Ulrike Meinhof Research Articles

"Die Welt glaubt nicht an die Gerechtigkeit des Weibes, sobald ein Weib das Opfer wird": Geschichtstheater als Literaturgeschichtstheater. Elfriede Jelineks ‚Ulrike Maria Stuart‘

In 2006, Elfriede Jelinek wrote a play in which Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin ­appeared on stage in interaction with Mary Queen of Scotts and Elizabeth I. By referring back to Schiller’s ‘Maria Stuart’, ‘Ulrike Maria Stuart’ raises questions about the female role and voice within history on the one hand, but also in literary history on the other. How much agency does the woman have in the story? How does historiography deal with femininity and violence? How is historical knowledge conveyed in historical theater? How does historical theater deal with women and what is its relationship to the political discourses of its time? Jelinek’s intertextual return to what is probably the most important German-language history play in connection with the two women at the head of the RAF formulates historical-theoretical questions which – according to the thesis of the following article – also deal poetologically with aspects of historiographical inter­pretation in historical dramas and the responsibility those plays may withhold towards a collective and cultural memory.

Primary sclerosing cholangitis-A long night's journey into day.

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Ciała podatne na zranienie. Judith Butler, samozniszczenie i radykalne akty oporu

Artykuł analizuje kategorię cielesnej podatności (vulnerability) i kruchości życia w ujęciu Judith Butler. Autorka stawia pytania o projektowany przez Butler nieopozycyjny związek między podatnością podmiotu a oporem. Refleksji poddany zostaje również Butlerowski postulat niestosowania przemocy, dla którego wyzwaniem są analizowane w tekście przykłady działań, wykorzystujących co prawda podatność, ale przybierających postać destrukcji lub autodestrukcji. Zestawiając dwa przypadki samospalenia (Omida Masumali i Ryszarda Siwca) oraz dwie figury terrorystek (Ulrike Meinhof z RAF i Marthy Doherty fikcyjnej członkini IRA z powieści Anny Bojarskiej Agitka), autorka zwraca uwagę na trudną czasem do wytyczenia granicę między „siłą bezsilnych” a „przemocą zranionych”.

