After the Red Army Faction: Gender, Culture, and Militancy. Charity Scribner (review)

Recent publications on RAF terrorism (Red Army Faction), which shook West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, are abundant, yet only few explicitly examine representations of female terrorists in literature and the visual arts. In her book, thoroughly informed on the subject and participating in this scholarly discourse, Charity Scribner begins her investigation by pointing to a conspicuous constellation: while women made up only about one third of RAF members, they figure prominently both in media presentations of the 1970s and 1980s—ranging from tabloids to political magazines such as Der Spiegel—and in art, literature, and film that corresponds to the armed struggle of the Far Left. In other words, all these responses are inflected by sexual politics and trained the public’s gaze onto women, particularly onto Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin. The alleged overrepresentation of women in the RAF was often linked with second-wave feminism. While Günther Nollert, President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, suggested that terror from the Far Left was a result of an “excess of women’s emancipation” (210), numerous artists and writers have resorted to depictions of the group within a feminist imaginary.

After the Red Army Faction: Gender, Culture, and Militancy sets out to assess the symbolic impact of the RAF on contemporary culture with a focus on the role gender plays in representations of terrorism. Strongly relying on feminist analysis and resorting to the Frankfurt School’s observation that the RAF, in discarding theory in favor of militant action, collapsed the aesthetic and the political, Scribner analyzes “postmilitant culture.” This term denotes works of art that either follow a militant act temporally, or urge us to think beyond the militant because “they censure violence and reactivate the tensions between the aesthetic and the political, revealing the social forces that keep them engaged with each other” (5). While weaker illustrations of postmilitant culture simply repeat the media-driven tendency to retell the events of the “German Autumn” or recapitulate the RAF’s conceptual errors, stronger examples “open up the space between art and politics in order to reveal the social dynamics that figure within” (11). Such works of art that turn the depictions of the events of 1977 into spaces for reflection allow for exactly the multiple viewpoints, ambiguities, and contingency the RAF repudiated.

Establishing how militancy and terrorism in Germany need to be understood in relationship to German fascism and the Holocaust, but also to transformations in German society such as the rise of the Green Party and feminism, Scribner traces the cultural history of militancy and terrorism in cultural productions that reflect upon RAF terrorism, ranging from literature and theater productions to dance pieces, exhibitions, films, and paintings. Framed by a valuable introduction to the topic, which outlines the underlying methodology and clarifies terminology, and an afterword in which Scribner analyzes Fatih Akin’s film The Edge of Heaven (2007) as an example of a work of art that transfers the lessons of 1977 into the post-9/11 quandary and rethinks the relation between the Far Left and feminism, After the Red Army Faction offers seven chapters arranged in two parts. The first three chapters that form Part One, “Militant Acts,” outline RAF history against the backdrop of developments in postwar German society and politics. Based on the principle that an analysis of the literary and artistic responses to autumn 1977 can deepen our understanding of the interaction between the RAF and state powers since the 1970s, Scribner places her examination of various works of art in the historical context. She analyzes the 1978 film Germany in Autumn and Gerhard Richter’s 1988 cycle of paintings titled October 18, 1977 in Chapter One. “The Red Decade and Its Cultural Fallout” offers an overview of the “red decade” and explains the links between the Frankfurt School, feminism, and the Far Left. Moreover, it illustrates how the artists attest to...