, in Istanbul in 2012.

49. Gerrit-Jan Berendse has also studied the dynamics of art and culture within the RAF. He describes the relationship between aesthetics and the terrorism of the RAF as “reciprocal.” The extant art and literature on the RAF find a complement in the various ways that the RAF itself “instrumentalized” aesthetic means as part of their political interventions. Gerrit-Jan Berendse, “Die Wunde RAF: Zur Reziprozität von Fiktion und Terrorismus im Spiegel der neuesten Sekundärliteratur,” Seminar 47, no. 1 (February 2011): 10–26, at 11.

50. Hal Foster introduces the concepts of reactionary postmodernism and its resistant forms in Foster, “Introduction,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: New Press, 2002), xii–xiii.

51. Meinhof’s statement, directed largely against Oskar Negt, was reprinted in “den antiimperialistischen kampf führen! die rote armee aufb auen! die aktion des schwarzen september in münchen,” in texte: der RAF, 411–47. A useful historical study on the events of 1972 is Kay Schiller and Christopher Young, The 1972 Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

52. A similar argument is made by Klaus Theweleit, Ghosts: Drei leicht inkorrekte Vorträge (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1998). For reflections on postcommunist nostalgia and melancholy, see Claude Lefort, La Complication: Retour sur le communisme (Paris: Fayard, 1999); Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001); and Charity Scribner, Requiem for Communism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003).

53. Theweleit uses the term “Gespenst” in Ghosts. Other examples of this tendency include Gerrit-Jan Berendse, “Das Gespenst von Stammheim: Notizen zur Gewalt und Literatur um die Jahrtausendwende,” in Zur deutschsprachigen Literatur der neunziger Jahre: Rückblicke, Überblicke und Ausblicke, ed. Christiane Cosentino, Wolfgang Ertl, and Wolfgang Müller (Frankfurt: Lang, 2002); and Gerhard Wisnewski, Wolfgang Landgraeber, and Ekkehard Sieker, eds., Das RAF-Phantom: Wozu Politik und Wirtschaft Terroristen brauchen (Munich: Droemer Knaur, 1997). Sabine Eckmann uses the terms “phantom” and “specter” in her introductory essay “Historicizing Postwar German Art,” in Barron and Eckmann, Art of Two Germanys, 34–44, at 43, 44.

1. Note my usage: “a RAF member,” not “an RAF member.” In spoken German the Red Army Faction is conventionally referred to as die RAF (pronounced “raff”).

2. In Germany the political Left has encompassed an array of progressive, socialist, and anarchist movements, organizations, and parties. In the Cold War years, West German leftists were central to both the government of the Bundestag and the Extraparliamentary Opposition. The spectrum of leftist politics in the Federal Republic has ranged from center left (for example, the Social Democratic Party), to the New Left, to the extremism of the RAF and other Far Left groups. The German Democratic Republic, in contradistinction, recognized only one political organization, the Socialist Unity Party.

3. Klaus Theweleit, Ghosts: Drei leicht inkorrekte Vorträge (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1998).

4. Investigations into the RAF’s relationship with both pro-Palestinian militants and Fatah have motivated research in European political history. Examples include Rossana Lucchesi, RAF und Rote Brigaden: Deutschland und Italien von 1970 bis 1985 (Berlin: Frank und Timme, 2013); and Stefan Malthaner, “Internationaler Terrorismus und seine Bezugsgruppen,” in Determinanten des Terrorismus, ed. Peter Waldmann (Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2005), 119–31. For a recent analysis of “German-born” networks of militant jihadism, see Guido Steinberg, German Jihad: On the Internationalization of Islamist Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). See also founding PLO statements by George Habash in Rote Armee Fraktion: Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF, ed. Martin Hoffman (Berlin: ID-Verlag, 1997), 70–72; and statements by Wadi Haddad in Oliver Schröm, Im Schatten des Schakals: Carlos und die Wegbereiter des internationalen Terrorismus (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2002), 17.

5. Most investigations of the deaths of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe indicate that they committed suicide, but no conclusive proof has been produced. A fourth RAF member, Irmgard Möller, is also believed to have participated in the alleged suicide pact. Prison guards found her alone in her cell, suffering from multiple stab wounds. Möller recovered from the injuries and remained incarcerated at Stammheim until her release in 1995. In Germany many published sources investigate the conditions at Stammheim and the events of October 18, 1977. A recent example is Helge Lehmann, Die Todesnacht in Stammheim: Eine Untersuchung (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 2012).

6. Talal Asad touches briefly upon the RAF in his study of suicide terrorism: Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Although a thorough analysis of the role of suicide terrorism in the RAF agenda lies outside the scope of this book, starting points for an investigation of this matter—especially of the feminist questions raised by Meinhof’s and Ensslin’s suicides—would include Asad’s book as well as Cindy Ness, ed., Female Terrorism and Militancy: Agency, Utility, and Organization (New York: Routledge, 2008).

7. Many on the West German Right—and some in the center as well—commended the government’s harsh response to the German Autumn, calling it a success for the militant democracy (streitbare Demokratie) of the young Federal Republic. Against this, Sven Reichardt has described the state’s reaction to the threat of leftist terrorism as “excessive.” As he argues in the German History forum on 1977, the 1970s witnessed “a massive increase in state security personnel.” The expansion and centralization of the rights of the police and the Verfassungsschutz, Reichardt maintains, worked to undermine the principles of a liberal constitutional state. See Belinda Davis, Donatella della Porta, Geoff Eley, Karrin Hanshew, and Sven Reichard, “Forum: 1977,” German History 25, no. 3 (2007): 401–21, at 405.

8. Herfried Münkler, Neuen Kriege (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2002), 48–57. Giorgio Agamben’s recent reflections on Carl Schmitt’s theorization of dictatorships align closely with Münkler’s arguments about the RAF and German state power. See Giorgio Agamben, States of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

9. For a survey of these tendencies, see Donatella della Porta and Mario Diani, Social Movements: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), esp. chap. 3, “The Symbolic Dimension of Collective Action.”

10. Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey’s Die 68er Bewegung compares the cultural histories of the 1968 generation in Europe and the United States, as does her volume coedited with Freia Anders. Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, Die 68er Bewegung: Deutschland—Westeuropa, USA (Munich: Beck, 2003); Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey and Freia Anders, eds., Herausforderungen des staatlichen Gewaltmonopols: Recht und politisch motivierte Gewalt am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt: Campus, 2006).

11. As Jeremy Varon notes, in May 1966 more than two thousand activists ratified a statement describing the “national and social liberation struggle of the South Vietnamese people” as an act of “political necessity,” as well as a model for other anticapitalist movements. Karl A. Otto, ed., “Schlußerklärung des Frankfurter SDS-Kongresses ‘Vietnam: Analyse eines Exemples,’” in APO: Die außerparlamentarische Opposition in Quellen und Dokumenten, 1960–70 (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1987), 213; cited in Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the 60s and 70s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 34.

12. Varon, Bringing the War Home, 34.

13. Ulrike Meinhof, “Dresden,” in Everybody Talks About the Weather … We Don’t: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof, ed. and trans. Karin Bauer (New York: Seven Stories, 2008), 134–37.

14. In the original: “Für viele ergab sich daraus zwingend die Notwendigkeit zu handeln und Verantwortung zu übernehmen.” Birgit Hogefeld, “Zur Geschichte der RAF,” in Versuche, die Geschichte der RAF zu verstehen: Das Beispiel Birgit Hogefeld, ed. Carlchristian von Braunmühl, Birgit Hogefeld, Hubertus Janssen, Horst-Eberhard Richter, and Gerd Rosenkranz (Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 1996), 19–58, at 30.

15. Following Ohnesorg’s death, one of the most violent factions of the New Left sheared off: the June 2 Movement. Other splinter groups at the vanguard of leftist militancy included the Tupamaros-West Berlin, the Haschrebellen, and the Revolutionary Cells. Several members of these organizations cooperated with (and eventually joined) the RAF.

16. Cited in Stefan Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Bodley Head, 1987), 44. In Das rote Jahrzehnt Gerd Koenen casts doubt on the assertion—now a commonplace in RAF studies—that Ensslin actually made this statement. Koenen, Das rote Jahrzent: Unsere kleine deutsche Kulturrevolution (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2001), 383.

17. Carlos Marighella, The Terrorist Classic: Manual of the Urban Guerrilla, trans. Gene Hanrahan (Chapel Hill: Documentary Publications, 1985). First published in Portuguese in 1969.

18. All of these articles were published in Wolfgang Kraushaar, ed., Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006): Martin Jander, “Differenzen im antiimperialistischen Kampf: Zu dem Verbindungen des Ministerium für Staatssicherheit mit der RAF und den bundesdeutschen Linksterrorismus,” 1:696–713; Thomas Skelton Robinson, “Im Netz verheddert: Die Beziehung des bundesdeutschen Linksterrorismus zur Volksfront für die Befreiung Palästinas (1969–1980),” 2:828–904; and Christopher Daase, “Die RAF und der internationale Terrorismus: Zur transnationalen Kooperation klandestiner Organisationen,” 2:905–29.

19. Jeffrey Herf, “An Age of Murder: Ideology and Terror in Germany,” Telos 144 (Fall 2008): 8–37, at 9.

20. In 2001 students of the filmmaker Harun Farocki remade Herstellung eines Molotow-Cocktails, introducing a number of contemporary elements, for example, a closing shot of Naomi Klein’s book No Logo (2000).

21. “Solidaritätsbekundung namhafter Intellektueller vom 13. April 1968,” in Otto, APO: Die außerparlamentarische Opposition, 264.

23. Horkheimer, Adorno, and other prominent figures in the Institute were among the first to disavow the protesters’ militancy. The junior faculty who stood in the middle ground between the professors and the students (Oskar Negt and Claus Offe, for example) eventually distanced themselves from the revolutionary stance of the youngest leftists, especially when protests became violent. Despite these conflicts, some commentators continued to associate the Institute with the militants well into the 1970s. For example, the political scientist Kurt Sontheimer, in an interview on ZDF television in September 1977, drew parallels between the Institute and the Linksradikalismus that was challenging democratic structures in the FRG. To his mind, Habermas and the protesters—all Scheißliberaler—were operating on the same base level. This exchange is discussed in Sontheimer, Das Elend unserer Intellektuellen: Linke Theorie in der BRD (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1976).

24. Reprinted in Frank Böckelmann and Herbert Nagel, eds., Subversive Aktion: Der Sinn der Organisation ist ihr Scheitern (Frankfurt: Neue Kritik, 2002), 145.

25. As noted by Esther Leslie, “Introduction to Adorno/Marcuse Correspondence on the German Student Movement,” New Left Review 233 (January/February 1999): 120.

26. Reprinted in Jürgen Habermas, Protestbewegung und Hochschulreform (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969), 145–52. Andreas Musolff suggests that Habermas issued his warning “from a position of solidarity with the protest movement,” but that the students interpreted his message as “a malicious defamation.” Andreas Musolff, “Hitler’s Children Revisited: West German Terrorism and the Problem of Coming to Terms with the Nazi Past,” Terrorism and Political Violence 23 (2011): 60–71, at 64.

27. Jürgen Habermas, “Die Bühne des Terrors: Ein Brief an Kurt Sontheimer,” Merkur 31, no. 353 (October 1977): 957.

29. Stern editors do not allow the cover of the June 6, 1971, issue to be reproduced.

30. In 1974 a special edition of the journal Frauen und Film was dedicated Kluge’s Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin (Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave): Frauen und Film 3 (November 1974). Alexander Kluge responded in Gerhard Theurig, “Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin: Gespräch mit Alexander Kluge,” Filmkritik 18, no. 6 (1974): 279–83. Later reception of Kluge’s cinema includes: Jutta Brückner, “Carmen und die Macht der Gefühle,” Ästhetik und Kommunikation 4, nos. 53/54 (December 1983): 226–32; and Heidi Schlüpmann, “Femininity as Productive Force: Kluge and Critical Theory,” New German Critique 49 (Winter 1990): 69–78; and Helke Sander, “‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’: The Films of Alexander Kluge,” New German Critique 49 (Winter 1990): 60–68.

31. Miriam Hansen credits Gertrud Koch for this assessment. Miriam Hansen, “Cooperative Auteur Cinema and Oppositional Public Sphere: Alexander Kluge’s Contribution to Germany in Autumn,” New German Critique 24/25 (Autumn 1981/ Winter 1982): 36–56, at 51–52n34.

33. Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 228.

34. Silvia Bovenschen, “Über die Frage: Gibt es eine weibliche Ästhetik,” Ästhetik und Kommunikation 25 (September 1976): 60–75; translated and republished as Bovenschen and Beth Weckmueller, “Is There a Feminine Aesthetic?,” New German Critique 10 (Winter 1977): 111–37.

35. Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Group, 59.

