Charity Scribner
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231168649
- eISBN:
- 9780231538299
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231168649.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
This book uses critical theory to answer key gender-related questions about the Red Army Faction (RAF), a group that was masterminded by women and which terrorized West Germany from the 1970s to the ...
More
This book uses critical theory to answer key gender-related questions about the Red Army Faction (RAF), a group that was masterminded by women and which terrorized West Germany from the 1970s to the 1990s. The questions include: Why were women so prominent in the RAF? And what does the continuing cultural response to the German armed struggle tell us about the representation of violence, power, and gender today? The book analyzes works by pivotal writers and artists, including Gerhard Richter and Elfriede Jelinek, 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. The book maps out a cultural history of militancy and introduces “postmilitancy” as a new critical term. It demonstrates how the most compelling examples of postmilitant culture don't just repudiate militancy but also investigate its horizons of possibility, particularly on the front of sexual politics. The book uses previously untranslated essays by Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas, as well as novels by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Judith Kuckart, Johann Kresnik's Tanztheaterstück Ulrike Meinhof and the blockbuster exhibition Regarding Terror at the Berlin Kunst-Werke. It also focuses on German cinema and provides interpretations of films by Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff and Fatih Akın. This analysis discloses 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.Less
This book uses critical theory to answer key gender-related questions about the Red Army Faction (RAF), a group that was masterminded by women and which terrorized West Germany from the 1970s to the 1990s. The questions include: Why were women so prominent in the RAF? And what does the continuing cultural response to the German armed struggle tell us about the representation of violence, power, and gender today? The book analyzes works by pivotal writers and artists, including Gerhard Richter and Elfriede Jelinek, 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. The book maps out a cultural history of militancy and introduces “postmilitancy” as a new critical term. It demonstrates how the most compelling examples of postmilitant culture don't just repudiate militancy but also investigate its horizons of possibility, particularly on the front of sexual politics. The book uses previously untranslated essays by Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas, as well as novels by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Judith Kuckart, Johann Kresnik's Tanztheaterstück Ulrike Meinhof and the blockbuster exhibition Regarding Terror at the Berlin Kunst-Werke. It also focuses on German cinema and provides interpretations of films by Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff and Fatih Akın. This analysis discloses 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.
Charity Scribner
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231168649
- eISBN:
- 9780231538299
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231168649.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Charity Scribner
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231168649
- eISBN:
- 9780231538299
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231168649.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
