after the red army faction: gender, culture, militancy by Charity Scribner (review)

Nearly forty years after the most well-known founders of the Baader-Meinhof group—Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, and Gudrun Ensslin, also known as the Red Army Faction—hanged themselves in prison, the terrorism of the “German Autumn” (1977) has continued to occupy a central role in European social and political thought, cultural history, and the arts. Scribner constructs a sweeping study of post-war Germany in the years leading up to the RAF, a time span that included struggles with the Nazi past, the rise of the Cold War, Viet Nam, the Arab-Israeli conflict, growing capitalist inequities, and the rise of feminism and the far left. She is careful to note, however, that the RAF was not a feminist organization. The focus of her study is the “feminist imaginary,” built upon tropes from the history of German drama, literature, and opera, that influenced the depiction of the women in the terrorist group, and that has spread since the seventies to the novel, film, and dance. According to Scribner, this depiction “signals a radical feminism that could have been, but never was. Instead, this feminist potential was derailed by armed struggle.”

The intersections of politics and aesthetics and the neo-avant-garde form an important theme in this volume, with Frankfurt School theories and Adorno drawn into debates on feminism as it developed a radical critique of social norms, as well as the then new post-modern critique of Jürgen Habermas. Scribner also sets the RAF in relation to the Situationists, as did Guy Debord himself, emphasizing that both groups understood the potential of the image in capitalist society. Meinhof and the others were savvy in the use of media to promote their ideology, whereas the Situationists were more critical of mediatized culture. Scribner also makes the fascinating observation that concrete poetry and language experiments seem to have influenced the grammar and writings of the terrorist organization. What this study confirms is the long life of twentieth-century avant-garde debates centered in politics and art and revolutionary ideals.

Their transmutations in the depiction of the female are viewed as the legacy of militancy in what the author refers to as our now “postmilitant” world, with its many ramifications for a global age. Extensive commentary is offered on numerous artworks that have been made about or been influenced by the RAF, especially Ulrike Meinhof, a former journalist, who left behind many letters and texts. They include the films Germany in Autumn, a collaborative effort by Alexander Kluge, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Volker Schlöndorff, and others; Margarethe von Trotta’s Marianne and Julianne; Yvonne Rainer’s Journey from Berlin/1971; Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven; Gerhard Richter’s paintings series October 18, 1977; and Johan Kresnik’s dance piece Ulrike Meinhof. In addition, there are the novels and plays by Elfriede Jelinek, Frederich Dürrenmatt, and Don DeLillo. Scribner also takes time to criticize what she calls “an Idealist notion of historical progress” that Klaus Biesenbach built into the 2005 group exhibit Regarding Terror: The RAF at Berlin’s Kunst-Werke, not so long after the final demise of successive generations of the RAF, in 1998. (Biesenbach founded this center and served as its artistic director. He is now chief curatorat-large of MoMA.) Still, he is credited with opening up to the public sphere the discussion of terror and militancy.

Given the wide range of examples in various art forms that are scrutinized here, it is surprising that there is no mention of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine—one of the great plays of the late-twentieth century—whose Ophelia is modeled after Meinhof. It was written in 1977, the year Meinhof hanged herself in her cell. Another piece of history that would have been worthwhile to note is the fact that as head of the state theatre at Stuttgart when the RAF was imprisoned there at Stammheim, Claus Peymann, long-time head of the Berliner Ensemble, helped raise...