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

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 Žižek. 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 J rgen Habermas, as well as novels by Friedrich D rrenmatt and Judith Kuckart, Johann Kresnik's Tanztheaterst ck 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 Schl ndorff, 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.

Author: Charity Scribner
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 12/16/2014
Pages: 312
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.19lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.10w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9780231168649

About the Author
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.