Guerrilla Aesthetics: Art, Memory, and the West German Urban Guerrilla 9780773598744

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Illustrations
Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Negative Subjects
2 Aesthetic Convolutions
3 Choreography of the Unspeakable and the Urban Guerrilla Posture
4 From Consensus to Dissensus – Gerhard Richter’s Painterly Utterance
5 Coda Regarding an Accusation of Love: The RAF Exhibition
6 Unruly Memory and the Spectre of Monument
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
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T
U
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W
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Citation preview

Guerrilla Aesthetics

G U E R R I LLA AE STH ETICS

Art, Memory, and the West German Urban Guerrilla

Kimberly Mair

McGill- Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2016 isbn 978-0-7735-4694-3 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-4695-0 (paper) isbn 978-0-7735-9874-4 (epdf) isbn 978-0-7735-9875-1 (epub) Legal deposit second quarter 2016 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding also received from a University of Lethbridge Research Dissemination Grant. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Mair, Kimberly, 1970–, author Guerrilla aesthetics : art, memory, and the West German urban guerrilla / Kimberly Mair.

Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-7735-4694-3 (cloth).–isbn 978-0-7735-4695-0 (paper). isbn 978-0-7735-9874-4 (pdf).–isbn 978-0-7735-9875-1 (epub)

1. Terrorism–Germany (West)–History–2oth century. 2. Guerrillas– Germany (West)–History–2oth century. 3. Aesthetics–Political aspects– Germany (West)–History–2oth century. 4. Aesthetics–Social aspects– Germany (West)–History–2oth century. 5. Art–Political aspects–Germany (West)–History–2oth century. 6. Art–Social aspects–Germany (West)– History–2oth century. 7. Collective memory–Germany (West)–History– 2oth century. I. Title.

hv6433.g32m34 2016

363.3250943

c2015-908591-8 c2015-908592-6

Contents

Illustrations | vii Abbreviations | xi Acknowledgments | xiii

Introduction | 3 1 Negative Subjects | 53 2 Aesthetic Convolutions | 100 3 Choreography of the Unspeakable and the Urban Guerrilla Posture | 133 4 From Consensus to Dissensus – Gerhard Richter’s Painterly Utterance | 165 5 Coda Regarding an Accusation of Love: The RAF Exhibition | 199 6 Unruly Memory and the Spectre of Monument | 250 Conclusion | 275

Notes | 287 Bibliography | 329 Index | 345

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Illustrations

1.1 Atlas 477, Baader-Meinhof Photographs (18 October 1977) (1989), by Gerhard Richter, includes some of Astrid Proll’s photographs as source images. Courtesy of Atelier Richter © Gerhard Richter, 2015 | 64 1.2 The German Autumn in Minor Spaces (2007), by Allen Ball and Kimberly Mair, Stammheim-Stuttgart. Courtesy of Allen Ball and the author | 84 2.1 Camera Silens (1994), by Rob Moonen and Olaf Arndt. Courtesy of Rob Moonen | 109 4.1 Tote (Dead) (1988), by Gerhard Richter. Courtesy of Atelier Richter © Gerhard Richter, 2015 | 172 4.2 Tote (Dead) (1988), by Gerhard Richter. Courtesy of Atelier Richter © Gerhard Richter, 2015 | 172 4.3 Tote (Dead) (1988), by Gerhard Richter. Courtesy of Atelier Richter © Gerhard Richter, 2015 | 173 4.4 The German Autumn in Minor Spaces (2007), by Allen Ball and Kimberly Mair, shared grave of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe in Stuttgart. Courtesy of Allen Ball and the author | 177 5.1 Prada Meinhof (1999), by Scott King and Matt Worley, graphic design for cover for Crash!, a manifesto published for the exhibition Crash! Corporatism and Complicity held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Courtesy of Scott King and Matt Worley | 207 5.2 Meanwhile in a Large Central London Apartment the Telephone Is Ringing … (1998), by Scott King and Matt Worley, screenprint poster. Courtesy of Scott King and Matt Worley 209 5.3 Atlas 478, Baader-Meinhof Photographs (18 October 1977) (1989), by Gerhard Richter, includes source images of Baader’s

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5.4

5.5

5.6

5.7

5.8

5.9 5.10 5.11

5.12

5.13

6.1

Illustrations

cell and the source image for his painting Plattenspieler (Record Player). Courtesy of Atelier Richter © Gerhard Richter, 2015 | 225 Black and White Room (2003), by Christoph Draeger, installation from Christoph Draeger: Memories Of Terror From A Safe Distance at Kunstmuseum Solothurn, 13 September to 16 November 2003. Courtesy of Christoph Draeger | 228 Black and White Room (2003), by Christoph Draeger, installation from Christoph Draeger: Memories Of Terror From A Safe Distance at Kunstmuseum Solothurn, 13 September to 16 November 2003. Courtesy of Christoph Draeger | 228 Eleanor Antin, The Nurse and the Hijackers (film still), 1977 colour video, sound, 01:25:00. Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York | 231 Eleanor Antin, The Nurse and the Hijackers (film still), 1977 colour video, sound, 01:25:00. Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York | 231 Eleanor Antin, The Nurse and the Hijackers(film still), 1977 colour video, sound, 01:25:00. Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York | 231 The Raspberry Reich (2004), by Bruce LaBruce, film still, colour film, 90 mins. Courtesy of Bruce LaBruce | 236 The Raspberry Reich (2004), by Bruce LaBruce, film still, colour film, 90 mins. Courtesy of Bruce LaBruce | 236 Mara with Dingbats (2004), by Erin Cosgrove, digital images, 9⬘ ⫻ 11⬘, a poster for A Heart Lies Beneath. Courtesy of Erin Cosgrove | 241 A Heart Lies Beneath (2004), by Erin Cosgrove, video still, live action and animated video, 7 mins. Courtesy of Erin Cosgrove | 243 A Heart Lies Beneath (2004), by Erin Cosgrove, video still, live action and animated video, 7 mins. Courtesy of Erin Cosgrove | 243 The German Autumn in Minor Spaces (2007), by Allen Ball and Kimberly Mair, a K1 neighbourhood intersection. Courtesy of Allen Ball and the author | 251

Illustrations

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6.2 The German Autumn in Minor Spaces (2007), by Allen Ball and Kimberly Mair, near a shootout with police. Courtesy of Allen Ball and the author | 259 6.3 The German Autumn in Minor Spaces (2007), by Allen Ball and Kimberly Mair, route of escape during the Baader breakout from the reading room at Deutsches Zentralinstitut für soziale Fragen. Courtesy of Allen Ball and the author | 262 6.4 The German Autumn in Minor Spaces (2007), by Allen Ball and Kimberly Mair, near the site of the attempted assassination of Dutschke. Courtesy of Allen Ball and the author | 270 6.5 The German Autumn in Minor Spaces (2007), by Allen Ball and Kimberly Mair, Meinhof’s apartment. Courtesy of Allen Ball and the author | 273

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Abbreviations

apo Ausserparlamentarische Opposition I Extraparliamentary Opposition bka Bundeskriminalamt I Federal Criminal Investigation Office brd Bundesrepublik Deutschland I Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) cdu Christlich-Demokratische Union I Christian Democratic Union ddr Deutsche Demokratische Republik I German Democratic Republic (East Germany) dm Deutsche Marks I German Marks k1 Kommune 1 I Commune 1 li Lettrist International mfe Multi-Focal Expansionism mg Militante Gruppe nato North Atlantic Treaty Organization opec Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries pflp Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine pira Provisional Irish Republican Army plo Palestine Liberation Organization raf Rote Armee Fraktion I Red Army Faction I BaaderMeinhof Gang rh Rote Hilfe I Red Aid rz Revolutionäre Zellen I Revolutionary Cells si Situationist International spd Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands I Social Democratic Party of Germany

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Abbreviations

spk Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv I Socialist Patients’ Collective tw Tupamaros West Berlin 2jm Bewegung 2. Juni I 2nd of June Movement

Acknowledgments

Although the conventions of language deny it, neither texts nor authors are singularities. Guerrilla Aesthetics is the effect of many emplacements. Much support and encouragement, as well as insightful readings of this work in an earlier version, came from Chris Andersen, Charles Barbour, Leo Mos, William Ramp, Dennis Sweeney, and Patricia Ticineto Clough. The thoughtful attention that each person gave to my work, some of them many times over, provoked me to contemplate and animate things I had not seen in it before. I am also indebted to George Pavlich. Most especially, this work would never have happened at all without Derek Sayer, whose mentorship and care for it – not just for what it says but for how it says it – was crucial. Derek: Thank you for giving space for idiosyncratic prose and structure. Some of that has been muted in this iteration but remains somehow in the unsaid of it. Fellowships and grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Province of Alberta, and the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta generously funded the archival research that provided the basis for this book. The following institutions provided access to archival materials and assistance along the way: Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin, Deutsches Zentralinstitut fur soziale Fragen Berlin, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. Less formally, the Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: RAF Ausstellung, organized by the Berlin Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, offered a crucial source of materials. Whether knowingly or not, Sean Brayton, Craig Campbell, Jeff Davidson, Steve Ferzacca, Shane Gannon, John Granzow, Michael Granzow, Trevor Harrison, Michelle Helstein, Mark Jackson, Jay Laurendeau, Jones Mitchell, Jan Newberry, Thomas Perks, and Anne

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Acknowledgments

Winkler all touched the shape of this work through conversation or by bringing to me different texts and forms of popular culture resonating with this work – as well as by being treasured colleagues and friends. Stefan Lambert kindly wrote to several cultural institutions in Germany on my behalf to get answers to my questions about the politics surrounding the placement of the monument outside of the Berlin Opera House. Artist Allen Ball collaborated with me on The German Autumn in Minor Spaces. Amber Dean, Karen Engle, Trevor Harrison, and Claudia Malacrida offered supportive advice on aspects of the publishing process. Providing a myriad of supports, Jenny Oseen ties together so many things related to work and laughter in the Sociology and Anthropology corner in UHall at the University of Lethbridge. Ben Highmore, whose books I have cherished, generously gave his time to meet with me when I was working in England in the summer of 2014. Jacqueline Mason at McGill-Queen’s University Press offered crucial editorial guidance, as well as considerable patience through my first experience with a book-length manuscript. I am so grateful to Jacqueline and to mqup for taking a chance on this manuscript given its idiosyncratic a-disciplinarity. Grace Seybold copy edited this book with perceptive attention to how its orientation was sometimes at odds with the style manual. I thank her for that and for her sense of humour about it too. I am indebted to the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for their attention and efforts. These readers provoked and challenged me with their close readings, perceptive questions, and helpful suggestions. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. An earlier and abbreviated version of chapter six was published previously as “As Autumn Turns to Winter – In Search of the Archive Without an Address,” Journal of Historical Sociology 24, no. 2: 133– 54 (© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd). I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers of that earlier work for their thoughtful responses.

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This book would not be at all the same without the art. I am thankful for the generous and collaborative spirit of the following artists and galleries, whose works appear in this volume: Olaf Arndt, Allen Ball, Erin Cosgrove, Christoph Draeger, Scott King, Bruce LaBruce, Rob Moonen, Matt Worley, Atelier Richter on behalf of Gerhard Richter, and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts on behalf of Eleanor Antin (thank you also to Casey Dorobek). A special note of acknowledgment is due to graduate students Nathan Wong, Allie Ledoux, and Jenna Kummer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Lethbridge, whose own research and writing invited rich opportunities for me to read, discuss, and contemplate so many other things in the last months of this project. Jake Vinje gave the manuscript a thorough reading in the final stages. With theoretical sensibility and care, Jake intervened countless times to remedy my mistakes and reformulate obscure grammatical forms that I had been reading over without notice. To say thank you for all of this seems inadequate but thank you, Jake. Yoke Sum Wong has supported me, and my work, in countless ways over so many years, but above all with a friendship that endures distance and frequent punctuations of communication to always pick up as though not a minute has passed. I am thankful daily for the sheltering understanding, brilliance, and humour that Kara Granzow’s friendship brings to my life. An enduring background of love and support has come from my parents, Eric and Nonie, and my sister, Gina. And then there is Rain, who can, and will, succinctly summarize almost any situation with a pun that makes me laugh. I couldn’t think of one, so I leave it to her.

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Guerrilla Aesthetics

Introduction

This book explores a poignant and disturbing episode in recent European history, and in the history of what is commonly called terrorism. It confronts the legacy of the urban guerrilla movement active in the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (the former West Germany) during the Red Decade (1967–77)1 and its recurring reverberations through artistic and memorial practices. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, several different urban guerrilla cells arose in West Germany. Among these guerrilla cells were the Red Army Faction, the Tupamaros West Berlin, the 2nd of June Movement, the Socialist Patients’ Collective, and the Revolutionary Cells. West German urban guerrillas were known for violent operations that had a spectacular, even staged, character. It was as if it was more urgent that the guerrillas’ actions would produce a mise-en-scène than that they would be successful in any standard instrumental sense. Urban guerrillas who were caught, tried in court, and imprisoned seemed to communicate in ways that provoked frustration on the part of authorities then, and historians since. If that were not enough, West German urban guerrillas seem to have fascinated not only their contemporaries but generations to follow, as their image and the historical period have become what one observer has critically called the play material2 of younger generations, as well as fashion designers, musicians, novelists, contemporary artists, and curators. Hence, the pejorative term “Prada Meinhof” appears in the Urban Dictionary to describe political demonstrations and causes as alternative fashion shows. The concept of Prada Meinhof was originally posited by artist and graphic designer Scott King and historian Matt Worley, who imbued it with a more precise force.3 Prada Meinhof evokes both the glamourization of the West German urban guerrilla persona and the substitution of concrete

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Guerrilla Aesthetics

political activity with its simulation and commodification through the adoption of its radical imagery, behind which there is assumed to be neither substance nor conviction. The Red Decade was bookended by two key historical unfoldings. The decade commenced with the police killing of Benno Ohnesorg, who was participating in a protest against the city of Berlin’s hosting of the Shah of Iran on 2 June 1967. The decade closed in the numbing wake of a cluster of culminating events in the autumn of 1977. These include: the high-profile hostage-taking of industry executive Hanns Martin Schleyer; a drawn-out hijacking of a Lufthansa flight that was stormed by a special security tactical unit while stopped in Mogadishu; the mysterious deaths of imprisoned guerrillas Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe; and finally the assassination of Schleyer, whose body was found in the trunk of a car in Mulhouse, France.4 The space in between the two temporal markers of 1967 and 1977 saw the rise of the West German urban guerrilla cell. The first formal cell was the Tupamaros West Berlin (tw), formed in 1969, which was followed by a Munich incarnation of the cell.5 The Berlin tw cell later became the 2nd of June Movement (2jm), named in remembrance of Ohnesorg’s death. As 2jm member Bommi Baumann has noted, they named their group in acknowledgment that it was not the guerrillas who shot first.6 The infamous Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion – raf), which was popularly referred to as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, announced its formation in 1970, with other cells to follow. Notably, the Socialist Patients’ Collective (Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv – spk), a militant cell, emerged from unconventional group therapy sessions held at the University of Heidelberg. Urban guerrilla operations were often carried out in collaboration between these and other configurations of cells, with some overlap and crossovers in membership. Over the decade, urban guerrillas carried out countless operations: bank robberies; bombings of military and police headquarters, corporate offices, and a yacht club;7 shootouts with police; and attacks on embassies. They also took several hostages. In addition to Schleyer, guerrillas kidnapped the politician Peter Lorenz,8 candidate for the Christian Democratic Union (Christlich Demokratische Union –

Introduction

5

cdu), and also kidnapped several oil ministers from a 1975 opec conference in collaboration with pro-Palestinian guerrillas.9 They even committed assassinations. For instance, urban guerrillas assassinated Judge Günter von Drenkmann,10 Federal Prosecutor Siegfried Buback,11 and bank president Jürgen Ponto.12 While they made an attempt on the life of Judge Wolfgang Buddenberg, the car bomb that they planted instead injured his wife.13 West German urban guerrillas also participated in hijackings alongside pro-Palestinian guerrillas: the hijacking of an Air France flight in 197614 and the Lufthansa hijacking in 1977.15 Yet, the Red Decade is only a temporal snapshot and a historical construct of a much more textured cultural fabric in the existence of West Germany and in the Cold War period. Not only did it commence within an already long-standing tumultuous cultural and political crisis in Germany, much of what occurred during this decade had enduring resonance long after 1977, and the urban guerrilla movement persisted well into the 1990s. In the latter years, it operated primarily under the name of the raf until the group announced its disbanding in a communiqué issued in 1998. This disbandment followed a number of bombings and assassinations that occurred after the fall of the Berlin Wall and during the reunification of Germany. The chair of the Deutsche Bank, Alfred Herrhausen, was assassinated in 1989.16 Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, who managed the privatization of former Deutsche Demokratische Republik (ddr) public assets, was assassinated in 1991.17 Wolfgang Grams, a (now deceased) raf member, was suspected of involvement. In 1993, damaging explosions on the site of a new prison under construction in Weiterstadt significantly delayed its construction. Armed and masked guerrillas had reportedly overtaken the site’s guards.18 These actions constitute just a few examples of guerrilla activity attributed to the raf that carried on into the 1990s. Aside from a few touchpoints, however, this book’s discussion of urban guerrillas will remain mostly limited to the activities of the Red Decade and to many of its artistic and memorial reverberations thereafter. While the figure of the West German urban guerrilla emerged from within a specific cultural, geographical, and political ethos, the force of West German urban guerrilla enactments can no longer be contained by the conditions

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imperative to their initial realizations, as their echoes are perpetually remixed into new material and affective contexts to establish new acts and forms. Guerrilla Aesthetics eschews the attribution of instrumental rationality that is often granted to West German urban guerrilla actions19 and it seeks to retrieve the partial incomprehensibility of urban guerrilla enactments in their negation of recognizable subjectivity and corporeality. Acknowledging that the Red Decade was characterized by countercultural aesthetics that favoured self-displacement and disruption over instrumental goals, I argue that urban guerrilla enactments performed an aesthetic mode of action rather than authoring a project that sought to identify and realize instrumental imperatives. With respect to the exploding effects in popular culture, the arts, and the memory economy of urban guerrilla aesthetic modes, I observe that these now transgress the contextually emplaced conditions of the irruption of guerrilla actions to mingle and float into different cultural assemblages. While, indeed, most of the echoing iterations of urban guerrilla aesthetics do not appear to make identifiable programmatic interventions into states of affairs, neither do they engage directly in the radical negativity that I attribute to many urban guerrilla enactments. More recent cultural formations that are not explicit about goals and assume the illegibility of guerrilla (anti)language carry with them the traces of negative guerrilla aesthetics. Therefore, critics seem to be insistent upon neutralizing the effects of ambiguous aesthetic projects by imposing rationalizing criteria upon them. Even more curiously, artistic and curatorial renderings of guerrilla imagery that do not assume a position of judgment over the figure of the guerrilla fighter are at times positioned as alibis for the accused. Insofar as these works of art and exhibition are at times called upon to denounce not only guerrilla activities but their own inchoate aesthetics, the critics that mobilize such calls seem to demand that art substitute for the guerrilla to perform its remorse and to seek redemption. In this sense, the cultural reverberations of the Red Decade are deeply entangled with the guerrilla fighter’s aesthetics. Guerrilla aesthetics involve the body’s emplaced circumvention or convolution of the genres that govern communication, and do not map neatly and congruently onto what is meant by the prefigurative

Introduction

7

politics of direct action commonly attributed to the West German student movement.20 Circumvention into inculcated regimes of corporeal communication demands unrecognizable choreographies of bodies, objects, and spaces. At times, these convolutions adopt a radical negativity that repositions the body outside of the either/or alternatives set by convention,21 and opts for destruction. Guerrilla Aesthetics traces a mise-en-scène of self-unmaking by giving attention to the imperative sensorial elements in the emplaced enactments of urban guerrillas, their judicial opponents, and artistic formations that trouble the anchoring of hegemonic memory.

Guerrilla Aesthetics

The aesthetic mode of action that this book presents is an inherently politicized mode of enactment oriented towards the destruction of liberal subjectivity.22 I argue that the aesthetic mode of action that West German urban guerrillas deployed posited a new kind of radical subject unmoored from the contemporary social consensus of habitual norms, values, and assumptions. This new type of subject would produce a grammar of conduct that breaks free of the assumed relations between subjects, objects, and spaces governed by the normative social syntax and rhythms of concrete and sensual everyday life, though the adoption of this grammar showed itself to be annihilating. I argue that since the emergent subject that the urban guerrillas (especially incarcerated guerrillas) sought to realize is not a culturally domesticated one, its actions and words cannot be fully instrumentalized in terms of recognizable social goals. Hence, its conduct and words are incongruently-sensical (rather than commonsensical or even nonsensical), yet they remain politicized in their refusal of hegemonic sensibilities and conventional communicative formations. In this book, I explore incongruently-sensical formations in their various cultural iterations, from guerrilla actions to contemporary artistic practices and exhibitions relating to them, and to modes of collective instruction through archives, memorialization, and the production of public monuments. From this perspective, the success or failure of these performances, and their ability to resonate in any kind of

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homological way to their outcomes, is indeterminate and irrelevant, since they seek to circumvent rational terms of sense-making. The concept of aesthetics has been commonly used in a reductive way to refer to the beautiful or to distinctive taste, but its etymological origins urge us toward broader considerations. Stemming from the Greek words aisthitikos, that denotes what is “perceptive by feeling,” and aesthesis, for the sensorial experience of perception, aesthetics, as Susan Buck-Morss observes, encompass our sensorial perception of material reality that can only be accessed partially. Our pre-linguistic engagements with our surroundings are sensorial and, while our senses are culturally shaped and, as David Howes argues, “collectively patterned,”23 they retain an “uncivilizable trace, a core of resistance to cultural domestication.”24 Even eighteenth-century philosopher Alexander Baumgarten, whose interest in the senses motivated his mobilization of the concept of aesthetics to denote a science of the senses, conceived of sensorial experience as unruly, lowly, and requiring benevolent rescue through the systematic application of reason and science.25 Ben Highmore argues that “[a]s rationalist discourse expands to cover areas of life that are non-rational, that do not follow patterns of logical reasoning, what is lost (as these aspects of life are transformed into suitable objects for attention) is the very ‘stuff-ness’ that made them urgent problems in the first place,”26 and therefore Highmore insists upon the generation of multiple forms of study that can better enable the register of the experience of everyday life without disciplining it to rationalist discourse.27 Since this book elaborates the ways in which the urban guerrilla – and, at times, the contemporary artist, the curator, and others – amplifies and produces uncivilized traces as it seeks flight from a normative socialization that sustains the status quo as commonsensical, it is imperative that it acquiesces neither to rational discourse, nor to the demand of an either/or ‘choice’ that finalizes an explanation. Thus, the concept of aesthetics here refers neither to taste, to beauty, nor specifically to art, though artistic practice is of import. On the one hand, aesthetics refers to the focus in this work on corporeal experience, which is difficult to attend to in conventional disciplinary modes, as Highmore has observed. On the other hand, I use the word ‘aesthetics’ in my description of guerrilla performativity. The attention I give

Introduction

9

to the aesthetic mode of guerrilla enactments – or, indeed, to guerrilla aesthetics – does not aim to deploy an iteration of the Prada Meinhof critique that emphasizes the simulation of radicalized politics or style apart from concrete action. The concept of guerrilla aesthetics grants primacy to the sensorial, rather than rational, bearings of guerrilla communications. The senses, however, are not the possession of an independent body. They arise in the interstices of the quiet but stubborn politics of everyday life and its shifting emplacements.

Emplacement

My consideration of aesthetic modes of action presents the inextricable and mutual implications of space and subjectivity denoted by the concept of emplacement. Emplacement emphasizes the entanglement of mind, body, and space.28 None of these is a bounded and settled entity, as they can neither subsist nor be identified in absolute singularity. Given the lack of extended and comprehensive treatments of the concept of emplacement, this section gathers a number of related observations and concepts to trace its contours.29 Emplacement emerges out of interdisciplinary interactions between cultural and neo-Marxist geography, anthropology, phenomenology, deconstructive architecture, and environmental design, as well as from Michel Foucault’s genealogical interventions into history, which provoke us to think spatially.30 Some of these influences are primarily humanist in their orientation, but the concept of emplacement itself leans toward posthumanist concerns in its decentring of human subjects and its keen attention to inanimate things and flows. Hence, emplacement encourages us to think about how human subjects do things, but it simultaneously calls upon us to think about how places, objects, and conventions – indeed, how the dynamic interrelationships between all of these entities – do things and continually transform the social realities that we, together with supposed inanimate things, make and remake. Such processes of making, remaking, and transforming may be motivated, but their outcomes are not transparently intentional. In his elaboration of spatial geographies, Edward W. Soja insisted that “social life must be seen as both space-forming

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Guerrilla Aesthetics

and space-contingent” and operating in a tension-filled interrelationship that inspires his own “recomposition of Marx’s famous dictum: We make our own history and geography, but not just how we please; we do not make them under circumstances chosen by ourselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the historical geographies produced in the past.”31 The concept of emplacement runs against the taken-for-granted assumption inherited from Newton and Kant of space as an empty, infinite, non-substance awaiting our stake-claiming, naming, and place-making.32 Such abstractions get us nowhere, as Clifford Geertz announces, “[f]or it is still the case that no one lives in the world in general. Everybody, even the exiled, the drifting, the diasporic, or the perpetually moving, lives in some confined and limited stretch of it – ‘the world around here.’”33 To understand a subject, a thing, or an occurrence as emplaced is to acknowledge it in its profound relationality and to take seriously Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s observation that “[t]he perceptual ‘something’ is always in the middle of something else.”34 In other words, the concept of emplacement calls for attention to the intertwined constellations between entities that language falsely names and describes as discrete singulars. When Tim Ingold tells a story about having his students make kites out of bamboo, ribbon, tape, and so on, he observes that initially they each appeared to be making an object that would be complete in itself. Once taken outside, these seemingly finished objects “leaped into action, twirling, spinning, nosediving, and occasionally flying,” producing an effect of more than just the interaction of a person and an object (which itself is an assemblage of many objects).35 Rather, when this assemblage was caught up with the wind out of doors, it came to life. Ingold remarks: “In practice, then, flyer and kite should be understood not as interacting entities, alternately playing agent to the other as patient, but as trajectories of movement, responding to one another in counterpoint, alternately as melody and refrain.”36 These constellations of interrelationality and movement that emplacement elaborates are organized in places, which are themselves plural rather than isolated arrangements. Edward S. Casey emphasizes the mutual articulations of places and bodies when he insists that the body is not a “windowless monad.” Likewise, place is not an impervious

Introduction

11

structure without doors and windows that would invite the body’s passage: “the porosity of the skin of an organic body rejoins, even as it mimics, the openness of the boundaries of places; there is a fleshlike, pneumatic structure shared in a common ‘flesh of the world.’”37 Building upon Casey’s observation of the mutual porosity of place and body, which renders them more amorphous than is usually presumed, I note that emplacement also implicates time, which too often falls victim to the same empty abstraction as does space. MerleauPonty foreclosed the possibility of casting space and time as representational, conceptual, or external to the body when he remarked, “In so far as I have a body through which I act in the world, space and time are not, for me, a collection of adjacent points nor are they a limitless number of relations synthesized by my own consciousness, and into which it draws my body. I am not in space and time, nor do I conceive space and time; I belong to them, my body combines with them and includes them.”38 While emplacement often explicitly emphasizes space, I take this to be a reaction to the cultural preference to privilege temporality, a preference that Foucault simultaneously pointed out and challenged with his playful forwarding of the concept of heterotopia as a special, complex kind of space that intervened into social practice in a myriad of ways. The concept of heterotopia was really a methodological provocation, though – not a provocation to go out in search of special spaces, but to think about spaces, both mundane and extraordinary, and to think in terms of space, not just time.39 In this sense, emplacement attempts to intervene into the subordination of space to time,40 but does not abandon time, which is crucial to the concept because it is concerned with the dynamic interrelationships between things that come into contact, mingle, and make effects. Emplacement then articulates that place is implicated in the movements of bodies, and that movement contributes to the organization of place. The happy fact that the coordinated movements of pedestrians rapidly navigating a busy urban street at the beginning and end of the workday routinely result in relatively few collisions and associated injuries attests to the enfolded relation between space, time, and body. As I have already suggested, a far greater number of entities make up the arrangements that the concept of emplacement can denote.

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Inanimate objects, which are far more intricately involved in our movements and habitual repertoires, need to be included in the constellation. In keeping with the instance of a bustling city street, the transporting of packages and bags, the pulling of luggage, the navigation around trash bins, and the use of walking sticks do not seem to impede differentially paced passage through constrained spaces; rather, these objects become incorporated into the sensorial situation.41 Emplacement then observes that place opens itself to particular movements of bodies and objects. At the same time, the obdurate aspects of a place’s built environment (such as pathways, public benches, walls, mediated intersections, ‘no trespassing’ signs, and so on) permit, encourage, discourage, or constrain other forms of passage, placement, and arrangement of bodies and objects.42 Most of the time these interrelational operations are not immediately perceptible to us in any way that incites much reflection because they are consistent (and emplaced) with our habits as well as the cultural tendency to assign relative independence to things. We can, however, readily grasp at examples of this relationality when we think of institutional spatial arrangements that have formalized placements of individuals and objects that set what, through routine practice, appear to be commonsensical trajectories of movements. For instance, a patient attending a medical appointment does not take up a seat behind the reception desk but instead remains in the waiting room to be called. While the patient may visit places down the corridor, this is only permitted upon the order or invitation of the health practitioner. In contrast, a health practitioner may occupy or move through all spaces – at least during the working day while governed by routine tasks – but cannot take up a seat in the waiting room without disrupting the operations of the clinic in numerous ways. Certain objects, such as the patient’s file, are permitted only a few movements. For instance, the patient’s file remains in the possession of the practitioner, but even so the practitioner should not take the file home, to a dinner party, and so on. Rather, the file has its own set place within an explicit system of serial ordering. While we know and expect there to be such differential restrictions on movements, we rarely consciously acknowledge that movements are

Introduction

13

relationally interdependent with both material and immaterial forces immanent to a situation. Admittedly, this is only a surface treatment of emplacement in the setting described above, but the point is to show what kinds of considerations the concept prompts into what otherwise appear to be merely common-sense, or natural, relations between seemingly bound things. The difficult task is to be able to recognize emplacement in more subtle arrangements. But it is counter to convention to view the world in this way, and it is an assault upon the belief in individual autonomy to reflect too much on how our actions and movements are routinely called forth by obdurate surroundings, which are at times invisible to our disciplined attunements. As even the example of the medical clinic above suggests, the acknowledgments already made with respect to the implications of the concept of emplacement do not go far enough. With respect to the governance and treatment of the patient’s file, which notably is arranged only in relation to other files, it is possible to find that ethereal objects, such as bureaucratic policy and administrative practices (which are akin to traffic regulations that would be implicated in the previous example of pedestrian movements along a city street), have their own unique obdurate force in the relations between people, things, and the movements that are permitted in particular places,43 and yet they are simultaneously the effects of those very relations. Despite the extent to which emplacement suggests a human agency that is far weaker than classical assumptions of it as a centralized will organizing a locus of bodily control,44 a suggestion which threatens to offend the sensibility of the liberal humanist subject or any positing of a pure “I,” one of the reasons emplacement is difficult to recognize is that language stands stubbornly against our acknowledgment of it. Language gives little by way of vocabulary to speak of things in any way other than as singularities.45 Grammatical structure in English, for example, assigns the verb’s action to the subject – a one-directional relation that Annemarie Mol aptly challenges in her treatment of the exemplary situation of the statement “I eat an apple,”46 which reveals the radical inadequacy of this grammar to describe the process at stake and to recognize the complexity of the agency entailed. Thus,

14

Guerrilla Aesthetics

language is itself deeply implicated in emplacement – from the names we give to places and things to the grammatical rules that govern descriptions of relationships and actions. To the extent that emplacement posits a weaker conception of human agency, it also makes a more subversive gesture by suggesting that entities, such as inanimate objects, arrangements, or even concepts, not usually granted agency, may indeed have some measure of it.47 Permit me, in a brief aside, to make a related observation about the language and grammar of this particular text. First, the critique elaborated above with respect to the unidirectional relation of subject and verb that assigns authorship to acts informs my use of the word ‘enactment’ rather than ‘act’ at times throughout this text. I use the word ‘enactment’ at times to undercut explicitly the pretense of a discrete, substantive acting subject, presumed to be endowed with an agential intention and able to calculate and form in advance the unfolding effects of action within a situational field independently from the connectivity of its emplacements. Second, there will be times when language norms restrict what I can convey manageably, given the assumptions of emplacement and multiplicity and the challenge that they present to conventional attributions of agency; therefore, I will at those times need to rely upon subordinated grammatical phrasing, such as the passive voice, to avoid attributing action to identifiable subjects when the active voice would restrict the plausible agency of other entities in a particular situation. Another closely related reason why emplacement presents a profound challenge to our understandings is that, as John Law has shown, strategies of conceptual coordination inform the habits that allow us to frame our perceptions in socially recognized ways of drawing connections and coordinating elements in our surroundings. Among the several coordinating strategies that Law identifies are syntax, perspective, and system. These cultural strategies appear natural and obvious to us – they are, after all, habitual – and they have real implications to our conventional epistemology (conditions of knowing) and to our understanding of ontology (what exists). Linear perspective, for instance, Law explains, “works on the assumption that

Introduction

15

it is possible to distinguish in a three-way division between a viewer, that which is viewed, and a representation of that which is viewed.”48 This seems to be an obvious and natural assumption since it is a culturally preferred one, but, as Law insists, it has a number of political as well as philosophical effects. Here, I bring attention to only a few of Law’s illustrative observations. First, linear perspective assumes that entities are distinct from each other and “models the subject as a single point location within or to one side of a three-dimensional geometrical space.”49 Given the observations already noted about what conventions the concept of emplacement opposes, such assumptions take space as a pre-given and unaltered substance; likewise, they present subjects as the independent, substantial contents of abstract space. Second, linear perspective is reductive, as Law insists, because it grants only one privileged viewpoint from which to depict situations that are textured by several different potential viewpoints. Third, Law points out that linear perspective brings into play a family of related ontologies that all perform “a more or less stable world ‘out there’ that may be depicted from one perspective or another,” but an explicit attention to a preferred way of knowing obscures the performance of this particular ontology. This concealment matters because overt questions of epistemology tend to hide the active making of ontology.50 In other words, as linear perspective tackles problems of how we can know, it performs a sleight of hand by implicitly positing what is. This last point deserves restatement in different words: epistemological considerations do not merely concern how and what we can know about subjects, objects, and relationships; rather, epistemological considerations make subjects, objects, and relationships. The ontological substance conjured in this sleight-of-hand trick is populated with supposedly given, static, and discrete entities that foreclose the potential for tracing the movements and interconnections to which the concept of emplacement gives attention, while eliding the potential for tracing, to use Merleau-Ponty’s words, the extent of a subject’s “inherence in a world.”51 Law advocates for attunement to the simultaneous production and knowing of things. With this, his aim is not to cast heterogeneity and difference as problems to

16

Guerrilla Aesthetics

be subsumed and reconciled under a single perspective, but to acknowledge that different objects are produced and to ask in what ways they are connected. If we want to understand the inherence of body and surroundings, the implications of the concept of emplacement intertwine even further with the senses, habit, affect, memory, and imagination, which emanate neither from individuals nor surroundings, but are all engaged in processes that are, to borrow from Keith H. Basso, interanimating: “As places animate the ideas and feelings of persons who attend to them, these same ideas and feelings animate the places on which attention has been bestowed, and the movements of this process – inwards towards facets of the self, outward toward aspects of the external world, alternately both together – cannot be known in advance.”52 The acknowledgment of processes of interanimation brings attention to the “emotive force” of places53 as they “gather things in their midst,”54 to make affective networks forged in experience.55 Steve Ferzacca has shown how aesthetic activity is intrinsic to social relations and can make social lives through the “evocation of particular social identities that make sense in particular networks and contexts.”56 Ferzacca’s concept of “sensibilia,” which he finds elaborated in the making of kroncong music in a Yogyakarta neighbourhood, “are the sensorial sentiments evoked by the totality of sound and image that comprise the songs, but also by the activities and associations that go into making kroncong music that are meant to ‘move’ people as well.”57 Further, Ferzacca’s articulation of the “somophoric organization of social life and subjectivity,” which acknowledges “the body (soma) as an ongoing bearer of experience that acts as a carrier of or form (phore) of meaning,” observes the significance of sense in connecting “the domains of body, subjectivity, and society.”58 Accompanying affective networks can be, as Merleau-Ponty would say, “a latent significance, diffused throughout the landscape or the city, which we find in something specific and self-evident which we feel no need to define.”59 Or perhaps it simply cannot be defined because the latent significance is a feeling or attitude that is more often than not amorphous, without name, and is not necessarily captured in representation. It is perhaps, as Patricia Ticineto Clough has

Introduction

17

observed of affect’s “dynamism,” something that operates “below human perception.”60 Thus, this sense without a name can be sinister or playful with memory – both circling the realms of private and public consumption of experience.61 Perhaps it is also, as Kathleen Stewart offers, pervious to the shock of the weight of occurrences in “the spaces of desire (and dread) they incite in the imagination.”62 Whether concrete or imaginary, spaces, bodies, and objects assume dynamic postures in a culturally informed intersensorial situation rather than in an abstract space within which contents are arranged at fixed points in time. Situations that are unremarkably familiar and may seem unworthy of comment show their texture of import and significance when considerations of emplacement inform them. Highmore casts familiarity not as a state of things but as “a process of becoming habitual”63 that is intrinsically tied to moods and dispositions. His elaboration of the arrival of two new chairs in his childhood home illustrates this well. The chairs were low-seated campus chairs from Habitat’s mass-modernist line of affordable furnishings. Their placement among the existing household furniture, which he describes as dark, formal, and old-looking, provided a different perspective – particularly for a child – of “the underneath of things: the underneath of old tables that might be smooth and polished on top but from underneath looked dusty, wooden, and generally thrown together, with little sprinklings of glue, random wooden pegs and nail heads.”64 Significantly, the new chairs positioned their occupants in a relatively reclined position distinct from the existing chairs that supported and demanded an upright comportment. The relative repositioning of the body and intervention into scale had effects, as Highmore’s elaboration shows, on mood and ushered in a degree of informality.65 He does not suggest, however, that this is a one-directional relationship in which the chair alone governs new distributions in a place. The chair itself is culturally informed in its design, enacting a mood or way of being that is social in character. Habitual placements or movements of the body are, as this example suggests, never independent of the arrangements of objects and place, nor are they primarily governed by thought and intention. Instead, they are thoroughly emplaced. Examples of habitual activities – such as driving an automobile, which demands constant assessment of

18

Guerrilla Aesthetics

spatial allowances, and typing, even though most people do not consciously know where the letters are relatively located – demonstrate Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that “habit has its abode neither in thought nor in the objective body, but in the body as mediator of the world.”66 The concept of emplacement pushes beyond that of embodiment. Whereas the concept of embodiment challenges assumptions of the mind-body dualism, emplacement acknowledges the inextricable entanglement of mind, body, and space.67 These are porous and unsettled entities. The entanglement suggested by emplacement is not merely that of a meeting between three discrete entities, but a profound predicament of mutual production, within which the analytical demarcation of discrete object-entities is only one of many possible discursive effects. Emplacement insists then that subjects can be neither interpellated nor acknowledged externally from the spaces that they traverse, inhabit, and make. As Louis Althusser has insisted that we are never outside of Ideology in general,68 one might assert even more forcefully that we are never outside of space, and neither do spaces exist outside of the processes of social production. As Rob Shields has crucially observed, space is heterogeneous, and our attempts to know space(s) have at times obscured the extent to which our conceptions of space inform our intellectual engagements as well as the production and ordering of difference.69 Admittedly, there are concrete obstacles to tracing these aesthetic modes. They, as well as the emplacements in which they emerged, are ephemeral and can be accessed only indirectly and partially. Since quotidian details that give access to corporeal choreographies are devalued by the dominant sets of criteria that govern scholarship, those concomitant circumstances are passively omitted by not being documented, and at times they are actively excluded. Acknowledging that, while aesthetic choreographies refuse to give way to instrumental itineraries that can be polemically anchored and evaluated, they are intractable and active in the struggle over memory, I will explore in this book the emplacement of aesthetic choreographies and convolutions in their various cultural iterations to stress that the choreographies through which subjectivity is performed – the subjectivities of the urban guerrilla, the artist, or even the judicial agent – are emplaced choreographies.

Introduction

19

The stubborn questions that thread Guerrilla Aesthetics together pertain to the communicative tactics that arise within different kinds of emplacements. For the most part, social environments complement the norms and values that support recognizable conduct and speech. What kind of communication is fostered in a sustained situation (by which I mean emplacement) that does not complement shared understandings of the social world? What happens to social subjects when they are no longer situated within physical, technological, and cultural emplacements regulated by tacit social norms of communication? How do such subjects communicate? From where do they derive norms and values? Rather than treating urban guerrillas as though they were fixed subjects of socialization, as good, bad, or confused subjects, I consider the coordinates of the environments in which they were situated or emplaced. The point of departure for this consideration is the urban guerrillas’ leap into avant-garde negativity in rejection of what guerrillas understood to be a bourgeois subjectivity. The move underground (to become illegal) established a new emplacement that sought to negate or to annihilate the presumed bourgeois subject ‘within’ as well as its language of rationality. Negativity, a shapeless state with an indeterminate potential, was modernism’s imagined exit from the cool calculations of modernity.

Negativity

Guerrilla Aesthetics acknowledges the emergence of urban guerrilla tactics in the activities of the “fun guerrilla,” a term coined by Fritz Teufel of Kommune 1 (k1), which initially mobilized a dramatic battle of wit rather than violence with the state through illegible actions that were not to be explained.70 Thus, I treat the West German urban guerrilla within the avant-gardist ethos of the postwar brd.71 Postwar avant-gardes had a number of influences, including the Lettrist International (li), Situationist International (si), Dadaism, Futurism, German Expressionism, and Surrealism. These inheritances provided a rich terrain for anarchistic formations in various iterations. For instance, the li’s “autoterrorist” tendencies, which had called for individuals to strive for provisional formulations of the self (wherein

20

Guerrilla Aesthetics

“self-destruction” was at issue), and the li’s explication of the methodological device of the dérive (which sought self-displacement and not goals),72 describe the performance of urban guerrilla enactments. This self-destructive leap into an empty and shapeless abyss is particularly striking in the performativity of incarcerated guerrillas, whose tactics of hunger strikes and refusal of conventional communications fostered a new corporeality of multi-nodal subjectivity that the Socialist Patients’ Collective roughly anticipated in their writing. The emergent, hungry, and monstrous body – with its emaciating component parts segregated throughout high-security prison cells – perhaps articulates a concrete manifestation of the “necrophilic fantasies” that Richard Langston finds in German post-fascist avant-gardes.73 The destructive character of this cultural ethos, that strikes out at established reality, drew upon the salience of the Frankfurt School of critical theory for the New Left in West Germany, the United States, and elsewhere in the 1960s. The critiques of consumer society and the technical rationality of industrial capitalism forwarded by, among others, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse entreated students “with an urgency”74 by forwarding a challenge to the emancipatory possibility of individual autonomy assumed in Enlightenment thought. These critiques revealed intractable contradictions in the modern subject’s desires, senses, beliefs, behaviours, and conceptions of social reality. Marcuse would refer to the subject’s predicament in terms of its administered consciousness,75 a consciousness furnished with a comforting guise supported by the material affluence of advanced industrialized society. He contended that this affluence, and the restricted liberation that advanced technologies brought to material conditions, arranged a new kind of exploitative enslavement in a total administration of labour and existence submitted to automation and calculation.76 This analysis rested upon Marcuse’s distinction between freedom in necessity (or material freedom) and ‘real’ freedom: “The abolition of material poverty is a possibility within the status quo; peace, joy and the abolition of labor are not.”77 The calculated administration of existence that Marcuse observed, which even permeated human consciousness so that it was beset by repressed and perverted forms of gratification that complied with rationality, signalled the operation of a total-authoritarian state.

Introduction

21

Of particular significance is Marcuse’s identification of elements of the totalitarian view of the state in liberal social theory that led him to make the strong claim that “we can say it is liberalism that ‘produces’ the total-authoritarian state out of itself, as its own consummation at a more advanced stage of development.”78 This ominous observation and its suspicion of liberal social theory undergirded the subsequent unfolding of Marcuse’s critical theory. To the extent that Marcuse’s accusation of complicity between liberal thought and totalitarianism invoked a perceptible feeling of unease towards liberalism, it is possible to see that, in the context of the officially post-fascist brd, those readers who took Marcuse seriously felt that they could not rest under the wings of an emergent liberal democratic state. Marcuse’s theory of the socialized self departs from most theories of socialization, which depict it as a humanizing process to legitimate existing forms of social organization and the available modes of action that they demand.79 Douglas Kellner notes that, for Marcuse, subjectivity is “a product of societal normalization, whereby the individual is subjected to rationalizing forms of thought and behaviour.”80 Marcuse saw the self that was shaped in industrial Western society as standing in sharp contrast to his imaginings of the fully sensual Romantic pre-technical self in an existence characterized by the intertwined extension of the body and its surroundings in toil and relative privation. Humans and nature, the subject and state, the social and the political, all stood in relational opposition marked by contradiction and tension.81 In an advanced technological society, however, these oppositions are subsumed under a total administrative integration in which technology and technical rationality are applied to neutralize centrifugal social forces82 so that humans and nature can be “organized as things and instrumentalities”83 to be dominated through more invasive, yet pleasurable, social controls that discipline and restrict the senses. Horkheimer and Adorno had presented pleasure not as freedom’s reward but as its obstacle: “To be pleased means to say Yes … Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is flight; not as is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance.”84 With this, they contended that the modern

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Guerrilla Aesthetics

individual is marked by needs and desires manufactured by the culture industry of consumer goods and popular cultural forms that dull the capacity for critical thought, restrict pleasures to specified modes, and elide the opposition between the domains of the private and public. Therefore, for Marcuse, the private space of the self – its consciousness and unconsciousness – is saturated by both mass production and mass distribution so that the effects extend beyond the context of the individual’s obedience in labour and into the most intimate dimensions of existence to produce an “immediate, automatic identification.”85 The usurpation of the individual’s inner consciousness that once occupied an antagonistic relation with society now ensures a mimetic relation between the dominant ideology and the individual’s identification: “in the contemporary period, the technological controls appear to be the very embodiment of Reason for the benefit of all social groups and interests – to such an extent that all contradiction seems irrational and all counteraction impossible. No wonder then that, in the most advanced areas of this civilization, the social controls have been introjected to the point where even individual protest is affected at its roots. The intellectual and emotional refusal ‘to go along’ appears neurotic and impotent.”86 Hence, Marcuse contended that the individual in advanced industrial society is one-dimensional in both thought and behaviour, which have been colonized by the system’s political rationality, a rationality that reconciles all previous tensions and contradictions that were maintained in tension through a critical Reason. Marcuse observed that in industrial society, where technical reason abolishes the clash and contradiction of antagonistic forces so that all thought, even dissent, mobilizes in support of the system, what is lost is the unresolvable tension between the actual and the possible that had previously sustained a restlessness or an unhappy consciousness that presented a force of opposition to the actual – a force that could mobilize to negate the actual. For Marcuse, critical Reason is subversive, negative thought, while the technical rational character of the totally administered industrial society is irrational, yet its logic appears to be neutral and obvious. The rational logic of the administered society seems to be at one with both social reality and intimate desire: the antagonistic contradictions of critical Reason, as

Introduction

23

well as the sensorial richness of “the most ‘disorderly’ of all instincts – namely, sexuality,”87 are obliterated under its spell. Negativity maintains the opposition of contradictions and neither subsumes one element under another,88 nor renders objects as though they were discrete and independent of each other. Marcuse found negativity in artistic alienation, “the protest against that which is.”89 In regard to poetic language, for instance, Marcuse observes, “Naming the ‘things that are absent’ is breaking the spell of the things that are; moreover, it is the ingression of a different order of things into the established one.”90 While he advocated negativity as refusal of the administered reality, he asserted that the potential for refusal has greatly diminished, perhaps even become impossible: “The efforts to recapture the Great Refusal in the language of literature suffer the fate of being absorbed by what they refute. As modern classics, the avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without endangering the good conscience of the men of good will. This absorption is justified by technical progress; the refusal is refuted by the alleviation of misery in the advanced industrial society.”91 The significance and influence of the Frankfurt Institute for 1960s countercultural movements has been well-documented.92 Ironically, the vitriolic assaults that Adorno in particular received when he did not provide concrete supports to dissenters facing repressive policing measures93 serve to illustrate how significant these scholars’ theoretical formulations had been to countercultural formations. My argument assumes that, while initially the logic of liberal rationality informed a critique of established reality but did so in ways that resonated roughly within the terms of available modes of communication and either-or structure, guerrillas attempted to cleave a break in recognizable modes of communication, a break that “explodes the pre-established structure of meaning and, becoming an ‘absolute object’ itself, designates an intolerable, self-defeating universe – a discontinuum.”94 Therefore, Marcuse’s speculative insistence, quoted above, that the technological management of material needs refutes its refusal responds in advance to recent assessments of West German urban guerrillas, and even of the New Left, that cast a perplexed and accusatory glance at countercultural revolt in a time of relative material and experiential abundance.95

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Guerrilla Aesthetics

Further, while the dynamism of Marcuse’s characterization of consciousness in the industrialized West is illustrated in the above quotations, the abrasive tactility of Adorno’s writing, although more laden with philosophical abstraction than Marcuse’s (despite its call for attention to, and a shock philosophy of, the trivial and the pedestrian), needs to be taken into consideration with respect to its likely effect on the emergence of guerrilla aesthetics of negativity. In particular, I would like to draw attention to some of Adorno’s reflections, evidently composed in pain, in his Negative Dialectics, where he rails against the indifference demanded of the liberal bourgeois subject after Auschwitz. Adorno’s escape from the Nazis and the guilt of his survival frequently haunted his writing, at times taking sharp shape in his formulations. Imagine reading in the late 1960s this discussion of self-preservation and affective distance, which includes both allusion to, and revision of, one of Adorno’s own most infamous – but widely misread – lines: “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living – especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared.”96 The passage from which the above quotation is taken observes the disavowed but common-sense choice between indifference and the truculence of the involved – a “wrong” choice presented to the “spellbound” individuals who remain living that, either way, requires “bourgeois callousness”97 and serves self-preservation. “The only trouble with self-preservation,” Adorno tells his readers, “is that we cannot help suspecting the life to which it attaches us of turning into something that makes us shudder: into a specter, a piece of the world of ghosts, which our waking consciousness perceives to be nonexistent.”98 The postwar public consciousness is often described in terms of its silences,99 and, as will be addressed later, counterculture youth in West Germany had a belated confrontation with the history of Auschwitz. Encounters with Frankfurt scholarship, and specifically

Introduction

25

with the striking character of passages like these, intensified the sense that the spellbound consciousness posited by Marcuse and Adorno must be denounced. Along with it, the commonsensical “game” of either/or – paradoxical for being a socially involuntary choice – that underpinned the established reality that the Frankfurt scholars described must be rejected for the vertigo of negativity100 to be embraced in its place. The scandal of negativity resides in the refusal to offer a positive program of action that could not be formulated within the onedimensional consciousness that the Frankfurt scholars described. Cyrus Shahan finds in West German punk this negative refusal by elaborating its “anarchic socio-aesthetic tensions” expressed in its use of “cultural materials to tear down the present and reject the possibility of its own future.”101 Shahan offers punk as the other “cultural watershed” to the 1977 apex (the year associated with the German Autumn) of West German domestic terrorism waged by urban guerrilla cells. Shahan’s study of punk negativity punctures what he calls the “monochromatic history of social distress” that is the byproduct of viewing the 1970s through guerrilla “terrorism vis-à-vis 1968” that sought progress through “a misunderstood dialectic of theory or violence.”102 In this, Shahan ascribes to the guerrillas affirmative objectives and utopian hopes for the future that roughly resonate with that of ’68er protest movements, albeit with starkly different tactics to achieve those aims. But Shahan does so to describe the background upon which punk sought an “endless dystopia of the present”103 and pursued this through “a singular strategy: No,”104 a strategy that also insisted upon punk’s own disappearance. Punk ensured its own end, in part, by disallowing the formation of any unity or ideal and making concrete “no future,” even for itself: “punk’s representation of ‘no future’ was more than resignatory stasis. Framing its music, art, and fanzines through [Walter] Benjamin’s cosmic standstill shows how punk’s iteration of frozen time was actually a dynamic and vitriolic strategy against the oppressive and oversimplified concept of leftist progress.”105 As noted, Shahan’s argument casts guerrillas as pursuing a positive program. I endeavour to show that, while at their inception some guerrilla cells, and particularly the raf, did appear to have

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Guerrilla Aesthetics

affirmative aims, their tactics nonetheless became negative in ways that undercut the “fantasies of social rebirth” that Shahan observes in new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s in West Germany, and produced an ongoing dystopian present.106 Nevertheless, Shahan’s intervention, via West German punk, into the hegemonic identification of 1968 in terms of a progressive program of praxis raises key observations that illuminate some of the concerns of the present book. For instance, Shahan’s project illustrates the significance of avant-garde strategies, such as disruptions of rational communicative efficacy in the use of imagery (including punk’s use of the raf logo or the swastika), and finally it reacts to the neglect of the “trivial” that has written punk out of historical interpretations of the 1970s,107 perhaps because of the illegibility of its destructive negativity that offers “no future” to approximate or to create. That which cannot be understood in an affirmative sense, must be neutralized or brushed away, it seems. My hope is to show that guerrillas, although relationally emplaced with other new social movements, engaged in negativity that cannot be subsumed under other recent analyses, which are motivated either to rescue or to malign the New Left or even to assess violent political strategy in terms of successes and failures. For Marcuse, negativity involves a destructive response to the implantation of established, one-dimensional reality and its accompanying norms into the consciousness of subjects, rather than a program of objectives to be met. It is not enough, Marcuse insists, to be consciously aware of the predicament of the administered domination that he describes. He even denies his own project a positive set of goals and casts it in terms of the absolute refusal of complicity with domination: “The critical theory of society possesses no concepts which could bridge the gap between the present and its future; holding no promise and showing no success, it remains negative. Thus it wants to remain loyal to those who, without hope, have given and give their life to the Great Refusal.”108 In her reading of this passage in Marcuse, Carrie Smith-Prei observes that “[t]he Great Refusal does not provide answers, but instead a positioning of the subject with respect to the experience of repressive reality.”109 Yet, this posi-

Introduction

27

tioning is fraught because it tends to escape the repertoires of subjectivity available within the conditions that Frankfurt scholars diagnosed. The positioning and potential repositioning of the subject with respect to administrative domination are largely unsayable and elide strategies of representation. Given this, Smith-Prei approaches cultural identity in postwar West Germany through literature associated with the literary movements of New and Black Realism, whose shared critical force is mobilized in their enabling of negative and marginalized “bodily processes to dictate the narrative” to articulate the ways in which “the integral relationship between the public and private sphere politically charges these processes.”110 In these, she finds a narrative aesthetics of negative corporeality through which the politicized private sphere of toxic intimacy can be felt in the almost tactile interactions between the text and the reader, between the text and its own reality, and between the reader and the reader’s experiential reality.111 The interrelationships are produced through negativity modulated through uncomfortable feelings such as disgust and vertigo.112 Since Smith-Prei’s study situates the literary texts within her study of 1960s cross-disciplinary discourses on the private sphere of the family as well as the turn to art and literature for the resources for social and political intervention, her observations of the deployment of negativity richly inform the mostly unarticulated aspects of the cultural context from which the experimental life ways of West German communes and guerrilla cells, addressed in the present book, emerged. The literary texts that Smith-Prei reads for their negativity render palpable and “attend to the social and psychological effects of authority, excess, and repression of the 1950s on the private sphere in the 1960s. They critically comment on these effects through the negative workings of the body, intending that the reader be mobilized by the resulting negativity.”113 In these texts, subjects take oppositional postures to the dominant beliefs and practices that have been routinized and become impervious to questioning. The locus of critical opposition in these texts resides in the body and in its unleashing of sensoriality from the language that has governed it. Since the acquisition of speech is a socializing process that

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brings subjects and their bodily sensations into a pact with society, there is a tie between normative language use and sensorial experience.114 Smith-Prei tracks the ways in which the characters’ “body language often replaces or disrupts linguistic communication.”115 The disruption of this tie is significant also to the increasing loss of correspondence between language, thought, and sensoriality that I aim to trace for incarcerated guerrillas, as Smith-Prei’s study emphasizes the physicalized textual gaps as well as the repetitions that materialize in literary texts. Following Wolfgang Iser, Smith-Prei points out that negativity – arriving in the form of blanks in the text that prompt an imaginary engagement with its alien aspects because the gaps disrupt the reader’s ability to identify – “functions as a symbol for that which is not said or remains unsayable.”116 Thus, the blanks in the text outline a “specific repertoire of knowledge” – the terrain of historical and social context upon which the reader and text meet – that will be destabilized.117 Smith-Prei observes that repetitions of perception and bodies in the texts can invoke a politics of refusal. Drawing from Sianne Ngai’s work Ugly Feelings, Smith-Prei notes that repetitions produce a negative aesthetics of affect that function to disturb readers’ access to meaning and identification of representation: “The negativity in these organic representations is located not in the apparent effects on the individual subject in the text, but instead in the dizzying effect on the reader” and evokes “a ‘noncathartic’ emotion that brings about a ‘noncathartic aesthetic’ as a ‘kind of politics.’”118 Refusals, blanks, and disruptions are political in their stubborn existence and their unsettling force. If given a place, they work against the tendency to attribute the name of politics primarily to affirmative programs, which renders such disruptions, and even feelings, as inadmissible. My emphasis on guerrilla aesthetics acknowledges the necessity of a politics of negativity.119 This book seeks neither to depoliticize the actions of West German urban guerrilla cells, nor to diminish the immense and intractable suffering that was inflicted upon the targets, bystanders, and loved ones impacted by their operations. Indeed, these painful losses remain raw and incomprehensible. But, rather than attempting to explain guerrilla actions and communicative formations in terms of their instrumental orientations, or evaluate them

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in terms of their political efficacy, I will consider the emergence of the urban guerrilla and the long-term imprisonment of prominent urban guerrillas, who remained in the public eye during incarceration and after death through the reiterative circulation of associated images, figures, and words in contested productions of meaning and memory.120 The negativity of the extreme enactments of guerrillas materialized in their refusal of recognizable modes of identity and action. The threat of self-annihilation inherent to this negativity was exacerbated in the move from the urban setting to the prison cell, where urban guerrillas declared the body a weapon, refused conventional speech relations, enacted several hunger strikes, and even began to conceive of themselves as parts of a collective body that fostered a multi-nodal subjectivity. This move provides openings for consideration of the inextricable relationship between aesthetics, space, and communicative formations suggested by emplacement.

