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  • Maternal Ethics and Political Violence: The “Betrayal” of Motherhood among the Women of the RAF and June 2 Movement
  • Patricia Melzer (bio)

es gibt [...] niemand in der alten gesellschaft, der entfremdung [...] unmittelbarer erfährt als die frauen. [...] damit ist aber auch die dialektik ihrer situation klar – wenn sie nach den besonderen brutalitäten ihrer domestitizierung [...] überhaupt sich wollen, sich denken – müssen sie radikal und subversiv denken: ein inhalt und eine form, die sie für illegalität prädestiniert.

(Ensslin, qtd. in Schut 294; emphasis in the original)

Die Frauen sitzen in einer Klemme, in der Klemme zwischen Erwerbsfähigkeit und Familie, genauer: Kindern – vorhandenen, zu erwartenden, gehabten.

(Meinhof, “Falsches Bewußtsein” 126)

In the mid-1970s in West Berlin, a young woman, “R,” entered a hospital to terminate her pregnancy.1 She was able to have the procedure done legally under a recently reformed abortion law, and she left the hospital shortly after. Unlike the average West German woman claiming her right to reproductive freedom, this young woman accessed the medical care with a forged health-insurance card. Fearing arrest by the police, she returned to an illegally rented apartment to recover from the surgery. For her, the decision to terminate her pregnancy was not only personal (she had never wanted children), but also motivated by her political situation: living underground as part of a group that understood itself to be in armed struggle against a repressive state, she did not envision family life as a part of her immediate future. Motherhood, she felt, was strategically incongruent with revolutionary struggle. Other women who participated in political violence reached similar conclusions. However, some had to choose between their existing children and a political life they believed would ultimately better the world. For them, actively rescinding the role of mother was a necessary step in their political development, a choice that counters several assumptions about motherhood, [End Page 81] namely that, once pregnant, a woman will embrace her natural identity as mother and that, as a mother, she will foreground her children’s needs above all else. Most important, the decisions of these women regarding reproduction and family were framed by actions of political violence that trouble common notions of mothers as nurturing and life-giving.

It appears that because society views women and motherhood as synonymous and motherhood is tied to the assumption of nonviolence, the concepts of terrorism (violence) and women (mothers) can be imagined only as irreconcilable. This article addresses the contradictions that emerge when bringing three connected discourses to the current debate on West German leftist terrorism, namely an existing ideology of motherhood, a set of feminist theories that conceptualize nonviolent feminist politics as growing from “maternal ethics” or “maternal thinking,” and the decisions of women in the West German militant groups the Red Army Faction (RAF) and the June 2 Movement to abandon their lives as mothers. These women’s decisions either to leave behind their children when going underground or to terminate pregnancies challenge the ideological construction of motherhood as a woman’s primary identity, while also decoupling strategic violence from a naturalized masculinity.

The crisis that female terrorists pose to our cultural understanding of political violence builds on a long tradition of dissociating women from (political) violence in German culture and Western thought in general (Eager 1). The contradiction that women’s employment of violence poses is usually resolved by declaring these women as “unnatural,” a sentiment cemented into German cultural tradition with Friedrich Schiller’s famous line from his 1799 ballad “Lied von der Glocke” that describes French revolutionary women as having become crazed, immoral animals (“hyenas”). Underlying the relegation of “natural” women to the private (nonpolitical and implicitly nonviolent) sphere is the definition of women as mothers, since mothers are viewed as those who produce and take care of life rather than destroying it. Because women are excluded from both politics and the deliberate use of violence, those women who claim political space through violence are seen as inhuman. Hanna Hacker traces this phenomenon in the transgressive gender identity inhabited by “women” who committed public violence in fin-de-siècle France and Austria. The female soldiers, duel contestants, and murderers...

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