Reviewed by: Sisters in Arms: Militant Feminisms in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1968 by Katharina Karcher Svea Braeunert Sisters in Arms: Militant Feminisms in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1968. By Katharina Karcher. New York: Berghahn, 2017. Pp. xii + 163. Cloth $110.00. ISBN 978-1785335341. "Our dream is that there are small gangs of women everywhere; and that a rapist, trafficker of women, wife batterer, porn dealer, creepy gynecologist must fear that a gang of women finds him, attacks him, and humiliates him in public" (Red Zora, quoted and translated by Karcher, 61). What sounds like the manifest of the 2018 television series Dietland, in which a group of women takes revenge on predatory men and triggers a debate about patriarchy and female empowerment, is indeed from a 1984 statement by women involved in the militant feminist organization Red Zora. In Katharina Karcher's book Sisters in Arms, the Red Zora is the most uncompromising among feminist groups in West Germany that employed radical means to make their demands heard. Karcher analyzes their actions through the lens of militant feminism and situates the latter with regard to the New Women's movement on the one hand and left-wing terrorism on the other. The first two chapters, "The New Women's Movement in West Germany" and "Terrorism, Feminism and the Politics of Representation," recapture the history of these movements and hold few surprises for readers already familiar with the period. Nevertheless, they provide a concise and informed overview for an English-speaking audience that may be less familiar with the events and discourses in question. Also, engaging with these movements allows Karcher to position her writing within recent scholarship on gender and political violence put forward by historians and cultural theorists such as Clare Bielby, Dominique Grisard, Gisela Diewald-Kerkmann, Patricia Melzer, Charity Scribner, and Vojin Saša Vukadinović. Redressing the antifeminist reception of the 1970s that regarded the strong presence of women in left-wing terrorist groups as an unmistakable sign of an "excess of women's liberation," (Spiegel, quoted and translated by Karcher, 48) these scholars have come to different conclusions regarding left-wing terrorism's feminist potential. While a number of them agree that groups such as the Red Army Faction were lacking a feminist agenda, Melzer suggests in her Death in the Shape of a Young Girl (2015) that their existence can nevertheless be read as constituting a feminist practice, because they had "discursive [End Page 409] effects and shape[d] power in ways that undermine essentialist notions of femininity and masculinity" (Melzer, 237). Karcher taps into and shifts these debates about women and violence by approaching the topic from the side of the New Women's movement and considering the explicitly feminist actions carried out by the revolutionary cells and the Red Zora. Also, she speaks of militancy instead of violence, defining "feminist militancy as historically and politically specific ideas and practices that aim to overcome sexist oppression and are based on the assumption that this objective can only be reached with a confrontational attitude" (137). Choosing militancy instead of violence as her analytical category, Karcher is able to look at a range of protest forms, including walk-ins in sex shops, courts, and cinemas; media campaigns and manifestos; the establishment of feminist infrastructures; public humiliation of men implicated in violence against women and institutionalized sexism; acts of symbolic violence during demonstrations; and property damage, as well as bombings. She discusses these militant expressions in the context of three campaigns that were central to the New Women's movement: women's legal access to abortion ("Militant Feminist Protest against the Abortion Ban"); violence against women, pornography, and sexism in the media ("Women Fighting Back: Feminist Responses to Violence against Women"); and the transnational scope of West German feminism exemplified by a solidarity campaign with South Korean textile workers ("Sisters in Arms? Militant Feminist Protest and Transnational Solidarity"). The activities that accompanied these campaigns came out of diverse feminist practices and discourses, thereby ranging from the symbolic to the manifest use of violence. Examples of the latter include bombings against the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe ruling in favor of obtaining...