The Matter of History

Just as one is condemned to use language – to be at once enabled and restricted by the conditions immanent to the norms of its use – to speak or write about language, one occupies a similar double bind whenever one takes up events of the past. While in this book I do not offer a history of the West German urban guerrilla movement in the strict sense, the narrative that follows cannot emerge independently of historiographical engagement and historical narrative signposts. My endeavour is concerned with cultural memory and the entangled public feelings or intractable significances that it continues to animate. Thus, it necessarily draws upon historical source materials, citing presumed historical “facts,” but it also calls upon discursive practices that circulate the traces of this movement, while trying to capture some of the pulse of their interconnections and differential effects. On the one hand, apparent facts and interpretations provide context for the performative argument that is presented in this work. On the other hand, they are the constitutive ingredients of the flashpoints and narratives contained within. Quotations from, and citations of, source

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materials are neither given as unproblematic knowledge claims, nor are they to be understood as representative of a singular reality that the work strives to trace or reflect. While this book cannot be produced from a position that is external to historical discourses, its production is not governed by the assumption that it is possible to reflect a singular reality, even with the most comprehensive gathering of evidence or claim to an objective attitude. I assume that there never was, nor is, a singular reality that is external to collective instruction mobilized by divergent sources and positions. My approach attempts to territorialize and deterritorialize my text through these different positions, viewing source materials not solely as evidential or testimonial fragments that offer objectively true or false descriptions of persons and events. To take a particularly vivid contestation of fact as an illustrative example, I would point to the passionate and ongoing contestation over the status of the Stammheim deaths of the guerrillas Meinhof in 1976 and Raspe, Ensslin, and Baader in 1977 as either suicides or state murders. Indeed, some observers posit these respective positions as historical facts. What is crucial to my approach is that these contradictory assertions have force; they make a difference to the ways in which subjects speak about, remember, and hence make and remake a historical period referred to as the German Autumn (itself a construction). To stay within the bounds of this particular example, when I state that I am not writing a history of the urban guerrilla movement, what I mean in part is that I am not re-examining the evidence to provide a ‘True’ explanation of what occurred in the past. In the limited case of this example, I am not interested in determining whether the deaths were suicides or state murders; more broadly, I am not motivated to evaluate the effectiveness of the political strategies that urban guerrillas deployed. Rather, in these cases, I would be more concerned with what kinds of effects and affects are animated by the circulation of divergent truth claims, aesthetic and cultural formations, and the shifting reappearances of the spectre of the urban guerrilla in different sites. I am interested not in adding my voice to those who have forwarded or found support for truth claims, but in looking at what dynamics of cultural memory or feeling are enabled by those claims that have been popularly circulated and that have gained traction in

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fields of experience that now exceed the spatial-historical contexts of the Red Decade and its denouement of the German Autumn. To put this more formally within constructs of historiography for the purposes of framing what I have done in this book, I have drawn unevenly from the two approaches that Dominick LaCapra strategically identifies as documentary and radical constructivist.121 While LaCapra’s approach is a mediating third one, mine does not map onto his, as I am comfortable with aligning my practices more closely with the radical constructivist assumptions.122 Following LaCapra’s distinction, the selection of some of my source materials, such as archival materials and primary texts, is consistent with a documentary approach, but my work is not informed by its key assumptions, as he outlines them. I will give just a few illustrative points along these lines. First, I believe that the author and the writing are implicated in the product of the work, and therefore a work does not simply produce content separate from the form that it takes or from the words used to construct it. Second, I assume and accept that the subjects of my work would articulate values and perspectives that would challenge some of my claims and interpretations, and thus I need to conceive of my contribution accordingly and understand it to be one of multiple and conflicting constructions. Third, I am not concerned with providing explanations and establishing cause-and-effect relationships. In these ways, my work cannot be described as taking a documentary approach to historiography. LaCapra critically observes a tendency in documentary historical research models to assume that writing is a transparent and neutral medium of communication. For those adhering to such a model of historical research, the main concern with respect to writing is its clarity and effective delivery of content to the point that the writing itself ought to be nearly imperceptible, so that “style is limited to a restricted notion of mellifluous, immediately readable or accessible, well crafted prose.”123 In sharp opposition to this view, F.R. Ankersmit (1989) asserts: “Content is a derivative of style.”124 Ankersmit insists that there is a defining relationship “between the historiographical view and the language used by the historian in order to express this view – a relation which nowhere intersects the domain of the past – historiography possesses the same opacity and intensional dimension

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as art.”125 In preparing this book, I have assumed that its form and style are implicated in, and inseparable from, its effects. When LaCapra describes radical constructivist approaches against documentary ones, he emphasizes the former’s underplay of the significance of truth claims. In this book, I am cautious about making truth claims and instead attempt to mobilize alternative interpretations that often use the truth claims of others as objects of study or dialogical points in the narrative. Consistent with radical constructivist approaches, I give place to rhetorical, figurative, and aesthetic elements and source materials as a way of bringing attention to how explanations have been produced, but particularly with an interest in the problem of cultural memory as shifting and amorphous. Acknowledging that scholarly, journalistic, artistic, rhetorical, and popular source materials, which often present incongruent narratives and styles, have been mobilized in the ongoing shaping and contesting of memory in support of the contradictory political, cultural, and subjective agendas to which the present book is attuned and implicated, it draws upon a range of sources in its construction. As I have noted, historical references play a heterogeneous role in this book. Historical sign-points, interpretations, and ostensible facts – regardless of their presumed veracity – are dynamic and dialogical objects circulating in, and making up, the world of significance to the matters addressed in this book. Hence, the historical fact is here treated as an object in the same way that the figure of the urban guerrilla is an object. Both are constructed, incomplete, contested and contesting, and yet both have effects that are not exhausted by the contextual conditions of postwar West Germany. I do not assign privilege to one category of source or cultural form over another, as the multiplicities of interpretation, ostensible fact, and performance are integral to the problems of memory to which I attend. Some readers may find my refusal to grant hierarchical status to the sources that I use, as well as some of my inclusions, troubling. For instance, I have drawn from grey literatures and from key texts that are collected and arranged by editors who roughly identify with guerrilla organizations and whose direct or indirect affiliation with the last iteration of the raf, which disbanded at the closing of the 1990s, is a possibility. With this practice, I acknowledge that, while

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sources may lend authority, give context, and provide evidence, they do so always in constrained ways that at times seek to secure particular closures and to assert the final word. But even more imperative to the concerns of my endeavour is the extent to which sources are themselves subject-objects of study immanent to the scope of this work. Sources posit heterogeneous position points that enable different movements. Drawing from Ankersmit’s description of what he calls the contemporization of the historical source, I note that this movement is horizontal rather than vertical: “evidence does not point towards the past but to other interpretations of the past; for that is what we in fact use evidence for. To express this by means of imagery: for the modernist, the evidence is a tile which he picks up to see what is underneath it; for the postmodernist, on the other hand, it is a tile which he steps on in order to move to other tiles: horizonality instead of verticality.”126 While I am concerned with selecting sources that respond to the necessity of evidence that accompanies the treatment of the past, I include what are often subordinated or excluded source materials, for instance the rhetorically organized raf texts, popular websites, and aesthetic formations. Such sources are often excluded from studies of the West German urban guerrillas ostensibly on the basis of the incongruent sets of criteria (if any institutionally recognizable criteria exist at all) that governed their production. Whereas aesthetic formations are often included in scholarship in this topic area, they are rarely granted the same intensity of place (as they are in my work) as those produced under institutionally sanctioned criteria. My criteria for the inclusion of these sources respond to the observations that Mark Jackson has made concerning the methodological terms by which some sources are included and others are excluded. Jackson suggests that the historiographic task is positioned in the middle as a hinge; “between and within any saying, historiography is precisely the refusal to erase difference by subjecting it to an act of closure or by assigning objects of determinate reference in an attempt at homologous referentiality.”127 My use of sources is made in recognition that neither history nor memory occupies a space that is external to cultural practices. Hence, in this book, historical and other scholarly texts are placed on the

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same level as are images, artistic formations, popular websites, and other source materials that appear in it in the anticipation of offering a different constellation of intonations. This approach, as Law observes, supposes that these things “exist together on the same surface and may expose themselves without the necessity of a single order, may jostle one another. Yes, they may make links with each other or overlap. They may resemble one another or differ. Help one another or not. But this is a logic that also supposes that they do not, except coincidentally, belong to one another as part of a single, larger whole.”128 Such a move departs from convention in two respects. First, rather than aiming for a singular narrative that incorporates and neutralizes difference, this move operates “to perform decentered” knowing,129 allowing unruly traces that arise elsewhere – as they do in the world – with neither warning nor methodological sanction. Second, some of the things that I have brought in and treated as equivalent to scholarly source materials and preferred documents are, as I have already noted, undisciplined popular formations. If not for the potential to take seriously popular or subordinate forms, the concerns that this work attempts to examine would not be permitted, and the unspoken prohibition that I perceive to exist in much of urban guerrilla studies has implications for what can be written. As Jackson remarks in general regard to historiography: “The classical promise of historical commentary adding new pieces of knowledge to a pile of accumulating progress is an illusionary conceit that protects any text from change, transgression, and responsible engagement.”130 The key way that my approach departs from characterizations of the radical constructivist approach is that I make a small but crucial distinction between fiction and historical narrative,131 while still understanding fiction to have crucial force in historiography and to have the potential to grasp the ineffable affects that are indeed felt but only intermittently accommodated by the disciplinary conventions of non-fiction scholarship.132 The distinction that I make between fiction and historical narrative turns on the call to be as responsible as I can be to the voices that I bring into the narrative precisely because scholarship is required to pose as something other than just one among many different genres of writing. For this reason, it becomes crucial to note, for instance, that I am using the real

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names and words of discursively constructed figures that are not fully coincidental with, but are nonetheless linked to, identifiable persons both living and dead. I acknowledge that many of the voices that I take up cannot directly speak back and, therefore, I attempt to give space for point and counterpoint statements and performances. I have not given an authoritative voice that wishes to impose a last word, to assess strategy, to make normative judgments upon the movement’s violence,133 or to operate in strict polemics over the veracity of existing claims. Here, I note two of Hayden White’s many controversial remarks about historiography. First, aesthetic and moral grounds provide better bases than epistemological ones for choosing a perspective on history.134 Second, every historical account has inherent ideological dimensions.135 Together, these claims suggest that authoritative evaluations may make attributions to epistemological considerations, but these are already informed by ethical concerns. To this, White offers: In my view, there are no extra-ideological grounds on which to arbitrate among the conflicting conceptions of the historical process and of historical knowledge appealed to by the different ideologies. For, since these conceptions have their origins in ethical considerations, the assumption of a given epistemological position by which to judge their cognitive adequacy would itself represent only another ethical choice. I cannot claim that one of the conceptions of historical knowledge favored by a given ideology is more ‘realistic’ than the others, for it is precisely over the matter of what constitutes an adequate criterion of ‘realism’ that they disagree.136 So, rather than disavowing the presence of both conscious and unconscious ethical considerations or disregarding the way in which an approach necessarily sets the coordinates of possibility for knowledge claims to come, these considerations motivate me to use more tentative words such as ‘explore,’ rather than ‘analyze’ or ‘prove.’ In the case of the latter, it is only when using a hegemonic approach, which then takes the appearance of transparency and neutrality, that one can seriously entertain the deployment of such strong words.

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The particular concerns that I attend with respect to emplacement and the senses discourage the use of the words ‘analyze,’ ‘examine,’ and ‘prove.’ As Highmore has observed, recent attention to what he calls “immaterial material,”137 the persistent but subtle aspects of experience, affect, routine, sensoriality, and so on, “throws standard epistemologies into disarray, revealing the mentalist foundations of dominant forms of attention in the human sciences: forms of attention, then, that would remainder a world characterized by its nonideational aspects.”138 Therefore, he acknowledges that such aspects of social life are open to description and exploration rather than to prescription and assessment. With the word ‘explore,’ I wish to conjure not colonial connotations but rather spatial ones. And my explorations are not linear; they jump – moving horizontally rather than vertically, as Ankersmit would say – from one thing to another, producing juxtapositions. The text moves aside, takes up asides, and tells stories within the story that is being told. Exploring is a way of brushing up to the sides of things to see what they come up against, or touching what else is in the network of things that surround and mutually constitute what I am writing about, which is not discrete nor bound. W.G. Sebald, whose novels are attuned to the emplacements of history, describes his approach to history as “adhering to an exact historical perspective, in patiently engraving and linking together apparently disparate things,” and in trying to locate and to thread the “invisible connections” that matter in our lives.139 This shape of the narrative is a small intervention that attempts to compensate for the lack of presence there and then, and a way to grasp at the traces that remain. For instance, a discussion about a recent exhibition will include forays into already circulated tales of guerrilla activities in the 1970s. While such shuffles and leaps do not follow a random itinerary, and they pick up on resonances that inform a reader unfamiliar with the spectacle as well as attempting to approximate the blunt contact of urban guerrilla enactments, they primarily seek out the effects of juxtaposition that Law inquires about when he asks: “What would be the effect of telling about things, of knowing them, in little patches?”140 Both the horizontal movements and the tentative mood of exploration rather than analy-

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sis – analysis involves excision rather than emplacement – have implications within and beyond matters of historiography. This kind of historiographical narrative does not describe a substance, but instead it performs something that is indeterminate.

Performativity

The human subject assumed in this book is informed by poststructuralist social theory;141 hence, the subject is assumed to be formed in the coordinates historically set out by language and normative body formations rather than as a unique, bound, and coherent entity that merely navigates structural surroundings conceived as equally impervious to it. A poststructuralist perspective is poised to engage the terrain of guerrilla aesthetics because it radically critiques taken-for-granted norms and values that I argue urban guerrillas attempted to annihilate. Most significantly, poststructuralism challenges the conception of the autonomous rational individual – a conception that is roughly shared by liberal and radical social theories – whose coordinated action has the emancipatory potential to intervene into power conceived generally in juridical or sovereign, top-down terms.142 Poststructuralism’s attention to discourse and textuality asserts that meaning is located neither in a unit of language, nor in the subject who appears as the author of a gesture or utterance, nor in the relationship between a signifier and a signified observed in structuralism. For words to speak in meaningful ways, they must be relationally located with and amongst words, things, and situations; that is, they must be emplaced. The interaction between signifiers, situated in a given scene, produces meaning, and signifiers are not necessarily referential but instead signify other signifiers in ongoing deferral.143 Not only is meaning always sliding from our hands; if it is authored at all, this is done in a motley collaboration between human and non-human entities that happen to be emplaced together for a time and place. An implication of these observations is that poststructuralism troubles the still intractable expectation passed on to us from classical rationalism that language reflects a given world that is out there to be

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discovered. Hence, poststructuralism rejects the notion of representation because representation suggests a mirroring or abstract signification of an external reality rather than the production of, or assent to, a discursively announced social reality.144 These considerations, with their emphasis on the relational situatedness of signification, are consistent with the concept of emplacement I described earlier. Further, the poststructuralist challenge to the liberal conception of the autonomous and rational individual is well poised to address the negativity of guerrilla aesthetics. With respect to liberalism’s privileging of the individual’s capacity for rational thought and action consistent with hegemonic values in a culture, poststructuralism finds rational criteria to be arbitrary, acknowledging that multiple and contradictory sets of rational criteria exist simultaneously and that they are the products of social communities and situations.145 The poststructural critique of the autonomous individual cleaves a break into the authoring, one-directional relationship between subjects and acts that liberal approaches take for granted. This decentring of the subject with respect to the authorship of action and meaning is tied to the attention that poststructuralism gives to language, casting language not as the subject’s appliance for the realization of its aims, but as a crucial aspect of the subject’s very emergence and as a force that acts upon it and brings into existence many of the conditions of its possibility. Judith Butler’s considerations of the treatment of speech in legal contexts can help to elaborate the implications of this because they take as a point of departure that language is a force that acts upon and injures us rather than an instrument that we master rationally in the progressive course of subjecthood. Butler’s approach weakens the agency that modern liberal discourse has granted to human subjects and in turn heightens the agency of language. Butler acknowledges that we are vulnerable to language, since it exists prior to us and we are constituted in it – not all at once, but in repetition. In other words, we are named, described, and called upon to respond over and over again within discourses already circulating around us even prior to our own working acquisition of language. In this way, we can understand language in terms of its prior existence and its power.

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She notes, “If we are formed in language, then that formative power precedes and conditions any decision we might make about it, insulting us from the start, as it were, by its prior power.”146 Since subjects are the effects of language, there is an inextricable link between subjects and language that is marked by both pleasure and pain. Language offers to the human subject the simultaneous possibilities of coherence and dissolution. Butler is concerned with theorizing the force that is intrinsic to language, and she asks: What is this force, and what are its fault lines? The implications of Butler’s theoretical work have practical significance since she is concerned with the status of speech acts in legal contexts because they occur under duress. In particular, Butler addresses the legal category of hate speech to elaborate her points, since it is understood to have the capacity to wound its addressee. Butler’s theoretical intervention into this phenomenon implicates the work of J.L. Austin, who argues that utterances must be approached from the perspective of the total speech situation within which they occur, which has temporal and spatial implications to which I will return. But, in response to this, Butler gives more sustained attention to the significance of the ritual and historical character of linguistic convention in relation to individual utterances. This problem is raised by Austin’s distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts. Austin describes illocutionary acts as performative – that is, the utterances do what they say in the very instance of being said. For example, the judge’s pronouncement of a defendant as guilty is an illocutionary act: it does something more than convey informational content; it actually transforms the identity of the defendant from one who is presumed innocent to one who is convicted. Austin points out that, in order for illocutionary acts to do what they say, they must be implicated within ritual and ceremony. In the case of the above example, the space of the courtroom, the codes that govern its procedures, and the authority conferred to the judge all come together to provide ceremonial force to the performative and transformational force of the judgment. It is notable that the judge has the authority to make judgment not by virtue of possessing power as an individual, but by means of having been appointed to the bench, and only when at the

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bench. If at random on the street the same individual declares that an accused person is guilty, this is not a performative act because the power of judgment is neither conferred to the speaker nor germane to the situation in which the pronouncement is made. To be successful, according to the standard interpretation of Austin’s performative, the performative act must be emplaced within the appropriate “obligatory points of passage”147 that hold together interrelationships between subjects (in this case, between a judge and the accused) and spaces (in this case, a courtroom) that set the conditions of possibility for the pronouncement to transform a state of affairs. In contrast, perlocutionary speech acts produce effects that are quite apart from the saying of the act or the content of the act – they merely report information or describe the state of things. The distinction between illocutionary (performative) and perlocutionary (constative) utterances has been since challenged and reworked. Austin, for instance, although preserving the linguistic sphere of the performative and his assumption of competent speakers who draw upon the appropriate conventions, did expand the breadth of its reach, noting that constative or descriptive statements can be performative.148 But, before we unpack relevant reworkings of the performative act, the initial distinction serves contemplation of Butler’s concerns about the wounding capacity of speech. She considers the predicament of hate speech as presented in the one-directional image of dangerous speech that has the speaker potentially wounding the second- or third-party addressee. The utterance of a threat, for instance, is an illocutionary, performative speech act that suggests an inseparable relationship between body and speech (or at least the body of the listener and the speech of the speaker) as well as the inseparable relationship between speech and its effects. For Butler it is clear that a threat and the act that fulfills it are both bodily acts, since the threat “prefigures or, indeed, promises a bodily act, and yet is already a bodily act, thus establishing in its very gesture the contours of the act to come … The threat begins a temporal horizon within which the organizing aim is the act that is threatened.”149 Since Austin’s notion of the illocutionary speech act distinguishes between the speaker’s intention and the successful achievement of a performative, this implies that a competent speaking subject precedes

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the utterance. Butler reverses this order, however, by following Louis Althusser’s assertion that it is the speech act that in fact brings the subject into being, at least in terms of linguistic existence, so that speech acts precede the uttering subject.150 There are implications, then, to the acknowledgment that speech does not belong first to, or originate with, the speaker or the context. Speech draws upon a historical community of speakers, and the sovereign voice necessary for the designation of an act as originating with a speaker is absent, fictive, or both. Therefore, according to Butler, “[r]esponsibility is thus linked with speech as repetition, not as origination.”151 With respect to injurious speech, Butler observes “that physical metaphors seize upon nearly every occasion to describe linguistic injury suggests that this somatic dimension may be important to the understanding of linguistic pain. Certain words or certain forms of address not only operate as threats to one’s physical well-being, but there is a strong sense in which the body is alternately sustained and threatened through modes of address.”152 This paradoxical understanding of forms of address as both threatening and supporting underlines a crucial aspect of the relationship between language and subjectivity, especially to the extent that subjects are differentially constituted and situated within linguistic and social space. The language and practices that wound subjects also provide them with coherence. Hence, to draw upon one of Butler’s discussions of racialized hate speech, the speaker draws upon the historical script that has constituted subjects both individually and in hierarchical relation to each other. The historical script for hate speech itself is thoroughly racist, nationalist, and so forth. In other words, hate speech can only be recognized as injurious by virtue of the salience of the hegemonic historicity in which it is embedded. The subject to whom the injury has been addressed is constrained to respond within an already historically constituted horizon of possible linguistic and gestural responses that demands adoption of the subordinated identity discursively imposed upon it. Hence, the subject who attempts to respond to linguistic injury in such a way as to ensure that the injury is acknowledged as such, may only construct a response from available language conventions, which forces the response to be embedded within the hierarchical categories of difference from which the injurious speech

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arises. Or, to respond to such injury, one may attempt to satirize or to resignify aspects of this historical script, but will still need to draw somewhat on the conventions to do so. The political success of such resignifications cannot be guaranteed, as Moya Lloyd notes that their effects are uncertain.153 Since the conventions themselves are implicated in the constitution of subordinated subjectivity, one is compelled either to reinforce the hegemonic language to which one is subordinated by drawing upon a language that simultaneously threatens and sustains one’s own subjectivity, or to attempt to refuse conventional language entirely, at the risk of social identity and bodily preserve. The speaker, then, is susceptible to its own borrowed speech products, as these are assumed to reflect a pre-existent interior substance of the speaking subject. Butler acknowledges this predicament: There is no way to protect against that primary vulnerability and susceptibility to the call of recognition that solicits existence, to that primary dependency on a language we never made in order to acquire a tentative ontological status. Thus we sometimes cling to the terms that pain us because, at a minimum, they offer us some form of social and discursive existence. The address that inaugurates the possibility of agency, in a single stroke, forecloses the possibility of radical autonomy. In this sense, an ‘injury’ is performed by the very act of interpellation, the one that rules out the possibility of the subject’s autogenesis (and gives rise to that very fantasy).154 In addition to the disruption to the relation supposed by the image of a speaker as the originator of an utterance, Butler’s observation operates as a critique of Austin’s emphasis on the total speech situation or context in several ways. First, Butler unsettles the emphasis on context by staging the reversal of the competent speaker and the utterance and thereby challenges the status of the presumed autonomous and intentional speaker. Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive reading of Austin’s assumption of competent speakers is instructive to the extent that Derrida

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noted that these competent speakers defer “their purported sovereignty by following these rules and conventions with the right kind of serious, but honest intentions.”155 This challenge to the assumption of speakers (or actors) as competent shows the paradox of the assumptions of independent agency, capacity to control and predict, and self-transparent consciousness attributed to them.156 Second, Butler draws out the temporality implied in the ritual character of the total situation. This extension of temporality runs into the past, of course, as she notes above that it includes the call that solicits one into existence, though this should not be interpreted to be a singular or originating call, as “performative events are not singular events but, rather, the effects of ‘citational doubling.’”157 But, in consideration of the fantasy of autonomy that Butler finds in an interpellating address, there is an implication of futurity. As Jeffrey Nealon emphasizes with respect to the potential for performative ethics, an act “has future relays far beyond the control of the subject.”158 This is not to suggest that the performative absorbs all of time, but rather that the temporality of the performative does not coincide with the speech situation that Austin gives – one could say that it outlives the speech situation. Attending to Derrida’s reading and intervention into the implications of performativity, Matthias Fritsch observes that this temporality is disjoined, and performativity asymmetrical: “the call precedes the formation of subjectivity. A subject is, in part, called into being by its ineluctable, performative response to the call. As the constitution is at each time incomplete, no ‘each time’ corresponding to itself, the response cannot ever be adequate to the call.”159 Derrida, too, rejected this total context or speech situation, which could be interpreted roughly to be assuming a ‘neutral’ metanarrative, as something unavailable to us.160 For Butler, the historicity of speech that surpasses the subject “in all directions”161 provides the conditions for the subject’s survival or its demise at the discursive level. This problem can be considered beyond the legal contexts with which Butler is specifically concerned. Even in the context of the most banal of interpellative moments and their repetitious self- or other-initiated invocations of recognition, the compulsion to speak, to convey, to represent oneself, even in the

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mundane circumstance, is potentially treacherous for the speaker. Routine and mundane speech, to the extent that it relies upon a considerable amount of faith in a substantive (the “I” in speech) as its origin, may offer the most apt instantiation of excitable speech, speech that is made under duress precisely because it is implicitly demanded and is assumed to provide a reflection of the content of the self. Taken-for-granted assumptions about speech as a primary form of effective communication in the spirit of the primacy of the utilitarian exchange of pure information obscure the ways in which compulsory speech adheres to its speaker as though it were an alibi for the subject’s authentic core, even though what it says is something that can only be produced as an assemblage of linguistic forms and gestures that have historical resonance and adhere to convention. Speech involves far more than the volley of instrumental information – the passing of one object to another. The speech situation cannot be considered without recognition of it as a compulsion towards the constitution of oneself that can only occur within recognizable historical parameters. A crucial implication of Butler’s observations resides in the way in which her understanding of speech acts challenges the view of language as instrumental and representational. She emphasizes the performativity of language, insisting that “[p]erformatives do not merely reflect prior social conditions, but produce a set of effects, and though they are not always the effects of ‘official’ discourse, they nevertheless work their social power not only to regulate bodies, but to form them as well.”162 Performatives are discursive; therefore, they implicate linguistic constructions, practices, and spatial arrangements. They are, as the quotation above indicates, both regulatory and formative. Performatives are not the discrete gestures of the ‘uninterrupted consciousness’ of an autonomous individual. They are the effects and the conditions of subjective existence; therefore, they are both derived out of and enact social authorization. This authorization is not granted, however, by a pre-existent and substantive figure or formation, but by ongoing repetitions and contestations. Contestation, in turn, is constrained by the coordinates that set the contours of historically and culturally recognizable and practical enactments. This means that not all performances are authorized ones: “The ‘con-

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structive’ power of the tacit performative is precisely its ability to establish a practical sense for the body, not only a sense of what the body is, but how it can or cannot negotiate space, its ‘location’ in terms of prevailing cultural coordinates.”163 Hence, if performance needs to draw upon authorized postures and locations, then this suggests an inherent danger to performances that operate outside of the territory marked by authorized coordinates. One may resist, but is constrained to resist within socially recognized parameters or risk appearing irrational, insane, or dangerous. Returning specifically to speech acts, to redeploy words “means speaking words without prior authorization and putting into risk the security of linguistic life, the sense of one’s place in language.”164 To refunction authorized language, movement, gesture, and norms makes a subject vulnerable to social dissolution. There is a narrow margin between the enabling and limiting dimensions of authorization within which an effect of incalculable proportion may be enacted without self-annihilation. In the raf prisoners’ insistence on refusing to engage in conventional modes of speech with the representatives of the system, they seemed to understand speech as an activity that can displace or damage not only the listener or addressee but the speaker too. Adopting this view of speech means that guerrilla imperatives towards action over words may signal more than merely the switching of tactical means to realize certain ends. Yet, the implication of performativity stretches beyond this primarily linguistic consideration, even if the focus of Austin’s project was speech acts. As I noted early on in this section, Austin revised aspects of his work on the performative; others have made further interventions. Shoshana Felman, for instance, has troubled Austin’s emphasis on serious utterances, as well as that of successes and failures, and makes palpable the body in what has been taken as a primarily linguistic consideration, observing that the relationship between the body and language is “incongruous but indissoluble.”165 In his reading of Austin, Derrida insists: “‘communication’ is not restricted to linguistic exchanges but includes physical passageways, the communication of movements or of forces, and so on.”166 Therefore, according to Fritsch, Derrida places his emphasis on the marks of writing, significant for the absence of an author, rather than on

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the speech act. This is remarkable, as Fritsch demonstrates, because it enables the positing of a performative beyond the strict sense of the assumed self-assertive speaker. The performative in general attends to non-linguistic communication, which includes that of the nonhuman.167 Fritsch identifies the oeuvre as a salient example of this because its force is independent of the presence or intention of an author, but, as he points out, even codes, which operate through humans but are not authored by them, have performative force.168 To this list, we could add built environments, traffic patterns, and so on, which anticipate the fit of poststructuralist performativity with the concept of emplacement. Having set the contours of performativity in general theoretical terms, I will now take some initial steps to indicate how this is situated with respect to other scholarship responding to urban guerrillas in West Germany through considerations of performance. For instance, Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth have addressed the performative dimensions of guerrilla tactics, suggesting that they were a misappropriation of the performative character of the student movement’s avant-garde–influenced direct action.169 The concept of performance that they deploy is situated primarily in phenomenology, which neither has undergone the critiques of total context discussed above, nor shares the radical ontology of subjects assumed in poststructuralist performativity; thus, their analysis is shaped by different concerns, works within different parameters, and describes different objects than those assumed in this book. Klimke and Scharloth draw upon performance studies derived from Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology and Victor Turner’s elaboration of communication genres, the communication about, or above, communication as a conscious activity of a relatively stable subject170 engaged in role performance. There are several ways in which the concept of performance in their usage shades into aspects of significance to my argument. Ethnomethodology undermines the assumption of shared meaning in its suggestion that most communication is miscommunication, with meanings glossed rather than shared. Turner’s attention to communication as something other than referential or representative speaks to some of the concerns I aim to address. There are, however, crucial differences from what I am trying to trace in guerrilla aesthetics.171

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Among them is the determination of temporality; we see in Turner that, while performance is itself a process, and one that is dialectical with other processes, it is diachronically structured and bookmarked with beginnings and endings, which preclude the social linguistic considerations that Butler makes. A related and more crucial difference resides in the respective understandings of who, what, and when the subject is: for phenomenology, an already present reflexive subject performs roles and may do so negatively and disruptively; for poststructuralism, the subject has no previous substance and emerges in repetitive performance supported within specific emplacements, even though it is not determined by them. In their use of performance, Klimke and Scharloth emphasize concrete and physical actions, such as sit-ins and breaches of established rules; thus, they are able to equate it with prefigurative politics. Through experimental ways of living and organizing, performative politics involve transformative action because they concretely forge the democratic community for which they strive. While rejecting engagement in formal attempts to reform existing institutions, prefigurative politics do remain nonetheless bound to means-ends reason, but place stress on means over ends.172 Two recent in-depth studies that are dedicated to sustained analyses of raf guerrilla Ulrike Meinhof’s writing observe its performativity. But, despite references to Butler, both are reliant upon liberal conceptions of relatively stable human agents and seem to take, in practice, a phenomenological approach to the concept of performance. Sarah Colvin has done a thorough analysis of Meinhof’s editorial columns, the communiqués that she wrote for the raf, and her prison writings. Colvin identifies a performativity in her description of Meinhof’s use of a transformative language that operates above or outside of identity; this is consistent with a performative turn. Colvin does nevertheless insist that Meinhof’s writing retains the rational objective of rhetorical persuasion,173 which, for instance, rescues the notion of a liberal subject. Leith Passmore’s examination of Meinhof’s writing, following Colvin, is motivated to render meaning from her move from editorialist to terrorist. With respect to Meinhof’s later writings in particular, Passmore argues that she performs terror as a meaningful object, but the performance that he identifies and

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describes operates within primarily instrumental parameters.174 In the present work, performativity is deployed differently than in the studies described above, where the liberal framework and its assumption of a relatively autonomous actor, whose reason is more or less a self-possession, is operative. In contrast, this book, informed by poststructuralist performativity, supposes that repetitive performances that adhere to language conventions, spatial formations, and commonsensical narratives grant merely a fictive coherence to the subject’s achievements. Therefore, I seek to look at guerrilla operations from a different perspective to trace the unmaking of this fictive coherence and the arrival of an unruly shape transported through radically negative guerrilla aesthetics. West German urban guerrillas declared the body a weapon when they organized a hunger strike in response to their imprisonment in isolation. Urban guerrilla subjectivity is dependent upon armed immersion in the built environment of the city, yet many guerrilla fighters spent the majority of their cell’s existence as prisoners and as defendants in court – spaces that demanded different modes of communication and arms of flesh rather than guns. While the guerrillas’ actions and communications before and after imprisonment are mainly interpreted to be rational attempts to achieve definable political goals, Guerrilla Aesthetics, by highlighting negativity and attempting to preserve the illegible characteristics of guerrilla enactments, challenges what I perceive to be a rationalizing consensus in the literature that privileges the evaluation of guerrilla tactics and aims. This challenge does not operate in a dismissal of the scholarship that provides such evaluations. This scholarship addresses different concerns. Rather than addressing the terror of blood, however, the present work is concerned with the terror of incommensurable sensemaking and, hence, it seeks to get as close to the incomprehensible abyss as possible without effacing it. Many scholars have sought and found rationality within the seeming irrationality of the guerrilla movement. These projects present nuanced treatments of the urban guerrilla phenomenon and they respond, sometimes directly and other times indirectly, to a few very vocal scholars, such as Wolfgang Kraushaar, Gerd Koenen, and Jan Reemtsma, who cast urban guerrillas as irrational and pathological – presumably in order to dismiss

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not only the figure of the guerrilla but also the ongoing crucial need to address this difficult period in postwar West Germany. Notwithstanding the affirmation of guerrilla irrationality in this book, which here is an explicitly politicized irrationality, Guerrilla Aesthetics is not aligned with efforts to abbreviate serious debate and dialogue about the legacy of the West German urban guerrilla. Chapter one emphasizes the improvisational constitution of the urban guerrilla cell and the recession of programmatic strategies organized to meet measurable aims in the guerrillas’ move toward negativity. Acknowledging the avant-gardist influence on postwar counterculture, I consider the guerrillas’ struggle in terms of its aesthetic interventions into norms of recognizable subjectivity through its disruption of the syntaxes of social convention. I argue that guerrilla negativity began to crystallize with refusals of conventional speech forms, but its stark realization accompanied the sensorial reordering of bodies in a carceral emplacement. I consider that the negativity of guerrilla aesthetics and the differently constituted social reality of incarceration challenge the efficacy of interpretations that assume instrumental motivations for guerrilla enactments. Chapter two refunctions the notion of the body as a weapon to the body as a medium for communication and approaches an aesthetic of body (anti)language crucial to the shifting of guerrilla subjectivity and the eventual constitution of a multi-nodal guerrilla body. The hunger strikes of the incarcerated urban guerrillas and their use of gesture and other physical-spatial tactics are considered as forms of sensorially rich communication, despite the prisoners’ frequent refusals to engage in conventional speech. These forms of aesthetic communication do not need to be rendered publicly legible since they are organized around redistributions between subjects and objects that are mutually emplaced and, thus, constituted within institutional spaces, such as the prison. In chapter three, I consider the polyvocal autobiographical text Wie alles Anfing / How It All Began by Bommi Bauman, a former guerrilla from the 2nd of June Movement. Mediating between several imagined reading audiences, Baumann’s text anticipates that its imagined reading audiences make incommensurable demands: the simultaneous affirmation and disavowal of the urban guerrilla fighter’s life.

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My reading of the text highlights its form to consider the ways in which it choreographs rather than justifies Baumann’s posture as a guerrilla fighter and formally approximates an instructional manual for urban guerrilla warfare, despite its explicit call to his former comrades to give up the gun and to embrace love over terror. I argue that, while it emplaces the guerrilla body and explicitly elaborates the guerrilla turn as a sensorial-aesthetic predicament, its force as an instance of guerrilla aesthetics resides in its shattering form that fails to cohere in its initial declaration of a choice between either love or terror. Shifting beyond the West German urban guerrilla movement of the 1970s, chapter four explores its cultural reverberations and contestation over memory surrounding the fifteen oil paintings that constitute Gerhard Richter’s series of paintings entitled October 18, 1977, first exhibited in 1989. I gather different readings of the cycle October 18, 1977 to show that it opens up an experiential site for a heterogeneous public feeling of incongruent sense that the paintings perform. While I do not see in Richter’s cycle an enactment of negativity, I argue that it has opened up a site of aesthetic rupture that rips the paintings’ mediated source images from the anaesthetic repertoire of news reportage – which had for so long granted them a hegemonic signification of terror. Further, the October cycle aesthetically detonates the source images in painterly utterances that amplify their potential for heterogeneous and conflicting significations but posit new distributions between things and meanings in different emplacements without anchoring a preferred reading. By refusing his own authority to define and to rationalize the meaning of October 18, 1977, Richter enables the October cycle itself, as well as each curatorial enactment of it, to perform multiple emplacements and effects. Critical responses to Richter’s deferral of authority seek judgment, remorse, and redemption in the paintings. Several years later, as the kw Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin prepared for Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Die RAF / Regarding Terror: The RAF Exhibition (opened in Berlin, spring 2005), outrage from some members of the German public threatened the exhibition’s government funding. To save the show, organizers raised money through an eBay auction of donated art. Opposition to Regarding Terror charged that the exhibition would promote myths surround-

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ing the West German urban guerrilla and reductively aestheticize this history. Chapter five is a performative coda that suggests that the accusation contained in the opposition to the exhibition might be called an accusation of love. It is not only the case that one of the exhibition’s curators is the son of core raf member Gudrun Ensslin, but also that many of the included artworks address the theme of love – from the explicit examples, such as Erin Cosgrove’s A Heart Lies Beneath and Bruce LaBruce’s art porn film The Raspberry Reich, to the more implicit ones, such as Dennis Adams’s Lullaby, Gerhard Richter’s Atlas, or Joseph Beuys’s Dürer, ich führe persönlich Baader+ Meinhof durch die Dokumenta V. Imagining the raf exhibition as guilty of love, chapter five takes up these artistic enactments as responding to cultural image repertoires (or figures) presented in Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse. By positing these artistic counterimages as constituted in gymnastic and choreographic outbursts that emphasize space, gesture, and movement, I extend my critique of the rationalizing consensus that I perceive in the scholarship that addresses the urban guerrilla movement of the 1970s to a parallel consensus that targets artistic and curatorial practices turned towards this tumultuous period in West German history. Neither the exhibition nor the artworks are instances of negativity in a strict sense, yet they retain some of the disruptive illegibility of guerrilla aesthetics. I urge against the temptation to anchor an explanation that neutralizes the uneasy signification of these artistic formations. In a methodological intervention that responds to emergent shifts in cultural studies, I extend my critique of the imperative to assign instrumentality to enactments that provide sites of return for the haunting figure of the urban guerrilla. Speculating on the potential of the city street, or spaces as such, as sites of memory, the sixth chapter aims to perform a (double) displacement of public forms of memorialization, such as the formal archive, the gravestone, or the public monument, just as it approximates a displacement of the hegemonic source, methodology, and so on. I posit that institutional forms of memorialization tend to trade the ontological accumulation of imprints, echoes, and trajectories emplaced in everyday spaces for both physical and conceptual containment in a form that is subject to hierarchies of meaning to which public space is ultimately accountable.

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I conclude the tracing of guerrilla aesthetics by reflecting upon how a postructuralist framework enables considerations of absences, inchoateness, sensoriality, and space, raising questions about what hegemonic disciplinary approaches exclude. Yet, in this discussion, I also elaborate upon how and why my approach forecloses the potential for producing a normative evaluation of guerrilla violence, while acknowledging that guerrilla tactics – such as bombing, hostagetaking, assassination, hijacking, and armed bank robbery – are then characterized as performative in the same way that the refunctioning of words, the refusal to speak, or even hunger-striking are cast in Guerrilla Aesthetics. I address this tension by discussing how the concept of emplacement leads to different considerations than do liberal normative approaches to the evaluation of something like guerrilla violence. Simultaneously, I draw from Slavoj Žižek’s critique of what he calls the “hermeneutic temptation” to search for meaning in violent or traumatic episodes.175 The refusal of this temptation is what threads Guerrilla Aesthetics together because it is tied to the book’s mobilization against the rationalizing evaluation of the urban guerrilla movement. Existing analyses of the urban guerrilla remain too often in the trap of either/or ‘choice’: the guerrilla program of action was either the same as or different from that of postwar activists; guerrilla violence either taints or is indifferent to the legacy of the New Left and 1968; artistic renderings either glamourize or reinforce the mythologies of the raf. Guerrilla Aesthetics refuses the structure of this either/or choice and preserves the animating force of illegibility.

Chapter 1

Negative Subjects

At the end of 1972, the core members of the Red Army Faction (raf) declared the body a weapon when they organized their first hunger strike campaign in response to their imprisonment in social isolation and avowed: “Our last and strongest weapon is the body; collectively, we have put ours into the battle.”1 Prior to their capture, members of the raf had denounced speech as a viable form of action and insisted upon waging an armed struggle against the state of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (brd).2 By placing an unusual body into a battle of unforeseeable contours on a changing field, West German urban guerrillas also waged an attack on the coordinates of the liberal humanist subject, unmooring with it conventional modes of communication and tacitly agreed-upon rational criteria through its emplaced performativity of a negative subjectivity. This negative subjectivity became concrete in the commingled guerrilla body birthed in prison. Monstrous and incomprehensible, this body’s incessant linguistic renderings contributed to the cacophony that, rather than indicating a referent or meaning, became its aesthetic product. West German urban guerrillas, particularly the raf, have been extensively studied, with some attention given to guerrilla performance and performativity, yet much of this scholarship remains focused upon assessing the rationality of guerrilla objectives or the effectiveness of guerrilla tactics, reinforcing the supposed substance of a self-transparent agent who engineers a path from means to ends.3 Performativity used in this way remains within the assumptions of liberal discourse, which leaves intact a centred subject who is competent in speech and action, even if that subject’s intentions are presumed to be misdirected or perverse.

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While my use of the term ‘performative’ relies upon its radical implications of an opaque subject precariously performed in repetitious emplacements, I agree that we can find in urban guerrilla actions and writings illustrative instances of articulated aims and the requisite strategies fashioned and plotted to meet them instrumentally. Prefigurative politics play out, for instance, in the work that key figures from the guerrilla movement undertook with and alongside West German youth, in Ulrike Meinhof’s journalistic practice (prior to her move underground and her becoming a co-founder of the raf), in aspects of k1’s communal living, and so on. But, at certain turns, in particular concrete constellations of conventions, persons, and environments, something else that is primarily destructive and radically unrecognizable took shape. This emergent form did not drive towards bringing hoped-for community into being through prefigurative politics, but rather lashed out incessantly, even at itself. It is this emergent form – one that eschewed both liberal reason and understanding – that I endeavour to trace. This body – grotesque as it was for being more than one and fewer than two, and simultaneously occupying multiple sites both within and outside prisons – had already been partially imagined, if not quite known or precisely described, in the avant-garde ethos of a postwar Germany that was haunted by a spectre of violence somewhat impervious to narrative.4 This odd guerrilla formation did not appear all at once, and, while its emergence was tied to a particular constellation of its historical, cultural, geographical, and political emplacements, it arrived through a series of chance occurrences in improvisational leaps. In this chapter, I consider the urban guerrilla fighter’s struggle in terms of aesthetic interventions into modes of recognizable subjectivity, arguing that the prefigurative politics attributed to guerrillas, to the extent that such politics emphasize reflexivity and liberal rationality, go only part-way in capturing the performative nuances of the guerrillas on the ground or on the page. As Wini Breines argues, while prefigurative politics may place more emphasis on means than goals, they refuse neither instrumental relations nor the goal of formalized power: “The attempt to close the gap between political means and political ends did not entail the rejection of the goal of organizing for and achieving power, but rejection of a certain kind of

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organization and power.”5 Prefigurative politics involve the enactment of alternative organizational forms and lifestyles that approximate those of imagined alternative social arrangements, rather than organizing for institutional reforms within formal institutions resistant to change. While prefigurative politics are radical, they are not negative, and they do not adequately describe most of the activities of the urban guerrillas. Barbara Epstein’s observation that “[t]here is always a prefigurative element in radical politics, or at least a pull towards prefigurative politics, because without an effort to live one’s values radical claims collapse into hypocrisy. There is also a pull to accommodate to the existing system so as to be able to operate effectively in it”6 also undermines the usefulness of this concept for describing guerrilla tactics. Guerrillas did not accommodate the system. Instead, they excised themselves from it by going underground and battling with it. Once incarcerated as terrorists under special legislation (rather as than ordinary inmates), they provoked the system while occupying a position that was, in a sense, neither within nor without the system of law.7 Beyond escape, incarcerated guerrillas, and some of their above-ground guerrilla comrades, posited neither a goal nor a positive social program for which accommodation would be instrumental. With acknowledgment of the avant-gardist influence on antiauthoritarian movements and the improvisational constitution of the urban guerrilla, I will emphasize the recession of programmatic strategies organized to meet measurable aims in the guerrillas’ move toward negativity, while resisting what Slavoj Žižek has called the “hermeneutic temptation” to grant meaning8 to, or to make an evaluation of, guerrilla aesthetics. Guerrilla negativity began to crystallize with refusals of conventional speech forms, but its stark realization accompanied the sensorial reordering of bodies in a carceral emplacement. I will foreground my argument by very briefly situating the improvisational emergence of urban guerrillas within successive anti-authoritarian struggles and state counter-insurgency strategies. These struggles undermined the perceived efficacy of words and raised the spectre of violence – yet, they did so on a terrain already marked by violence.

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Arming the Counterculture – Words or Bombs?

It is crucial to acknowledge that the spectre of violence was a feature of everyday life in the brd, materialized in: its segmented occupation by the Allies; the Vietnam War, which was largely waged from domestic military bases; ongoing struggles over Emergency Laws; and, not least of all, the extent to which the brd was palpably haunted by an intractable and heavy postwar silence. When some scholars now look back, taking a demographic and generational change approach to the assessment of revolt in West Germany, to cite the expansion of social, cultural, and economic mobility potential for this postwar generation,9 they not only dismiss the politics of recognition, accompanied by an internationalist awareness, that characterized the emergence of new social movements in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, but they also reenact the silence of the postwar period by disregarding the presence of an inarticulate affect that saturated the fabric of willful forgetting. But even at the most pragmatic level, such accounts do not ask for whom there was greater affluence and a smoothing of the lines of difference. Quinn Slobodian has posed a challenge to the implications of such claims by bringing attention to persistent racialized violence in West Germany in the 1960s.10 Further, demographic postmaterialist arguments, such as those that Gerd Koenen and Detlef Siegfried offer, de-emphasize or indirectly challenge the sincerity of the concerns that these movements raised and the violence with which their expressions were met. The radicalization of the student and youth movements was intertwined with the postwar rise and political metamorphosis of the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands – spd) in the brd,11 which reflected more favourable attitudes toward Western integration and free-market economics and prepared the way for the spd coalition with the conservative cdu in 1966. The spd’s student group, the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (sds), did not support these changes in political direction and became a growing source of criticism of the party’s policy positions, with the prominent student activist Rudi Dutschke publicly re-invoking Rosa Luxemburg’s infamous description of the spd as a “stinking corpse.”12 As disenchantment with the direction of partisan politics grew, stu-

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dents and other countercultural groups sought to work through national concerns in the global context of the Cold War. The rise of urban communal living and squatting in the latter half of the 1960s represented widespread cultural and political interventions into the West German everyday life. Communal living was a concrete manifestation of prefigurative politics in that, as a way of life, it took the shape of the desired community to come, rather than formally attempting to initiate reforms to the relevant institutions: in this case, having impacts on the family, housing, and so on. For working-class youths who were drawn to communal experimentation, disenchantment with the potentials of family structure and labour conditions appear to have preceded their politicization,13 for which the Vietnam War eventually served as a decisive catalyst. When Dieter Kunzelmann’s commune project k1 began in Berlin in 1967, it initiated a program of intervention into the daily lives of those who joined. This intervention into the everyday targeted a public feeling of social isolation and aimed to remove social, sexual, and political inhibitions imposed by practices of socialization. Members of k1 worked to liberate themselves from social norms at as many levels as possible. They shoplifted their groceries, pirated and distributed texts, and initiated both spontaneous and planned political operations.14 When the impending visit of United States Vice-President Hubert Humphrey to Berlin in April 1967 was announced, plans for mass demonstrations immediately got underway. k1 planned its own response, which would involve throwing custard at the vice-president as a satirical reference to America’s sustained and systematic bomb attacks on civilians in Vietnam. Commune members responded by preparing a large quantity of custard. After they went to a local park to execute a trial run of their plan to see what sort of visual impact their project would produce, rumours and speculation spread about the broader and more insidious plans that the curious tableau of splattered trees might signal. The domestic news press, led by Axel Springer Publications, already widely noted to be hostile to the mounting political radicalization of youths, published sensationalized headlines asserting that a group of people were conspiring to commit a bomb attack on Vice-President Humphrey during his visit. Arrests followed,

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but there was an absence of evidence beyond k1’s supply of custard and other edible items. This incident became known as the pudding assassination attempt.15 The arrests led to further suspicion that the news media were deliberately distorting the facts to constrain and to delegitimize political protest and resistance. In particular, konkret journalist and editor Meinhof retorted sardonically, “It is thus not a criminal act to drop napalm on women, children, and old people; protesting against this act is a crime … Yes to napalm, no to pudding.”16 Meanwhile, Meinhof castigated the so-called pudding assassins for not taking the opportunity to explain themselves, and thus “wasting the opportunity to make available the considerable knowledge they have of what is going on in Vietnam to a poorly informed public.”17 While protest against military actions in Vietnam was globalized, it carried a unique significance for student and worker movements in the brd, due to the Allied neo-occupation. Divided as Germany was between East and West, West Germany and West Berlin in particular were seen as the key sites of struggle in the Cold War. As Paul Hockenos contends, “Many understood the U.S. war against the Vietcong as a displaced ‘hot front’ of the Cold War. The real frontline of the superpower stand-off ran straight through Germany – indeed, it divided Berlin … the Germans interpreted the war in Vietnam as being waged on their behalf – and their government in Bonn was actively supporting it, as it supported (so the students claimed) everything Washington did.”18 Another fault line between the movements and state powers was the ongoing struggle over proposed changes to the constitution. In particular, the ephemeral state was constructing an armature of emergency law amendments to the constitution. The proposed emergency laws became a site of active contestation from 1960 to 1968, when a somewhat weakened amendment was finally passed.19 The state sought the capacity to suspend basic rights in the event of emergent threats as part of its Westernization under Allied support. From all sides, whether from the point of view of smaller Eastern European countries, the Allied countries, or the local student and worker movements, West Germany was understood to be a key field of Cold War struggle and a nation to be watched and perhaps feared – albeit for

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very different reasons.20 As the domestic state lacked emergency powers, the Allied countries retained this capacity on the behalf of the brd. The Allied countries’ monopoly on counter-insurgence stood in the way of the brd’s full recognition as an autonomous, Western nation. Further, financial aid to the brd in the very early postwar years under the Marshall Plan had enabled the brd’s eventual branding in terms of a Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) and established an ongoing ethos of cooperation with the Americans – perhaps, therefore, even in constitutional matters.21 Since the postwar constitution entrenched basic rights, student and worker movements understood the proposed legislation as part of the state’s mobilization towards a return to the Weimar constitution that had demoted rights and freedoms to decorative constitutional afterthoughts with little force behind them. The National Socialists’ use of protection laws to suspend basic rights and ordinary law in the Auschwitz years was at the forefront of the students’ vehement opposition to the proposed emergency laws.22 With the benefit of hindsight, such concerns were not entirely unfounded. In a short time, the state’s counter-insurgency operations included legislative improvisations, including: the Hand Grenade Law of 1970,23 which enabled police to carry machine guns and grenades; the Berufsverbot or Radicals Edict of 1972,24 which acted as a professional ban of leftists from the civil service; and censorship laws that were passed in 1976. The censorship laws and section 129a of the criminal code, which targeted anyone perceived to be giving support to a criminal organization, together justified a wide range of insidious policing actions, including the collection of names of public library patrons who signed out certain titles.25 Before these laws were enacted, the often-debated tensions between action and theory among activists led to an increasing ambivalence towards the effectiveness of words. The events that unfolded around a planned visit of the Shah of Iran to Berlin in June 1967 (to be treated to, among other events, an evening at the Berlin Opera House to see a performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute) brought this debate to a critical point, even though demonstrators responded to the impending visit through peaceful means, including a teach-in and a protest. Wanted posters that read “Wanted, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, for the murder and torture of journalist Karimpour

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Schirazi, 71 oppositional officers, and hundreds of communists, civilians, and students” were placed around the city.26 But, as the large protest outside of the Opera House on the evening of 2 June began to disperse, a young student named Benno Ohnesorg was shot in the head on an adjacent residential street by officer Karl-Heinz Kurras. The death of Ohnesorg deepened the countercultural suspicions about the intentions behind proposed constitutional amendments and media complicity with state violence towards dissent. Incidentally, the struggle over the meaning of Ohnesorg’s death continues, especially since it has been reported that Kurras (now deceased) may have been an East German spy at the time. This revelation has sparked some speculation that he may have been tasked with upsetting the leftists to provoke greater political instability in the West.27 The countercultural movements at the time saw Ohnesorg’s death not as an accident but as an execution and a signal that violence would continue to be deployed by West German authorities against dissenters. Within the sds, there were intractable tensions around the mode of action to be taken. In hindsight, Klaus Theweleit has observed that “[d]irect action, pacifism, abhorrence of weapons, verbal support for armed struggles – this was all in our heads at the same time.”28 If those participating in countercultural movements had any faith left in the power of rational discourse in postwar West German political engagement, much of this faith turned to disenchantment and distrust after Ohnesorg’s death. Words were considered no match for tear gas and bullets. Afterwards, Gudrun Ensslin (later a co-founder of the raf) reportedly entreated others at the sds office, “They’re going to kill us all – you know what kind of pigs we’re dealing with – it’s the Auschwitz generation we’re dealing with – and you can’t discuss anything with people who created Auschwitz. They’re armed, and we’re not. We have to get armed too.”29 It is illustrative that the guerrilla fighter cell the 2nd of June Movement (2jm) took its name from the date of this crucial event. The killing of Ohnesorg escalated the sense of political urgency and contributed to the militarization of aspects of the counterculture. The turn towards violence for some within the anti-authoritarian movement consisted of small steps, according to Brown, but these responded to crystallizing events of

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violence that targeted dissenters, particularly the killing of Ohnesorg and the attempt on Rudi Dutschke’s life. He observes, The willingness to consider violence was woven into the very fabric of the antiauthoritarian revolt, inasmuch as this revolt, as the assault on peaceful demonstrators on June 2, 1967, demonstrated, and as subsequent events reinforced, faced a violent response. Short of a Gandhian commitment to nonviolence, a commitment that, in this case, would have involved turning the other cheek to police batons, and, at its logical extreme, advocating that the Vietnamese and other national liberation movements lay down their arms and submit to imperial demands, counterviolence had inevitably to be on the table.30 Another point relevant to considerations of the ubiquity of the spectre of violence as a possible mode of action is that the distinction between state security activities and radical or guerrilla actions were at times blurry. A case worth noting along these lines is connected to the bomb found in a commune during the security police raids carried out just prior to Richard Nixon’s visit to Berlin in February 1969. A man named Peter Urbach, who was later discovered to be working as one of many Verfassungsschutz informants, had brought the bomb to the commune and had advocated for the use of incendiary weapons.31 Set up in 1950 to counter East German spy activities in West Germany, the Verfassungsschutz was tasked with the protection of the constitution and relied upon covert surveillance measures, including the use of over twenty thousand informants by the early 1970s.32 In other words, the earliest bombs to make their way into the West German countercultural circles may have been planted there by agents of the state. A brief sketch having been given of the terrain upon which it could make sense for a group of illegal dissenters to assume a socially recognizable form in the figure of the urban guerrilla – thus trading protests for attacks, placards for guns, and wit for assassination – a final observation assists in filling in some of this context. While Gerd Koenen and Wolfgang Kraushaar have brought critical attention to

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the instrumental use of violent or gruesome bodily imagery that guerrillas staged and imported into the culture through, for instance, their self-starvation and their claims of isolation in prison,33 Quinn Slobodian has posited that a “corpse politics” characterized the mid-tolate 1960s political culture in West Germany, but he implicates an already existent popular and commercial culture marked by violent imagery into which New Leftists intervened. Noting the extreme violence depicted in the film Africa Addio released in 1966, Slobodian observes that countercultural groups raised passionate responses to the racist and colonial uses of its unrelenting and brutalizing imagery. Slobodian’s analysis of media imagery brings attention to the salience of stark juxtapositions of violent and sexualized imagery in print media, including konkret, Pardon, and even the conservative Springer tabloids. He asserts, “Images of the real dead Third World body, the dead fictive body, and the sexually exhibited First World body shared space (sometimes within the proximity of inches) in the print products of the late 1960s as canny publishers folded political acts of Third World advocacy and sexual transgression into a more passive field of visual consumption. New Leftists formulated their political interventions in a fraught relationship with a visual environment saturated with both disturbing and pleasurable images of violence and gore.”34 Therefore, Slobodian challenges the assumption that violent images in countercultural productions were deployed merely to shock, and he suggests instead that counterculturalists attempted to forge new identifications in response to the prevalent juxtaposition of violated bodies in entertainment and news.

