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  • West German Radical History Seen From the 1980s: Projekt Artur and the Refusal of Political Confiscation1
  • Petra Rethmann (bio)

Recent years have seen an intense growth in memories of West German left-wing, radical political culture. There now exists an extensive body of interpretive labour seeking to make sense of how that culture developed from the mid-60s until approximately the mid-80s, a vast expansion of the notable few attempts of previous decades (Aust; Botzat, Kiderlen, and Wolff) to analyze its forms and themes. Yet while this intensified interest may mark a particular kind of “Vergangenheitsbewältigung,” much of it takes place on the analytical planes of trauma, performance, and representation (Theweleit; Trnka). This article focusses on one approach to radical left-wing politics and culture that, even as early as the 80s, perceived the promise rather than the threat of that movement. It does so by undertaking an analysis of Projekt Artur (Danquart et al.), the 1987 political documentary produced by the left-media collective Medienwerkstatt Freiburg and demonstrating three major aspects of that film’s significance: first as a cinematic document of both the political imaginaries and the practices of West Germany’s radical left, providing a glimpse of the historical legitimation, political commitments, and emotional attachments that left radicals associated with “the struggle” of that twenty-year span; second as a history “from below” that grows out of the heterogeneity of “the movement” and that serves, rather than the academic goal of explaining, the political goal of continuing the debate within that movement; and third as a project comparable, in its production and form, to experiments in collective authorship that proliferated in the 60s and 70s and sought not only to refute the myth of the lonely, gifted theorist and writer and the film director as “auteur,” but also to relegate these figures to the solitary confinement of elitist culture and knowledge production.

In Germany (and beyond), to raise the question of radical, left-wing culture is to confront the ways in which this radicality is represented and remembered. In many of the recent histories and documents, there exists a tendency to reduce the movement to a few trademarked representatives or iconic leaders. These are the radicals with a capital “R,” immutable in their heroism and frequently [End Page 46] represented in mythic terms, undergoing brutal oppression, or, by extension, the heroes of a glorious story, “the negative heroes of the nation,” as Wilfried Rasch – the physician who attended Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, and Andreas Baader in the high-security track of prison Stuttgart-Stammheim – calls them in Projekt Artur. Caught in the long shadow that the history of the Red Army Faction (RAF) casts over the political culture of West German left-wing radicalism, the stories of Holger Meins, Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, and Gudrun Ensslin tend to monopolize this culture. This tendency exists for several reasons. There is the spectacular manner of their deaths and the ensuing tumult of debate. There is the RAF’s claim to represent exclusively the revolutionary struggle against the state – a claim that contributed to the group’s iconic status and led to its losing contact with the “people” in whose name it fought and whom it sought to represent. Within this context, other groups are frequently marginalized or forgotten, and the political labour of Projekt Artur is aimed at making visible the often neglected heterogeneity of the movement, its variety of approaches, challenges, and goals. In pursuing this goal, the project resists what Kristin Ross (200) has called “the family photo-album tendency” – that is, the tendency to reduce a movement to a few trademarked representatives or iconic leaders. Circumscribed in this way, the traces of groups such as the June 2 Movement, the Revolutionary Cells, Red Zora, and others are increasingly difficult to find. Consequently, the left-wing radicality becomes the property of a few, easily marked off as the “activity of crazy zealots” (Varon 9; also Becker; Horchem) or a specifically German form of “militarism” (Varon 9). Projekt Artur does not deny that the history of West German left, radical culture involves a surfeit of violence, a violence fuelled as much by radical militants as...

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