After the Red Army Faction: Gender, Culture, and Militancy by Charity Scribner, and: Death in the Shape of a Young Girl: Women’s Political Violence in the Red Army Faction Patricia Melzer (review)

The 1970s saw the formation of armed leftist movements in a number of Western democracies, including Italy, Japan, the US, France, and West Germany. One of the distinguishing features of these movements was that women constituted a significant part of their membership and played a number of roles ranging from carrying messages to taking leading positions. Previous research suggests that thirty percent of the members of the Italian Red Brigades and more than one third of the leadership of the group were female. (De Cataldo Neuburger and Valentini 7–8). In the Federal Republic of Germany, the percentage of women in armed leftist groups was even higher. According to German historian Gisela Diewald-Kerkmann, almost half of the members of the Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, were female (275). Moreover, almost all of the group’s leading ideologists were women.

The violence of women in the RAF was not only perceived as an immediate threat to state representatives but also as a violation of the prevailing gender norms. State authorities and journalists quickly found a culprit for this gender transgression: feminism. As early as 1971, Günther Nollau, the future president of the Federal Criminal Police Office, suggested that female involvement in the RAF constituted an “excess” of women’s liberation. Patricia Melzer pointedly described the underlying logic as follows: “female terrorists […] were acting against their natural disposition, ergo, feminism, which agitates against traditional gender roles, produces female terrorists” (3). Although most women in the RAF did not identify as feminists, “Das weibliche RAF-Mitglied wurde zum negativen Emblem der Frauenbefreiung, wie sie sich westdeutsche Männer ängstlich ausmalten: Bewaffnet und unsichtbar im Untergrund agierend, im Gefängnis dann unbeugsam weiterkämpfend” (Vukadinović 86).

Since the early 1970s, the relationship between feminism and female participation in armed leftist groups has been the subject of critical debate among feminist activists and journalists. In 1978, the editor of the feminist anthology Frauen und Terror, Susanne von Paczensky, pointed out that “Es genügt nicht, den Zusammenhang zwischen Terror und Emanzipation einfach zurückzuweisen, um unserer eigenen Loyalitätskonflikte willen müssen wir ihn genau und gewissenhaft untersuchen” (12). In her contribution to the volume, Margarete Fabricius-Brand argued that “Frauen, die sich terroristischen Gruppen angeschlossen haben, leben unter Bedingungen, in denen sie ihre ökonomischen, kulturellen und psychischen Bedürfnisse radikal verleugnen müssen […]. Insofern entsprechen sie voll dem Bild der unemanzipierten Frau” (67). In a study from 1981, the sociologist Liese-lotte Süllwold came to a similar conclusion. According to her, the “overzealous conformity” and “cold perfectionism” of women in the RAF and other armed leftist groups were indicative of a complete disavowal of the emancipation of women (106).

A number of recent publications have drawn on and further developed the arguments in Frauen und Terror (e.g. Bandhauer-Schöffmann; Grisard; Vukadinović). In 2009, Irene Bandhauer-Schöffmann concluded that “der Konnex zwischen Terroristinnen der 1970er Jahre und der Frauenbewegung ein von außen herangetragener [war]” (84). Dominique Grisard’s lucid analysis of the gendered discourse on left-wing terrorism in Switzerland from 2011 shows that anti-feminist, anti-terrorist, and racist discourses during the Cold War intersected and jointly produced an image of the female terrorist as the antithesis to the white heterosexual male citizen. Two books from 2015 show that the relationship between feminism and terrorism in West Germany continues to fascinate, and remains controversial. While sharing an interest in aesthetic and political forms of subversion, Charity Scribner’s After the Red Army Faction: Gender, Culture...