Rote Armee Fraktion Research Articles

Contestazione studentesca: cultura del dissenso in America e in Europa negli anni Sessanta e Settanta

Dissent is the nineteen-sixties-seventies cultural keyword both in the States and Western Europe. Dissent defines the long uninterrupted 1960s – 1970s juvenile cultural revolution both in the United States and Europe. The new time was announced by the 1964 free-speech movement at Berkley University involving from its very beginning the civil rights question, to which the protest was soon added against the American military involvement in the twenty-years long Viet-Nam war. As a matter of fact, the student movement was meant to radically change the world. Some of the roots of this revolution are to be looked for in the late forties and in the fifties. The question more or less knowingly being dealt with was first of all the radical perspective of freeing the mind from all social conditioning and received ideas. It was the same perspective defined by Ronald Laing’s and David Cooper’s new anti-psychiatric approach. Protest, and the struggle for freedom, however, was doomed to extreme radicalization, turning discussion, and utopian dreams into political violence the Weathermen, of course, in the States, die Rote Armee Fraktion in Germany, Le Brigate Rosse in Italy, turning dreams and ideological struggle into a nightmare.

Screening the Red Army Faction: Historical and Cultural Memory by Christina Gerhardt

Reviewed by: Screening the Red Army Faction: Historical and Cultural Memory by Christina Gerhardt Claire E. Scott Christina Gerhardt. Screening the Red Army Faction: Historical and Cultural Memory. Bloomsbury, 2018. 307 pp. Paper, $35.96. Leading up to a 2005 exhibition on the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF; Red Army Faction) at the Kunst-Werke Museum in Berlin, journalists debated what the legacy of the RAF had become and what it should be. Christina Gerhardt, who uses this exhibition to frame her book Screening the Red Army Faction, argues that the history of the RAF and cultural depictions of militant terrorism in Germany are not complete without recognizing international solidarities. Screening the Red Army Faction is a well [End Page 109] researched book that connects the history of the RAF to its depiction in a range of visual and audiovisual materials. Gerhardt argues that our cultural memory of the RAF needs to properly contextualize these events within other contemporaneous and international political movements, including anti-imperialism, anticolonialism, labor movements, and feminist movements. This laudable goal is a loft y one that is achieved, albeit unevenly, within the book’s six chapters. Screening the Red Army Faction progresses chronologically, starting with historical context and background from 1945 to 1970. In the first chapter, Gerhardt lays out her argument for why our investigation of the history of the RAF needs a more global context. For example, she highlights how the Algerian War played a role in politicizing social movements in West Germany by citing how Algerian immigrant protests in 1958 inspired the first official political position of the Verband Deutscher Studentenschaften (VDS; German National Union of Students) against apartheid and colonial wars. Concern about the Algerian War also found expression in the work of artists on the left, such as Volker Schlöndorff’s film Wen kümmert’s (1960; Who cares) (28–29). Unfortunately, Gerhardt is quickly forced to admit that once we reach the 1970s, both these militant groups and the films about them take on a more domestic focus. Performing close readings of lesser-known, more globally focused works such as Schlöndorff’s Wen kümmert’s might have better served Gerhardt’s intervention. Instead, the first films that Gerhardt analyzes in detail are Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (1975; The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, 1975) and Deutschland im Herbst (1978; Germany in autumn). Domestic relations between the student movement and the press dominate these canonical works of New German Cinema in ways that sometimes undermine Gerhardt’s emphasis on global solidarities. The fourth chapter of the book is the most compelling for readers of Feminist German Studies because of its significant contribution to feminist scholarship on RAF-themed films. In this chapter, Gerhardt effectively ties cultural representations of the RAF to other social movements, specifically labor movements and the women’s movement in West Germany. Gerhardt’s close readings would definitely be useful secondary sources when teaching these films, because they are both detailed and accessible. In a compelling reading of R. W. Fassbinder’s Mutter Küsters’ Fahrt zum Himmel (1975; Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, 1976) Gerhardt categorizes this work as a combined melodrama and Arbeiterfilm (worker film). She also examines two films directed by Margarethe von Trotta, [End Page 110] Das zweite Erwachen der Christa Klages (1978; The Second Awakening of Christa Klages, 1978) and Die bleierne Zeit (1981; Marianne and Juliane, 1981), highlighting their connection to contemporaneous feminist causes including childcare and abortion rights. Gerhardt then looks at Christian Petzold’s Die innere Sicherheit (2000; The State I Am In, DVD release 2009) and Schlöndorff’s Die Stille nach dem Schuss (2000; The Legend of Rita, 2000) as examples of the emphasis on Cold War politics in RAF-themed films from the early 2000s. She concludes by shift ing away from film to visual art for an analysis of Gerhard Richter’s series of paintings October 18, 1977 (1989) and the Kunst-Werke exhibit (2005). By dealing with different types of screens in these final chapters, Gerhardt illustrates how all of these visual representations provide spaces for re-imagining the RAF in the twenty-first century. The strength of Gerhardt...

