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Masterminded by women, the Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorized West Germany from the 1970s to the 1990s. Afterimages of its leaders persist in the works of pivotal artists and writers, including Gerhard Richter, Elfriede Jelinek, and Slavoj iek. Why were women so prominent in the RAF? What does the continuing cultural response to the German armed struggle tell us about the representation of violence, power, and gender today? Engaging critical theory, Charity Scribner addresses these questions and analyzes signal works that point beyond militancy and terrorism. This literature and art discloses the failures of the Far Left and registers the radical potential that RAF women actually forfeited. After the Red Army Faction maps out a cultural history of militancy and introduces \"postmilitancy\" as a new critical term. As Scribner demonstrates, the most compelling examples of postmilitant culture don't just repudiate militancy: these works investigate its horizons of possibility, particularly on the front of sexual politics. Objects of analysis include as-yet untranslated essays by Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas, as well as novels by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Judith Kuckart, Johann Kresnik's Tanztheaterstück Ulrike Meinhof, and the blockbuster exhibition Regarding Terror at the Berlin Kunst-Werke. Scribner focuses on German cinema, offering incisive interpretations of films by Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, and Fatih Akin, as well as the international box-office success The Baader-Meinhof Complex. These readings disclose dynamic junctures among several fields of inquiry: national and sexual identity, the disciplining of the militant body, and the relationship between mass media and the arts.

Shortly after September 11, when Berlin curators announced plans for a blockbuster exhibition of art about the Red Army Faction, or RAF, alarms went off across Germany. Masterminded by women, the Rote Armee Fraktion had splintered off from the New Left in 1970, turning from protest to armed resistance. The group’s misguided take on Marxism and its flawed efforts to redress Nazi crimes devolved into a campaign of terror in the German Autumn of 1977. This season was darkened by hijackings and suicides, the proliferation of wanted posters, and the reinforcement of state surveillance. More than thirty years later, many

Hari Kunzru’s novelMy Revolutions(2008) begins with an epigraph from “The Concept of the Urban Guerrilla,” the founding statement of the RAF, written by Ulrike Meinhof in 1971: “The question of what would have happened if . . . is ambiguous, pacifistic, moralistic.”¹ Meinhof had no patience for the logic of “if . . . , then . . .” With the RAF she wanted revolution and she wanted it right away. Kunzru sets his novel in contemporary Britain but derives much of its texture from the documents and legends of the Baader-Meinhof group. Part of the cultural fallout

Discusses the relationship between the 20th century art movement the Situationist International (SI) and the German terrorist group the Red Army Faction (RAF). The author explains that the film 'In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni' (1978; illus.) by Guy Debord drew attention to the connections between the two movements, argues that both groups challenged their societies and the process of modernization, and examines the two groups' attitudes to urban environments. She focuses on both groups' response to the Watts riots noting that a leaflet produced by the former Situationist Dieter Kunzelmann directly influenced the decision by members of the RAF to bomb German department stores, and describes the legal proceedings against those involved in the dissemination of the leaflet with reference to the analysis carried out by experts as to whether the work constituted a political or artistic work. She assesses the influence of aesthetic values on the RAF, notes that the SI rejected political violence and a vanguardist approach to politics, and studies Ulrike Meinhof's analysis of the department store bombings noting that she differentiated the actions from those of the Watts rioters. She comments on the attitudes of the SI and the RAF towards using the media to promote their actions, refers to the creation of a 'multimedia hagiography' relating to the RAF during the 1970s, and comments on Debord's analysis of terroristic acticivity, also studying the disbandment and legacies of the RAF and the SI.

With their scenes of feminine victimisation and feminist defiance, Friedrich Christian Delius's Mogadischu Fensterplatz and Friedrich Dürrenmatt's Der Auftrag engage and test the tropes of 'woman' and 'terrorist' that circulated and sometimes intersected in Western Europe in the 1970s and 80s. Casting female protagonists, the authors tested out the then-current vicissitudes of gender and national identity. This chapter places Delius and Dürrenmatt's novels in the historical and literary-critical context of the mid-1980s. It also reaches back to the first years after WWII to draw a useful comparison with Ernst von Salomon's novel Der Fragebogen. Key reference points are second-wave feminism, the 'Historikerstreit' (historians' debate), and the 'Tendenzwende' (conservative consolidation). [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

On the occasion of Alexander Kluge's receipt of the Büchner Prize, this article considers the Kulturphilosophie of this influential German author, filmmaker, and television producer who has been central to Marxist criticism in the postwar period. Special attention is devoted to Kluge's use of subtitles and captions in his recent collection of works, the Chronicle of Feeling. Reprinted by Taylor & Francis Ltd

On the occasion of Alexander Kluge's receipt of the Büchner Prize, this article considers the Kulturphilosophie of this influential German author, filmmaker, and television producer who has been central to Marxist criticism in the postwar period. Special attention is devoted to Kluge's use of subtitles and captions in his recent collection of works, the Chronicle of Feeling.

Scribner discusses artist Joseph Beuys' installation \"Economic Values\" and curator Andreas Ludwig's historical exhibition of the GDR quotidian at the Open Depot, which both exhibited Tempo Peas. Tempo Peas, a quick cooking food product formulated in the sixties for the millions of working mothers in Germany, offer a juncture between current museal and artistic practices. Ludwig reads Tempo Peas as an object in the narrative of the GDR while Beuys incorporates Tempo Peas as a fetish of his proto-Marxist ideals.

Documenta 11, the international platform of contemporary art and ideas, was held in Kassel, Germany in 2002. Following its aim to \"activate the space of public art as a site for the reconciliation of current political conflicts,\" the curators designated \"Truth and Reconciliation\" as one of the platform themes. This essay evaluates Documenta's success at staging this theme, and addresses the criticism that the curators' emphasis on public discourse diminished the aesthetic effects of the art shown. It elaborates a comparison between two works: Eyal Sivan's film about Adolf Eichmann, The Specialist (1996-1999), which featured in the 2002 exhibition, and Peter Weiss' earlier play The Investigation (1964), which dramatizes the Auschwitz Trials held in Frankfurt from 1963-1965. Drawing from Theodor W. Adorno's writings both on the Documenta projects of the 1950s and 1960s and on the aesthetics of the documentary, this essay demonstrates that the contemporary art exhibited in Documenta 11 does not advance any critical strategies beyond those that emerged in Weiss's drama. The Investigation offers an aesthetics of negativity that The Specialist does not match.