Writing the Revolution: The Construction of “1968” in Germany by Ingo Cornils

Reviewed by: Writing the Revolution: The Construction of “1968” in Germany by Ingo Cornils Sabine von Dirke Writing the Revolution: The Construction of “1968” in Germany. By Ingo Cornils. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2016. Pp. xii + 315. Cloth $90.00. ISBN 978-1571139542. Ahead of its fiftieth anniversary, Ingo Cornils’s monograph offers a comprehensive study of the contested interpretation of the sociopolitical and cultural upheavals epitomized by the cipher 1968. Cornils takes as his point of departure the remarkable staying power of 1968 in public discourse and pursues interrelated analytic trajectories. For one, his study carefully maps how 1968 has been constructed by various players vying for control over the meaning and memory of this history. Secondly, it elucidates the past and present sociopolitical constellations that animate and perpetuate the discourse on 1968. Reminiscent of Dominick LaCapra’s appreciation of literature as a valid resource for understanding the past, Cornils demonstrates that literary imagination holds a privileged position in this discourse on 1968 since it has the capacity to articulate an emotional memory that escapes the archive in the conventional historical-scientific sense. Cornils’s analytical approach is at its most persuasive when applied to the print media, social science accounts—in particular historiographies—and literature. Drawing on literary critical tools, he demonstrates that both media and literary discourses develop grand melodramatic narratives of 1968 that cast real-life individuals as stock characters. Hence, the discourse on 1968 depicts Benno Ohnesorg, the student shot during the anti-Shah protests in 1967, as an “everyman” struck down by evil forces. Rudi Dutschke is cast as an idealistic hero and reluctant leader quite differently from the ambivalent depiction of this major activist at the time. By contrast, the much more complicated third martyr, Ulrike Meinhof, becomes the tragic heroine in those accounts of 1968 that do not outright vilify her because of her participation in Red Army Faction (RAF) terror. Applied specifically to scholarly historiographies, Cornils’s discourse analysis challenges the claim that historicization represents the path to a nonvested and truthful narrative of 1968. Quite to the contrary, Cornils convincingly shows that social science accounts are also embedded in a binary evaluative framework that perceives 1968 either as a fall from grace, more specifically as a “romantic relapse,” or as a Golden Age and democratic redemption of the Federal Republic. Cornils quite brilliantly deconstructs both paradigms as flawed in their authoritarian claim to tell the truth about the significance of 1968 for Germany. Cornils concedes that the students’ own discourse during the 1960s shared traits with that of their romantic predecessors. He differentiates, however, his own analysis from the faulty premise on which the interpretation of 1968 as a “romantic relapse” rests. He reminds us that German romanticism was “an effort by disenfranchised Germans to envisage ways [End Page 208] of escaping oppression” (213), which supports Cornils’s own positive understanding of the utopian dimension of 1968 for the present. With the same critical acumen, Cornils takes those who sing of 1968 as a “Golden Age” to task for constructing a foundational myth that stages 1968 as the fundamental liberalization necessary to turn West Germany into a true democracy. Against this backdrop of the construction of 1968 across the media and disciplinary discourses, Cornils’s pitch for literary imagination as a valid historical resource appears convincing because his study elucidates literature’s superior ability to articulate an emotional memory of 1968 that retains the utopian dimension driving the protest for the present. Not all of the literary texts Cornils discusses rise to this level but only a smaller subset written by 68ers. Hence, Cornils treats this privileged group of literati—Peter Schneider, Uwe Timm, Erasmus Schöfer, Ulrich Schimmang, F.C. Delius, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger—repeatedly across several chapters in great depth. He thereby also engages with literary scholarship and puts pressure on Monika Shafi’s argument that literature on 1968 represents only a minor phenomenon within German literary history. At the same time, Cornils agrees with Shafi’s criticism that the discourse on 1968 replicates the dominance of a white, male middle-class perspective typical for the time at the expense of the experience of women and non...

Mad Mädchen: Feminism and Generational Conflict in Recent German Literature and Film by Margaret McCarthy