36. The network Südwestfunk/ARD had scheduled the program Bambule for broadcast in 1970, but when Meinhof suddenly appeared on the list of public enemies, they shelved the project. The program was finally aired in 1997, twenty years After the German Autumn, when postmilitant culture was hitting one of its first peaks. The major Meinhof biographies discuss Bambule and its broadcast. See Jutta Ditfurth, Ulrike Meinhof: Die Biografie (Berlin: Ullstein, 2007); Sarah Colvin, Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism: Language, Violence and Identity (Rochester: Camden House, 2009), esp. 51–80; and Leith Passmore, Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction: Performing Terrorism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

37. Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Mark Williams, eds., Terror and Text: Representing Political Violence in Literature and the Visual Arts (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2002), 197. More recently Berendse has argued that these works of literature are “ein wichtiger Bestandteil terroristicher Strategie, die zum Model allgemein ideologischen Denkens werden sollte.” Berendse, “Die Wunde RAF: Zur Reziprozität von Fiktion und Terrorismus im Spiegel der neuesten Sekundärliteratur,” Seminar 47, no. 1 (February 2011): 10–26, at 11.

38. Examples of kleinschreibung are the titles konkret (the journal), die taz (the newspaper), studio neue literatur (the imprint), and texte: der raf (the standard edition of the RAF’s writings, published in 1977). We can also see the kleinschreibung effect in documenta, the name of the international survey of art and ideas, which is often written in lowercase letters.

39. Olaf Gaetje has analyzed the correspondence among the RAF members imprisoned at Stammheim (and other penitentiaries) and their legal advocates, a body of texts that was part of their so-called information system (or “info”-System). Olaf Gaetje, “Das “info”-System der RAF von 1973 bis 1977 in sprachwissenschaft-licher Perspektive,” in Kraushaar, Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus, 732. Butz Peters discusses the broader significance of the “info”-System, which enabled a high degree of interaction between (and among) the inmates and their defense. Butz Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum: Die Geschichte der RAF (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2007), 307–11.

40. From the original: “revolutionär ist damit eine dichtung, die das medium sprache selbst verändert, umfunktioniert, die den hierarchischen sprachlichen charakter zerstört, die im neuartigen sprachspiel und durch das neuartige sprachspiel diejenige gesellschaft liche umwälzung vorwegnimmt, für die alle revolutionäre arbeiten.” Chris Bezzel, “dichtung und revolution,” Text + Kritik 25 (1970): 34. Cited by Gaetje, “Das “info”-System der RAF,” 733.

41. Gaetje, “Das “info”-System der RAF,” 733.

42. Quoted in Michael Seufert, “Dissension Among the Terrorists: Killing People Is Wrong,” Encounter 51, no. 3 (September 1978): 84.

43. Bernward Vesper wrote The Trip between 1969 and 1971, the year in which he committed suicide. The März Verlag published it in 1977; the book was then republished as Bernward Vesper, Die Reise (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1983).

44. Part of the Blut-und-Boden ideology that informed National Socialism, Will Vesper’s works include Das harte Geschlecht (1931), Kämpfer Gottes (1938), and Bild des Führers (1942). He was an editor and contributor to Die schöne Literatur (Die Neue Literatur) from 1923 to 1943.

45. As an adult, Felix Ensslin has directed a number of theater productions, worked as a Green Party staffer, and translated the works of Agnes Heller. He also cocurated Regarding Terror at the Berlin Kunst-Werke in 2005.

46. Hundreds of writers and artists have responded to RAF attacks in their work. Heinrich Böll’s novel Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, 1974) was one of the first to describe the social complex produced by the intersections of militancy, media, and mass politics. In the 1970s Alfred Andersch wrote several poems about terrorism, as did Erich Fried, who published works titled “Ulrike Meinhof’s Suicide” and “Armed Idyll.” Heiner Müller’s drama Die Hamletmaschine (Hamletmachine, 1978) extended the pall of the Stammheim deaths over the suicide of Shakespeare’s Ophelia. And Elfriede Jelinek’s play Ulrike Maria Stuart (2006) pits Schiller’s portrait of powerful women against RAF figures.

By the late 1990s, a veritable subgenre of literary fiction on the RAF was forming, including the novels Kontrolliert (1988) by Rainald Goetz and Erste Liebe Deutscher Herbst (1997) by Michael Wildenhain, Leander Scholz’s Rosenfest (2001), and Ulrich Woelk’s Die letzte Vorstellung (2002). Somewhat later there appeared Berhard Schlink’s Das Wochenende (2008), which was widely translated, and Lukas Hammerstein’s Wo wirst du sein (2010). English-language authors have also added to this trend, for example, Erin Cosgrove, with The Baader-Meinhof affair (2003), and Ada Wilson, with Red Army Faction Blues (2012). For an overview of novels that treat the RAF, see Julian Preece, “RAF Revivalism in German Fiction of the 2000s,” Journal of European Studies 40, no. 3 (September 2010): 272–83.

47. Astrid Proll, Baader-Meinhof: Pictures on the Run, 67–77 (Zurich: Scalo, 1998). Simultaneously published as Astrid Proll, Hans und Grete: Die RAF, 1967–77 (Göttingen: Steidl, 1998). Proll first compiled the photographs for Stefan Aust, who used them as a resource for Der Baader-Meinhof K omplex.

48. Since the late 1970s there have appeared dozens of documentaries, feature films, and television specials that recount and reimagine the rise and fall of the Far Left; a cursory title scan would include Fassbinder’s Die dritte Generation (1978–79), Reinhard Hauff’s Stammheim (1986), Christoph Petzold’s Die innere Sicherheit (2000), Andres Veiel’s Black Box BRD (2001), Christoph Roth’s Baader (2002), and Uli Edel’s Baader-Meinhof K omplex (2008). A foundational analysis of films about the armed struggle is Petra Kraus and Natalie Lettenwitsch, eds., Deutschland im Herbst: Terrorismus im Film (Munich: Münchner Filmzentrum, 1997). There have also appeared a number of English-language critiques of these films, including Anton Kaes, Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). More recent contributions to the growing field of RAF-cinema studies focus on the work of Heinrich Breloer, Christian Petzold, Andres Veiel, and Margarethe von Trotta. See Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien, “The Wild West and East of Eden: The Red Army Faction and German Terrorism,” in Post-Wall German Cinema and National History: Utopianism and Dissent (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2012), 173–252; Jamie Trnka, “‘The Struggle Is Over, the Wounds Are Open’: Cinematic Tropes, History, and the RAF in Recent German Film,” New German Critique 34, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 1–26; Rosemary Stott, “Revolutionary Fiction: The Baader-Meinhof Complex and Other Representations of the Red Army Faction in German Film,” Twentieth-Century Communism 2 (2010): 180–94; Eric Kligerman, “The Antigone effect: Reinterring the Dead of Night and Fog in the German Autumn,” New German Critique 38, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 9–38; and Christina Gerhardt, “RAF as German and Family History: Von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane and Petzold’s The State I am In,” in The Place of Politics in German Film, edited by Martin Blumenthal-Barby (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2014): 166–84.

49. October 18, 1977 was first exhibited from February 12 to April 4, 1989, at the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld. It then traveled to London, Rotterdam, Saint Louis, Montreal, and Boston, among other cities, before New York’s Museum of Modern Art acquired it in 1995.

50. Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof,” New Yorker (April 1, 2002): 78–82. A character in DeLillo’s novel Falling Man (2007) also seems to relate to the RAF legacy: Martin, the art dealer, is described as a member of Kommune I.

51. Richter set the condition that the fifteen canvasses be shown together, but the installation order is variable, and individual curators and gallerists have arranged them differently.

52. For example, the covers of Wolfgang Kraushaar’s two-volume Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus feature two photographs of Baader and Meinhof that the book’s designer has abstracted into the filmy haze of a Richter painting.

53. This effect is particularly evident when the paintings are viewed in person. Reproductions of Richter’s work, like some of the photographs in this book, rarely convey the complex visual sensation of photopainting. Robert Storr, in his discussion of the “substraction” of Richter’s work, distinguishes the technique from that of photorealism: the “removal of information, which varies in quality from a sfumato pall hovering over the canvas to the rich, disorienting impastos that slide vertically in Cell and sweep horizontally in Funeral, is at odds with photorealism generally, where a premium is usually placed on hyper-verisimilitude.” Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 110–11.

54. On the Richter cycle, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s influential studies: Buchloh, “A Note on Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977,” October 48 (Spring 1989): 88–109; and Buchloh, ed., Gerhard Richter: 18. Oktober 1977 (Cologne: Walther König, 1989), 55–59. Other notable accounts include Isabelle Graw, “View: Gerhard Richter: 18. Oktober 1977,” Artscribe International 9/10 (September/October 1989): 7–9; Graw, “Gerhard Richter,” special issue, Parkett 35 (March 1993); and Rainer Usselman, “18. Oktober 1977: Gerhard Richter’s Work of Mourning and Its New Audience,” Art Journal 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 4–25.

55. Meir Seidler criticizes Sartre’s support of Andreas Baader in Meir Seidler, “The Beauty and the Beast: Jean-Paul Sartre and the Baader-Meinhof Gang,” Terrorism and Political Violence 25 (2013): 597–605.

56. Gerhard Richter, “Gerhard Richter: 18. Oktober 1977,” interview with Jan Thorn-Prikker, Parkett 19 (1989): 130.

57. Karin Crawford ascribes an explicitly feminist consciousness to Gerhard Richter that is difficult to substantiate. She writes, “Given Richter’s statement that, for him, the RAF was ‘a women’s movement,’ I argue that [the] question of the individual [in the contemporary public sphere in Richter’s work] can be viewed only through the lens of the question of women’s rights.” The actual exchange between Richter and Jan Thorn-Prikker, as printed in the bilingual journal Parkett, indicates that it was the interviewer (Thorn-Prikker) who gathered from the paintings that the RAF is “eine Frauenbewegung”/“a women’s movement,” not Richter. Richter assented to this interpretation, but only with qualifications, which are evident in my translation of his remarks. Gerhard Richter, “Gerhard Richter: 18. Oktober 1977,” 130. See Karin L. Crawford, “Gender and Terror in Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 and Don DeLillo’s ‘Baader-Meinhof,’” New German Critique 36, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 207–8.

58. For example, the journalist Klausjürgen Hehn has called Ulrike Meinhof “a feminist icon.” Klausjürgen Hehn, “Im Tod größer als im Leben,” Frankfurter Rundschau (September 9, 2008): 13. Also cited in Sarah Colvin, “Wir Frauen haben kein Vaterland: Ulrike Marie Meinhof, Emily Wilding Davison, and the ‘Homelessness’ of Women Revolutionaries,” German Life and Letters 64, no. 1 (January 2011): 108–21, at 110n7.

59. Kaja Silverman, “Photography by Other Means,” in Flesh of My Flesh (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 168–222, at 190.

60. See, for example, Gudrun Ensslin, “hh-paket, sept./oktober 76,” in das info: Briefe der Gefangenen aus der RAF, 1973–77, ed. Pieter H. Bakker Schut (Kiel: Neuer Malik, 1987), 288–300; and Ensslin, “‘Zieht den Trennungsstrich, jede Minute’: Briefe an ihre Schwester Christiane und ihren Bruder Gottfried aus dem Gefängnis, 1972–73,” ed. Christiane Ensslin and Gottfried Ensslin (Hamburg: Konkret Literatur Verlag, 2005). Gerd Koenen also documents the exchange of sexist language between Ensslin and Baader in Koenen, Vesper, Ensslin, Baader (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2003).

61. Several essays on Deutschland im Herbst make this point, including Thomas Elsaesser, “Antigone Agonistes: Urban Guerrilla or Guerrilla Urbanism? The RAF, Germany in Autumn and Death Game,” in Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity, ed. Michael Sorkin and Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1998), 267–302; and Nora Alter, “Framing Terrorism,” in Projecting History: German Nonfiction Cinema (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 68–71.

62. Donatella della Porta, quoted in Belinda Davis et al., “Forum: 1977,” 419.

1. Theodor W. Adorno, “Minima Moralia,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 4:43. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.

2. In the mid-1980s, when the first editions of Der Baader-Meinhof K omplex were published, reporters and scholars could access only a portion of the sources (now available) that document the connections between the RAF, the PLO, and the Stasi.

3. Wolfgang Kraushaar, Die Bombe im Jüdischen Gemeindehaus (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2005).

4. Julia Hell draws attention to the German Left’s stance vis-à-vis Fatah and al-Qaeda initiatives. Julia Hell, “Terror and Solidarity,” Telos (October 25–26, 2006): 254–65, www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=165.

5. Hans Kundnani, Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), esp. 89–94; and Tilman Tarach, Der ewige Sündenbock: Heiliger Krieg, die “Protokolle der Weisen von Zion” und die Verlogenheit der sogenannten Linken im Nahostkonflikt (Freiburg: Edition Telok, 2010). Both of these works build upon Kraushaar’s foundational study. Several critics responded quickly to Kraushaar’s allegations of anti-Semitism among the New Left and Far Left; see, for example, Js., ed., “Dem Staate dienen: Das Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, die RAF, und der ‘Sympathisantensumpf,” Analyse und Kritik, March 16, 2007, www.linksnet.de/de/artikel/20421.

