Guerilla Aesthetics: Art, Memory, and the West German Urban Guerilla by Kimberly Mair (review)

Almost twenty years after the dissolution of the Red Army Faction (RAF), journalistic coverage continues to shape the organization’s posthumous image. For a historical episode that has left such an enormous imprint on German memorial culture, there are still comparatively few contributions from the humanities and social sciences that help to understand the origins, shifting ideology, social composition, and political dissolution of the RAF—aspects that are all neglected by the predominant sensationalism of medial accounts, which tend to foreground the group’s spectacular facets, or expose well-known protagonists such as Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin.

Kimberly Mair’s Guerilla Aesthetics is also concerned with the persistent memorial bits that linger over this historical object, and approaches it from precisely that angle: the analysis is literally “about” the RAF, interested in the “terror of intelligibility or incommensurable self-making” (276), which surrounded the group’s attacks. By scrutinizing the “communicative” dimension of the organization’s actions as well as complementary ways by which its members made themselves heard, and by retracing the aesthetic reverberations of the Red Decade’s counterculture, the study aims to capture the shock that hit West Germany. In order to understand the incomprehensible, Mair concentrates on what she calls “Guerilla negativity”—an apt term for an organization with a radical deindividualizing agenda that promoted group think on every level of its internal structure, staged its warfare as a collective uprising against a disdained other, yet imaginary collective “imperialism,” and refused to offer any utopian vision throughout the twenty-eight years of its existence. The study is particularly interested in the leftist use of language and related aesthetics, drawing on the Stammheim trial, the politics of self-starvation, and “das info,” the group’s circular in prison. Images from the photo series The German Autumn in Minor Spaces complement the argument: together with painter Allen Ball, Kimberley Mair has documented sites of one-off RAF actions or lasting monuments of that era, such as the Stammheim prison and the grave of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe in Stuttgart. The respective chapter ends with a noteworthy question that surely deserves further investigation: “Perhaps we ought to refuse the distinction between the grave and the monument. They both present the problem of the undead, with what cannot be buried, with (what) remains” (274). Mair also revisits canonical art dealing with the RAF, such as Gerhard Richter’s paintings 18. Oktober 1977, the quarrel over the Berlin exhibit Zur Vorstellung des Terrors (2005), and The Raspberry Reich (2004), Bruce La Bruce’s satire that parodied both the scoffing public representation of the female RAF members throughout the 1970s and the uptightness within the organization.

One of the study’s weaknesses is that its theoretical references often supersede the original sources that Mair analyzes. Her archival findings and her own photographical material once held and continue to generate plenty of meaning themselves, yet the recurring references to Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, and others push the attention into labyrinthine directions, rather than clarifying the study’s guiding questions. Particularly the introduction to Guerilla Aesthetics leaves the reader with the initial impression that what follows might be a work concerned with the aforementioned authors’ take on space. Although the following chapters prove that this is not the case, the theoretical framework leads to puzzling announcements: The “human subject in this book is informed by poststructuralist social theory” (37), states Mair, a verdict followed by the declaration that her examination is not interested in “a normative evaluation of guerilla violence,” adding that “bombing, hostage-taking, assassination, hijacking, and armed bank robbery” are “characterized as performative” in her analysis (52). It is debatable whether conceptual tools commonly associated with questions of gender identity should be transferred to the sphere of murder, particularly if the incomprehensible part of such violence is first and foremost about ending people...