Postwar Avant-gardes, the Fun Guerrilla’s Words, and the Red Army’s Bombs

A communiqué published in June 1970 in the insurrectionist magazine Agit 883 announced the rise of an army that would confront the quotidian domination that was routinely waged by social workers, work-floor supervisors, teachers, and the police. It explicitly hailed apprentices, labourers, married women, and youths, especially those

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under state control in group homes, to help build up this red army.35 This first Red Army Faction communiqué followed soon after the spectacular breakout of Andreas Baader from prison in May 1970. Baader was imprisoned for his part in the political arson of two department stores in the city of Frankfurt with Gudrun Ensslin, Thorwald Proll, and Horst Söhnlein in 1968.36 Prior to the department store action, Baader already had a history of trouble with the police, but this had been for vehicle thefts and reckless driving rather than political actions. Proll was a student, and Söhnlein was with Action Theatre, which emphasized collective production and avant-gardist radical social critique. Ensslin had been a student activist deeply interested in critical pedagogy. As the daughter of a Protestant pastor, she had been active in the church, leading Bible studies and taking on other commitments related to the church’s youth. She found her spiritual beliefs to be consistent with radical politics, and her family accepted the mode in which Ensslin enacted her beliefs. Even when she turned to illegal means, they remained vocally and publicly supportive of her. Pastor Ensslin told a reporter that the arson was part of his daughter’s “holy self-realization.”37 Having already served fourteen months in prison, the four were released in June 1969 while they awaited an appeal of their conviction. When their appeal was rejected, Baader, Ensslin, and Proll fled to France and then to Italy before they could be ordered back to jail. Thorwald Proll’s younger sister, Astrid, helped them across the border and arranged false identity documents. Their first stop was Paris, where they would hide out in the Latin Quarter, staying in the uninhabited apartment of revolutionary Régis Debray,38 whose writings Baader would later read while incarcerated at Stammheim-Stuttgart prison. Astrid Proll had been a student of photography; her photographs of this journey and the edited collection of images that she later compiled for publication provide, as she explains it, an approach to the history of the raf. Proll’s photographs are among the few concatenating traces of the improvisational move from activist to guerrilla. Proll remarks, for instance, that the Paris café photographs depicting the escapees laughing, posing, and smoking Gitanes in a diner may “look like holiday snaps” but they are markers of a “farewell to legality and the assumption of an inconspicuous

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1.1 Atlas 477, Baader-Meinhof Photographs (18 October 1977) (1989), by Gerhard Richter

normality.”39 When they returned to the brd, Thorwald Proll turned himself in, and Baader and Ensslin went underground. A short time later, stopped on the road by police, Baader, having forgotten the details of the forged identity papers he carried with him, could not answer the police officer’s questions, and thus he was arrested, identified, and sent back to prison.40 Prior to their excursion to France and Italy, Meinhof took notice of the arson action, but denounced it, determining that, as an act of political transgression, it was ineffective. While the arson trial was in progress, Meinhof’s editorial published in konkret stressed the ambiguity of the action and interpreted it in rational terms with respect to the achievement of goals. The action’s ambiguity was the crucial target of her critique, as her interpretation undermined the distinction between the deliberate destruction of goods through planned obsolescence, which effectively aims to shorten a product’s life to bolster

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consumption, and the spectacular destruction of goods through political arson. She observed, “The occasional destruction of a few goods – free of charge – does those who make money by producing and selling things that proliferate in the department stores a considerable favor. The damages – the profits, in other words – are assured by the insurance companies. Arson easily resolves the problem of consumer gluts and markets that stagnate because products don’t sell, but it is a method akin to those already deployed by industry.”41 In a momentary pause from her emphasis on the potential concrete outcome of the department store fire, Meinhof conceded that the criminal act of the arson itself – the act of breaking the law that protects property and the logic of capitalist accumulation – may be progressive, but she cautioned her readers: “we need to ask how this might be useful, say, for political education.”42 Although she did not have a personal relationship with either of them at that time, Meinhof shared with Ensslin and Baader an active interest in the plight of marginalized youth, especially youth in state care, and all three had in various ways worked directly with young people. Meinhof had even been commissioned to produce a television docudrama about the conditions for young girls in the care of the state, which she embarked upon with a participatory vision that involved the girls in the production process.43 Ensslin and Baader approached Meinhof, asking her to shelter them after their return from Italy. Meinhof agreed and opened her home to them. Baader was arrested and returned to prison while they were living covertly in Meinhof’s apartment. Meinhof, hence, became central to the plot to free him from prison. Meinhof was well positioned to set the stage for Baader’s escape, given their shared interest in youth and Meinhof’s successful journalistic career and celebrity. She applied for permission to visit with Baader under the pretense that they had been contracted to co-author a book about marginalized youth.44 Baader was transported from Tegel Prison to a research meeting with Meinhof in a reading room in one of the buildings45 at the Deutsches Zentralinstitut für soziale Fragen (German Central Institute for Social Questions) in Berlin. The research meeting was suddenly stormed by a group of disguised individuals, including Ingrid Schubert, Irene Goergens, an unknown man,

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and possibly Ensslin. The individuals, evidently armed, were set to intimidate the guards so that Baader could be freed from custody. It is unclear whether Meinhof intended to remain behind in the reading room to preserve her legality or to reveal her complicity by fleeing with the others. The struggle with the guards, however, resulted in the accidental shooting of institute staff member Georg Linke. Linke survived his injuries but never returned to work after the incident.46 The shooting may have been the decisive impetus to Meinhof’s resolve to escape with the others out of a window, a decision that she likely would have had only seconds to deliberate. The culmination of these events forced Meinhof underground with the others, as she was then wanted for both attempted murder and her role in the illegal breakout of Baader. From then on, those identified as having been involved in the action were on the run, dwelling in temporary apartments, inhabiting multiple identities, and answering to various names conferred by forged documents. With guerrilla manuals and a visit to a Palestine Liberation Organization (plo) camp in Jordan, they embarked upon technical training in guerrilla tactics and learned to forge documents and build bombs.47 I characterize the move from activist-dissident to guerrilla as improvisational; in this respect, I am casting this move as paving a sinuous and unmapped route of chance concurrences, rather than as an intentional trajectory followed by more or less discrete and otherwise anomalous agents. I suggest that the circumstances in which this group was situated after the dramatic staging of Baader’s release, which had gone terribly awry in the shooting of Linke, had made the move underground to guerrilla action a plausible social possibility. Perhaps more significant to their move from radical dissidents to underground guerrillas than their precarious futures above ground, was the social readiness to understand such a move within the countercultural ethos that I have already described as concerned with the question of militarization. The figure of the urban guerrilla was a readily available posture to assume, as the speculative call for a West German urban guerrilla had already circulated within the discourse of the student movement, within which “[v]iolent rhetoric, more generally, had a life of its own. It was difficult to rail against oppressors

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and praise those who struggled against them without being drawn inexorably toward acts of physical resistance.”48 As Timothy Scott Brown observes, the persistence of violent discourse coupled with support for Third World guerrilla struggles produced an equivocal feeling toward the possibility of revolutionary violence.49 My intent is to illustrate the contextual social recognizability of, not necessarily widespread agreement with, the improvisational assumption of a guerrilla posture, given the complexities of the situation at hand. I do not echo re-evaluations initiated by Wolfgang Kraushaar that would cast 68ers in general, and student leader Rudi Dutschke in particular, as complicit in terrorism.50 As such endeavours are oriented to elaborate the grounds of 1960s revolt, Brown’s critical riposte to these renderings is quite sharply put: “attempts to turn Rudi Dutschke and Andreas Baader into ‘colleagues’ attack a straw man: the either-or question of whether the ‘terrorists’ were also ‘68ers’ (or vice versa) holds less significance for our understanding of the antiauthoritarian revolt in West Germany than it does as an entry in the ongoing war over the politics of memory in Germany.”51 Rather than assigning the origin of postwar terror to the psychology of particular individuals and groups – as Koenen does when he describes postwar radical leftists as suffering from a “damaged self-image” and the raf as exemplary of the first German postwar generation’s “mental and moral void”52 – it is more productive to consider the constellation of images, concepts, and practices that could at least provisionally support a move toward a guerrilla posture. One aspect of this constellation is the avant-gardist ethos of postwar counterculture that provided the resources for the introduction of the fun guerrilla. The Frankfurt department store arson that provided an impetus for escalated actions, and eventually to the move underground, was ostensibly connected to a series of Spassgerilja (fun guerrilla) pamphlets. Leaflet number 7 of k1, dated May 24, 1967, opened with the question: “Why do you burn, consumer?” The circular appears less as an incitement to arson than as an avant-gardist device mobilized to bring into confrontation the contradictions presented by West German military and economic imperialism intertwined with nato’s neooccupation. It noted the structural complicity of American industrial

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efficiency and advertising in and beyond the brd: “Coca Cola and Hiroshima, the German economic miracle and the Vietnam war, the Free University and the University of Teheran” are listed among the “achievements” of American inventiveness in the k1 leaflet.53 Fritz Teufel, a member of k1 and later the 2nd of June Movement (2jm), who favoured inventing his own words to describe conditions and actions, posited his concept of the fun guerrilla as centrally characterized by ridicule rather than blood.54 Teufel’s approach to conditions in the brd approximates avant-gardist social interventions that strove to make up a “second sense” by first “ripping up the syntax of social life.”55 The fun guerrilla was engaged in an ongoing play with conventional and instrumental language use that undermined referential discourse. Teufel was fond of spectacularly outwitting the judiciary and the police: “As a means for fighting in the metropoles, I would still recommend the Spassgerilja [fun guerrilla], no one knows what I mean by Spassgerilja. Perhaps I will return to this in the final words of the trial [his own trial] … I have struggled long against the uncanny desire to bore a larger audience with a pompous exegesis on the theme which I will fail to develop adequately.”56 Reworking playwright Bertolt Brecht’s comparison of bank managers to bank robbers, Teufel had remarked in public support of the department store fire defendants that “[i]t’s always better to torch a department store than to run one.”57 Yet it appears that, beyond the public eye, Teufel and others in k1 were perplexed by the Frankfurt action.58 Further, in association with the production of the k1 Leaflet number 7, Teufel and Rainer Langhans had been arrested and charged with incitement to arson. In court, Langhans had retorted to the charges against them: “we can only assume that anyone who feels he’s been incited to arson’s a fool – and this court’s certainly distinguished itself in that line.”59 Their trial ended with a judgment of not guilty on 22 March 1968, as the court had to concede that the leaflet could be read as satirical. During the k1 leaflet trial, the court heard testimony from five art history experts assessing the status of the leaflet. Four of the witnesses explicated connections to futurism, Dada, surrealism, theatre of the absurd, fluxus, and the Happening.60 But Wolf Vostell, whose practice of dé-collage brushed with Marcuse’s interest in the rational indication in irrationality and prefigured the emergence of

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the Happening, rejected any connection between k1 activities and avant-garde practice. Richard Langston observes that the avant-garde, which had been suppressed during fascism, reemerged and flourished in Germany after World War II, albeit in mostly unaffiliated formations. Despite Vostell’s attempts to distance the Happening from the activities of the communards, Langston insists that both k1 and Vostell were equally “indebted to the historical avant-garde.”61 In this way, Langston indirectly draws lines of connection between guerrilla action and avant-garde practice. By the time of the Teufel and Langhans court sentencing, it was coming on to a year since the leaflet had first been circulated. Not even two weeks after the judgment, Baader, Ensslin, Proll, and Söhnlein set the Frankfurt store fires. Ironically, to the extent that arson can be incited, it appears more likely that the trial, rather than the leaflet, incited the arson – although such cause-andeffect relations are suspect. In any case, the four arsonists had restaged the fun guerrilla pamphlet in a more concrete, spectacular, and piercing form. At the end of October 1968, when Baader, Ensslin, Proll, and Söhnlein were sentenced to three years in prison for the Frankfurt department store fires, lawyer Horst Mahler, representing Baader, had planned to use Herman Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf as the basis for making his client’s action publicly legible. While Mahler did not in the end use this strategy in the defence, his planning notes for the trial draw the following interpretation of the act: “From the bourgeois humanist position, the individual can preserve himself as a human being only in the abstract negation of the bourgeois world, that is by destroying himself.”62 In this, Mahler’s never-used defence speech simultaneously illustrates the difficulty of communication presented by the limits of social convention and in hindsight appears as a prophetical anticipation of modes of radical negative subjectivity that would be inchoately articulated by raf members several years later in prison hunger strikes, self-photography, and other enactments. But in its first communiqués, the raf had formulated a message to communicate and objectives to meet. Early on, the raf communicated more directly than did the fun guerrilla, who made up words knowing that they would not be understood.

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In their paper “Das Konzept Stadtguerilla” (“The Urban Guerilla Concept”), the raf ambivalently situated itself within the disenchantment of the student movement, with the assertion: “The urban guerilla is the consequence of the negation of parliamentary democracy that has long been carried out by its very own representatives.”63 Their communiqué affirmed the analyses of the student movement but critiqued its form of organization as bourgeois and as an obstacle to forging connections with labour and with a wider revolutionary struggle: “Unlike in Italy and France, the spark of the student movement here failed to ignite the prairie fire of class struggle.”64 For the raf, the question of armed struggle was settled by their perspective that social democracy, in the form of the spd government, which had failed to alter conditions in the brd that were fostered by two consecutive conservative governments after the fall of the National Socialist regime, did not provide a substantive break with a fascist past.65

Not a Word – The Refusal of Conventional Speech

The arrests of the core organizers of the raf were carried out in a mass police action over several weeks following the Red Army Faction’s May Offensive in 1972. This offensive consisted of a series of bomb attacks, including those on a United States Army base in Frankfurt,66 the Hamburg office of the print media monopolist Axel Springer Publishing (responsible for the daily newspaper Bild),67 and the Ausburg police headquarters.68 In one of the letters that claimed responsibility for the attacks, the raf expressed that they had come to the conclusion that “demonstrations and words are of no use.”69 In the case of the Springer attack, the lives of workers were not the intended targets. The guerrillas had issued warnings to Springer, but these were ignored, and the work routine carried on as usual until the explosions. Since workers were injured, this action became a source of insider contention for the cell. The injuries sustained and deaths resulting from the other attacks, however, were characterized as an inevitable consequence of the guerrilla battle against imperialism. In their use of incendiaries, the guerrillas made a stark move from a heav-

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ily verbal presence in the form of communiqués to concrete contacts and visual echoing in media reports of carnage and property damage. The predicament of words became an even more urgent matter of consideration for guerrillas in prison. Incarcerated guerrillas internally distributed a code of conduct for their imprisonment. The code, as articulated by member Holger Meins, called for resistance that eschewed any direct provocations, while emphasizing a refusal of speech: “Not a word to the pigs, in whatever guise they may appear, particularly as doctors.”70 In a letter to her lawyer, one raf prisoner described speech with prison guards as an act of complicity in one’s own institutionalization. She notes that it is possible to understand the relationship with the guard as a contradictory one; after all, the guard does not occupy a position of official power, but is a wagelabourer subordinated to the same forces as the prisoner. Yet, she observes that the guards operate as the instruments of the prison official, the juridical system, and so forth. In these respects, to speak to a guard makes the prisoner vulnerable: “You realize how important it is to not speak when you see how they celebrate every one of your words like a victory – in reality something to ease their conscience, their knowledge that they are torturers and assassins. You help them to carry the burden of their responsibility, you make yourself into their accomplice. You are supposed to show them that you consent to the torture you are being subjected to. They want a total victory – and in this way they will have it.”71 The code of conduct reveals the guerrillas’ understanding that the prisoner’s speech can be a form of acquiescence to its institutionalization. Regardless of its content, speech complies with socialization. The prisoners’ refusal to speak to the senior doctor, Dr Henck, at Stammheim-Stuttgart prison came at a high price, as subsequent attempts to initiate complaints and appeals with regard to the conditions of their detention and their fitness to stand trial were deemed inadmissible both in the Federal Republic and at the level of the Council of Europe, in part on the grounds that they refused to be examined by Henck.72 Further to their decision not to speak with authority figures, a never-completed book outlining the main principles of the Red Army Faction, if it had ever been finished, might have

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carried Baader’s proposed title “The Gun Speaks,”73 which starkly acknowledges the limits of instrumental language use and affirms guerrilla violence. As prisoners preparing for their trial, the raf members were critical of not only the state-appointed defence lawyers, with whom they refused to engage, but of their own chosen lawyers, from whom they demanded self-criticism and an understanding of what was important to the group: the matter of identity.74

Negative Situations – The (Anti-)Happening, Illness, and Self-Starvation

The raf’s ambivalent use and refusal of speech in proximal contexts with guards, doctors, and police highlight their acknowledgment of the ambivalent character of speech, with the underside of its function as a potentially dangerous conduit of personal and collective vulnerability. The vulnerability that the raf prisoners wanted to avoid was not vulnerability to the coherence of a human subject’s individualized identity, but to the negative subjectivity to which I suggest that the raf increasingly ascribed. Circulating critiques of consumer society, as proffered by Frankfurt School scholars such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, outlined an ontology of the self beset by the opposition between the authors’ notion of a Romantic pre-technical self known before humans and nature “were organized as things and instrumentalities”75 and their concept of a false self that is marked by needs and desires manufactured by the culture industry of consumer goods and popular cultural forms that dull the capacity for critical thought and subsume the antagonistic tensions and contradictions characteristic of subversive, negative thought. According to the Frankfurt School thinkers, who were largely influential on the countercultural movements in West Germany in the 1960s, the self as lived in modern industrial society was a “onedimensional” self, whose inner and critical dimension had been subsumed into an automatic and immediate identification with the status quo76 and resided under the anaesthesia of consumer culture, which “reflects the belief that the real is rational, and the established system,

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in spite of everything, delivers the goods. The people are led to find in the productive apparatus the effective agent of thought and action to which their personal thought and action can and must be surrendered. And in this transfer, the apparatus also assumes the role of a moral agent.”77 Marcuse’s work with Hegelian dialectics offered a possibility of overcoming one-dimensionality, but to do so, one had to feel profoundly alienated. Marcuse had lamented that the unhappy consciousness of felt alienation had been conquered by the appearance of individual liberty under the technical rationality of the modern industrial society. For Marcuse, it was only in the restlessness of the unhappy consciousness, aware of the conquest of its inner dimension and feeling its alienation, that negative thinking and revolt would once again be possible.78 Hence, one must negate the stabilization of contradiction that sustains the rational humanist subject in its “positive” thinking that renders all other “notions as mere speculation, dreams, or fantasies.”79 Marcuse would posit that “the mere absence of all advertising and of all indoctrinating media of information and entertainment would plunge the individual into a traumatic void where he would have the chance to wonder and to think, to know himself (or rather the negative of himself) and his society … he would have to learn his ABCs again. But the words and sentences which he would form might come out very differently, and so might his aspirations and fears.”80 In this, Marcuse offers an image of a subject stripped of inculcated regimes of bourgeois subjectivity; a negative subjectivity without scripted conventions, hopes, and fears would make itself differently out of nothing. The presumed potential of negation, which for Marcuse could only be realized in a different form of society, holds a prominent place within the art-historical ethos of the 1960s in a variety of movements. For instance, as Claire Bishop shows, the 1960s brought with them the phenomenon of the Happening, a theatrical event, often staged in everyday contexts, that eschewed many of the structural components of conventional theatre, such as plot and character. It also eroded the distinction between performer and spectator. European iterations of the Happening were more politically oriented than those in the United States, and thus played a part in a waning distinction between

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art and everyday life that contributed to ushering in the political upheavals of 1968 and transformations in consciousness.81 Bishop describes Jean-Jacques Lebel’s Happening 120 Minutes Dedicated to the Divine Marquis on 4 April 1966 as an instantiation of Lebel’s understanding of the artist as a moral transgressor and conduit for collective desires repressed by dominant culture. Bishop notes that, in addition to producing homage to the writings of the Marquis de Sade, whose Oeuvres Complètes had been recently published, Lebel’s Happening was a response to the censorship of Jacques Rivette’s film La Religieuse. Lebel’s Happening began with fingerprinting at the door administered by nude women posing as customs agents, after which attendees were required to make their way through a tight passage between hanging slabs of bloody meat. There was no seating awaiting the attendees when they reached the other side, where they would come into direct and sometimes brutal contact with aspects of the performance. Among several concrete enactments that brought the audience into direct contact with the action was soprano Shirley Goldfarb’s performance, during which she urinated on the audience from the rafters. Further, as Bishop describes, “[t]he most notorious part of the evening featured a transsexual prostitute called Cynthia, dressed in a nun’s habit, who stripped, washed her genitals, and then auto-sodomised herself with carrots and leeks. (When she turned around to reveal her breasts and penis to the crowd, the writer Lucian Goldmann had a heart attack).”82 Deeply influenced by the poetics of Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, Lebel’s Happenings undermined instrumental language as well as rational ends and instead ritualized a poetics of transgression that posited “a space of collective transformation where categories of individual and social, conscious and unconscious, active and passive, would purportedly disintegrate in a ‘défoulement’ or unleashing of pent-up tensions.”83 While the example of Lebel’s Happening is derived from the French context, the war on instrumental reason also occupied the social context of the West German counterculture. Urban-based activist movements going back to the anti–atom bomb movement of the 1950s routinely performed sophisticated street interventions and produced satirical media. For instance, in response to publisher Axel

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Springer’s public comparison between the student movement and fascism, a leaflet was produced and circulated with a picture of Springer in an ss uniform with the caption: “Who is the Nazi here and who is the Jew?”84 This dichotomy, used as an abusive metaphor, was indeed ill-judged for its apparent trivialization of the terror of Auschwitz, yet comparisons to either the Jewish or Nazi position were frequently reiterated in an ongoing polemic between students and Springer Publications in a battle of mutual delegitimation. The Springer publishing company had a reputation for strong right-wing partisanship, and its newspapers, such as Bild, frequently expressed in sensationalized terms anxieties about the destabilizing political potential of the student movement. In the mid-1960s, Meinhof and others were involved with collective journalistic writing experiments, some of which were produced in a style akin to that of Argentina’s El Grupo de los Artes de los Medios Masivos. This group is known for its production of the “antiHappening,” which, as Bishop explains, sought to mobilize a critique of mass print media, while producing a dematerialization of the Happening. While the Happening as a form emphasized physicalized immediacy, its dematerialization in the form of the anti-Happening demanded that no one would actually be present for it. The antiHappening would consist of the press release and its accompanying photographs, reporting upon a Happening that no one attended because it never actually took place. Members of the group staged the photographs and collectively authored the press release. A subsequent press release “revealed this construction, seeking to expose the way in which the media operated, and served to generate yet further press coverage.”85 While Meinhof and her experimental co-authors were not concerned with staging a dematerialized reversal of the Happening, they mobilized a critique of mainstream print media using similar tactics. They called their genre ‘political fiction.’ It consisted of fictionalized articles that parodied the journalistic styles of major news publications responding to press releases from a nonexistent press agency.86 Countercultural performances in the brd frequently permeated elite and official spaces, such as the courtroom, throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In this spirit, West German urban guerrillas staged

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fantastic reversals in official, ritualized, and highly scripted spaces, thereby deploying a stripping of official culture through comedic dismemberment. In his essay on laughter, Henri Bergson observes a critical relationship between official ceremony and its hidden comedic underside: “The ceremonial side of social life must, therefore, always include a latent comic element, which is only waiting for an opportunity to burst into full view. It might be said that ceremonies are to the social body what clothing is to the individual body: they owe their seriousness to the fact that they are identified, in our minds, with the serious object with which custom associates them, and when we isolate them in imagination, they forthwith lose their seriousness.”87 The isolation and removal of ceremonial clothing through comedic dismemberment in trial contexts was frequent during the postwar years in West Germany, as there was a constant parade of countercultural youth through the courts. An especially vivid example of comedic dismemberment occurred in one of the many trials mobilized against emerging guerrilla tactics in September 1968. Karl-Heinz Pawla was on trial for insulting a judge, trespassing, and causing a nuisance. During his trial, Pawla defecated in front of the judge’s bench and then wiped himself with the judge’s file. Pawla was sentenced to ten months in prison for this spectacular courtroom act.88 Another instance occurred in 1971 during a trial at the Moabit Criminal Court in Berlin for an assault on journalist Horst Rieck. Just prior to the attack, Rieck had published a story in the tabloid Quick about the New Left in Berlin speculating about who might have committed recent political bombings. Members of the Tupamaros West Berlin (tw), Thomas Weisbecker, Michael (Bommi) Baumann, and Georg von Rauch, stood trial for the assault on Rieck. The judge set bail for Baumann and Weisbecker, but it looked as though von Rauch could face up to a ten-year sentence. Baumann and Weisbecker were released on bail, but actually von Rauch and Weisbecker, both bearded and sporting long hair, had each made a successful attempt to pose as the other in the courtroom. When Weisbecker was released from the courtroom, it was actually von Rauch who walked out as a free man. By the time Weisbecker’s true identity was revealed, it was too late, and von Rauch had slipped underground and was out of reach. About this, Baumann has re-

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marked, “So once again there was a man out, in a perfectly simple way, through one of these sleight-of-hand tricks. Of course, it’s a much better thing to get out like this, than in one of those revolver numbers. There’s more wit behind it, more imagination plays a part in it.”89 Acknowledging the performative and satirical context of the West German radical counterculture changes the tenor of the primarily linguistic remnant documents of the raf’s activities that have lent disproportionate weight to the attribution of straightforwardly instrumental means-ends calculations to West German urban guerrilla operations. Above, I noted that k1 activities and Teufel’s notion of the fun guerrilla operated in avant-gardist communicative modes that strove to explode the syntaxes of social convention. Teufel, when tried for his alleged participation in bank robberies, organized his speech in court against a mode of understanding and function. First, as he insisted, he would give a “boring exegesis” in his trial that could not be understood. Second, against the functional notion of the alibi that furnishes proof of innocence through official documentation or personal testimony, Teufel introduced the concept of the B-libi: “The B-libi is a story, which the accused doesn’t prove, and which the court cannot refute.”90 These pronouncements and courtroom performances subvert rather than borrow from conventional discourse; they are consciously dysfunctional rather than functional. The si, from which Lebel was expelled, likewise refused functional ends. The si promised an intellectual terrorism engaged in the organization of detonation of meaning.91 West German countercultural movements, such as k1 and the guerrilla cells, had a situationist ethos to them. West Germany’s own short-lived si group was Spur, active from 1957 to 1962. Having been invited to join the si in 1959, Spur was the si’s German arm, although the relationship between Spur and Guy Debord’s Paris si group was a troubled one, so that Spur was eventually to join a long list of those expelled from the si. The Gruppe Spur’s 1958 manifesto announced an “artistic rearmament” and deemed art the “last domain of freedom.” Art for Spur had nothing to do with the institutions of the art world, nor with technique or artistic tradition; Spur likened the latter to trying to chew a dry piece of gum one more time. The line that artificially lifted

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art above everyday life and its banal profanity would be attacked: “we insist upon kitsch, dirt, the original mud, chaos.”92 Spur targeted rationality, insisting, “We mean to protest against the monstrous colossus of the technicized machine. We are opposed to the rationalism that has engendered a cultural desert. Automatically functioning thought has engendered the lack of ideas, academicism, the atomic bomb.”93 By the early 1960s, Spur was under mounting pressure brought on by criminal charges of obscenity, for which they went to trial, as well as by tensions that culminated in their expulsion from the si. Under the weight of these pressures, the group disbanded. Kunzelmann had been a member of Spur; he went on from Spur to Subversive Aktion, a group of agitprop artists that emerged in 1962. Rudi Dutschke, later known for his leadership within the West German student movement in the sds, was also with Subversive Aktion. The group’s practices involved attempts to “shock and provoke the lethargic masses”94 and were informed by German Dadaism and the si. Subversive Aktion began in Munich, but more cells emerged in other cities, including Tübingen, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, and West Berlin. They published their own paper, Anschlag (Attack).95 While Dutschke moved on from Subversive Aktion into the sds, he did not entirely break from the former’s practices and he imported some of these tactics into the student movement.96 Kunzelmann likewise moved on from Subversive Aktion, but instead of taking up the student movement, he formed k1, where he enacted, along with Teufel and others, the concept of the fun guerrilla.97 Mia Lee has observed that “Spur remains pivotal for understanding the aesthetic origins of the New Left,” while noting its close relationship to the emergence of the student extra-parliamentary opposition in the brd.98 The situationist ethos is also imperative to the modes of communication deployed by the guerrilla movements in the brd and to the transformational imperatives towards negative subjectivity. The tactic of negation is present in the artistic interventions of the late 1950s and into the 1960s. For instance, it appears at the cultural level in Spur’s manifesto: “S/he who wants to create culture must also destroy culture.”99 Rather than a call to retrieve an

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authentic culture that has been repressed, it is a call to create culture through its active annihilation. The extreme enactments of the West German urban guerrilla movements can be seen as various engagements that approximate negative subjectivity by refusing or opting out of recognizable modes of identity and action, which may occur only in the annihilation of the socially recognizable self. The raf and other urban guerrillas, hence, remained suspended between their socially recognized identities and a restless negative subjectivity. Word use was the line that marked the boundary between these identities, and it is consistent with Artaud’s call in his manifesto Theatre of Cruelty for the creation of not a stage but a theatre of action that breaks down the separation between spectator and spectacle and makes space speak rather than relying on the instrumentality of conventional speech.100 Artaud placed communication within space rather than in language proper. He called for a new and unique language, one that resides somewhere in between thought and language. Speech, for Artaud, must be poetic, granting to words the significance that they have in dreams. He insisted that the material side of language must be apprehended and emphasized so that words are embraced in their incantational capacities; the voice is extended so that we may recognize its rough texture; sounds must be pile-driven – they must make contact.101 Hence, in the hands of the guerrilla, words were refused, deployed, re-intonated, and distorted in fraught attempts to walk the tightrope of negation. Rather than the transmission of instrumental information, urban guerrilla discourse approximated the gestural lyricism advocated in the theatre of cruelty. Hence, we find words deployed rampantly over the course of the guerrilla imprisonment in internal and external communiqués, in the courtroom, and in other contexts, despite the abandonment of words as the decisive instruments for confronting the brd and imperialist expansion through what would threaten to remain tied to largely instrumental, merely reformist, and benign strategies. The raf’s proclamation of the body as a weapon, and the sentiment that words exchanged with doctors, police, and other agents are dangerous, resonates with the explicit position of the Socialist

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Patients’ Collective (spk – Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv), which rallied for illness to be turned into a weapon. The spk originally consisted of a group of politically radicalized psychiatric patients in the care of Dr Wolfgang Huber at the Psychiatric Neurological Clinic at Heidelberg University. The spk’s membership at times crossed lines into the raf and the 2jm. The spk understood illness to be inherent to capitalism. Illness was, for its members, both the condition for, and the product of, the capitalist relations of production.102 Hence, the notion of ‘health’ for the spk is at its very core a bourgeois concept that indexes an individual’s capacity to be properly integrated into, and exploited by, the system through wage-labour.103 Huber held group therapy sessions up until his dismissal from the clinic in early 1970. Huber’s patients mobilized a hunger strike and occupied an administration office in response to the clinic’s decision to dismiss Huber. While the clinic’s administrators would not reinstate Huber’s official position, buckling under the pressure of spk agitation, they extended his salary and provided him with meeting space on the university’s campus. In this unconventional capacity, Huber, along with his patients, established the spk. Among the spk’s organizing principles was the insistence that there was no cure for illness residing in late capitalism: “Let’s bury the silly hope for health! … There must be no therapeutic act which has not been previously clearly and uniquely shown to be [a] revolutionary act.”104 According to the spk, the task of the police officer and the physician was the integration and reintegration of patients into the system, as objects for the system. Thus, illness, the “productive power par excellence,”105 must be turned into a weapon rather than used as a justification for methods of integration. The health system, according to the spk, is a key disciplinary mechanism of capitalism. Both the physician and the patient are ill, although they are positioned relationally in linguistic terms. The physician is the signifier and the patient is the signified. The physician is the subject who can interpret the patient, who is in turn produced as an atomized object to be explained and categorized either for its treatment, so that it can be re-inserted into the exploitative wage-labour system, or for its exclusion.106

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Given this interpretation of the health system, the spk advocated that all public institutions concerned with illness ought to be patientcontrolled; patients ought to have control over health education (the socialization of science); and patients ought to have self-determination in all matters of treatment. Further, patients should have control “of the way and of the manner in which social security contributions (Sozialabgaben) are levied and invested, control of the budget of the social insurances or services.”107 Practicing spk meant participation in study groups dealing with Hegelian dialectics and Marxist praxis as well as in group agitations. The latter progressively became militarized towards guerrilla activities. By 1971, Huber and a number of spk members were facing raids on their residences and arrests. They issued a demand for “500 weapons licences for patients so that they can defend their often demanded right to self-defense, against the outbreak of unrestricted police terror.”108 Despite the production and issuing of pamphlets and manifestos, the spk took an austere approach to the use of speech in their program of tactics. Their intention was to turn illness itself into a weapon, but, as their Patient’s Info no. 51 stated, to work in a “total refusal of speaking to and acting with every kind of authorities” as well as with the press.109 Hence, there existed a social fabric in the brd in the 1960s and early 1970s within which several entrenched elements were tightly interwoven: preoccupation with identity and its negation, deep distrust of authorities and institutions, spectacular modes of communicative intervention, revolutionary impulse, and restless ambivalence towards the exchange of conventional speech with agents of state institutions. With respect to the latter, the core first-generation raf prisoners gave much attention to the significance of verbal exchanges with prison staff and other authorities in their prison writing. Their approach to this problem, via a code of refusal, suggests considerable importance of speech in relation to subjectivity, as though speech itself constituted a sort of permeable and vulnerable skin. While in prison, guerrillas faced shifting conditions that at times involved isolation, sensory deprivation, and highly restrictive contact bans. These conditions constrained some communicative forms. Depending upon the circumstances, certain communications, such as the exchange of

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letters or access to news media, were controlled or prohibited. Over time, the conditions of isolation and sensory manipulation also dramatically reshaped patterns of thought, language, and speech.110 While these conditions constrained or blocked certain forms of communication, they offered a field for the emergence of new communicative modes. Hunger-striking, for instance, is a mode of internal and external communication that is not purely linguistic but is thoroughly sensorial and crucial to the annihilation of the recognizable human social subject. An internal and ostensibly covert communications system, das info, became a vital mode of communication and a social cement amongst guerrillas, and through it both a collective guerrilla identity and a collective guerrilla body were solidified. It was assumed that das info was facilitated by lawyers who smuggled letters and communiqués in, out, and between prison cells and guerrillas working on the outside.111 While communications via das info were limited to the use of linguistic formations, the use of these texts to privilege interpretations of these communications as instrumental transmissions of information or as the volley of polemics surely misses the crucial struggle against an instrumentalized subjectivity (in their terms, a “bourgeois” subjectivity) that the self-starving guerrillas were enacting. It was against this background of isolation, hunger strikes, and the struggle against recognizable subjectivity that the Stammheim trial proceedings began, and the prisoners were called forth to account for themselves and for their actions. The Stammheim trial was the stage for a drama between unsettled characters. By this, I refer to the struggle against rational subjectivity that was characteristic of countercultural movements in the period but heightened in the guerrilla movement’s negativity. But I also refer to the state of the brd in terms of its own unsettled identity. The brd was a state still reeling from the horrors and largely unspeakable guilt of Auschwitz, inhabiting voids of silence policed by what author W.G. Sebald aptly described as a “preconscious censorship – a means of obscuring a world that could no longer be presented in comprehensible terms” since “the great majority of the German population, remained under a kind of taboo like a shameful family secret, a secret that perhaps could not even be privately acknowledged.”112 Politically, the brd was situated on a

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divided geographical territory and caught between the two major superpowers of the Cold War. The brd was an infant state desperate to prove itself to the United States, to Britain, and to the rest of the world as an emergent Western power and to distance itself from the horrors of Auschwitz. Rather than an orderly site of ideological polemics and the determination of guilt or innocence, the drama that unfolded during the Stammheim proceedings may be better described as a clumsy struggle for two unsettled identities to come into being or to come undone.

Out of Order – The Stammheim Trial

The Stammheim trial began on 21 May 1975. Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, and Raspe were tried together. The state designed and built two buildings to house the trials of urban guerrillas. One of the courthouses was located in Kaiserslautern and the other in Stuttgart.113 The special courthouse built in Stuttgart was referred to as “the multipurpose room.” It was built directly on the prison grounds of Stammheim and specifically for the Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, and Raspe trial. The special courthouse at the prison was an explicit response to the state’s assessment that routine transport of the defendants to an external location for proceedings would constitute a major state security risk. During its construction, the courthouse was described as follows: “A concrete and steel fortress that will cost about £3 million, it includes among the features not normally found in courthouses, anti-aircraft defense against helicopter attack, listening devices sown into the ground around the building, scores of closed-circuit tv cameras, and an underground tunnel linked to Stammheim so that defendants can be smuggled in and out of court without showing their noses in the open. The five judges (no jury), the accused and all witnesses will sit behind bullet-proof glass security screens.”114 Incidentally, this structure is now the Stammheim State Court and is used for other high-security, high-profile trials, and is generally the site of trials that address charges under the counterterrorist sections of the German Criminal Code 129a, passed in 1976 while the Stammheim trial was underway.

1.2 The German Autumn in Minor Spaces (2007), by Allen Ball and Kimberly Mair

The trial process was complicated by the raf prisoners’ attempt to have their activities recognized as part of political115 and military conflict. As urban guerrillas, they saw themselves as participating in an ongoing military struggle with domestic as well as international states and institutions of governance. This aspect on its own sets the Stammheim process apart from most trials. More significantly, however, the administration of the trial departed from convention and operated in exception to law; therefore, it was plagued by controversy and constant threats to its legitimacy that set the stage for an extended-run performance in what could be considered a form of state theatre. The trial began with an exaggerated spectacle of security.116 It ended in a crisis of state legitimacy, with all four defendants dead ostensibly by suicide in a prison whose heightened level of security ought to have precluded that occurrence. Stefan Aust describes the opening day of the Stammheim trial in the following way: “It was a sunny day; people crowded around the

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fortress built for the trial as if it were a fair. Mounted police patrolled the perimeter of the building, which was protected with barbed wire. Aircraft were banned from the air space over the prison and the multi-purpose hall. The inner courtyard and the roof of the courtroom building were covered with steel netting, so that explosive devices dropped from the air could do no harm.”117 In addition to these security provisions, there were daily mass confiscations of even the most innocuous-seeming objects belonging to anyone entering the court. Arguably, these measures may have been well-advised rather than paranoid, given that many of the raf’s associates were extensively skilled, and it would not have been unreasonable to fear that ordinary objects in the courtroom might have hidden properties and multiple uses. It was known that raf members had previously secured a strangely fortuitous and productive relationship with a metalworker, Dierk Hoff. Hoff had allegedly fashioned all sorts of innovative espionage gadgets and creatively deceptive weapons and bombs for covert operations.118 When called to trial by the prosecution, Hoff testified in the hopes of distancing himself from the raf, insisting that he had all along believed that he was building props for a film about revolution. Active raf member Holger Meins, after all, had been an art and film student known for his instructional film on how to make a Molotov cocktail. Hoff’s testimony aimed to assert that the otherwise benign props were subsequently refashioned into operational weapons to be deployed in raf actions. Whether the items were operational weapons when obtained or converted later, the troubling fact remained that the raf had the creative and technical capacities required to produce covert weapons of subterfuge equalled only perhaps by those found in the great works of secret agent fiction. Another associate, a Berlin auto mechanic known as Eric G., reportedly inspired by a raf member’s suggestion that Horst Mahler could be rescued from incarceration through the prison’s sewer infrastructure, designed and began construction of a mini-helicopter. The “freedom mobile,” to be constructed potentially from the engine of a Volkswagen 1500 and other parts, was a component of G.’s elaborate plan that would enable a prison rescue from the sky rather than from underground, by unexpectedly swooping down into the prison

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yard at exercise time. While the plan was reportedly received as a joke when it was proposed to the group, G. embarked upon his project. During a raid in February 1971, police found the partially constructed freedom mobile and its technical drawings in a garage.119 Another spectacular example of the technical resourcefulness of the raf was their attempted rocket launcher attack on the federal prosecutor’s office in Karlsruhe. It deserves description even though it did not happen until the Stammheim trial was well underway in the summer of 1977.120 Two members of the raf posed as a couple interested in purchasing art from a painter named Theodor Sand. Sand invited the couple to meet with him at his home. They arrived at his home and spent much of the morning visiting and talking with Sand and his wife about art and Sand’s paintings in particular. At midday, the tone of the visit abruptly changed when the couple produced weapons and announced that they were about to carry out a Red Army Faction operation. Soon afterwards, several more members of the raf arrived at the apartment. The new arrivals methodically moved containers of metal objects from the back of a vehicle parked in the street, marked with a name of a fictitious commercial outlet specializing in customer service. As some of the uninvited guests organized their collection of metal objects and began to assemble a larger contraption out of the smaller parts, the Sands were tied to their living room chairs. While securing the restraints on the Sands, raf members apologized for the intrusion but explained that their apartment was ideally located for a grand raf operation – a major attack on the federal prosecutor’s office located in the building across the street. In the weeks leading up to the day of the encounter in the Sands’ apartment, Peter Jürgen Boock121 had designed and manufactured all of the component parts of the raf’s very own rocket launcher. The Sands were told that the contraption would be a rocket launcher with which they would fire upon the federal prosecutor’s office through the apartment window. As work continued, the Sands were reportedly offered several hundred dm in cash to remedy damage to their apartment during the launching of the rocket and were invited to partake in a bottle of brandy that was being passed around. After the potentially deadly contraption was assembled, the operation was

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able to move to the next level; all that they needed to do was to vacate the area to avoid arrest and to wait. But nothing happened. The rocket did not launch. It became a matter of speculation how it was that the launcher did not ignite. Boock later asserted in court that he had deliberately sabotaged the action, but some authorities assumed that he had merely forgotten to wind up the clock that was to govern the ignition process. With the two former instances of technical and creative prowess providing the background setting to the state theatre about to unfold with the commencement of the Stammheim trial, and the latter instance providing a window into some of what was to come, the elaborate security measures implemented in the design of the special courthouse on the prison grounds are contextualized. Yet, beyond the excesses of the high-security terrorist-proofing methods that were used to secure the trial space and its surroundings, the Stammheim trial had other extraordinary characteristics. For instance, the legislation governing the trial was continually revised to meet the obstacles that raf members presented to the legal system during the course of the proceedings. The Stammheim process was remarkable also for the sheer number of legal personnel involved, including five judges and shadow defence lawyers for the accused. While the defence team of lawyers for the raf was extensive, the relationship between the defendants and their lawyers was complicated in at least two significant ways. First, constantly evolving revisions to the Criminal Code intended to negotiate trial procedures led to increasingly blurry distinctions between actual participants in raf activities and ordinary citizens critical of the state, which culminated in a routine practice of casting defence lawyers as raf members themselves or as threats to national security.122 Throughout the proceedings, several lawyers were thrown off of the case, prevented from practicing law, or arrested and charged. Second, a governing principle for lawyers was the raf leaders’ insistence that they would decide how their own defence would be carried out. Lawyers who were not willing to take direction from the raf leadership were either dismissed or ignored. From the defendants’ position, the whole concept of the defence lawyer was troubled in the first place, since the trial and its terms of

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reference were controlled by the state. While the defendants and chosen lawyers mobilized physical and verbal interventions into the proceedings that made palpable the limits of the court, the state exercised its legislative means to the fullest to extend the boundaries of its powers through extraordinary amendments to Basic Law. From the raf’s point of view, this fact ensured – as even the international press would later note – that the outcome of the trial had been determined in advance.123 The raf noted, “And we see how [Judge] Prinzing sees things in a way that allows for a verdict even though there is no evidence; and so it becomes clear why he previously, and now for a second time, felt obliged to decimate the defense with a volley of legislation and illegal attacks. We have been amused by this for some time now.”124 With public proclamations that critiqued the process, the trial itself became a space for the raf’s dissemination, but over time this dissemination became more performative than instrumentally communicative. In the midst of these conditions, the defence lawyers often were subject to suspicion. The files and correspondence of some chosen lawyers, such as Kurt Groenewold, Klaus Croissant, and Hans-Christian Ströbele, were seized. All of these lawyers were later barred from the proceedings and temporarily disbarred from practicing law. All were later arrested. Ströbele and another lawyer, Schily, later went on to political careers.125 Even from the earliest moments on the opening day of the trial, speech in the courtroom became a central matter of tension, beginning when Meinhof tried to issue a complaint about the assignment of compulsory defence lawyers appointed by the court. The state’s assignment of defence lawyers is curious since, with the exception of Baader, the defendants had sought out and obtained lawyers to represent them. The court’s gesture of appointing lawyers predicted that the chosen lawyers would not be able to carry out their roles to the trial’s completion. Meinhof’s attempt to speak her concerns was halted temporarily because the tape recorder had not been started properly. The matter of the interruption escalated to shouting and arguing in the courtroom. At one point, Judge Prinzing tried to prohibit further speech from Baader. When the raf members expressed suspicions that the microphones were actually set up with a double

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function – not only to project their voices throughout the courtroom during testimony but to capture speech between the defendants and their lawyers for the purpose of surveillance – the judge replied, “I am afraid your meaning is too obscure for me. I don’t know what you are trying to say.”126 On the third day of the trial, the defendants’ microphones kept being shut off because they repeatedly spoke out of turn, refused to remain seated, and demanded to be allowed to leave the courtroom. At times, even the spectators in the court participated in the chaotic symphony of voices. Additionally, the two camps of defence lawyers – the chosen and the appointed – were divisive and frequently engaged in disruptive disagreements with each other. For the raf, the main point was to keep the appointed defenders – whom Baader referred to as puppets in a show trial – from speaking at all because, as Ensslin said to one of them, “You’re not speaking for me!”127 The accused lost their petition to have the court-appointed lawyers removed. Despite this, the raf members made it clear to the court that whenever one of the compulsory defence lawyers spoke, the defendants would leave the courtroom to demonstrate their refusal to recognize the lawyers as their representatives. Early on in the proceedings, and before the charges had been formally read out in court, the raf members had tried to be deemed unfit to stand trial after being kept imprisoned and awaiting trial in isolation from the rest of the prison population for three years. The defendants demanded examinations by an independent doctor. This demand was deferred for quite some time. When doctors were finally brought in to examine the prisoners, they determined that the defendants suffered from severely deteriorated health and that, therefore, they were unfit to stand trial. The court responded to the medical reports by arranging for the defendants’ eventual exclusion from the proceedings.128 The matter of having the Stammheim process recognized as a political trial, rather than a criminal one, also met with frequent and explicit refusals from court officials. Prepared statements that outlined the justification for the trial as political in character were dismissed on the stated grounds that the relevance of these statements

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to the trial was unclear. Although, in a statement made in August 1975, the raf asserted that “[g]iven that the prisoners do not have any recognized rights [in reference to amendments to Basic Law], our identity is objectively reduced to the trial itself.”129 The defendants’ multiple attempts to respond to the informal charges of terrorism involved the use of examples such as military actions in Vietnam. These attempts to elucidate what was, to the raf, a fundamental distinction between actions against the state and actions directed at citizens were met with annoyance and the eventual refusal to allow the defendants to speak on the matter any further. When the formal charges were finally read on the twenty-sixth day of the Stammheim trial, the defence lawyers chosen by the raf were absent from the courtroom in an act of protest. The defendants themselves were also absent when the official charges were read, since they had been formally removed from the court. Only the compulsory, appointed defence lawyers were present when the charges were finally read. At this time, a new paragraph had been added to the Code of Criminal Procedure that governed the trial. Amendments 231a and 231b allowed the trial to carry on without the presence of the accused.130 Also, over the course of the trial, the defence lawyers that were chosen by the raf were one by one dismissed from the court by the judges, under the provisions of amendments. The uses of paragraph 129a (regarding criminal or terrorist organization) and Lex Baader-Meinhof, which allowed the removal of lawyers assumed to be in violation of section 129,131 fulfilled the prediction that a court-appointed team would be necessary. Even in this predicament, the raf members still would not accept counsel from the compulsory defenders. In fact, the accused were only sporadically in the courtroom during the proceedings. When they were present and tried to speak, they were repeatedly told that they were out of order. Throughout the duration of their trial, the raf members conducted themselves and organized their expression often in an explicit refusal to defend themselves. While they made use of speech in the courtroom, their approach implicitly acknowledged the extent to which words are assumed to be anchored through relations of power in the context of a trial setting. The raf acknowledged the theatrical aspect of the enactment of power: “We consider what is going on

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here to be a masterpiece of reactionary art. Here, in this ‘palace of freedom’ (as Prinzing calls these state security urinals), state security is pitifully subsumed within a mass of alienated activities. Or in other words, it’s as if the same piece is being played out on three superimposed levels of the same Renaissance stage – the military level, the judicial level, and the political level.”132 By using ridicule and refunctioning the meanings or conventions of words, the raf was able to disrupt the norms of verbal exchange, thereby destabilizing, even threatening, some of the practices of the court. As the trial unfolded, contestation over the meanings of words became routine to the point that progression of the proceedings was a near impossibility. The members of the raf relentlessly challenged the usage of words by exposing the situatedness of these words within established power relations. For instance, the defendants were intent upon refunctioning the definition of terrorism being used by the court, which underlined the killing of as many people as possible and fostering a numb state of mind in the population. Baader stated in the courtroom that, by this definition, the policies of Israel towards the Palestinian liberation movement, the United States towards Vietnam during the war, and the federal prosecutor’s office in the brd were all examples of terrorism. Meinhof asserted, “Terrorism is the destruction of utilities such as dykes, waterworks, hospitals, power stations. All the targets at which the American bomb attacks in North Vietnam were systematically aimed from 1965 onwards.”133 At this stage, a rational logic that aims to achieve instrumental and transparent communicative objectives remains apparent in the defence strategy, as the raf defendants were still situated within a broader community of exchange. The defendants spoke out at length in efforts to use the court as a public site from which to forward their analyses of global conditions and brd involvement in imperialist projects, but they refused conventional speech that was required for the operation of official proceedings. For instance, they refused to give their names, birthdates, nationality, and so forth.134 raf defendants were concerned with the potential for the dissemination of ideas but they were not mobilized to defend themselves. Rather than delivering a coherent program of persuasive rhetoric,135 the chaotic character of their communications suggests that their words and gestures

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were suspended between the compulsion to produce efficacious discourse and the compulsion towards an implosive destruction of culturally dominant discourse. By shifting the accent away from aims that can be discerned in testimonial rhetoric and towards the disruption of conventions of communication, I do not intend to deny or to undercut the antiimperialist political mobilizations of the urban guerrilla movement. Indeed, the subversive methodologies of autonomous workers in Italy in the 1970s in a different way took notice of the incommensurability of communicative formations, with Antonio Negri’s acknowledgment that “there is no homology; no possible immediate translatability of languages, of logics, of signs, between the movement’s reality for me and the overall framework of capitalist development, with its contents and goals.”136 I seek here to foreground the problem of negative subjectivity that would be exigent to a guerrilla fighter – that is, to struggle against the entrapments of a bourgeois identity and consciousness. Baader addresses this fundamental problem when he distinguishes the revolutionary position and bourgeois anti-fascism, which he insists stands in an unacknowledged complicity with the state through reformist aims. He asserts, “So bourgeois anti-fascism puts itself at the service of the state in the hope of changing it, and is itself changed by the state, becoming an instrument of the state, serving to prevent radicalization, before it is finally liquidated for being an expression of bourgeois ideology, bourgeois humanism, of traditional bourgeois liberties.”137 Even more significant than the motivated disruption of social syntaxes, however, is the consideration that the guerrillas were emplaced in a radically different social reality at the time of the trial. Each time that the trial convened, the defendants were imported into the courtroom from the altogether different social order of their incarceration as terrorists, an order held together by different relations and differently ordered bodies. I will address this further in the next chapter to make these emplacements more vivid. At this point, I want to underline that verbal interventions in the courtroom cannot be understood primarily in terms of political motivations that reference an outside world of increasing abstraction for the incarcerated guerrillas, not because of their absence from the out-

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side world but because carceral emplacement entails different bodily, social, and spatial relations. The verbal interventions mobilized a degree of resistance to socialization and what the prisoners understood to be the state’s programmatic attempts to “re-educate” them through social isolation in the prison system. As Baader had observed: “One regresses and flounders about aimlessly amidst the ubiquitous mystifications of bourgeois socialization, because one is alone.”138 But, as will be addressed later, detention reordered the prisoners’ bodies and modes of communication. Hence, I argue that verbal interventions in the courtroom cannot be fully accounted for in concrete instrumental terms, nor simply defined as persuasive rhetoric intended to master public opinion. These verbal interventions ought to be considered tasks in a program of work on the self that is motivated but not fully intentional. In this case, such work on the self may involve irrational interventions deployed as part of a refusal to use language as an instrumental defence of oneself, especially as the prisoners became more isolated from the communities of understanding within which they had been embedded. As Meinhof observed, “I am in no position to defend myself, and naturally I can’t be defended either.”139 Meinhof argued that the state’s control over the prisoners’ available contexts for speech amounted to torture: “in a situation when you are in isolation, there are just two alternatives … [interruption]. Either you silence a prisoner … [interruption]. By which I mean he dies, or you get him to talk. And that means confession and betrayal. That’s torture.”140 The courtroom is the site of a pact, an agreement to tell the truth. Its authority rests upon the precarious structuring of the dramatic gestures taken up by a speaking community produced in the convergence of individuals in that particular public space to take part in the legitimization of the setting and its relationship to the truth of what is said. To take seriously the complex interrelationships between individuals, objects, and spaces that produce the possibilities and limitations of what can be meaningfully said and done in specific subjective spatial configurations is to also take seriously the implications of the concept of emplacement, which highlights the inextricable entanglements of mind, body, and space, while emphasizing the production of its inhabiting subjects as relational and porous rather than individual.

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Yet, the West German state’s design and construction of a multipurpose room in the Stammheim prison to serve as a courtroom specifically for the high-tech security requirements of this trial was an exercise of faith in a particular understanding of language, human subjects, and a specific perspective of social reality that relied upon the assumption of these entities as stable and discrete – granting to each a pre-existing static identity that needed only to be expressed with accuracy. A point of departure for my argument assumes that truth, the nature of a human subject, and the contours of social reality are collectively produced in emplacements and must be re-produced continuously in recognizable ways to inhere. Mechanisms as mundane as speech and as spectacular as trial proceedings serve to anchor them. The legitimacy of the court of law in part rests upon the assumption that the statements given are either true or false – that these statements are constatives that merely report a state of affairs – and the objective is to establish the status of these statements in relation to a whole event.

Irrational Performativity

Meinhof’s observation about the relationship between speech and torture, “Either you silence a prisoner … [interruption]. By which I mean he dies, or you get him to talk. And that means confession and betrayal. That’s torture,”141 references social, as well as physical, injury. There resides here a restlessly urgent ambivalence in the contradiction felt in speech that is at once physically, socially, and existentially dangerous to the speaker and yet simultaneously crucial to the speaker’s very social survival. For the raf prisoners, concern around the matter of speech was only partially directed at the way in which speech was used to constitute them, for instance, as members of a violent gang or as terrorists – indeed, they actively contested those designations. Yet their concerns were also crucially centred upon the risks to the speaker. They frequently articulated the fear that speech made a person more susceptible to being broken down by the authorities. What was at

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stake in being broken down had little to do with being found guilty. The prisoners all acknowledged from the outset that they would be convicted in what they considered to be a pre-scripted trial, so that the success or failure of their insistence on chosen defence lawyers would have no impact on the trial’s outcome. If the speech and gestural mechanisms appropriate to an emplacement – in this case that of a trial setting – are refused, the subject who refuses becomes unruly, incomprehensible, and must be excluded. Indeed, the amendments to the procedural code that governed the trial eventually enabled the court to exclude the raf defendants and their chosen lawyers from the proceedings. An instrumental motivation – the calculation of means and ends – as expressed in raf communications cannot be taken as primary in the interpretation of the meanings behind their actions. The consideration of West German urban guerrilla cells within the cultural context of the situationist ethos, the concern to negate bourgeois subjectivity, and the problem of emplaced performativity presented in this chapter all run against the tendency to privilege the written remnants of the guerrilla movement within liberal rational interpretations of its actions. In an insightful study of Meinhof’s writing, Passmore presents a different argument from mine, although we share many of the same concerns. Passmore makes a compelling argument, in particular, when he elaborates one of his opening claims that “[f]ar from choosing between words and deeds, Meinhof’s underground activities reveal an understanding that actions can say something and that writing can do something.”142 While fully accepting the latter claim that writing can do something, the argument that I am putting forth is cautious about the implicit privileging of writing over action and the assumption of a settled identity143 that works towards accurate expression in a language that escapes taming. While I acknowledge the limits of language to which Passmore brings attention, I consider language to be a pre-existing, although shifting, substance that shapes unruly and incoherent beings whose bodies are more porous and drifting than linguistic discipline acknowledges. Passmore considers a pre-existing and relatively stable subject, Meinhof, who attempts to tame language. The divergence between my position and Passmore’s

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is derived from two major differences between the contours of our respective endeavours. First, Passmore’s study is focused primarily upon Meinhof’s writing within the scope of terrorism as a meaningful object to be understood in primarily rational terms,144 while mine seeks to write through a number of West German guerrilla enactments, artistic formations, and memorialization processes (the latter of which will be addressed in subsequent chapters) to approach linguistic and extralinguistic sensorial aspects of communication as inherent to the unmaking, rather than the representation, of subjectivity. I am deliberately undercutting the compulsion towards the grasp of meaning and understanding to foreground an enduring struggle to negate a prescribed existence rather than to express or reflect an already substantive existence. Second, while Passmore does frame his analysis of Meinhof as performing terror, initially setting up his argument with reference to Butler’s theory of performativity, he does not assume the ontological points of departure necessary to fulfill a performative analysis consistent with Butler. In other words, Passmore’s conception of the human subject remains planted within the parameters of liberal humanism that support a subject whose life project is marginally shaped by lived and concrete experience. Such assumptions are inconsistent with a radical poststructuralist performativity, which assumes that the subject’s identity is derived not from within but relationally from without, and that the subject has no substance apart from the reiteration or disruption of culturally and historically recognizable performances. The assumption of a pre-existing subject who is engaged in a struggle to find her voice, as Passmore describes Meinhof, is supported by a liberal humanist conception of the subject that is more consistent with a phenomenological theory of performativity, and it leads to different conclusions. I do not wish to privilege one theoretical stream over another, as each approach grants different possibilities for consideration. Passmore’s argument challenges Colvin’s study of Meinhof’s writing that sets out to trace how her writing developed from the journalistic form into the conduit for the voice of a terrorist organization. Colvin presents this as a troubled and painful development and casts

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Meinhof’s use of language as a search for meaning145 and as key to understanding the raf.146 Colvin’s analysis of Meinhof’s writings is most provocative when it emphasizes adoptions and rejections of language conventions, the latter of which realize a transformative mode of language147 and an ideal language dispensing with individual identity.148 These observations about the departures from writing conventions, although not central to Colvin’s underlined point that Meinhof’s writing is fallacious throughout its development,149 lend support to my contention that the guerrilla communications were destructive to assumptions of self. While acknowledging the force and richness of these arguments, I observe that they firmly place the raf and West German urban guerrilla operations (including speech and writing) within socially recognizable patterns of instrumentality. Colvin insists that Meinhof’s writings are gifted with rhetorical power, but they consistently draw invalid conclusions. Although she finds that the writings fail to abide by the rules of logic, they remain rational because they are mobilized to persuade their readers. Passmore’s argument grants even more instrumentalization to Meinhof’s writing by attributing meaning to the performances of the raf. In contrast to these arguments, I assume that the performances of the raf were not conventionally rational, despite their interventions into global imperialism and despite all sorts of convolutions in their texts, speeches, gestures, and actions from which means-ends calculations with respect to the presence of a third-party addressee can be identified or presumed. Indeed, from a commonsense perspective, their performances were irrational. My use of the word ‘irrational’ is not meant to be a pejorative one, despite its resonance as such. Instrumental rationality is hegemonic discourse from which I have aimed to show sections of the West German countercultural movement worked to free themselves both politically and artistically. This rationality is embedded within the recognizable language of the law, the language of the bourgeois state, and is a communicative logic from which West German guerrillas sought escape. As the raf noted, “The revolutionary organization is not a legal entity, and its aims – we say, its goals and objectives – cannot be understood in dead categories like those found in the penal code, which represents the bourgeoisie’s ahistorical view of

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itself.”150 The categories – and, indeed, a guerrilla language – did not yet exist and could only come into existence in the isolation of the prisoners, who increasingly perceived themselves as constitutive parts of a collective body. Thus, when the defendants were called upon to account for themselves singularly in the courtroom, they each engaged in a sort of choreography of refusal, using their bodies in what may be described as a body (anti)language consistent with their hunger strike campaigns. They used gestures, threats, and physical-spatial stunts that employed all available space. Since they were restricted to only a small and specific space within the courtroom, they used not only horizontal but vertical movements. When ordered to stand, they refused to stand. Similarly, they refused to sit when asked to be seated.151 Further, they climbed over and around structural barriers and, at other times, refused to walk so that they would need to be moved forcibly. In at least one instance during her 1974 trial for her part in helping Baader escape from prison, Meinhof simply stood and repeatedly slammed her chair down on the floor, not saying any words at all.152 When they used speech as their medium for communication, it was in an explicit refusal to take up the speech conventions required by the court.153 Their approach oscillated between shouting out words such as “swine” in response to the demand to account for one’s self and refusing to speak at all. Baader warned the court, “Oh, all right, carry on with your ridiculous procedure. I shall create a disturbance as long as I’m in here.”154 At the same time, within the prison structure, there was much concern about the state of Baader’s messy – quite filthy – prison cell.155 Baader’s cell was littered with refuse and rot: strewn with bits of paper, ashes, cigarette butts, and decaying food. The cell’s contents had attracted flies and created a terrain of obstruction. This multisensory tableau perhaps constituted another performance of body (anti)language. On a practical level, it placed the prison staff and authorities in a double-bind, especially when a governmentordered Commission of Inquiry was initiated to investigate prison conditions at Stammheim. On the one hand, prison officials thought that having the staff clean the cell would be a futile project, given that Baader appeared to be intentionally creating and maintaining

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disorder in his cell. On the other hand, using the removal of privileges to encourage Baader to clean up his own cell would be in violation of medical orders that sought to intervene into the negative impacts of long-term isolation. Yet, the practical interventions staged by the multisensorial tableau within the cell for prison authorities do not fully explain the willingness to emplace oneself within a terrain that concretely abused the sensorial instruction of subjects towards a reaction of disgust in response to the scent of rotten food. Perhaps, as I speculate, the terrain of refuse and rot produced an emplacement that allowed for the emergence of a negative subjectivity – one whose comportment was shaped with different aesthetic norms. Nevertheless, the courtroom and the prison block called for different enactments of guerrilla fighter subjectivity than those delineated by the guerrilla manuals, which emphasized the guerrilla fighter’s emplacement within urban spaces. One of the prescriptions for the urban guerrilla fighter that Carlos Marighella had highlighted in his minimanual for urban guerrillas was the production of a permanent state of alarm in anticipation of attacks or in search of tracks that lead to nothing.156 This was one of the few guerrilla postures that the raf prisoners could still enact within these juridical and disciplinary spaces through their verbal and non-verbal interventions. More than forms of expression of a previously existing static subject, these interventions can be seen as necessary performances of subjectivity in perpetual ambivalent (mis)alignment within and against the spaces in which they were emplaced, whether in the prison or in the courtroom. In the following chapter, these concrete interventions will be considered in aesthetic rather than rational terms. The discussion will elaborate upon the ambivalent potentials that emerge in spaces of containment, such as the prison cell, for the realization of a negative subjectivity and its communication through aesthetic convolutions, different modes of communication, and arms of flesh rather than guns. These modes are: illegible within the parameters of ordinary discourse; intersensorial; and extra-linguistic, rather than directly instrumental and primarily linguistic.