6. The Kinkel Initiative proposed parole for prisoners who were ill or who had served out most of their terms. Press articles on the controversial topic include Stephen Kinzer, “German Terrorist Group Says It Will End Attacks,” New York Times, April 18, 1992; and “Kinkel-Initiative nimmt erste Hürde,” die tageszeitung, May 5, 1993.

7. Federal prosecutors released findings on Wolfgang Grams’s relationship to the assassination of Detlev Rohwedder in May 2001. See, for example, “Mordfall Rohwedder: Hogefeld soll vernommen werden,” WDR-Online, May 17, 2001, http://wdr.de/online/news/rohwedder_mord.

8. Former Bundespräsident Horst Köhler denied Hogefeld’s first two appeals for clemency in 2007 and 2010. She was finally released on parole in 2011.

9. See the RAF declaration, quoted in Andreas Musolff, Krieg gegen die Öffentlichkeit: Terrorismus und politischer Sprachgebrauch (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 1998).

10. Christoph Hein, In seiner frühen Kindheit ein Garten (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005).

11. Julian Preece perceptively identifies Katharina Blumenschläger’s namesake in the protagonist of Heinrich Böll’s Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (1974). Julian Preece, Baader-Meinhof and the Novel: Narratives of the Nation/Fantasies of the Revolution, 1970–2010 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 88.

12. Early examples include Jan Brandt, “Nichts erfunden: Christoph Hein hat ein RAF-Roman geschrieben,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 23, 2005, 24; and Wolfgang von Höbel, “Kohlhaas in Bad Kleinen,” Der Spiegel (January 24, 2005): 168.

13. These studies appeared in rapid succession in the 1990s, when the Stasi files were first opened to the public. Two early, conservative accounts of the relations between the RAF and the Stasi are Michael Müller and Andreas Kanonenberg, Die RAF-Stasi-Connection (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1992); and John Schmeidel, “My Enemy’s Enemy: Twenty Years of Cooperation Between West Germany’s Red Army Faction and the GDR Ministry for State Security,” Intelligence and National Security 8, no. 4 (October 1993): 59–72. Gerhard Wisnewski’s somewhat later take on the relationship between the RAF and the SI betrayed his unreformed commitment to the armed struggle. See Gerhard Wisnewski, “Die RAFStasi-Connection,” in Das RAF-Phantom: Wozu Politik und Wirtschaft Terroristen brauchen, ed. Gerhard Wisnewski, Wolfgang Landgraeber, and Ekkehard Sieker (Munich: Droemer Knaur, 1997), 372–401. Tobias Wunschik, meanwhile, offers a more tempered account in Wunschik, Baader-Meinhofs Kinder: Die zweite Generation der RAF (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997).

14. Uwe Backes and Eckhard Jesse call the relationship between the RAF and the Stasi “ein[e] unübersehbar[e] Geistesverwandtschaft.” Uwe Backes and Eckhard Jesse, eds., Jahrbuch Extremismus und Demokratie, vol. 3 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1991), 200.

15. Judith Kuckart, Wahl der Waffen (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1990). Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. For a comparison of RAF memoirs, both fictional and documentary, including Kuckart’s novel, see Julian Preece, “Between Identification and Documentation, ‘Autofiction’ and ‘Biopic’: The Lives of the RAF,” German Life and Letters 56, no. 4 (2003): 363–76.

16. Kuckart writes of Katia’s “search for the right way of living” ([die] Suche nach dem richtigen Leben), for a life that is “always elsewhere” (immer anderswo). Kuckart, Wahl der Waffen, 38.

17. In the original: “[S]ie [sprach] von einem Loch, das zwischen ihr und der Wirklichkeit sich weitete.” Kuckart, Wahl der Waffen, 115.

18. In the original: “Schreiben heißt, den Weg gehen, der einem verwehrt.” Kuckart, Wahl der Waffen, 50. Thomas Hoeps draws a comparison similar to mine. Thomas Hoeps, Arbeit am Widerspruch: “Terrorismus” in den deutschen Romanen und Erzählungen, 1837–1992 (Dresden: Thelem Universitätsverlag, 2001), 312.

19. The spectacular abduction of Peter Lorenz prompted an unusual response from the German government as it negotiated with the RAF terrorists to free him. The RAF demanded that a group of their members be released from German prisons and granted safe passage into Yemen. The government authorities conceded, and Lorenz was surrendered. (Ina Siepmann was one of the RAF members included in the exchange; this incident features in Kuckart’s Choice of Weapons.) The exchange of prisoners for Lorenz set a dangerous precedent; when the RAF called upon it in the German Autumn of 1977, however, Helmut Schmidt and his crisis management team refused to give in another time.

20. Inge Viett, Nie war ich furchtloser (Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 1997). Details about Viett’s exile in Iraq are included in her Stasi file: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, Information zu Aktivitäten von Vertretern der palästinensischen Befreiungsorganisation in Verbinding mit internationalen Terroristen zur Einbeziehung der DDR bei der Vorbereitung von Gewaltakten in Ländern Westeuropas, Berlin, May 3, 1979, Die Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, Zentralarchiv, Hauptabteilung XXII 18613, Berlin, 277–92, esp. 287.

21. See, for example, Inge Viett, “Lust auf Freiheit: Unsere Geschichte als Klassenkampf von unten verteidigen,” Junge Welt, February 24, 2007, 10.

22. In fact, the film uses so many details from Viett’s life that she was able to win a settlement for plagiarism against Schlöndorff and his screenwriting team. These negotiations are discussed in Viett, “Kasperletheater im Niemandsland,” konkret 4 (2000): 58–59. Viett collaborated in the production of a documentary film that presents an account of her militancy, Große Freiheit, kleine Freiheit, dir. Kristina Konrad (2000). For an analysis of this film, see Christina Gerhardt, “Narrating Terrorism: Kristina Konrad’s Große Freiheit, kleine Freiheit (2000),” Seminar 47, no. 1 (2011): 64–80.

23. In 2007 several press accounts of the RAF’s visit to the Stasi retreat appeared: for example, Jens Bauszus, “Terrorismus: Die RAF-Stasi Connection,” Focus-Online, May 8, 2007, www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/raf/tid-5678/terrorismus_aid_55571.html.

24. Volker Schlöndorff, “Director’s Commentary,” Die Stille nach dem Schuss (Potsdam: Babelsberg Film, 2000), DVD.

25. Baumann’s interrogation was held at the prison in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen and the report on it—registered under the code name “Anarchist”—was forwarded to Markus Wolf, the head of the foreign intelligence division of the Stasi (the Hauptverwaltung Aufk lärung). After six weeks of cross-referencing the figures in Baumann’s profiles, his interrogators released him into West Berlin through a secret passage at the Friedrichstraße checkpoint—what Baumann calls the “Ho-Chi-Minh Passage.” Michael Baumann, HI HO: Wer nicht weggeht, kommt nicht wieder (Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe, 1987), 64.

26. Wolfgang Kraushaar calls Baumann’s report a “who’s who” of the German armed struggle. Kraushaar, Die Bombe, 226. See also “Michael Baumann: Stadtguerilla als Zeuge der Stasi,” Spiegel Online, December 2, 2008, www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/0,1518,592746,00.html.

27. Baumann notes the involvement of the high-profile writers Peter Handke and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, the filmmaker Wim Wenders, and the former Minister of the Interior, Otto Schily. Michael Baumann, Wie alles anfing (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1991).

28. Jürgen Arnold and Peter Schult, Ein Buch wird verboten: Bommi Baumann Dokumentation (Munich: Trikont, 1979).

29. Kraushaar, Die Bombe, 224–33.

30. Two early accounts of Kunzelmann’s interventions are Uwe Backes and Eckhard Jesse, “Biographisches Porträt: Dieter Kunzelmann,” in Jahrbuch Extremismus und Demokratie (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1999), 11:200–14; and Konrad Jarausch, Die Umkehr: Deutsche Umwandlungen, 1945–95 (Munich: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 2004). Aribert Reimann’s recent biography of Kunzelmann responds to Kraushaar’s Die Bombe im Jüdischen Gemeindehaus. See Aribert Reimann, Dieter Kunzelmann: Avantgardist, Protestler, Radikaler (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2009).

31. Reimann, Dieter Kunzelmann, 104.

33. Another example of a gendered “weapon” is the baby carriage that the RAF used to block the way of Hanns-Martin Schleyer when they kidnapped him in 1977. Terrorist groups have been known to use women (or men dressed as women) to gain access to secured sites. For an overview of such tactics and an analysis of how counterterrorist forces might deflect them, see Karla L. Cunningham, “Countering Female Terrorism,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 30 (2007): 113–29.

34. At the time, Peter Urbach was an agent provocateur who worked for West Berlin’s intelligence office. Thanks to Hans Kundnani for this note. According to Tilman Fichter (Albert Fichter’s brother), Urbach lived under cover and with a false name in the United States until his death in 2011. See Philipp Gessler and Stefan Reinecke, “Wir haben das nicht ernst genommen (Interview),” die tageszeitung, October 25, 2005, http://taz.de/1/archiv/archiv/?dig=2005/10/25/a0178.

35. Kraushaar, Die Bombe, 245–46.

36. Andreas Musolff raises the controversial question of whether support for Palestinian sovereignty might offer Germans “an escape from the ethical burden” of the nation’s responsibility for the Holocaust. Discussing Kunzelmann’s situation, he suggests that it became possible in the protest movement “for ‘leftist’ Germans to voice radically anti-Israeli attitudes while retaining a good antifascist conscience.” Andreas Musolff, “Hitler’s Children Revisited: West German Terrorism and the Problem of Coming to Terms with the Nazi Past,” Terrorism and Political Violence 23 (2011): 64.

The relationship between Jews, Germans, and Israelis remains a topic of great interest. See, for example, the special issue on the “German-Jewish Controversy” in New German Critique 38 (Spring/Summer 1986), which discusses the problem of anti-Semitism with regard to the cinema of R. W. Fassbinder. A notable history of the relationship between Israel and the German Left is Martin W. Kloke, Israel und die deutsche Linke: Zur Geschichte eines schwierigen Verhältnisses (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990). The historian Jeffrey Herf has focused on the RAF’s failed attempt to bomb a group of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union while on a trip to Israel. He sees this incident as a repercussion of the attack on Berlin’s Jewish Gemeindehaus in 1969, which marked the Far Left’s ill-fated start of the “age of murder.” Jeffrey Herf, “An Age of Murder: Ideology and Terror in Germany,” Telos 144 (Fall 2008): 11.

37. Kundnani, Utopia or Auschwitz, 92.

38. In the original: “Palestina [sic] ist für die BRD und Europa das, was für die Amis Vietnam ist. Die Linken haben das noch nicht begriffen. Warum? Der Judenknax. ‘Wir haben 6 Millionen Juden vergast. Die Juden heißen heute Israelis. Wer den Faschismus bekämpft, ist für Israel.’ So einfach ist das, und doch stimmt es hinten und vorne nicht.” Dieter Kunzelmann, “Brief aus Amman,” Agit 883 1, no. 42 (November 27, 1969): 5.

40. Gerd Koenen discusses the correspondences between Kunzelmann’s writings and the RAF communiqué about the attacks on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. The RAF statement, authored by Ulrike Meinhof, blames the Israeli government for refusing to negotiate with the PFLP and holds them responsible for the assassinations, accusing Defense Minister Moshe Dayan of “burning up” the hostages “just as the Nazis did the Jews, as fuel for genocidal policies.” Gerd Koenen, Vesper, Ensslin, Baader: Urszenen des deutschen Terrorismus (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2003), 258. Koenen cites from “die action des schwarzen september in münchen,” in Rote Armee Fraktion: Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF, ed. Martin Hoffman (Berlin: ID-Verlag, 1997), 151–77, at 170–71, 173. This translation is from Musolff, “Hitler’s Children Revisited,” 65, 68.

41. Kunzelmann calls divided Berlin “ein geradezu idealtypisches [P]rovokantenparadies.” Dieter Kunzelmann, Leisten Sie keinen Widerstand! Bilder aus meinem Leben (Berlin: Transit, 2002), 49.

42. Kunzelmann, “Brief aus Amman,” 5.

43. In the original, “den Feind wieder sichtbar zu machen.” Kunzelmann, “Brief aus Amman,” 5.

44. In a letter to Die Welt, Heinz Galinski wrote, “Mit dem Anschlag auf das Jüdische Gemeindehaus habe sich die Lage so weit zugespitzt, daß es nun nicht mehr Sache der Jüdischen Gemeinde sei, Stellung zu beziehen, sondern die aller Repräsentanten der Bevölkerung.” Galinski, “Brief,” Die Welt, November 12, 1969, 33.

45. “[E]in Schauspiel inszenieren,” as recounted by Albert Fichter. Albert Fichter, “Gespräch mit Wolfgang Kraushaar,” in Kraushaar, Die Bombe, 249.