Reviewed by: Mad Mädchen: Feminism and Generational Conflict in Recent German Literature and Film by Margaret McCarthy Alexandra M. Hill Margaret McCarthy. Mad Mädchen: Feminism and Generational Conflict in Recent German Literature and Film. Berghahn, 2017. 270 pp. Cloth, $120.00. Margaret McCarthy's Mad Mädchen uses the mother-daughter conflict as a framing trope for examining intergenerational tensions within feminism. As each generation of daughters rebels against its mothers, feminism is often presented as a teleological process of evolution, when in fact multiple [End Page 170] iterations of feminism coexist and shape each other. McCarthy's complex and nuanced analysis of literature, film, magazines (EMMA and Missy Magazine), and Internet-based media shows that the mother-daughter conflict—while still relevant—oversimplifies the complex processes by which feminist thought and politics in Germany evolve. Chapter 1, "German Feminism in the 2000s," is a broad survey of media and pop-culture discussions of feminism and women in contemporary Germany, including Katja Kullman's Generation Ally (2002), the books Wir Alphamädchen (2008; We alpha girls) by Meredith Haaf, Susanne Klingner, and Barbara Streidl and Neue deutsche Mädchen (2008; New German girls) by Jana Hensel and Elisabeth Raether, and the founding of Missy Magazine (2008). Although often taken together as evidence of third-wave feminism in Germany, these pop-cultural moments (and the responses they evoke) instead give voice to a variety of political agendas and neoliberal attitudes, and varying degrees of knowledge of and respect for second-wave feminism. McCarthy's careful readings of the texts' intent—and especially of the media's tendency to reduce them to binary relationships—illuminate the multiple layers of today's feminist landscape. Chapter 2 centers on three examples of women writing Popliteratur (an anomaly in itself): Zoë Jenny's Das Blütenstaubzimmer (1997; The Pollen Room, 1999), Alexa Hennig von Lange's Relax (1997; Relax, 1999), and Elke Naters's Lügen (1999; Lies). McCarthy reads these novels for their complicated and uninformed attitudes toward feminism and even ambivalence toward relationships with other women. The close readings of the texts are excellent, for example of the opening paragraph of Lügen (88–89). This thorough and nuanced approach continues in chapter 3, which focuses on Charlotte Roche's infamous Feuchtgebiete (2008; Wetlands, 2009) and the subsequent Schoßgebete (2011; Wrecked, 2013). McCarthy contends that in these novels (and in Roche's own media appearances) is "a manifest rejection of feminist mothers" but at the same time "a tacit embrace of some of their tactics" (103). In this way, Roche's texts exemplify the messy, tangled, and ambivalent attitudes of new feminists toward their feminist foremothers (most often symbolized by Alice Schwarzer, who appears both in Roche's novels and throughout McCarthy's book). The next two chapters shift the focus from literature to film. Chapter 4 looks at Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (2008) and Das wilde Leben (2007; Eight Miles High, 2007) with an eye to the portrayal of Ulrike Meinhof [End Page 171] in the former and Uschi Obermaier in the latter. While McCarthy is interested specifically in how mainstream film represents these wild women through the lens of today's pop-cultural understanding of feminism, this chapter seems the least connected to the concerns of the book. Perhaps because the directors of both films are men, the idea of the mother-daughter dialogue inherent in feminism's evolution is missing here. The films discussed in chapter 5, Die innere Sicherheit (2000; The state I am in) and Auf der anderen Seite (2007; The Edge of Heaven, 2007), are also directed by men but thematically feature intergenerational conflict among women. Fatih Akin's Auf der anderen Seite is perhaps the best example for McCarthy's analysis of multigenerational feminisms. Her beautiful reading of the character Susanne, a white German mother, leads her to conclude that the film posits "women, bolstered by humanist and revolutionary ideals as well as psychic mother-daughter bonds that extend beyond a German frame, as the contemporary agents of '68" (196). In chapter 6, after an analysis of the conversations between EMMA and Missy magazines—roughly representing two different but not oppositional generations—McCarthy...

ПРИЧИНИ РАДИКАЛІЗАЦІЇ СТУДЕНТСЬКОГО РУХУ В ФРН У 1960-Х РОКАХ І УТВОРЕННЯ ТЕРОРИСТИЧНОЇ ОРГАНІЗАЦІЇ ФРАКЦІЯ ЧЕРВОНОЇ АРМІЇ (РАФ)

