RAF Revivalism in the 2000s

Abstract

Younger German writers in the 2000s are angrier with contemporary politics than are the aging 68ers, whose late terrorist fiction is predicated on characters’ remorse for their association with violence. German political fiction as a whole enjoyed a renaissance in the decade of the 2000s. Urban guerillas battling the system come in a number of guises. They may be embittered former Stasi operatives, as in the surreal social panorama The Good and the Bad by André Kubiczek, (2003) or an inscrutable group of underground bomb makers, as in Michael Kumpfmüller’s Message to Everybody (2008), which is set in the near future in an unnamed European country.1 The most talked about novel of 2008 was Uwe Tellkamp’s epic of GDR life The Tower, but three years earlier in The Kingfisher (2005) he portrays a right-wing terrorist movement that calls itself “The Rebirth,” and is inspired by RAF methods, if not their ideology.2 Where Will You Be (Hammerstein, 2010) is set in the near future after a complete meltdown of the world financial system.3 A group calling themselves the Victims takes Germany’s most infamous stock market speculator, Lisa Locust, hostage in an imitation of the RAF’s ambush of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, except that nobody is killed. While “Lisa Locust” is a villain de nos jours, representing international finance capital, the Victims are postmodern protestors, who are convinced that nothing they can do will have any effect, in contrast with the heroic era of protest in the recent past.KeywordsPrivate Equity FirmMurder VictimWorld Financial SystemUrban GuerillaItalian Prime MinisterThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.