46. In the original, “Nicht nur über sein Leben, auch über seinen Tod hat er frei bestimmt—1939–1998—Dieter Kunzelmann,” Berliner Zeitung, April 3, 1998, 10. Kunzelmann spent most of the early 1970s in and out of courts and jails for a number of offenses, but he has not been charged with any hate crimes. He went on to hold several political offices, including representing the party Alternative Liste in the Berlin State Senate from 1993 to 1995. In 1997 Kunzelmann finally got snagged for throwing eggs at the Berlin Mayor Eberhard Diepgen. Kunzelmann hosted a party the night before his prison sentence started and then at daybreak took the U-Bahn to the Tegel penitentiary, where he banged at the gates and shouted, “I want in already! Enough! I want to go to prison!” Meike Bruhns, “Kunzelmann im Gefängnis: Der Arzt wollte ihn sofort sehen,” Berliner Zeitung, July 15, 1999, 33.

47. Gessler and Reinecke, “Wir haben das …,” d ie tageszeitung, October 25, 2005, www.taz.de/1/archiv/archiv/?dig=2005/10/25/a0178, 25 October 2005.

48. The original is in English. Schlöndorff, “Director’s Commentary.”

49. In the original, “ein[e] revolutionär[e] kommunistisch[e] Organisation mit geheimen Strukturen.” Quoted in Jörn Hasselmann, “Ex-Terroristin Viett im Visier der Justiz,” Der Tagesspiegel, August 5, 2011, www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin.

50. Ibid. The second passage quoted in this sentence is cited in “Staatsanwaltschaft klagt Ex-RAF-Terroristin Viett an.” Junge Freiheit (June 6, 2011), www.jungefreiheit.de/Single-News-Display-mit-Komm.154+M540153a3969.0.html. In November 2011 a Berlin court fined Viett €1,200 for her conference statement, which was found to be an endorsement of “a violent attack on the state.” Ibid.

51. “Viett fand Randale in Heiligendamm ‘toll,’” Focus-Online, July 1, 2007, www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/raf/raf_aid_65094.html. The political scientist Kristin Wesemann detects a similar flaw in Ulrike Meinhof’s vision of politics in the 1970s: the contradiction between her valorization of the communist ideal and the absence, in her writings, of inquiry into the actual experience of life in the GDR is the target of criticism in her biography of the RAF leader. Kristin Wesemann, Ulrike Meinhof: Kommunistin, Journalistin, Terroristin—eine politische Biografie (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2007).

52. Thomas Elsaesser, Terror und Trauma: Zur Gewalt des Vergangenen in der BRD (Berlin: Kadmos, 2007), 17.

1. Guy Debord, “In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni” (screenplay), in Complete Cinematic Works: Scripts, Stills, Documents, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Oakland, Calif.: AK Press, 2003), 162–63.

4. Jürgen Habermas anticipated the comparison of the RAF to the SI in “Die Bühne des Terrors.” With reference to surrealism, he asks for an investigation of the links between the postwar avant-garde and its contemporary political vanguard in the German Far Left. Jürgen Habermas, “Die Bühne des Terrors: Ein Brief an Kurt Sontheimer,” Merkur 31, no. 353 (October 1977): 944–59. In an essay on the mediation of the RAF in television and film, Thomas Elsaesser identifies the common ground occupied by artists and activists in postwar Europe and brings the SI into his analysis. Thomas Elsaesser, “Antigone Agonistes: Urban Guerrilla or Guerrilla Urbanism? The RAF, Germany in Autumn, and Death Game,” in Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity, ed. Michael Sorkin and Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1998), 267–302. Joachim Bruhn has called for an investigation of the overlapping histories of the SI and the RAF: Joachim Bruhn, “Der Untergang der Roten Armee Fraktion: Eine Erinnerung für die Revolution,” in Stadtguerilla und soziale Revolution: Über den Bewaffneten Kampf und die Rote Armee Fraktion, by Emile Marenssin, trans. Gabriela Walterspiel and Joachim Bruhn (Freiburg: Ça ira-Verlag, 1998), 7–30. Another relevant comparison is Mia Lee, “Umherschweifen und Spektakel: Die situationistische Tradition,” in 1968: Handbuch zur Kultur-und Medi engeschichte der Studentenbewegung, ed. Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007), 101–6. Julian Preece has recently acknowledged the coupling of radical politics with advanced art and culture—prevalent in discussions of postmilitant culture—in his analysis of aesthetic representations of the RAF beyond Germany. He writes, “In international work, extremist politics [is taken to be] an extension of avant-garde art.” His examples include Yvonne Rainer’s film Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980), Jennifer Egan’s novel The Invisible Circus (1995), and Alban Lefranc’s literary trilogy Des foules, des bouches, des armes (2006). See Julian Preece, Baader-Meinhof and the Novel: Narratives of the Nation/Fantasies of the Revolution, 1970–2010 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 123.

5. One of the closest analyses of Debord’s work on the spectacle is Thomas Y. Levin, “Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 321–454.

6. Raoul Vaneigem, “Comments Against Urbanism,” trans. John Shepley, in McDonough, Guy Debord, 120.

7. Raoul Vaneigem, Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Left Bank Books, 1994), 34.

8. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone, 1995), 122–23.

10. Another record of the Situationists’ interest in the Reichstag fire is the article “Le Reichstag brûle-t-il?,” which compares the events of Berlin 1933 to those of Milan 1969. Eduardo Rothe and Puni Cesoni, “Le Reichstag brûle-t-il?,” trans. Joël Gayraud and Luc Mercier, in Écrits complets de la section italienne de l’ Internationale Situationniste, 1969–1972 (Paris: Contre-Moule, 1988), 101–3.

11. Key studies of the Watts riots include Seymour Spilerman, “The Causes of Racial Disturbances: A Comparison of Alternative Explanations,” American Sociological Review 35 (1970): 627–49; and Vincent Jefferies, Ralph H. Turner, and Richard T. Morris, “The Public Perception of the Watts Riot as Social Protest,” American Sociological Review 36 (1971): 443–51.

12. “Le Déclin et la chute de l’économie spectaculaire-marchande,” Internationale situationniste 10 (March 1966): 415–23. The essay is translated, along with most of the journal, by Ken Knabb as “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” in The Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 157.

13. Spur was published under the SI imprint from 1958 to 1962. Kunzelmann’s association with the SI is recounted in Gerd Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt: Unsere kleine deutsche Kulturrevolution (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2001), 152, 155. Kunzelmann is cited several times in the Internationale situationniste. See issues 6:28–29; 7:25, 27, 28, 31, 49; and 8:25. Thanks to Tom McDonough for this reference.

14. Reprinted in Klaus Hartung, Der blinde Fleck: Die Linke, die RAF und der Staat (Frankfurt: neue kritik, 1987), 223. The last line of the leaflet is in English in the original: “Burn, Ware-House, Burn.”

15. Stefan Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Bodley Head, 1987), 49.

16. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), secs. 3:2, 8:5. For an overview of the Langhans-Teufel case, see Hans Egon Holthusen, Sartre in Stammheim: Zwei Themen aus den Jahren der großen Turbulenz (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982), 117.

17. To develop this point, Holthusen draws upon the Merkur article “Surrealistische Provokation” by Jacob Taubes from 1967. Holthusen, Sartre, 114–16.

18. Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Group, 48.

19. Holthusen, Sartre, 115.

21. André Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1972), 124.

22. Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Group, 58.

23. Koenen describes Fassbinder and Baader’s milieu as “bisexual” and “decadent.” Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt, 156.

24. For views into the so-called radical years of West German film academies, especially the DFFB, see Harun Farocki’s essay on Holger Meins and, in turn, Tilman Baumgärtel’s study of Farocki: Harun Farocki, “Sein Leben einsetzen: Bilder von Holger Meins,” Jungle World 52, no. 1 (December 23, 1998): unpaginated supplement; and Tilman Baumgärtel, Harun Farocki (Berlin: B-Books, 1998).

25. Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Group, 50.

26. Social scientists have identified the dynamic of expulsion as central to the formation of terrorist organizations. For an overview, see Jessica Stern, “Holy War Organizations,” in Terror in the Name of God (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 139–296.

27. Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 161.

28. “Now, the S.I.,” in Knabb, The Situationist International Anthology, 135–38; “Maintenant, l’I.S.,” Internationale situationniste 9 (1964): 367–69; and Sadler, The Situationist City, 161n11.

29. McDonough, Guy Debord, ix–xx.

30. See, for example, René Viénet, “The Situationists and New Forms of Action Against Politics and Art,” in Knabb, The Situationist International Anthology, 213–15.

31. Retort [Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts], Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (London: Verso, 2005), 173.

33. Ulrike Meinhof, “Warenhausbrandstiftung,” in Ulrike Meinhof, Dokumente einer Rebellion (Hamburg: Konkret, 1972), 87.

38. Kelly Baum, “The Sex of the Situationist International,” October 126 (Fall 2008): 24.

39. In her study of chemistry and aesthetics, Esther Leslie discovers an affinity between the Situationists’ interest in the looted air conditioners of Watts and the Cold War politics of the 1960s. Esther Leslie, Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art, and the Chemical Industry (London: Reaktion Books, 2005).

40. “The Decline and Fall,” 157.

43. Ivan Chtcheglov, “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” in Knabb, The Situationist International Anthology, 3.

44. Debord, “In girum imus,” 183.

45. For example, Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Group, 93.

46. The fashion world has taken some of its cues from this cultural moment. Editors of the German lifestyle magazine Tussi Deluxe ran a “terrorist couture” feature in 2001; the design house Comme des Garçons ran a pop-up Guerrilla Store in Berlin in 2004; and the Hamburg boutique Maegde u. Knechte sold underwear silk-screened with the logo “Prada Meinhof.”

47. Asger Jorn, “Guy Debord et le problème du maudit,” in Contre le cinéma, by Guy Debord (Aarhus, Denmark: Institut Scandinave de vandalisme comparé, 1964), 3–8.

48. Knabb, The Situationist International Anthology, 88; and “La cinquième conférence de l’I.S. à Göteborg,” Internationale situationniste 7 (April 1962): 26–27.

49. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon, 1964), 12, 22, 64.

50. Jürgen Habermas, “Die Scheinrevolution und ihre Kinder,” in Kleine politische Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981), 249–60.

51. For overviews of the June 2 Movement, see Peter Brückner and Barbara Sicherman, Solidarität und Gewalt (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1974); and Ralf Reinders and Ronald Fritzsch, Die Bewegung 2. Juni (Berlin: ID-Archiv, 1995).

52. Jürgen Habermas, “Kongreß ‘Hochschule und Demokratie,’” in Kleine politische Schriften, 205–16.

53. Theodor W. Adorno, “Letter to Herbert Marcuse, 6 August 1969,” trans. Esther Leslie, New Left Review 233 (January/February 1999): 136.

54. Jürgen Habermas, Protestbewegung und Hochschulreform (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969), 27, also cited in Thomas Hecken, Avantgarde und Terrorismus: Rhetorik der Intensität und Programme der Revolte von den Futuristen bis zur RAF (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2006), 8.

55. Guy Debord and Gianfranco Sanguinetti, “La pratique de la théorie,” Internationale situationniste 12 (September 1969): 90.

56. Ibid., 5. Although this argument about the pervasiveness of the SI critique enabled the group’s dissolution, Debord amplified his call for scrutiny in subsequent writings and film work; for example, Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (London: Verso, 1990); and the posthumously broadcast television program Guy Debord, son art, son temps, directed by Guy Debord and Brigitte Cornand (Canal Plus, 1995).

57. The communiqué was written in March 1998 and first published by Reuters on April 20, 1998. Rote Armee Fraction [RAF], “Auflösungserklärung,” April 20, 1998, www.rafinfo.de/archiv/raf/raf-20–4–98.php. Translated and republished as “The Urban Guerrilla Is History,” in Arm the Spirit: Autonomist/Anti-Imperialist Journal 17 (Winter 1999/2000): 57–59.

58. RAF, “The Urban Guerrilla Is History,” 61.

59. Elsaesser, “Antigone Agonistes,” 292.

60. Several major exhibitions on the SI have been organized in North America and Europe, including On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International, 1957–1972 at the Institutes of Contemporary Art in Boston and London in 1989 and In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni: The Lost Paradise of the Situationist International at the Central Museum in Utrecht in 2007.

1. Ulrike Meinhof, “aus der zeit 16.6.72–8.2.73,” Me,U 009–002, Archiv des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung (HIS Archiv). Reprinted as “Brief einer Gefangenen aus dem toten Trakt,” in Ulrike Marie Meinhof und die deutschen Verhältnisse, ed. Peter Brückner (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1976), 152–54. In the original: “Wärter, Besuch, Hof erscheint einem wie aus Zelluloid—/ Kopfschmerzen—/ flashs … / Das Gefühl, Zeit und Raum sind ineinander / verschachtelt—/ das Gefühl, sich in einem einem Verzerrspiegelraum zu / befinden—/ torkeln—.”

