After the Red Army Faction: Gender, Culture, and Militancy - Tapa dura

The saga of the Red Army Faction's decades-long war with the West German state hardly ended when the shooting stopped, as Charity Scribner's superb book explains. Instead, the conflict captured and even haunted the imagination of generations of German novelists, filmmakers, and visual artists, whose diverse works are themselves an integral part of the RAF's legacy. Scribner offers both incisive and inventive readings of an array of texts, showing how they labored - and often struggled - to articulate a post-militant politics to move beyond the moral hazards of armed struggle. After the Red Army Faction dramatically expands our understanding of what it means to "read" violence and come to terms with its many wounds. -- Jeremy Varon, New School for Social Research, author of Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies The most innovative discussion of the RAF to date. This book provides a much-needed, nuanced understanding of the influence of the RAF on German cultural memory and will revolutionize the study of militant politics and aesthetics. -- Sabine von Dirke, University of Pittsburgh, author of "All Power to the Imagination!": Art and Politics in the West German Counterculture Charity Scribner's After the Red Army Faction will be an important contribution to our understanding of the impact of the left-wing terrorism of 1970s West Germany, and in particular the Baader-Meinhof Group or Red Army Faction (RAF), on culture in West Germany and beyond. -- Hans Kundnani, editorial director at the European Council on Foreign Relations, author of Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany's 1968 Generation and the Holocaust How can 'postmilitancy' offer clues to understanding West Germany's RAF and its afterlives, all the more after 9/11? How might it suggest new directions for resistance when everyday life remains saturated with violence? Charity Scribner provides searching and compelling answers in this study that reaches across disciplines. -- Belinda Davis, Rutgers University, University, editor of Changing the World, Changing Oneself: Political Protest and Collective Identities in West Germany and the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s Poised between an increasingly nostalgic tendency to romanticize the violent struggles of 1970s militants and our own deeply troubled response to the brutality of contemporary fundamentalisms, After the Red Army Faction provides us with an invaluable reflection on the complexities of past leftist terrorism and its continuing ramifications. With a keen eye for the ambiguities and blind spots of ideological extremism, Scribner examines German postmilitant culture through literature, film, dance, and the visual arts. Shunning easy cliche and superficial spectacle, she reminds us of the intellectual and human costs of the German armed struggle and of the ways gender and sexuality inflected its attitudes and representation in the media. A brilliant piece of cultural history. -- Tom McDonough, Binghamton University, State University of New York, editor of The Situationists and the City

Masterminded by women, the Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorized West Germany from the 1970s to the 1990s. Afterimages of its leaders persist in the works of pivotal artists and writers, including Gerhard Richter, Elfriede Jelinek, and Slavoj Zizek. Why were women so prominent in the RAF? What does the continuing cultural response to the German armed struggle tell us about the representation of violence, power, and gender today? Engaging critical theory, Charity Scribner addresses these questions and analyzes signal works that point beyond militancy and terrorism. This literature and art discloses the failures of the Far Left and registers the radical potential that RAF women actually forfeited. After the Red Army Faction maps out a cultural history of militancy and introduces "postmilitancy" as a new critical term. As Scribner demonstrates, the most compelling examples of postmilitant culture don't just repudiate militancy: these works investigate its horizons of possibility, particularly on the front of sexual politics. Objects of analysis include as-yet untranslated essays by Theodor Adorno and Jurgen Habermas, as well as novels by Friedrich Durrenmatt and Judith Kuckart, Johann Kresnik's Tanztheaterstuck Ulrike Meinhof, and the blockbuster exhibition Regarding Terror at the Berlin Kunst-Werke. Scribner focuses on German cinema, offering incisive interpretations of films by Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlondorff, and Fatih Akin, as well as the international box-office success The Baader-Meinhof Complex. These readings disclose dynamic junctures among several fields of inquiry: national and sexual identity, the disciplining of the militant body, and the relationship between mass media and the arts.