Factors behind the Rise and Fall of Left-Wing Terrorism in Western Europe: The Cases of Rote Armee Fraktion and Brigate Rosse

The article discusses the rise and fall of the two famous left-wing terrorist groups, namely Rote Armee Fraktion and Brigate Rosse. After a brief discussion about left-wing extremism, following sections will focus on each group in more detail. After these sections, an analysis of commonalities and differences about their rise and fall will be presented. It is expected that a causal mechanism will be fleshed out not only regarding left-wing terrorist groups but also terrorist groups all around the world regardless of their particular mind-set, which can both open up space for future research and help devising more effective counter-terrorism strategies.

West German radical protest in the long 1960s

In April 1968, four members of an infamous organisation to be, the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion, RAF), started their revolutionary career by setting fire to two department stores in Frankf...

German Leftist Terrorism and Israel: Ethno-Nationalist, Religious-Fundamentalist, or Social-Revolutionary?

The relationship of the three leftist terrorist organizations in the Federal Republic of Germany to Israel can be summarized, in somewhat abbreviated fashion, as follows: All three groups, the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion; RAF), June 2 Movement (Bewegung 2. Juni), and Revolutionary Cells (Revolutionäre Zellen), and the milieu from which they emerged in West Berlin, Munich, Heidelberg, Hamburg, and Frankfurt, hated America, Americans, Israel, and Jews. They participated in the international terror war against Israel and did not shy away from attacks on Jews and Jewish facilities in the Federal Republic of Germany. The three organizations mentioned, for all their differences, are, to be reckoned among the organizations coming out of leftist traditions that, like the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands), after the end of the Shoah and the Second World War, and in the name of a supposed struggle against fascism, conducted antisemitic propaganda, supported the war of terror against Israel, and publicly justified and supported those groups and institutions working in the same direction.

Antropologia rewolucji w RFN i Polsce w latach 1970–1979 w perspektywie porównawczej i historycznej

The nineteen seventies number among the most interesting periods of post-war times. They included the Vietnam war, the Hippie movement in the United States, the Socialist movement in Western Europe and the policy of ‘Détente’ in the East-West relationships. It was the extra-parliamentary opposition that gave birth to the extreme-left (terrorist) movements in Germany and worker protests in Poland, which, in turn, set about fighting the authorities and changing the relationships in their country. It was a time of rapid, dynamic changes and involvement. In the opinion of the participants in those processes themselves, they brought about a release, they constituted an apotheosis of a freedom such as they would probably never again experience in their lifetimes. These were the years of anti-authoritarian rebellion, of risking one’s own life and of international contacts of various kinds; they were the years which were to change the two countries and their history forever. The Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction) in Germany and the Workers’ Defence Committee in Poland were the two groups which spurred the great mobilisation of the societies in both countries. They provoked the events which were talked about, which were lived, the events which, transforming themselves into a great cause-and-effect machine, introduced changes that gave rise to effects, we have continued to experience to this day. Both groups had a similar genesis; they were rooted in political opposition and revolutionary purpose and they brought about immense consequences for the two societies, for politicians and for history.