2. Margrit Schiller, “Es war ein harter Kampf um meine Erinnerung”: Ein Lebensbericht aus der RAF (Hamburg: Konkret Literatur Verlag, 2007), 138–39.

3. With regard to the semantics of the RAF and the Federal Republic’s attempts to contain it, Jeremy Varon argues that “the RAF sought to compensate for its chief political failure: the absence of a sociopolitical referent beyond itself.” See Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the 1960s and 1970s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 225.

4. Notable early analyses of von Trotta’s film include Charlotte Delorme, “Zum Film, Die bleierne Zeit von Margarethe von Trotta,” frauen und film 31 (1982): 52–55; E. Ann Kaplan, “Female Politics in the Symbolic Realm: Von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane (The German Sisters),” in Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (London: Methuen, 1983), 104–12; and Kaplan, “Discourses of Terrorism, Feminism, and the Family in von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane,” Persistence of Vision 1, no. 2 (Spring 1985): 61–68. See also Thomas Elsaesser, “Margarethe von Trotta: German Sisters—Divided Daughters,” in New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 232–38.

5. Karen Beckman, “Terrorism, Feminism, Sisters, and Twins: Building Relations in the Wake of the World Trade Center Attacks,” Grey Room 7 (Spring 2002): 24–39.

6. The prison also serves as a stage in von Trotta’s Rosa Luxemburg (1986). See Antonia Lant, “Incarcerated Space: The Repression of History in von Trotta’s Rosa Luxemburg,” in Perspectives on German Cinema, ed. Terri Ginsberg and Kirsten Thompson (New York: Prentice Hall, 1996), 361–77.

7. For an example of cinema studies with Foucauldian and Benthamite tendencies, see Mark Shiel, “Cinema and the City in History and Theory,” in Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (London: Blackwell, 2001), 1–18.

8. Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 53–54.

10. Thomas Elsaesser, “Antigone Agonistes: Urban Guerrilla or Guerrilla Urbanism? The RAF, Germany in Autumn and Death Game,” in Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity, ed. Michael Sorkin and Joan Copjec (New York: Verso, 1999), 292.

11. Influential cartographies of political space include Manuel Castells, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); and Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye (London: Faber and Faber, 1990).

12. Elsaesser, “Antigone Agonistes,” 285.

13. The Kontaktsperregesetz endured beyond the German Autumn, compromising the initiatives of outlying RAF cells and other accomplices that were active into the 1980s and 1990s. For an historical overview of the Kontaktsperregesetz, see Anna Oehmichen, “Incommunicado Detention in Germany: An Example of Reactive Anti-Terror Legislation and Long-Term Consequences,” German Law Journal 9, no. 7 (July 2008): 855–87.

14. “rede von ulrike zu der befreiung von andreas, moabit 13. september,” in Rote Armee Fraktion [RAF], texte: der RAF (Malmö: Bo Cavefors, 1977), 65. In the original: “[im antiimperialistischen kampf geht es überhaupt um gefangenenbefreiung…] aus dem gefängnis, das das system für alle ausgebeuteten und unterdrückten schichten des volkes schon immer ist[,] aus der gefangenschaft der totalen entfremdung und selbstentfremdung.”

15. Stefan Aust and Pieter Bakker-Schut have established that the RAF’s counselors facilitated illegal contacts among the Stammheim inmates. See Stefan Aust, Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Bodley Head, 1987); and Pieter Bakker-Schut, Stammheim: Der Prozeß gegen die Rote Armee Fraktion: Die notwendige Korrektur der herrschenden Meinung (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1997). Olaf Gaetje argues that Bakker-Schut’s editing of the prison documents distorts the meaning of the correspondence between the RAF and their legal counsel. See Olaf Gaetje, “Das “info”-System der RAF von 1973 bis 1977 in sprachwissenschaft licher Perspektive,” in Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus, ed. Wolfgang Kraushaar (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006).

16. If we dismiss the conjecture that prison staff killed the RAF leaders, then we should also acknowledge that the incarcerated militants received treatment in accordance with federal conventions on prison conditions. For a fuller consideration of the conditions at Stammheim, see the following: “Folter in der BRD: Zur Situation der politischen Gefangenen,” special issue, Kursbuch 32 (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1973); Sjef Teuns, “Isolation/Sensorische Deprivation: Die programmierte Folter,” in Ausgewählte Dokumente der Zeitgeschichte: BRD-RAF, ed. Christian Schneider (Cologne: GNN Verlagsgesellschaft Politische Berichte, 1987), 118–126; Heinz Brandt, “Zur Isolationshaft—Interview,” in Kuß den Boden der Freiheit: Texte der Neuen Linken (Berlin: ID-Archiv, 1991); Kurt Oesterle, Stammheim: Die Geschichte des Vollzugsbeamten Horst Buback (Tübingen: Klöpfer und Meyer, 2003), which is based on the accounts of a Stammheim warden; and Oliver Tolmein, Stammheim vergessen: Deutschlands Aufb ruch und die RAF (Hamburg: Konkret Literatur Verlag, 1992), which offers a sympathetic slant on the RAF plight.

17. Von Trotta has written about the weibliche Ästhetik of cinema in “Female Film Aesthetics,” in West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices, ed. Eric Rentschler (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988), 89–90. For a consideration of the personal/political dynamic in the film, see Ellen Seiter, “The Political Is Personal: Margarethe von Trotta’s Marianne und Juliane,” in Films for Women, ed. Charlotte Brundson (London: BFI, 1986), 109–16.

18. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Herbsttag,” in Das Buch der Bilder (Leipzig: Insel, 1935), 42. In the original: “Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr. / Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben, / Wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben / Und wird in den Alleen hin und her / Unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.”

19. Gottfried Semper, “The Principle of Dressing Has Greatly Influenced Style in Architecture and in Other Arts at All Times and Among All Peoples,” in Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, or, Practical Aesthetics, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2004), 242–55.

20. Adolf Loos, “Das Prinzip der Bekleidung,” Neue Freie Presse (September 4, 1898); translated as “The Principle of Cladding” and republished in Adolf Loos, Spoken Into the Void: Collected Essays, 1897–1900, trans. Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), 67. Mark Wigley also references this. See Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 10.

21. Wigley, White Walls, 11.

22. The coupling of architecture and clothing in Marianne and Juliane can also be seen to open a channel for Wim Wenders’s film Notebooks on Cities and Clothes (1989), which identifies parallels between the couture of Yohji Yamamoto and the cityscapes of Tokyo and Paris. Thanks to Nora Alter for this note.

23. Cited in Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Complex, 253.

24. Hans Kundnani, Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 120.

25. See Julia Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, trans. Brian O’Keeffe (New York: Semiotext[e], 2002), 120–23.

26. Examples of RAF communiqués in which the roles of victim and agent are reversed include “den antiimperialistischen kampf führen!” and “das konzept stadtguerilla,” both of which are reprinted in texte: der RAF.

27. Marianne and Juliane also incorporates brief sequences depicting Cambodian war victims.

28. A similar question guides the line of inquiry in Eric Kligerman, “The Antigone effect: Reinterring the Dead of Night and Fog in the German Autumn,” New German Critique 38, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 9–38.

29. For a critical comparison of the Stammheim and Majdanek trials, see Rebecca Wittmann, “Zweierlei Maß: Nazis und Terroristen vor westdeutschen Gerichten,” in Die RAF als Geschichte und Gegenwart, eds. Jan-Holger Kirsch and Annette Vowinckel (May 2007): 1–7, www.zeitgeschichte-online.de/themen/zweierlei-mass.

30. These controls included the addition to the Criminal Code of Sections 129, 129a, 130, and 188, what is known as the “Lex RAF.”

31. Varon, Bringing the War Home, 272.

32. “Wir werden in den Durststreik treten (Interview),” Der Spiegel 4 (January 20, 1975): 52–57. In the original: “absoluter Mangel an Einfluß auf die Masse,” “Verbindung zur Basis,” and “die Spur der Politik der RAF.”

33. Bruno, Streetwalking, 56.

34. For a critical retrospective of von Trotta’s career up to 2010, see the special issue “Margarethe von Trotta: Making Films,” Salmagundi (Fall 2009/Winter 2010): 164–65.

35. In the original: “Weg vom Fenster kriegen sie uns nicht, weil sie keine Macht über unsere Seele haben.” Jürgen Weber, Die bleierne Zeit: Ein Film von Margarethe von Trotta (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1981), 55.

1. The Lufthansa hijacking was preceded by the attack on an Air France flight to Entebbe, Uganda, in July 1976, an unsuccessful mission aimed to force the release of fifty-three “political prisoners” around the world, six of whom were RAF members. Conducted by members of the PFLP and the Revolutionary Cells, the hijacking showed the persistence of anti-Semitism in the postwar period. Wilfried Böse and Brigitte Kuhlmann, who led the Revolutionary Cells, separated Jewish from non-Jewish passengers on the plane, an act that many associate with the Selektion of inmates for execution or slave labor at Nazi death camps. As Annette Vowinckel argues, “while ‘Entebbe’ fills part of the collective memory of Jews, Israelis, and Americans, it has been replaced by ‘Mogadishu’ in Germany in order to distract the collective memory from the Nazi past and to shift attention to Arabic anti-Semitism.” She makes this point in an essay that examines filmic representations of 1970s-era aeroterrorism: Annette Vowinckel, “Skyjacking: Cultural Memory and the Movies,” in Baader-Meinhof Returns: History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism, ed. Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Ingo Cornils (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 251–68, at 251.

2. The Radikalenerlass forbids employment in the civil service and education fields to citizens considered to have “radical views,” especially members of “extremist” party organizations such as the German Communist Party (DKP) and the National Democratic Party (NPD).

3. Jürgen Habermas, “Keine Normalisierung der Vergangenheit: Rede zur Verleihung des Geschwister-Scholl Preises (18.11.1985),” in Kleine politische Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987), 11–17.

4. F. C. Delius, Mogadischu Fensterplatz (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1987).

5. Julian Preece writes that Windowseat at Mogadishu, like the rest of Delius’s Deutscher Herbst trilogy, “comments critically” on the mythologization of the West German 1970s, the RAF’s attack, and the government’s retaliation. My reading of Windowseat aligns with Preece’s acknowledgment that Delius’s writing actually “helps to create” a national mythology of victimization and redemption. See Julian Preece, Baader-Meinhof and the Novel: Narratives of the Nation/Fantasies of the Revolution, 1970–2010 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 47–64, esp. 47.

6. Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Der Auftrag, oder Vom Beobachten des Beobachters der Beobachter (Zurich: Diogenes, 1986); Dürrenmatt, The Assignment, or On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers, trans. Joel Agee (New York: Random House, 1988).

7. In the introduction to her study of the Far Left in Switzerland, Dominique Grisard provides a discursive analysis of the relationship between terrorism and gender. Dominique Grisard, Gendering Terror: Eine Geschlechtergeschichte des Linksterrorismus in der Schweiz (Frankfurt: Campus, 2011).

8. See, for example, the feature articles in “Zurück zur Weiblichkeit,” special issue, Der Spiegel 27 (June 3, 1975).

9. The lecture was translated into English and published as Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” New German Critique 22 (Winter 1981): 3–14. For a critical response to the Adorno Prize lecture and the debates it generated among European intellectuals, see Martin Jay, “Habermas and Modernism,” and Richard Rorty, “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity,” in Praxis International 4, no. 1 (April 1984): 1–14, 32–44.

10. Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 252. Herzog adds that it was in the 1980s that campaigns for the legalization of civil unions for homosexuals made substantial progress.

11. Alice Schwarzer, “Terroristinnen,” Emma (October 1977): 5. See also Gisela Diewald-Kerkmann, Frauen, Terrorismus und Justiz: Prozesse gegen weibliche Mitglieder der RAF und der Bewegung 2. Juni (Dusseldorf: Droste, 2009).

12. Margarete Mitscherlich, “Hexen oder Märtyrer?,” in Frauen und Terror: Versuche, die Beteiligung von Frauen an Gewalttaten zu erklären, ed. Susanne von Paczensky (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1978), 13–23, at 18. Also cited in Sarah Colvin, Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism (Rochester: Camden House, 2009), 192.

13. Colvin, Ulrike Meinhof, 192.

14. For a comparative analysis of female suicide bombers that engages the German armed struggle, see Mia Bloom, “Bombshells: Women and Terror,” Gender Issues 28 (2011): 1–21.

15. Here I have in mind Helma Sanders-Brahms’s film Deutschland, bleiche Mutter (Germany, Pale Mother, 1979), an important document of 1970s feminism. Sanders-Brahms’s title is the first line of Bertolt Brecht’s poem “Deutschland” from 1933.

16. Der Fall Franza was posthumously edited and published as part of Das “Todesarten”-Projekt, ed. Robert Pichl, Monika Albrecht, and Dirk Göttsche (Munich: Piper, 1995). An English translation followed: Ingeborg Bachmann, The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann, trans. Peter Filkins (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999).

