De-/Konstruktionen der RAF im Post-2000-Kino. Filmische Erinnerungsarbeit an einem Mythos by Corina Erk, and: Screening the Red Army Faction: Historical and Cultural Memory by Christina Gerhardt (review)

These two new studies, which total very nearly 1000 pages of analytical narrative and were written on opposite sides of the Atlantic—Christina Gerhardt is currently based in Hawaii while Corina Erk studied at the University of Bamberg—would appear to show how films that engage with the Red Army Faction or Baader-Meinhof terrorism continue to interest young academic minds in German studies. It is indeed a rich topic. This is indicated emphatically by Erk's detailed appendices, which make up more than a seventh of her long text. Yet it is instructive that neither author gives a sense that worthwhile material is still being produced: Erk stops in 2012 with Das Wochenende, Nina Grosse's star-studded adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's novel of the same title, and Gerhardt even earlier, in 2000 with Die innere Sicherheit (dir. Christian Petzold) and Die Stille nach dem Schuss (dir. Volker Schlöndorff), which she compares with its chief inspiration, Inge Viett's memoir Nie war ich furchtloser (1997). Erk's study offers yet closer analyses of these two films with a greater wealth of contextual detail and information. Gerhardt's book is itself part of the "terrorist wave" that came in the wake of Heinrich Breloer's Todesspiel (1997), a made-for-television film in two parts documenting and dramatizing the events of the German Autumn in 1977 and the formation in 1998 of a Red-Green Coalition, which also coincided with the formal disbandment of what remained of the Red Army Faction (RAF). Todesspiel attracted mass audiences in October 1997 and succeeded in de-tabooing the subject and, in cinematic terms, wresting it from the clutches of the art house. The government formed in 1998 contained a number of politicians, most notably the foreign minister Joschka Fischer, with a background in militant activism in the 1970s, which prompted much public debate and included at least one high-profile court case.

Gerhardt writes that her "study was researched and written between 2006 and 2016" (x) but she begins with a quotation from Die Zeit dating to 2003. Given that the study enjoyed such a long gestation period it is unfortunate that the body of work analyzed is not more up to date and that more secondary literature published in the last decade has not been fully taken into account. In 2006 the subject may have been relatively neglected, though the New German Cinema's engagement with terrorism was hardly terra incognita, but by 2016 this was no longer the case. There are other problems. Her title makes no grammatical sense, but the first part invites readers to expect a book about films about the RAF (Screening the Red Army Faction). Gerhardt also discusses Gerhard Richter's sequence of paintings 18. Oktober 1977, the 2005 Berlin exhibition Zur Vorstellung des Terrors, and Die RAF-Ausstellung—which screens the RAF only up to a point, and also includes seven films. Readers would surely benefit from the inclusion of filmographic information in the table of contents. Five of these films were made contemporaneously with the events that serve as their subjects, including Katharina Blum (dir. Schlöndorff, 1975), Mutter Kösters Fahrt zum Himmel (dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975), and Das zweite Erwachen der Christa Klages (dir. Margarethe von Trotta, 1976); none of these films can be said to "screen" the RAF in any direct way; however, in contrast to Deutschland im Herbst (dir. Alexander Kluge et al, 1978) and Die bleierne Zeit (dir. von Trotta, 1981), the last two films under analysis, Die innere Sicherheit and Die Stille nach dem Schuss, were made after 1997. All seven are well known and have been subject...