On the basis of published documents on the activities of the terrorist organization “Red Army Fraction” (RAF) in West Germany during the 70s-80s, the authors highlight the causes that led to the radicalization of the student movement and the transition of activists to the armed confrontation with the police in the name of “City guerrilla” concept. Among the documents mentioned, texts of the RAF members, their manifestos, etc. are avaliable, as well as the articles by one of the leaders of the organization, Ulrike Meinhof, which she wrote for the left-radical magazine “Concrete”. Also there authors used the materials of the German media. In addition, the authors have analyzed foreign and domestic historiography focusing on German-language studies. The conclusions, to which the authors of the article have come, can be summarized as follows. There were three main reasons for the radicalization of the German student movement in the late 1960s. Firstly, the protest spirit and antipathy towards the “conformist” older generation, caused not least by the fact that the governments of the Chancellors Adenauer and Kiesinger were associated with the rehabilitation of former Nazis, so left-radicals saw in their politics the returning of authoritarianism and the militarization of FRG. Secondly, the views of the leftist scholars (such as Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Jurgen Habermas, and others) that were popular among young people and reflected, albeit exaggeratedly, the social problems of Germany at that time related to labor migration, property inequality etc. Thirdly, speaking of the internal political context, the authors have underlined the important role of the events that led to a creation of radical groups. Among these events the most important were the protest actions against so called “Extraordinary laws,” the beating of a peaceful demonstration by the police on the 2th of June and the killing of Benno Onezorge, the assassination of the leader of the student movement Rudi Dutschke, the occupations of universities in 1968 etc. Characterizing the foreign policy context, the authors figure out that in the conditions of the bipolar world and the unfolding of the Cold War, the German youth was inspired by the revolutionary movements of the Third World and also by the American youth movement against the war in Vietnam. At the same time, the future German “city guerrillas” were inspired by the images of Che Guevara, Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, etc. There is no doubt that they were rather skeptic about the USSR, not considering it as a socialist state, while they were preferring Cuba or Maoist China, because at that time almost nobody was aware of an essence of the “cultural revolution” and Mao’s repressive policy. However, activity of left-radicals in West Germany was still profitable for the GDR government, controlled by Soviet Union, as far as they were trying to use every possibility to destabilize the situation in FRG.

After the Red Army Faction: Gender, Culture, and Militancy by Charity Scribner

Reviewed by: After the Red Army Faction: Gender, Culture, and Militancy by Charity Scribner Gary L Baker After the Red Army Faction: Gender, Culture, and Militancy. By Charity Scribner. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Pp. 294. Cloth $45.00. ISBN 978-0231168649. Charity Scribner investigates the enduring influence of the Red Army Faction in several cultural productions that were created both during and after the heyday of the group's activity. In doing so she provides her readers with an account of the history of the terrorist movement but also perceptive analyses of RAF actions as cultural [End Page 462] moments. Her study is based on the fact that RAF activities resonated for decades with artists in the German-speaking realm and internationally, even after its disbanding in 1998. Scribner presents her readers with a comprehensive study as she investigates the prevalence of women in both the theoretical defining of the group's views as well as the concretization of those views in violent actions against perceived enemies. In this regard, Scribner's study complements the work of historians and journalists with closer connections to the era, such as Stefan Aust's Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex (1985), Wolfgang Kraushaar's Acht Und Sechzig. Eine Bilanz (2008), or Gerd Koenen's Vesper, Ensslin, Baader. Urszenen des deutschen Terrorismus (2003), which look, at varying levels, at the group's emergence out of the Student Movement. Scribner reminds us that the RAF was as much a cultural catalyst as a violent political movement. This meticulously researched book is divided into two sections: the first section concentrates on the history of the RAF, its militant acts, and the resulting "cultural fallout." Scribner describes its origins in groups of counter violence after the death of Benno Ohnesorg on June 2, 1967. Violent acts were initially directed at symbolic real estate such as department stores, Springer Press property, US military bases, and Amerikahäuser. Later the targets become individuals, high-profile figures such as Jürgen Ponto and Hanns Martin Schleyer, as well as later victims Detlev Rohwedder and Alfred Herrhausen. Scribner considers the German Autumn to be the culminating moment of RAF history and views this short time, September and October 1977, as the key moment of its cultural influence, its social significance, and its political messaging. This was the time when the RAF garnered its greatest impact on political policy and public opinion. She labels the larger second section "postmilitant culture," which for Scribner is not only culture that occurs temporally after the RAF but also constitutes artistic expression that responds to the RAF by focusing on aesthetics and politics while bracketing out violence. The common theme in both sections involves an investigation of the women of the group who populate films, narratives, and works of art. In doing so, Scribner provides insightful discussions of Volker Schlöndorff's Die Stille nach dem Schuss (2000), Rainer Werner Fassbinder's piece in Deutschland im Herbst (1978), Margarethe von Trotta's Die bleierne Zeit (1981), and Fatih Akin's Auf der anderen Seite (2007). She compares novels written by Friedrich Dürrenmatt (Der Auftrag, 1986) and Friedrich Christian Delius (Mogadischu Fensterplatz, 1987). In the visual arts she discusses Joseph Beuys's Dürer, ich führe persönlich Baader + Meinhof durch die Dokumenta V (1972) and Gerhard Richter's 18. Oktober 1977 (1988). The stage piece Ulrike Meinhof (1990) by Johann Kresnik receives a lengthy analysis. This list is only representative of what she covers in the book. Her analyses are thoughtful, perceptive, and contribute to the broader discussion of the relationship between violence, activism, and art. The tension in this ambitious study emerges from its focus on the relationship [End Page 463] between or even the complicated conflation of feminism and terrorism. Scribner works under the valid assumption that Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin would not have reached positions of prevalence in their organization if women's emancipation of the time had not opened up this possibility. But Scribner wants to create distance between feminism and armed struggle. The underlying current of Scribner's study is the idea that feminist and terrorist goals did not coincide, a signpost that she sets a few times...

