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

after the red army faction

charity scribner

after the red army faction

gender, culture, and militancy

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS  NEW YORK

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

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NEW YORK   CHICHESTER, WEST SUSSEX

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Copyright © 2015 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-53829-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Scribner, Charity.

After the Red Army faction : gender, culture, and militancy / Charity Scribner.

      pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16864-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53829-9 (e-book)

1. Rote Armee Fraktion—In literature—History—Exhibitions. 2. Women terrorists in literature—Germany (West)—History—Exhibitions. 3. Terrorism in literature—Germany (West)—History—Exhibitions. 4. Rote Armee Fraktion—In mass media—History—Exhibitions. 5. Women terrorists in mass media—Germany (West)—History—Exhibitions. 6. Terrorism in mass media—Germany (West)—History—Exhibitions. 7. Rote Armee Fraktion—History—Exhibitions. 8. Women terrorists—Germany (West)—History—Exhibitions. 9. Terrorism—Germany (West)—History—Exhibitions. 10. Right and left (Political science)—Germany (West)—History—Exhibitions. I. Title.

HV6433.G32R673 2015

363.3250943—dc23

2014012080

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

COVER IMAGE: GERHARD RICHTER, ATLAS TAFEL 432, 1989

COVER DESIGN: CHANG JAE LEE

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To Dorothy Foster Teer

and Dorothy Scribner Foster,

my mother and my grandmother

contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Beyond Militancy

part 1. militant acts

1.  The Red Decade and Its Cultural Fallout

2.  Damaged Lives of the Far Left: Reading the RAF in Reverse

3.  Buildings on Fire: The Situationist International and the Red Army Faction

part 2. postmilitant culture

4.  The Stammheim Complex in Marianne and Juliane

5.  Violence and the Tendenzwende: Engendering Victims in the Novel and Film

6.  Anatomies of Protest and Resistance: Meinhof, Fischer

7.  Regarding Terror at the Berlin Kunst-Werke

Afterword: Signs of a New Season

Notes

Works Cited

Index

acknowledgments

When I was twelve I traveled from the United States to Germany for the first time. I spent the summer in Hamburg, where I lived with the wonderful Ruhnau family and trained with a gymnastics team. While preparing for the trip, I overheard my grandfather talk about the angry youths who lived in European cities, and how they would shoot businessmen, like him, in the knees. He probably meant the German Red Army Faction or the Italian Red Brigades.

I didn’t recall this remark until years later, in 1987, when I was studying abroad at Heidelberg University. I was well aware of anti-American sentiment among certain sectors of the student body. Some of the biggest U.S. army installations at the time were close by in Mannheim, and the streets were often occupied by people protesting the arms race. One night I saw an early performance of Johann Kresnik’s Tanztheaterstück Ulrike Meinhof. More than the choreography and staging, what made the biggest impression on me was the scene that unfolded After the curtains closed. As the audience spilled out from the theater and onto the open square, we encountered groups of activists handing out pamphlets and selling books about the RAF—many with illustrations. The pictures that stayed with me the longest were those of Ulrike Meinhof.

Who was this woman, and what do her pictures mean to those of us who study German culture and history? I returned to this question in graduate school at Columbia, where I had the occasion to cross over from comparative literature and write my first paper in art history—on Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 paintings and Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s book Mausoleum. My dissertation and first years of teaching took me in other directions, but two things brought me back to the topics of militancy, terrorism, and their representation. One was the attack on the World Trade Center, which I experienced from the safe distance of 125th Street in Manhattan, while on a brief trip away from my postdoc apartment in Berlin. The other was feminism, my thoughts about feminism and resistance. My first book, which I had set out to write about gender and socialism, evolved into a project about collective memory. I wanted to write another book in the field of cultural studies that would put women in the middle of the picture.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology I taught Plotting Terror in European Culture, and in working with my students I came see to how prominently women figured in the art, literature, and film that responded to the RAF’s rise and fall. That course became a foundation for this book. After the Red Army Faction has been nearly ten years in the making. Besides the students who took Plotting Terror for the first two semesters I taught it, I have many individuals and institutions to thank for enlivening my research. I’d like to mention them here.

A number of sponsors have funded my work. I received much-needed grants from the Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York, the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, and the Class of 1954 Career Development Professorship at MIT. My research was advanced through participation in several CUNY programs: the Center for the Humanities, the Faculty Fellows Publication Program, the Faculty Scholars Publication Workshop, and especially the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, where Ruthie Gilmore, David Harvey, and Peter Hitchcock gave me a chance to discuss this project with other like-minded scholars. Earlier on I benefited from access to the archival resources at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, and I wrote early chapter drafts on these documents while working as a visiting professor at Balliol College, Oxford, in 2006.

I appreciate the cooperation of several artists and writers: Thilo Beu, Johan Grimonprez, Alexander Kluge, Gerhard Richter, and Margarethe von Trotta. Yvonne Rainer kindly extended to me the rights to use video stills from her film Journeys from Berlin/1971 and to quote at length from the screenplay. For aid in coordinating permissions to cite and reproduce the works that enrich my book, I acknowledge the archive of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, the Goethe Institute-New York, the Alliance Française-New York, the Marian Goodman Gallery, and the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation.