17. Parts of the text follow the bureaucratic formulas of the Antrag auf Versorgung nach dem Gesetz über die Entschädigung für die Opfer von Gewalttaten (Application for Assistance according to the Law for the Compensation of Victims of Violent Acts), which was devised in accord with the Opferentschädigungsgesetz (OEG), or Victims’ Compensation Law of 1976.

18. Delius, Mogadischu Fensterplatz, 5.

19. In the original: “dunkles, schwarzes Gesicht.” Ibid., 253.

20. In the original: “alle Sorten des leiblichen Gestanks vereint und konzentriert zu einem einzigartigen Gestank, dem persönlichen Kennzeichen der Andrea Bölander. Das ist es, was von dir übrigbleiben wird, unverwechselbar, dein Gestank!” Delius, Mogadischu Fensterplatz, 191.

21. See Franz Futterknecht, “Die Inszenierung des Politischen: Delius Romane zum Deutschen Herbst,” in F. C. Delius: Studien über sein literarisches Werk, ed. Manfred Durzak and Hartmut Steineicke (Tübingen: Stauffenberg, 1997), 82, 86.

22. Delius, Mogadischu Fensterplatz, 145. Delius’s term Austauschobjekt could also be rendered as “commodity.”

24. Dürrenmatt, The Assignment, 70. In the original: “Was soll da kommen, was sollen fremde Zeiten (fremtiden) bringen? Ich weiß das nicht, ich ahne nichts. Wenn eine Kreuzspinne (edderkop ?) sich von einem festen Punkt in ihre Konsequenzen niederstürzt, da sieht sie beständig einen leeren Raum (tomt rum ?) vor sich, worin sie keinen festen Fuß (fodfaeste ?) finden kann, wie sehr sie auch zappelt.” Dürrenmatt, Der Auftrag, 75.

25. Kierkegaard published the two-volume work Either/Or under four different pseudonyms, a fact that resonates with the name-play of The Assignment. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). For a feminist analysis of Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms, see Dera Sipe, “Kierkegaard and Feminism: A Paradoxical Friendship,” Concept 27 (2004): 1–25, www.concept.journals.villanova.edu/article/download/146/117.

26. Dürrenmatt, The Assignment, 70–71. In the original: “So wie dies geht es mir; vorn beständig ein leerer Raum (tomt rum ?), was mich vorantreibt ist eine Konsequenz, die hinter (bag) mir liegt. Dieses Leben ist verkehrt (bagvendt) und rätselhaft (raedsomt ?), nicht auszuhalten.” Dürrenmatt, Der Auftrag, 75.

27. Dürrenmatt, The Assignment, 24.

28. For a detailed consideration of bodily reification in counterculture German literature, see Gerrit-Jan Berendse, “Schreiben als Körperverletzung: Zur Anthropologie des Terrors in Bernward Vespers Die Reise,” Monatsheft e 93, no. 3 (2001): 318–32.

29. Dürrenmatt, Der Auftrag, 15.

30. Louis Althusser elaborates his theory of ideology in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” first published in 1970 in La Pensée. The essay was reprinted in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 85–126.

31. Ernst von Salomon, Der Fragebogen (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1985). In 1922 von Salomon collaborated in the right-wing conspiracy to assassinate Walther Rathenau, Germany’s proassimilation Minister of Foreign affairs. Franz Futterknecht also compares Windowseat at Mogadishu to von Salomon’s The Questionnaire. Futterknecht, “Die Inszenierung des Politischen,” 82.

32. Von Salomon’s cynicism about administrative research was substantively prefigured in Adorno’s writings from the mid-1940s. Two examples of Adorno’s critiques of empiricism and the use of questionnaires and other new methods of sociology are Minima Moralia, especially early drafts of the aphorism “Procrustes,” and his correspondence with Paul Lazarsfeld about the Princeton Radio Research Project. This stance is discussed in David Jenemann, Adorno in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

33. Ernst Nolte, “Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will: Eine Rede, die geschrieben, aber nicht gehalten werden konnte,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 6, 1986, reprinted in Rudolph Augstein, ed., Historikerstreit: Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung (Munich: Piper, 1987), 45.

34. A useful English-language analysis of Habermas and Nolte within the Historikerstreit is presented in Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).

35. Examples of mid-1980s historical research on sexual violence against German women during and After the war include Erika M. Hoerning, “Frauen als Kriegsbeute: Der Zwei-Fronten Krieg: Beispiele aus Berlin,” in “Wir kriegen jetzt andere Zeiten”: Auf der Suche nach der Erfahrung des Volkes in antifaschistischen Ländern: Lebensgeschichte und Sozialkultur im Ruhrgebiet, 1930–60, vol. 3, ed. Lutz Niethammer and Alexander von Plato (Berlin: Verlag JHW Nachfolger, 1985), 327–46; and Ingrid Schmidt-Harzbach, “Eine Woche im April: Berlin 1945: Vergewaltigung als Massenschicksal,” Feministische Studien 5 (1984): 51–62. Examples of memoirs on the Red Army rapes are the republication of the book from 1968 by Margaret Boveri, Tage des Überlebens: Berlin 1945 (Munich: Piper, 1985); and Inge Deutschkron , Ich trug den gelben Stern (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1987).

36. Atina Grossman points out that these rapes weren’t always silenced; in the first postwar years, many spoke openly of the crimes, public policies were implemented to protect the women harmed by them, and even antiabortion laws were lift ed to deal with the many unwanted pregnancies that resulted from the rapes. Atina Grossman, “A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers,” October 72 (Spring 1995): 42–63.

38. The release of Liberators Take Liberties prompted debate among feminists. See, in particular, Gertrud Koch, “Kurzschluss der Perspektiven,” Frankfurter Rundschau (November 17–18, 1992); and Helke Sander, “Du machst es Dir viel zu einfach,” Frankfurter Rundschau (November 26, 1992).

39. Annette Michelson, Andreas Huyssen, Stuart Liebman, Eric Santner, and Silvia Kolbowski, “Further Thoughts on Helke Sander’s Project,” October 72 (Spring 1995): 89–113.

40. Helke Sander and Barbara Johr, eds., BeFreier und BeFreite: Krieg, Vergewaltigungen, Kinder (Munich: Verlag Antje Kunstmann, 1992), 11.

41. Sander’s collaborator Barbara Johr estimates the number of rapes in “Die Ereignisse in Zahlen,” in ibid., 46–73. A substantive overview of the casualties is presented in Norman M. Naimark, “Soviet Soldiers, German Women, and the Problem of Rape,” in The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–49 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 69–140.

42. Grossman, “A Question of Silence,” 46.

43. With reference to the situation during and just After liberation, Grossman argues that German women felt “confirmed as well as violated” by the assaults of Red Army soldiers. Ibid., 53.

44. Margaret Scanlan, Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 109.

45. Dürrenmatt, The Assignment, 118. In the original: “gierig, fleischig, leer.” Dürrenmatt, Der Auftrag, 122.

46. Dürrenmatt, The Assignment, 118. In the original: “die Leiche lag zwischen den Heiligen.” Dürrenmatt, Der Auftrag, 122.

47. In the original: “ob vielleicht alle Männer jetzt so aussahen wie der, wie Jassid.” Delius, Mogadischu Fensterplatz, 261.

48. In the original: “Jassid und allen Jassidmenschen.” Delius, Mogadischu Fensterplatz, 261.

49. Edward Said, “Islam Through Western Eyes,” Nation (April 26, 1980): 488–91, at 488.

50. Dürrenmatt, The Assignment, 120. In the original: “hatte es alles gewünscht, was ihr widerfuhr, die Vergewaltigung und den Tod.” Dürrenmatt, Der Auftrag, 124.

51. Dürrenmatt, The Assignment, 120. In the original: “lustverzerrt” Dürrenmatt, Der Auftrag, 124.

1. For a concise overview of Meinhof’s writing and cultural influence, see Karin Bauer, ed., “In Search of Ulrike Meinhof,” in Everybody Talks About the Weather … We Don’t: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), 12–99.

2. After early performances of Ulrike Meinhof at the Bremer Theater in 1990, the Tanz-theaterstück premiered at the Volksbühne in East Berlin in 1993 and was restaged there in 1999 and the early 2000s. It subsequently moved on to Bonn and Darmstadt. In 1987 at the Theater der Stadt Heidelberg, Kresnik choreographed and produced a preliminary work based on Meinhof’s life. Although it had the same title, the form and content of this first production differed from those at Bremen and Berlin. The Volksbühne performances were the first to attract sustained critical attention, as is evidenced by the publication of a special section on the Tanztheaterstück in Theater heute. See Michael Merschmeier, “Der Gesellschaft stanz: Johann Kresnik oder Ein Lobpreis der politischen Choreographie,” and Michael Wildenhain, “Fleischerhaken, postmodern: Michael Wildenhain contra Johann Kresnik’s Ulrike Meinhof,” Theater heute: Jahrbuch (1990): 76–79, 80–81.

3. Recently several critical biographies of Meinhof’s life and writings have appeared, for example, Jutta Ditfurth, Ulrike Meinhof: Die Biografie (Berlin: Ullstein, 2007); and Sarah Colvin, Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism (Rochester: Camden House, 2009). See also Leith Passmore, Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction: Performing Terrorism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

4. Hans Finkemeyer and Rudolf Kautzky, “Das Kavernom des Sinus cavernosus,” Zentralblatt für Neurochirurgie 29, no. 1 (1968): 23–30. Meinhof is identified by the initials R. U., which stand for her married name at the time, Ulrike Röhl.

5. Bettina Röhl, “Warum ging Ulrike Meinhof in den Untergrund? Das Hirn der RAF,” Rheinische Post (November 9, 2002).

6. In a related vein, Patricia Melzer, in her study of women in the armed struggle, poses the rhetorical question of whether terrorism and maternity “can be imagined only as irreconcilable.” Patricia Melzer, “Maternal Ethics and Political Violence: The ‘Betrayal’ of Motherhood Among the Women of the RAF and June 2 Movement,” Seminar 47, no. 1 (February 2011): 81–102, at 82. Drawing upon writings by Meinhof, Ensslin, and other militant women, Melzer considers both the social compulsion to reproduce children in postwar Germany and the widespread tendency to pathologize militancy. Her article presents the case of the German Far Left as a challenge to the assumption that women’s experience of political subjectivity is necessarily grounded in “maternal ethics.” Ibid., 86.

7. For an account of this episode, see Gerd Koenen, Vesper, Ensslin, Baader (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2003).

8. After the autopsy, the neuropathologist Jürgen Peiffer obtained Meinhof’s brain for further research in his Tübingen laboratory. He later transferred it to the Magdeburg laboratory of Bernhard Bogerts. Bettina Röhl was the first to contest Peiffer’s and Bogerts’s illegal possession of the specimen. For an overview of the handling of Meinhof’s brain, her possible neuropathology, and the question of Meinhof’s mental fitness at her Stammheim trials, see Christian Füller, “Ein Gehirn auf Abwegen,” die tageszeitung, November 13, 2002, 3.

9. Bettina Röhl, “Die durchgeknallte Republik: Ist der deutsche Terrorismus ohne Medien denkbar? Oder: Die Geschichte des 26 Jahre unterdrückten, medizinischen Gehirnbefunds von Ulrike Meinhof.” The site bettinaroehl.de is not active at the time of publication.

10. Sophocles, A ntigone, in The Theban Plays, trans. E. F. Watling (London: Penguin, 1974), 159.

11. Bettina Röhl published one of her first accounts of Ulrike Meinhof’s life in an article in Der Spiegel in 1995, which she coauthored with her sister and a staff writer for the same magazine. See Bettina Röhl, Regine Röhl, and Carola Niezborala, “Unsere Mutter: ‘Staatsfeind Nr. 1,’” Der Spiegel 29 (July 17, 1995): 88–109.

12. An extended examination of Fischer’s foreign policy is included in Hans Kundnani, Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). For an analysis of Fischer’s early years in the leftist opposition, see Wolfgang Kraushaar, Fischer in Frankfurt: Karriere eines Außenseiters (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001).

13. Together with Gudrun Ensslin, Irene Goergens, Ingrid Schubert, and another, still-unidentified man, Meinhof was part of the group that freed Baader in 1970. It is alleged that the male comrade, not Meinhof, shot and wounded Georg Linke, who was employed to guard Baader.

14. After the Ohnesorg shooting in 1967, Ensslin was quoted as saying, “This fascist state means to kill us all. We must organize resistance. Violence is the only way to answer violence.” Attributed to Ensslin by Stefan Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Bodley Head, 1987), 44.

15. Several of Meinhof’s texts ratcheted up the group’s terror, including her communiqués on the series of fatal bombings in May 1972 and her essay commending the Black September attacks at the Munich Olympics later that same year. The violent potential of Meinhof’s writing is evident in the Erklärungen that followed the attacks in 1972 on U.S. and West German targets as well as in the text “die aktion des schwarzen september in münchen: zur strategie des antiimperialistischen kampfes (November 1972),” which responds to the assassination of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists. These are reprinted in Martin Hoffman, ed., Rote Armee Fraktion: Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF (Berlin: ID-Verlag, 1997), 145–48, 151–77.