Chapter 2

Aesthetic Convolutions

raf member Holger Meins, a former film student and a visual artist, died in Wittlich Prison on 9 November 1974 during the raf prisoners’ third hunger strike. Prior to his death, Meins had been kept in isolation in his cell on security measure orders. The security directives were extensive, ordering: that he be completely searched and his clothing changed after each visit, which would be supervised by two guards; that he be handcuffed and accompanied by armed guards when he was outdoors for his exercise; that he be excluded from all prison community activities, including the church services; and that he be given a full body search daily.1 In very ill health after the fourth week of the collective hunger strike, Meins was fed artificially. Several guerrillas imprisoned in Stammheim and in other facilities engaged in hunger strikes and were also force-fed by prison doctors. Meins authored a three-page report on the practices of force-feeding, demonstrating it to be a very violent intervention. It describes the use of physical restraints as well as the use of a crowbar to pry open the prisoner’s lips and then teeth before locking the jaw open so that the tubes could be inserted down the prisoner’s throat.2 In the following discussion, I seek to emphasize the sensorial predicament of the incarcerated guerrilla as primarily negative, rather than to identify and evaluate a rational strategy of guerrilla actions ostensibly oriented to make reformist changes on the outside. The members of the first generation of the raf, and other guerrillas roughly associated with it, spent the majority of their cell’s existence incarcerated and as defendants in court. Trial proceedings assume instrumentally rational subjects and implicitly demand that those subjects account for themselves accordingly by defining themselves and their aims,3 but not only had the guerrillas sought to destroy the conventions that govern this assumed rational subjectivity, their

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incarceration furthered this destruction. The hunger strikes, selfemaciation, and immersion of self in refuse and rot – particularly against backdrops of contact bans, isolation, surveillance, sensory deprivations, and disordering – ushered into being an unusual multinodal subject tied to its incarcerated emplacement and entrenched in negativity. As countercultural movements became militarized in the brd, the hunger strike was a relatively widely performed mode of communication; members of the spk and 2jm, among others, used this tactic. The raf hunger strikes have been understood to play a part in, on the one hand, the retooling and repackaging of its rhetoric and the bolstering of its instrumental communications program, and, on the other hand, the extension of the external life of the raf,4 while enforcing its internal hierarchy and disciplinary mechanisms.5 Indeed, there is textual evidence from the raf to situate the hunger strikes as effective means to meet goals. Among such ends, the hunger strikers explicitly demanded that the conditions of detention be improved, and later that they be recognized as political prisoners according to the Geneva Convention. The prisoners’ support networks on the outside opposed the latter demand, as it undermined the equality of all prisoners by awarding special privileges.6 While the raf’s explicit aims were envisioned in an internationalist context in solidarity with guerrilla actions organized in the periphery and in concert with both actual and imagined dialogue with such groups, raf members made several attempts to gain recognition through official means both within and outside of the brd, especially once the first-generation guerrillas were caught and imprisoned. In this chapter, I emphasize the emplacements of prolonged detention and the aesthetics of guerrilla incarceration, which trouble the ostensible obviousness of hunger strikes and guerrilla prison writing as primarily goal-oriented in conventional liberal rational terms. I reiterate that my use of the concept of aesthetics, as outlined at the outset, implicates the sensoriality of everyday life and is not confined to matters of taste, style, and reflected appearance. When the emplacements of guerrilla incarceration are considered, the hunger strikes appear to be more than a component part of motivated political strategy. I argue that the hunger strikes were a necessary posture

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of refusal in the struggle against conventional subjectivity for the emergent body of the incarcerated guerrilla that cannot be described adequately without reference to sensorial reordering, intermittent isolation, hunger, info networks, and a feeding apparatus.

Guerrilla Ambivalence towards Sympathizers

Incarcerated guerrillas recognized that the survival of the cell, and not necessarily all of the bodies that composed it, depended upon the solidarity of others on the outside. State officials were also very aware of the crucial role of sympathizers in the viability of the guerrilla. In 1972, the Interior Minister asserted, “The sympathizers are the water in which the guerrilla swims: we must prevent them from finding that water.”7 To that end, the state enacted the Berufsverbot of 1972, which operated as a professional ban of leftists from public-sector employment,8 and organized Aktion Winterreise (Operation Winter Trip), a series of nationwide checkpoints in addition to raids on homes, bookstores, publishing offices, and law firms.9 The raf’s dependence upon the support or sympathy of others and their attempts to secure that support do not, however, consign their operations primarily to the sphere of instrumental rationality. They received direct or indirect assistance from a wide range of sources over time. These included: legal activist groups, other guerrilla cells, the external operations breakaway cell of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (pflp – involved with the opec action of 1975 in which participating oil ministers were kidnapped from a meeting in Vienna), the government of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (ddr), and even more casual participants, who offered temporary shelter to guerrillas between actions, and passive, anonymous sympathizers, who at times placed pressure on government authorities through vocal dissent and public disapproval. An early survey conducted by the Allensbacher Institute of Public Opinion in 1971 (in advance of the series of violent attacks that made up the 1972 Offensive) attempted to measure public sympathy for the raf. It reported that a quarter of respondents under the age of thirty expressed sympathy for the raf and that ten percent of

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North Germans and five percent of all Germans would be willing to provide shelter for a night to a member of the group.10 Indeed, raf actions, at all times, were heavily dependent upon both passive and active assistance from non-members. Over time, the connection between countercultural organizations and the raf grew ambivalent. The 1972 May Offensive bombings sparked both fear and secret pleasure within the countercultural milieu, but the group received limited respect and support.11 Yet, attempts from within prison to solidify and to maintain this support grew unstable at best, and at times incarcerated guerrillas met gestures of support with hostility or even rejection that illustrate a striking departure from the strategic call to build up the Red Army expressed in the early raf communiqués. Incarcerated guerrillas presented strong and sometimes undercutting challenges to their strategic allies. At times the prisoners seemed willing to risk entirely alienating sympathizers and networks of support over tactical disagreements and what, to outsiders, might have appeared to be relatively minor political differences. From within West German countercultural circles, however, the political differences were stark and meaningful. For instance, the squatters and the anarchist Spontis rejected vanguard fantasies of leading the so-called masses out of alienation. Instead, they worked to make immediate interventions at the level of everyday life practices: living arrangements, work and gender relations, and sexuality. Sponti (spontaneous) anarchism called for first-person politics (rather than a politics that speaks on behalf of others) and an avoidance of either organization or the espousal of a defined political program.12 One raf member assessed the Sponti first-person politics as a narrowminded and apolitical orientation.13 The state did not acknowledge the wide range of countercultural approaches and perspectives in the development of its counter-insurgent strategies mobilized to close in on above-ground support of guerrillas, even when that support came in the form of legally administered advocacy. raf prisoners and other militarized groups also at times refused to recognize respectfully the differences in political orientation amongst countercultural formations. Many sympathizers – from legal organizations, such as Committees Against Torture and Rote Hilfe (rh – Red Aid); to intellectuals and authors, such as Jean-Paul

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Sartre14 and Heinrich Böll;15 to guerrillas still on the street – became the objects of imprisoned raf members’ harsh scrutiny and demands. In an open letter addressed to raf prisoners written in December 1976, a faction of the Revolutionäre Zellen (rz – Revolutionary Cells) attempted to engage the prisoners about this but prefaced its remarks by anticipating that “we might receive an unreasonably hostile response from you. Something suggesting that we are at least objectively acting as cops, or that our letter is a state security initiative.”16 While the authenticity of the letter’s authorship is unclear, the prisoners assessed the letter in the very terms that it predicted. While it is conceivable that the letter was a counter-insurgency instrument aiming to weaken solidarity or to gain insight by provoking the prisoners to clarify their strategies, the letter’s subversive character equally lends support for its stated authorship. In the letter, the rz guerrillas state that it has been nearly impossible to coordinate a common strategy with the raf due to a lack of both direct communication and clear statements on the group’s positions and aims. Its authors assert that they believed that the raf’s stance had changed since the actions and declarations of 1972. The authors also take the raf prisoners to task for being too quick to judge the supporting groups on the outside as either comrades or pigs (the latter was the raf’s abusive designation for those perceived to be acting in accordance with bourgeois sensibilities). The letter expresses dismay at the raf prisoners’ characterization of the above-ground support as weak, noting that the death of Holger Meins was avenged by the 2jm’s assassination of Günter von Drenkmann, the President of the Berlin Supreme Court. It references other actions, such as Rote Zora’s (Red Zora – a women’s guerrilla cell) bombing of the Karlsruhe constitutional court after an anti-choice abortion ruling. But the rz letter also brought attention to a number of practical, non-violent actions, such as the rz’s and Red Zora’s forging and distribution of public transit passes and food vouchers for the homeless, and pointed to the general support given to the prisoners’ hunger strikes. The letter asked if these actions were really nothing but the signs of the entire left being on the defensive. If the letter’s stated authorship is authentic, then it demonstrates that, even within the guerrilla support network itself, clear aims were not evident to key participants.

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Further, it undermines interpretations of prisoners’ actions as primarily rhetorical and instrumental for gaining and maintaining support on the outside. The relationship between the raf prisoners and the activist group rh furnishes another example of the lack of instrumentality demonstrated by raf prisoners with respect to above-ground sympathizers. Members of rh were engaged in conventional forms of political agitation to achieve greater public support and better conditions of detention for imprisoned guerrillas. The group operated several campaigns and distributed literature that was concerned with trial preparations and the conditions of detention for raf and other leftist prisoners. raf prisoners had at times a hostile reaction to the approach taken by rh. Baader wrote to the other raf prisoners about one of the Berlin rh documents. In rather harsh words he characterized their work as merely blathering away and compared their position on the question of violence to that of “the pigs.”17 In these cases, and in the context of the correspondence that circulated amongst raf members though their informal communications system, in which they specified and debated particular aspects of the content of information campaigns and written statements to be distributed for mass media publication, it is possible to find a wildly inconsistent attitude towards both political recognition and recognizable goals. For this reason, perhaps, the rz open letter had asked pointed questions about the raf orientation and strategy, stating that “we’re asking you these things, because we are no longer clear about your politics.”18 If the guerrillas at one time mobilized their tactics as part of an ongoing project to provoke the state to undermine it both domestically and abroad, the ambivalent relationship that raf prisoners fostered with sympathizers and support networks destabilizes interpretations of hunger strikes as primarily instrumental means towards stable goals, especially when the conditions in which they were situated are considered. Can we assume that guerrilla identities remained stable throughout the passage underground, arrest, incarceration, hunger strike, and so on? Days before his death, Meins wrote a letter to Manfred Grashof, a raf prisoner who had just given up the hunger strike. In his letter, Meins tries to persuade Grashof into again taking up the hunger

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strike, but his script is written in an impersonal, monological tone. In its lack of dialogical anticipation, as well as in its abrupt and cool address to Grashof (“you stupid idiot”19), the note is characteristic of internal guerrilla communications. Unlike the officially circulated statements with respect to the strike, which were produced for a public audience and tended to emphasize its role in gaining concessions from the state and as a direct political strategy,20 Meins’s letter seems to have a different function. While the letter is situated in terms of guerrilla identity – as Meins describes “[a] revolutionary in the struggle” who loves life21 – it reflects upon neither an individual identity, nor simply a collective one. Rather, this monological, internal communication circulates a message through a collective guerrilla body, in what approximated a strange corporeal form that became more real than rhetorical over the duration of incarceration. If the letter’s provocations about feedings in prison at 400 calories per day are taken as urgent and incendiary mobilizing devices that catalyzed the underground arms of the guerrilla body that remained on the outside, I interpret them as negative, not reformist, provocations. They incite guerrilla action and not the kind of legal advocacy that rh, Amnesty International, and other organizations promoted on the prisoners’ behalf. When Meins insisted, “there are no guilty in the guerrilla and no penalties in the collective, only decisions and consequences. I say just continue. The only thing that pays is the fight,”22 he forwarded a negative message oriented towards the guerrilla struggle in itself rather than a vision for an alternative future politics on the ground.

Carceral Emplacements

Interpretations of the prisoners’ acts as primarily instrumental interventions into the political field overlook the ways in which the individual bodies and consciousness of the prisoners had already been reconfigured by the conditions of their detention. Meinhof, for instance, was incarcerated in what the raf called the “dead wing” of Cologne Ossendorf Prison in 1972 to 1973. They called it the dead wing because, there, she was kept in physical and acoustic isolation

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in a white cell with fluorescent lighting on for twenty-four hours a day.23 As a writer, Meinhof attempted to put the sensations that she experienced onto paper. Her prose is fragmented and jarring; it is written without first-person constructions: impossible to recall the meaning of words, except very vaguely. the use of loud hissing sounds – s, ß, tz, z, seh – is absolutely unbearable. the warders, the visits, the courtyard, the celluloid reality. sick in the head. flashes. no longer mastering the construction of sentences, grammar, syntax. if you write – at the end of two lines, impossible to recall the start of the first.24 In addition to the disruptions of thought, sensation, and temporality that these fragments describe, Meinhof lists sharp sensations of pain and a physical awareness of her brain and spinal cord. She suggests that the brain is being pressed by the spinal cord, that the brain is shriveling, that the head explodes, and observes the feeling that the skin is being scalded by boiling water. Notably, these sensations are described with detachment, often using gerund formations in subject-less sentences. When a subject is proffered, it is “one,” not “I.” Meinhof does not say “I” feel as though “my” skin is being scalded; rather, the skin is described as though it is independent from her. In this context, her writing under these extreme conditions is without the self-reflexivity assumed of an intact subject. A hunger strike mobilized explicitly in response to prison conditions led to a short reprieve for Meinhof from these conditions, but she was subsequently placed back into the wing. During this second period, Meinhof wrote: “A process of inner disintegration occurs – like something being dissolved in acid, which one attempts to slow down by concentrating on resistance, but nothing can stop it.”25 Astrid Proll had also been imprisoned in this cell earlier. Of this, she later noted, “The shocking experience was that I could not hear any noises apart from the ones that I generated myself. Nothing. Absolute

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silence. I went through states of excitement, I was haunted by visual and acoustic hallucinations. There were extreme disturbances of concentration and attacks of weakness. I had no idea how long this would go on for. I was terrified that I would go mad.”26 By the fall of 1975, an initial set of health-related examination reports found the raf prisoners Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, and Raspe to be suffering from both physical and mental exhaustion. In addition to being approximately seventy percent of their respective expected weights, they all had low blood pressure. The reports also noted several symptoms that are of social significance and relevant to their participation and preparation for trial proceedings: “They present the following symptoms in varying degrees: problems of concentration, marked fatigue, difficulties of expression or articulation, reduced physical and mental performance, instability, diminished spontaneity and ability to make contacts, depression.”27 By April 1977, the reports concluded that, while the prisoners Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe (Meinhof had been dead since May 1976) were fit to be incarcerated, they had deteriorated much more significantly since the initial medical reports of 1975. Ensslin had deteriorated the most. Changes in her condition were described as “loss of weight, very low blood pressure, premature aging, severer [sic] difficulties of expression and lack of concentration, motor disturbances.”28 Changes relative to previous findings with regard to the state of health for Baader and Raspe included “decrease in activity and spontaneity, emotional regression, problems of articulation, hesitancy of speech.”29 Examiners tended to avoid attributing these outcomes specifically to either hunger strikes or sensory deprivation, but rather to a combination of these and other factors. Examiners seemed to be cautious about using the term ‘sensory deprivation,’ despite the use of acoustic and social isolation for extended periods of time. Nevertheless, it can be posited that there was a notable sensorial rearrangement that occurred in the convergence of general conditions of detention, hunger strikes, and force feedings. In this respect, prison authorities and the guerrilla prisoners themselves, as well as arrangements of space, lighting, sound, and other aspects of prison architecture, all contributed in various ways to the reordering of bodily sensorial capacities.

2.1 Camera Silens (1994), by Rob Moonen and Olaf Arndt

Lawyers and groups observing the conditions of detention for the incarcerated guerrillas drew a link between the social isolation and sensorial disruption of guerrillas in prison to the research implications of studies conducted by Jan Gross at Hamburg-Eppendorf University Hospital into the effects of sensory deprivation on persuasion. Artists Rob Moonen and Olaf Arndt’s installation Camera Silens (1994) is a reconstruction of a sealed acoustic isolation chamber like the one Gross used for the study of social and sensory deprivation. Thus, Camera Silens brings attention to the willfully obscured and littleknown history of experimental research in sensory deprivation that flourished from the 1950s to the 1970s, often under covert funding programs of the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (cia) as well as various state defence departments. Gross’s research stands within a broader counter-insurgency project across the Atlantic. Sensory deprivation research was of considerable interest to security and

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intelligence organizations, particularly during the Cold War, for its potential to manipulate subjects’ attitudes and to produce pliable subjects for interrogation. Historian Alfred McCoy has traced this “Faustian” behavioural science from the medical studies conducted at the Dachau death camps, to mind-control Cold War experiments for which many American and Canadian cognitive psychologists were recruited through attractive grant opportunities, to the contemporary War on Terror. A significant figure in Cold War behavioural research under a grant from the Canadian Defence Research Board was Dr Donald Hebb, who conducted studies into sensory isolation. Hebb noted extreme effects in the research subjects in his laboratory: “the subjects, some of them, were seeing things in the experimental conditions, and feeling things. One felt that his head was disconnected from his body, another had two bodies.” Further, Hebb recalled: “It scared the hell out of us to see how completely dependent the mind is on a close connection with the ordinary sensory environment, and how disorganizing to be cut off from that support.”30 Schiller’s description of her time held in the dead wing at Lübeck is striking because it highlights either the displacement of her own body within her surroundings or a melding of her body into the built environment of her cell that finally accumulates into a flattened perception, as though she and her surroundings together constitute an undifferentiated mass. She characterizes it in the following way: “No sound, no answers, no laughing, no crying. Only me. In this emptiness, there are no contours anymore. Your feeling of your own body disappears, even the feeling of your own existence, and the walls, the iron bedstead, the few objects and your own movements melt into an indefinable sameness.”31 This profound reordering of the prisoner’s perception of the body and its surroundings cannot be strictly attributed to any one of the particular conditions to which the guerrillas were detained, but it seems that the acoustic and social isolation would have been significant contributing factors in these transformations.32 Devorah Kalekin-Fishman’s observation that, in certain contexts, sounds (and silences) “disclose the inner workings of social arrangements”33 and “habituation to these sounds becomes second ‘nature,’ a reality impermeable to conscious decisions”34 suggests the power of patterns of acoustics as well as their accompanying silences.

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In the so-called dead wing, unbroken silence must have had sharpened impacts upon the habituation of those incarcerated within it. Beyond their potential to garner support from the outside, I suggest that prison writing, communiqués, and hunger strikes had far more significance to the guerrillas within the context of practices of negative subjectivity. Surely these transformations were not all accomplished through the guerrillas’ own actions, but rather exacerbated by the extreme conditions of detention described above. When the raf prisoners declared the body as a weapon and began the first of several group hunger strikes, the body to which they referred was not merely their individual bodies. Imprisoned guerrillas increasingly conceived of their bodies as porous and as constitutive of a collective body in struggle. Gerrit-Jan Berendse’s observations are illustrative here: “in contrast to their underground existence outside the prison walls, incarceration rendered the terrorists themselves the objects of terror. In spite of regarding this terror as issuing from the prison authorities and their old enemy the state, the terrorists had themselves invented a new species of terror. A new concept of collective suffering – of the victimized ‘corpus terrorismus’ – initiated by the collective and modeled in part on literary tropes, emerged from the experience of the group in prison.”35 While this collective suffering could be easily read as a tactic to forge radical solidarity, I stress the concrete significance of their being situated in a radically different environment, governed by different norms, relations, and sensations. In particular, for guerrillas exposed to the kinds of sensorial abridgements engineered in dead wings, the receding sense of the boundaries of one’s own body appears to have become concretely real and neither rhetoric nor fantasy. In practice, they understood that, for the survival of the collective body, what each body does, whether it eats or dies, was not an individual and private matter. What each body did had implications for the collective body of the guerrilla prisoners – but its physical survival was not necessarily what was at stake. To whatever extent a collective consciousness was possible, this was fostered through self and other criticism. It was imperative that the collective would reside in each of the prisoners’ heads.36 Beyond the reordering of the individual bodies of guerrilla prisoners, this reordering fostered an emergent collective guerrilla body

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and a multi-nodal subjectivity within the prison. Figuratively, the veins that circulated the living force within this multi-headed body that the prisoners strove to animate were the connections between the prisoners, the lawyers, above-ground raf and other guerrilla cells, and legal groups of supporters. The flows between these connections were made concrete by the time of the third hunger strike through the establishment of a covert communications system, das info. The blood that coursed through the system was a flow of words in letters, declarations, and self-criticisms. Colvin observes that the writing style in das info was unconventional and thus anti-authoritarian. Correspondences were often, though not always, addressed and signed using code names or initials. They made strict use of only lower-case letters, even in the marking of nouns, which are capitalized in German. The guerrillas shared in a practice of abbreviation and used contractions that were unconventional. Colvin notes that this has been referred to as a reductive style that shares consistencies with “the ultra-concise mode of the telegram; it is echoed in the way sentences in the letters are put together, often with missing words, so that they make sense largely by implication and the reader is left to fill the gaps.”37 Colvin asks why the raf fostered this style of writing. She makes the perceptive observation that “[t]he ellipses certainly reinforce the sense of the group – no one who was not thoroughly up-to-date on raf matters would be able to make sense of the gaps.”38 But she also suggests that the letters exchanged in the info took the condensed and coded form of a hurried, urgent, and secret note, despite the fact that they were typed, placed in envelopes, and sent legally: “They nonetheless imitate the style of hurried, secret notes. The fantasy that the writer has no time to consider grammatical rules (for fear of being caught in the forbidden act of writing) seems to support the raf correspondents’ self-identification; communications for the info imitate texts written by prisoners held in the kind of undemocratic, dictatorial system the raf imagined itself captive of.”39 A limitation to the strict interpretation of the writing style being symptomatic of a paranoid fantasy, however, is the often observed tendency of the prisoners who were subjected to isolation, sensorial reordering, and self-starvation to lose the train of their thoughts and

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to forget what they were trying to say. This is mentioned in Meinhof’s writing from the dead wing, in Sartre’s description of his meeting with Baader, and in Schiller’s description of her time in the courtroom: “At the very moment that I wanted to say something, my speech – the small structure of thoughts that I had put together in my head – disappeared beyond my grasp. I started a sentence and lost my thread half way through.”40 The changes in the thought patterns of the guerrillas must have had impacts on the structure of writing in das info, but its style also helped to construct boundaries and to manage access to communications. Further, the role of state security should not be made out to be benign or imaginary. There was an intense interest in the textual materials produced by the guerrillas. The interior ministry entertained engineers in attempts to deploy parabolic mirrors to make letters visible from up to two hundred metres away, and a decoding centre in the city of Bonn reportedly attempted to decipher raf letters.41 These communications undoubtedly had effects – from intervening into the shaping of concrete support from close above-ground cells to the working-out of group strategies. But the monstrous collective body that was being forged through their surroundings, practices, and circulated textual communications may have been far more real than rhetorical, especially as the rearrangement of their senses, noted earlier, reordered the perception of the borders of their bodies. Recall the unusual address of the Meins letter that is only ostensibly addressed to Grashof or any other, despite being written in recognition of impending death. Indeed, the internal communications within the prison are remarkably impersonal, demonstrating neither affection nor empathy. In fact, the letters were brutally cruel in tone and consisted of name-calling, especially when addressed to someone who had previously shown any sign of reaching out emotionally.42 The communications also lack the dialogical character that would be expected of strategic collaboration, and, as Karin Bauer has noted about the raf, the expressed “worldview became increasingly selfreferential and modeled after its experience in prison.”43 The abuses and the textual gaps found in the communications are consistent with the negativity that Carrie Smith-Prei observes in postwar New and Black Realisms that contain blanks in the texts, which

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disrupt identification with the text and provoke the reader to “[project] imaginary experience into the negation.”44 Further, with respect to negativity, the circulation of these internal writings appears as the empty conduit of didactic accounts of the theoretical writings of Marx, Gramsci, Mao, and so on, the latter of which belie the frequent assertion that the guerrillas rejected theory for action. They obsessively and incessantly quoted theoretical texts in their internal communiqués. Even when they chastised each other’s offerings, the rebuke was oddly monological. Smith-Prei has noted that the production of “multiple, slightly variegated, repeating reflections … destabilize[s] perception, reception of meaning, and representation. These repetitions form a negative affect-based aesthetics.”45 Hence, the contracted and repetitious scripts in these communiqués could be read through their negative form rather than through their content. This negative form is not separate or distinct from the emplacements in which the communiqués were produced. My point is neither to dismiss the rhetorical force of raf writings produced during this period nor to deny their political allegiances, but to consider the vital significance of the production of a collective body in an intractable struggle in the spatial-sensorial emplaced arrangements of their incarceration and in which a different kind of consciousness emerged. Das info was divided into levels of differential access.46 Inclusion in the circulatory system of das info was vital to guerrilla subjectivity and cannot be overestimated; hence, there was vehement discussion about the parameters of access. Only those who were perceived to be militant enough would secure their access;47 but demonstration of worthiness had to be repeatedly performed. Schiller notes that she was devastated when she was cut off from das info but she observes that within it “a harsh tone was the order of the day. Criticism was often used as a cudgel and self-criticism became self-flagellation. The language used was often unbearable, the relations between us were not comradely, but an expression of the brutality of the situation in which we found ourselves.”48 The social spaces in which a subject is produced and sustained are intertwined with the production of that subject. This is the imperative force of the concept of emplacement, which underlines the mutually constituting interrelationships between subjectivity and

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space. Drawing upon the concept of emplacement, the prison context demands a reconsideration of what underpins the subjectivity of the imprisoned guerrilla. If the urban guerrilla identity is hinged upon its struggle on urban terrain,49 then the guerrilla fighter incarcerated in various degrees of isolation must necessarily undergo a remaking of identity and posture. In turn, the incarcerated guerrilla may attempt to grasp small opportunities to reconstitute the social meanings of spaces, such as the prison cell, to ground itself in a new distribution of relations within the institutional environment. The discussion that follows will underline hunger-striking as a radical corporeal extension of the negative subject and consider aesthetic interventions in the prison.

S PK

– Utopathie and Multi-focal Expansionism

The dialectical discourse that had underpinned the spk’s call to realize a “Utopathie”50 by turning illness into a weapon had led them to insist that illness was both the condition and the effect of capitalism. This structure was realized in the production and animation of new subjectivities under conditions of isolation and hunger strikes in Stammheim-Stuttgart and other facilities, where detainees attempted to refunction the borders of their bodies and the spaces they were forced to inhabit. The prisoners’ bodies were transformed through periodic isolation and sensorial rearrangement. The hunger strikes exacerbated those transformations. Social isolation and starvation were both punctuated periodically by violent force-feeding sessions that would have heightened previously dulled sensations while introducing sharp new ones, including the insertion of feeding tubes and extended periods held in restraints to ensure digestion. The conditions through which guerrilla bodies and subjectivity were transformed in the prison cells and medical rooms were increasingly undifferentiated from the results of those conditions. The prisoners’ capacity to concentrate and to think in conventional linear terms was at times diminished by the conditions of detention, as most aptly described in Meinhof’s writing from the dead wing but also observed by Jean-Paul Sartre after his meeting with Baader in 1974. Sartre noted:

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Sounds, which we call silence – but which carry to us, for example, the sound of a passing tram, that of a passer-by on the street, warning sirens – are connected to human conduct; they mark human presence. This absence of communication with others through sound creates profound problems – circulatory problems of the body, and problems of consciousness. These latter destroy thought by rendering it increasingly difficult. Little by little, it provokes blackouts, then delirium, and, obviously, madness. So even if there is no torturer, there are people who squeeze certain levers on another level. This torture provokes deficits in the prisoner; it leads him to stupefaction or to death. Baader, who is a victim of this torture, speaks quite appropriately, but from time to time he stops, as if he has lost his train of thought. He takes his head in his hands in the middle of a sentence and then starts up again two minutes later.51 As these observations suggest, the accumulated conditions within which the guerrillas were emplaced subjectively and corporeally disrupted and displaced the prisoners. With respect to the emergence of a collective and multi-nodal subjectivity facilitated in part through das info, it is instructive to consider the program of the spk, which may give insight into this transformation. I qualify my use of the spk’s program by acknowledging that the guerrilla cells and countercultural groups pertinent to these events continue to defend the borders of their respective groups’ identities and practices. I also acknowledge the fraught relationship between core raf members and Huber that contributed to the mutual distancing of the two groups.52 Nevertheless, there were blurred boundaries between the groups. While the boundaries between their respective official programs remain clear, several guerrillas crossed over between the raf, 2jm, rz, and spk to collaborate in particular actions, and many became imprisoned together. I suggest, however, that some of the spk articulations appear to take shape in the subjective transformations that occurred amongst incarcerated guerrillas. Notably, the spk’s approach to the self-organization of

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agitation groups was informed by their analysis of the dialectics of centralism and decentralism, which they called multi-focal expansionism (mfe). mfe stems from a critique of democratic centralism, characterized by the polarization between the leader and the rank and file, and the passivity of the latter. Under the spk’s analysis, democratic centralism subsumes contradictions under the quantification of majority votes within an already determined structure of capitalist organization that defines in advance what needs must be met and thus masks its hierarchical structure of governance. Democratic centralism is contrasted with the mediation between the centralizing and decentralizing tendencies of mfe, in which the point of departure is the needs of each individual situated within a small, unified group. In other words, mfe is a horizontal process of collective organization and governance in which the participants themselves both define group needs and delineate group actions. However, within each individual, a profound consciousness of the political identity of the union must be fostered so that “each productivity, each initiative has to find promptly a whole of its organizational connection … Everybody can express herself and himself and everybody ought to do so, in order to get influence upon the common work and therefore nobody can evade from the consequences of the work, because those consequences have started from the needs of everybody.”53 Somewhat controversially, at least from the point of view of the respective groups, I suggest that, through hunger-striking and das info, the imprisoned guerrillas attempted to approximate the structure of mfe – even if this was neither explicitly stated nor consciously acknowledged. I suggest that in theory, das info approximated mfe, even though I acknowledge that the structure of it was more vertical and centralized in practice than mfe aspires to be, with Ensslin and Baader holding greater influence and control than other participants over the parameters of its circulated discourse. My intention is not to foreground spk practices in raf operations, although contributors to das info would have been familiar with the principle of mfe and practised it in other configurations. At minimum, the spk’s formulation of mfe attests to the existence of an ongoing dialogue concerned

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with making radical interventions into relations within collective structures and at the level of individual and collective identity. For the spk, the political identity of the union must be forged into each person’s consciousness; and for the raf, the guerrilla is the soul of the united front,54 and the collective resides within each head. The new Stammheim subject was thus unmoored from the coordinates that had previously anchored the socialized subject in place and instead found host in a grotesque assemblage in the making. This transformation was enabled by enactments of radical negation of the rational subject, whose motivations are delivered through conventional modes of communication that can be readily understood by others. In sharp contrast, the multi-nodal guerrilla subject speaks and performs in another language that does not yet quite exist; it is an (anti)language that is made as it is performed. There is no dictionary for a confounded audience to consult, but perhaps if there were one, it would not be of much help.

“Indeterminate Trajectories” as Refusals of Legibility

In his book The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 1, Michel de Certeau posits the notion of indeterminate trajectories to refer to meaningless circumventions of vocabularies that remain at least somewhat consistent with “prescribed syntaxes.”55 These describe the regimes of communication that privilege instrumental speech, as constituted in the formulaic and expected routes of the pact at work in a trial setting or in the mundane settings of everyday life, for none are exempt from those conventions and their implicit agreements. The regimes of communication enforce repeated achievements of particular extrinsic requisites from which we cannot extricate ourselves completely. Notably, the demand to make oneself understood is an intractable one, to the extent that subjects are compelled to produce potentially legible stories about themselves that achieve a logical link between their identities and their actions. These fictions are necessary at the level of subject identification; they are necessary to the subject’s positioning in a way that makes them recognizable to, and addressable by, others. The failings, the gaps, and the unavoidable illegibilities that

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persist, despite all best attempts at structure, are inherent to mundane self-narratives. When the subject is under social duress, these stories call for another communicative mode conducive to performing a successful response to the demand to make oneself understood. In this regard, the bid for understanding requires the subject’s complicity in a particular production of self, which involves entrance into, and emulation of, a frozen likeness or effigy.56 Within the confines of that production, the body, disciplined as it is, performs with agility. Nevertheless, the body and its movements remain to some extent sites of illegibility, even if the body is subject to far more cultural shaping than is routinely acknowledged. For instance, de Certeau asks: “Where and when is there ever anything bodily that is not written, remade, cultured, identified by the different tools which are part of a social symbolic code? Perhaps at the extreme limit of these tireless inscriptions, or perforating them with lapses, there remains only the cry: it escapes, it escapes them. From the first to the last cry, something else breaks out with them, the body’s difference, alternately in-fans and ill-bred, intolerable in the child, the possessed, the madman or the sick – a lack of ‘good manners.’”57 But this escape occurs at the extremes of an otherwise stubborn comportment that appears effortless rather than forced. Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process underscores the significance and power of discipline to shape our bodily performances into the daily performances that we have come to assume are natural. Elias shows this in his elaboration of how the notion of civility profoundly transformed human behaviour. In particular, Elias observes that, in his treatise on civility of 1530, Erasmus placed considerable emphasis on appearance, including facial expression, bodily comportment, and gesture. Among the imperatives laid out in the treatise was the proscription against standing on only one leg, a comportment that in contemporary times sounds preposterous and unworthy of explicit instruction. Elias remarks that there are “gestures and movements that have become strange to us” but were once commonplace and were “embodiments of a different mental and emotional structure.”58 Therefore, Erasmus’s proscription signals that even a practice that appears and feels so natural, such as standing on both feet, is a culturally and historically imposed comportment.

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If, as Elias and de Certeau insist, the body is formed by culture, it may have incremental opportunities to circumvent the limits imposed upon it. The forms that this circumvention can take exceed involuntary gestures, such as a cry, an uneven breath, or a facial expression – the way in which a flinch quickly crosses the face to reveal weakness in response to an affront. Circumventions may include unsanctioned uses of the very spaces that are implicated in the body’s formation. In any case, the public legibility of such circumventions is not guaranteed. The hunger strikes of the raf prisoners and their use of gesture and other physical-spatial tactics in the courtroom are aesthetically rich forms of communication. While the practice of hunger strikes is consistent with a long history of individual and collective protest culture, it could be argued that the hunger strikes that were carried out in the prisons that housed guerrillas disrupted ready regimes of interpretation for a number of reasons. First, the hunger strikes served as an activity through which the individual bodies of the group members could be coordinated and disciplined against the assumed borders of individuality, as though they together constituted one body. That is, the hunger strikes facilitated the constitution of the raf itself as a decentred and multi-nodal body against the atomized body of the individualized subject, whom liberal humanism assumes to be autonomous. Accompanying this heterogeneously constituted body were analogous shifts in consciousness and subjectivity. Second, the prisoners’ use of space, gesture, and movement, as well as the effects of their hunger strikes, subsequent force-feedings by prison authorities, and frequent confrontations with guards, constituted a major intervention into normative body formation in terms of posture, movement, extreme reshaping of the body through starvation, and the violence (e.g. routine force-feedings and associated prolonged periods in restraints) incurred by refusals to comply. Third, amongst the many items that had been smuggled into Stammheim over the course of their imprisonment was a small camera59 with which the raf prisoners covertly photographed their lives within the prison, thus perhaps inadvertently producing documentation of their emaciating bodies. The rolls of film were in turn smuggled back out of the prison. Federal investigators found some of the photographs taken at Stamm-

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heim in an illegal residence, but they also at one time found a camera with shots taken from within the prison on the film. It has been speculated that the camera served as a test run for the smuggling of other objects into the prison, such as food, literature, and weapons. While the significance or legibility of some of the photographs to the prisoners, and to the raf members still at large who collected them, is ambiguous, the self-photography establishes a body of visual and material documentation of corporeal signs with multiple, fractional, or absent referents. While it appears that the raf’s program of actions was partially produced and represented with an eye fixed on a global field of conditions, power relations, and processes as an echo of earlier aims, the totality of their enactments cannot be fully accommodated within a strategic program of action and objectives. Their actions often eschewed any indebtedness to the conventional norms, values, and communicative strategies that generally sustain the social pact. Rather than translating guerrilla actions into publicly legible objectives and leaving incongruently-sensical aspects out as remainders, it may be productive to consider that their actions, communicative tactics, and organizational formations destabilized perceived limits of the body – indeed, challenging its assumed borders – and approximated negative subjectivity within the spatial arrangements of incarceration. In this context, it will be illustrative to consider briefly a similar case that involved the reworking of the body and subjectivity in prison: that of the Blanketmen of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (pira) in 1976. Though I will draw observations about the incarceration of West German urban guerrillas into the discussion, the purpose of this consideration is not to carry out an outright comparison between West German guerrillas and the Blanket protest. The value of this excursus, which focuses primarily on interpretation and argumentation, is twofold. First, the ethnographic research that was carried out in the Blanketmen case provides insight into the profound situatedness of imprisonment for presumed terrorists, and enables deeper scrutiny of incarcerated emplacements in the absence of this kind of explicit and sustained detail in the West German case. Second, since the non-conformity of the Blanketmen has provoked positive assessments of the (hunger-striking) body as a site of resistance and

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as a resource to fulfill objectives, this provides a nuanced opportunity to debate the extent to which the confined body in particular can be understood as able to fulfill that demand. Instead, I focus on the aesthetic expansion of the communicative formations emplaced in incarceration despite their elusive legibility in instrumental terms.

Wasteful Resources

The raf prisoners’ declaration of the body as a weapon in 1972 was independently echoed in the 1980s by the Blanketmen protester pira prisoners. From the spring of 1976 onwards, pira convictions no longer held political status, and thus, prisoners were required to wear ordinary prison uniforms. The imposition of the prison-issued uniform elided a significant corporeal marker distinguishing the pira prisoner from the ordinary criminal within the prison population, and inadvertently prompted what would become known as the Blanket protest. As Allen Feldman’s ethnographic research has demonstrated, the word ‘protest’ fails to elucidate the fullness of the experience or way of life that was entailed by “going on the blanket.”60 Further, Feldman’s work is concerned with what the way of life that the Blanketmen experienced in prison in the late 1970s to their hunger strikes in the early 1980s articulates about agency in late modernity. Feldman emphasizes the relational character of political agency as an effect, rather than an originator. Notably, for Feldman, political agency is an effect of situated practices. Chris Yuill has responded to Feldman’s treatment of the concept of the body as weapon by attempting to elaborate it in terms of three interpretive modes: as a positive resource to fulfill objectives; as a destabilization of notions of the body in modernity; and as an expression of self-sacrifice as a hidden impulse of modernity.61 The first and third of these interpretations need further explication and consideration. The following critical elaboration of the first interpretation of the body as a positive resource, which involves references to excrement, self-starving bodies, and a spilled tin of fish, will show that this section’s heading of “wasteful resources” is mobilized as a double

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entendre, rather than as a judgment upon ways of life mobilized within incarceration. With respect to the first mode of interpretation, Yuill proffers the body as a resource, particularly for members of oppressed groups who have restricted access to other resources. Yuill insists that there is an “agentic malleability” to the body that makes it analogous to a project. Yuill notes that “the body can be reconfigured and developed in accordance with someone’s desires and objectives.”62 Yuill is considering the Blanketmen’s potential for utilizing their bodies in hunger strikes as resistance and as a reaffirmation of themselves as soldiers rather than criminals. I want to challenge or amend the suggestion that the body and embodiment are effectively resourceful for politically marginalized groups in the attainment of goals to the extent that this interpretation obscures the existence of an equally active underside to this claim. While the body’s malleability may very well serve its own objectives (where stable objectives are assumed), the body’s malleability also serves the objectives of prison wardens, school teachers, employers, and other regulatory figures. If the body’s malleability is a resource, then it is also a profound vulnerability, as raf prisoners’ reflections upon their experiences in the dead wing attest. While Yuill acknowledges that there are limits to the resourcefulness of the body that come out of previously defined parameters and barriers, the ongoing vulnerability of the malleable body is not fully appreciated in the body as resource thesis. As Feldman’s research vividly demonstrates, the interventions of the Blanketmen were repeatedly met with the positing of new conditional barriers to the “biological order” of the body, and “[t]he body was an essential component of the material conditions of incarceration.”63 For instance, the initial phase of the Dirty Protest, during which the Blanketmen began defecating into pots in their cells to avoid invasive strip searches when visiting the washrooms, was responded to variously by prison staff, including through the collection of the contents of all of the pots into a large bucket that was then spilled into one prisoner’s cell.64 If the Blanketmen had come to be able to withstand the odour of their own fecal waste that saturated their own cells, they were repeatedly brought into forced direct contact with the waste of others,

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towards which they felt a strong aversion. Feldman remarks, “The Dirty Protest did not constitute a resolution of the Blanketmen’s situation. On the contrary, it accentuated the cyclical and cathartic performance of institutional violence and magnified the liminality of the protesters beyond all previous levels. They now lived outside of all ‘civilizational’ standards of biological order. The Blanketmen had propelled themselves into an alien condition, the cognitive and biological implications of which they could not anticipate or control.”65 Having set up a challenge against the extent to which it makes sense to think of the body and embodiment as resources without adequately acknowledging them as vulnerabilities, I want to address the aspect of Yuill’s contention that bodies are effective in the realization of objectives. In addressing this, I acknowledge that Yuill is working from a different ontological conception of the human subject – a rational and self-knowing subject of liberal humanism – than the performative subject that is assumed in the present work. This difference of perspective accounts for aspects of my disagreement with the emphasis on objectives, but separate issues pertaining to objectives will be elaborated here. Yuill perceives the outcome of the Republican hunger strikes as a successful one in that it may have contributed to the advancement of the Republican movement, particularly through institutional political channels – for instance, electorally – rather than through an exclusive program of violence. His perception of this success may underpin his optimistic view of embodiment as a resource. It is unclear whether he would offer privilege to material forms of communication or action over other forms of political intervention such as speech, which many marginalized or derided political groups such as the raf cast as ineffective or even threatening to the speaker. In the case of imprisoned West German urban guerrillas generally or the raf more specifically, one of my aims has been to counter a rationalizing consensus that would evaluate guerrilla performance with respect to the perceived outcomes of their enactments. If we agree with some observers that the raf’s actions inadvertently enabled the West German government to emphasize the terrorist threat to contain or alienate moderate leftist movements, or, further, to legitimate the building of emergency laws to curb civil rights in the brd,66 we might be tempted to conclude that the raf failed to meet its objectives. In

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contrast, it would be possible to construe the urban guerrilla actions as partly successful, if we were to adopt an optimistic interpretation like that of Hockenos. He suggests that the initially unwelcome countercultural forces of the 1960s and 1970s helped to shape presentday Germany into a vibrant and open democracy.67 While it is unclear to what extent Hockenos would include the urban guerrillas in his assessment, he most certainly intends to include the squatters’ movements and the Sponti anarchists, whose radical actions repeatedly provoked the state’s policing machinery. Even if one could accept the possibility that the urban guerrilla movement may have contributed to the opening of German society, the guerrillas would not have assessed the political fabric of present-day Germany as favourable. In any case, evaluations of outcomes need not lead to assumptions about objectives or the resources through which they can be met. Further, it is evident that even outcomes that are concrete enough to be named cannot be cleanly attributed to discrete entities, but rather to networks of relational ones that need to be understood historically. The drawing of a strict relationship between objectives and outcomes is one that is difficult to support. Corporeal interventions such as the ones carried out by the raf and the Blanketmen constituted powerful forms of communication that relied upon apparatuses of constraint. De Certeau insisted that forms of state power tend to work towards the establishment of concrete and delimited places within which exteriorities can be administered and contained, but that, even within these, there are unanticipated opportunities to be realized.68 I understand these opportunities to apply to all parties situated within such spaces; they apply to the prisoner in a cell, to the guard that is the prison’s agent, and to the administrative legislator who may make interventions into the minute inner workings of the institution as necessary. I reiterate in this context that the specifically corporeal interventions can be understood as necessary performances of subjectivity aligned within and against the spaces of inhabitance, whether those of the prison or the courtroom. These corporeal circumventions or realignments do indeed capitalize on opportunities within delimited spaces, but they are not necessarily any more effective in realizing the body as a discrete accomplishment or as an instrument in meeting specific

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objectives than any other modality of communication. The effects of corporeal circumventions cannot be determined in advance and may be met with institutional uses of medical, psychiatric, spatial, and other disciplinary technologies that further reorder or confine the body in insidious ways. Further, the urban guerrilla and Blanketmen phenomena challenge the emphasis on both intention and objectives implied in Yuill’s argument, despite explicit objective criteria being set out in communiqués from time to time. Part of what is at stake here is the necessity of attributing meaning in Yuill’s claim. Yuill must make the case for the body as a site to which we ought to look precisely because this site is too often overlooked and conceptually alienated. Our lack of means to describe or to understand our sensorial predicament and the translation problem posed by our bodily gestures make it difficult to read the body the way we read a political slogan, a signpost, a petition, or a speech – although these are not as communicatively clear as is often taken for granted. The (incarcerated) body communicates in a convolution. It uses excrement rather than ink. When the infamous Marquis de Sade wrote on his prison walls with excrement, his transgression could be interpreted as twofold: first, the breaking with the civilizing process that demands that the body’s functions and its waste be hidden from view and indeed from all of the recognized sensorial capacities; and, second, the breaking of law in materializing the content of his writing – the words, sentences, and acts spelled out on the prison walls. The excrement in the cells of the Blanketmen is even more ambiguous. At the commencement of the Dirty Protest, the painting of excrement on the walls was a practical solution to a set of constraints and bodily violations. As Feldman’s work shows, the Blanketmen stopped visiting the washrooms for showers, shaving, and routine use of toilets because of the intensified searches that they were subjected to with each visit. These included, beyond strip searches, rectal mirror searches. Of these, Feldman asserts: “The functional contribution of the mirror search to the detection of contraband was wholly subordinate to its ideological structure, which arranged guards and inmates on either side of the glass in a performed hierarchy.”69 To avoid such violations, the Blanketmen’s Dirty Protest began with the refusal to leave their

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cells for bathing or toilets. They stopped shaving because they did not have mirrors in their cells. They urinated and defecated in their cells, but met with escalated circuits of guard-initiated defilements of the prisoners’ bodies and prisoner-initiated counter-defilements of the cells and the guards, which included the prisoners spilling urine and feces on the floor and under the doors of the cells, and the guards sweeping it all back under the inmates’ doors. During searches and other interactions with inmates, guards demonstrated a tendency to run inmates’ belongings, such as linens and mattresses, through the excrement. In response to this, the Blanketmen started smearing the excrement on the walls rather than leaving it in pots that could be spilled on the floor. It is possible to understand excrement deployed in these ways as inextricably tied to sensorial communication external to conventional speech, if not also tied to an unconventional form of sensorially based action. Indeed, Feldman observes what might be described as an intensified mutual identification between the guards and the inmates, as they looked to each other for amusement. For a prisoner in isolation and undergoing sensorial abridgement, however, such interactions might be absolutely necessary to sustain a prisoner, despite the violence inherent to the exchange. In this spirit, note Meinhof’s reflective remarks on her experience of the dead wing at Ossendorf: “I finally realized I had to pull myself out of this … it was my duty to fight my way out of it. By whatever means there are for doing that in prison: daubing the walls, coming to blows with a cop, wrecking the fitments, hunger strike. I wanted to make them at least put me under arrest, because then you get to hear something.”70 These last few quoted words, “because then you get to hear something,” underline a crucial point for incarcerated subjects: to expose oneself to profound violation and to risk oneself to brutal violence is preferable to undergoing sensorial containment and social isolation. In addition, the subject’s emplacement within these conditions slowly sets new coordinates for what is sensorially normative and polluting. With respect to the relationship between prisoner and guard, Feldman argues that the figure of the guard was in a sense the “double” of the figure of the prisoner, and that the two figures were caught up in a “symbiosis” within the prison.71 The sensorial disorder achieved within the prison during the Dirty Protest was not something to which

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the prisoners condemned only themselves. As Feldman remarks, “In this proliferation of pollution, a reversal had occurred. The prison guards had sought to dominate the prisoners through colonization of the prisoners’ bodies. The protesting Blanketmen now determined the working conditions and private lives of the prison guards through the contagious emissions of the very bodies that were the object of domination. The guard who spent four hours every working day attempting to rid himself of the stench of the H-Blocks, and who had to bring that stench home to his family, had become an inadvertent emissary of the Blanketmen.”72 In a more muted way, Baader’s filthy prison cell threatened contamination. There were both discretionary and routine cell searches. The former of these may have been discouraged by the cell’s conditions, but the required searches subjected guards to undesirable surprises in the cells. Small traps might be set, perhaps to thwart a search. For instance, a partially opened tin of herrings strategically placed amongst objects on high shelves might be set to spill onto a guard once it was disturbed. The cell and the guard would both become saturated with the scent of tinned herring.73 So, while this threat of contamination has instrumental force because it disrupts cell searches, it also deploys a sensorial intervention into the borders between bodies and spaces, since the guard may leave the cell, but the smell will not leave the guard. The smell of, in this case, tinned fish on a person or on objects furnishing an inhabited space also defies the acceptable norms of sensorial instruction. Although the Blanketmen did not use the primarily textual approach to coded communications deployed in the raf’s das info using code names and abbreviations, they developed their own idiomatic and secret language to facilitate communications in the presence of guards. Indeed, some of the raf prisoners in Hamburg developed such a language as well. Schiller, for instance, describes a finger language that enabled them to communicate in the prison yard and through windows.74 Some of the Blanketmen taught the others to speak in Gaelic. Eventually, cell walls that were covered in layers of fecal matter also contained both coded messages and Gaelic instruction on sections of wall that were obscured from the guards’ sight due to the placement of fixtures and beds. This is significant

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given that prisoners were often moved from one cell to another as a way to confront them with the contamination impacts of being housed in other prisoners’ waste. Feldman notes that the cell walls covered in excremental writing became both historical records and pedagogical spaces.75 In how many different ways can the excrement use in the Blanketmen’s cells be translated? The translation of an act, like the performing body itself, is inextricably bound to the space within which the act is produced, but its legibility for the political program either internal or external to the prison cell is ambiguous at best. To posit these aesthetic convolutions as effective corporeal means for the realization of objectives is to elide the complexities of the predicament of illegibility in which these bodies are constituted repeatedly. This predicament surely stands outside of the instrumentally rational conditions in which objectives and their appropriate means can be determined. As one pira source conveyed, “When people ask me, I find myself at a loss for words, to find words to portray what I really felt. I remember telling people who were always talking about the ‘protest’ we were in, ‘Hold on a minute. This was more than a fuckin’ “protest!” This was a way of life for us!’ It was no longer a protest with a visible end to it. That’s how we experienced it at the time. This was our lifestyle for two, three, four, five years. It had become an alternative life-style for us and not one we wanted by choice like.”76 In this respect, the characterization of the refusal of food, the refusal of prison-issued clothing, and the self-immersion in polluted environments through the spilling of urine and the smearing of excrement on cell walls as the realization of objectives – in particular, the reframing of the prisoners’ bodies in a mode of resistance to reaffirm their identity as Republican soldiers instead of as ordinary criminals – is not evident. What these corporeal acts realize instead is the reordering of boundaries that allows not so much for the reaffirmation of soldier bodies, as for the performance of an unrecognizable body as “living corpse.”77 Indeed, this is how some of the prisoners described their bodies. Yuill quotes Leo Green noting that he and many of the others could smell their bodies and compared the scent to that of a corpse: “It was the smell of the body wasting itself, the smell you sometimes sense when paying respect to the dead.”78

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The implication of my line of argument is not to claim that these aesthetic convolutions are not at all socially transgressive ones, but rather to trouble the characterization of this particular “embodiment” as a resource contributing to the achievement of programmatic political objectives and the public legibility that the realization of objectives implies. There are relational struggles continuously reenacted on the surfaces of bodies and the spaces within which they are situated, and these struggles trouble the extent to which the body as resistance can be acknowledged without a simultaneous recognition of the body as a profound vulnerability. While I accept Yuill’s second interpretative mode, in which he insists that the body as weapon destabilizes the body in modern discourse, the West German urban guerrilla phenomena pose a challenge to Yuill’s third interpretive mode, which asserts that the body as weapon expresses self-sacrifice as a “hidden” impulse of modernity. Although, in a very different way, Feldman appeals to sacrifice in relation to his ethnographic study of the Blanketmen, his analysis is nuanced in ways that are consistent with the aesthetic convolutions to which my argument appeals. This is so, for instance, when Feldman acknowledges the communicative force of the hunger strikes as an action that “eloquently demonstrated the condition and image of the human body infested with the state apparatus.”79 Feldman does not fully align the hunger strikers’ deaths with self-sacrifice; the hunger strikes were also understood as the counterpart to military operations on the outside: “[t]he ideological and tactical equivalence between hunger striking and military violence was based on the corpse as a fundamental unit of political communication. This is the assumption that informs the grotesque mechanical imagery … of an assembly line of coffins emerging on schedule, from the prison.”80 Specifically, however, Yuill attempts to show that, beyond the prevalence of discourses of health improvement, vitality, and youthfulness, there resides in modernity a “hidden” impulse toward selfsacrifice underpinned by an emotional imperative that works “in tandem” with rationality.81 He draws upon the examples of WWII kamikaze pilots and the revolutionaries of France and America to illustrate self-sacrifice as inherent to modernity as a project. Yuill is correct to insist that sacrifice has not been banished by the cool

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rationality assumed to characterize modernity. Indeed, self- and other-sacrifice might be cast as a crucial instrument in rational calculation; eugenics policies and programs, military operations, and suicide bombers (perhaps) are just a few examples that come to mind. A minor objection to his claim, however, is that sacrifice (of self or other) is not so much hidden in modernity as it is disavowed and recast in other terms. Security would be a site where sacrifice operates, for instance. My major objection to the casting of the body-as-weapon concept in terms of self-sacrifice is that it neglects the way in which hunger-striking in the context of incarceration is tied to the sensorial predicament in which the striking bodies are situated and the way in which hunger-striking is more than a potential path to death but also a way of living that has sensorial aspects worth consideration. The hunger strikes, the self-emaciation, and the immersion of self in refuse and rot, particularly against backdrops of contact bans, isolation, surveillance, and sensory deprivations and disordering, usher a subject into being through repetitive material acts inherently tied to the concrete situatedness of the subject as it finds itself emplaced. Emplacement not only repairs the Cartesian dualism of mind-body but also undercuts the assumption that entities are neatly bound and, in their presumed rational autonomy, relatively impervious to surroundings. Emplacement emphasizes the specificity of spatial contexts. Spatial contexts themselves can be complex in terms that extend beyond Euclidean considerations but also include the social aspects of space. Hence, it is a different experience to be in a prison as a guard than as a prisoner, despite the relational embeddedness that the two figures share in that space. Further, for the urban guerrilla or the pira member, emplacement emphasizes what it differentially means to be situated on a city street or in a prison cell and the way in which subjects are constituted in physical environments, which inherently come with potentials and limits, as do our bodies in different emplacements. The bodily circumventions that guerrilla prisoners made suggest an alternative program of performance for the urban guerrilla described by Carlos Marighella in his infamous “Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla” as having intimate knowledge of the terrain, “to

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know how to use with intelligence its unevenness, its high and its low points, its turns, its irregularities, its regular and its secret passages, abandoned areas, its thickets, etc.”82 Once arrested and imprisoned, the urban guerrilla is exiled from the physical environment that is necessary to its constitution. After imprisonment in Stammheim Prison, the urban guerrillas’ terrain was constituted by an architecture of juridically imposed corrective or management forms, but these architectural formations were routinely appropriated and remade by the prisoners in the construction of contagious multisensorial tableaux and internal communications systems that required the transference of communications between corporeal forms and existing objects within the prison structure – whether that was through the appropriation of air ducts or by means of the posited guerrilla communications system that the authorities insist the raf established within Stammheim. Hence, the mingling of corporeal and object technologies became significant to the mutual remaking of the guerrilla subjects and the juridical architecture of the prison. Instead of the alleyway or the street intersection, the prison cell and the trial room were potential sites for guerrilla struggle directed toward communication marked by the necessity of aesthetic convolution and the deployment of body (anti)language rather than the utility of language directed towards selfdefence and transparent means-ends calculations.

Chapter 3

Choreography of the Unspeakable and the Urban Guerrilla Posture Michael (Bommi) Baumann’s autobiography, Wie alles Anfing / How It All Began, was written while Baumann was in hiding and living under an illegal identity. It offers candid reflections on his participation in the postwar West German urban guerrilla movement, particularly through the 2nd of June Movement (2jm) and some of its forerunning cells. While it is often referenced in statist scholarship for its insights into the psychological development of a terrorist career or into the terrorist organization,1 this chapter addresses Baumann’s autobiography as a heterogeneous assemblage that explicitly seeks to tell how the West German urban guerrilla movement began, but implicitly choreographs, rather than justifies, Baumann’s posture as a guerrilla fighter. With respect to its announced project, Baumann’s autobiography indeed constructs a rich description of the emergence of the West German urban guerrilla. Although it is not lengthy, it is rife with detail about everyday existence, the banal and the extraordinary. It captures on the page not only, as Timothy Scott Brown observes, “an unprecedented look into the mindset of the radical scene,”2 but also the traces of the routine and non-routine sensorial existence of an urban guerrilla that, due to the ephemerality and supposed triviality of the quotidian, resist documentation but are imperative to recognizing the pulse of guerrilla aesthetics. For instance, Baumann’s autobiography consistently grants a place of significance to the body, describing the body in labour, in dance, in the workingclass family, and in violence. As he observes the dispositional effects of having long hair or carrying a concealed gun, he hints at mutually emplacing effects that I understand to elaborate choreographies of aesthetic modes of communication that guerrillas enacted. But this is not all that arrests my interest in Baumann’s book. Within its seemingly singular form as an explanation of origin, amidst its more or

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less apparent coherence as the deliverer of Baumann’s announcement of his choice of love over terror necessary to overcome the scandal of his being a guerrilla, and his appeal to others to put down the gun, fractional operations collide in Baumann’s text – from a production of self achieved through a confessional mode to an instructional manual of guerrilla practice. Despite its seemingly transparent recognizability as exercise and object, autobiography is a curious and confounding endeavour for both author and reader. Early scholarship in autobiography, informed by the liberal-humanist tradition, took for granted that the author was a self-transparent and exemplary model of his time.3 Accompanying this conception was the assumption of simple referentiality contained in the autobiographical enterprise, coupled with the generic demand that this converge with aesthetic and historical contingencies.4 But, over time, the self-transparent and exemplary author of supposedly great acts and great autobiographies was slowly displaced by an unreliable narrator potentially beset by false consciousness, repression, and the power-laden limits of language.5 Scholarship in autobiography began to acknowledge it as a literary genre and a creative form, and since then, the autobiographer has been further decentred through the influences of deconstruction, feminism, post-colonialism, queer theory, and decolonization.6 But this does not mean that anything goes in the domain of autobiography, nor does it follow that expectations of authenticity and facticity have disappeared; rather, the approach to these problems has become more nuanced. In domains external to the literary field, and for many readers, the problem of authenticity remains intractable. Chantelle Warner, for instance, has noted that, where the autobiographer appears to be representative of a social group within which there is a sense of collective identity, the problem of referentiality is amplified because the affective force between the autobiographer and the audience becomes crucial to the authentication of the text.7 Hence, autobiographies that implicate collective identity are particularly fraught, as the fidelity that they must achieve with their reading audiences is distinct from the problem of truth,8 the latter of which is not eradicated by the recognition of autobiography as a literary genre and may serve as the grounds for the dismissal of the work.

