After the Red Army Faction: Gender, Culture, and Militancy

Charity Scribner

Published by Columbia University Press 2014

After the Red Army Faction

Gender, Culture, and Militancy

Charity Scribner

https://doi.org/10.7312/scri16864

Overview
Contents

About this book

Analyzing the afterimage of revolutionary violence in contemporary culture and politics.Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust

Author / Editor information

Charity Scribner is an associate professor at the City University of New York, where she teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center and LaGuardia Community College. She is also the author of Requiem for Communism.

Reviews

Tom McDonough, Binghamton University, State University of New York, editor of The Situationists and the City:
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 cliché 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.

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:
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.

Hans Kundnani, editorial director at the European Council on Foreign Relations, author of Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany's 1968 Generation and the Holocaust:
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.

Sabine von Dirke, University of Pittsburgh, author of "All Power to the Imagination!": Art and Politics in the West German Counterculture:
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.

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 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.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Introduction. Beyond Militancy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part 1. Militant acts
1. The Red Decade and Its Cultural Fallout Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	27
2. Damaged Lives of the Far Left : Reading the RAF in Reverse Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	53
3. Buildings on Fire: The Situationist International and the Red Army Faction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	73
Part 2. Postmilitant culture
4. The Stammheim Complex in Marianne and Juliane Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	97
5. Violence and the Tendenzwende : Engendering Victims in the Novel and Film Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	117
6. Anatomies of Protest and Resistance: Meinhof, Fischer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	137
7. Regarding Terror at the Berlin Kunst-Werke Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	161
Afterword: Signs of a New Season Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	189
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	205
Works Cited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	257
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	279

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 312
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 30
- Other: 30

eBook

Published: December 16, 2014
ISBN: 9780231538299