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Three different productions of Antigone are investigated with regard to the way in which the aesthetic of each performance was related to its political context: (1) the Tieck/ Mendelssohn production in Potsdam in 1841, one year after Friedrich Wilhelm IV ascended to the throne and ushered in a new era in Prussia; (2) Karlheinz Stroux's production in Berlin in 1940, the second year of World War II, and (3) Christoph Nel's production in Frankfurt upon Main in 1978, taking place at the time of the trial against the terrorist Red Army Faction in Stuttgart‐Stammheim, the suicide of the defendants in prison, and their funeral. It is argued that in all three cases it was the special relationship between stage and auditorium that brought about the politicization of the performances in their distinctive contexts, not so much because of a specific reading of the tragedy they conveyed, but primarily due to their particular aesthetic.

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.

In the fall, the collective relocated from their working-class digs in southern Seattle to the more middle-class north Seattle. As usual, the banks robbed by the members of the George Jackson Brigade were far away from their home, including the Old National Bank in Juanita and the Skyway Park branch of the People's National Bank. The proceeds from these and other recent bank robberies funded a new campaign, one in support of automotive machinists in Bellevue who had been on strike since May 18. Brigade members walked with picketers at five different automobile dealerships and concluded that the workingmen would be amenable to some old-fashioned American labor violence. The Brigade launched attacks against the Westlund Buick-Opel-GMC, S.L. Savidge Dodge, and the BBC Dodge dealerships. It sent a letter addressed to the Automotive Machinists Union claiming responsibility for the three automobile dealership bombings. While the Brigade took its potshots at the owning class in the United States, a parallel formation in West Germany involving the Red Army Faction was shaking the country to its foundations.

This chapter traces the development of the armed struggle in Germany after World War II, especially the “red decade” that spanned from the public protests of the late 1960s to the events of 1977. It begins with an overview of the Red Army Faction's (RAF) origins and the factors that precipitated the German Autumn in order to relate the armed struggle to several historical transitions, including the nation's entry into a postwar democratic system, Germans' attempts to grapple with their history of violence, and the emergence of the new social movements. It then considers a literary and artistic response to the German Autumn, along with the evolution of German radicalism that was guided by a range of intersecting discourses, such as public policy, popular media, and intellectual life. It also compares the rehashing of the German encounter with militancy and terror with the operations of the 1978 film Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn) and Gerhard Richter's 1988 cycle of paintings titled 18. Oktober 1977 (October 18, 1977).

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 examines the relationship between postmodernism and postmilitancy by focusing on literature and cinema of the 1980s and early 1990s that considered terrorism. In particular, it considers two novels, Der Auftrag (The Assignment, 1986) and Mogadischu Fensterplatz (Windowseat at Mogadishu, 1987), written by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Friedrich Christian Delius, respectively, to highlight instances where the effects of postmodernism and postmilitancy overlapped and intersected. It considers how some of the main topics of discourse about the postmodern, such as identity, enlightenment, and emancipation, are configured within the fields of postmilitant art and writing. By comparing selected novels and films during this period, we can discern a restructuring of national identity that unfolded over the course of the Tendenzwende and gain a fuller understanding of the concept of postmilitant culture, its potential, and its problems. The feminine protagonists in The Assignment and Windowseat at Mogadishu carry as many traits of the victims of the Red Army Faction (RAF)-backed hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181 in October 1977 as they do the agents of RAF violence.

This chapter examines the exhibition Zur Vorstellung des Terrors (Regarding Terror), held at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin in 2005. Here, the Kunst-Werke curators set out to demonstrate how forcefully the media had shaped the Red Army Faction (RAF) legacy. Indeed, many of the artworks displayed highlighted their indebtedness to news sources, especially stock photographs of Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin. The chapter analyzes this mediatized condition, moving beyond the apparently mechanical reproduction of RAF imagery that typified Regarding Terror, both in the curatorial propositions of the show and in some of the individual works chosen for it. Focusing on the work of four artists included in Regarding Terror—Johan Grimonprez, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Gerhard Richter, and Yvonne Rainer—it explores the margins between art and terror, aesthetics and politics. It argues that the social impulses that motivated these and other artists included in the exhibition were all but eclipsed by the curators' decision to highlight the power of the media.

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 chapter examines Margarethe von Trotta's 1981 feature film Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne and Juliane). Based on the lives of Gudrun Ensslin and her sister Christiane, the film depicts the feminine face of the social forces that were changing West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. It reenvisions the circumstances that Ulrike Meinhof describes in her writings, the concrete constraints of the prison complex, and the psychological strictures of forced isolation from 1972 to 1973, when she was held in solitary confinement in the Women's Psychiatric Section of the Cologne-Ossendorf Prison. Marianne and Juliane explores the divide between the public programs of the Frauenbewegung and the Red Army Faction's (RAF) underground machinations. In revealing the broader social frameworks that coexisted with the RAF, von Trotta touches on issues of sexuality, labor, and militancy that were fiercely debated in the years of the group's first generation. Making Stammheim into a metonym of German authoritarianism, von Trotta blurs the margins between police state and nation-state.