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In his anticipatory critique, Paul de Man observed some time ago in the generic designation of autobiography a unique productivity: “We assume that a life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences, but can we suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his medium?”9 The productive character of autobiography tentatively proposed in the above quotation is more strikingly evident in more recent scholarship. Sidonie Smith, for instance, asserts the performativity of autobiography, noting that it “enacts the ‘self’ it claims has given rise to the ‘I.’”10 In his discussion, de Man suggests that autobiography is not a genre at all, noting that, to the extent that the reading and making sense of a text is dependent upon its attribution to a particular author, all attributed works are in a sense autobiographical. If, in that case, the double observation can be accepted that what we call the self is the product of activity called autobiographical and that all attributed works are in a sense autobiographical, this poses a challenge to the tendency to read Baumann’s text as anything but performative, while emphasizing the significance of its incongruities as signalling something quite other than a lack of sincerity or a failure of mimetic effectiveness. Given that the autobiography under discussion addresses the life and actions of a wanted man who anticipates his capture and arrest, it is of significance that the general assent in literary scholarship to the productive or performative character of the confessional discourse in autobiography does not extend to other spheres, and especially not to juridical contexts,11 in which such a text could be appropriated as evidence or a confession.12 While Baumann’s autobiography is a text of historical significance, resonating with postwar German history in the context of Cold War social movements, the exploration that follows is not concerned with the problems of factuality and authenticity. Rather, it acknowledges the undecidable dimensions that de Man’s assessment emphasizes in the context of autobiography, but does so by positing that Baumann’s autobiography is characteristic of what Mikhail Bakhtin has identified as a polyphonic text to the extent that it presents multiple and

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contradictory expressions of consciousness in interdependent interaction.13 Warner, also following Bakhtin, looks to the chronotope, “the spatio-temporal matrix in which represented time necessarily appears in the literary work,”14 of Bernward Vesper’s autobiography Die Reise (The Trip). Vesper was the former partner of Gudrun Ensslin and the father of their child, Felix, born in 1967. Vesper began writing Die Reise in 1969, but he committed suicide in 1971. Warner notes that the publication of Vesper’s book in 1977 made little impact, but later in that same year, as the events of the German Autumn unfolded, Die Reise was recoded as the defining narrative of the generation.15 In her discussion, Warner observes the double signification of the novel’s title. While it connotes the displacement or reordering of space and time of an lsd trip, it also suggests the metaphor of life as a journey. Warner remarks that this journey is not fluid, purposeful, or destination-oriented, but rather “more of a series of meanderings” that constantly intersect with other elements of the narrative.16 She considers that “broken histories,” characterized by “stuttered series of instances” coalescing around the disconnected before and after, seem to be connected with traumatic remembering: “in traditional, teleological autobiographies, processes of natural, individual, and cultural time are synthesized, in these broken histories, the emergent identities of the autobiographical narrators seem discontinuous, shifty, and polycentric. This break with the past disallows the trajectory from personal or cultural past to biographical present and the gaps and fissures in narrative structure almost seem to radiate out from this moment of rupture.”17 Warner’s description of how broken histories take shape on the page may give insight into the textual peculiarities of Wie alles Anfing. Baumann’s text shares a number of the qualities of the broken histories that Warner’s discussion identifies and describes. Notably, despite the conjuring of the body’s presence throughout Baumann’s text, there is a discernable break from the biographical present. In the present of the text’s production, the physicality ends, and Baumann’s body is suspended, rendering instead an abstract affirmation of love in repetition. Whether this gap is connected to traumatic remembering is unclear, since Baumann’s existence was at that time suspended between two identities: that of Bommi Baumann the former urban

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guerrilla gone underground, on the one hand, and an assumed new identity, on the other hand. His positioning in duplicity, secrecy, and illegality, coupled with the fear of being discovered by either the police or former comrades, may have necessitated this temporal break. In either case, the inherent multi-vocality of the Baumann text, which shares characteristics of broken histories, presents an obstacle to the easy attribution of intentions, meaning, and the instrumental force of the text in achieving identifiable objectives, despite its framing in the either/or choice between terror and love. The point of departure for my reading of Baumann’s book is the poststructuralist assumption that texts speak independently of their authors and are simultaneously susceptible to multiple, even paradoxical, readings. As Roland Barthes has observed, “a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.”18 What Baumann’s sincere and presumed self-conscious intentions or motivations were in the construction of the text is not the target of the analysis. Neither generally, nor particularly in the context of the latter claim, is the aim to make attributions to Baumann’s latent or manifest objective goals; rather, it is to elaborate on the performance of the text as a living object – a non-human agent – that emplaces all of the declarations, assertions, interruptions, slippages, hesitations, elisions, and second thoughts intrinsic to the communicative formations that are frequently frustrated by the clumsy and partial consciousness of the human subject. This is not to say that Baumann is without conscious intentions in the construction of the text. Indeed, the text explicitly affirms love over terror. Further, Baumann’s own commentary on his text, as expressed in an interview with Richard Huffman in 2010, confirms the explicit desire to discourage people from taking up arms. Incidentally, Baumann seems to be sincerely exasperated in the interview when he describes the Bavarian state prosecutor’s decision to stop the book’s distribution in the 1970s because he deemed it to be pro-terror; Baumann exclaims that the prosecutor obviously never read the book. What my reading of the text illustrates, however, is that the autobiographer’s intentions, as realized in the text, are as fragmented, as

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unsettled, and as precarious as the subject who is produced again and again performatively through the making of such accounts. In both its content and its form (posed here as an analytical, rather than real, distinction), Baumann’s autobiographical text can be taken up in multiple ways that are equally plausible for readers, given its construction and the context of its immediate production and circulation. A case in point is that, while the state exercised extensive security measures to stop the circulation of the Baumann text due to its perceived incitement to terror, raf members, who had read a draft of the manuscript from their prison cells in Stammheim, opposed its publication presumably because they saw it as counter-revolutionary.19 Between the prosecutor and the raf, these evaluations represent two strikingly different texts, yet both derive from readings of essentially the same word units, composed in the same ordering. When emplaced differently, the text becomes a different object, sustaining a different network of operations, and potentially seeking divergent objectives.

How It All Began

Published late in 1975 by the small Munich publishing house Trikont Verlag, Baumann’s autobiography, Wie alles Anfing – soon after published in English as Terror or Love? Bommi Baumann’s Own Story of His Life as a West German Urban Guerrilla – initiated a brutal demonstration of suppression on the part of the state against the production and circulation of texts that addressed the subjects of political violence and guerrilla activities in the brd. A raid on the Trikont office in November 1975, which facilitated the seizure of several hundred copies of Baumann’s text,20 left the small publisher, along with an even smaller-scale women’s publishing collective located in the same building, economically and organizationally incapacitated. During the raid, the police: trashed the offices; apprehended files, bank information, financial records, and subscription mailing lists; seized several copies of unrelated publications ready for sale and distribution; and confiscated all of the equipment necessary to the daily operational activities of the publishing houses, such as typewriters

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and typesetting machines. The raid was reportedly carried out at gunpoint by thirty police officers over a period of approximately five hours. The handful of employees who were present at the time of the operation were not only held at gunpoint but subjected to body searches.21 In fairly close succession, several smaller search-and-seize operations were carried out in major urban centres throughout the brd on small alternative book distributors and booksellers in what appeared to be an attempt to curb distribution of the Baumann text, but occurred within the broader context of the state’s attempts to strangle the support networks of the active and incarcerated guerrilla cells, using section 129 of the German Criminal Code to charge anyone suspected of providing support to a criminal organization.22 The larger context of palimpsest law in the brd at the time (in particular the tightening of censorship laws) is consistent with the apparent motivation to block circulation of the book. Yet, as observers have noted, the state’s attempts to suppress Baumann’s autobiography “pushed a book which might otherwise have had a fairly restricted readership – the initial press run was 3000 copies – into the international limelight.”23 Indeed, Baumann’s text achieved much attention internationally and was published and republished in various translations in Europe and in North America under the title Terror or Love? inspired by the heading of one of Baumann’s closing sections. The text is supplemented with statements written by novelist Heinrich Böll and activist-author Daniel Cohn-Bendit (known as “Red Danny” of the 1968 revolts in France before he was exiled to West Germany’s Sponti anarchist scene in Frankfurt) that argue for recognition of the broad social significance of the text and against its suppression. These statements, also produced while Baumann remained in hiding from state authorities, are constructed with an eye towards his eventual capture and judgment. While they exercise much care in addressing (perhaps attempting to contain) the imminent danger lying dormant like a bomb that was about to be tripped in Baumann’s seemingly confessional text, these statements openly target the explicit formations of official censorship that arose during this period – formations that rendered the very telling of one’s own story, if one were an urban guerrilla fighter or political dissident, illegal in the brd. For instance, Cohn-Bendit called it a “literary masterpiece,” for which

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the “most important task is to distribute it as widely as possible because it is a revolutionary book, a helpful tool for turning society over.”24 Cohn-Bendit observed about Wie alles Anfing, “It strikes me as truly exceptional when a writer succeeds in transmitting to others a part of his consciousness – that is, when the words do not interpose themselves between him and the reader like a screen or a mask. Just the opposite: one discovers the author with all the contradictions he brings with him and which he will have to acknowledge right to the end. Bommi’s situation doesn’t allow him to say to us: ‘Hey you guys, here I am, Bommi Baumann, here’s my story.’ He isn’t free; he’s being hunted by the police.”25

The Primacy of Materiality

We never played the Internationale, but always Jimi Hendrix.26 –Bommi Baumann

Baumann takes 1965 as the temporal point of departure for his account, but as we will see, this is not the time marker that is of significance to the rupture he describes. Raised and educated in the communist East, his family moved to West Berlin when Baumann was twelve years old. He left school soon afterwards to apprentice, consciously choosing carpentry over factory work. Nevertheless, he describes his employment as a series of “shit jobs.”27 It was in 1965 that he quit working and stopped conforming. The impetus that he identifies for his retreat from a conformist rhythm of life was not a change in consciousness but a change in practices. In particular, he points to rock music and to the blues, long hair, clothing, and the spaces in which he began to hang out as constituting the crucial concreteness of his everyday life that produced shifts in his consciousness. For him, everything began with a place: the Gedächtniskirche, a church located on the Breitscheidplatz in the centre of the former West Berlin. As a casualty of the Allied Air War, it is one of the remains that was not demolished and built over, but whose damages have been preserved as a monument. Simon Ward, following Alois Riegl, calls it

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an “unintended monument,” noting it amongst concrete traces in Berlin public space that have memory value.28 The ruin, decentred by the new structures built around it, is a powerful signifier, though by no means was its signification settled. Among the observations that Ward makes is that the Gedächtniskirche signals “the irrelevance of previous ideological function and architectural merit as well as the need for signs and borders to stabilize the workings of memory value and establish the exhibition value of the remnant,”29 though Ward’s observation pertains specifically to post-unification considerations of memory traces. If we consider Baumann’s accent on the significance of the Gedächtniskirche as a countercultural site, the place is of great import to marking his understanding of his personal and social identity as much as or even more than the temporality of the transition he articulates. Baumann explicitly grants to this place the status of origin for the guerrilla movement. By doing so, he privileges place over time, but he does not treat the Gedächtniskirche as a monument as such. In fact, for him, it is not about the building, it is about the connectivity of people and things that gathered there. Its significance to the counterculture Baumann describes is spatial and relational. It is where new practices were staged and became habitual in the body, and it need not relate to the conceptual struggles that the site endured pre- and postwar. As Ward notes, the building was almost torn down in the 1920s and then became a site of struggle again after the war. As Egon Eiermann’s architectural additions were under construction, the Wall went up and completely reconstituted the conceptual and concrete spatializations of Berlin. Even before it was damaged, this building had been literally standing in the way of things – of traffic, of commerce, and of free spatialized growth. But after the Wall went up, its rescued trace was repositioned in the fractured Berlin, where centre had become edge. It became a material site of resonance for countercultural, postwar youth who occupied a new centre – where they were in the way of traffic, in the way of commerce, in the midst of it all. There, the youth didn’t take up jobs, they grew their hair, they hung out. Baumann speaks of his transformation as a break with automatic conformity – an orientation towards life which, in his account, is

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instinctive to the extent that it is motivated by the stresses associated with the fear of not fitting in or failing to approximate what would be perceived as a socially comprehensible existence. Beyond the pressures to perform in acceptable ways, there is the poverty of articulated routes by which one could conceivably engage otherwise: “Since you’re in the system, you go along with it automatically, because you don’t know anything else and don’t see anything else, and you don’t have any alternatives. You don’t really know what you could do differently.”30 Identity became, for Baumann, something that could be reimagined and realized differently, and the key to this was the body and the traces that it could hold and enact. Even things like having long hair or wearing nine-centimetre heels were ways of doing things differently because they had concrete and felt consequences; they meant being outcast – they meant trouble, such as exclusion from employment, problems with passers-by on the street, and even the loss of some friends who did not understand or whose parents disapproved. Baumann notes that the social experience of being cast differently and having fewer mainstream opportunities sparked a greater awareness of the social exclusions experienced by Black and Jewish persons in Berlin at that time.31 In the text there is a tendency towards conflating the cultural struggle against norms with racialization at the expense of a more historically informed understanding of such systemic productions of difference and the entrenched exclusions that they foreground.32 Baumann’s assumptions here are not merely individual ones, as Detlef Siegfried has drawn attention to the tendency for young West Germans to idealize and perform the outsider social figure of the “hipster,” which drew from racialized stereotypes of the urban black man that emphasized the unconscious over the rational and the body over the mind.33 Baumann’s emphasis on the body and its practices is reinforced in the temporal order of the moments of transformation that he suggests. First, he grows his hair, and second, his awareness shifts: “I liked long hair – with the long hair you start getting a different relationship to yourself – a new identity – at least, that’s how it went with me.”34 Political awareness, Baumann insists, was a slow process.

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The way he describes it, awareness emerged out of the segregation and opposition experienced by looking differently and acting differently, by ‘dropping out’ of the dominant organization of life. He writes not only of the more subtle and individual reactions he faced but of the concrete mobilization against the postwar generation’s countercultural orientations. In particular, he notes the explicit campaign that was deployed by print media monopolist Springer Publishing Group’s newspapers against the subculture. He cites the reaction to rioting at a Rolling Stones concert and couples it with the protests against the Vietnam War as a turning point or initiation into a greater sense of political awareness. Baumann’s emerging political consciousness and interest in intellectual life sparked his involvement with the sds in 1967. At this time, many German students were primarily concerned with international issues such as the Vietnam War and imperialism in the context of the Cold War. While the late 1960s were marked by insurgent uprisings across the world, the West German context is unique not only because it was occupied by United States and nato army bases, from which weapons were being deployed in warfare, but because German youth grappled with the legacy of the Third Reich. With respect to Baumann’s introduction to the workings of the sds, he remarks on a palpable gulf between his world and that of the students, to whom he refers as “those bookworms.”35 It was in the sds that he encountered members of k1. With them, he found a connection, one that he attributes to a shared interest in “the music” and having long hair. In his account, Baumann maintains a strict distinction between the realms of culture and politics, even as he describes his developing political consciousness. In k1, Baumann saw a compatible relationship between the culture, with which he identified, and a “political idea, or knowledge … a style of life, a concrete alternative, this collective living.”36 Baumann describes a scene defined by collective living and the giving up of private property, private living quarters, and monogamous sexual relations. Collective living was accompanied by music and drug use (for a while, he and his group referred to themselves as the “Roaming Hash Rebels”).37 What is significant here is the implicit demarcation in Baumann’s text between

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the concrete alternative style of living and action in the rhythm of everyday life practices that k1 invited and the “sds line that there’s going to be a revolution sometime, but it’s not going to change anything in your situation right now.”38 The text observes that while k1 was sustained by action, the sds was sustained by adherence to a particular program, the sds “line.” The Baumann text constantly deploys distinctions between thought and action, mind and body, while affirming action and body. Baumann’s understanding of labour illustratively informs what is at stake for him in the distinction. Baumann sees in the proliferation of prefab construction and factory piecemeal production an accompanying – almost mirroring – impact on workers’ lives. These are lives lacking sensuousness. The same conversations and the same minute movements, day in and day out, over and over again, structure these lives, according to Baumann. He laments the loss of craftsmanship – work done with one’s hands to make something. He reflects upon an older finishing carpenter under whom he once apprenticed, remarking about the man, “To him what was important is that people have a roof over their heads. That work fulfilled him, he had a whole other sense of his life. That old man had something on me. That’s how I see it today. At that time I thought he was an idiot, killing himself working there, a pure fool, putting so much effort into that garbage. But you could see that he still found meaning in what he was doing … In your work, you reach a certain measure of freedom; when you’re really working, you recognize yourself in your work, that’s exactly what a craftsman does.”39 Ubiquitous in the text are references to popular music, and the responsive kinesthetic sensations of the body are expressed as a form of knowing. For instance, the text reads: “When I heard Chubby Checker’s ‘Let’s Twist Again’ for the first time, I got up out of bed and danced the twist exactly as I saw it done later. I had intuitively understood what the guy was trying to get across.”40 Baumann insists that a worker has a stronger relationship to rock music than does an intellectual. The worker has a more corporeal existence than does the intellectual, and rock music is a physical medium. Of this, he observes, “That kind of music isn’t a Beethoven trip, no head trip, but purely a body trip.”41 For Baumann the relationship between music

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and the turn to the political was a proletarian thing, and music had a greater impact on the young workers than it did on the students. Notably, however, former raf member Margrit Schiller, who was a student at the time, grants much attention to rock music and dancing in her autobiography. As with Baumann, Schiller observes that politics in the strict sense were not the impetus to her move into the guerrilla movement. Instead, she emphasizes the material conditions of the life in which she was immersed. While she insists that she was neither concerned with the implementation of emergency laws in 1968, nor the election of Willy Brandt as chancellor in 1969, she recalls the images that she watched on television of the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia and the My Lai massacre by United States soldiers. Schiller writes, “I was in a process of awakening myself. I still wasn’t interested in the historical facts or the global context of the rebellion: I was first of all looking for my own way in life to avoid perishing in the constraints of the old order. And this is exactly what made me part of the movement without even realizing it.”42 The use of Schiller’s observations is not to challenge Baumann’s assessment of what remained distinctive between worker and student groups, but to illustrate the material emphasis found in descriptions or explanations of the move into the urban guerrilla movement. The extent to which the youth of the postwar period pulled away from German culture, as it had been represented to them through the institutions of learning and popular culture, needs to be recognized to make sense of their reliance upon, or complex identification with, music borrowed from abroad that became not only the conduit of imported popular cultural references but a vital sense-based source material for countercultural experiences that were also thoroughly corporeal. Against the rigid silences of their parents’ generation with regard to WWII, the youth of the 1960s and 1970s were still coming to grips with the tremors of their late realization, or their hindered puzzling-together, of their nation’s past. Literature produced by or about guerrillas repeatedly expresses a theme of shock in response to the slow revelation of their nation’s then so-recent past and its enduring but silent traces on everyday life in the brd. Schiller, for instance, recounts the horror that she felt while growing up when she realized that what had constituted the content of her

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piano lessons were songs that had been composed with the intention to glorify the Third Reich.43 From this point on, Schiller would distrust the otherwise benign-seeming products of German culture, such as songs. The corporeal element of the significance of Schiller’s disturbing adolescent discovery should not be taken lightly, since the bodily or sensorial impacts of piano lessons are totalizing in respects that exceed other forms of cultural instruction. The reflexive repetitions of movement, acoustics, and tactile sensations acquired and refined through musical training are as subtly shaping as are other centrally formative instructive experiences, such as, for example, classed, racialized, or gendered comportments. The practices inherent to the gradual mastery of not only an instrument but the repertoire of melodies that constitute the sacraments of a nation’s civil religion find as their site the living body of the citizen, who exists in the double-bind of being both the benefactor and the heir of hegemonic cultural instruction. David Schwarz has observed the National Socialists’ systematic attention to music in their project to reshape German culture and to produce a coherent collective identity. He notes that this involved a rewriting of music history to eradicate the music of “the other” and to create “a musical fantasy of a unified, right-wing Germany.”44 Schwarz emphasizes the sensorial significance of music in the complex identification in which the Nazis hoped to immerse the public. In an important way, sound is a particularly effective means to inculcate subjects, due to the body’s “acoustic vulnerability,” by which sound permeates the skin: “We can close our ears to loud sounds, but this gesture always only mutes, never cancels out sound. And at night, our subjectivity is utterly open to sounds. Sounds thus carry a profoundly imperative agency for us. Sounds enter our bodies as carriers of messages of intent from agencies benevolent, malevolent, or indifferent.”45 Acoustic vulnerability, then, also offers to us a vulnerability to the interpellative power of music at the level of subjective identification. In this way, Schwarz asserts that one is interpellated by the sound and experiences a trace of guilt that precedes identification. This sense of guilt emerges out of a feeling of complicity with the social order, since the subject is sustained through that order – in this case, that of the state and the shared lie that it fosters. Therefore, the shared lie is more

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effective as an ideological basis than the imagined truth.46 That many of the rewritten German folk and war songs were amended to include accompanying sets of gestures only further insinuates the corporeal performance of the unconscious relationship of complicity between the subject and the social order. In this respect, music is a form particularly suited for the forging of bonds between the citizen body and the state. Hence, postwar youth did not have much in the way of a domestic music scene and consumed imported music. The occupying presence of military bases located in the brd had brought fragments of American pop and consumer culture, as embodied in the military forces’ radio stations and the leisure activities of soldiers from the bases, to West German youth. Having shown that the significance of imported rock music to West German counterculture prior to the turn towards guerrilla identification was not necessarily as class-based as Baumann suggests, I want to return briefly to his discussion of the relationship between the worker and rock music to consider how Baumann’s autobiography ‘choreographs’ rather than justifies his posture as a guerrilla fighter. For Baumann, rock music is corporeal and something more relatable to the worker than to the intellectual – since, as a worker, “you’re only tuned into the body, not into the mind, and dancing and stuff like that is more your thing, because somehow you’re closer to the earth. I mean, it’s more a matter of pure feeling with this kind of music. The whole message in rock is fucking or whatever you want to call it, screwing … make love not war. It’s easier for a worker to grasp or relate to that.”47 Not only is music more relatable to the corporeality of the worker, Baumann insists that violence is something that is intrinsic to the working-class experience. While there are conceptual confusions in the strict binaries upon which Baumann insists, there is insight in the observations that his text offers. Baumann characterizes his relationship to violence as embodied in: his working-class family-life;48 the rhythm of work as he experienced it as a crafting apprentice; his socialist education in the ddr that informed his illegal activities in the brd; and popular music. Baumann describes violence as inherent to his life experiences – whether in fights in the street, in bar rooms, or in beatings at home – and as something that was inevitably heightened as part of his

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transformation and eventual turn towards guerrilla warfare. For him, violence is associated with action and repetition. It is not something that stems from beliefs or is thought through in advance, but is performed spontaneously. He remarks on how violence was realized differently in the actions of the raf, which was constituted primarily of students and the children of middle-class professionals. He argues that the raf, having an intellectual core, exercised a violence that stemmed from the movement of which it was a part to a limited extent, but that its violence was derived largely from theoretical abstractions, not embedded in the rhythms of everyday lived practice. In contrast, of his group, he observes, “[w]e’d lived with violence from the time we were children; it has material roots. On payday, when the old man comes home drunk and beats up the old lady – it’s all that stuff. At school, you get into scrapes, you have to make your way with fists, for you that’s a perfectly normal thing; you have to fight at your workplace, you fight in bars, you have a more healthy relationship to it.”49 Thus, the sources of violence for the respective groups are quite different, according to Baumann, and different in ways that are consistent with the conceptual mind-body split that threads his text together. According to Baumann, the view of revolution was also different across the groups. The raf, although somewhat engaged in free love and to a lesser extent drug use, criticized the 2jm for not taking the task of revolution seriously enough. Beyond the “total opposition to pleasure”50 that he attributes to the rigidity of the student-based movements, the specificity of the task marks a fundamental difference between them. For Baumann and the 2jm, the task is not to strive for a revolution to be realized in the future, but to adopt a sense of living in a concrete and immediate way (in this respect, the 2jm perspective is closer to the Spontis’ first-person politics). This was an orientation towards life as the openness of being in the moment: it is ‘the Blues feeling of life,’ as Baumann often refers to it. Active cosmopolitan and transnational interactions helped to shape political conceptions that became crucial to the social movements in West Germany.51 By the close of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, several small and deeply radicalized groups had emerged in West Germany. These groups had been influenced by South American guerrilla movements and they developed a complex identifica-

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tion with the Latin or South American guerrilla (as represented in the writings of Che Guevara, Régis Debray, and Carlos Marighella). At the end of the 1960s, some radical activists had taken up guerrilla fighter training in Palestine and Syria. Those who returned from Palestine influenced a reframing of the issues in such a way that domestic issues played a reduced role in the conceptualization of the international political field; they also worked to establish Palestine rather than Vietnam as a focus for guerrilla activities. In 1969, guerrillas calling themselves the Black Rats planted a bomb in a Jewish synagogue on the day of Crystal Night, leading to struggles within the movement. The bomb did not explode, but intractable social damage had been done nonetheless. The communiqué that was issued to accompany the bomb situated the action primarily in anti-Zionist terms, but, due to the bomb’s actual placement at a synagogue (and on the anniversary of the Nazis’ Crystal Night), it expressed anti-Semitic sentiments and posed a concrete threat of violence to the Jewish community in Berlin.52 Even the communiqué slips into explicit anti-Semitism when it shifts its focus from the institutional Zionism of the state of Israel to Jewish peoples generally with the following remark: “the Crystal Night of 1938 is repeated daily by the Zionists in the occupied territories, in the refugee camps, and in Israeli prisons. The Jews displaced by fascism have themselves become fascists.”53 Later, members of other cells, including members of the raf, went to Palestine for training in guerrilla tactics. These training sessions and the external relationships forged within them set the stage for German guerrilla fighter participation of rz members in a section of the pflp hijacking of an Air France flight in 1976, during which Jewish passengers were segregated out and threatened by the hijackers. These actions present a stark contradiction to the anti-fascist impetus of the West German urban guerrilla movement. While these antiSemitic actions were condemned within the movement, they have also been subject to less exposure within the circulated literature that has stemmed from the movement. Baumann condemns the synagogue bombing action, but particularly for the date on which it occurred. Former rz member Hans-Joachim Klein has been one of the most vocal and decisive in his characterization of the Air France hijacking

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that ended in Entebbe as thoroughly fascist. Klein was almost recruited for the Air France hijacking. In 1978, Klein remarked: The problem is that they [the West German guerrillas] claim their actions are independent but that they aren’t any longer. Each time they were dependent on Wadi Haddad [leader of a breakaway section of the pflp] and his group. For every action in support of the liberation of prisoners the guerrillas are dependent on others because they need countries where they can seek refuge. They depend on others for their money and weapons. All that has a price: the participation of German guerrilla members in other actions. Since Haddad needs people who aren’t Arab for his operations. That even goes as far as participating in actions which are fascist like the one at Entebbe. That’s exactly what Entebbe was. What happened at Entebbe is Auschwitz as far as I am concerned.54 Another element of guerrilla identification is the way in which the West German urban guerrilla fighter body attempts to take up the posture of the peripherally situated insurgent South American guerrilla body.55 Student organizers too, Dutschke specifically, had already been discussing the tactical potential of the sds taking up a “‘propaganda of action’ in the metropolis, complementing the ‘propaganda of bullets’ modelled on Che Guevara’s actions in the Third World.”56 Though, as Klimke and Scharloth note, many scholars of the West German student movement tend to draw a firm boundary between these debates and the emergence of West German guerrilla cells,57 Kraushaar’s study of Dutschke’s writings influenced his assertion of direct links of conceptual solidarity between the movements around the matter of violence.58 The tendency to attribute the proposal of guerrilla violence to one or two key figures of the movement – beyond mere citation, but to assign its origin in the thought of visible spokespeople – obscures the relations and conditions, immediate and remote, that were intertwined with the consideration of guerrilla modes of struggle. For Baumann, although the suggestion of guerrilla potential had already circulated, it was the return of those who went to Palestine and Syria for training in guerrilla tactics that concretely presented

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an urgent case for the possibility of turning to armed struggle. Baumann and his friends had renamed their group; the Blues became the tw, invoking the framework and ongoing legacy-building of the guerrilla movement active in Uruguay from 1967 to 1972. By naming themselves thus, the tw initiated identification with foreign contemporaries whose concrete existence and struggle was completely different than it was for guerrillas situated within industrialized cities. This identification, in concert with the training abroad, issued a call to action, but one that, as Baumann later observed in Wie alles Anfing, was out of place in the city of West Berlin: “These Latin American experiences that were still fresh then had not been properly reflected on; that is, Latin America is (a) Third World, and (b) has completely different metropolises that still naturally contain the general chaos of a Third World city that a settled European capital doesn’t have. Because of that, you can still survive there in the most dire circumstances better than you can here in the best of circumstances. Of course, we didn’t realize that.”59 Thus, guerrilla manuals and tactics were imported and adopted from other parts of the world. The influence of prominent figures in the international anti-imperialist struggle slowly replaced that of rock musicians. Despite the essential and classed status of violence in Baumann’s life on his account, the text emphasizes the role of two significant events in German postwar history, as they pertain to worker and student radicalization, as well as to the emergence of the West German urban guerrilla movement. One of them was the 1968 assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke, the student leader, whom Baumann describes as the James Dean for the rock generation in West Germany. This assassination attempt was preceded by the killing of protester Benno Ohnesorg at the demonstration against the visit of the Shah of Iran to Berlin in June 1967 and the state-hosted evening planned for him at the Berlin Opera House to see a performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Of his reaction to the Ohnesorg killing on 2 June, the impetus for the name of the 2jm, Baumann writes, “I had been in a lot of barroom fights, and even though they were often really tough, you always kept some semblance of fairness. I had even boxed for a while; I had a different, fully clear relationship toward violence. But a thing like this was just straight out murder to me.

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Benno Ohnesorg. It did a crazy thing to me. When his casket went by, it just went ding, something got started there.”60 Similarly, Baumann experienced the attempt on Dutschke’s life at a bodily level. He describes it as though the bullet was meant for them all – and he felt it as though it was intended for him. Dutschke’s attacker had read one of Springer’s61 newspapers, Bild, and he reportedly carried the article with him when he shot Dutschke. The headline called out: “Stop Dutschke Now.” After the shooting, there would be no more holding back, Baumann recalls: “[I]t was clear now: hit them, no more pardons.”62 The embodiment that Baumann perceived extended beyond the boundaries of the skin of an individual; the attacks on Ohnesorg and Dutschke were attacks on them all, as though together they constituted one body.63 Likewise, it did not matter who held the gun – whether the gun was grasped in the hands of an agent of the state or in the hands of a citizen incited by Springer’s campaign – they all constituted the limbs of the apparatus that must be attacked. As already noted, the Baumann text works primarily on the distinctions of mind-body, concept-action, and word-deed, with the latter terms made primary in the account given. There exists a fundamental contradiction at the level of the text’s form: Baumann is constrained to give an account in conceptual terms of something that is neither accountable nor abstract. Baumann’s autobiography, despite itself, gives an idealist rendering of a materialist existence that cannot be represented. The explicit turns to the body within Baumann’s text are vital, not only because the text is inflected with a materialist orientation, but because words are inadequate to the explication of Baumann’s life as a guerrilla fighter. Rather, his guerrilla activities are concretely unspeakable. Further, the problems of articulation exceed those of the urban guerrilla, as the ability to reproduce the truth of the self in retrospect is dependent upon the existence of a coherent and knowable self, one whose constitution is independent of its imagined and real addressees. Nevertheless, it is that retrospective construction of self that subjects are repeatedly called upon to produce.

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The Double-Voice of Self-Production

One way of taking up Baumann’s autobiography is as a form of selfproduction that is marked by a paradoxical tension. On the one hand, there is the compulsion to answer to accusations made publicly against him and to answer to the ways in which he is accused of a failure of solidarity by other participants of the movement. This is a more crucial problem than that of making oneself understood, which is problematized in the first place by the impossibility of self-knowledge and the incoherency of the human subject. As Michel Foucault’s work has shown, confession is the modern apparatus not only through which power operates but through which subjectivities are produced – from the most solemn to the most mundane of contexts.64 On the other hand, in the Baumann text there is an implicit refusal to communicate something definitive through the medium of language in the strict sense. As will be shown, the text deploys devices that undermine even its own strongest assertions. The casual style of Baumann’s prose obscures the extent to which his autobiography is an urgent telling of a story. Judith Butler distinguishes between telling a story about oneself and giving an account of oneself.65 Giving an account of oneself, as required in the context of a trial, demands the existence of a knowable, transparent self and the establishment of a causal relation between oneself and one’s act, a structure that echoes the syntactical relationships between subject, verb, and object. While the autobiography explicitly attempts to affirm the relationship between Baumann and his actions, in its formal realization, it acknowledges the impossibility of this relation and instead emphasizes the corporeality of guerrilla activism in a textual form that is arguably performative rather than constative.66 In other words, the text does not offer a constative description of a state of affairs that can be evaluated as true or false in epistemological terms. In this respect, Baumann’s text tells a story about himself in the face of the demand that is to come for an account of his life, since Baumann’s autobiography anticipates his inevitable capture and trial. Baumann was eventually found in London and extradited to West Germany in 1981. By the time he was caught, limitations had been reached on some of the charges he had faced. He served five years in

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prison for his participation in one bombing and two bank robberies.67 But Baumann’s story and the process of its telling are fraught with the inextricable limitations upon knowing oneself, and the story is itself a device that is complicit in ongoing subject constitution. This predicament inherent to accounting for oneself echoes the problem set out by de Man: “does the referent determine the figure, or is it the other way round: is the illusion of reference not a correlation of the structure of the figure, that is to say no longer clearly and simply a referent at all but something more akin to a fiction which then, however, in its own turn, acquires a degree of referential productivity?”68 Considered a traitor by some members of the guerrilla cells that he left behind and sought by the authorities to face charges, Baumann wrote his autobiography while living under a false identity, as I have noted. A reading of the autobiography that emphasizes the text as an exercise in self-production highlights the significance of this very critical moment in Baumann’s life as the temporally and spatially disrupted site of the text’s production.69 Mediating between several imagined reading audiences, and thus multiply emplacing, Baumann’s text reveals a struggle of articulation – a self-constituting project – from a polyphonic position. Not only does the text anticipate that its imagined reading audiences make incommensurable demands to which Baumann responds – the simultaneous avowal and disavowal of his life as an urban guerrilla fighter – but it anticipates that these imagined audiences issue their demands in different ‘languages’: official, unofficial, and familiar. In this respect, the text maintains an active dialogue with physically absent interlocutors whom Baumann can only constitute via his reconstruction of the past. Yet, what is at stake in Baumann’s text is far more than a straight instrumental attempt to intervene into how his activities will be constructed in the court of public opinion when he is captured and goes to trial, as the text embodies an ongoing struggle to participate in specific social relationships cut short by the constraints of a life of illegality. For instance, the narrative intermittently, yet implicitly and urgently, addresses a young Irish woman named Hella, whose fate at the hands of brd state authorities Baumann does not know. The text’s implicit address to Hella retroactively idealizes and designates what appears to have been the primarily casual sexual relationship

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that the two of them shared as based in love – with love being the alternative to terror that Baumann’s story ostensibly offers. Baumann situates the problem of violence within a generalized fear of freedom but, for him, freedom and love are intertwined. He sometimes even conflates them, referencing them interchangeably so that it is also the fear of love that leads to violence: “Today, I can see that – for myself – it was only the fear of love, from which one flees into absolute violence. If I had checked out the dimension of love for myself beforehand, I wouldn’t have done it.”70 Here, love is presented as already present in that past and, in that respect, this section of the narrative approximates a traditional but secular conversion narrative. Susanna Egan observes that these narratives tend to order experience from the vantage point of the autobiographer’s supposed conversion, which makes it possible to see the answer that was already there.71 This announcement and its appeal retroactively recast the past and render the present relatively bodiless in the grip of a feeling that in this section is cast as a motivating force (his fear of love led to his violence). This move marks a sharp contrast with the tactile concerns that thread through the balance of the text, with its emphasis on social practices, places, and bodies. Beyond the references (or, perhaps, invitations) to Hella, there are several appeals to the experiences of other former 2jm members, such as Heinz Brockmann and Ulrich Schmuecker. Brockmann was generally viewed as a traitor to the group for giving information to the police. The police allegedly threatened that his girlfriend Petra would disappear if he did not cooperate. Of this, Baumann insists, “No one is to blame for that; you really have to see it that way. Brockmann is not a traitor in the classical sense: he is really only a victim of circumstance.”72 For Baumann, Brockmann’s action is an instantiation of the affirmation of love over fear and violence. It is believed that Schmuecker was assassinated because he informed on the group. Baumann’s assertion is that Schmuecker was in over his head, and the group failed to recognize that. It would seem that he had little choice but to tell what he knew, and thus what ultimately happened to Schmuecker “really is murder, you have to see that.”73 The deployment of phrases such as “you have to see that,” which are frequent throughout this section, signal an informal address to

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former comrades of the movement. In this case, the text argues for recognition that the real and concrete situations in which Brockman and Schmuecker found themselves, in which they were assumed to have informed on the group, were fraught with tensions between competing values that did not fall so neatly along the lines between guerrilla actions and the violence of the system. In a sense, informing could be understood not necessarily as complicity with the system but as a way of attempting to come to terms with the real problems associated with the ontological structure of the self that the text presents to Baumann’s readers. This is a self that is torn; it must choose again and again, between freedom and love, on the one hand, and a violence that (despite itself) perhaps colludes with the values of the state, on the other hand. The urgency here indexes these real problems: the struggle between a newly found freedom that flings one into the dangerous unknown, against the call to return to the recognizable rhythms of an obedient and conforming life. Baumann’s text calls upon its readers (in this case, his former guerrilla cell comrades) to identify with the very real predicament that it assigns to Brockman and Schmuecker, to identify with them, indeed to identify not only with Brockmann and Schmuecker but with Baumann himself. This implicit identification is significant not only because Baumann recognizes his precarious situation in terms of the appearance of his betrayal of the group, but because he anticipates the concreteness of what will come in the future. His appeals anticipate the interrogations that he knows he will face when he is eventually captured – police interrogations that he worries he might not be able to withstand. While this connection is neither explicitly made nor elaborated in the text, Baumann’s identification with these two abandoned guerrilla figures is evident and yet disavowed. Significant also is the following comment in Baumann’s text with reference to the Schmuecker assassination: “They threatened me with that too, but I just laughed at it. But a guy like Schmuecker, they just wrap him up and do him in.”74 Here, the text seems to insist: “‘I’ am not innocent and naïve like Schmuecker, so I am not at risk as he was.” Nevertheless, Baumann’s text attempts to say everything that someone like Schmuecker presumably did not have an opportunity to

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say in his own defence. Baumann’s text answers to the risk of erasure, whether erasure through the barrel of a gun or erasure through symbolic dislocation. Baumann was the subject of severe internal group criticism from k1 for some of his actions, such as the approximately one hundred tire slashings that he did in 1968, for which he was incarcerated for nine months. Members of k1 did not consider Baumann’s spontaneous tire slashings to be serious actions, and, at least in Baumann’s interpretation, the slashings were equated with the Frankfurt department store fire committed by Proll, Söhnlein, Baader, and Ensslin in 1968. k1 attributed the Frankfurt action to “psychological failure” and a sublimated desire to be caught.75 More significantly for Baumann, however, was the reaction after the publication of a media interview with Der Spiegel in which he participated while in hiding. One aspect of the interview that drew negative responses was discussion of the death of his close friend Georg von Rauch in a shootout with police, for which Baumann was present. In the interview account that he gave, Baumann stated that von Rauch shot at police first: [A] great many people thought badly of me – that is, the left did … I have to say today that I no longer know who first pulled the trigger. I believe it was Georg, but after all the confusion, I really can’t remember anymore. In any case, one thing I find really shitty is that the left simply begins with the assumption that Georg didn’t pull the trigger at all. The left has made a real Christian martyr – a real Christian humanity trip is what is coming off. The guy wasn’t like that, he was the kind of guy who said, “of course we’ll shoot.” We had the gun with us so that we wouldn’t be arrested anymore. That’s why we had the things with us, and not so we could stand there with our hands up and be shot down in a row.76 The Spiegel interview was published with a title addressed directly to Baumann’s former fellow anarchists: „Freunde, schmeißt die Knarre weg“ (“Friends, Throw Away the Gun”). In the interview, which was

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heavily altered for publication, Baumann insists that he has not carried a gun for a year and a half. In parts of the autobiography, particularly in the last two sections, Baumann affirms that the gun must be put down and that he has chosen something else: love. Yet, this turn represents a sharp contradiction with other parts of the text where violence is treated quite differently. Noting this oscillation, William C. Donahue has characterized Baumann’s call to put down the gun as “the requisite ‘deniability’ for the pro-violence discourse that surrounds it.”77 But this incongruent appearance of violence in the text seems not to be the result of a consciously tactical move. On the one hand, the violence is normalized, justified, exalted, or described in a semi-instructional mode: “I’d rather shoot first, that’s clear now. If the gallows is smiling at you at the end anyway, then you can fight back beforehand.”78 On the other hand, the contents of the text are neutralized or contradicted by the concluding pages that insist: “I don’t have a message.”79

Avowing the Unspeakable

I did it and it’s all right. Even the worst experiences were right in their time, because otherwise, it wouldn’t have come to this point. That was your road, and you had to walk it.80 –Bommi Baumann

Despite paradoxical moves constituted by the explicit disavowal of the gun, together with the insistence that there is no message contained in Wie alles Anfing, there is something else at work in the text. There are several points in which its tone shifts into an instructional mode of discourse that advises readers on matters such as movement throughout the city after an action, covert communication with collaborators or sympathizers, the construction of a bomb, and behaviour in prison. It also addresses organizational issues, such as the role of ideology, the division or specialization of labour, and the lines of authority within a guerrilla cell; and it gives general advice to the guerrilla fighter. This final section will elaborate on a few of these

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instructional dimensions of the Baumann text to illustrate that it provides the contours of an instructional manual for the urban guerrilla fighter, despite its explicit renouncement of terror in exchange for the power of love. The Baumann text tells its readers that, for the individual urban guerrilla fighter, the development of experience precedes the development of the necessary instincts: “It is precisely this instinct for doing the right thing unconsciously that’s actually the highest form you can reach in this guerrilla business, developing instincts like an animal in the jungle.”81 The means to attain this level of unconscious instinct are material and cannot be translated into words “because it is a concrete experiential value which cannot be made in any other way.”82 For instance, Baumann stresses the way in which carrying a weapon changes a person. He insists that the weapon – a gun – has its own dynamics. The person who carries a weapon is changed by it, obtains a sense of security and control, and can act spontaneously even in chaotic situations. The gun, rather than ideas, imposes upon the body’s movements and gestures. The body is choreographed relationally with objects and in spaces. Incidentally, with this, Baumann has described the strict meaning of the concept of emplacement, which connotes the relational placements of guns and artillery to facilitate the optimal communications between agents, objects, and the battlefield in warfare. Hence, the capacities of fighters and weapons are enabled not in their discrete properties but in their distributions with respect to each other. Hence, the subject who carries a gun does not move or act in the same way as it would without the gun. The guerrilla and the gun together produce a different subject, with different capacities and different movements. In the text, the emphasis on spontaneity and the use of space by weaving together one’s movements with the particularities of surroundings remains crucial. Baumann notes that a getaway after a bank robbery is better made on public transport (by bus, for instance) than by automobile – at least in the context of coordinated counter-revolutionary security measures. If travelling by automobile, the tactical move, according to Baumann, is to act in unexpected ways, to look colourful rather than camouflaged: “I’d get caught in a street barricade, and always get through, even with stolen cars or a motorcycle, because they said, a bird like that

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would never have anything to do with this. So I always got through. Once, the car was brightly painted, and on the back, in big letters was written: ‘Careful, Dynamite Transporter!’ And there really were bombs in it, and they just looked at it and said, ‘Dynamite Transporter! – Idiot. Just go on.’ And it really was one!”83 Remarkably, Baumann’s advice on the getaway starkly contradicts much of the instruction found in Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla that had informed many West German urban guerrillas. In terms of organizational instruction, the role of ideology in a guerrilla formation is of central significance to the concerns of Wie alles Anfing. Baumann’s text eschews the adoption of an ideological framework because Baumann argues that it leads to dogmatism and ritualistic practices. Rather, he privileges the openness that was characteristic of earlier collective formations that had preceded the rise of the urban guerrilla, such as the Roaming Hash Rebels. The collective experience, marked by spontaneous actions, did not call for explanations that attempted to frame actions for consistency with perceived public opinion. Further, the formation that Baumann argues for is more likely to be impervious to counter-revolutionary measures by state agents because it can neither be pinned down nor predicted. Indeed, the several incarnations of groups within which Baumann participated that stemmed from his early association with k1 were more resilient to the generalized state theatre of court proceedings than the raf was over several so-called “generations,” particularly the first generation that was active over the same time period that Baumann’s text covers. The raf assumed a much more defined ideological orientation that was disseminated in a relatively organized program of articulation in the distribution of detailed and frequent communiqués, usually written by Meinhof. Significant to the problem of ideology that Baumann raises is the practice of naming and renaming guerrilla cells, even when their membership had not changed. Baumann discusses the way in which the constant renaming of the group confused state authorities, who thought that they were battling a small army of cells, when in fact there may not have been more than ten people involved overall. More importantly, however, the cell names allowed for different iterations

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of collective struggle, and each name was answerable only to the question or concrete emplacement that had initiated it. The emergence of each new name and set of dynamics made a new conscious activity possible, but without a forced adherence to a structuring framework of approach or to set instrumental ends. For instance, the Roaming Hash Rebels were interested in raising the political consciousness of other drug users, especially those with addiction. Somewhat influenced by the work of the Black Panthers in the United States, the Hash Rebellion was concerned with trying to politicize the drug users and others who were criminalized but without determining in advance the contours of that political realization: “So we began making an analysis and laying out problems and heightening contradictions, where they were concrete for people day by day in confrontation with the police, so that we couldn’t say, abstractly, ‘now you have to fight as urban guerrillas.’”84 Another illustrative point in the instruction of organizational matters is that the specialization of labour within a cell should be avoided. Each participant should learn everything, from breaking into locks and falsifying documents to building bombs. It is important to note that the mode of address in this discussion changes so that the text takes on a quick tempo, moves into second person, and directly interpellates the reader: “You’re a specialist in every field. You’re a planner as well as an executor; you can do it as well as put it together, and you know how to conduct it; you know how to handle radio, you can change radios into police transmitters. You learn everything, you must know everything.”85 Noting that present-tense, second-person narration tends to forge complicity between narrator and reader,86 this mode of discourse not only assumes a new relationship with the reader, but, in its content, dissembles the affirmation of love in the either/or choice between love and terror. It is unclear what has happened to the choice. Has the either/or of love and terror been re-invoked for deliberation again or has Baumann refused the alternative altogether in a move of radical negativity?87 This new mode of narrative that interrupts the text also suggests that it can be read instructionally and it exhibits characteristics of a manifesto. In the construction of their prose, manifestos generally

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contain stark imagery and consist of striking word combinations that seek embodied responses in the reader. Claude Abastado notes that a manifesto “produces a flagrant commanding relationship … between its producer and his or her audience.”88 At the level of content, manifestos produce scathing and sharp characterizations of the state of conditions pertaining to their subject matter and pose a challenge to widely accepted goals or aims, usually in “combative” language.89 Manifestos usually operate in a mode of outrageousness and abandon in terms of their claims and what they advocate, which facilitates the imagining of alternative futures that are only negatively and provisionally described. In this respect, the emphasis is on inciting action but not on providing a program of aims.90 The form of the manifesto often performs the very approach that it advocates – the manifesto tries to realize the approach in its own construction. Finally, and most significantly, a manifesto offers an intervention into subjectivity itself – that is, the manifesto tries to create a space for the emergence of a new type of human subject freed of the constraints that it critiques, and the reader is in some way invited to occupy that new space. These characteristics are all evident to various degrees of realization in, for instance, Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince,91 Marx’s and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, and F.T. Marinetti’s “The Futurist Manifesto.” With regard to Wie alles Anfing, the positing of a new space of subjectivity, accompanied by repeated invitations to the reader to occupy that space, is subtly achieved, since it deploys devices that issue invitations to the reader that could be understood as interpellative, even if this is inconsistent throughout. Since Abastado has identified multiformity as a central characteristic of manifestos, and Berg has noted their plurality and co-occurrence with other textual forms, Yanoshevsky observes that these interventions dramatically enlarge the genre.92 As a whole, Baumann’s text is very multi-modal. It can be read as instructional, addressed to an ongoing and emerging generation of guerrillas, but it is simultaneously marked as an autobiography, a confession, or an apology. Parts of How It All Began imitate the structure of the guerrilla manuals imported from the South and mined for instruction by the West German urban guerrilla movement.

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Marighella’s minimanual, for instance, defines the urban guerrilla, strictly demarcating the aims of the guerrilla from those of the criminal. While it emerges out of the context of Brazil and initially situates its instruction to these conditions, it presents the characteristics and tactics of the urban guerrilla in general terms that could be transferrable to other urban contexts. The manual describes urban guerrilla tactics and the significance of the elements of surprise, knowledge of the terrain, mobility and speed, guerrilla security, and communications, both internal and external. As observed in the case of Baumann’s text, neither an evaluation of current conditions nor a presentation of an alternative future is present. The primary aim of the document is the elaboration of tactics and coordination of guerrilla warfare. One of the latter chapters of Baumann’s book is subdivided into categories that echo those of urban guerrilla manuals such as Marighella’s. It includes “contact with the population,” “informants,” and “support through so-called sympathizers.” The text, therefore, provides instruction in regard to a number of practical problems inherent to guerrilla practice. Looking at the Baumann text from this point of view, it is evident that state authorities would attempt to curb the book’s distribution. In the better-known case of the French urban guerrilla Régis Debray, it was his own book Revolution in the Revolution? that was used as the primary evidence against him, contributing to a thirty-year-long prison sentence, as the prosecution used his book to support their charge that Debray was the intellectual author of the actions carried out by the Bolivian urban guerrilla movement. Hence, Baumann’s text both offers his own incriminating evidence of incitement to the state in its instructional components and constructs a testimony in advance of his trial to come. Remarkably, and in the spirit of the spontaneous “blues way of life” that Baumann advocates, Wie alles Anfing deploys a call for the production of new forms of struggle and new values, which Baumann refuses to define in advance by setting out objectives for an instrumental program. Instead, he leaves the task open to the reader to realize in praxis. Rather than affirming the choice of love over terror (or violence), Baumann’s How It All Began, despite itself, locates violence in ordinary, routine life. Rather than to justify or to disavow, its focus on the

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body choreographs the guerrilla’s aesthetic posture. It turns out that it all began in places, relationships, practices, and habits – including that of violence, which Baumann casts as a routinized bodily gesture in the fabric of everyday life preceding his taking up of arms. The seeming coherence of this text unravels as it continues to explode in fractional operations; origin story, announcement, documentation, explanation, appeal, apology, instruction, and so on arise in part because, as I have noted, the text is called upon to make a polyvocal address to incommensurable audiences. But it also engages a radical negativity that annihilates this either/or opposition in mutual erasure of explicit pronouncements, on the one hand, to choose love and put down the gun, and, on the other hand, unexpected irruptions such as: “That was your road, and you had to walk it”;93 “I don’t have a message”;95 and “I’d rather shoot first, that’s clear now.”96 Despite its appearance in a recognizable genre of autobiography, the Baumann text has an ambiguous status. To the extent that it witnesses and confesses, it renders palpable traces of a shadowy outline of the emergent guerrilla, as it stands as a resource for providing details of how it all began. It emplaces the guerrilla body and explicitly elaborates the guerrilla turn as a sensorial-aesthetic predicament, but its force as an instance of guerrilla aesthetics resides in its shattering form that fails to cohere in its initial declaration of choice and calls into question what kind of activity the reader engages in while holding this text in hand.

Chapter 4

From Consensus to Dissensus – Gerhard Richter’s Painterly Utterance In the winter of 1989, fifteen of Gerhard Richter’s paintings were exhibited for the first time at a small museum, Haus Esters, in the city of Krefeld. In shades of grey, Richter’s cycle of oil paintings October 18, 1977 echoes several photographic images that are each singularly immediately recognizable to many Germans. Even as fragmented images of a much larger whole, each image has the signifying force to denote a stark and protracted period in German postwar history. Even a blurry, black-and-white image of bookshelves has the potential to instill again a feeling of shock that brings, for some viewers, corporeal echoes of the German Autumn in the fall of 1977 and afterwards. But this does not exhaust the force of the cycle. For critics, the interpretive potential for October 18, 1977 is vast and far-reaching. The interpretive excess extends the initial perception of the cycle’s illegibility when it was first exhibited.1 For some commentators, the cycle raises haunting ideological questions or makes interventions into unresolved aspects of the Stammheim prison deaths;2 for others, it exceeds the historical period of postwar protest and the German Autumn to anticipate Germany’s reunification.3 Some critics find in it redemptive ruminations,4 while others again wonder if it is a confession of sympathy with the raf.5 These fifteen paintings provoke contradictory readings and sensations from their viewers, but Richter has refused to explain them and to fix finally the incessant flow of their potential rendering of meaning. Instead, he has given only gestural responses, offering in one instance: “It is impossible for me to interpret the pictures. That is: in the first place they are too emotional; they are, if possible, an expression of a speechless emotion.”6 In what follows, I will gather different readings of, and resonances with, the cycle to argue that October 18, 1977 opens up an experiential site for what Jacques Rancière has called “dissensus”:

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“an aesthetic rupture [that] arranges a paradoxical form of efficacy, one that relates to a disconnection between the production of artistic savoir-faire and social destination, between sensory forms, the significations that can be read on them and their possible effects.”7 Thus, regardless of whether Richter was speaking personally when he suggested that the paintings express “a speechless emotion,” the expansive and explosive response to this cycle of paintings in Germany and abroad suggests the presence of a heterogeneous public emotion of incongruent sense that the paintings perform. While I do not see in Richter’s cycle an enactment of negativity, I argue that it has opened up a site of aesthetic rupture that rips the paintings’ mediated source images from the anaesthetic repertoire of news reportage – which had for so long granted them a hegemonic signification of terror. Further, the October cycle aesthetically detonates them in painterly utterances that not only amplify their potential for heterogeneous and conflicting significations but posit new distributions between things and meanings in different emplacements without anchoring a preferred reading. By refusing his own authority to define, and thus to rationalize, the meaning of October 18, 1977 as an act to be justified, Richter enables the October cycle itself, as well as each curatorial enactment of it, to perform multiple emplacements and effects. Rather than the meaning of the cycle being contained in the apparent referential contents of its source photographs (the cycle is an entity separate from the source photographs), it brings into each exhibition echoes of the German Autumn – not just echoes of it as it occurred, but also as it has been performed in historical, popular, and artistic forms. The discussion that unfolds here is likewise indebted to these forms, which attempt, in their detail, to give an approximation of the experiential texture of a public feeling attuned to the discursive productions of the German Autumn that are imperative to the force that these fifteen blurry and grey paintings have continued to have since they appeared in 1989.8 With the inclusion of some of these discursive productions, I seek to provoke an imagination of an everyday life peppered with ‘wanted’ posters of ordinary youth and intruding news stories of a murder by houseguests, hostage-taking, hijacking, and prisoner deaths, while acknowledging that Richter’s cycle continues to

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circulate beyond the geographical, historical, and cultural contexts to which it is partially anchored.