Book Review: The Marxism of Manuel Sacristán: From Communism to the New Social Movements by Renzo Llorente (trans. and ed.)

Renzo Llorente (trans. and ed.) The Marxism of Manuel Sacristan: From Communism to the New Social Movements, Brill, Leiden and Boston, 2014; 312 pp: 9789004223554, 119 [euro] (hbk) The Portuguese writer and Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago once famously said, 'writers make national literature, while translators make universal literature'--a statement that nicely captures what Renzo Llorente has accomplished for the international Marxist tradition with his book The Marxism of Manuel Sacristan: From Communism to the New Social Movements (TMMS hereon). Llorente, a professor of philosophy at the Madrid campus of Saint Louis University, has translated and compiled a list of twenty pieces, made up of articles and interviews by arguably the most important Spanish Marxist philosopher of the 20th century, Manuel Sacristan (1925-1985). Until this publication by the international publisher Brill, only a couple of pieces of Sacristan's oeuvre had been translated into English, and efforts to popularise his thought in the Anglo-Saxon world had been, unfortunately, significantly scarce. (1) In TMMS, Llorente seeks to fill this void with a carefully selected list of materials, whose translation and edition is marked by exemplary and meticulous work, a characteristic that he seems to take from Sacristan's own substantial work, which brought to the Spanish-speaking world translations of various of the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Antonio Gramsci, Theodor Adorno, Georg Lukacs, Karl Korsch, Galvano Della Volpe, Ulrike Meinhof, W. V. Quine, and other significant figures within and outside the Marxian tradition. The sixteen articles and four interviews contained in TMMS are preceded by a magnificent introduction by the editor in which we are given a taste of the intellectual and practical development of Sacristan's life, especially under the Franco dictatorship. Persecution, harassment and imprisonment were a constant in this experience, where Sacristan's theoretical-political practices flared up tensions, not only with the dictatorship, but also within the Communist Party of Spain, as well as the International Communist movement. Llorente provides materials produced by Sacristan during the 1960s and all the way up to the final years of his life, when the Spanish philosopher was more than convinced that Marx's work had to be adapted to the new circumstances and social movements that expressed them. These materials are organised in three parts, with the first one, 'On Marx and Engels', containing some of Sacristan's most famous articles, such as 'Marx's scientific work and his notion of science' and 'Engel's task in Anti-Duhring. In the first of these essays, first published in 1980, Sacristan examines the 'crisis' surrounding the scientific status of Marx's contributions, a crisis explained, in part, by the 'deceptive illusions' (p. 29) contained in the representations of thinkers like Sollers, Althusser and Coiled, and by the crass misunderstandings of major critics such as Popper and Bunge. For Sacristan, the key to unveiling Marx's scientific contributions is to first understand the multiple notions of science at work in Marx's work, which according to him can be identified as being three: 'the notion of science that I have called normal, la science; the Hegelian notion, Wissenschaft...; and a notion of Young-Hegelian inspiration ... the idea of science as critique' (p. …