16.Tanztheater is a dramatic form that was influenced by the expressionist choreography of the 1920s of Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman, as well as the politicized street theater of the 1960s. It aims to establish a visceral and often political connection between the performers and audience. Incorporating rehearsed and improvised sequences, Tanztheater takes on the rhythm and cadences of spontaneous “happenings.” Kresnik’s often disturbing work synthesizes elements of ballet, Butoh, and performance art to weave biographical narratives about figures whose work has changed Western culture and society. Besides Meinhof, Kresnik has also taken as his muses other prominent women: Sylvia Plath, Frida Kahlo, and Rosa Luxemburg, as well as Hannelore Kohl, the wife of the former chancellor Helmut Kohl.

17. Joschka Fischer, Mein langer Lauf zu mir selbst (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1999). The book’s title recalls Rudi Dutschke, Mein langer Marsch: Reden, Schriften und Tagebücher aus zwanzig Jahren, ed. Gretchen Dutschke-Klotz, Helmut Gollwit zer, and Jürgen Miermeister (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980). It also plays on the problem of “the long march through the institutions” that was central to leftist debates in the 1960s and 1970s.

18. Already in 1956, Jürgen Habermas detected this tendency: Germany’s booming economy was pulling leisure pursuits into the cipher of “consumption-time,” eradicating whatever vestiges of folk and mass culture that remained untainted by the Nazis. See Jürgen Habermas, “Notizen zum Verhältnis von Kultur und Konsum,” Merkur 10 (1956): 212–28, at 216.

19. Fischer, Mein langer Lauf, 17, 19.

20. Fassbinder’s reflections on subject formation are analyzed in Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996).

21. George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985).

22. Leith Passmore, “The Art of Hunger: Self-Starvation in the Red Army Faction,” German History 27, no. 1 (2009): 32–59, at 32, 52.

24. Buchloh describes this condition in order to contextualize the work of Gerhard Richter. See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive,” October 88 (Spring 1999): 117–45.

25. The Spontis were one of several militant groups to shoot off from the collapse of the Socialist Student Union; they were inclined to “spontaneous” acts of dissidence (hence the name), such as squatting and civil disobedience.

26. Quoted in Dirk Kurbjuweit and Günther Latsch, “Ich hab gekämpft,” Der Spiegel 2 (2001): 29.

27. The charges against Fischer were dropped, either for lack of evidence or on the ground of self-defense. For a lucid account in English of Fischer’s militancy and subsequent political career, see Paul Berman, “The Passion of Joschka Fischer,” New Republic (August 27 and September 3, 2001): 36–59.

28. The rights to reprint Thomas Hesterberg’s photograph could not be obtained.

29. Reiche writes: “‘Sexuality makes you free’ fits with this picture as well as ‘Work makes you free’ fits with Auschwitz.” Reimut Reiche, “Sexuelle Revolution—Erinnerung an einen Mythos,” in Die Früchte der Revolte: Über die Veränderung der politischen Kultur durch die Studentenbewegung, ed. Lothar Baier (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 1988), 65. This translation is from Herzog, Sex After Fascism, 405.

30. In Meinhof’s original terms: “der votzenchauvinismus ist was fürchterliches.” Ulrike Meinhof, “naja der votzenchauvinismus,” Archiv des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung, HIS Ba,A 002–004. Sylvia Schmitz-Burgard identifies a feminist argument in Meinhof’s article “Falsches Bewusstsein” (1968). See Sylvia Schmitz-Burgard, Gewaltiges Schreiben gegen Gewalt (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2011), 23–29.

31. In the original:

32. This is translation is from Colvin, Ulrike Meinhof, 200. Meinhof’s statement, in the original, reads, “scheiß auf die gleichberechtigung der frau.” Meinhof, “hier meine selbstkritik,” Archiv des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung, HIS Me,U 025–005.

33. Sibylla Flügge, “1968 und die Frauen: Ein Blick in die Beziehungskiste,” in Gender und Soziale Praxis, ed. Margit Göttert and Karin Walser (Berlin: Ulrike Helmer Verlag, 2002), 264–65. Thanks to Dagmar Herzog for referring me to this article.

34. In her discussion of Oskar Negt’s commentary on the 1968 generation, Julia Hell notes that the New Left had an ambivalent relationship to political violence. As much as they romanticized the prospects for cultural revolution, they also suffered a sense of “macho guilt” about not having met the RAF’s challenge to take up arms. See Julia Hell, “Terror and Solidarity,” Telos (October 25–26, 2006), www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=165; as well as Oskar Negt, Achtundsechszig: Politische Intellektuelle und die Macht (Göttingen: Steidl, 1995), 264–65.

35. The original reads: “In unserer Gesellschaft finden sich immer hunderttausend Männer, die man (Mann!) für ein Auschwitz, Gulag oder Vietnam braucht.… Es gibt ja keine andere Wahl mehr, Brüder: entweder schaffen wir’s, die Macker und Gewaltmuft is, auf die andere Seite der Barrikade zu kommen, zu den Frauen und Kindern, oder wir gehen an der Schizophrenie unserer eignenen Befreiungsansprüche und unserer Männlichkeit zugrunde.” Fischer plays on the German homonyms man and der Mann (“one” and “man” in English). Joschka Fischer in Autonomie (1977), cited in Christian Schmidt, “Wir sind die Wahnsinnigen :” Joschka Fischer und seine Frankfurter Gang (Munich: Econ-Verlag, 1999), 111. For an overview of the German autonomist movement, see Geronimo, Fire and Flames: A History of the German Autonomist Movement, trans. Gabriel Kuhn (Oakland, Calif.: PM Press, 2012), 63–66.

36. Flügge makes a similar point. Flügge, “1968 und die Frauen,” 281.

37. Joschka Fischer in Autonomie 1977; cited in Schmidt, “Wir sind die Wahnsinnigen,” 111.

38. In 1968, for example, Meinhof wrote several columns for konkret that examine the status of women, including “Falsches Bewusstsein,” “Die Frauen im SDS oder In eigener Sache,” “Wasserwerfer—auch gegen Frauen,” and “Warenhaus-brandstiftung.” English translations have been published in Bauer, Everybody Talks About the Weather. Meinhof also wrote and directed the film Bambule (Riot), about girls in a reform school, for German television. The film Bambule was scheduled for broadcast in May 1970, but executives shelved it After Meinhof forced Baader’s escape from prison. The script was first published in 1971, but the program was not aired until 1997. The script was republished in 2012 as part of documenta 13. See Ulrike Meinhof, Bambule: Fürsorge, Sorge für wen? (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 1971) and Ulrike Meinhof, Bambule: The Script/ Das Regiebuch. 100 Notes—100 Thoughts = 100 Notizen—100 Gedanken, No. 092 (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012).

39. Alan Rosenfeld’s reference here is to the notion, prevalent in the 1970s, that terrorism was the product of an “Exzess der Befreiung der Frau.” As I indicate in the introduction, this expression is attributed to Günther Nollert, President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

40. Alan Rosenfeld, “‘Anarchist Amazons’: The Gendering of Radicalism in 1970s West Germany,” Contemporary European History 19, no. 4 (2010): 351–74, at 373.

41. Employing the concepts of psychoanalysis and critical theory, Dominick LaCapra detects a break at the shifting margins of two mnemonic modes: the “acting out” of Holocaust traumas through repetition and the possibility of their being “worked through.” Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 64–66, 205–23. LaCapra’s central reference is Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” (1914), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1958), 12:147–56.

42. LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust, 65–66.

43. Thanks to Jeremy Varon for helping to develop this point.

44. Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 10, 350.

45. Birgit Haas, “Terrorism and Theatre in Germany,” in Baader-Meinhof Returns: History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism, ed. Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Ingo Cornils (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 191–210, at 206.

46. Referring to the work of Marc Fischer, Jarausch and Geyer also employ the term “negative foil.” Jarausch and Geyer, Shattered Past, 29n85. See Marc Fischer, After the Wall: Germany, the Germans, and the Burdens of History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).

47. Freud uses the concept of the “phallic mother” in several of his studies. See, for example, his use of the concept in his elaboration on the castration complex and disavowal in Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” (1918), in The Standard Edition, 17:1–122.

1. Anders Stephanson, “Johan Grimonprez: Deitch Projects,” Artforum International 36 (December 1997): 109.

2. Note the use of all lowercase letters in the exhibition title “documenta.” I discuss the convention of kleinschreibung in chapter 1. Herfried Münkler analyzes the rise, fall, and return of aeroterrorism in Münkler, “Ältere und jüngere Formen des Terrorismus: Strategie und Organisationsstruktur,” in Herausforderung Terrorismus: Die Zukunft der Sicherheit, ed. Werner Weidenfeld (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaft en, 2004), 29–43.

3. A precursor to Regarding Terror was the film series Red Army Friction held in 2002 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. The ICA followed this with another series in 2007, Baader’s Angels: Women’s Roles in German Terrorism Films.

4. Andreas Elter examines the RAF’s use of public communications and media in Elter, Propaganda der Tat: Die RAF und die Medien (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008).

5. A useful study of the relationship between terrorism and the German media is Klaus Weinhauer, Jörg Requate, and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, eds., Terrorismus in der Bundesrepublik: Medien, Staat und Subkulturen in den 70er Jahren (Frankfurt: Campus, 2008).

6. Raymond Williams elaborates the concept of the cultural dominant in Williams, “Dominant, Residual and Emergent,” in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121–27.

7. Scores of articles covering the response of victims’ families to the Kunst-Werke project appeared in 2003, including “Geld-Vergabe an RAF-Ausstellung geprüft,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 12, 2003, 4; and “Angst vor der Bildermaschine,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 25, 2003, 11. A number of these articles were informed by the press releases of parliamentary organizations, such as the CSU Landesgruppe. See their “Presse Mitteilung 432/2003: RAF-Ausstellung” (July 22, 2003).

8. Reporters from both the national and tabloid presses published a range of articles on the Kunst-Werke proposal in the context of Berlin’s cultural financing crisis. See, for example, Mainhardt Graf Nayhauß, “Warum zahlt Berlin 100 000 Euro für Skandal-Ausstellung über RAF?,” Bild (July 22, 2003): 2; and Heribert Prantl, “Auf dem Grund der Geschichte der Republik: Warum Deutschland eine Ausstellung über die RAF braucht,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 21, 2003, 4.

9. Many artists donated works to the auction. See Clemens Niedenthal, “Alternative Finanzierung,” Berliner Zeitung, January 19, 2005, www.berliner-zeitung.de/archiv/alternative-finanzierung,10810590,10250320.html.

10. Felix Ensslin, “post PR,” email to author, April 10, 2004.

11. For an overview of Kraushaar’s criticism of Regarding Terror, see Frank Kallensee and Jan Sternberg, “Kunst allein kann den Terror nicht erklären: Protest-Forscher Wolfgang Kraushaar zur RAF-Ausstellung,” Märkische Allgemeine Zeitung, February 22, 2005, 9.

12. As discussed in “Alles nur Stimmungsmache: Wirbel um die RAF-Ausstellung,” die tageszeitung, July 24, 2003, 6. For a discussion of the relationship between Jan Philipp Reemtsma and the Kunst-Werke, see Annette Vowinckel, “Der Terror und die Bilder: Anmerkungen zum Verhältnis von Kunst und Geschichte anläßlich der Berliner RAF-Ausstellung,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 34 (Göttingen: Wallstein-Verlag, 2006), 309–29.

13. Conversation with Felix Ensslin, New York City, February 8, 2004.

14. Ensslin, “post PR,” email to author, April 10, 2004.

15. Rosalind Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” October 54 (Fall 1990): 3–17.

16. Feldmann also published the images in book form: Hans-Peter Feldmann, Die Toten, 1967–1993: Studentenbewegung, APO, Baader-Meinhof, Bewegung 2. Juni, Revolutionäre Zellen, RAF, … (Dusseldorf: Feldmann, 1998). Feldmann doesn’t permit the reproduction of Die Toten in any form, hence the absence of illustrations of the work in this chapter.

17. In their discussion of The Dead, Inge Stephan and Andrea Tacke call the source photographs “objet[s] trouvé[s].” Inge Stephan and Alexandra Tacke, “Einleitung,” Nachbilder der RAF, ed. Inge Stephan and Alexandra Tacke (Vienna: Böhlau, 2008), 7–23, at 13.

18. The deaths of Benno Ohnesorg and Wolfgang Grams are discussed in chapters 1 and 2.

19. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive,” October 88 (Spring 1999): 117–45.

20. Ibid., 134. Richter began Atlas in the 1960s, shortly After emigrating from the GDR to the FRG.

21. Sheets 475–79 are followed by a series of sketches of Richter’s studio and house, made in 1994, and then sheet 482 is another, earlier sketch of a table, dating from 1987.