October 18, 1977 – A Synecdoche for a Long Autumn

The title of Richter’s cycle gives to its viewers a temporal marker – the date that the bodies of West German urban guerrillas were found in their prison cells – but the cycle carries with it a much longer historical duration for which this date is a synecdoche. As a historical marker, the German Autumn refers to a heightened political turmoil, intensified state surveillance and paranoia, and a number of deaths, all sensationally covered in mass-mediated contexts, that accompanied and followed a successive cluster of events. These events, characterized by rapid moves and countermoves between guerrillas and the state, could be said to have had their beginning in the summer of 1977. In July 1977, three members of the raf amicably gained entry into the home of Jürgen Ponto, the Chairperson of the Board of the Dresdner Bank. Suzanne Albrecht, a member of the raf, knew the Ponto family, as Ponto was godfather to her sister. Albrecht, whose political associations were unknown to the Pontos, appeared at the door along with two companions and presented roses to Ponto and his wife. The three guerrillas were thus invited into the home. Reportedly, their plan was merely to kidnap Ponto so that he could be used to negotiate the release of prisoners. When the plan went awry, the guerrillas killed him instead. This action elicited internal criticism from imprisoned raf members, who saw the botched kidnapping as evidence of the above-ground guerrillas’ incompetence.9 This action was followed by the failed but spectacular rocket launcher attack on the federal prosecutor’s office.10 These events set the stage for what was to come: a series of unrelenting guerrilla and brd state confrontations and escalations. First, there was the kidnapping of the president of the German Employer’s Association, Hanns Martin Schleyer, on 5 September. It must be noted that the state suspected this attack in advance. Schleyer was under state security guard at the time of his abduction, with armed guards following behind his chauffeured Mercedes in an unmarked vehicle.11

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Schleyer’s convoy stopped suddenly when it encountered a baby pram in the middle of the street.12 Unbeknownst to the convoy, the baby pram had been strategically placed on the road by an raf commando force that had meticulously mapped out Schleyer’s daily travel route. The pram had served a double purpose. Not only did it disrupt the convoy and set security agents off-guard momentarily, it served as a discreet way to carry the weapons used to facilitate the hostage action. A massive shootout followed. Schleyer was drugged with a needle injection, dragged into a Volkswagen minibus, and whisked away by his captors. Second, Flight lh 181 from Mallorca to Frankfurt was hijacked by a breakaway section of the pflp on 13 October. The hijacking was organized in discussion with above-ground raf members and sought the release of raf prisoners and a substantial ransom in exchange for hostages.13 The aircraft made several stops for refuelling, while a special mission of federal security officials and agents specially trained in emergencies, gsg 9, was already mobilizing an intervention and had flown out of Germany.14 Out of fuel and facing blocked runways at multiple airports, the hijacked plane made its final landing in Mogadishu. After a long delay and the pretense of negotiations with West German officials, the special unit gsg 9 successfully stormed the plane, killed all but one of the hijackers, and saved the hostages.15 In Germany, it was late at night on 17 October when the rescued passengers were leaving the plane. Just after gsg 9 reported their mission successful to the home state, the clock hit midnight. It was 18 October 1977 – the date of the third event that marks the period known as the German Autumn: the alleged suicides of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe in Stammheim-Stuttgart in the very early hours, long before sunrise, of the 18th. Curiously, the alleged suicides all occurred just after it would have been reported that the hijacking had failed. Even more curiously, the simultaneous deaths occurred while the prisoners were under a complete contact ban put in place as one of the state’s ad-hoc emergency measures deployed under section 34 of the Criminal Code after Schleyer was abducted. A special law was quickly passed and came into effect at the beginning of October to support the already enacted contact ban for raf prisoners.16 The law

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enabled a ban on prisoner contact with each other and with the outside world, including legal counsel, for up to thirty days. The fourth event was the discovery of Schleyer’s body. In retaliation for the raf prisoners’ deaths, Schleyer had been executed on 19 October, after forty-three days of captivity. These events culminated in the period known as the German Autumn; it was marked by an ever-intensifying fear, reticence, and uncertainty that covered the brd then and for some time to come. While the German Autumn is sometimes referred to as ‘the hot autumn,’ the film Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn), a pastiche of individual contributions from several prominent German filmmakers (including Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder) that was produced in the immediate aftermath of the Stammheim deaths and the killing of Schleyer, deploys tropes of winter-like frost throughout. The film depicts a deep chasm between the bodies of governance and those who are governed, since the overwhelming sense of fear – fear of being suspected, fear of proximity or association, fear of speech – is palpable across the contributed productions. As Liselotte Eder remarks in the film, “You just don’t know, in the current situation of hysteria, how something you say can be used against you. And that’s why I think I wouldn’t encourage anyone to talk.”17 Heinrich Böll’s written contribution to Deutschland im Herbst, which was directed by Volker Schlöndorff, offers a satirical treatment of mass media in the context of the period of surveillance and heightened efforts to contain not only sympathy for the raf’s motives or politics but, as some would argue, the young West German left in general. This was a period of state censorship and widespread scrutiny. An ethos of fear was fostered by counter-insurgent institutional and policing measures, but self-censorship was just as, or more, effective than the official initiatives of the Ausgrenzung (efforts to contain the terrorist threat). The Böll-Schlöndorff piece is set in a meeting in which broadcasters consider pulling the plug on a scheduled television broadcast of a recently completed production of Sophocles’s tragic play Antigone. The debate is structured by the assumption that broadcasting the play will spark associations between Antigone and her sister Ismene, and Gudrun Ensslin and her sister. Ensslin’s sister fought for the burial of the three raf members in a cemetery in

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Stuttgart, despite public outcry. The broadcasters wonder: Could this classical play be perceived as an incitement to terror? Their question, although couched in terms of concern for impressionable youthful audiences, raises the spectre of the frozen terrain of the brd during the German Autumn that threatens the accusation of sympathy and thus ensures self-censorship. Hence, amidst the breadth of so many vivid associations, the title for Richter’s cycle of paintings, October 18, 1977, does not neatly signal a specific referent and brings with it heavy and fractional symbolic weight. Richter’s approach to the October works involves painting from photographs already in existence for purposes other than pictorial reference. In this case, the model photographs had already been in mass circulation through various media for more than a decade. Richter’s October 18, 1977 references several well-known press photographs of first-generation raf figures as well as recognizable sites at which the events that culminated in the German Autumn unfolded. Thus, a process of mass media reiteration in which these images were key instruments made familiar the scenes and figures that the paintings appear to denote. A portrait of Ulrike Meinhof called Youth Portrait (Jugendbildnis) is based on a posed photograph taken before her move underground; nevertheless, it would be highly recognizable to German spectators. On the one hand, portraits of Meinhof had been frequently published or shown on television during the two years that she was sought by the police in connection with her participation in the armed freeing of Andreas Baader. The accidental shooting of Georg Linke, an employee of the Deutsches Zentralinstitut für soziale Fragen (German Central Institute for Social Questions), meant that those suspected of participating in the action thereafter faced charges of attempted murder. On the other hand, Meinhof had been a recognizable public figure well before she became illegal. As a journalist and editor for konkret, a political and cultural magazine in West Germany, Meinhof was often invited to participate on panels addressing various political topics hosted by news and current events television programs. She was a dynamic and articulate speaker who stood out in panel discussions for making sharp and critical commentaries.

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Her presence and speech stood in vivid contrast with the other more stylistically and ideologically conservative panel guests usually invited to participate. Further, Meinhof was well-respected enough as a journalist and commentator that her screenplay Bambule (roughly translated as Riot), which addressed the poor treatment of young girls in state care, had been commissioned by a public broadcaster. After backing this production with both human and financial resources to its completion, the broadcaster pulled the television play just prior to its airing. Only days before the program’s scheduled air date, Meinhof made what appeared to be a sudden and incomprehensible leap from her increasingly promising middle-class life to that of a fugitive when she jumped out of the window along with Baader and ran to a waiting getaway vehicle. Instead of watching the anticipated broadcast of Meinhof’s television play, the public was treated to images of Meinhof on the evening news and on posters, announcing that she was wanted by authorities on suspicion of attempted murder. These posters were plastered throughout urban centres. The wanted posters promised a reward of 10,000 dm for information leading to Meinhof’s capture. Seen in the context of the sustained mass media attention that surrounded Meinhof’s biography and her sudden turn to a life in hiding until she was arrested in June 1972, Richter’s painting Youth Portrait contains, contrary to the sense of hope usually associated with such images, a sense of an abrupt end to a life not understood. In referencing the beginning of Meinhof’s adulthood, Youth Portrait succeeds in transgressing the borders of an individual’s biography by implicitly referencing not only the future in terms of the bitter and quick end to Meinhof’s life but a whole series of events and emotions that, on a collective level, challenged the hopeful discourses whispered within the young West German state that was wishing for recovery from the self-inflicted wounds sustained under the Third Reich. Three other paintings from the series – Dead (Tote), Dead (Tote), and Dead (Tote) – together share the same title and content. The three paintings are based upon a widely published press photograph, first appearing in the popular German magazine Stern in May 1976 when the shocking news of Meinhof’s sudden death was announced. They

4.1, 4.2, and 4.3 Tote (Dead) (1988), by Gerhard Richter

depict Meinhof from the shoulders up; dead on the floor of her cell, Meinhof had been cut down from a noose fashioned from a strip of towel. Distinguishable from each other by the size of the painting, the degree of proximity to the subject as suggested by the composition, and (to use a concept from photography) the depth of field (or focus) of the image, the paintings appear to make direct reference to the practice of photography, thereby perhaps staging a reversal of the aesthetics of the pictorialism of late-nineteenth-century and earlytwentieth-century photography, when some photographers explicitly sought to achieve a painterly perspective through the lens of a camera.18 Reaching back in time, Richter’s paintings Arrest 1 (Festnahme 1) and Arrest 2 (Festnahme 2) were produced from two press photographs of the Meins and Baader arrests that were carried out just outside of a garage in Frankfurt on 1 June 1972. Responding to a tip, authorities arrived at a garage to find two men inside. The two

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men were Holger Meins and Baader. Meins was a visual artist and young filmmaker who had attended the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin. Baader was, by all accounts, an unemployed ‘bad boy,’ intimidating in his presence and speech, yet charismatic. The police and federal border security authorities soon surrounded the garage and blocked the exit. Meins and Baader responded with laughter from within the garage; eventually, they fired their weapons at the police from within. A detective later reported that, from his vantage point through a window at the back of the garage, he could see that the two were smoking cigarettes, laughing, and waving their pistols around. The security agents and police were shocked that the two did not surrender. After preparing openings in a windowpane, the agents threw canisters of tear gas into the garage and demanded that the two men surrender. They then removed the obstacle at the exit to allow the two guerrillas out of the structure within which they had been trapped. Baader surprised the agents, however, by emerging from the garage with the tear gas canisters in his hands, which he threw at the police and federal agents. He then continued to enjoy his cigarette, as he and Meins situated themselves only partially within the opening to the garage, in such a way as to have cover from police fire but also to limit their exposure to the tear gas inside the garage. In the meantime, affected by the canisters that had been unexpectedly thrown back at them, the police and federal agents were forced into retreat temporarily before more gunfire was exchanged. When a sniper finally hit Baader in the right thigh, Meins surrendered to police and was arrested. Baader was found wounded on the garage floor.19 These arrests signalled to federal authorities a visible end to the terrorist threat. While it was the case that the events on the street depicted in two of Richter’s paintings would prove to be a turning point in the relationship between the raf and the West German state, with several other key arrests closely following, including those of Ensslin on 7 June and Meinhof on 15 June, it was by no means the beginning of the end. If anything, the image of this street, vacated except for the armoured vehicle from which authorities took down Meins at gunpoint, represents a change in the composition of the raf and the severity of its organized actions. The events on the street on

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1 June 1972 provided the hailing and subsequent birth of the so-called second-generation raf, heavily populated by members of the spk. Richter’s cycle of paintings includes three of Gudrun Ensslin after her arrest in a Hamburg clothing boutique. In these paintings titled Confrontation 1 (Gegenüberstellung 1), Confrontation 2 (Gegenüberstellung 2), and Confrontation 3 (Gegenüberstellung 3), Ensslin is dressed in prison-issued clothing. Each painting depicts a different photograph of Ensslin taken while in custody and each articulates a different level of visual distortion. By chance, the photographs that document Ensslin’s walk, as though on a fashion runway in her newly acquired prison attire, echo but reverse the stylistically fashionable presentation associated with, and expected of, members of the socalled Baader-Meinhof Gang in the 1970s. Photographs of Baader’s arrest, for instance, show him in style; even while suffering from a gunshot wound, he is clad in Ray-Ban sunglasses. Most distorted, however, is the painting Hanged (Erhängte), a reproduction of a photograph of Ensslin, five years after her arrest, dead from hanging in her cell. The paintings Man Shot Down 1 (Erschossener 1) and Man Shot Down 2 (Erschossener 2) show, from two only slightly different perspectives, Baader on the floor of his prison cell, dead from a gunshot wound to the head. Two other paintings accompany the previous two: one of Baader’s prison cell, Cell (Zelle), that is trained specifically on his book collection, rather than on his bed or the overall composition of the cell and its contents, and another of his record player, Record Player (Plattenspieler). Both of the latter paintings reference the original photographs that, on the one hand, reveal the sites in which the raf members allegedly hid the weapons used in their own destruction, since in order to show that suicide was a plausible explanation for the Stammheim deaths, prison officials needed to give an account of the presence and accessibility of the handguns that killed Baader and Jan-Carl Raspe. The cells, it had to be shown, harboured tools for the facilitation of inter-prisoner communication and weapons with which they could take their own lives. Investigators insisted that Baader’s record player had been internally modified in such a way that it could conceal the firearm used in his death.20 On the other hand, these two images implicitly offer visual documentation to support a well-worn theme in the long-standing debate

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and coverage about the Stammheim prisoners. That is, the circulated images of the cell and the record player perhaps unconsciously respond to the controversy over the conditions of detention for guerrilla prisoners and the intractable question of social isolation. In response to frequent charges from guerrilla prisoners, Rote Hilfe, other human rights organizations, and independent medical examiners, state authorities continually cited the lists of mass-mediated objects, including books and record albums, available to prisoners in their cells.21 As though in anticipation of the crescendo of mounting accusations and political fallout that was to come, these two photographic images attempt to have the last word (or last image?), so to speak, on the question of the prisoners’ treatment while incarcerated. This question is one that has still not been put to rest.22 At the time of their first appearance, however, Richter’s paintings Cell and Record Player usurped that last word asserted by the publication of the original photographs by re-accentuating the images and recirculating them almost twelve years later. The final painting in the series, Funeral (Beerdigung), reproduces on a large scale a photographic image of the combined funeral for Ensslin, Baader, and Raspe, at the Dornhaldenfriedhof in Stuttgart. Planning for the funeral for Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe was obstructed in numerous ways. To begin with, many service providers refused to assist with the funeral. Designating them as terrorists, many vocal members of the public and local government did not believe that the three raf members ought to be given a burial in the cemetery in Stuttgart. The very public and ferocious struggle over the burial of the raf members grounds a recurring thematic that both implicitly and explicitly runs through the independently produced parts that comprise the whole of the film Deutschland im Herbst. Again, Sophocles’s Antigone figures prominently, since family, friends, and supporters were concerned to secure a proper burial for Ensslin, Baader, and Raspe, while others insisted that the burial of terrorists would contaminate the cemetery. This echoes Antigone’s struggle over the burial of her brother Polynices, who is considered to be a traitor and therefore, according to the law, his body cannot be buried. Instead, Polynices’ body is left outside of the city wall to rot and to be consumed by scavengers. Antigone, of course, refuses the law and

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attempts to bury her brother despite Creon’s decree.23 The funeral of Ensslin, Baader, and Raspe depicted in Richter’s painting is so distorted that it can be identified as a funeral only within the situating context provided by the cycle of paintings as a whole, and only by viewers with knowledge of the events surrounding the raf phenomenon and the German Autumn. Early responses to October 18, 1977 took Richter himself as a subject of scrutiny.24 Much of the commentary and critique took Richter’s authorial position of these works to task by characterizing him as a bourgeois painter who exhibited these works in a venue characterized by bourgeois significance – architect Mies van der Rohe designed Haus Esters. Within a particular circle of debate, one of the central questions was not so much whether the subject material of October 18, 1977 was appropriate (although many insisted that it was not), but whether Richter, from his subject position, ought to have been the one to take up this topic. Some of the initial critiques were marked by suspicion of his motives, suggesting the presence of an unarticulated objective message. Is he a guerrilla sympathizer? Are

4.4 The German Autumn in Minor Spaces (2007), by Allen Ball and Kimberly Mair

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his paintings of dead guerrillas meant to introduce a position within the suicide-murder polemic regarding the Stammheim deaths? One commentator remarked, “There is a puzzling timidity to his approach. In the case of the prison deaths, no one really believes in the suicide hypothesis anymore, and as shocking, accusatory images, political images, the works arrive too late, too blurred.”25 From ad hominem responses to Richter’s work there eventually sprung several debates strictly concerning the role of painting as an artistic medium, with some critics even declaring the end of painting.26 Whether Richter’s approach to the works was a timid one, as the above-quoted critic asserts, is not a crucial question but a diversionary one. Certainly, Richter was neither the first German (or even foreign) artist to take the West German urban guerrillas as subject matter, nor was he to be the last to do so. Therefore, the works neither approach unexplored and unoccupied territory, nor can it be the case that the works “arrive too late,” when they take on a subject matter that continues to have collective resonance even long after Richter’s paintings first appeared. The subject of the raf was by no means alien to the production of art either inside or outside Germany.27 From within the brd, the late seventies saw the production of several cultural products that dealt rather explicitly with the raf and other radical left and anarchist movements of the period, as well as with the state’s counter-insurgent responses to the operations that these groups had undertaken. Many of these early representations were found in the medium of film, notably Deutschland im Herbst. The events of the fall of 1977 were still raw when the film was released, and all of the raging political fallout surrounding still unanswered questions – for instance, about how weapons would have gotten into Stammheim prison – suggested that the raf was not yet buried. Furthermore, the membership of the raf was regenerating and the group was active in various iterations until 1998. The figure of the West German urban guerrilla was, and continued to be, treated in literary works.28 Heinrich Böll’s novel The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum is of significance here due to its particular attunement to news media, which I consider to resonate with Richter’s refunctioning of mediated photographs through painting.

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With his novel, Böll focused in on the suffocating and distorting social and personal impacts that the mutually supportive relationship between the news media and state counter-insurgency measures imposed upon the population, particularly those associated with leftist politics. In his novel, published in 1975 (in the same year as the commencement of the Stammheim trial), Böll makes a controversial but apt observation with his suggestion that the news comes first and then reality follows, and thereby events come to fulfill pre-circulating media representations. In Böll’s novel, an ordinary young woman’s life is usurped by the mutually complicit complex of overzealous security officials and unrestrained media speculation that she is involved with a terrorist organization, until circumstances lead to a situation within which she kills a reporter and, in that act, realizes the very construction of her self that has been shaped by the press. Deutschland im Herbst and The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum constitute just two examples of early treatment in Germany of the events surrounding this topic, but the subject has continued, in each subsequent decade, to be addressed in art, film, and literature.29 Beyond the subject matter of October 18, 1977, the ways in which, on the one hand, the content is composed on the canvases, in the grey and blurry presentation of the images, and, on the other hand, the way in which Richter’s own comments frame the completed cycle, may provide hints as to why these paintings elicited the reactions that they did from critics.

Blurred Intonations, Multiple Emplacements

In order to approach Richter’s project, an observer encounters palpable tensions posed by the source material around the question of the identity of the paintings’ contents: Is the raf the main subject matter of the paintings? How are viewers to read the temporal accent placed on the cycle by its title? Is the structure of a cycle an intervention into time, space, or both? These and other questions have initiated rich terrains of interpretation, the products of which demonstrate that October 18, 1977 can perform multiple objects as subject matter,

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while enacting new emplacements. My reading emphasizes Richter’s approach of using press and forensic photographs that provide visual documentation of the arrests and deaths of the core, first-generation raf members. Hence, I speculate upon Richter’s ruminations on the press photograph as a form, and not primarily upon the raf itself. Can the rhythm of the cycle avoid making explicit reference to the practices of reiteration in the presentation of the raf and the broader social and historical context of their production within the mass media? Astrid Proll, a photographer and member of the early raf, who says that she could not even stand to look at the original press photographs of the dead, suggests that Richter’s paintings have emancipated these images from the mass media context.30 Regardless of Richter’s conscious intentions, about which he is reticent, the structure of the paintings appears to answer back to the press images that they echo, press images that would have been immediately recognizable to most spectators of the Richter paintings in Krefeld. The contours of the images present reverberations of the original photographs through the subtle repositioning of their subjects and the distortion of lines. Further, repetition is expressed within the very structure of October 18, 1977, with two series within the cycle, Man Shot Down and Dead, specifically articulating the reiteration of an image. Subtle topographical re-articulations of the image take liberty with the spatial perspective that the viewer can possess. In a sense, the audience becomes displaced as each spectator’s gaze moves, for instance, from Dead to Dead to Dead. Here, the spectator is treated to both a visual experience and a kinesthetic one, since, together in succession, the three paintings suggest movement.31 Together, they manipulate the perception of proximity and focus as the lines that distinguish objects progressively blur. Richter’s project seems to refunction the medium of painting to deliver a mimetic performance of the precision and calculation produced by a camera lens. Yet, perhaps what disturbed some commentators about this is that the paintings may have unsettled the assumed veracity of the familiar mass media photographs with which the public had become so familiar by refusing to proffer “the naive satisfactions of supposing that tangible ‘facts’ speak

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unequivocally for themselves.”32 Derek Sayer’s observations of the so-called “straight photography” of Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange led him to remark that “they can represent the real, in the double sense of standing in for it and presenting it anew, because and to the extent that they depart from it.”33 Hence, Sayer asserts that the image can serve as an alibi to reality not because it “reproduces it, but because it has supplanted it.”34 It is then worthwhile to note the curious status of the photograph as a form of documentation – as a material witness, so to speak. In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin observed that, with respect to their exhibition value, there is a sharp distinction between the reception of a painting and the reception of a photograph. He noted that, unlike a painting, a photograph is considered to be a valid contribution to a trial record because it is assumed to reflect the truth.35 According to Benjamin, this documentary status is conferred onto the photographic medium due to its capacity to dissect and to make visible those aspects of reality that are not readily accessible to the human eye unaided by advanced technological enhancements. Paradoxically, where the technological capacities of the camera are acknowledged for the greater precision of vision that they afford, the photographic medium contributes to the distortion and alienation of our senses that is characteristic of the rush and chaos of the modern age.36 The heightened sensorial affronts of urban and factory life that were associated with modernity were increasingly accompanied by technologies that gave the illusory appearance of reality, such as the mass entertainment technologies of the magic lantern and the diorama, the precursors to shopping malls and airplane interiors.37 These technologies of phantasmagoria produce total environments that manage and manipulate the senses and offer to the public a collective anaesthetic of distraction as a means of social control. Significant to Buck-Morss’s coupling of phantasmagoria and its anaesthetic force is its effect on memory. Following Benjamin, Buck-Morss observes that the technologically saturated environments of the modern city or factory, for instance, threaten the body by making sensorial contact with it. The body must shelter itself from the shock of multiple stimuli by

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dulling its capacity to feel everything to which it is exposed. Phantasmagoria delivers a reversal of this sensorial numbing by managing and flooding the senses in the illusory reality that it gives. Hence, the sensorium is flooded with particular sensations in compensation for the anaesthetic numbing of the organism and its senses. Together, phantasmagoria and the anaesthetic mode of perception in modernity are complicit in the repression of memory. While Richter’s October paintings suggest a phantasmagorical intervention into the viewer’s perception of space and time to the extent that several of the series internal to the cycle (Arrest, Confrontation, Man Shot Down, and Dead) represent action on either the part of the subject or the viewer, they also intervene with respect to the intonation of the image. Since all of these images have been circulated again and again as visual utterances expressed to the public, Richter’s use and manipulation of these reiterations repeat the images with new intonations, perhaps reversing the anaesthetic effects of the mass-mediatized cycling of these images in a phantasmagorical mode of exhibition that presents the recognizable images with distortions in a managed environment. In reference to speech, Mikhail Bakhtin emphasized the uniqueness of each utterance, even drawing strict distinction between two or more utterances constituted by the exact same words ordered in the exact same way.38 This differentiation is possible because, as Bakhtin observed, expression occurs not through the use of single words or even sentences. Rather, expressions are governed by genres. While it is the case that Bakhtin’s theory specifies the speech genre, I suggest that his distinction is relevant to the problem of media images and collective instruction39 as it relates to the reiteration of cultural images. The adoption of Bakhtin’s work on speech genres here does not represent a move that reduces the image to a model of language or speech. Rather, I argue that the significance of the sensory dimensions of expression is inherent to Bakhtin’s work, since he insisted upon a firm demarcation between utterances, on the one hand, and units of language (such as words and sentences), on the other hand. While he does not give particular and explicit attention to the inter-sensorial dimensions of his theory of speech genres (he only

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makes brief references to the extra-verbal dimensions), his demarcation necessarily rests upon an assumption of a point of contact that is not only emplaced temporally and spatially but is thoroughly sensorial. What is at stake in this distinction is the intonation (or meaning) of referential content. For Bakhtin, units of language, such as words or sentences, are neutral, do not belong to anyone, and are not addressed to anyone; they are merely tools for communication. In contrast, utterances (which most certainly make use of the units of language) are unique and assume a position in relation to that which has preceded them, actively anticipating a response. They are tied to, and shaped in relationship to, the sphere of communication in which they are expressed. Bakhtin’s suggestion that the same words said in the same order and in the same way twice constitute qualitatively different utterances provides a theoretical elaboration of the linguistic dimensions of the performance of emplacement. That is, utterances take shape depending on the full context (referring also to the corporeal dimensions of networks between objects, cultural conventions, built environments, and so on) of communication in which they are participating. In this respect, the generic form of the utterance is a constituent aspect of what is being conveyed, and recognition of that demands attention to the utterance as an “inseparable link” in the chain of communication.40 The concept of genres is productive to making sense of the way in which a project such as October 18, 1977 can effectively draw so closely from what may be considered an iconic press photograph. If it can be permitted that the images, articulated by the individual paintings, be considered utterances, then it is the case that they express those already recognizable utterances with different intonations. Rather than two utterances constructed out of the same words in different tones and different social contexts, these images offer to their viewers the same subjects – whether the sensational arrest of Meins (and those of the others, not depicted but signified), or the shocking, grisly, and puzzling discovery of the death of Baader on his cell floor – but these subjects are articulated by altered figures and modified lines. Further, the contextual conditions in which Richter’s October paintings are introduced are remarkably different from those

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in which the original photographs appeared. They are differentially emplaced both historically and in terms of their appearance in an art exhibit rather than through the reportage of the mass media. On the one hand, there is the historical context of the close of the 1980s, when the paintings were first exhibited, which was remarkably different from the previous decade that, with the hostage-taking, the failed Lufthansa hijacking, the Stammheim deaths, and the discovery of Schleyer’s corpse, culminated in the German Autumn. At the time of the appearance of Richter’s paintings, the central question in the brd was the impending reunification with East Germany. On the other hand, the sphere in which the paintings are presented also re-accentuates the images, despite their iterative pasts. In this particular case, the move from the context of reportage to that of an art exhibition represents a shift in genre and acts as an intervention into the productive possibilities offered by the presentation of these images. Therefore, even though the subjects denoted in the October paintings are the same as those in the original press photographs, the subjects that are signified cannot be the same, even when each photographic image is considered singularly with its painted counterpart. The effects of the paintings are multiplied and they slip out of grasp. As Richter himself observes, “Even when I paint a straightforward copy, something new creeps in.”41 Richter’s project as a totality sets up another problematic, as it seems to exceed the referential gesture towards individual images and instead responds to and mimics the repetitious practice of mass circulation as it relates to the presentation of these images in a series. As a cycle, these images, together, tell a story central to the collective instruction offered at a particular point in, by, and on postwar – and even ‘postwall’ – German history. In fact, Julia Hell and Johannes von Moltke find in October 18, 1977 an accent on postwall Germany. They note in Richter’s October paintings a new representation of German history after 1989, which opens “a new spatial dimension.”42 With October 18, 1977, they suggest that Richter embarked upon a transformative itinerary towards a ‘postwall’ Germany that would be characterized by a historical imaginary based upon a logic of return that simultaneously invites struggle over the controversial pasts and the working through of a new mise-en-scène of the East-West present.43 Their interpreta-

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tion that Richter’s cycle forecasts new time and space relations in a historical representation of a unified Germany rests explicitly upon the convention by which curators have tended to arrange the cycle for exhibition, opening with Youth Portrait and closing with Funeral,44 while Richter’s notes do not specify a particular ordering.45 This discrepancy does not undermine their observations, as curatorial practice and curatorial space are inextricable from the cycle’s ongoing processes of production and consumption in exhibition and through other media; hence, the author of an exhibited work is not confined to its artist, and different exhibitions make new arrangements of significance. Indeed, the emphasis on the cycle’s exhibition in their reading is consistent with the insights that the concept of emplacement brings to the consideration of Richter’s October paintings because it implicitly suggests that it is not a singular object, but rather many objects variously emplaced and emplacing in multiple fields. Further, regardless of the ordering of the paintings, support for Hell and von Moltke’s explicitly spatial reading resides in the inherently relational characteristics of the series as a cycle, rather than as a series of presumably static and potentially discrete objects. One of the striking aspects of Hell and von Moltke’s interpretation of the October cycle in exhibition is that its presentation, usually in an enclosed space, beginning with the portrait of Meinhof and ending with Funeral, provokes them to assert that the cycle is arranged as an Orphic journey that brings about Richter’s – as well as the viewer’s – descent into the world of the dead to seek his beloved. Drawing from the stronger presence of women than men in the cycle, and giving attention to the scopic structuring of the Confrontation series (depicting Ensslin) and the Dead series (depicting Meinhof), Hell and von Moltke suggest that “the men recede into the background.”46 This process sets up a confrontation between the visible and invisible aspects of the past and provokes consciousness of the presences and absences in the visual archive, since, as they note, texts and images constitute both personal and social memory: “Richter invites the viewer to follow Orpheus in his search for his beloved, to follow him to the crucial moment of the confrontation with the final image of her dead body. In these paintings, Meinhof’s dead body becomes increasingly invisible, thus concluding the scopic arc with a disturbance of

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vision: the Orphic gaze fails at the sight of the beloved woman’s dead body. The cycle’s Orphic space stages an artist’s reflection on the very act of artistic production in the face of catastrophic events.”47 While I shall bracket for now the direct references to the myth of Orpheus, to which I will return below, I want to stress again how this reading of the cycle depends as much upon its curatorial renderings as it does on its painterly production. Some of the key aspects of the curatorial enactment that redistribute objects, making the cycle into an intervention into a postwall imaginary, include the ordering and relations of scale between the paintings and the relation of scale between the cycle and the built spaces in which the cycle is exhibited. The emplacements of the curatorial production enable Hell and von Moltke to posit that these dynamic space and time relations are at work within the cycle. It is also of significance to the historical aspects of their reading that the cycle makes its first curatorial appearance early in 1989, nearing the historical threshold of a reunified Germany, and then goes into curatorial circulation in multiple sites thereafter. Incidentally, October 18, 1977 was mostly exhibited internationally in its first couple of years, predominately in the United States. Given the geographical circulation of October 18, 1977 in exhibition, Rainer Usselmann raises the problem of its public legibility with respect to its new audiences. Usselmann contends that, for German audiences, the October cycle’s legibility is tied to the mediation of the press photographs and is particularly dependent upon the aura of the paintings’ source materials that constitute a significant part of the national collective memory. For Usselmann, the canvases borrow the aura from the press photographs, which is then intensified “by staging them as unique masterpieces.”48 Usselmann’s main concern is centred upon the Museum of Modern Art (m o ma) purchase of October 18, 1977, which relocates the paintings within public memory and obscures further their legibility by giving them to a new audience for whom the photographic sources have no aura. Usselmann cautions that the cultural and national relocation of the October paintings threatens to consign them to a future emptied of historical significance unless the art institution offers supplemental textual support for their new viewers: “It seems as if these paintings can only

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make sense to a non-German audience when the exhibiting institution provides a second text, some sort of historical Überbau or superstructure. Only then can these impenetrable works be opened up and access to a concise reading be made available. As much as the initial reaction to the Oktober cycle may well be one of bafflement, the Überbau can easily provide the necessary support structure.”49 Usselmann’s point is a crucial, but perhaps unresolvable, one. Usselmann’s argument indexes the slippage of legibility to which, as an itinerant cycle of paintings that calls upon a collective cultural repertoire for its reception, October 18, 1977 may be vulnerable. While inculcation into an image repertoire that includes the raf is assumed in the cycle’s structure, I do not contend that the October cycle’s potential meanings are exhausted by the national historical processes culminating in, and constituting, the German Autumn, but I acknowledge the problem that provokes Usselmann’s concerns about a new audience’s reception of the paintings. Indeed, the cycle’s (il)legibility and its contestation in Germany, where the source images meet with recognition, is a crucial aspect of its significance. It provokes German viewers and critics to contemplate and debate its possible meanings, but the complexities of its legibility indeed run up against amplified interpretative obstacles when the audience is constituted within a different cultural repertoire of imagery and has no collective instruction that would readily give the uneven entry points available to German audiences. Yet Usselmann’s call for an accompanying textual supplement raises other considerations. Indeed, Robert Storr’s book published by the m o ma provides an elaborately detailed second text for the October cycle’s new North American home audiences, but it met with its own criticism. For instance, Hilton Kramer responded harshly to Storr’s publication by providing a critique that was both political and art historical in its mobilization. Kramer had publicly denounced the October cycle for commemorating terrorists. Critical of the raf’s politics, Kramer accused Richter of moral evasion. In response to Storr’s treatment of the cycle, Kramer’s accusation extends to Storr as well, describing his political analysis as exalting the crimes of the “Baader-Meinhof Gang” and his art criticism as only feigning

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attempts to trouble Richter’s supposed aestheticization of terrorism.50 Kramer cites the m o ma’s inclusion of Richter’s October cycle in the exhibition m o ma2000 and its publication of Storr’s book to support his insistence that the m o ma is guilty of giving a revisionist history of modernism by highlighting artworks that claim trendy or sensational political and social content at the expense of aesthetic questions in general and abstract art in particular. Therefore, Usselmann’s understandable call for supplemental textual interventions into the North American (and British) reception of the October paintings does not necessarily alleviate the conundrum of public legibility in this case. No matter the extent of sensitivity applied to such a project, any attempt to supplement the artwork will come up against a number of art historical, social historical, national, and political tensions already invoked in the cycle itself and already amplified through its global flows and its passage through spatialhistorical contexts, which are likewise in flux. The problem of satisfying a privileged legibility with supplemental didactic texts will be addressed in the following chapter with respect to Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Die RAF / Regarding Terror: The RAF Exhibition, which, although first exhibited in Berlin, Germany and then in Graz, Austria in 2005, was simultaneously critiqued for providing too much and not enough contextualization. Benjamin Buchloh’s observations, which explicitly highlight the art historical significance of October 18, 1977 for modern painting, indirectly point to troubling limits for a second-order supplemental text because his analysis calls attention to the social restrictions that he claims operated on the remembrance of the raf in the late 1980s when Richter’s cycle was first exhibited in Krefeld.51 Exacerbating the problem of cultural restraints surrounding raf remembrance, modern painting too, Buchloh insists, has been subject to a prohibition against the representation of historical subjects. Thus, he chastises contemporary German painting, such as polit-kitch, that ignores or attempts to neutralize the operation of this repression. At the same time, however, he insists that this prohibition of representation is an “irreversible historical reality.”52 He celebrates Richter’s October cycle because it confronts the prohibition directly by underlining

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“history’s own accessibility to itself.”53 By this, Buchloh specifically indexes history’s uneven accessibility due to repression and taboo; he is not primarily concerned here with mobilizing a broader historiographical observation. Indeed, Buchloh’s essay has a more specific task at hand, as it invokes an explicit political critique that equates the “to a large degree unproven” crimes of the raf with the “never even investigated” deaths of the Stammheim prisoners.54 Buchloh’s main argument about the October cycle, however, is an art historical one: October 18, 1977 deploys painting itself “to transform this power of repression into the question of its very representability.”55 For him, the cycle operates as a cipher for memory that has been disallowed or repressed. Eric Kligerman observes in October 18, 1977 another kind of intervention into memory, as he elaborates how it acts as a screen to “incite the spectator to recall a censored history embedded in the artworks.”56 Acknowledging that, in the 1960s, Richter had tried to paint photographs from concentration camps but could not do it, Kligerman draws upon Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s concept of transgenerational hauntings in his analysis of Richter’s painting practice to argue that a transgenerational memory of the Holocaust is encrypted in the October paintings. Kligerman then casts the cycle as a screen for twentieth-century traumata blurring two moments of censored memory in German history.57 With the emplacement that Kligerman gives to the cycle when he takes into account Richter’s struggle with the concentration camp photos, the synecdoche of the date 18 October 1977 is granted yet another layer of extension. If the cycle performs different objects with new emplacements, what then ought to be included in the contextual support structure for October 18, 1977? As, in different ways, both Buchloh and Kligerman raise the spectre of troubled memory – memory that is actively banished or subject to trauma, respectively – perhaps what is at stake is not so much what the cycle means but what kind of device it might be in collective instruction.58 To put it another way, what kind of public memories might it make? As Sayer has noted, “our memories are not the things we remember” but “merely a trace, existing wholly in the realm of the signifier, which has always already gone through that

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transformative alchemy” of replacement.59 If we listen to Richter, what is left over is a ‘speechless emotion,’ but this unspeakable emotion matters, even if it cannot be explained, described, or known. Much like the public story told in popular media and marked by Freudian parapraxis, represented by gaps, silences, lapses in memory, mis-speakings, or slips of the pen, Richter’s October 18, 1977 expresses its own fissures and absences. This is so not only because one cannot help but ask: Why this image and not that one? Rather, the sense of burial is structurally inherent to the October cycle in what has been painted over or left out. That is, Richter’s cycle makes present the absences of paintings that he actually produced but left out of the cycle. These exclusions include two other incarnations of Hanged, one other of Man Shot Down, and a painting of the much circulated and shocking photograph of Holger Meins, six feet tall but a mere ninety-two pounds, taken after his death in 1974 by starvation after participation in the prison hunger strikes. The painting of Meins and some of the other works were overpainted but, as Storr observes, in a way that left traces behind: “[B]eneath the surface … lie layers that are not ‘underpainting’ in the traditional sense but the intact archeological sediment of deliberately obscured pictures. Their cancellation is part of the meaning of the finished abstract work insofar as finding new ways to make images visible – or invisible – is at the heart of Richter’s enterprise.”60 These images do more than index a set of historical events or figures, as an innocent operation implied by the word ‘representation’ would suggest. Rather, the paintings as a cycle point to the performative character of iterative practices of representation; they do not reflect – or give again – an existing state of affairs, but instead make one (or many). The cycle makes meaning into a problem that exceeds and confounds any consensus that could be anchored in the spheres of either exhibition or reportage. Kaja Silverman’s elaboration of October 18, 1977, while grounded in the formal study of Richter’s painting practice, explicitly mobilizes it beyond either of these spheres as an instrument of universal humanistic recognition that can be founded upon our finitude. Finitude, Silverman remarks, connects all living beings to each other and, because it imposes beginnings and endings upon iterations of being, it is what reserves space for others. Paradoxically, Silverman notes,

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our finitude is “the most narcissistically injurious of all the qualities we share with others,”61 especially in a relatively individualist-centred Western culture. As Hell and von Moltke did earlier, Silverman draws upon Ovid’s Metamorphosis, specifically its myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, to structure a sustained meditation to posit the existence of a spatial and temporal oceanic desire for wholeness to which she challenges readers to acknowledge and respond. Hence, while Hell and von Moltke examine the relation of space and time in Richter’s cycle with respect to a ‘postwall’ Germany, Silverman’s analysis turns to a more universal, or at least Western, humanist reading. To accomplish this, Silverman repeatedly uncovers the implicit persistence of the Orphic myth in cultural formations to find it residing at the core of the Western psyche. In brief, the story tells us that, after his love Eurydice dies, Orpheus entreats the gods in Hades to allow him to bring her back. They permit it under the condition that he not look back at her as they embark on their travel out of the underworld. Nearing the end of their journey, Orpheus is overcome by his desire to look back at Eurydice. When he turns around and casts his gaze upon her, she is pulled back into the depths of Hades. Forced to absorb death’s concreteness, Orpheus struggles thereafter; unable to confront the finitude of his life, he disavows it “by feminizing it, and since this projection renders women repugnant to him, he transfers his desire to young men.”62 Among the many iterations of the Orphic myth that Silverman’s project explores is Richter’s October cycle, especially as she finds it relationally constituted with other works in Richter’s oeuvre, including paintings from Atlas as well as paintings of his daughter Betty. Considering the production of these paintings relationally, Silverman’s main emphasis is on the status of analogy in Richter’s work, which is grounded first in his use of the photographic source, itself having an analogical quality. The analogy that Silverman detects in Richter’s photo paintings, having noted that these paintings invite their viewers to see double, presents a resemblance of two terms without privileging one over the other. Richter’s analogies, Silverman observes, are analogies of profound indifference; yet she encourages readers to recognize that the analogies are emotional, as Richter speaks of grief with respect to the October paintings. Their indifference, Silverman

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observes, is one of neither/nor thinking that finds its expression in the blurry greys that tend toward resemblance, not opposition.63 With respect to the photographic referents of the paintings’ source materials, Richter’s indifference takes shape in marking the resemblances rather than oppositions between generations, state apparatuses and their disciplined or incarcerated subjects, perpetrators and victims, and East and West. This indifference, Silverman insists, may invoke an oceanic feeling in which the viewer can find resemblance and interdependency with Meinhof or Ensslin: “regardless of the order in which we look at the fifteen paintings in October 18, 1977, they show these two women to be flesh of our flesh and skin of our skin. They also teach us that our own capacity for destruction is as limitless as theirs.”64 While Silverman’s biographical and relational readings of this constellation of Richter’s paintings – such as those of his daughter Betty, the October paintings, and his self-portrait series Six Photos, as well as paintings based upon the concentration camp and pornographic photos from Atlas – are substantive, perceptive, and brought into sharp dialogue with Richter’s notes and interview responses about these works, the larger theoretical landscape upon which these readings are mobilized places a rather heavy burden on them, no shorter than that of a universal redemption for humankind made possible by the production of new analogies: “Our resistance [to acknowledging affinities] strengthens the link between us and our predecessors, since what we call ‘history’ has been one long refusal to open the Book of Life. Over the centuries, the pile of unacknowledged analogies has grown ever higher, impeding our vision, and our capacity to change.”65 These analogies, although pointing to the affinity of mortality that is possessed by all living things, are, in her analysis, anchored in the category of the human. Silverman observes that the analogy between the concentration camp images and those pertaining to the raf members rests upon the German state’s expulsion of these subjects from the category of the human. Perhaps Richter had something like this in mind, but whether his analogy turned with emphasis on the category of ‘the human’ remains to be determined. The more frightening and challenging proposition to consider is that being recognizable as human, as flesh of my flesh, as it were, is precisely what presents vul-

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nerability towards subjection to the kind of political abandonment that subjects human bodies to a spatially arranged management through their use, abuse, or (sometimes slow) annihilation – a management of bodies66 that, as Agamben, following Foucault, has shown, involves making those bodies live or leaving them to die67 precisely as human flesh. My point here is to note that Silverman mobilizes the proposed analogies in Richter’s paintings in her insistence that, if only we would finally recognize our shared humanness and finitude, we would be saved. Silverman’s formal analyses of Richter’s paintings, particularly with respect to those of his daughter Betty – whom Silverman perceptively notes has in one work been positioned to echo the forensic photograph of Meinhof after her death and in another is repeating Orpheus’s gesture of turning around – lead her to assert, “Richter was able to respond to [the raf source photographs] because of some striking formal analogies that permitted him first to extend the category of ‘kin’ from his daughter to Meinhof and Ensslin, then to acknowledge the analogies linking him to the terrorists and the police, and – finally – to recognize aspects of himself both in the concentration camp inmates and in their captors … All of our stories really are part of the same great volume: the Book of Life. And unlike logos, the words in this book do not have to become flesh in order to save us. They are flesh.”68 Thus, while Silverman’s relational analysis of a constellation of Richter’s paintings both intertwines with previous interpretative frames and brings new layers of potential meanings to the October paintings in particular, extending and amplifying an already very rich and complex symbolic field, it also appropriates the October cycle into a universal humanist project of redemption. Explicitly, Silverman insists that hers is a secular argument, but, as some of the quotations above reveal, it is heavily laden with religious languages of salvation. Although Silverman’s argument is singular in the intensity of its frequent references to the metaphor of the Book of Life,69 which conjures multiple theological connotations that in any case intrinsically denote exclusions, it is not alone in positing that a strong humanist message is delivered by October 18, 1977. Usselmann, for instance, anticipated that the problems of the cycle’s interpretation would be amplified not only by the movement

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of the paintings from Germany to the United States but by the passage of time, which could render their relationship to a fading historicity out of date. To this possibility, Usselmann suggests that the cycle may occupy a new role bathed in “quasi-religious sentiments” of universalism, mobilizing thereafter Richter’s work of mourning to convey “a shared sense of what it is to be human.”70 A similar weight is placed on the cycle when Karin Crawford finds that October 18, 1977 personalizes ‘terrorism’ by forging intersubjective relationships with its viewers and depoliticizes the raf by evoking an emotional response from its viewers. Through these two mechanisms, Crawford finds that Richter “relies on an alternative path to truth and enlightenment that extends from a presumed truth residing in the validity of one’s emotional response, the validity and universality of a human(ist) response to the events Richter captures in his cycle.”71

The October Paintings Unframed

Richter’s own conceptual (un)framing of the October paintings perhaps points to the source of ambivalent and negative reactions posed by some critics to this particular project. Of the paintings included in October 18, 1977, Richter observes: “Their presence is the horror of the hard-to-bear refusal to answer, to explain, to give an opinion. I am not sure whether the pictures ask anything: they provoke contradictions through their hopelessness and desolation; their lack of partisanship.”72 With this and other remarks, Richter’s attempt to evade the act of framing the meanings animated in his cycle of paintings paradoxically mobilizes the paintings as refusals, specifically in the case of the Confrontation series, depicting Ensslin as “neutral.” While Richter resists giving any explanations of the works that constitute October 18, 1977 and routinely rejects even a discussion of the motivations that provided the inspirational impetus to the works, his claim that, for instance, the paintings in the Confrontation series approach a sense of neutrality is not satisfying to his critics. His descriptive qualifier, “almost like pop stars,”73 resonates with the experience of encountering the images (as mentioned ear-

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lier, the images that the Confrontation series are based upon structurally echo fashion plates from a runway shoot when placed together in a series). This structural resemblance offers an uncanny reflection upon the ways in which, for some West German youths, the raf members were considered to be pop stars.74 Richter’s bold hesitancy, if such a posture can be posited, applies also to his selection of models for the production of other paintings explored in Storr’s catalogue. Uncle Rudi (1965) is a painted portrait of Richter’s uncle in his army uniform. Uncle Rudi was a Nazi soldier, proud of the soldier’s uniform that he wore. Only a short time into the war, Uncle Rudi was killed. Richter worked from a family photo of his uncle to create his painting. The significance of this as a work imbued with personal subject matter is eclipsed by the impact of such a painting on the German public. Though it is a painting, Uncle Rudi immediately invokes the photographic medium of its model, perhaps more so than that of the subject itself (Uncle Rudi as an individual or the Nazi soldier as a figure) because photographs of young Nazi soldiers are found throughout family photo albums. Or, alternatively, because absences of photographs of Nazi soldiers are found throughout family photo albums. Occupying their ambivalent spaces in the photo album, the photos and their absences are traces of events and relationships that can neither be spoken nor buried. Another portrait of a family member produced in that same year references again this period in German history that has been relegated to an uneasy silence. This painting, also based upon an old family photograph, is Aunt Marianne, and it depicts Richter’s aunt when she was only a baby, held in the arms of her sister, Richter’s mother. This painting is saturated with both biographical and historical significance, since not only is it based upon a photographic image of yet another family member lost to the terrors of Auschwitz but it is paradoxically intertwined with that of Uncle Rudi. Marianne’s physical absence furnished a spectral presence for Richter while he was growing up because he was frequently warned as a child not to act out or he would become like “crazy Marianne.” When Aunt Marianne, Rudi’s sister, reached adulthood, she was institutionalized for mental illness but was later killed under the Nazi

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regime’s systematic killing of patients. In contrast to Uncle Rudi, there is nothing inherent in the portrait of Aunt Marianne that would have symbolic impact for audiences without further knowledge of its subject, though the social relevance is striking, both individually and in connection with some of Richter’s other works such as Uncle Rudi and especially a third related painting called Mr. Heyde, also produced in 1965. Heyde was the doctor who had engineered the strategies that were used in the elimination of populations deemed to be undesirable under Nazi rule. In other words, Heyde, as a key figure in extermination programs, was responsible for the death of Aunt Marianne. Even after the war, Heyde went unpunished for his integral involvement in the atrocities committed under the auspices of medicine during the Third Reich. With a new identity, Heyde was allowed to continue practicing medicine with the cooperation and protection of authorities. Heyde was taken into custody in 1959 after his identity was revealed, and he committed suicide before he went to trial. The painting depicts Heyde accompanied by a police officer. Again, in this context, the portrait of Aunt Marianne stands out for its culturalhistorical invisibility, since audiences not possessing knowledge of Marianne’s fate do not have an entry point into readings informed by its historical significance. Mr. Heyde, however, to the extent that it both references an actual event presented in the domestic mass media and echoes the ever-present anticipation of the discovery of war criminals, has cultural resonance at the visual level and is aided by a caption that is internal to the work. Consistently occupying a posture of uneasiness toward interpretative practices in relationship to his paintings, Richter maintains a tension between the intimacy and distance of these works. While the paintings have thoroughly intimate dimensions, Richter builds distance into them when he speaks about them. Statements Richter has made in relation to his work include: “I don’t believe in anything”; “I don’t care about anything”; and “the motifs in my paintings have no meaning whatsoever, I might have just as well painted cabbage.”75 Of these comments, Richter reflects: “I made those statements in order to provoke and in order not to have to say what I might have been thinking at that point, not to pour my heart out. That would

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have been embarrassing, I didn’t know why I painted Uncle Rudi or Aunt Marianne. I refused to admit any kind of meaning that these had for me.”76 For establishing and maintaining this sort of distance from interpretations of his work, critics have charged Richter with aesthetic cynicism. In other words, he is accused of refusing to take a firm position on things or confirming meanings that others have conferred onto his paintings.77 Richter’s refusal to anchor a privileged interpretation has resigned that status to commentators, who mine his writings and interviews to support or dismiss their speculations. His elusive responses to those who pursue explanations of October 18, 1977 fail to achieve approval perhaps in part because his responses neither give clear reasons for producing the work, nor apologize for the paintings’ presumed contents. He aims neither to be seen as having attempted to paint over the postwar German history that is characterized by the presence and activity of the urban guerrillas, nor to offer an unequivocal critique of the raf and its organized actions. He neither renounces the practice of treating this subject matter, nor expresses regret. In a sense, Richter is charged for his refusal to offer the remorse demanded from the raf prisoners themselves.78 The unapologetic appropriation and use of images that associate with the raf is perhaps perceived on some level as an act of complicity, as critics confer alibi status on the artist who would take these images as a point of departure. But what Richter’s works seem to produce is a search for a site outside of explanation that would give place to what he calls a speechless emotion and, through dissensus rather than consensus, posit new distributions between things and meanings, as well as new potentials for collective enunciations that contain the capacity to tear these images from the rigid sphere of their mass-media reportage during the German Autumn. Richter’s intervention into the medium of painting, not normally associated with the dissecting practices of photography and film, enacts a phantasmagorical sideways glance at the iteration of images in the mass media context that makes visible the anaesthetic effects of reportage that aim to assert the comfortable consensus that Richter ultimately has refused. Notwithstanding either Roland Barthes’s pronouncement of the death of the author and the birth of the reader79 or Foucault’s response to the death pronouncement that casts the author as a thrifty

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principal by which the unruly proliferation of meanings can be managed within the reason that presides over a discursive field at a particular time,80 consideration of the works’ emplacements in particular built spaces and contexts further removes their meanings from the producer’s hands. John Law shows that an object remains stable only to the extent that its positioning within a relational distribution of objects, spaces, and institutionalized practices remains so; an object remains only “while everything stays in place and the relations between it and its neighbouring entities hold steady.”81 In other words, when we comment upon October 18, 1977, we are not speaking of the same object every time. It becomes something else whenever the network circuit or organizing syntaxes that hold its surroundings together change or break. It matters under what conditions it is emplaced (these conditions are a part of the network of its object-ness): at which exhibition, and in which city, and what texts or other entities are part of its relationality and in what distributions. It matters what form supports it: whether it is viewed in a gallery or on a webpage. It also matters when it is emplaced, whether before or after: the wall came down, it was purchased by the m o ma, the detentions began at Guantanamo, and so on.

Chapter 5

Coda Regarding an Accusation of Love: The RAF Exhibition Love falls outside of interesting time; no historical, polemical meaning can be given to it; it is in this that it is obscene.1 –Roland Barthes

When the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin was compiling art for Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Die RAF / Regarding Terror: The RAF Exhibition, outrage from some members of the German public threatened the exhibition’s funding. To save the show, organizers raised money through an eBay auction of donated art. Among the works auctioned was the unsettling sculpture My grandma went to hell and all I got was this lousy souvenir by the infamous brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman. The exhibition Regarding Terror brought together works that articulate a different, more fractured, and less legible entanglement of images than those that were produced through the media image repertoire of people and events connected with the Red Army Faction and the urban guerrilla phenomenon of the 1970s. Critics’ reactions to Richter’s October 18, 1977 at Krefeld, the exhibition that was said to have “reawakened deep-seated, intensely conflicted emotions” in 1989,2 anticipated to some extent those that would be levelled at the curators of Regarding Terror: The RAF Exhibition, which opened first in Berlin and later in Graz, Austria in 2005. As already noted, Regarding Terror was the site of struggle long before it was realized. Early on, it was provisionally titled RAF , the Myth. In many respects, the reaction it faced was far worse when it was a mere abstraction at the organizing stage than when it materialized with a series of public talks and screenings over the duration of the exhibition’s run. Anticipation of an art exhibition that took the raf as its

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focus made some observers angry, and several people, including relatives of raf operation victims, actively lobbied to block public funding of the project. The debate even spilled into Parliament. After Regarding Terror was open to the public, reactions produced or relayed through popular media forms appeared to suggest that the exhibition had confirmed for some of these critics the expressed concerns that had preceded it. In other words, these reactions confirmed that the exhibition had, as expected, presented images of the raf in iconographic proportions and by extension led to the glorification of terror. German mp Friedbert Pflüger (cdu) charged that within the show “there is no distinction between culprits and victims,”3 while political science scholar Christoph Daase took the exhibition as a sign of the weakening of the power of the raf from within political spheres and a sign that it had traded its political significance for ornamentation. Daase argued that the image of the raf had become a fashion accessory: “People wear the raf insignia, but only because it looks chic.”4 Beyond the content of the exhibition, its form was also the target of vocal critique. In one example, the form of the exhibition was described as though it were an academic research project: “Sometimes more reportage than art exhibition, the show failed to provide a rigorous historical analysis.”5 Since the art exhibition as the formal product of curatorial practice tends to emphasize the display, arrangement, and viewing of its objects at the expense of descriptive textual elements, it is not customarily required to produce rigorous analysis. Although a call for contextualization in the case of a show that has as its focus a set of historical events of serious proportion spanning approximately thirty years is arguably understandable, this criticism seems misplaced, given the attention to historical documentation evident in the structure of Regarding Terror as it was actually exhibited. Against the one hundred art works exhibited, Regarding Terror included two media rooms, highlighting twenty-nine key dates in the history of the raf as it was discursively constructed in print and television broadcasting media. A third room, in which political tracts, posters, and leaflets were displayed, was equipped with hours and

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hours of related documentaries and film shorts on view for visitors. In addition to these resources, there was a work-based archival room stocked full of manuscripts about the raf and related political groups, works by the authors and theorists whose writings raf members read and cited, extensive annotated bibliographies, and books addressing various aspects of the historical milieu in which West German urban guerrillas were active. A computer was available so that visitors could access resources on the Internet.6 The critique then needs to be reconsidered, because it cannot be claimed, as perhaps it could be in the case of Richter’s October 18, 1977, that the exhibition suffered from a lack of context. Rather, there was an abundance of unbound context embedded into the almost archival structure of the Regarding Terror exhibition. The exhibition was designed in the visible anticipation of active visitors willing to work through, with various potential degrees of commitment, the architecture of contextual materials offered within the exhibition. The unspoken dimension of the critique levelled at the curators is that the historical material artifacts, both textual and non-textual, were neither ordered to privilege some contributions as more authoritative than others, nor were they subsequently reinterpreted for exhibition audiences in a recognizably legible way. In other words, the exhibition did not provide the kind of historical Überbau or superstructure that Usselmann advocated to support “a concise reading” of Richter’s October cycle.7 Paradoxically, Regarding Terror has also been critiqued for the context that it was perceived to provide. Wolfgang Kraushaar, for instance, acknowledges the inclusion of historical source materials within the exhibition, but he argues that this “combination” of art and contemporary history itself constituted the contextualization offered by the exhibition. The problem that Kraushaar raises pertains to the relationship or “reciprocal distance” between the artworks and the historical materials within this combination. In other words, he wonders: What is the direction of the relationship? Does the history elucidate the art or does the artwork elucidate the history? Echoing art historian Martin Warnke, who asked, “How is it that this historical period that shocked an entire generation could

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become the play material for a subsequent generation?”8 Kraushaar wonders what allowed for the move toward the posthumous popularity of terrorism.9 Dierk Spreen’s review, the title of which translates to “Neon Sign for Terror,”10 targets what he considers to be the context of the exhibition and suggests that the messages of individual artworks are compromised by the context. For Spreen, the exhibition constructs the members of the raf as the victims of the West German state, depicted as powerful and paranoid, while presenting political terrorism as though it were violence-free. He sees Regarding Terror as presenting the guerrillas as victims of state counter-insurgency measures, and charges that the exhibition is relativizing, mythologizing, and aestheticizing. For him, the individual works are subsumed by the overshadowing context of the exhibition.11 Rather than the lack of context that is described by mp Friedbert Pflüger and others in opposition to the exhibition, Spreen sees an overabundance of context that threatens to smother, corrupt, or annihilate the (true) meanings of particular artworks included in the program. A concrete example of this that Spreen offers in his review is a video installation by Rainer Kirberg entitled Überfahrt (Crossing) (2004). In the video, a fictional work, three young members of the later raf sit in a rowboat on the Oder-Spree Kanal. The location resonates not only with the title Crossings, since the canal links the Spree and Oder Rivers, but in relation to political asylum in East Germany for West German urban guerrillas. Situated here, at the crossing, the activists discuss the conditions of their situation and the question of identity. The boat offers a space of reflection for their lives and the expression of criticism and self-criticism that was central to the internal practices of the raf. The production of new personal identity documents is necessary for this relocation; in most accounts of the urban guerrillas – documentary and fiction – the problems of both material and immaterial identification are staples of their communications. The raf members roughly outline the necessary parameters of their proposed identities on a piece of paper, while struggling with questions around the assumption of a new identity and its remainders. One of their papers, folded into the shape of a boat, is placed into the water,

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where it floats alongside their humble rowboat until its structure is breached by the surrounding waters and it sinks slowly, remaining irretrievable to the desperate grasps of the video’s characters. From the title of Crossings to the Romantic imagery of the boat drifting on the water to the writing-over of identity, all of the elements in this video are rich in terms of their possibilities for multiple significations. Spreen, however, interprets over or around the inherent complexities of the work, and understands it as the deconstruction of raf discourse in which pity and regret are finally possible. He laments that in the context of Regarding Terror, the video seems to say something more: “[I]n the context of the exhibition this film had the effect only as a further contribution to the tale of the terrorists as victims (in this case as victims of their own ideology).”12 He argues that in the case of the raf exhibition, through a context of directed meaning, “the art exceeded its limits.”13 In the midst of such reactions, interested observers are confronted with a paradoxical expression of the problem of context surrounding this exhibition. The curatorial thesis or program underlying Regarding Terror is accused of providing too much interpretive direction, for instance, in the spirit of Spreen’s reading of the exhibition as being too heavy with pre-packaged meaning and the construction of victimmythology, and, at the very same time, the exhibition is accused of providing a lack of direction and only a troubled and suspect attempt at social-historical grounding, as is suggested in Kraushaar’s observations noted above. This paradox is differently intonated but structurally similar to the reversal of criticism Richter’s series October 18, 1977 received when the Museum of Modern Art (m o ma) in New York acquired the cycle of oil paintings for its collection. The sharp criticism that sounded when Richter’s paintings were first exhibited in the city of Krefeld from a public that was stirred by both the subject matter and the stature of the artist who had taken it up14 appeared to suggest that the native German artist had betrayed the nation by addressing a taboo subject without adequately anchoring it within parameters of normative discourse. Richter’s perceived betrayal with respect to the nation was underlined but reversed when it became apparent that

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the paintings would move abroad and become the property of an American cultural institution. This public outcry mobilized the claim that the paintings could not be understood outside of the German context. From this perspective, the paintings were suddenly symbolically naturalized as national property, just as they were being expatriated to the m o ma: “Once again, skeptics questioned the artist’s good faith, some of them inferring American money had lured him into a deal that effectively deprived his country [of] a part of its historical and cultural heritage.”15 In what follows, I extend my critique of the rationalizing consensus that I perceive in the scholarship that addresses the urban guerrilla movement of the 1970s to a parallel consensus that targets artistic and curatorial practices when the latter are turned towards this tumultuous period in West German history. As I have noted, in the cases of Richter’s paintings and Regarding Terror: The RAF Exhibition, it appears that critics have been concerned to identify the presumed objectives of artists and curators on the basis of either a perceived lack or abundance of supporting text or code that accompanies works and exhibits. Again, the prevailing structure of these critiques takes the either/or form: the artist projects the guerrillas as either heroes or victims; the curator either reductively aestheticizes this history or re-invokes myths in sympathy. The rationalizing consensus demands neutralization of the artwork or curatorial offering by way of determining which side of the closed either/or choice it covertly articulates. The critics’ either/or framing of the possible renderings amount to the same thing: an accusation of a wrong politics or a wrong emotion. As I noted in the previous chapter about suspicion towards Richter’s October paintings, artistic and curatorial works that take up guerrilla subject matter or imagery seem to be called upon either to make an explicit judgment or to proffer accounts of self-justification. The artistic and curatorial projects discussed here are not instances of negative guerrilla aesthetics in any strict sense, yet they do tend to refuse constative statements, and therefore they raise more questions than they answer. This chapter urges against the temptation to anchor an explanation that neutralizes the uneasy signification of these projects, but does so through a

