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

The last few years have seen a proliferation of publications on RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion or Red Army Faction) terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s, which speak to an enduring fascination with the topic as well as to the horror it evokes. For example, Seminar: A Journal for Germanic Studies dedicated an entire volume to the topic (Vol. 47, February 2011), and some scholars also examined female terrorists more closely in these publications. At the same time, both the student movement’s and the RAF’s troubled relationship with the press, particularly with the conservative Springer publishing house that polarized West German society for decades and is said to have been significant in producing a political climate that led Josef Bachmann to shoot Rudi Dutschke in 1968, have been widely discussed.

Clare Bielby’s book, thoroughly informed on the subject and participating in this scholarly discourse, offers a slightly different angle and consequently fresh components: it sheds light on the German mass media’s depiction of women who bring together femininity, to some extent feminism, attractiveness, sexuality, and, most notably, violence in the 1960s and 1970s. Emphasizing the aspect of violence committed by women independent of their potential political motivation, Bielby not only centers on the leading figures of the RAF, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof, but also draws attention to the case of Vera Brühne, who was charged with incitement to murder in 1962. While quite different, these women prompted anxieties regarding their resolve to determine their own sexuality, to adopt unconventional female roles, and to employ violence; and they were perceived as a threat to bourgeois notions of the family and to the German nation and its deeply troubled sense of self due to women’s significance for reproducing the nation culturally and biologically. Bielby reveals that the media’s portrayal of these women, both in texts and in images, contributed substantially to the development of an ambivalent hegemonic discourse that spotlights violent women’s body, sexuality, and irrepressible emotions; a discourse that tries to elucidate, theorize, and hence mitigate the fears they triggered while simultaneously amplifying the threat emanating from them to boost newspaper sales.

Bielby’s analysis is strongly influenced and substantiated by critical theory, gender theory, and media theory, and references scholars ranging from Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Tamar Mayer, Michael Billig, and Benedict Anderson to Todd Gitlin, Stuart Hall, Roland Barthes, Gunther Kress, and Theo van Leeuwen. Four chapters are framed by an informative introduction to the topic which also outlines the underlying methodology and a conclusion in which Bielby demonstrates the extent to which the violent woman of the 1960s and 1970s remains a part of the (West) German cultural imagination.

Chapter One, “The Violent Woman, Motherhood, and the Nation,” illustrates how the mass media established an image of female terrorists as symbolically attacking the female body, motherhood, and nature, and hence as directly endangering the nation. This chapter also exposes the degree to which media coverage served to hold second-wave feminism responsible for left-wing terrorism, asserting that the media’s feminization of the RAF turned the violent woman into an “abject (m)other [who] is feared and needed as constitutive outside to German womanhood and the nation” (53).

While Chapter One thus focuses on the ways the media portrayed the violent woman as outside, objectified “Other” opposite the Federal Republic and its appropriately gendered subjects, Chapter Two surveys means of feminization that allow for defusing the threat posed by these women. The German mass media of the 1960s and 1970s imposed clichés of womanhood supported by nineteenth-century pseudoscientific discourses of hysteria, criminology, and physiognomy as well as psychoanalysis to explain the violent woman’s behavior and simultaneously stage her as transhistorical. Depicted as hysterically feminine and female, these women become objects of science, are reduced to their body...