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 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 focuses on the 1978 film Germany in Autumn, an omnibus film that was shot in immediate response to the events of the so-called “German Autumn,” a series of terrorist attacks by the Red Army Faction (RAF). The film is about two funerals: that of the industrialist hostage Hanns-Martin Schleyer, and the joint funeral of RAF leaders Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, and member Jan-Carl Raspe. The significance of mourning and the public act of grieving evident in Schleyer’s funeral becomes apparent in contrast to the funeral of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe, which is contested with respect to both its legitimization and its legitimacy. The chapter then examines how the question of humanization or dehumanization is confined to the question of presentation; and it is the task of cinematic presentation that the film pursues.

The emergence of decolonization and national liberation movements in the Global South in the 1950s and 1960s exposed the limits of pacifism and nonviolent movement strategies. In a strange twist that escaped most cold warriors, it was the Third World liberationists’ language of freedom and liberation that made some peace advocates question their adherence to nonviolence. Sympathetic to the demands for independence in Asia and Africa, they condemned the violence with which colonial regimes and ruling elites backed by former colonial powers maintained control over indigenous populations. The level of violence from above called into question the precept of nonviolence as the best and only acceptable strategy. Nonviolence and pacifism became increasingly marginalized in the antiwar discourse as the 1960s drew to a close, contributing to the radicalization and ultimate fragmentation of the protest movements.

Chapter 7, ‘Inventing New Forms of Political Theatre’, covers the 1960s and 1970s. It situates the chosen productions in the socio-political climate of the GDR—that is, within the discussions on the leadership of the Party—and in the Federal Republic of Germany, where the anti-authoritarian movement, the student movement, and the emergence of the Red Army Faction provide the context. The aesthetics of Benno Besson’s Oedipus Tyrant (1967, East Berlin), Hansgünther Heyme’s Oedipus (1968, Cologne), Hans Neuenfels’ Medea (1976), and Christoph Nel’s Antigone (1978, both in Frankfurt/Main) is evaluated in terms of their contribution to this discussion and their political stance. The last three productions serve as examples of how the Bildungsbürgertum—still the majority of the theatregoers in West Germany—wanted the politicization of theatre to be not merely justified but mandatory.

Chapter 5 traces how art deemed outside of the state’s civilizing discourse is met with censorship. It expands the definition of censorship beyond explicit bans and suppressions of artworks by the state, as such bans have become technically speaking difficult to enforce and somewhat unnecessary. Instead, it highlights processes of (partial) silencing, including incentives for self-censorship and delegitimization as well as modes of foreclosure that authoritatively frame the production and reception of art. At the center of the chapter are the attempts to censor the exhibitions Regarding Terror, thematizing media perceptions of the Red Army Faction (Berlin, 2005), and Freekick (Istanbul, 2005), mainly featuring works on the “Kurdish question” and other instances of state violence. Under the shadow of the “global war on terror” and each country’s historical challenges with “security politics,” critics of both exhibitions construed arts and politics as incommensurable. Outlining how freedom of expression is circumscribed by official memory regimes in Turkey and Germany, the chapter analyzes different modes of censorship and the variety of actors engaged in it. It highlights that silencing efforts use the argument of the autonomy of art not to shield art from political intervention but to suppress political expression through the arts.

This chapter examines the shift towards a more confrontational form of campus politics in the wake of the dissolution of SDS in 1969/70, one in which concerns about left-wing violence moved centre-stage. It analyses centre-right students’ roles in some of the key debates of the 1970s—the controversy surrounding the ‘Radicals Decree’, the ‘Mescalero Affair’, and students’ alleged support for the terrorism of the RAF. It argues that Christian Democratic students were instrumental in making a scandal of left-wing activism at a time when a left-wing coalition governed the country for the first time since the war. Centre-right students contributed much to the febrile climate of the 1970s, this chapter shows, stoking public hysteria and helping to create a climate of distrust that made left-wing dissent politically suspect. Their conduct highlights that the process of political liberalization in the wake of 1968 was not a linear but rather a winding one.

In this article Böckenförde argues in favour of constitutionalizing the possibility of a state of emergency instead of regulating it through normal law. The primary purpose of constitutions is to limit, not to authorize power, Böckenförde argues. Therefore, emergencies must be dealt with through constitutionally embedded procedures of declaring a state of emergency. The most rights-preserving way of dealing with emergencies is through measures, which in contrast to laws are temporary, purpose-oriented, narrow in application, and most importantly can only complement but not abrogate extant law. Drawing on Carl Schmitt, Böckenförde underlines that the securing of freedom lies not only accidentally, but fundamentally in forms and procedures.