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performative coda16 structured like Barthesian figures. In these figures, the seemingly solitary discourse of subjectivity is always bound to a cultural image repertoire. This alien discourse could be the unidentical doppelgänger or reversed reflection of negative discourse. Unlike negative discourse, this solitary one speaks a recognizable and shared language, but it does not necessarily want to be understood. While it seems to be directed towards a specific object, it attempts to make something out of nothing, out of a simulation, whereas negativity makes nothing out of something. While it is hopeful for unity, this discourse flourishes best in incoherence and is stubbornly equivocal, but perhaps at times unwittingly seeks its own dissolution by pursuing a new normal. Perhaps for its indirectness and illegible attachment, it is accused of being consumed by a decontextualizing interiority that is apolitical – or of the wrong politics that will not sort out the culprits from the victims. Critics of Regarding Terror insisted that the exhibition would further glamourize the raf members and their actions and presumed the project to be indifferent to the seriousness of guerrilla violence. Indeed, such reservations have been expressed perennially in a longtime struggle over cultural products that address or appropriate images that depict or resonate with the raf and the history of the urban guerrilla phenomenon in the brd. After all, the West German urban guerrilla was the inspiration for a line of trenchcoats from fashion designer Josephus Thimister. The connotative reverberations of the West German urban guerrilla within artistic, creative, and popular culture are almost countless. In film, there are the classics, such as Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn, 1978),17 Die Dritte Generation (The Third Generation, 1979), and Die bleierne Zeit (The German Sisters, 1981). More recent films include Die Stille nach dem Schuß (The Legend of Rita, 2000), The Raspberry Reich (2004), Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (2008), and Carlos (2009). A number of musicians have referenced or made works in explicit homage to the West German urban guerrilla, including the Bauhaus song “Terror Couple Kill Colonel” (1980), Cabaret Voltaire’s song “Baader-Meinhof” (1980), the Brian Eno and Snatch song “R.A.F.” (1982), and Chumbawamba’s songs “Ulrike” and the instrumental “Meinhof”

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(1990). Marianne Faithfull dedicated “Broken English” to Meinhof in 1979. Luke Haines produced a whole album under the name of Baader Meinhof in 1996. Most recently, Joshua Richardson, working with various other collaborators, produced two incendiary albums, dbmg/raf: Die Baader-Meinhof Gruppe / Red Army Faction (2008) and Capitalism (2011). There are also countless websites dedicated to the West German urban guerrilla, some of which archive key texts from this history. Culturally notable, however, is Richard Huffman’s long-standing and extensive website and online forum baader-meinhof.com: the baadermeinhof gang and the invention of modern terror. Huffman’s website hosts his ongoing research on West German urban guerrillas and related ephemera; in recent years, he has added podcasts of his interviews with key figures and observers. The impetus to Huffman’s research was his off-hand discovery that his father had defused one of the 2jm bombs (although they had previously assumed that the bomb had been planted by the raf) while stationed in Berlin in the early 1970s. The baader-meinhof.com site appears to be driven by Huffman’s ambivalent fascination with West German urban guerrillas – the tone and content are simultaneously critical and almost affectionate. The above is merely a sample of titles in the ongoing circulation of guerrilla references and performances, intended to establish that there indeed exists a guerrilla sound and image repertoire in popular culture, one that perhaps makes up a pseudo-encyclopedic series of entries into affective culture. The commodification of guerrilla imagery, most starkly observed in the production and sale of t-shirts and underwear that depicted the raf logo, sparked critiques drawing attention to the aestheticization of the urban guerrilla.18 But these critics, much like the opponents of Regarding Terror, pose concerns that are quite differently inflected from the conceptual force contained in the playful but critical concept of Prada Meinhof posited by the artist-historian collaborative team of Scott King and Matt Worley. While critics of the exhibition opposed the aestheticization of urban guerrillas, King and Worley see how politics and aesthetics are historically intertwined. Worley notes the following about radical chic stylization in popular culture:

5.1 Prada Meinhof (1999), by Scott King and Matt Worley

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Indeed, a predilection for radical chic has been omnipresent throughout the late 20th-century culture: Warhol’s Mao TseTung portrait, The Clash’s penchant for the Red Brigade, the first Stone Roses’ lp’s reference to the lemons used by rioters in Paris ’68 to offset the effects of tear gas, Public Enemy’s paramilitary wing (the Security of the First World) and Black Grape’s Carlos the Jackal cd cover. At the same time, the astute revolutionary has traditionally retained a sense of style – be it Trotsky’s finely tailored suits or the Red Army Faction’s love for crushed velvet flares and white Mercedes. In cases of the more recent fashion-based references, however, due respect has been eclipsed by shallow parody as the once inspirational become an empty aesthetic for post-baby boom fashion designers.19 In other words, style was only part of an aesthetic whole – if by aesthetics, we assume reference to a sensorial and collective situation and something more than appearance. With Prada Meinhof, King and Worley target the presentation or crass commodification of guerrilla imagery and symbols emptied of their political contents and the appropriation of the style apart from, or even in opposition to, these political emplacements. King and Worley’s Meanwhile in a Large Central London Apartment the Telephone Is Ringing… (1998) is a text-based collage that plays on the differences between speech and writing to present the transcription of an imagined telephone conversation between the raf’s Ulrike Meinhof, campaigning for funds in support of anti-capitalist guerrilla action, and English reporter turned pop celebrity Tamara Beckwith, known for her guest appearances on several variety and reality television shows and charity-related publicity. In Meanwhile, Beckwith, a frequent guest on the English comedy quiz show Shooting Stars, which is often described as “anarchic” in form, confuses Ulrike with Ulrika Jonsson, one of the show’s team captains, and negotiates more appearances on the show in exchange for her donation to the raf, which she assumes is the Royal Air Force. Their other related works that appeared in Regarding Terror and also respond to the commercial and pop cultural appropriation of political

5.2 Meanwhile in a Large Central London Apartment the Telephone Is Ringing … (1998), by Scott King and Matt Worley

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language and imagery, include King’s Mona Meinhof (2004) and the Prada Meinhof (1999) poster, which was accompanied by a manifesto and designed for the Institute of Contemporary Arts exhibition they curated entitled Crash! Corporatism and Complicity. Notably, when Felix Ensslin, one of the curators for the exhibition Regarding Terror, answers to critiques with regard to artists and others taking up the raf as a subject, he cites not only love but the process of falling in love as an explanation for aesthetic attention to guerrilla subject matter. With this unexpected proposition, Felix Ensslin inadvertently echoes Barthes’s assumption that to fall in love is to fall into a discursive system that is accountable to a cultural image repertoire. The charge of “abstract radicalism” is sometimes levelled at cultural producers’ adoption of urban guerrilla or radical imagery into popular culture and at those who consume that imagery. It suggests that such consumers and/or producers attempt to appropriate or vicariously take up such radicalism on a merely superficial level. To the charge of abstract radicalism, Ensslin responds, “It’s like falling in love with something you would like to be a part of, of which you yourself want to be, without having the means or the will to attain its qualities yourself. On one level this is a banal argument, as with any activity with which you engage in the world it is a ‘fight against the loss of significance.’ On another level it leaves out the issue of why a certain object has the power to help you fight this loss by choosing it as your subject matter.”20 It may be felicitous, then, to consider how it is that the accusation contained in the opposition to The RAF Exhibition could be called an accusation of love. Never mind that Felix Ensslin is the son of core raf member Gudrun Ensslin, having been an infant when Gudrun went underground; indeed, themes of love and attachment are ubiquitous in the show’s artworks – from the explicit instances, such as Cosgrove’s A Heart Lies Beneath (2004) and Bruce LaBruce’s The Raspberry Reich (2004), to the more implicit ones, such as Dennis Adams’s Lullaby (2004), Gerhard Richter’s Atlas (Panels 470–479) (1989), or Joseph Beuys’s Dürer, ich führe persönlich Baader+Meinhof durch die Dokumenta V (1972). Imagining the raf exhibition as accused of something like love, in what follows, I will take up

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Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse in relation to some of the included works, reading them as Barthesian figures. In this spirit, the artworks and enactments discussed herein will be treated as Barthes describes figures: as though they are constituted by gymnastic and choreographic outbursts that emphasize space, gesture, and movement in the offering of counter-images not of the raf but ones that produce new subjective coordinates and new distributions between things. Following Barthes’s use of discourse in the full sense, as action – “of running here and there,” one might consider how the curatorial principle of Regarding Terror and the solitary practices of the individual contributing artists (and others) might make use of the lover’s discourse. But, as Barthes warns prior to his arbitrary listing of figures, “The argument does not refer to the amorous subject and what he is … but to what he says.”21

Figures

The description of the lover’s discourse has been replaced by its simulation, and to that discourse has been restored its fundamental person, the I, in order to stage an utterance, not an analysis. What is proposed, then, is a portrait – but not a psychological portrait; instead, a structural one which offers the reader a discursive site: the site of someone speaking within himself, amorously, confronting the other (the loved object), who does not speak.22 –Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes designates the lover’s discourse as a solitary one. Even more, he insists that it is one of extreme solitude, even though it is “spoken, perhaps, by thousands of subjects (who knows?).”23 Further, Barthes describes the lover’s discourse as a necessity. This discourse itself – which is “warranted by no one; it is completely forsaken by the surrounding languages: ignored, disparaged, or derided by them, severed not only from authority but also from the mechanisms of authority (sciences, techniques, arts)”24 – is a necessity. That

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is, Barthes’s book is not a book about the lover’s discourse but is the lover’s discourse in simulation, and this discourse, Barthes tells his readers, is a necessity. Unyielding and compulsive, this discourse cannot be abandoned by the I without changing languages altogether. This is because, although the lover’s discourse is one of extreme solitude, the solitude to which Barthes refers is not one possessed by a person. Rather, it is the solitude of a system; he insists that each person is alone in making a system out of it. Recognizing that he observes a paradox, Barthes explains: “I can be understood by everyone (love comes from books, its dialect is a common one), but I can be heard (received ‘prophetically’) only by subjects who have exactly and right now the same language I have.”25 This characterization echoes Jacques Lacan, who insists that one cannot speak about love but rather about stupidity, and that such stupidities provide an opening into a new subject.26 For Lacan, this new opening demands a switching of discourses. Perhaps it must suffice merely to hope for the adoption of what Barthes refers to as an “un-heard-of form of consciousness,”27 one that prefers to decorate rather than interpret, or cut up, or understand. With Barthes’s discourse, left behind is the linguistic notion of discourse as language extended beyond the sentence, and exaggerated are extra-linguistic notions of discourse as social practice, including relations of power and ideology,28 or discourse that incorporates technologies of the body into its armory.29 Discourse here implicates the body, and Barthes’s discourse everywhere assumes so: “The other’s body was divided: on the one side, the body proper – skin, eyes – tender, warm; and on the other side, the voice – abrupt, reserved, subject to fits of remoteness, a voice which did not give what the body gave. Or further: on the one side, the soft, warm, downy, adorable body, and on the other, the ringing, well-formed, worldly voice – always the voice.”30 But the body’s implication is not situated in the body of the other but that which is taken from it through the I’s discourse – that which strives to produce meaning (to produce the I) out of absolutely nothing. It is not just that every word demands or anticipates a response;31 rather, “[e]very contact, for the lover, raises the question of an answer: the skin is asked to reply.”32 Here, we are in the myste-

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rious realm of gestures, movements, proximities, proportions, temporalities – all of those occurrences for which no dictionaries have been authored that could guide us into that (un)comforting slide into concrete indexicality that is so characteristic of speech communication. Moreover, Barthes’s discursive site is like a city at once both old and new. This site is constituted by crumbling ruins and massive reconstruction initiatives of a violent gentrification process, and the pedestrian trying to negotiate this city will need to re-trace this terrain on a regular basis to work around this or that ephemeral obstruction. Such re-tracing will be a thoroughly individual task even though countless others will need to make the very same calculations, also singularly. Within this city-site, the pedestrian is without a predetermined route, without a certain and concrete destination, without a map. Rather, this chaotic pedestrian operates in the mode of dis-cursus, “the action of running here and there, comings and goings, measures taken, ‘plots and plans.’”33 Such plots, Barthes will tell his readers, are taken against oneself rather than the other. This is not a matter of grammatical structure, word order, or the proper ingredients for effective communication; it is perhaps a matter of last-minute evasions. But, whatever this discourse is or is not, it is necessary. Barthes describes the fragments of discourse that he outlines in this work as “figures” to elaborate the discourse as a gymnastic and choreographed feat. The figure, however, captures and molds the body in time and space so that “the body’s gesture is caught in action and not contemplated in repose: the body of athletes, orators, statues: what in the straining body can be immobilized.”34 It is not a question of what is said because what is said is conjured in what might be a sort of panic in the face of something (or everything) overwhelming. Instead, what is said in this case is a “rather stupid word,” or “a blank word, an empty vocable,” and, in an attempt to say it all, it says absolutely nothing other than to announce “the end of language.”35 For all of the valour this discourse holds in the realm of literary achievement, from Ronsard to Goethe (even if it is, as Barthes insists, derided by all of the major systems of thought and science), it frequently makes itself manifest in the form of pure prose. Prose, from the Latin “prosa oratio,” is mundane and ordinary speech or writing

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but, more than that, its referent is straightforward discourse. If this is so, then why is it so much easier to translate plot than it is to translate prose? The directionality and shape of this discourse’s movement is challenged by Barthes’s treatment of the lover’s discourse in fragments, as figures. Barthes collects these figures and presents them but not in any sort of straightforward or linear manner – appropriately, they are out of order. This persistent discourse takes its protagonists out of the narrative structure. Arguably, there are no introductions, no developments, no plot arcs, no perfectly placed obstructions or their accompanying poetic resolutions that imply a causal or instrumental relation to eventual outcomes, and, what is worse, there are no defined conclusions – except for what is tacked on in the end: “There is a deception in amorous time (this deception is called: the love story). I believe (along with everyone else) that the amorous phenomenon is an ‘episode’ endowed with a beginning (love at first sight) and an end (suicide, abandonment, disaffection, withdrawal, monastery, travel, etc.). Yet the initial scene during which I was ravished is merely reconstituted: it is after the fact. I reconstruct a traumatic image which I experience in the present but which I conjugate (which I speak) in the past.”36 Another way of thinking about it is that there are no explanations and no reasons; there is nothing to understand. Established after the fact is this story that is authored and imposed upon a series of associations that could have, and in fact may have, been otherwise. This discourse may be an anthology of fictions – each of which is without unified form and each of which is constituted by topics, both fleeting and random. The relationship between the concepts “topic” and “tópos” (place) is an explicit one for Barthes and it underlines his structuring use of figures. The implication of tópos as place or field and, in adjective form, topikós as commonplace,37 affirms the concreteness of the subject’s movement within a particular locality or position, both physically and in terms of themes or interests. ‘Place’ implies locations haphazardly visited; they make up an unplanned retroactive itinerary of becoming – or an itinerary of accumulated identification. These are not planned visits but accidental ones, detours, re-routings, and bypasses.

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Consideration of these concepts, essentially those of place and topic, and their intrinsic connection to one another serves to remind that concerns and preoccupations of all kinds – possibly the ingredients of ongoing identification and, hence, performative subjectivity – arise from meetings between concrete emplacements and movements within those contexts. Further, such deliberation invites a troubled but necessary conflation of the (extra)ordinary. Similar to the lover’s discourse, which, as Barthes asserts, is a discourse of devaluation and therefore a discourse of solitude that is spoken by many (if not all), the discourse of a large-scale art exhibition regarding terror illustrates by virtue of its figures (the artworks and their arrangement) the way in which this extraordinary and singular thing, a strange and ineffable preoccupation, is spoken singularly by many. Of the lover’s discourse, Barthes writes: “I refer the devaluations of love to a kind of obstructionist ethic, to a let’s-pretend realism, against which I erect the realism of value: I counter whatever ‘doesn’t work’ in love with the affirmation of what is worthwhile.”38 Lullaby Maybe I was never properly socialized: use value is something I prefer to transgress.39 –Dennis Adams

It would seem that Dennis Adams’s Lullaby references a photograph originally taken on behalf of the public prosecutor’s office during initial investigations of the Stammheim deaths. This photograph has been significant to the popular imagination in the context of the story of arguably the most significant date in the history of the raf: 18 October 1977. The photograph reveals (only after digital enhancement of the original archive photograph) the title of the LP that was sitting on Andreas Baader’s turntable in his Stammheim prison cell when he was found dead from a gunshot wound to the back of the head. Amongst the images that circulated in the press after the Stammheim deaths in October of 1977 was a black-and-white photograph of Baader’s record player, upon which Eric Clapton’s 1975 blues

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album There’s One in Every Crowd sat with side two facing upwards. Side two includes the songs “Singin’ the Blues,” “Better Make it Through Today,” “Pretty Blue Eyes,” “High,” and “Opposites.” When this photograph was originally circulated during the flurry of press coverage of the Stammheim prison deaths, the album title was unidentifiable. It is significant that it was only through the heightened interest in this particular photograph, demonstrated in the production of contemporary art around the topic of the raf, that the digital enhancement and imaging work required to decipher the text on the record album was finally carried out.40 Before Adams, Gerhard Richter painted the photograph of Baader’s record player as part of his cycle of oil paintings October 18, 1977. The original image of Baader’s record player had the power to capture the popular imagination because of the haunting suggestion of presence inherent in it. That is, the photograph pointed to the album as a very particular, active, and potentially meaningful trace of Baader. The Clapton LP on the turntable spoke to the popular imagination and it said: ‘Baader was just here, and the soundscape captured on this album is the last thing that he must have heard.’ Note that this is exactly what Robert Storr invokes while writing about the record album, as the photograph is included in Gerhard Richter’s notebook: Given what occurred during the night or early morning of October 18, 1977, the lyrics of several of these songs – “We’ve Been Told (Jesus is Coming Soon),” “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” “The Sky is Crying,” “Better Make it Through Today” – are, to say the least, eerie and depressing. However, none of the cuts is more so than the last song on side two of the album, the side facing up on the record player. Titled “Opposites,” its single, hauntingly repeated verse goes: “Night after day, day after night … Life after death, death after life.”41 Perhaps, one might be tempted to suggest not only that the Clapton album, side two, depicts the mood in Baader’s cell just prior to his death, but that it contains a message from Baader to be decoded, as the notes exchanged through the guerrilla prisoners’ das info were painstakingly decoded by state security agents. But what meaning

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can be taken from the identity of the album on the record player and this selection of songs in particular? If we accept that Baader’s death was an act of suicide, the album on the turntable, along with his book collection and the state of his cell generally, could be interpreted as elements constituting a larger tableau of self-representation and intentionality. Perhaps. That is not to say, however, that the meaning of it is clear or that there is a carefully crafted or even a conscious authoring of a translatable, instrumental message. Even if Baader’s death was a suicide, it appears to have been performed as though it were a murder, and the scene that it entails ensures a lingering and haunting ambiguity surrounding the conditions of his death. During the drawn-out hostage-taking of Hanns Martin Schleyer, seventy-two prisoners held in various high-security institutions in the brd were impacted by a state-issued contact ban.42 Soon afterwards, the prison doctor determined that Raspe was suffering from severe depression and appeared to be at risk of committing suicide,43 and only a week and a half before the deaths of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe, Baader wrote: “Putting together all the measures adopted over the last six weeks, one can conclude that the administration is hoping to incite one or more of us to commit suicide, or at least to make suicide look plausible. I state here that none of us intend to kill ourselves. Supposing again in a prison officer’s words, we should be ‘found dead,’ then we have been killed in the fine tradition of all the judicial and political measures taken during these proceedings.”44 It appeared that Baader was shot execution-style, and this demanded that various ballistics experts would be brought in to analyze and determine whether it would have been possible for him to have inflicted a wound to the base of his neck.45 Just as the song’s title “Opposites” suggests, the song’s lyrics themselves, that Storr finds exceedingly eerie and depressing, could as plausibly be interpreted as a comforting and affirming refrain that refuses finalities and completion. In Adams’s assemblage sculpture Lullaby, the manipulated image of the album on the turntable is surrounded by a steel encasement. The title Lullaby points beyond the image to the object that it signifies, drawing upon the assumption that Clapton’s album was the last voluntary acoustic exposure that Baader experienced, and potentially that this music played on as he was dying. The title also suggests

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affection, perhaps an offering for Baader’s vulnerable passage into an everlasting slumber. For all of the cultural weight that the photograph indexed in Adams’s project carries, the work could stand on its own with the photograph as one of its referents, but his assemblage also has an audio component. Somewhere beneath the photograph, a mechanism is emplaced to play the tracks from Clapton’s There’s One in Every Crowd. With this, Adams seems to want to draw the audience’s attention to time, since the audio track is decelerated, and the songs play in a slow, dragged out, distorted manner. With this, both formally (in terms of the assemblage’s production) and conceptually, Lullaby challenges not only the photograph and its circulation but memory – particularly “selective” memory, which Adams states is one of the themes he frequently takes up: “I try to bring forward what is being left out. I’m fascinated with the politics of silence.”46 Consideration of this poses questions about the relationship between the photographic (forensic and media) exhibits of the Stammheim deaths, the social conditions that followed the events of 18 October 1977, and the accepted readings of the events that continue to have concrete political and social impacts in Germany today. These relationships and the objects that signify something about the photograph still matter, even after all of this time has passed. It appears though that the photograph was not further examined until the production of the Museum of Modern Art’s catalogue for Gerhard Richter’s October paintings, published in 2000. Is it not the case that “[s]ometimes the metonymic object is a presence (engendering joy); sometimes it is an absence (engendering distress). What does my reading of it depend on? – If I believe myself to be gratified, the object will be favorable; if I see myself as abandoned, it will be sinister”?47 But, again, this is not all that is curious about lingering preoccupations with the photograph or especially the record album itself as a signifier for the events of the night of 17 October, since Baader’s record player might not have even been functional at the time of his death. The record player, inspected in the aftermath of the October events, was reportedly found to be housing a makeshift holder that had been constructed out of paper clips.48 The holder was determined to be large enough to conceal a pistol. For this reason, it is believed

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that the record player served to hide the weapon that ultimately ended Baader’s life.49 These objects that haunt us, after all, may have no instrumental use value, but they index something intractable that is not easily transcribed into conventional language. Given its ongoing salience as a recurring figure associated with the West German urban guerrilla phenomenon, Baader’s record player may work as a metonymic device that enables the invocation of unresolved matters from the German Autumn: namely, the nature of the Stammheim deaths.50 The official story holds that the Stammheim prisoners learned of the failed Lufthansa hijacking through a covert guerrilla communications system that they had secretly built and maintained in their cells,51 and that, as a result, they had arranged and executed a suicide pact. Despite this official account, as I have noted throughout, many people continue to insist that the deaths were state murders. Similar to the fallout after Meinhof’s death by hanging roughly a year and a half earlier, and again after the death of another raf prisoner, Ingrid Schubert, in her Munich cell in November 1977, several observers have noted that one’s acceptance or refusal of the official story that the prisoners had committed suicide usually was taken as an indication of one’s political position on the right or left, respectively. The coincidence of beliefs with respective political commitments is rarely so neatly divided, however. There were urban guerrillas who suspected the deaths to be suicides. Of the events in Stammheim in October 1977, Hans-Joachim Klein, former member of the rz, for instance, asserted: “As soon as I knew that gsg 9 had successfully pulled off their action at Mogadishu, I thought that Schleyer would be killed and that something would happen at Stammheim. Either a suicide mission or a suicide. You mustn’t think I’m psychic: I knew that there had been weapons in the prison since 1975.”52 Due to speculation about what may have occurred in Stammheim, protests followed the prisoners’ deaths. Accusations of murder were scrawled across buildings in the form of graffiti and on placards at demonstrations. Meinhof’s burial in 1976 and the collective burial of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe in 1977 looked more like political demonstrations than funerals, complete with an overwhelming police presence and arrests. Reactions to these events echoed the aftermath

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of Holger Meins’s death from starvation in 1974 after a prolonged collective hunger strike in prison. After each of these deaths, there were protests and attacks on German institutions and businesses. Distrust of the West German state ran so deeply that various attempts were made to construct out of bits of evidence alternative explanations for the deaths at Stammheim. One of these alternative explanations, in part inspired by traces of sand that were reportedly found on Baader’s shoes after his death, suggested that Baader had been flown to Mogadishu and used to trick the pflp hijackers into releasing their hostages. It was believed that afterwards Baader had been shot and returned to his cell, where evidence consistent with a finding of suicide had been planted.53 An inquiry was ordered by the Stuttgart regional parliament to explain what had happened on the seventh floor of the StammheimStuttgart prison on the early hours of 18 October 1977. In the morning of 18 October, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Irmgard Möller were found in their cells in their day clothes. Baader and Ensslin were both dead, while Raspe and Möller had lifethreatening injuries. Baader had been shot in the head execution-style and was dead when found. Two other shots had been fired in his cell; one had hit the wall and the other hit the mattress. Ensslin was also dead. She was hanging from a noose fashioned from a stereo cable cord that had been attached to the window grating of her cell. Raspe was still alive but had suffered a gunshot to the right temple. He died soon after being taken to the hospital. Möller had sustained four knife wounds to the chest and was the only one of the four to recover from her injuries.54 The official story was that all of these were the result of a suicide pact, even though Möller insists that she did not make an attempt on her own life and denies that the raf prisoners had made a suicide pact: “I can only say that, for us, suicide did not come up as a question. There were no discussions about it and there was no long-term plan.”55 Möller says that she was awake most of the night and that at about 5:00 am she heard noises. She could neither determine the source of the noise, what could have caused it, or the direction from which it could have come. She had not been alarmed by the noise at the time. At some point while she was asleep, she had the sensation

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that she had lost consciousness. When Möller awoke, she was already on an emergency stretcher. As Aust illustrates, the inquiry’s conclusions in support of the official story raise unanswered questions due to unexplained inconsistencies in its report. For Aust, the treatment of these contradictions, most of which the inquiry ignored, posited several “invitation[s] to speculation.”56 Although other prisoners in nearby cells at Stammheim were questioned for the purposes of the inquiry, none of them reported hearing anything that resembled the sound of gunshots. International experts were invited to conduct autopsies on the bodies, but the delay involved in realizing these arrangements, although slight, meant that the exact time of death for Baader and Ensslin could not be determined. The experts agreed, however, that the findings of their examinations could support suicide as the possible cause of death for Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe. Yet, many observers interpreted the Stammheim deaths as state murders. Möller still insists, “At this time, we felt in every fibre that they wanted to annihilate us. Even in the weeks and months before the Schleyer kidnapping, the refrain always was ‘Death penalty for terrorists.’ The years of isolation, the conditions, they witnessed the hunger strikes, and, finally, the contact ban was issued. They wanted us dead.”57 There were several unexplained elements that posed challenges to both the official story and the alternative speculations. According to Aust, who believes that the deaths were suicides, secrecy, inaccuracies, and carelessness marked the investigations in a way that invited suspicion. He cites several serious problems with the procedures of the inquiry’s commission, including that many of the commission’s meetings were held in camera, and some of the minutes of those meetings were sealed. Members of the public were prohibited from posing questions to some of the witnesses who appeared before the inquiry. Aust also raises a number of other problems: The Commission of Inquiry made its report before the last of the technical criminal investigations had been completed. It contradicts itself on several pages in close proximity to each other. For instance, p. 88 speaks of “a nickel-plated Smith & Wesson pistol,” found in a hiding place in the wall in Cell 723,

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which on p. 90 has become “a chrome-plated Colt Detective Special revolver.” No witness was asked the obvious question of whether the monitoring measures taken in Stammheim went on after the spring of 1977, whether the prisoners’ cells were bugged during the Schleyer kidnapping, whether there could perhaps be a tape recording of conversations or of sounds made on the night of their deaths.58 Questions remain unanswered in relationship to the inaudible gunshots and discrepant expert reports with regard to the distance from which the gunshot that killed Baader was fired. While there is agreement that the shot was fired from the pistol found in Baader’s cell, the inquiry, using expert investigations that examined the dispersion of gun powder and a pressure mark on the skin, found that the shot was fired at close range so that the gun had to be directly against the skin at the back of his neck when the gun was fired. Investigations carried out by Dr Roland Hoffmann, a scientist working with the Bundeskriminalamt (bka), the Federal Criminal Investigation Office, contradicted the findings that the inquiry reported. Hoffmann’s investigations determined that the shots were fired from a distance of between thirty and forty centimetres away. Due to the location of the entry wound, this distance would be inconsistent with a finding of suicide. Aust points out that the inquiry’s failure to take up these inconsistencies in their investigations led to the report being the object of suspicion. He cites speculation, born out of the inaudibility of gunshots and the lack of dispersion of gunpowder, that a silencer might have been used, but since no silencer was found at the scene, this would make Baader’s death out to be a murder. Another point of contention is the way in which the gun must have been positioned in order to produce the wound. The official account asserts that Baader must have held the gun upside down in his right hand, with the handle pointing upwards, pulling the trigger with his left hand. This account is inconsistent with that of the police at the scene, who argued that the gun was positioned with the handle pointed downwards. Although questions remained long after the inquiry released its final report, the public prosecutor’s office refused

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to address many of the specific concerns raised or to answer questions media commenters posed with regard to contradictory evidence or investigation findings. Having very briefly explicated some of the tensions over the forensic evidence and its disciplinary interpretations carried out by police, ballistics experts, medical examiners, and juridical adjudicators, I return to the artistic preoccupation and treatment of forensic evidence from Baader’s prison cell. The record player is a key piece of evidence, given that its operational integrity can support or undermine the determination of suicide. But Richter’s and Adams’s treatments of the forensic photograph are neither oriented instrumentally towards a verdict, nor do either of them attempt to support a circulating theory about the status of the Stammheim deaths. Hence, this refusal to forward an instrumental underpinning for working with the evidence may be what makes the preoccupation with the record player obscene to commentators. As with the discourse of love, “no historical, polemical meaning can be given to it; it is in this that it is obscene.”59 The title of Adams’s work may hint at the anaesthetic properties of the circulation of, and preoccupation with, these images – and not just in the popular press, but more so amongst those (amorous?) subjects for whom it matters dearly just which record album actually sat on Baader’s turntable on the night that he died. Lullaby then would also constitute a self-implicating act for Adams as well. For whom is the lullaby? Atlas They are the almost forlorn attempt to give shape to feelings of compassion, grief and horror (as if the pictorial repetition of the events were a way of understanding those events, being able to live with them).60 –Gerhard Richter

Over several decades, Gerhard Richter has assembled many albums of collected images. These images are both personal family snapshots and

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publicly circulated press and archival photographs, and among them are numerous photographs related to the raf. Atlas consists of groupings of these found images in various panels that include landscapes, family photos, pornography, intellectuals, prisoners of concentration camps, animals, objects, and murder victims. Many, but not all, of the found images that constitute Atlas became source documents for Richter’s painting. For instance, his series of paintings Eight Student Nurses (1966) is based on source images included in Atlas. As Storr has noted, the panels are organized sometimes thematically and sometimes taxonomically, often producing surprising or disturbing associations: [W]hole panels devoted to concentration-camp pictures are set against others devoted to pornography, an incommensurable pairing Richter once considered as the possible basis for an exhibition of paintings but abandoned when he found the concentration-camp photographs ‘unpaintable’ … The editorial mind at work in forming these ensembles seems as determined to disrupt patterns as to create them, as eager to draw attention to certain pictorial equivalencies or disjunctions as to nestle the most personal or shocking items or clusters of items in settings that obscure their meaning to the artist and stymie interpretation based on conventional attitudes regarding intrinsic significance. At once a vast index of primary material and a device for reviewing and rethinking the many possible relations of one image to another as icons in their own right, as image-types, or as entries in his intellectual and artistic autobiography, Atlas is a mechanism for simultaneously organizing and disorganizing information, a way of showing the artist’s hand and of camouflaging his intimate connections to the contents on display.61 Atlas includes ten panels that concern the raf – its members, their funerals, and sites of significance to the raf ‘story.’ Each panel consists of eight to twelve black and white images that Richter reproduced with an exceptionally blurry quality. Many of these served as source images for paintings in his cycle October 18, 1977.62

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5.3 Atlas 478, Baader-Meinhof Photographs (18 October 1977) (1989), by Gerhard Richter

While Richter’s practice of collection, as realized in Atlas, could be understood as a form of research that supports63 his painting, it may be illustrative to consider seriously the practice of collection as a form of action in its own right, rather than as an instrumental means to an end for which a definitive value can be attached. The collection of found objects – whether systematic or chaotic, whether avowed (for example, the stamp or antique collection attributed to taste and discretion, and enjoying a conflation of use and exchange value) or unacknowledged (for example, the seemingly haphazard collection of discrete objects void of any determinable use or exchange value that is readily attributed to ‘packrat’ habits) – is a widespread, and often solitary, pursuit. In either case, the reason why a particular object must be kept and another can be abandoned without a second thought is often not something that can be articulated by the collector, and the dear item that must be treasured at one point

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in time can be hastily hurled into the trash bin at another, as though it were an alien object. Incidentally, the solitary character of collecting may even be asserted in connection with public or official practices of collection, as illustrated during the height of urban guerrilla activity by the ever-expanding collections of the bka, which was originally charged with border security but turned toward policing the interior in the context of terrorist threats. Central to its procedures of counter-terrorist policing were practices of seemingly boundless and covert collecting. So much was collected as to be almost meaningless, as though the practice of collecting was an end in itself, since the bka kept files on thousands of people in their database entitled “Persons, Institutions, Objects, and Items,” which even documented the acquaintances of people under surveillance. The bka also kept an extensive writing sample database in the “Central Handwriting File.” Aust notes that the bka’s chief commissioner Horst Herold lamented his perception that the public identified better with members of the raf than they did with him. Herold himself had more than a strong level of identification – one might even suggest obsession – with raf members, particularly with Baader. Herold once asserted, “Baader was the only man who ever really understood me, and I am the only man who ever really understood him.”64 Against Storr’s assertion quoted above that Richter “nestle[s] the most personal or shocking items or clusters of items in settings that obscure their meaning to the artist and stymie interpretation based on conventional attitudes regarding intrinsic significance,” is it not conceivable that, rather than trying to conceal the meanings that these images hold for him, Richter does not have a fully authored program of meaning and intention in regard to these images, and that his assemblage of the panels may be more intuitive than rationally ordered? That many of the images are of semi-iconic proportion, and that they are set among personal snapshots (particularly if Atlas is taken as a whole, rather than as completely isolated and bordered panels), suggest the reciprocal vulnerability of images and subjectivity, tied together by intrinsically fallible remembrance. One does not know why one is compelled towards an object, person, or thing, but such a compulsion pauses on the threshold of the solitary realm, on the one hand, and at the border of the mass transfer of common

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images, on the other. In this way, the collector’s compulsion does not belong to the collector alone but is found, borrowed, and stolen. Further, the collector’s compulsion is not a choice but an order, an externally issued demand: “The body which will be loved is in advance selected and manipulated by the lens, subjected to a kind of zoom effect which magnifies it, brings it closer, and leads the subject to press his nose to the glass: is it not the scintillating object which a skillful hand causes to shimmer before me and which will hypnotize me, capture me? This ‘affective contagion,’ this induction, proceeds from others, from the language, from books, from friends: no love is original.”65 Black and White Room Multimedia artist Christoph Draeger examines social and environmental catastrophes, whether real or fictional, often from intimate spaces of domestic living rooms or hotel bedrooms. Rather than enclosed spaces of presumed safety and privacy, domestic and other intimate interiors in Draeger’s work are permeable sites through which mass-mediated messages pass and strike. With the installation Black and White Room (Memories of Terror From a Safe Distance, Kunstmuseum Solothurn), Draeger presents a 1970s West German living room – perhaps it could even be that of a neighbouring apartment to an illegal residence of covert guerrillas – with its communications systems (in this version of the installation, a television; the record player appears in Richter’s painting on the wall), which seem to serve as relay points in a network of increasingly militarized social communications – a subject and set of processes that Draeger tracks and elaborates vividly in other works such as The Last News (with Reynold Reynolds), Destroyin’ LA, and Tsunami Architecture (with Heidrun Holzfeind). In Black and White Room, the emphasis on the vulnerability of enclosed private spaces to the penetration of biopolitical communications that produce and amplify threats is significant because, as Tiziana Terranova insists, tele-technologies “are fundamental mechanisms of capture and control of new segmented, undefined subjectivities operating as publics.”66 Observing Gabriel Tarde’s argument that particular productions (such as a news program, in the case of

5.4 and 5.5 Black and White Room (2003), by Christoph Draeger

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Draeger’s Black and White Room) can produce a public, Terranova points out that this process is not merely one-directional: “it is not just that publics are the provisional result of a capture, but they can also capture and take control of novels, tv serials, radio programmes, blogs, speakers, etc.”67 The resonance of the record player in Black and White Room is multiple; it cannot be read without reference to Stammheim and Baader’s record player, or the contested official suggestion of a guerrilla-rigged electronic communications system that ostensibly connected incarcerated guerrillas to each other and perhaps to outside communications. The television indexes the dramatic element of intrusion and noise that shot through West German living rooms in the 1970s, as the news media frequently delivered images of guerrilla terror targeting intimate spaces as anchoring points in a relay of “affective capture” that could produce new publics68 during perceived security threats. The Nurse and the Hijackers Eleanor Antin’s feature-length video The Nurse and the Hijackers (1977) was conceived and produced in the period between two key hijackings associated with the urban guerrilla movement: the hijacking of an Air France flight in June of 1976 taken down at Entebbe, and the hijacking of a Lufthansa flight in October 1977. The six-day ordeal precipitated by the Air France hijacking, which had been depicted in the made-for-television movie Raid on Entebbe that aired in the spring of 1977, prompted Antin’s concept for the video. In Antin’s The Nurse and the Hijackers, performed with paper dolls in model sets, idealistic eco-hijackers divert a flight to several oil-producing countries with the intention of persuading Middle Eastern presidents and prime ministers to stop exporting oil to the United States and other Western nations. Their eco-guerrilla action fails not only because they are unsuccessful in persuasion, but also because the hijackers in the video are, as in the real-life hijackings, killed in a special-forces action to rescue the plane. Amidst this chaos and uncertainty, the nurse aboard the flight must save another passenger’s life using rudimentary items. The protagonist of the nurse in the video, symbolically twinned with the figure of the flight attendant, was an incarnation of Antin’s

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Little Nurse Eleanor, just one of the many personas that Antin performed in her work through various media, which took up the figures of the king, the ballerina, and the nurse. These figures disrupted the presumed interiority or essence of identity by highlighting its gendered and racialized performance. Antin documented the gestural achievements of these performances – the king’s regal stroll amongst his subjects, the ballerina’s graceful poise, the nurse’s caregiving – but she also documented the laboured production of these personas, including the ballerina’s stumbles and falls necessary to her achieved poses and the application of the king’s beard and cape, as well as his struggles for recognition of his authority. Antin demonstrates performativity of ‘self’ not as an individual activity but as a collective and historical one that is implicated in social expectations. As Emily Liebert has observed of Antin’s work, “troubling stable notions of identity serves as a thematic through which to make works that critically interrogated spectatorship, and more specifically, the act of looking.”69 To the act of looking, we might add the act of expecting, since Antin’s disarticulations of the (presumed stable) self render the spectator’s assumptions about identity both palpable and complicit in the action. The nurse must perform acts of care, but in a gendered performance that is simultaneously active and passive. The nurse’s activity, much like that of the flight attendant, is tied to the cultural belief in women’s nurturing capacity as an innate attribute, as well as to the social demand for her anticipation of others’ needs – from basic to erotic ones. The nurse’s passivity, again like that of the flight attendant, is marked in her positioning relative to doctors’ orders and patients’ global requirements of assurance, comfort, medical intervention, and intimate care. Occupying this hinge position, the nurse’s performance relational to either the doctor or the patient is at once vital and eroticized.

5.6, 5.7, and 5.8 (Opposite) The Nurse and the Hijackers (1977), by Eleanor Antin Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York

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Antin’s video premiered at an exhibition on 1 October 1977, only two weeks before the notorious Lufthansa hijacking. The Nurse and the Hijackers’ emphasis on the complex emotional labour of women in service work – in the post-Fordist labour positions of nurse and flight attendant – eerily anticipated aspects of the strange drama that would unfold during the Lufthansa hijacking, throughout which flight attendants’ caregiving labour continued under the oscillating imperatives of routine duties and hijackers’ orders given under threat. Flight attendants continued to facilitate drink and meal services (including birthday cake and champagne that the hijackers ordered from the Dubai airport food services after having discovered that it was flight attendant Anna-Maria Staringer’s birthday), delivered icepacks to relieve swelling in passengers’ legs, and instructed passengers on safety procedures whenever necessary.70 Yet, the flight attendants had to carry out these usual duties always in careful negotiation with the plots of the hijackers and under extremely unusual conditions, especially when the flight’s captain was executed71 and when other lives were directly threatened. The Lufthansa hijackers set a final ultimatum specifying that they would blow up the aircraft with hostages onboard if their demands, which included the release of guerrilla prisoners, were not met by their deadline. Unaware of the gsg 9 mission underway that would save them, flight attendant Gabi Dillmann delivered an emotional message over the radio that first condemned the German government for doing nothing to save the hostages but made the following plea oriented toward the care of her passengers: “Say thank you to everyone for me, and if there’s any chance left in these last one and a half hours, please, I beg you, try everything. Think of all those children, think of all the women, think of us. I can’t understand it, I really can’t. Can you live the rest of your life with this on your conscience? I don’t know. We’re all going to try to be as brave as we can, but it isn’t easy. I pray to God, please, if there is any chance at all, any kind of way, help us. If there is any chance at all, please help us.”72 Having drawn the historical connection between Antin’s video and the real-life hijackings of 1976 and 1977, I would like to make a couple of observations about the form of this artwork. While Antin has emphasized that the materials of the dollhouse-like set for the

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airplane’s interior cabin and the paper dolls, as well as her performative storytelling in which she orchestrated the voices and movements of all of the characters in The Nurse and the Hijackers, is reminiscent of the play materials and practices of young girls,73 her use of paper dolls reinforces her critical intervention into assumptions of stable identity. Further, for the figure of the Nurse (which is performed at times through a doll and other times directly by Antin), the flexible and precarious properties of paper are strikingly apt. Sianne Ngai’s discussion of de-differentiated labour in neoliberal disorganized capitalism drew upon the performative art of Linda Montano (one of Antin’s contemporaries, who also took up the figure of the nurse in her 1973 work Home Nursing) to elaborate upon the shift towards immaterial labour: “Whatever set of terms used to describe capitalism in its effort to adjust to the economic crises of the early 1970s, analysts agree that the shift is one in which human competences once viewed outside capital – affect, subjectivity, and sociability – are systematically put to work for the extraction of surplus value.”74 In this way, the nurse (or the flight attendant, or the service worker) occupies a flexible labour position that demands both particular and general physical, sociable, and affective qualities that resist containment within the strict parameters of the workday and the institution in – and for – which the labourer is situated. The lines between paid and unpaid labour, labour and leisure, and labourer and person are increasingly indistinct across several productive spheres; but these lines have for a long time been blurry or absent for the gendered and paradigmatic flexible worker: the nurse. In this context, the paper dolls in The Nurse and the Hijackers embody these ambiguities not only because, as materials, they are, as Antin noted, feminized, but also because, put to work as they are in this performance piece, they render the line between work and play as a major aspect of the artwork itself. The Raspberry Reich The protagonist of Bruce LaBruce’s art porn film The Raspberry Reich (2004) is Gudrun, who models herself after Gudrun Ensslin of the raf, and is the radical leader of a band of aspiring guerrilla men who under her instruction plan to continue the work of the raf as

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the “sixth generation.” Gudrun asserts that there can be no revolution without a sexual revolution. Initially, this means for Gudrun that sex should be practised everywhere, since she insists that it is a force of nature that cannot be contained in the bedroom. To this, her boyfriend Holger complains, “Gudrun, you know I have a bad back.” Gudrun’s sloganistic discourse rules the group’s activities and motivates its members for radical and revolutionary action. When she takes her premise further and insists that heterosexual monogamy is nothing but a bourgeois construct – one that must be abolished in order for the realization of revolutionary subjectivity and, hence, the revolutionary transformation of societal structures – she is able to convince the members of the sixth-generation raf cell to have sex with each other for their cause. Of this, LaBruce notes that it “just happens to be the perfect set-up for a gay porn movie.”75 In terms of its handling of the urban guerrilla phenomenon, LaBruce’s film is open to flexible interpretation. Through Gudrun’s instructive discourse, The Raspberry Reich educates its viewers about the West German urban guerrillas’ actions and beliefs, the Stammheim prison deaths and the state murder theory, and even Herbert Marcuse’s call for liberation from dominant sexual practices. Yet it presents its fledging guerrilla cell as naïve, painfully incompetent, and intractably comical. Further, Gudrun’s philosophical imperatives and practical interventions are all borrowed ones. LaBruce explains, [M]y movie is about a group of very inept, would-be terrorists who emulate the Baader-Meinhof in a kind of comical way. I was referencing movies like Fassbinder’s The Third Generation, Godard’s La Chinoise, and Dusav Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism – agit-prop films that playfully illustrate revolutionary principles with narrative skits, direct camera address, or even documentary elements. My movie isn’t exactly supposed to be taken seriously as an investigation of the fundamental principles of terrorist abduction, but in a strange way, any time you make a movie, especially a low budget one, you become a bunch of urban guerillas. We worked completely without permits, shot in ad hoc locations without permission, shot people surreptitiously on the street without them knowing

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it, etc. We got kicked out of our location in a great old East Berlin apartment building on Karl Marx Allee because the neighbours started to complain when they saw guys in ski masks holding guns running in and out of their building. So in a way it did approximate that kind of feeling of trying to evade the authorities and operate under the radar. Also when you make a movie you inevitably adopt this conviction that you will get it done by any means necessary, whatever it takes, that the ends justify the means completely. Shooting a porno always feels like a guerilla activity, like you’re contravening some law, morally if not legally.76 But, for the Raspberry Reich, the kick-off operation that would hail the birth of the raf’s “sixth generation” would be the group’s planned kidnapping of the son of Herr Herman Schmidt, a (fictional) wealthy industrialist. The operation is planned to mark the twentyfive-year anniversary of the raf’s abduction of Hanns Martin Schleyer; however, they botch even the date and take the hostage two weeks after the anniversary. Of course, the kidnappers drive an old bmw – as you would if you wanted to emulate the group. In 1971, a young West German urban guerrilla, Petra Schlem, was killed in a confrontation with police. She and another guerrilla fighter had been driving a blue bmw. This bmw was displayed over and over again in media coverage of the shooting. bmws came to be associated with the raf and were assumed to be the preferred getaway car for the cell, even though the guerrillas also frequently stole other fast luxury vehicles. The brd’s counter-insurgency operation, Aktion Kobra, involved checkpoints on roadways to stop all bmws. Hence, the bmw came to be nicknamed the Baader-Meinhof-Wagen and has been appropriated in an ongoing struggle over signification surrounding the raf mythology. It continues to enjoy repeated cultural appearances in relation to narratives that address West German urban guerrillas. In this context, the film mocks the mythology of the raf by deploying the bmw as a conspicuous getaway vehicle to use in the abduction of a political hostage, as though the use of the bmw confirms the authenticity of the protagonists’ identity as guerrillas more than the successful realization of a guerrilla action that has no

5.9 and 5.10 The Raspberry Reich (2004), by Bruce LaBruce

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actual political demands attached to it. So, while en route in the bmw, the guerrillas make a stop at a Burger King drive-thru for takeout, and they hope that Gudrun will not find out about this counterrevolutionary indulgence. Nevertheless, the action ultimately fails because, as it turns out, their hostage is estranged from his father after recently “coming out,” is in willing solidarity with the guerrillas’ sexual revolutionary praxis, and soon afterwards runs off with one of the guerrillas, who is his secret lover. Gudrun laments: “The dream has died. The sixth generation has died before it had a chance to be born.” The Raspberry Reich could be mobilizing something like the Prada Meinhof critique. We laugh at Gudrun’s hyper-militant approach to everything that she does, and her assurance that she looks excessively glamourous while doing it. She wavers in her convictions when doing so serves her immediate wishes. With this, the film points to radical chic in consumer culture and appearance over substance. Most of what Gudrun does is speak or, more accurately, what she mostly does is cite the words of others, casting these words into the form of didactic orders directed at the other members of the group. In this way, the film indexes the perhaps predominant sense that concrete action has been subsumed under a cycle of reiterated media images and mantras. Perhaps, today, all we have at our disposal are slogans, signs, and images, and the only possible action might be a somewhat empty appropriation and redeployment of these evercirculating radical signifiers. Perhaps this reading could be supported by the ambiguous ending of the film, which mirrors the film’s opening that depicts Gudrun strolling along an urban street lined with shops, intermittently stealing objects (or “liberating” them from their status as property) that catch her attention: a bouquet of flowers, some candy, a hand gun. At the closing of the film, two years after the failed hostage action and the disbanding of their cell, Gudrun walks along the street with Holger and baby Ulrike in a stroller. What happened to revolution, Gudrun? This remains an open question because the satire reveals how social concerns seem to be rendered as private matters. So, “the revolution is postponed,” and baby Ulrike, who listens to Gudrun’s history lessons about the founding of the apo in West Germany, symbolizes “the next generation.”

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More than the practical elements of shooting in locations without permissions that LaBruce outlines, his film, which he refers to as a “genre exercise,” mobilizes a form of guerrilla operation that is aimed directly at normativity. The Raspberry Reich draws from the sexual politics of the 1960s and 1970s that acknowledged the intrinsic ties between normative relationships and social institutions, particularly that of the heteronormative nuclear family, that support capitalism and imperialist war economies through discipline and control. Gudrun borrows from the Weathermen’s ‘gutcheck’ for new recruits when she turns to her comrades Holger and Che and challenges them: “Are you revolutionary enough to smash your closest relationships? Are you revolutionary enough to give up your girlfriends?” The commune projects of the 1960s and 1970s targeted monogamy more directly and consistently than they did heteronormativity. But LaBruce extends the critique mobilized in the sexual politics of the period by explicitly queering the fictional guerrilla cell. In The Raspberry Reich, queering critically observes, as the sexual politics of the 1960s and 1970s did in a more constrained way, the immaterial or affective aspects of social order and control that are mobilized in support of larger economic and political flows, by emphasizing reproduction, dominant forms of socialization, production, and so on. If, as Antin explored through the figure of the nurse in The Nurse and the Hijackers, labour in flexible capitalism appropriates capacities of communication, care, and feeling – dimensions of subjectivities that are often assumed to be private, ‘mine’ only, and distinct from public concerns – The Raspberry Reich observes the ways in which attachments, practices, and desires presumed to be individual and private inscribe subjects within that system by binding them with artificial natures, comportments, and practices that, together, support a historically specific form of rationality. In this way, while the new social movements of the twentieth century gained political recognition for politically subordinated subject positions, their grounding in identities and identity politics founds new, albeit alternative, normative expectations that incorporate subjects into social institutions. Queering is a negative practice because, rather than defining identities, which then become tied to social practices in ways that impose

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new normative demands, it seeks to disentangle articulations that bind subjects, practices, and social expectations. Thus, while Gudrun’s insistence that “there will be no revolution without a sexual revolution” is not a new one, in The Raspberry Reich it is deployed as a queering intervention that does not present an either/or alternative of identification. While the film is overwhelmingly comical at times, LaBruce suggests that the work intentionally constitutes a serious critique not only at the level of norms generally, but a critique that particularly targets radical movements that hold to rigid notions of sexual and gender identification. A Heart Lies Beneath In the satirical art novel The Baader-Meinhof Affair (2003), multimedia and performance artist Erin Cosgrove delves into the romance genre by tracking its preoccupations and tropes – in this case, that of fascination with the figure of the outlaw – and advances the genre towards its edges. When does the romantic stop being romantic? Or, what does the unsaid of the genre say? Serious in its playfulness, The Baader-Meinhof Affair (a retro-designed circa-1950s romance paperback from the “A Secret Romance Series”) is set on an American college campus, which is home to a German reading group. The reading group provides an appropriate cover for students who are covertly (although it is the source of gossip) engaged with acquiring intimate and exhaustive knowledge of the raf, its members, the political context, and the group’s concerns. In their secret society, the distinction between knowing and being is effaced as they emulate the raf and participate in what they call the Baader-Meinhof Games, which are not just games. The novel’s love story draws the reader into the interior monologues of its protagonist Mara, an American college student majoring in Abnormal Psychology and specializing in the study of serial killers, as she falls for another student, Holden. Since Holden, the radical student and Mara’s romantic object, is mysterious, and what Mara knows of him is derived less from direct experience and more from what others say and from her vivid imagination supported by cultural imagery, the referent of Mara’s love – the love object – is unstable. Holden is a signifier, but of what? Holden, as a figure of imaginative

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attachment, enables Mara to imagine herself situated differently in multiple and contradictory relations, but not to represent herself as a substantive identity that has its own content. Mara only defines herself negatively, in terms of what she is not, or speculatively, in terms of what she could be. The novel’s semi-fictional authorship, given in third-person narration, mirrors this sliding instability of identity of subjects which do not self-coincide by enacting shifting subject positions that are elaborated in Cosgrove’s legends (such as Jello Shots [2004], Regan’s Room [2004], and Holden’s Room [2004]), independent artworks that simultaneously map out and trouble the novel’s significations while placing them into reflexive dialogues with psychoanalysis, literature, history, and popular culture. Cosgrove’s video A Heart Lies Beneath (2004) is based upon The Baader-Meinhof Affair, with cameos from artist John Baldessari and Italian model Fabio (he also appears on the covers of Cosgrove’s romance novels), whose public persona has become synonymous with the modern romance genre. As the narrator for A Heart Lies Beneath, Fabio is an expert of the heart (much like on his real-life album, Fabio After Dark) and he frames Mara’s story as a universal one. Mara meets Holden on campus and immediately falls for him; he invites her to a planning meeting for a Free Mumia benefit. Yet Holden’s behaviour is aloof. Mara wonders: is he protecting her from something? Holden’s ex-girlfriend Regan hosts Mara in her dormitory room, where the walls are covered in radical revolutionary social movement paraphernalia posters. On the bed is a throw cushion adorned with the raf’s symbol. Mara inquires: Is R.A.F. a band or a clothing line? Regan commits to prepping Mara for initiation into the group: “Okay, we have one hour in which to make you R.A.F. fluent. Sit.” But, for Mara, the knowledge that Regan offers will make her more desirable to Holden. Cosgrove’s project explores and emphasizes an inextricable relationship between love and cultural myth, as the passionate relationships developed within the narrative somewhat depend upon the absorption and internalization of trivia culture related to the raf story, as it is constructed within the reading group. The reading group’s construction, in turn, echoes the collective instruction of raf history through popular culture. When Mara first learns from Regan

5.11 Mara with Dingbats (2004), by Erin Cosgrove

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about the secret reading group’s intent interest in anything pertaining to either Baader or Meinhof, she understands this via a comparison to Trekkies. As Mara is instructed on urban guerrilla and revolutionary history, she fantasizes: After she and Holden rob a bank, Mara would, in an act of benevolence, bestow a bag of cash on a pregnant woman whose clothes signal her relative structural disadvantage. But, acknowledging the importance of “looking the part,” Mara considers what to wear, where to be seen, and what to drink. Espresso is definitely more of a guerrilla fighter’s drink than café crème. Regan’s instruction oscillates from historical and referential key points that, across Cosgrove’s related works, produce archival and encyclopedic entries that are troubled and split into multi-vocal narrations, to warnings such as: “Don’t trust anything in a baseball cap or banana clip.” Cosgrove’s novel, legends, and video enact the codes of the romance, while the narrations perform for their audiences the political instruction that the characters do for Mara. Cosgrove’s works are not alone in producing what may at first seem to be an unlikely connection between lessons in raf trivia and seduction. Instruction on raf history drives not only the narrative but also the revolutionary-erotic play in LaBruce’s The Raspberry Reich. The teaching of this history is also central to the action in the film Monkey Warfare (2006), directed by Reginald Harkema. Monkey Warfare is about a disenchanted couple of post-1960s radicals with a secret past and their chance meeting with a young bicycle revolutionary. An informal crash course in the history of the raf and the loaning of Astrid Proll’s book Baader Meinhof / Pictures on the Run 67–77 decidedly marks the initiation of intimacy and passion between two of the film’s protagonists. These works straddle a curious tension between attached instruction and the critique suggested in King and Worley’s proposed concept of Prada Meinhof, because they ruminate upon the appearance of critical symbols and associations in the absence or denial of praxis. Simultaneously, the works themselves, not only the stories they tell, are shot through with something that could be interpreted as affective attachment as they dig things up, sift through the flash images of guerrilla histories, and place them into orbit with the seemingly superficial play of guerrilla dress-up. As these elements collide, the

5.12 and 5.13 A Heart Lies Beneath (2004), by Erin Cosgrove

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meanings of the works cannot be pinned down; they are contradictory in their force. In this sense, they resonate with the contemporary aesthetic categories of triviality that Sianne Ngai observes in the zany, the cute, and the interesting, because these works refuse the sublime’s resolution of discord in a “final feeling” and instead “evoke intrasubjective discord as well as intersubjective or social conflict”77 that remain open and “[clarify] something that the beautiful and the sublime tend to obscure, which is that to aestheticize something is not necessarily to idealize or even revere it.”78 The word “trivia” has paradoxical connotations. In regular usage, it refers to that which is without consequence or import; to what is common, lowly, or the quotidian. Etymologically, it is derived from the Latin word trivium, denoting a place where three roads intersect. Epistemologically, it refers to knowledge derived from the senses. Lauren Berlant associates both attachment and the condition of being teachable with optimism. In her claim that “[a]ll attachment is optimistic, if we describe optimism as the force that moves you out of yourself and into the world in order to bring closer the satisfying something that you cannot generate on your own but sense in the wake of a person, a way of life, an object, project, concept, or scene,”79 Berlant’s observation resonates with Felix Ensslin’s comparison between the subject matter of Regarding Terror and the process of falling in love. “To be teachable,” Berlant remarks, “is to be open to change,”80 and “the compulsion to repeat optimism, which is another definition of desire, is a condition of possibility that also risks having to survive, once again, disappointment and depression, the protracted sense that no-one, especially oneself, is teachable after all. All that work for what? Love isn’t the half of it.”81 Berlant makes these observations in Cruel Optimism, her exploration of the neoliberal present in which (postwar) promises of the “good life” remain in our fantasies but have become increasingly contingent or impossible to realize on the ground. While optimism animates and incites, it also binds as it supports, and when it captures you in impassivity, it becomes cruel. “Whatever the experience of optimism is in particular, then, the affective structure of an optimistic attachment involves a sustaining inclination to return to the scene of fantasy that enables you to expect that this time, nearness to this

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thing will help you or a world to become different in just the right way. But, again, optimism is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving.”82 These works that mobilize the device of instruction in raf trivia coupled with seductive attachment seem to index a curious optimism, one that is mixed and contradictory. At once, they contain: a raw and cutting sarcasm (which perhaps mingles with the perceived failure to recuperate the concrete course of ’68); a gently affectionate preoccupation with the cultural repertoire of collective instruction; and I’ll leave the third path of the tri-via unnamed as a question – as a trace of the negative. After all, “[a]chieving and succeeding are not the measures for assessing whether the desire for the political was ridiculous.”83 But this would definitely not be a reformist third way. Dürer, ich führe persönlich Baader+Meinhof durch die Dokumenta V Wasn’t Joseph Beuys attempting to instruct guerrillas with Dürer, ich führe persönlich Baader+Meinhof durch die Dokumenta V (Dürer, I will personally guide Baader + Meinhof through Documenta 5)? Produced for Documenta 5 in 1972, Beuys’s sculpture is constructed out of two wood-fiber boards painted yellow with its title and Beuys’s signature scripted in black paint. The two boards are each supported by a wood plank, each of which is set into a felt slipper filled with rose stems and fat (one of Beuys’s staple materials). The sculpture emulates a walking figure but in a state of tentative stasis, waiting for its charges to be taken on a tour of resocialization into West German society. It presumably stands in as an alibi for Beuys himself, who debated participants at Documenta 5 as part of his dialogue for Direct Democracy. Baader, Meinhof, and several other core members of the raf were still underground when Beuys issued this call. The sculpture represents a double-address to the extent that it not only called upon the raf to reconsider their tactics and aims, but it also issued “an appeal to their followers and supporters to return to the fold rather than pursue revolution outside of the broad counterculture front in which Beuys saw himself as one of the father figures.”84 It was also an attempt to suture the divide cloven within the political

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left of the brd in part by the extremism of the urban guerrillas and the effects of counter-insurgency efforts upon dissent. Beuys’s sculpture and its implicit restorative gesture, particularly in its promise of resocialization, echo a parental plea and the adoption of the loved object as a personal project, offering to do for the other that which one cannot do for oneself. Drawing from Lacan’s observation that the I “designates the enunciating subject, but does not signify him,”85 this gesture could be seen to contain a conflation of the self, the other, and the symbolic order of authority in a multiple address inflected with affection, urgency, and the infantilization of the explicit, but not ultimate, addressee. This is, perhaps, how Meinhof could have interpreted it in any case, as it echoes an open letter written by her foster mother. In November 1971, only months after the announcement of the raf’s formation, Renate Riemack, Ulrike Meinhof’s foster mother,86 published an open letter to Meinhof in konkret, the publication for which Meinhof had previously worked as a journalist and co-editor. Riemack urged Meinhof to give up and to turn herself in to authorities. Riemack’s explicit concerns predict what would occur up to and throughout the Stammheim trial. She wrote: This country offers, at most, suitable conditions for a gangster drama. Ulrike, you know that you and your friends can expect nothing but bitter enmity from the German public. You also know that you are condemned to play the part of a company of spectres serving the forces of reaction as an excuse for a massive revival of that anti-Communist witchhunt which was perceptibly discouraged by the student movement. Who – apart from a handful of sympathizers – still understands the political and moral impulse behind your actions? A spirit of sacrifice and the readiness to face death become ends in themselves if one cannot make them understood.87 Riemack’s letter is implicitly addressed as much or more to the public and to the West German state authorities as it is explicitly to Meinhof. The letter opens with the line “You are not like that, Ulrike,” and goes on to construct an image of Meinhof that troubles

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the representation reiterated in the press and media frenzy that followed her involvement in the successful guerrilla action that broke Andreas Baader out of prison in 1970. The letter describes Meinhof as a long-time committed and experienced anti-violence activist; Meinhof was involved since the 1950s with the anti–atom bomb movement. She also reportedly had a long-standing aversion to guns and to violence generally.88 In its double-voiced address, Riemack’s letter condemns in advance the state structures that would use the raf to implement a body of law to crush dissent in the brd.89 Found in a trash bin at Wittenbergplatz in Berlin some weeks after Riemack’s letter was published were several documents and some ammunition in a bag. Among these was a response to the letter in the form of its refunctioning, although its authorship is unconfirmed. It read: A Slave Mother Entreats Her Child Ulrike, you are not like your picture on the Wanted poster, but a slave child – you are a slave woman yourself. So how would you be capable of firing upon your oppressors? Don’t let those who refuse to be slaves any more lead you astray. You cannot protect them. I want you to remain a slave – like me… Revolution is great – we are too small for it. Slave souls are quicksands upon which no victory can be built… You are a good child. It wasn’t you who climbed over the masters’ fence, it was the others. But they set the dogs on you. Oh, child, you deserved better. To think of what you might have been! I’m sure you would have risen to be an overseer. Don’t you see how strong our masters are? All the slaves obey them. Even those who did protest, and won a victory, will lay that victory at their masters’ feet, so that they may go on being slaves… Do not transgress, my child. Do penance, even if our masters impose dreadful punishment on you. It is God’s will. Be subject to the authorities who have power over you. Give up, Ulrike!90

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If Regarding Terror produces scenes of attachment to West German urban guerrilla figures, symbols, and imagery, these scenes split open unto a place charged with a “hard-to-register flicker of affect”91 and where the “unequivocal”92 feeling of classical aesthetics is deferred in attachments that are seductively contagious but without resolution. What we know about Romance, from Tristan onward, is that it involves not the chase “after love for its own sake,” but a “quest [that] is only the disguise of a love for obstruction per se.”93

“Show me whom to desire” 94

…we can’t simply discard and forget a story like that; we must try to find a different way of dealing with it.95 –Gerhard Richter

If the fire-storm reaction to the application for the public funding of the KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s research and preparation for Regarding Terror can be said to imply an accusation of love, there are certainly many instances that could readily confirm its guilt in this regard. Everywhere, the show expresses compulsion, obsession, affection, attachment, and ambiguities of all kinds. It does so at the levels of: the individual production of participating artists; the curatorial research, work, and overriding programming principles; and the consumption of the exhibition by visitors and critics. To the extent that Regarding Terror can be seen as an archive not only of the raf and its representation but also of necessary compulsions, it is worth taking seriously curator Felix Ensslin’s response to critics who object to the taking up of the raf as subject matter (or as “play material”), when he, following Gerhard Richter, insists that it has something to do with the “fight against the loss of significance” and he compares projects of engagement with this subject matter to the process of falling in love. Whosoever struggles against the loss of significance in such a manner is required to integrate such a fall into a form that is “subjugated to the great narrative Other, to that general opinion which disparages any excessive force and wants the subject

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himself to reduce the great imaginary current, the orderless, endless stream which is passing through him, to a painful, morbid crisis of which he must be cured, which he must ‘get over.’”96 That process of falling in love – intertwined as it is with the threat to the I of falling into a discursive abyss – is not a pursuit with which one would consciously choose to occupy oneself. But it offers a diagram or schema for movement into a new sort of consciousness, which is temporary. This movement, pre-mapped ahead of us, does not belong to us and nor does the object that ostensibly motivates it. Barthes’s schema implicates not only the loved one but the whole of the situation of which the lover is only an effect. The use of the raf as a loved object proffers a site upon which to choreograph the outbursts of a subject who is not an origin but an effect of conventional language and the prohibitions inherent to its identification. The subject’s attachments take the shape of Barthesian figures by first adopting recognizable forms and then performing gymnastic and choreographic outbursts to enact a mundane workingthrough of negative identification that is similar to the aesthetic convolutions of guerrilla enactments. This is not to suggest a symmetry between the preoccupations of the artist, the curator, the musician, the novelist, or the ordinary subject engaged in the rhythms of everyday life and those of the guerrilla fighter. Rather, it is to suggest that aesthetic convolutions operate by way of indeterminate trajectories97 that may begin from an encyclopedic repertoire of cultural figures or images that repeatedly circulate yet simultaneously seek displacement from them through detonated syntaxes. This is its coda. Hence, the works described herein do not seek to prove a thesis, fulfill an instrumental objective, nor even to represent something. They do not represent but make something new and, in doing so, they incrementally change the distributions between things – they make new emplacements within which the subject performs in a (anti)language that has not yet been written and, hence, cannot be translated. Aesthetic convolutions respond to the authority of dominant regimes of cultural representation by offering counter-images and a potential antidote to the anaesthetic properties of mediatized reiteration.

