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This book explores gender-related questions about the Red Army Faction (RAF), a Far Left militant group that was masterminded by women and terrorized West Germany from the 1970s to the 1990s. It revisits the debates about the aestheticization of politics in relation to critical theory and German self-understanding in the decades that immediately preceded and followed World War II, and how these debates have shifted with the strikes of the Far Left in the 1970s and 1980s and, more recently, with the return of terrorism to European cities. To answer this question, the book analyzes postmilitant culture—the charged field of literature, art, and criticism that responds to militancy and political violence. The focus is on the response to the West German armed struggle. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 links the evolution of the RAF to important developments in postwar politics and society, including the emergence of second-wave feminism. Part 2 considers the response to the RAF's actions to a number of theoretical exchanges.

This chapter examines the damaged lives of the Far Left, in both fact and fiction, in Germany. It analyzes the works of novelists Judith Kuckart and Christoph Hein and filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff and compares them with the history of the German armed struggle. More specifically, it considers the doppelgängers that appear in the novels of Kuckart and Hein and in Schlöndorff's films on militancy and relates them to the alter egos that were actually adopted by members of the Far Left. It also explores the role of sexual politics, along with left-leaning ideological formations on both sides of postwar Germany, from the large-scale socialist experiment that was the German Democratic Republic to the minute cells that composed the Red Army Faction. Finally, the chapter discusses postmilitancy just after the Wende of German unification as well as the relationship between the armed struggle and socialism in Germany.

This book concludes by considering a film that points beyond militancy in the present period of transnational terror: Fatih Akın's Auf der anderen Seite/Yaşamın Kıyısında (The Edge of Heaven, 2007). It examines how The Edge of Heaven transposes the lessons of the German Autumn into the post-9/11 predicament and rethinks the relationship between feminism and the Far Left in Germany. Many elements of Akın's cinematic aesthetic are deeply informed by the story of the Red Army Faction. Working from the present, Akın processes the implications of the German 1970s and offers us a more skeptical slant on political violence than some of the better-known directors have done. This afterword also addresses feminist questions about culture and power and indicate new directions for the ongoing investigation into the concrete reality of women's experience.

This chapter examines how the militant body has been articulated and disciplined in culture and media in postwar Germany by taking up representations of Ulrike Meinhof's body, which was found hanging from the window grillwork in Stammheim Prison on May 9, 1976. More specifically, it compares such representations to those of other prominent leftists, particularly Joschka Fischer, Germany's Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor from 1998 to 2005. One of the most protracted reflections on Meinhof's life and death is the Tanztheaterstück titled Ulrike Meinhof, choreographed by Johann Kresnik. Playing off of familiar photographs of the German Far Left, Kresnik's dancers depict the articulation and disciplining of the militant body. Comparing the disparate representations of Meinhof and Fischer also reveals a cultural anatomy of protest and resistance that discloses the sexual politics that have shaped militant acts as well as postmilitant memory associated with the Red Army Faction.

This chapter discusses the organizations and publications that sought to lead as well as to express the tradition of the Left. It notes that these organizations and publications experienced public defections, mysterious losses, and the arrival of ambitious younger voices. The chapter explains how in February 1942, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (1908–72), a flamboyant Harlem politician nicknamed “King of the Cats” by his biographer, launched an iconoclastic African American newsweekly that had Far Left politics. It names the publication as People's Voice, which was published in an office atop the Woolworth's Department Store at 210 West 125th Street, across the street from the Apollo Theater. The chapter observes that the paper's editorial manifesto called World War II “one of the great crossroads of history,” which invoked the obligation of all people to forge a unity against fascism.

This chapter examines the Red Army Faction's (RAF) ties to the Situationist International (SI), the Paris-based group of artists and activists led by Guy Debord. More specifically, it considers the points of contact between the SI and the Far Left in Germany, as well as the major differences between them. Drawing on a range of sources, from Ulrike Meinhof's journalism on gender and consumer society to Debord's writing on the commodity fetish, it explores the ways that the SI's and the RAF's different definitions of autonomy generated divergent modes of resistance. It also discusses key junctures in the history of each group, including the early impulses to set fire to European cities, their analyses of consumer society, the status of women within the SI and the RAF, and the modes by which each group disbanded and dissolved.

This chapter follows the themes of the previous chapter to explore the specific social and psychological demands young Trotskyists faced in adapting their political language and social behaviour to the landscape of militant labour politics at a high-point of 1970s trade union struggles. Discussing the gendered dimension of revolutionary identity, it shows the challenges and contradictions of trying to reconcile everyday social and emotional life to a fraternal political culture that denied space for the personal. As men and women who were not directly committed to the sexual politics of the non-aligned left, but who were close enough to the movement to be aware of its politics, it argues that the stories of this far left cohort provide insight into the impact of Women’s Liberation on the everyday private life and subjectivity of individuals beyond the immediate vicinity of socialist feminist circles.

This chapter draws attention to Sen, the fifth Saigon sister. It mentions how Sen disliked politics but empathized deeply with the suffering of her people under the French. It also talks about her appeal to aspects of outdoor life in the maquis, especially working with peasants, as well as her condemnation of several practices, including the resistance marrying young city girls to older, uneducated soldiers. The chapter points out how Sen never shared her friend's “Far Left” tilt on the political spectrum. It also delves into Sen's observation of leaders chasing girls of a different class and her conclusion that most marriages in the maquis were for the worse because couples did not share similar culture, education, and customs.