22. Jefferson Chase, “The Art of Terror: An Exhibit About a Group of’70s Homegrown Terrorists Divides Germany,” Boston Globe, February 13, 2005.

23. Klaus Biesenbach, “Engel der Geschichte, oder Den Schrecken anderer betrachten, oder Bilder in den Zeiten des Terrors,” in Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Die RAF Ausstellung, ed. Klaus Biesenbach (Göttingen: Steidl, 2005), 11.

24. Chase, “The Art of Terror.”

25. Interestingly, both of these works were included in documenta X in 1997. The entire Atlas project (up to that point) was installed so that it allowed the viewer to move around among the various sheets, skipping forward or tracking back to consider the network of associations and experiences that obtains among the images.

26. For example, Rosie Millard, “It’s the Thought That Counts,” Art Review 50 (April 1998): 28–29.

27. Here Adorno refers to Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1979).

28. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 182. For another elaboration of this section of Aesthetic Theory, see Charity Scribner, “From Document to Documenta: A German Return to Truth and Reconciliation,” Rethinking Marxism 16, no. 1 (January 2004): 49–56.

29. Yvonne Rainer, “Working Title: Journeys from Berlin/1971,” October 9 (Summer 1979): 80–106, at 83.

30. Vito Acconci, the artist, and Amy Taubin, the film critic, play these parts.

31. On objects and object relations in Journeys, see Claudia Mesch’s feminist analysis “Berlin and Post-Meinhof Feminism: Yvonne Rainer’s Journeys from Berlin/ 1971,” in Berlin: Divided City, 1945–89, ed. Philip Broadbent and Sabine Hake (Oxford: Berghahn, 2010), 135–44.

32. Indeed the art historian Philip Glahn has made exactly this point in his recent study of Journeys. See Philip Glahn, “Brechtian Journeys: Yvonne Rainer’s Film as Counterpublic Art,” Art Journal 68, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 76–93.

33. Noël Carroll, “Interview with a Woman Who …,” Millennium Film Journal 7, no. 9 (Fall 1980/Winter 1981): 37–68, at 51; also cited in Glahn, “Brechtian Journeys,” 80–81.

34. Dominique Grisard discusses the history of Russian women and the “roots” of terrorism. See Dominique Grisard, Gendering Terror: Eine Geschlechtergeschichte des Linksterrorismus in der Schweiz (Frankfurt: Campus, 2011), 44–50.

35. Yvonne Rainer, The Films of Yvonne Rainer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 166–67.

36. Ibid. Reprinted with permission of the author.

37. Theodor W. Adorno, “Objectivity and Reification,” in Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury, 1973), 189–92. My reading of this section is informed by the analyses of Susan Buck-Morss and Simon Jarvis. See Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), 24–25; and Simon Jarvis, “Negative Dialectic as Metacritique,” in Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), 148–74.

38. Hegel’s reading of Antigone and his wider reflections on gender are a major topos of feminist philosophy and criticism. The responses have ranged widely and include: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (London: Vintage, 1989), esp. 62–139; Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992), especially 242–59; Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); and much of Luce Irigaray’s writing, for example, Irigaray, “The Eternal Irony of the Community,” in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 214–26.

39. Patricia Mills, “Hegel’s Antigone,” in Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel, ed. Patricia Mills (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 59–88, at 77.

40. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 12.

42. See also Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 191.

43. It appears that Žižek’s “Das Unbehagen in der Demokratie” was excerpted from a larger project and reworked for the Kunst-Werke show. Many points in the essay align with Žižek’s “From Politics to Biopolitics … and Back,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, nos. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2004): 501–21.

44. Biesenbach, “Engel der Geschichte,” 11.

45. Žižek, “Das Unbehagen,” 202.

47. Ulrich Schneckener, Transnationaler Terrorismus: Charakter und Hintergründe des “neuen” Terrorismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006), 25–27. As I noted, Habermas also diagnosed the actions of the German Far Left, as early as 1968, as “masochistic.”

48. Žižek, “Das Unbehagen,” 203.

49. A critical account of the RAF’s various appropriations of US-Black Nationalism and other liberation movements has yet to be written. My statement is an inversion of Gil Scott-Heron’s formulation in the poem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” in Now and Then: The Poems of Gil Scott-Heron (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2001), 77–79.

50. Jean Baudrillard considers the impact of the RAF on postwar media society in Europe in Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, Or, The End of the Social, and Other Essays, trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston, and Paul Patton (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), 113–23.

51. Sara Hakemi, “Terrorismus und Avantgarde,” in Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus, ed. Wolfgang Kraushaar (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006), 604–19. Another scholarly article that directly addresses the Kunst-Werke show is Heinz-Peter Preußer, “Warum Mythos Terrorismus? Versuch einer Begriffsklärung,” in Mythos Terrorismus: Vom Deutschen Herbst zum 11. September, ed. Matteo Galli und Heinz-Peter Preußer (Heidelberg: Winter, 2006), 69–84.

52. For reflections on “the most radical gesture” see Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (London: Routledge, 1992).

53. Don DeLillo, Mao II (New York: Penguin, 1991), 72.

54. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 259.

55. DeLillo, Mao II, 157.

1. In the original, “Die Frage: was wäregewesenwenn, ist aber vieldeutig—pazifistisch, platonisch, moralisch, unparteiisch.” Ulrike Meinhof, “das konzept stadtguerilla,” in texte: der RAF (Malmö: Bo Cavefors, 1977), 340. Cited in Hari Kunzru, My Revolutions (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007), unpaginated front matter.

2. Jürgen Habermas, “Die Bühne des Terrors: Ein Brief an Kurt Sontheimer,” Merkur 31, no. 353 (October 1977): 944–59.

4. Adorno introduces the concept of Entkunstung in Prisms, trans. Sherry Weber Nicholsen and Samuel Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983) and further develops it in Aesthetic Theory. See especially Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 7:32–35. Richard Wolin translates Entkunstung as “de-aestheticization” in Wolin, “The De-Aestheticization of Art: On Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie,” Telos 41 (Fall 1979): 105–27.

5. Habermas, “Die Bühne des Terrors,” 957. This notion of cultural decriminalization is to be distinguished from the highly litigious response of the German state to the threat of revolutionary violence. As I demonstrate in the introduction and chapter 1, in the 1970s, strict counterterrorism policies were implemented and new legislation was passed to contain and control the Far Left.

6. For relevant articulations of the “postideological,” see Matthias Konzett, Rhetoric of National Dissent in Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, and Elfriede Jelinek (Rochester: Camden House, 2000); and Peter M. Daly and Hans Walter Frischkopf, eds., Images of Germany: Perceptions and Conceptions (New York: Peter Lang, 2000).

7. Karin Bauer, ed., Everybody Talks About the Weather … We Don’t: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008). To support this point, Bauer refers to Jelinek’s published conversation with Nicolas Stemann, the director of the debut performances of Ulrike Maria Stuart at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg in 2006. See Ulrike Maria Stuart [performance program], Hamburg, Thalia Theater, 2006, 18. For a fuller analysis of the play, see Georgina Paul, “The Terrorist in the Theatre: Elfriede Jelinek’s/Nicolas Stemann’s Ulrike Maria Stuart,” German Life and Letters 64 (December 2010): 122–32.

8. In fact, Bettina Röhl intervened into the production of Ulrike Maria Stuart. Claming that she was unfairly represented by one of the characters in Jelinek’s play, Meinhof’s daughter tried to block its run at the Thalia. Although Stemann, the director, prevailed with the plan to perform the drama, Jelinek opted not to publish the script in order to avoid a lawsuit by Röhl.

9. In the original, “Die Stadtguerilla in Form der RAF ist nun Geschichte.” RAF, “Auflösungserklärung,” April 20, 1998, www.rafinfo.de/archiv/raf/raf-20–4–98.php. For an analysis of how and why terrorist organizations die out, see Audrey Kurth Cronin, How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Cronin attributes the RAF’s failures to two main factors, weak intergenerational transmission of goals and objectives and the loss of contact with a broader constituency. Ibid., 97–98, 111.

10. In the original: “Die Revolution sagt: / ich war / ich bin / ich werde sein[.]” RAF, “Auflösungserklärung.” See also Rosa Luxemburg, “Die Ordnung herrscht in Berlin,” Die Rote Fahne 14 (January 14, 1919), republished in Rosa Luxemburg, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, ed. Günter Radczun (Berlin: Dietz, 1970), 533–38, at 538.

11. Wolfgang Kraushaar, “Die RAF wird nie Geschichte sein,” Stern.de, March 21, 2007, www.stern.de/politik/deutschland/politologe-kraushaar-die-raf-wird-niegeschichte-sein-585294.html.

12. Thomas Elsaesser, Terror und Trauma: Zur Gewalt des Vergangenen in der BRD (Berlin: Kadmos, 2007), 17.

13. Christiane Walerich, “Die Linke dient heute nur noch als Karikatur: Interview mit Fatih Akın,” September 20, 2007, www.woxx.lu/id_article/2385.

14. In the original:

Associates of the film production company Corazón International have established that Nejat’s lines were drawn from a lecture by Jan Philipp Reemtsma. Establishing the source for this citation has stimulated a lively discussion on the listserve german-studies@jiscmail.ac.uk. Akın’s screenplay attributes this quotation to Goethe, but the only published source for this attribution can’t be corroborated. The citation appears to come from a paper published on the website for the Humboldt-Gesellschaft in 1995: Helge Martens, “Goethe und der Basaltstreit,” 11. Sitzung der Humboldt-Gesellschaft (June 13, 1995), www.humboldtgesellschaft.de/inhalt.php?name=goethe.

In this paper, Martens attributes the same passage to Goethe, but cites only Richard Friedenthal’s mention of it in Goethe: Sein Leben und seine Zeit (Munich: Piper, 1963). No page number is given, and a search of the most comprehensive database of Goethe’s works, goethe.chadwyck.com, doesn’t support the claim that he wrote these lines. For this collegial inquiry, my thanks to Ronald Speirs, Howard Gaskill, Alan Ng, Jo Catling, John Wieczorek, Johan Siebers, Matthew Bell, Jim Reed, Dan Wilson, Michael Gratzke, Nils Reschke, and especially Karin Yesilada. The relevant online postings are at www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgibin/webadmin?A1=ind0807&L=german-studies.

15. Akın audited Jan Philipp Reemtsma’s course at the University of Hamburg in order to research the role of Nejat. For this helpful note I thank Karin Yesilada. Reemtsma’s criticism of Regarding Terror is discussed in chapter 7.

16. Cited in Klaus Biesenbach, “Engel der Geschichte, oder Den Schrecken anderer betrachten; oder, Bilder in den Zeiten des Terrors,” in Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Die RAF Ausstellung, vol. 2, ed. Klaus Biesenbach (Göttingen: Steidl, 2005), 11.

17. Ulrike Meinhof, “Das Konzept Stadtguerilla,” in texte: der RAF (Malmö: Bo Cavefors, 1977), 337.

19. Rudi Dutschke and Hans-Jürgen Krahl, “Organisationsreferat,” in Die Studentenbewegungen in den Vereinigten Staaten und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland der sechziger Jahre: Eine Untersuchung hinsichtlich ihrer Beeinflussung durch Befreiungsbewegungen und-theorien aus der Dritten Welt, ed. Ingo Juchler (Berlin: Duncker und Humboldt, 1996), 242. Also cited in Jamie Trnka, “The West German Red Army Faction and Its Appropriation of Latin American Urban Guerrilla Struggles,” in Counter-Cultures in Germany and Central Europe: From Sturm und Drang to Baader-Meinhof, ed. Steve Giles and Maike Oergel (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003), 320.

20. As discussed in chapter 1. Miriam Hansen identifies Kluge’s tendency to privilege women’s sensuality over their sexuality in Miriam Hansen, “Cooperative Auteur Cinema and Oppositional Public Sphere: Alexander Kluge’s Contribution to Germany in Autumn,” New German Critique 24/25 (Autumn 1981/Winter 1982): 36–56, at 52n34.

21. Alice Schwarzer, “Terroristinnen,” Emma (October 1977): 5.

23. Gudrun Ensslin, “Zieht den Trennungsstrich, jede Minute”: Briefe an ihre Schwester Christiane und ihren Bruder Gottfried aus dem Gefängnis, 1972–1973, ed. Christiane Ensslin and Gottfried Ensslin (Hamburg: Konkret Literatur Verlag, 2005).

24. Marlis Dürkop refers to this threshold as “[eine] Schwelle politischer Abstinenz.” See Marlis Dürkop, “Frauen als Terroristinnen. Zur Besinnung auf das soziologische Paradigma,” Kriminologisches Journal 10, no. 4 (1978): 264–80, at 276. Dürkop’s study is often cited in literature on the RAF. See, for example, Sarah Colvin, “‘Wir Frauen haben kein Vaterland:’ Ulrike Marie Meinhof, Emily Wilding Davison and the ‘Homelessness’ of Women Revolutionaries,” German Life and Letters 64, no. 1 (January 2011): 108–21, at 114.