RAF revivalism in German fiction of the 2000s

Abstract

The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest among German novelists in the political violence associated with the Baader-Meinhof Group or RAF in the 1970s. Much of this has been from writers who were young adults during the student movement and its aftermath. A trio of writers born between 1956 and 1973, Ulrich Peltzer in Teil der Lösung (2007, Part of the Solution), Thomas Weiss in Tod eines Trüffelschweines (2007, Death of a Truffle Pig), and Thilo Bock, Die geladene Knarre von Andreas Baader (2009, The Loaded Shooter of Andreas Baader), depict, in very different ways, politically motivated violence or planned violence in the present. Each time the cause is globalized capitalism and each time links are made with the 1970s. There the similarities between them end. In Peltzer’s highly accomplished novel, whose plot echoes Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four , what the ‘solution’ might be is left open. Weiss, in contrast, appears to justify the murder of an American investor, who furthermore may be Jewish, whose company’s purchase of a formerly German firm will result in profit for him and job losses for the Germans. Bock, on the other hand, shows terrorism to be a dark fantasy, for which his narrator pays with his life.