Violent Women in Print: Representations in the West German Print Media of the 1960s and 1970s by Clare Bielby (review)

Reviewed by: Violent Women in Print: Representations in the West German Print Media of the 1960s and 1970s by Clare Bielby Jamie H. Trnka Violent Women in Print: Representations in the West German Print Media of the 1960s and 1970s. By Clare Bielby. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012. Pp. 225. Cloth $80.00. ISBN 978-1571135308. Clare Bielby’s monograph takes as its primary object representations of West German terrorism in the 1970s that foreground women’s participation in political violence. To that end, it examines representations in the print media of nonpolitical, violent women since the 1960s alongside representations of political violence in the 1970s, arguing that the press did not distinguish among differently motivated acts of violence. Bielby considers the coverage of three trials of women for murder or incitement to murder, most prominent among them Vera Brühne’s 1961–1962 trial for incitement to double murder. According to Bielby, all of these representations must be understood within a media climate engaged in shoring up public anxieties about changing gender roles and public sexuality. In producing “visual demonizations of the supposed paradox of women taking rather than giving life” (29), print media, she argues, pursued social agendas that marginalized second-wave feminism and undermined women’s political agency. They alternately infantilized women, collapsed political dissent and allegedly aberrant sexuality, and transformed threatening women into desirable women. Bielby organizes the book’s four main chapters around the exclusion of violent women from motherhood and the nation; the equation of violent femininity with hysteria; the sexualization and masculinization of violent women; and the language of “filth” and the abjection of the violent woman. In each chapter, she shows how media effectively contained and minimized the symbolic threat of women’s violence to established social orders. By looking at continuities and ruptures in the representation of violent women in postwar West Germany, Bielby takes an important step toward recontextualizing the portrayal of women terrorists in the media. Yet much work remains to be done to address the numerous stumbling blocks that such an analysis poses and which Bielby seems at times to intuit, but not address. One example is her reference to dramatic [End Page 236] changes in visual sexual content in the media between the time of the Brühne case and the height of media attention to women terrorists, a development she attributes to the sexual revolution in West Germany. While she suggests that such changes might account for substantial differences between her nonpolitical and political examples, more work is needed to push this potentially fruitful yet speculative argument even further. All in all, some elements of her argument about an enduring iconography of the violent woman remain too broad to offer real historical or cultural insight into the material. Sexist and heterosexist discourses in nineteenth-century criminology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis persist as commonsensical ideology, but it is unclear how her recurring references to these discourses support her argument about 1970s West Germany. Indeed, there are moments when her invocation of iconographic types masks other crucial elements of the images in question. For example, treating photos of Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin in uniform, walking the prison yard, as “sculptural” and legible within a tradition of aestheticizing female madness obscures an alternate set of readings that could just as well associate the same photographs with images from Nazi concentration camps. Along similar lines, prioritizing as a key discursive frame the nation writ large, and the role ascribed to women in bourgeois nationalisms all over the world, fails to elucidate representations of violent West German women and nationalist narratives in the more complex way they deserve. Reference to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (London, 1983) and the role it ascribes to print capitalism would require us, at a minimum, to consider the vast differences between infrastructure, authorship, and readership in the Americas of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries, on the one hand, and postwar West Germany on the other. The gesture is there; the argument is not. The same holds true when Bielby relies on other theorists. The analytic yield of Julia Kristeva and Mikhail Bakhtin on the “abject” in her chapter on filth and the exclusion...