NARRATING THE REVOLUTIONARY SELF IN GERMAN POST‐TERRORIST LIFE‐WRITING: GENDER, IDENTITY AND HISTORICAL AGENCY

ABSTRACTOver the last two decades, a number of former members of the ‘Rote Armee Fraktion’ and ‘Bewegung 2. Juni’ have published accounts of their past. This article turns to four examples from that corpus of German post‐terrorist life‐writing, focusing on gendered differences in the narrative (re)construction of the revolutionary self. Through a close reading of texts by two former women terrorists, Margrit Schiller (1999) and Inge Viett (1996), and those by two former male terrorists, Karl‐Heinz Dellwo (2007) and Till Meyer (1996), I explore the representation of historical agency, gendered subjectivity, and of the trajectory of becoming a revolutionary. In a context in which, as has been argued, there is very little discursive space to imagine the revolutionary woman, certainly at the time these women were operating, I address the degree to which Viett and Schiller can be seen to articulate a distinctly female ‘Kämpferin’ identity and in how far that might be seen as making a feminist intervention.

The Need to Belong: Writers' Voices at the 2008 Gothenburg Book Fair

The Need to Belong: Writers' Voices at the 2008 Gothenburg Book Fair

Comment sortir du ‘terrorisme’? La violence politique et les conditions de sa disparition en France et en République Fédérale d'Allemagne en comparaison 1970–années 1990

Research on political violence and terrorism is usually focused on the origins and the dynamics of violence. This article attempts to overcome the neglect of ways of leaving terrorism. One important hypothesis of this article is that terrorism should be understood as a strategy of communication. How did states and societies face the ‘communicative challenge’ posed by terrorism? This question will be applied to the cases of left-wing terrorism in 1970s and 1980s West Germany and France. In the 1970s, in West Germany, a political dialogue with the left-wing group RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion) seemed to be impossible, whereas in France violent groups engaged with the wider public through public communication. By this way an escalation of violence could be avoided, but in the 1980s French terrorist groups such as Action Directe modelled themselves on the West German RAF: as a consequence, any communication with the state or society was interrupted. At the same time, in West Germany, the question of whether a dialogue with the RAF should be started was at the core of public discussion. Some stated that it would be the only possibility to make them give up, while others rejected any idea of communicating with terrorists. The West German and French cases show us that the communicational situation, especially the degree of integration of the concerned left-wing groups in public discourse, had an important impact on the outcome of violence.

On Militancy, Sort Of

his is how the story of Baader-Meinhof, the Red Army Faction (RAF, Rote Armee Fraktion), terrorism made-in-West Germany, begins. Gudrun Ensslin, future sphinx-like icon of the RAF,I is no longer satisfied in her relationship with writer Bernward Vesper, son of Nazi poet Will Vesper. In 1967 she leaves him for petty criminal and con artist Andreas Baader, a man not of the word but of the deed. In the meantime, star journalist Ulrike Meinhof, after an acrimonious divorce from husband and publisher Klaus Rainer R6hl, moves with her sixyear-old twin daughters from Hamburg to Berlin where-inevitablyshe meets Ensslin and Baader. Not accustomed to her new environ-

Todesspiel and the terrorist docu‐drama in Germany

This article argues that newspapers and films act as a forum for debating the difficult issues which political violence raises, and mapping out the process of reconciliation. The reaction to a recent docu‐drama on the recently dissolved Rote Armee Fraktion shows consensus on key issues, aiding the process of reconciliation. This is striking when compared to the reactions to similar films in the past, which were subject to highly ideological interpretations and discursive strategies designed to discredit the production, thus attempting to foreclose debate on difficult political issues.

Germany's other terrorists

Abstract When analyzing terrorism in Germany, attention normally focuses on the Rote Armee Fraktion, better known as Baader‐Meinhof gang. Already in the early years of the RAF there existed different groups, such as the Movement 2nd June, which often rivaled and strongly critized the elitist avant‐gardism of Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, and Gudrun Ensslin. Today only a small fragment of the some 350 terrorist acts and 500 acts of sabotage (1985 statistics) can be attributed to the RAF. Germany's other terrorists, the Revolutionary Cells and autonomous/anti‐imperialist groups have long ago outdone the RAF and become a much graver threat to the internal security of the Federal Republic. Though similarities in rhetoric and operational approach exist between the RAF and these groups, the existing underlying differences are strong and until recently have prevented cooperation. The hunger strike campaign of the winter 1984/1985 appears to present a change in policies on behalf of the Cells.