My colleagues and students continue to be the greatest inspiration. Thanks to the Department of Writing and Literature at LaGuardia Community College, the Department of Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center, and to the Program in Foreign Languages and Literatures at MIT. From these different homes and from my travels I’ve had the good fortune to meet the many people who have read and commented on different parts of the manuscript that became this book. They are Nora Alter, Karen Bauer, Benjamin Buchloh, Sarah Colvin, Isabelle de Courtivron, Ed Dimendberg, Thomas Elsaesser, Tina Gerhardt, Paul Greenberg, Karrin Hanshew, Ursula Heise, Andreas Huyssen, Eric Kligerman, Hans Kundnani, Esther Leslie, Laura Liu, Samantha Majic, Tom McDonough, Leith Passmore, Julian Preece, Ute Staiger, Henriette Steiner, Despina Stratigakos, Margaret Sundell, Edward Baron Turk, Sabine von Dirke, Andrew Webber, John Zilcosky, and Slavoj Žižek. Thinking through their comments—along with the invaluable reports a received from anonymous reviewers at the Columbia University Press—I was able to deepen my grasp of the book’s material and sharpen my arguments.

Others have enabled the production of this project in different ways, both in its conception and with a range of practical matters. I’m grateful for the assistance of Jörn Ahrens, Eduardo Cadava, Sorin Cucu, Steve d’Arcy, Brent Edwards, Geoff Eley, Konstanze Ell, Felix Ensslin, Bettina Funcke, Anke Geertsma, Cigdem Göymen, Dagmar Herzog, Richard Huff-man, John Hutnyk, Farideh Koohi-Kamali, Phillip Khoury, Carrie Lambert, Anahit Martirosjan, Christine Marx, Helke Sander, Alex Star, Katie Trumpener, Jamie Trnka, Greg Wilpert, Hannah Winarsky, and Rebecca Wittmann. Here Markus Müller stands out for giving me access to research files at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin and responding to an ongoing series of emails. I am also indebted to an inner circle of family, friends, and associates who have supported me over the years that I worked on this book. They are my parents, Simone Burgos, Angelica Emmanuel, Hillary Grill, Angela Le, LaRose Parris, Harlan Protass, Steve Silber, and the staff of Clayman and Rosenberg. Special mention goes to my son, Simon, for his excellent company in the last months of revising the manuscript and for teaching me how to do new things with my computer keyboard.

I have presented some of the concepts contained here as works-in-progress at several venues: Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts in New York, the 2011 and 2014 Annual Conferences of the American Comparative Literature Association, the 92 Street Y-Tribeca, the Centro Cívico de San Francisco/Arteleku in Bilbao, the Consortium for Intellectual and Cultural History at the CUNY Graduate Center, the Department of Art History at Northwestern University, the Matadero in Madrid, MIT, and the University of Cambridge.

Earlier versions of the material in this book have appeared in the following publications: From Document to Documenta: A German Return to Truth and Reconciliation, Rethinking Marxism 16, no. 1 (January 2004): 49–56; Buildings on Fire: The Situationist International and the Red Army Faction, Grey Room 26, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 30–55; "Controlled Space: The Built Environment of Margarethe von Trotta’s The German Sisters ," in Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis, ed. Emma Wilson and Andrew Webber (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), 141–55; Engendering the Subject of Terror: Friedrich Christian Delius and Friedrich Dürrenmatt in the Mid-1980s, in Baader-Meinhof Returns: History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism, ed. Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Ingo Cornils (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 125–36; and Paradise for Provocation: Plotting Berlin’s Political Underground, in Memory Culture and the Contemporary City: Building Sites, ed. Ute Staiger, Henriette Steiner, and Andrew Webber (London: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2009), 161–80. My gratitude to the editors who helped me to shape these pieces of writing and to the publishers who granted me permission to use some of the ideas and language from these essays in After the Red Army Faction.

For the last year I have had the pleasure of working with my editors at the Columbia University Press. Wendy Lochner has been a tremendous source of expertise and enthusiasm, and Christine Dunbar, Anne McCoy, Kathryn Jorge, Robert Demke, and Lisa DeBoer have guided me steadily through the final phases of preparing the manuscript. I credit my research assistants for working into the night to put the notes and bibliography into proper order. They are Noel Duan, Agata Kasprzyk, Leah Light, Michael Lubing, and Thomas Ribitzky.

Lastly, I’d like to recognize three friends: Jeremy Varon, for sparking my thoughts on militancy and sharing with me a box of his files on the RAF, and Dalton Conley and Jackie Stevens, for listening to me talk about this project over the years and helping me find a way to make it public. Completing this book would have been impossible without their intelligence and commitment.

introduction Beyond Militancy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joseph Beuys, Dürer, ich führe persönlich Baader + Meinhof durch die Dokumenta V (Dürer, I will personally guide Baader + Meinhof through Documenta V), 1972. Installation (chip board, wood, felt, fat, planks). © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

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

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

German Federal Police, Anarchistische Gewalttäter (Criminal Anarchists), 1972. Wanted Poster, Plak 006–001–058, German Federal Archive, Koblenz.

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

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

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

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

To challenge this anti-aesthetic, the sharpest minds of postmilitancy aim