En outsider och en gentleman

An Outsider and a Gentleman. Bo Cavefors’s Publishing and Two Mythical Archetypes of the Western Book Market
 This article aims to examine how contemporary literary criticism and statements from the publisher Bo Cavefors contributed to the construction of his public image. Bo Cavefors’s Swedish publishing house was active between the years 1959 and 1979. The company’s book list attracted notable attention from the literary media of the time, and was considered to be both economically and culturally ”daring”. It was a multifaceted publication list, containing genres such as contemporary Swedish poetry, drama and fiction, along with Marxist theory and politically controversial writers such as Ezra Pound, Ernst Jünger and Ulrike Meinhof. The publishing house had a reputation for ”good taste” and for offering literature of ”high literary quality”, but the publisher himself was often portrayed as an eccentric. This combination of qualities seems to have generated a contradictory reputation for the publishing house – a reputation both at odds with, and in tune with, its cultural and political context: the Swedish cultural sphere of the 1960’s and 70’s. The article argues that unquestioned power relations and masculinity norms manifest themselves in two myths surrounding the publisher Cavefors: the myth of the ”Gentleman Publisher” and the myth of the ”Literary Outsider”. The former is a personification of early twentieth century book-market honour codes. The latter is a version of the ”Romantic Genius”, which specifically pertains to a literary context. These two archetypes could be perceived as both unanimous and contradictory, since they traditionally represent different positions in the process of literary production. With respect to the image constructed of Bo Cavefors’s publishing, they seem to coexist in one and the same persona.

Résister au monde. Déclinaisons historiques de l’identité contemporaine dans quelques romans de Véronique Bergen

Fictional autobiographies of a Belgian writer, Véronique Bergen, describing fates of outstanding characters albeit marginalised by history (Kaspar Hauser, Ludwig II of Bavaria, Ulrike Meinhof), may be interpreted as a metaphor of a contemporary man’s fate, a man caught, often against his will, in a course of political or social events. The characters described here adopt an active resistance stand against life, the stand defi ned by Bergen in her essay Résistances philosophiques, and manifested by striving to create one’s own, coherent world and a new language. In her reference to G. Deleuze, the author states that the said resistance is not only an act of existence but, also, an act of creation while creation of a new language involves, mainly, building of one’s own “I’. Identity of an individual is entangled within identity of a creator while reflection on language – with reflection on artistic medium.

Terrorystka w archiwum: "Śmierć Człowieka-Wiewiórki" Małgorzaty Sikorskiej-Miszczuk

Tekst prezentuje analizę dramatu "Śmierć Człowieka-Wiewiórki" Małgorzaty Sikorskiej-Miszczuk, prowadzoną pod kątem strategii obrazowania śladów wydarzeń historycznych w sztukach performatywnych. Utwór, pochodzący z 2006 roku, będący swoistą fantazją pamięciową na tematy związane z postacią Ulrike Meinhof i działalnością RAF, wpisuje się w krótką przygodę polskiego teatru z tematami "terrorystycznymi", a jednocześnie przekracza ją, jako oryginalny projekt sceniczny, konstytuujący krytyczną propozycję "słabego" obrazu, naruszającego ramy medialnego archiwum wyobrażeń dotyczących RAF.

A Terrorist in the Archive: The Death of the Squirrel-Man by Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk

The article presents an analysis of the play "Death of the Squirrel-Man" by Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk, which concentrates on strategies of representation of the traces of historical events in the performative arts. The piece is being treated here as a kind of memorial phantasy, a variation on the figure of Ulrike Meinhof and the activity of the RAF, and is an example of Polish theatre's engagement with the issue of terrorism, offering a unique insight into the practices of memory of 1970's terrorism.

Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction: Performing Terrorism

Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction: Performing Terrorism

Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction: performing terrorism

Introduction: Performing Terrorism Where Words Fail Writing Under Ground The Art of Hunger Show, Trial, and Error SUICIDE = MURDER = SUICIDE Conclusion: Voices and Echoes

Book Review: Sarah Colvin: Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism: Language, Violence and Identity

Book Review: Sarah Colvin: <i>Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism: Language, Violence and Identity</i>

Everybody Talks about the Weather ... We Don't: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof (review)

Everybody Talks about the Weather ... We Don't: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof (review)

Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism: Language, Violence and Identity.

Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism: Language, Violence and Identity.

Imprisonment and Excessive Femininity:Reading Ulrike Meinhof's Brain

It's a question of submitting feminine disorder, its laughter, its inability to take the drumbeats seriously, to the threat of decapitation. If man operates under the threat of castration, if mascu...

Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. (review)

Reviewed by: Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. Andrew Donson Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. Stefan Aust ; translated by Anthea Bell New York: Oxford University Press, 2008; 480 pages. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-19-537275-5 (hardcover) Translated into eight languages and recently made into a $20-million film, this revised reissue by a leading journalist has now, more than any other work, determined the public memory of the Red Army Faction (RAF), the left-wing terrorist organization that convulsed Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. A popular account, it starts off with the personalities: Andreas Baader, the hotheaded ringleader who fleeced drunks in bathroom bars as a young man and later goaded his coconspirators to be more violent; Gudrun Enslin, the cool daughter of a minister, former U.S. high school exchange student, and Baader's lover; and Ulrike Meinhof, the nervous, chain-smoking journalist who wrote the gang's muddled manifestos. The book then traces the sensationalist narrative: the [End Page 174] arson of the department stores, the subsequent arrests, and the flippant antics in the dock while on trial. In May 1970, Meinhof and Enslin rescued Baader from prison, and the group hightailed to Jordan for training in urban guerilla warfare by Palestinian terrorists. After returning to Germany via East Berlin, life as fugitives involved disguises, countless bank robberies, almost weekly apartment changes, recruitment of new members, and shoot-outs that were oft en fatal for the police. In May 1972, the RAF conducted bomb attacks on police stations and U.S. Army headquarters, killing four. Baader, Enslin, Meinhof, and most of the first-generation of RAF leaders were arrested shortly thereafter, and to demand their release, the rump members firebombed the German Embassy in Stockholm and assassinated a prominent banker. Most of the book details the numerous hunger strikes of the prisoners and the "1977 Autumn," when the second-generation of RAF hijacked a Luft hansa plane with the aid of Palestinian terrorists and kidnapped and murdered Martin Schleyer, the president of the German Employers Association. The book ends with the collective suicides of Baader, Enslin, and Meinhof in 1977, even though the RAF continued to function into the early 1990s. Aust argues that RAF terror spun out of control because life as fugitives radicalized the gang. He also shows how, aft er 1972, the RAF focused their protest on the imprisonment and social isolation of the first gang members. His interpretation emphasizes that the ideology of the RAF was an incoherent anti-imperialism that conflated Auschwitz with the U.S. bombings of Dresden and the Viet Cong, among other things. In Aust's portrayal, Baader comes off as a psychopath, Meinhof as a major depressive. Because the book offers little from the perspective of German society at large, the reader gets the impression that the longevity of the gang resulted from the police who bungled arrests and the nonplussed trial judges who adhered to procedure, even when facing the defendants' harangues and theatrics. Most scholars reject this portrayal of the justice system. Furthermore, the book mentions but does not explore the key reason why the RAF evaded the police for so many years: at least until the fall of 1977, the RAF had support from a small but sizable minority of left -wing Germans—by one survey, 6 percent of the population was willing to aid the fugitives. Though the first chapters trace the New Left movements that protested the Vietnam War, the book does not follow through on how the RAF won sympathy from the New [End Page 175] Left as the government used heavy-handed tactics against protesters and passed laws that criminalized expressions of dissent that were legitimate in every other democracy. This draconian reaction led the New Left to believe that the government was reverting to a Nazi-era police state. Furthermore, many found it hard to sympathize with RAF targets like Schleyer, who managed to become rich and powerful despite being a former SS officer and deputy of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the masterminds of the Final Solution. Though Aust discusses Margrit Schiller, he leaves out that she joined the...