The Making of a Terrorist: On Classic German Rogues by Jeffrey Champlin (review)

Jeffrey Champlin's intriguing new book, The Making of a Terrorist: On German Classic Rogues, represents a novel close reading of canonical works from late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German literature with the aim of explicating the appearance of excessive violence and its rhetorical and representational implications. Champlin identifies Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen, Schiller's Die Räuber, and Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas as texts that push understandings of terrorism and the political use of force to the limit by including passages that make the audience want to turn away. By dwelling on such acts and their ramifications, Champlin argues, these literary works confront their readers with the exercise of excessive violence, and thereby open up political and cultural discourses to new conceptualizations of violence and its justifications. Champlin does not, however, provide a guide according to which violent occurrences in literature can and should be identified as "terrorist"; instead, he understands and defines terrorism much more "as an indicator of a threat to political, aesthetic, and epistemological representation" (5). In this sense, Götz von Berlichingen, Karl Moor, and Michael Kohlhaas do not merely fit the description of terrorist because of the death and destruction they instigate; rather, the excessive nature of their actions radically disrupts traditional discursive conventions and representations in a way that can be understood as terrorism. In order to support his assertion that these texts represent at their very core a critique of violence and its practice, Champlin undertakes an extremely detailed rhetorical analysis of each work focused on the linguistic and literary depiction of excessively violent acts and the interpretational ambiguity they reveal.

In the first chapter of his work, Champlin thoroughly situates and contextualizes his understanding of terrorism as disruption in the light of political philosophical traditions ranging from Hobbes to the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF). Drawing on Hobbes and Robespierre, Champlin investigates the implementation and justification of excessive violence by the sovereign, a figure who represents the established power structure that attempts to dictate and monopolize all discursive meaning surrounding the exercise of violence. Turning then to Arendt and the manifestos of the RAF, Champlin interrogates the very utility of violence as a political tool. Although groups like the RAF employed violence as a means to supposedly specific political ends, Arendt recognizes the inherently destructive nature of violence and that certain kinds of violent acts defy incorporation into any conceptual framework. In the second chapter, Champlin undertakes a rigorous rhetorical analysis of Götz von Berlichingen, in which he identifies the continued return of certain literary tropes throughout the drama that influence and inform the narrative action. These tropes, chief among them apostrophe, continually disrupt the narrative, literary convention, the audience's expectations, as well as a clear understanding of the characters' motivations.

Turning then to Die Räuber in his third chapter, Champlin makes use of Freud's formulation of the death drive to articulate the narrative arc of the play. According to Champlin, Karl Moor's acts of violence can be seen as serving a structuring function that mirrors Freud's theories regarding repetition compulsion. Following this reading, Karl's oath to the band of robbers, and the "manly" hand by which he swore it, rhetorically represents the locus of this repetitive behavior, from which he continually retreats and inevitably returns. Although the extreme violence exercised by the robbers throughout the play serves as a cyclical outlet for Karl's compulsion, it consistently exceeds any political instrumentalization or justification offered by the characters. Champlin contends that only through a type of narrative anamorphosis, a continual enactment of the fort/da nature of the protagonist's compulsion, are Karl and the robbers able to maintain their unity of purpose and action. Amalia's murder, then, serves as the point of rupture, at which the narrative and psychological structure of the play is disrupted by Karl's final rejection of the robbers and his oath.

In the fourth...