Screening the Red Army Faction: Historical and Cultural Memory explores representations of the Red Army Faction (RAF) in print media, film and art, locating an analysis of these texts in the historical and political context of unfolding events. In this way, the book contributes both a new history and a new cultural history of post-fascist era West Germany that grapples with the fledgling republic's most pivotal debates about the nature of democracy and authority; about violence, its motivations and regulation; and about its cultural afterlife. Looking back at the history of representations of the RAF in various media, this book considers how our understanding of the Cold War era, of the long sixties and of the RAF is created and re-created through cultural texts.

The long-awaited Volume 2 of the first-ever English-language study of the Red Army Faction—West Germany’s most notorious urban guerillas—covers the period immediately following the organization’s near-total decimation in 1977. This work includes the details of the guerilla’s operations, and its communiqués and texts, from 1978 up until the 1984 offensive. This was a period of regrouping and reorientation for the RAF, with its previous focus on freeing its prisoners replaced by an anti-NATO orientation. This was in response to the emergence of a new radical youth movement in the Federal Republic, the Autonomen, and an attempt to renew its ties to the radical left. The possibilities and perils of an armed underground organization relating to the broader movement are examined, and the RAF’s approach is contrasted to the more fluid and flexible practice of the Revolutionary Cells. At the same time, the history of the 2nd of June Movement (2JM), an eclectic guerilla group with its roots in West Berlin, is also evaluated, especially in light of the split that led to some 2JM members officially disbanding the organization and rallying to the RAF. Finally, the RAF’s relationship to the East German Stasi is examined, as is the abortive attempt by West Germany’s liberal intelligentsia to defuse the armed struggle during Gerhard Baum’s tenure as Minister of the Interior. Dancing with Imperialism will be required reading for students of the First World guerilla, those with interest in the history of European protest movements, and all who wish to understand the challenges of revolutionary struggle.

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 i ek. 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 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. Scribner focuses on German cinema, offering incisive interpretations of films by Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, 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.

With a communicative approach to the phenomenon of terrorism and new archival sources, the book documents Meinhof's journalism and terrorism (1959-1976) and challenges many of the established narratives that have calcified around the story of Meinhof and the history of Germany's most infamous terrorist group.

In 1970 a small group of West German revolutionaries decided to go underground, set up safe houses, and learn the skills of the urban guerilla. They were the Red Army Faction. Seven years later, almost all of the original combatants were in prison or dead, yet, through their example, they had inspired a militant and illegal support movement, comrades willing to take up arms in defense of the prisoners. 1977 was to be a year of reckoning. Through daring attacks and devastating errors, the West German guerilla brought their society to the brink, mounting one of the most desperate and incredible campaigns of asymmetrical warfare ever waged in postwar Europe. That they failed is no excuse to not learn their story, to see who they were and what they fought for—and, most tragically, to bear witness to the lengths the state would go to silence them. This pamphlet is our very modest introduction to this story.

First published in 1977 in the US and Britain to universal critical acclaim, Hitler's Children quickly became a world-wide best seller, translated into many other languages, including Japanese. It tells the story of the West German terrorists who emerged out of the 'New Left' student protest movement of the late 1960s. With bombs and bullets they started killing in the name of 'peace'. Almost all of them came from prosperous, educated families. They were 'Hitler's children' not only in that they had been born in or immediately after the Nazi period - some of their parents having been members of the Nazi party - but also because they were as fiercely against individual freedom as the Nazis were. Their declared ideology was Communism. They were beneficiaries of both American aid and the West German economic miracle. Despising their immeasurable gifts of prosperity and freedom, they 'identified' themselves with Third World victims of wars, poverty and oppression, whose plight they blamed on 'Western imperialism'. In reality, their terrorist activity was for no better cause than self-expression. Their dreams of leading a revolution were ended when one after another of them died in shoot-outs with the police, or was blown up with his own bomb, or was arrested, tried, and condemned to long terms of imprisonment. All four leaders of the Red Army Faction (dubbed 'the Baader-Meinhof gang' by journalists) committed suicide in prison.