Chapter 6

Unruly Memory and the Spectre of Monument It is thus, in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take place.1 –Jacques Derrida Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away. Even if the whole farm – every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there – you who never was there – if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you.2 –Toni Morrison

Wait here, in this place, for just a moment. There is traffic, even though it might not be visible in the frame. Figure 6.1 depicts an intersection on Stuttgarter Platz, Berlin. The photograph was taken on a hot summer afternoon in June 2007. I begin here because this is the photograph that causes me to pause and to give way. Do not mind the literal yield sign; it figures prominently in the image only incidentally. I like this photograph because this is the photograph that reminds me the most of the doubt I felt on the day the photograph was taken. Stuttgarter Platz – of the significance of this when the photograph was taken, I was not certain. I marked it on my map because I understood it to be one of the former sites of k1. Founded in 1967, k1 was an important postwar experiment in community living; its members eschewed the nuclear family as inextricably tied to fascism. But, of the

6.1 The German Autumn in Minor Spaces (2007), by Allen Ball and Kimberly Mair

accuracy of the location for k1, I was not sure. I had noted more than one possible address from various sources and did not know the exact building of the many that reside on the Platz. So, perhaps the intersection was a good compromise. Surely, it holds the imperceptible but present imprints of those days. If only streets could surrender the traces of paths that they most certainly house. I wondered: Could the street’s memories be cultivated? But even though it is the correct street, so what? The doubt remains. I want to give in to the doubt that I felt when visiting the Platz to see what, if anything, such doubt may make palpable. In particular, I wish to address some of the absences, complications, and challenges that emerged while I was carrying out archival research on the West German urban guerrilla movement to elaborate upon matters of methodology that I raised at the outset of this book in order to attempt to acknowledge what is excluded or seemingly absent. As I have noted, what remains left out or what is deemed too quotidian to be remarkable shares with negative guerrilla aesthetics a stubborn

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resistance to public legibility and haunts attempts at cultural articulation.3 The gaps left by that which is unsayable, and thus remains unsaid, or by the things that seem unimportant, are not empty but instead house an intractable negative feeling that is culturally emplaced and emplacing. Andreas Huyssen has brought attention to what he believes is a crisis in modern temporality that feeds a cultural obsession with memory that contests the acceleration of temporality that characterizes our present time. This crisis of temporality confronts us with multiple “non-synchronicities,”4 but it also produces multiple emplacements to which this negative feeling can migrate. Therefore, as I noted at the outset, while the urban guerrilla movement and its aesthetics emerged within a particular geographical and cultural ethos, their effects and echoes now transgress the contextually emplaced conditions of their irruption. The strange appearance and intimation of the guerrilla figure recurs in fashion, in films, in artwork, in curatorial projects, in practices of memorialization, in state security procedures that operate as if the war on guerrillas never ended (or could never end), and in contestations over memory. In this chapter, I reflect upon the making of memory through institutionalized and non-institutionalized operations, including artistic and cultural production, with a methodological discussion that makes an appeal for the inchoate, the ephemeral, and the absent. It recalls absences in the institutional archive and considers the problems associated with the search for non-textual records or absences. Speculating on the potential of the city street, or spaces as such, as sites of memory, I seek to perform a (double) displacement of public forms of memorialization, such as the formal archive, the gravestone, or the public monument, while approximating a displacement of the hegemonic source, method, and so on. While I do not claim that the cultural formations I treat here each perform guerrilla aesthetics, the dislocated returns that they support bring with them traces of negativity and the incongruent-sense-making of guerrilla aesthetics, and they are met by an apparent compulsion to explain their appearance and to give meaning to the figure of the guerrilla as well. The traces of negativity that accompany the illegibility and absences (as well as the doubts) that I will address in this chapter inhabit what Svetlana Boym calls the “off-modern” condition in which “reflection and

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longing, estrangement and affection go together.” As she notes, “the adverb off confuses our sense of direction; it makes us explore sideshadows and back alleys rather than the straight road of progress.”5 The images that Boym’s words give suggest a jagged mingling of time and space that, as with the concept of emplacement, poses a challenge to common-sense assumptions of these supposed orders as empty and discrete. This chapter remains consistent with my endeavour to preserve the illegibility of guerrilla enactments by extending my critique of what I consider a rationalizing consensus that organizes an imperative to give meaning or reason to the negative traces that are attached to cultural productions that retrieve the figure of the guerrilla, but it foregrounds the potential of the sideshadows and alleyways that I had to take to approach the predicaments of incomprehensibility, emplacement, and absences.

The Place of Departure

When I began this work, I wanted to give particular attention to communicative formations within the guerrilla movement. My point of departure was the limits of speech, informed by the assumption that the production of self in speech is partial, hesitant, and always frustrated, and yet acknowledging that speech is the privileged mode in which subjects are compelled to convey something of themselves, or to tell their stories. Given these concerns, this work invited consideration of the aesthetics of the body as a communicating and acting materiality, which necessarily implicates the intermingling of the senses and emplacements. The place in which the body is situated and the inextricable conjunctions between kinesthetics, chronotope, and the multi-authorship of memory all matter. The force of the work was not to advocate a substitution by which corporeal choreographies of subjectivity are privileged over speech as liberating or more authentic modes, but to argue for attending to them as forceful, yet neglected and perhaps opaque, forms of communication. Corporeal choreographies are neglected perhaps because, in their refusal to give way to instrumental itineraries, they enact the scandal of their persistent

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illegibility and lack of fit for polemical anchoring. Giving attention to corporeal choreographies, which I have called aesthetic convolutions, coupled with the textual remnants of the urban guerrilla, led me to speculate upon the ways that urban guerrilla enactments unmoored them from the anchoring granted to the liberal humanist subject and its socially recognizable projects. I have been concerned with, on the one hand, the possibilities of corporeal forms of communication to the extent that the body engaged in guerrilla aesthetics circumvents the limits of the genres that govern speech communication, and, on the other hand, the forms that this circumvention can take and their potential for the performance and production of new or negative subjectivities. Consistent with the spirit of those concerns, the production of the work itself performed parallel circumventions into the process of academic research. This mirroring between form and this particular content was not out of place, since academic research is communicated in a site-specific mode of storytelling, albeit guided, if not obscured, by the specificities and limitations that govern its hegemonic genre. It has required double movements between disciplinary regulation and necessary flights posed by the specificities of the subject matter and the implicit demand to approach it using a logic that I have argued guerrilla aesthetics attempt to destroy through their incongruent-sensemaking enactments. Judith Butler’s insistence that the subject is formed in language’s prior power, and that its speech is repetitious and citational, means that the subject is not the origin-author of speech acts (or acts of writing). This suggests that language will refuse to give to the subject the constative means to convey something that is external to the parameters of what can be said intelligibly in a particular historical and cultural context. Hence, addressing the possibility of indeterminate aesthetic convolutions rather than the instrumental objectives of urban guerrillas (as well as those of artists and curators) is challenging, if not impossible, within the confines of conventional writing and research methodologies. Of particular relevance to the research that I set out to do were the limitations posed by the archive. While archives were crucial to the completion of this work, they frequently refused to deliver the materializations that I had previously hoped and imagined they would

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contain. This is not to say that the objects for which I was looking did not exist and that they instead had to be conjured up.6 Rather, the official state archives did not provide direct access to these objects, even if they were somewhat haunted by them. Disproportionately represented amongst the materials were texts over images and explanations over descriptions. Granted the authority to decide by virtue of presence what constitutes a historical source, the archive issues both invitations and refusals. The work that I wanted to do demanded access to images that West German urban guerrillas had produced: for instance, images, film, photography, and visual art. Also, appropriate to the study of urban guerrillas, it seemed, would be to trace their movements, exploring their use of space in the city, in the courtroom, and in their prison cells. Significant too were the many idiosyncratic language events, as illustrated in their internal communiqués, courtroom speeches, and even their silences. It is, after all, just as important to note what is not said as what is said, especially when a silent placeholder, or a “negative blank,”7 is given in a communicative situation. As James Clifford has observed, official records woefully omit “gestures, hesitations, clothing, tone of voice, laughter, irony … the sometimes devastating silences.”8 What remains is language itself, as fixed markings typed verbatim onto each page. It is arranged with a narrative order, already partially digested in a way that can be translated and consumed as the conduit for the subject’s reason. As Barthes notes, this narrative order is the tribute that must be paid “to the world in order to be reconciled with it.”9 Many of these intractable but omitted things, for a variety of practical reasons, were absent from archival records, and those that were not absent were barely represented. It is not just that the archive may be understood as an alibi for official voices on the topic – voices perhaps motivated to select carefully what ought to be conveyed and what ought not to be conveyed – although that is likely somewhat the case. Jacques Derrida observes and reminds us that one of the principles invoked in the etymology of the word “archive” is a nomological principle: the archive is the place (or residence) where the law is made and order established.10 The archive privileges, and therefore excludes, certain forms of communication. Namely, it often excludes

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the extra-textual or the mise-en-scène of the circumstances it aims to preserve through collection and documentation. It appears as though the archive’s voice is too often committed to a sort of transcribed speech, and therefore tends to reaffirm the limitations into which I was seeking signs of intervention. Ben Highmore’s reading of Michel de Certeau’s historiographical approach underlines the crucial consideration that, while institutions such as the archive implicitly govern knowledge production, this invites ways “of working at the limits of what is allowable in a place,” to move toward silences or to become, as de Certeau says, a “prowler.”11 Increasingly, I considered the idea that the city itself must have a capacity to archive something of what I was seeking. Derrida posits an instance of singularity in which the trace is indistinguishable from the substrate, and this he so pertinently describes in the context of walking – in particular, in the traces of Gradiva’s footsteps: “It is the condition for the uniqueness of the printer-printed, of the impression and the imprint, of the pressure and its trace in the unique instant where they are not yet distinguished the one from the other, forming in an instant a single body of Gradiva’s step, of her gait, of her pace … and the ground which carries them.”12 The suggestion that the built environments of the cities where urban guerrilla operations were carried out could perhaps maintain some (im)perceptible traces of the urban guerrilla phenomenon is consistent with considerations within this work of emplacements. It is tempting for me to say that the key here is memory, which C. Nadia Seremetakis has described as a bridging sense that is internal and intertwined with each sense.13 But to give too much weight to memory would not be quite correct in this instance. Those who can make claim to place-specific memory in relation to some of these phenomena are not the only ones for whom the attachments matter. Necessary at this point is the qualification that memory, like the subject itself, is a production, often elicited by means of interpellation, rather than something static and dependable to which we may and do return on a voluntary basis. As Douglas Aoki has observed, “[s]ubject to neither command nor possession, [remembrances] make a mockery of the hope that they might be ‘managed.’ We do not remember, and make the convenient mistake of thinking that we have

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forgotten. But the unremembered are always waiting to come home again, and there is good reason to crave and fear their homecoming.”14 Memories such as these homecomings are experienced corporeally and involuntarily. While we are condemned to the necessary and intrinsic ambivalence of reference in the usage of the word “memory,” on the one hand, the employment of a distinction between slippery memory and reconstruction15 may be helpful. On the other hand, it is worthwhile to recognize the kind of reconstruction – or “collective instruction,” following Susan Sontag16 – that is fully social in character. I have been dealing with things that are not my memories, but to an extent I have intonated them, spoken them, as Barthesian figures17 as though they could be my own; this, despite the geographical, experiential, and temporal disconnect with aspects of my subject matter. But I am not making assumptions of ahistorical universality. It is not just that the contemporary conditions of production, circulation, and consumption of images, traces, and voices pose a sensorially charged mingling of imprints, but that, as Avery Gordon has stressed, there is an inherent sociality to these reconstructions. Although, in her words, these are called “the picture of the place” or “rememory” – the latter term is borrowed from Toni Morrison: The picture of the place is not personal memory as we conventionally understand it, private, interior, mine to hoard or share, remember or forget. The picture of the place is its very sociality, all the doings, happenings, and knowing that make the social world alive in and around us as we make it ours. It is still out there because social relations as such are not ours for the owning … The possibility of a collectively animated worldly memory is articulated here in that extraordinary moment in which you – who never was there in that real place – can bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else.18 Approaching the city itself as a potential archive facilitated in many different respects the collection of materials for this work. In connection with the force of the above discussion and the intractable question of what one can do with absences, one of the ways in which I used the city as an archive was to map out the places of significance

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to events I was studying that are accessible now primarily in disciplined utterances mobilized to import a reason that was not there in the first place. This mapping motivated two iterations of a collaborative photography project, The German Autumn in Minor Spaces with visual artist Allen Ball.19 The German Autumn in Minor Spaces maps out visible and invisible traces that remain on the surfaces of the urban landscape from the events leading up to the so-called German Autumn of 1977. The vehicle for presentation for the initial iteration of this project is a single digital lcd picture frame. The eighteen photographs that constitute The German Autumn in Minor Spaces cycle sequentially, one image dissolving into another in a repetitious documentation of the sites of shootouts, breakouts, and hideouts – events that occurred in minor spaces within the otherwise vastness of the industrialized and highly policed city in the context of coordinated counterterrorist measures. As a formal element, the digital picture frame serves to reflect, through a small medium, events that still reverberate in their significance to the weight of postwar German history, and the cool manufacture of the star that encases the picture frame stands in sharp contradiction with both the snapshot quality of the images and the raf’s infamous logo of a red star with a Heckler & Koch mp5 submachine gun in the centre. The picture frame itself suggests the mundane and the domestic, acknowledging that the inconspicuous actions of the urban guerrilla occur alongside and within the familiar of the everyday and then continue to rupture ordinary life in their circulation in mediatized forms. The expanded version of the show includes the eighteen photographs on aluminum panels and, with measurements of 48⬙ ⫻ 32⬙, they express the scale of advertising that exaggerates the repetitious presentations of photographs of the raf in glossy magazines throughout the core cell’s tenure. The photographs for this project were taken in three German cities, Berlin, Kassel, and Stuttgart, in June 2007. The aim was to photograph mostly unmarked and seemingly negligible sites relevant to the history of the urban guerrilla movement in the brd from the late 1960s through to the late 1970s. The project addresses the suppressed significance of public spaces that otherwise make up the passages of everyday life in the city today, as sites of shopping, entertainment, residential living, and routine civic engagement.

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6.2 The German Autumn in Minor Spaces (2007), by Allen Ball and Kimberly Mair

Writing at the end of the 1960s, Richard Sennett20 set out to make sense of the search for community that youths embarked upon in the postwar years in the United States. Sennett was interested in the revolutionary movements that arose in industrial, urban spaces of affluence. He argued that, despite freedom from the struggle against scarcity that marked the postwar era in industrialized cities, young revolutionaries were responding to the problem of needing to make a social life and to found a sense of community. Additionally, Sennett argued that, while the abundance of the West had offered a release from toiling against deprivation, Western cities had likewise invited new forms of social tyranny: notably a self-imposed slavery in the service of security. Sennett’s project aimed to combat what he called an anti-urban bias against cities that had proliferated amongst revolutionary movements. In response to this anti-urban sentiment, Sennett extolled the virtues of disorder and chaos, emphasizing how social groups could use the large-scale systems and bureaucracies that are characteristic of the urban environment.

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Sennett’s contention is that the vastness and the loneliness of the city have positive human value because this loneliness demands contact even in the face of the risk of potentially painful social situations. He argues that attempts to avoid differences and conflict are inherent to affluent societies and are intertwined with the pursuit of purified selves that are self-limiting and contained. Sennett insists that this pursuit of purity is reproduced on a larger scale, for instance, in city planning in which projections of cohesion and solidarity precode experience, so that acts of will come to substitute for acts of experience. In the 1960s generation of revolutionary activists, Sennett saw an emergent refusal of this tendency. In this way, he codified the disorder that the activists authored as a positive reaction against the impulse toward security. Contrary to the suspicion towards the city that Sennett observed in revolutionary movements in the United States during the late 1960s, in the case of the urban guerrilla movements in the brd, the industrialized urban environment was considered a most vital and productive site from which to wage a form of warfare against not only the West German state but the practices and logic of imperialist expansion on a global scale. West German urban guerrilla fighter cells were motivated to work in conjunction with peripheral guerrilla struggles but they saw themselves as positioned to carry out a strategic attack from within the urban centres at the heart of capitalist expansion. For these underground cells, the significance and urgency of inhabiting a nation from which troops, weapons, and capital were deployed in armed struggles across the world, including that of the Vietnam War, represented an obligation to act by bringing the guerrilla struggle into industrialized urban centres of capitalist expansion, bombing department stores, embassies, army bases, and publishing houses, while hiding out in illegal residences and holding political hostages in the jungle of high-density urban housing complexes. The raf explicitly articulated the inception of their cell as an effort to bring the imperialist war back “into the belly of the beast.”21 The underlying assumption of photographing places of guerrilla contact – whether of habitation, confrontation, incarceration, or interment – was that consciousness is established in the reiterative meetings of body and built environment,22 acknowledging that one’s

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experience of a space is shaped not only by personal biography but by cultural instruction, reconstruction, or the picture of the place, as Gordon would have it, that takes shape through the production and circulation of representations manifest in, for instance, the repetition of images in media or narratives such as those found in historiography or popular literatures.23 These recurrent meetings between the body and the built environment constitute the prerequisites to knowing a place24 and the basis of the potential for one site to have multiple social existences. Likewise, such recurrent meetings, as the concept of emplacement posits, furnish the basis for the reiterative becoming of new subjectivity. In this context, a photographic cartography of the urban guerrilla phenomenon attempts to provide documentation of the mobility, action, and posture of the urban guerrilla fighter – even in its physical absence – offering a corporeal (yet spectral) counterpoint to the present absence of secret state documents relating to controversial security measures and other practices taken in response to the rise of the urban guerrilla.

Minor Spaces

With the concept of minor spaces, The German Autumn in Minor Spaces refunctions what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari capture in their notion of minor language – a language of escape that “stops being representative in order to … move towards its extremities or its limits.”25 A minor language is a language of non-grammar or of a different grammar – one of silences, interruptions, repetitions, and strange inflections that deterritorialize words from sense. It is perhaps what the unconventional grammar in the raf prisoners’ das info approximates in eschewing conventional language structure and privileging context. Notably, in das info, Meinhof even attempted to posit a new form of writing that would enable fluid subjectivity. This new writing might have approximated a minor language of flight had it been realized.26 Ironically, however, her gesture was apparently not understood, and she retracted it, berating herself for it in subsequent self-criticism. In their attempts to elucidate their concept of minor

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6.3 The German Autumn in Minor Spaces (2007), by Allen Ball and Kimberly Mair

language, Deleuze and Guattari draw upon spatial and architectural examples. Since the photography project is concerned with the uses of spaces rather than language, it foregrounds their illustrative spatial elaborations of the rhizome or burrow as a space endowed with trick passageways. The use of minor spaces to frame the photography project articulates the political and historical reverberations contained within the condensed spaces within which particular events unfolded to become part of a larger story reiterated in both official and unofficial forms and demonstrates that the documented sites exceed their routinized public functions and significance; but it stresses that this excess cannot be inscribed upon the politically uneven topology of public spaces, even several decades later. The German Autumn in Minor Spaces takes as one point of departure the limits to the potential of public space as a site for memorialization, which works towards the achievement of preferred meanings or interpretations of the events or people represented. Acknowledging the relations of power that govern the hierarchy of meanings

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intrinsic to such projects, which are achieved through negotiation and the consensus of a few, it proposes the humble category of minor spaces as a counterpoint to the problems associated with projects of memorialization – problems that beset their negotiation and their reception within a given set of power relations. In this respect, the banal snapshots in the series acknowledge the extent to which “an archive ought to be idiomatic, and thus at once offered and unavailable for translation, open to and shielded from technical iteration and reproduction.”27

The City and Its Emplaced Documents

Could the city itself be a repository for a type of document that is more conducive to the study of the urban guerrilla phenomenon than is the formal archive, cutting across locations of former illegal residences, guerrilla actions, and confrontations with the police? The city’s spaces, in this case often empty of any concrete traces, still reverberate with the echoes of events, both as they were represented and as they were experienced physically and repeatedly by participants and spectators. Amidst clamouring silences, the street continues to be a site of battle over the interpretation of events, and a place in which people struggle to project something from the past into the future. More than this, the fallout of such events has implications for the present so that it is possible to speak of contemporary participants in the context of the endless perennial construction of key moments in the urban guerrilla phenomenon, not through a form of collective memory but through the continued production and circulation of images and stories that provide the constituent elements of selfmaking and identification for contemporary human subjects, and in a very particular way for contemporary activists in the major cities of unified Germany. This is the reconstruction of things for which there are inextricable attachments. As Gaston Bachelard observes about the relationship between images/imaginings and spaces, “It is a strange situation. The space we love is unwilling to remain permanently enclosed. It deploys and appears to move elsewhere without difficulty; into other times, and on different planes of dream and memory.”28

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The spectre of the urban guerrilla, simultaneously glamourized and derided, still haunts the city streets because of its perpetual reappearance in present struggles that interpretively resonate with contemporary issues contextualized within a presumption that history takes a particular, linear course. The appearance of such linearity is a by-product of collective instruction, and it makes contemporary struggles vulnerable to official memory if new dissident groups share an identifiable resemblance, no matter how small, to the guerrilla challenge to the brd. Those groups’ supposed connection as an extension or return of the guerrilla threat legitimates the use of the emergency powers legislated in the brd crisis of the 1970s, which bypassed or negated key principles entrenched in the constitution. In other words, appeals to official memory of the urban guerrilla fighter cells in the brd provide the instruments for revolutionaries and lawmakers to carry out particular actions in the present. The starkly uneven power relationship between activist groups and the state is significant, though, and has been made strikingly evident in events in Germany as recent as 2007, when German authorities became preoccupied with protest events around the g8 Summit. An emergent underground cell called the Militante Gruppe (mg) was of particular interest, but the mg’s organized actions were occurring on a much smaller scale than did those of the 1970s urban guerrilla. In comparison with the bombings, bank robberies, and hijackings of several decades ago, the mg’s activities paled somewhat, since their activities included the burning of military and federal vehicles and arson attacks on (uninhabited) urban renewal projects. Yet, the German state mobilized the full range of the extended powers that the brd justified during the height of its counter-terrorist efforts in the 1970s and section 129a of the Criminal Code: to raid apartments; to use exhaustive and covert surveillance methods; and to detain prisoners in excessive conditions (such as solitary confinement with extended bans on visits) without releasing the full evidence against them to their legal counsel. Here, even the state, newly constituted after the turning point initiated by the fall of the Berlin Wall, compulsively returns to its ritual practices of collection in relation to the urban guerrilla and the German Autumn of the 1970s. With respect to the authorities’ compulsion towards collection in the 1970s, shock

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waves followed the stunning revelation in 2002 that the brains of Meinhof, Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe had been covertly removed from their bodies during their autopsies for the purposes of scientific research in search of the neurological origin of the terrorist mind. Secretly, Meinhof’s brain had been soaking in formaldehyde in storage at the University of Magdeburg. Amanda Third has read the scientific study of Meinhof’s brain in the context of the history of criminological thought and its production of woman as enigma, as that which refuses to be categorized. Despite the inconclusivity of attempts to analyze Meinhof’s brain, for Third, the fact that it was kept covertly for several years in a basement lab suggests that “ultimately, the dissection of Meinhof’s brain reads as a futile attempt at containment … it constitutes an absurd form of punishment enacted on a dead organ – an act of excess that betrays the destabilising potential of the object upon which it is enacted.”29 When it was revealed that Meinhof’s brain was being kept as a scientific specimen, Meinhof’s daughters successfully petitioned the courts for the return of the brain. Yet the brains of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe have reportedly “disappeared.” Commenting upon this and upon a report that a member of the medical team had crafted a death mask of Baader, a journalist attributed to the authorities a “morbid fascination” with the guerrillas.30 Returning to recent state preoccupations, the surveillance, arrest, and solitary confinement in summer 2007 of Andrej Holm, a professor of urban sociology, in addition to the arrest and detainment of another academic, were justified by the federal prosecutor’s office by the allegation that not only were the academics associated with the mg, but they may have authored mg communiqués,31 eerily echoing Antonio Negri’s predicament in the 1970s and 1980s in Italy when he was accused of organizing the Red Brigade’s assassination of Prime Minister Aldo Moro and seventeen other murders on the basis of written texts. Holm’s case is even more perplexing given that the texts directly associated with his charges, the mg communiqués, are not necessarily ones that he even wrote. The German federal prosecutor’s office based its allegation of authorship on a number of assertions, including the academics’ access to research institutes and libraries that would help to facilitate the production of writing that is contained

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in the mg communiqués, which are concerned with issues of gentrification especially pertaining to the urban spaces of the former East. Further, the federal prosecutor’s office had carried out first a comparison of internet search words and later a systematic analysis of the academics’ research publications and their inherent grammatical or stylistic patterns, including the use of particular words, phrases, and other markers embodied in written texts, such as the presence or absence of periods between letters in acronyms. The office cites the overlapping of words and phrases between the scholarly works and the mg communiqués as evidence of involvement. Some of the words that brought the state’s attention were: gentrification, reproduction, political practice, and precarisation.32 Holm’s academic research specializes in the gentrification of the former East Berlin. As Holm and Roth have stressed, not only do these policing tactics threaten to criminalize critical research, but they assume that suspicion no longer precedes investigation. Rather, suspicion is now an effect of policing practices and investigation that is oriented towards the exhaustive collection of information under the auspices of terror prevention. As it turned out, Holm and six other men had been unknowingly under heavy state surveillance for a period of at least one year preceding the arrests. The surveillance included the monitoring of telephone calls, email, and internet usage, video surveillance of entrances to residences, gps on vehicles, microphones in public settings to capture informal conversations, and the tailing of the targets throughout daily activities.33 Holm and Roth have noted how Holm’s arrest has altered the modes of communication and movement that they now use, observing for instance that “[w]e were constantly aware of the danger of endangering others, and so were they. Being in touch with us meant (and still means) being included in the scope of surveillance measures at least for a while.”34 What is more, Holm is accused in part because of meetings that he allegedly held with others suspected of association with the mg. These meetings, according to the federal prosecutor’s office, were covert in nature because Holm had left his mobile telephone at home. Even “to turn off mobile phones during meetings or to arrange a date by phone without explicitly naming time, place and reason to meet” can be perceived to be conspiratorial under these security measures.35

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In this, the state demonstrates its compulsion not only to collect material things such as handwriting samples, objects, information on persons and institutions, and even human brains under the auspices of medical research, but to collect absences such as punctuation and mobile telephones, or substitutions – the presence of this word rather than that word.36 In this, the state recognizes what its public archives do not in relation to this history. That is, the state recognizes the crucial significance of absences. Despite the incriminating link that the federal prosecutor’s office establishes between concerns about the uses (and study) of urban space and the incitement to terror, the city has long been and continues to be a site of important struggle for material existence and meaning-making. In the late autumn of 2002, frequent riots occurred over several weeks in the city centre of Hamburg, due to conflicts over housing issues. The interior minister, a former judge known for his severe law-and-order approach, had issued an eviction notice for a squat that had housed artists, students, circus performers, and workers who had taken up residence in circus wagons and construction vehicles in the development of an alternative form of society there for approximately a decade. Commune experimentation has a long history in the major cities of Germany, with k1 and its later incarnations of the 1960s and 1970s having had direct and sustained involvement in anarchist actions and the urban guerrilla cells during the period. A key struggle over squatting unfolded in the autumn of 1971, when anarchists took up illegal residence in a disinvested quarter of Frankfurt’s west end during a housing shortage. The anarchists not only kicked off the squatter movements in West Germany, according to Hockenos, but they had unwittingly taken up a quarter that the City had been mobilizing towards aggressive gentrification by encouraging investors to purchase the boarded-up homes for future redevelopment. After the mayor threatened a police raid of the squats, the squatters prepared themselves. When police in riot gear advanced on 113 Grüneburgweg, they found one hundred people defending the gates. A brutal clash ensued involving bottles, stones, and tear gas. Both sides sustained injuries in what would become known as the Battle for Grüneburgweg and the beginning of the Häuserkampf (house wars). Incidentally, Hockenos cites the Battle

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for Grüneburgweg as a contributing spark in emergent militancy, explicitly raising the question of violence: “when, how much, and what kind of violence the left should employ – was on the table again across West Germany.”37 Thus, the inhabitants of the squat in Hamburg in 2002 acknowledged this historical connection to their living practices. Also, by calling their alternative community Bambule, a word that means riot, they perhaps made a sublimated reference to Ulrike Meinhof’s madefor-television film of the same title, which was about the harsh treatment of young girls in state care. Completed in 1970 and scheduled to air in the spring of that same year, Bambule was subsequently struck from the broadcast schedule and was not shown until the 1990s because of Meinhof’s participation in the armed release of Baader from prison in 1970. State authorities feared that the film might contain covert incitements to anarchist terrorism. While the inhabitants of the squat Bambule had been cleared out, they regularly took to the streets in protest of their eviction. The protests, which at times erupted into the breaking of windows, the smashing of vehicles, and street fighting, were brought to the city centre during the peak hours of Saturday Christmas shopping. Confrontations with the police were particularly volatile and on one occasion the police even brutally attacked each other, when uniformed police began a fight with plain-clothed police from another region.38 Even in the absence of markers in particular locations of significance, contestations over the meanings of urban spaces continue to be carried out. This struggle in its most obvious form occurred around the renaming of streets in the former East Berlin, but since then has surprisingly occurred in connection with the history of urban guerrilla actions of the 1960s and 1970s, a phenomenon that, for some, is considered to be merely a product particular to the existence of the brd as an ephemeral nation-state. One example of this was the long-term struggle that preceded the renaming of a section of Kochstraße, a Berlin street, from its intersection with Friedrichstraße to where it intersects with Axel Springer Straße. A major event in the militarization of the student and worker movements in the brd was the assassination attempt on prominent student activist Rudi Dutschke, who has been described as having

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“had a number of unique qualities, one of which was the ability to unite different factions under his name. Dutschke had personified the unity of a movement that really wasn’t unified at all.”39 In April 1968, a house painter from Munich named Josef Bachmann travelled by train to Berlin, carrying with him a cut-out from a newspaper published by the print media monopolist Springer Publishing. The article’s headline read: “Stop Dutschke now!” The content of the article, published approximately two weeks earlier, suggested that the activities of the radical left student movement would lead to civil war and encourage the imminent arrival in the brd of revolutionary troublemakers from abroad. Bachmann walked from the zoo station to 140 Kurfürstendamm and waited for Dutschke to emerge. When Bachmann recognized the man from press photographs, he shot Dutschke three times, hitting him in the right cheek, the shoulder, and the head.40 While Dutschke survived his injuries in the short term, he died some years later from enduring complications. On the same day of the shooting, barbedwire fences were installed around the perimeter of the Springer offices located on the east side of Kochstraße. News of the shooting and Springer’s defensive response spread across the city and prompted a barricade and a partially spontaneous attack on the Springer building. Protesters were determined to stop trucks from leaving the site with the newspapers for delivery that day. Demonstrators blocked the exits with a line of vehicles, threw rocks, and damaged property. This event, known as the Easter Attacks, provides the historical basis for efforts in recent years to rename the street after Dutschke, which were tension-ridden, divisive, and drawn-out. The struggle for the realization of the name-change speaks to the impulse to grasp and fix meaning to past events and to the spaces – otherwise emptied of their traces – within which these events occurred. What kind of weight does the renaming of streets (or to name at all) carry? It is a grasp at the genesis – the one who names is the one who produces objects, closures, and openings, and the one who makes records of things – things that may or may not have actually happened. As Derrida remarks with regard to the archive, “It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we

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6.4 The German Autumn in Minor Spaces (2007), by Allen Ball and Kimberly Mair

want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come. Perhaps. Not tomorrow but in times to come, later on or perhaps never. A spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive and ties it, like religion, like history, like science itself, to a very singular experience of the promise.”41 Today, the Springer publishing complex, which has recently expanded beyond its stronghold in print media into television broadcasting, takes up considerably more space on the streetscape (the street that is now called Dutschke) than it did in 1968,42 when it was represented only by its solitary looming golden tower, situated just west of the Berlin Wall, which is of course now absent – except for a singular line of bricks embedded into the otherwise sutured road to trace the Wall’s former contours.43

The Spectre of Monument

While the photography of The German Autumn in Minor Spaces is concerned primarily with unmarked sites, it does not call for the monumentalization or memorialization of sites upon which these events of

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great historical weight in the history of postwar Germany occurred. On the contrary, the underlying approach is critical of what could be called the spectre of monument, or the impulse toward the closure of meaning through the imposition of nodal points for the practices of hegemonic signification of public spaces.44 The contention is that, to the extent that memorialization constitutes the materialization of a fierce struggle over meaning, it both obeys and enforces the limits of knowledge and experience. The declarations of memorials have instrumental force within the parameters of what can be conveyed.45 Memorialization attempts and fails to pose an adequate intervention into a nagging sense of loss by endeavouring to exorcise routine spaces of excess traces that cannot be singularized or articulated in short form but are nevertheless emplaced there.46 It trades the ontological accumulation of imprints, echoes, and trajectories embodied in everyday spaces for both physical and conceptual containment in a form that is subject to hierarchies of meaning to which public space is ultimately accountable. Taking the impulse towards the memorialization of past events – a compulsion that is materialized almost everywhere in the city of Berlin in particular – as a constitutive part of the process of self-making or subject formation, leads one to consider Frederic Jameson’s observation that “at an outer limit, the sense people have of themselves and their own moment of history may ultimately have nothing to do with its reality.”47 In a different spirit, however, one might wonder whether securing a connection to reality actually matters in such a case, or if reality is what is at stake in projects of memorialization. In the face of such questions, the visits to Ulrike Meinhof’s grave in Berlin and to the shared grave of Gudrun Ensslin, Andreas Baader, and Jan-Carl Raspe in Stuttgart in the context of the production of the broader photographic project presented many questions that still remain unanswered. These questions resonate with the observations offered at the outset about the veracity and authenticity of the very precise location depicted in the opening photograph in relation to k1. The photographs that constitute The German Autumn in Minor Spaces are empty to the extent that they are void of visual markers associated with the events that they document. They document without explaining.48 To explain would be to distill the multiple and

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incongruently-sensical character of social spaces and to cast them within an instrumental narrative that adheres to a particular grammar of conduct. It was from this grammar of conduct that I have suggested that the emergent Stammheim subject fled, while appealing instead to the performance of a multi-nodal guerrilla language not yet established. Michael Taussig has written about his and others’ visits to the gravesite of Walter Benjamin and remarked upon the underlying motivations that they suggest, which raise questions about the tensions between absence and presence, memory, and subjectivity. Having fled the Nazis but having been denied entry into Spain in the autumn of 1940, Benjamin committed suicide on the French-Spanish border. Taussig tells us that the philosopher Hannah Arendt visited the cemetery only months after Benjamin’s death, but she could not find his gravestone anywhere. Taussig reveals, however, that apparently Benjamin was buried under a reversal of his name; he was buried as a Catholic named “Benjamin Walter,” which effectively elided his Jewish identity and accounts for Arendt’s inability to locate his gravestone. Since records show that the plot was only paid up for a period of five years, it is believed that Benjamin’s body was later interred in a common grave, now part of an undifferentiated mass of human remains. But today the cemetery is inhabited by a gravestone and monument to Benjamin. The monument, completed in 1994, is an iron stairwell cut into the rock of a mountain, leading to the sea; the gravestone, however, rests over the absence of Benjamin’s body. Taussig’s initial reaction to his dissonant realization that the grave is a fake – that the stone in fact does not mark the location of Benjamin’s remains – was one of indignation. But, he later remarks in his book, “you must ask yourself whether such carefully crafted invisibility of the public secret is not the most significant monument imaginable. What real monument of stone or glass, people’s names or lofty literary quotation, can compete with invisibility?”49 noting also that “we find meaning in the world not only from smoothly functioning symbols … but also from an awkwardness of fit between signs and what they refer to.”50 Following these considerations, Taussig echoes something that decades earlier struck Arendt when she went in her failed search for

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6.5 The German Autumn in Minor Spaces (2007), by Allen Ball and Kimberly Mair

Benjamin’s grave, by focusing on the landscape of the cemetery rather than its markers and musing about the way in which the landscape invites a different kind of monument. He writes: “To sit on a ledge by the sea and watch the waves is to invite us, for a moment, at least, to slow down and think … That is a memorial, too, a type of monument, to slow down and think.”51 My visits to the gravesites of the core members of the raf were infused with intense and conflicted feelings about what it meant to be

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there. I experienced the visit to Meinhof’s grave with a tinge of panic, for we arrived at the gates with a map only vaguely indicating the location of her stone and only minutes before the cemetery was scheduled to close. The fervent efforts to capture photographs before a cemetery employee anxious to leave for the day drove us out of there (of course, no such person ever actually materialized) meant that the visit was experienced largely through a camera lens and through the anticipation of its immortalization in digital images. But what needs to be explored is this sense of loss or nagging sense of inauthenticity that accompanies my memories of the visit. There is an overriding notion that gravesites are to hold an intrinsic connection to their referents, but just what is the referent to which a gravestone refers? What actually rests there? Why does a gravesite hold the cultural power that it does when the streets, stairwells, and floors that the dead once trod upon day in and day out – or the architectural structures within which the sounds of their voices echoed – are discounted and are easily restored with a veneer of neutrality? Perhaps we ought to refuse the distinction between the grave and the monument. They both present the problem of the undead, with what cannot be fully buried, with (what) remains. The marker is a trace of the doubt that remains. Perhaps the gravesite – as, arguably, the most obvious and most reverent formation of the practice of public memorialization – articulates a desire to divide up and banish such significances from our everyday spaces out of an unspoken fear of being consumed by an ever-present accumulation of multiple and shifting memory that will be there, in place, waiting for you.

Conclusion

Having explored the radical performativity of guerrilla enactments and the accumulating cultural renderings that stammer around their opaque communication tactics, this book has touched upon a range of concerns relating to what I have called guerrilla aesthetics. It destabilizes an apparent rationalizing consensus to evaluate, explain, and hermeneutically neutralize West German urban guerrilla enactments and their cultural reverberations in artistic production and memorymaking. Not all of the iterations attended to in this book are instances of guerrilla negativity, but each site of exploration enables different engagements with guerrilla aesthetics and their inchoate stubbornness. Two operations remain common to every chapter in this book. First, each chapter undermines the assumption of intention and thereby challenges a unified conception of the subject for which the concept of emplacement invokes a new distribution of problems. Second, each chapter underlines the repetitious return of a general and intractable discomfort with illegibility that seems to elicit gestures of redemptive intervention through the attribution of meaning, reason, and explanation – if not accusation. This exploratory endeavour intervenes into the struggle over what Sontag has called collective instruction. It does so by objecting to the impositions of meaning and instrumentality upon guerrilla negativity and even upon artistic practice. But this elaboration also attempts to say something about hegemonic disciplinary approaches by pointing to what they affirm and what they exclude in order to render coherence at the expense of attachments, senses,1 and emplaced experiences.2 Guerrilla Aesthetics attempts to give place in its text to absences and to make present the things that the archive would not give. This approach remains speculative in its force, since evidence, ephemeral gestures, omissions, and things left unsaid hold less credibility than

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do ostensible facts derived from the historical record. If I had given an analysis of organizational structures or a critique of guerrilla ideology, this work’s achievement would be more conclusive. My curiosity about partial imprints and inchoate elements, sensoriality, and space counters the imperative to grant meaning and to find reason in guerrilla enactments. It also operates in a refusal to make a normative judgment of – or to psychologize – the urban guerrilla and thereby manage or foreclose the messy questions that the Red Decade left behind. I do not deal with all of these questions here, as this work is not concerned with managing the intractable public feelings of shock that reached an apex in the German Autumn of 1977. Instead, Guerrilla Aesthetics tries to approach that shock without effacing it. My reading of guerrilla enactments will render for some readers a curious absence in this book thus far: I have not given an explicit evaluation of guerrilla violence. Thus, a troubling question for a reader might be: Can, or should, guerrilla tactics such as bombing, hostage-taking, assassination, hijacking, and armed bank robbery be considered performative in the same way that the refunctioning of words, the refusal to speak, or even hunger-striking have been cast in Guerrilla Aesthetics? My response to this question is that violence is performative, and therefore I do not distinguish between the tactics of the fun guerrilla and the armed guerrilla on the matter of performativity. While liberal approaches to this subject matter would call for an evaluation of violence for its effectiveness as a solution or as a problem to be evaluated on the framework’s own normative grounds, a poststructuralist approach reframes attention away from that path of analysis to open onto other concerns. One of the concerns that this book responds to is substantive and stretches beyond the West German urban guerrilla phenomenon. As I indicated at the outset, Guerrilla Aesthetics explores not the terror of bombs and guns but the terror of illegibility or incommensurable sense-making. This anxiety or shock is not specific to the crisis in West Germany that saw the rise of emergency legislations that, as shown in chapter six, remain ready at hand for state use in presentday Germany. Since 9-11, similar forms of legislation that operate outside of the law have become almost ubiquitous throughout Europe and in North America. In the service of national and even personal

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security, these exceptions to law make claim to their perpetual justification. My treatment of the illegible character of negative aesthetics of incarcerated guerrillas relates to the sensorial and social implications of the routine operation of emergency measures that enable subjects, not only presumed terrorists, to be kept in various forms of isolation for undetermined periods of time.3 By drawing on the concept of emplacement, which is attuned to the sensorial reordering of subjects, I have argued that a negative subject emerges in such conditions. Such a subject cannot retain the communicative resources to engage in socially recognizable ways with other individuals or towards oneself. Notwithstanding the guerrillas’ plunge into avantgarde negativity in their move underground, and despite the violence that preceded their detainment, the multi-nodal body of incarcerated guerrillas was the effect of an altogether different kind of emplacement. I have shown that the reordering of the senses that occurs in these arrangements necessitates pain as a way of charting the body relative to place and objects. Emplacements of sensorial reordering, such as acoustic isolation and twenty-four-hour lighting, make pain and violence into resources for the construct of the self because pain marks the body’s provisional boundaries. The other concern that this book responds to is conceptual. As my elaboration of performativity in the introduction shows, performativity as a theoretical concept informs a particular conception of the subject as the retroactive effect of repetitious performances that are situated within cultural and historical conventions.4 Performativity as it is used here is not a dramaturgical metaphor that denotes a shift in political protest from institutionalized forms of social action, such as petitions, demonstrations, and electoral participation, to the dramatized spectacles associated with sit-ins, direct actions, and related prefigurative politics. I have observed that performativity is commonly used to refer to spectacular forms of dissent in scholarly accounts that otherwise remain fluent in liberal-instrumental interpretations of such enactments. These analyses seek rational interpretations and they make strong contributions to the literature. They are valuable because they can inform policy and intervene into forms of social organization by commenting upon the efficacy of social movements and strategies of social action. Yet, these uses of the concept of performativity are

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not informed by the poststructuralist ontological underpinnings of performativity that have the subject constituted in reiterated discursive practices situated in cultural and historical convention. While the poststructuralist approach that threads through Guerrilla Aesthetics forecloses some lines of exploration, such as the evaluation of political tactics for their capacity to calculate and achieve intended goals, it invites openings to other lines of consideration about negativity, aesthetics, and emplacement. These other pathways have enabled me to foreground the implicit problems of sensoriality and space, which I suggest illuminate the limits of liberal approaches to this subject matter. For instance, emplacement demands that the incarcerated guerrilla not be equated with the street guerrilla, even if it is the same biological and biographical entity. The norms, conventions, sensations, interactions, and movements inherent to the social and physical worlds of the incarcerated guerrilla radically depart from those of the guerrilla on the outside. I have shown that this difference matters, and it poses a problem for analyses that are invested in the assumed stable identities and intentions of notorious guerrillas and the cell groups to which they belonged. As deployed in this book, performativity assumes a particular ontology of the nature of human subjects and the relationship between a subject and its supposed actions that challenges the liberal conception of the human subject as a discrete and self-transparent actor governed by reason. Historical and cultural conventions of language and strategies of coordination5 construct and hold together a view of social reality that reinforces the dominant conception of the self-reflexive and rational individual who acts upon the environment. Performativity, as it has been worked out in poststructural social theory, is consistent with the relational networks and distributions between things, assemblages of subjects, objects, norms, values, language, practices, built environments, places, and so on, that the concept of emplacement foregrounds. Characterizing guerrilla violence as performative and as part of an emplaced enactment of negative guerrilla aesthetics neither accompanies indifference to violence nor casts suffering and grief as unreal and inconsequential. It does, however, complicate the supposed origins and ends of violence. To the extent that guerrilla aesthetics per-

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forms a circumvention into inculcated regimes of corporeal communication, taking form in unrecognizable, perhaps monstrous, choreographies of things, while reordering the senses of coalesced bodies in (anti)language, its negative posture stands outside of the either/or alternative set by social convention6 and amplifies the field of things to which the observer can attempt to attend. Avery Gordon, whose methodological interventions posit the social figure of the ghost as a “dense site where history and subjectivity make social life,”7 has grappled with the need to reach for different kinds of knowledges and acknowledgments attuned to small pieces that do not seem to add up: Changing shape more readily than the scholarly analyst might like, all the bits and pieces – the screams and cries, the silences, the density of the nation’s history, the ideological justifications, the geopolitical forces, the long-standing creative capacity for domestic terror, the cultural pathways of the tango and the pampas, the debts, the international economies of money and national pride, the courageous political resistance, and so on – do not quite add up. They can be isolated and laid bare, and they can be put to the political task of exposure, but it seems as if in that very act the ghosts return, demanding a different kind of knowledge, a different kind of acknowledgment.8 While Gordon’s work looks at different subject matter, her attunement to the stubborn presences of “inert furniture” that make up ordinary yet complicated life does share in the concerns invoked in the concept of emplacement. There is also a hint of the impossible here, for the field grows as large as it is illegible. How do we, for instance, trace all of the connections? What vocabularies can be lent to describe adequately that which is intractable but unnoticed even as it supports us? Gordon often turns to art and literature to show how disciplinary vocabularies may be able to articulate some modes of modern power but fail to recognize others. She tells her readers that “[p]ower can be invisible, it can be fantastic, it can be dull and routine. It can be obvious, it can reach you by the baton of the police, it can speak the language of your thoughts and desires … power arrives

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in forms that can range from blatant white supremacy and state terror to ‘furniture without memories,’”9 the latter of which calls upon Gordon’s engagement with literature to unpack the weight of the phrase “furniture without memories” from Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye, a phrase that had no previous meaning in strictly disciplinary languages and methodologies. Similarly, while giving a thorough reading of official public discourse that politicizes intimacy and the family in West Germany, Carrie Smith-Prei turns to literature to elaborate how the social and political concerns of the 1960s are worked out in “negatively coded bodies” inhabiting the private sphere in these texts that seek to mobilize readers through negative emotions.10 The New and Black Realisms that Smith-Prei addresses strike against “all acts of normativity and methods for meaning making; instead of the imaginary about the good life, these realisms create an imaginary about the uncomfortable life”11 and, through the blanks in the texts, produce “a simulation space for the reader to practise non-normative behaviours.”12 Faced with the gaps I perceived in the archives and other source materials, I have turned to city streets, the intrusive retellings of guerrilla stories, grey literature, popular source materials, struggles over memory, and artistic renderings as part of my refusal of what Slavoj Žižek, in his book Violence, has called the “hermeneutic temptation” to search for meaning in violent or chaotic episodes.13 While not engaging in the concerns inherent to the concept of emplacement, Žižek’s sustained deliberation on violence does trouble its attribution to individual social agents as conceived in liberal thought, while revealing the distribution of violence through abstractions, spectrality, and the dismembering force of language. He achieves this by identifying three modes of violence: subjective, objective, and symbolic. Subjective violence is the most visible of the three modes, as it is the most spectacular in its direct and concrete application at the hands of social agents. In Žižek’s terminology, guerrilla violence in its most blunt form falls under subjective violence. For Žižek, we ought to be suspicious of the fascination that subjective violence invokes, and its appearance as something that strikes from “out of nowhere.” Could such violence be as symptomatic of a broader culture of violence as it is distracting to our capacity to recognize other modes of violence?14

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Objective violence is abstract and anonymous but delivers misery all the same through its production of expendable individuals. Žižek draws from Marx’s analysis of capital and of the fantastic form of the commodity, which work on their own without an agent: “Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, much more uncanny than any direct precapitalist socio-ideological violence: this violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their ‘evil’ intentions, but is purely ‘objective,’ systemic, anonymous.”15 Žižek observes that these two modes of violence “cannot be perceived from the same standpoint: subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of [a] non-violent zero level. It is seen as the perturbation of the ‘normal,’ peaceful state of things,” while objective violence is “the counterpart to an all-too-visible subjective violence.”16 Symbolic violence pertains not only to language and the habits of speech but to the intricate field of meaning that is operative within language. Further, language possesses the capacity, or we might say imperative, to “dismember a thing,” to cut it down into one or two properties that distort and isolate a thing from its complex richness and its situatedness in a violent reduction.17 In drawing attention to Žižek’s three modes of violence, I do not suggest that the force of (subjective) guerrilla violence is lessened or that this is merely an expression of exchange and equivalence in response to which we ought to look at state action, and so on, to extend a reprimanding finger so that we can measure them against each other. It seems to me that this would be a careless exercise lacking in requisite subtlety, as such an undertaking would enlist an instrumentalization process engaged in the implicit, but likely unintentional, measuring of degrees of harm and the relative worth of different lives. Nor do I think that this is what Žižek intends when he elaborates these modes. For the present moment, I seek to show that, to the extent that these modes of violence are intertwined, their recognition demands greater attunement to emplacements, and it challenges the temptation to look primarily at the supposed agents presumed to possess and to originate enactments of subjective violence. In her examination of the question of violence and the New Left in West Germany, Ingrid Gilcher-Hotley has insisted upon contextualization that acknowledges the interactional terrain upon which the

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question of violence was worked out. Her approach to this problem pushes beyond the attribution of violence to key agents assumed to share more or less the same motivations,18 which, in this case, would enable the conflation of differences within and between the New Left and guerrilla cells. Gilcher-Hotley takes into account the transnational context (as well as the particular influence of the civil rights movement in the United States) in which the question of violence arose and was debated, but she also stresses the multidimensionality of the concept of violence, a move that troubles its easy attributions and conflations. She notes that, in the context of political subversion in the late 1960s, violence referred more to relations of point and counterpoint, or strategy and tactic, which was “used on both sides to scandalize and delegitimize the actions of the respective opponent.”19 This combat relation stands apart from the infliction of bodily harm, which she identifies as the more dominant criterion of violence.20 Another consideration that Gilcher-Hotley unpacks is signalled by the rich concept of Gewalt in German, which denotes both violence and power.21 The word ‘violence’ in English fails to distinguish between, and hence obscures, state power as legally administered constraint, on the one hand, and private acts of violence that may involve actions that target the state’s power, on the other hand. Hence, as she points out, Gewalt captures the combat relation noted above. But, as Žižek also notes when he designates objective violence, Gilcher-Hotley displays another dimension of violence that stresses the structural relations of dependence that Marx elaborated. Of the participants in the 1968 movements, she highlights that “contemporary activists followed Marx’s premise that violence stemmed not only from human beings but also from superindividual powers and structural relations. As a result, they adopted the thesis that the capitalist economic system generates violence.” Given this, their counterpoint tactics to this structural violence often came in the form of “violence against things” – violence against property.22 Of great significance to the New Left movement was the recognition that language is inherently violent to the extent that it is central to the constraining processes of subjectification. Following the Situationist International, activists were concerned with producing a new language that could make an intervention into the symbolic violence

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of language. Gilcher-Hotley observes: “‘Acts of violence’ was a designation for the creative and nonconforming action of breaking up normal meanings and everyday situations, of rules of speech or games. Their objective was to intensify the authentic expressivity of the individual by breaking rules, to renew lost or broken communication, and to alter templates of classification and perception.”23 This unpacking provides a point of departure for Gilcher-Hotley’s argument to unfold and to demonstrate that the question of violence as it pertains to 1968 cannot be abstracted from the different perspectives in operation and in particular from the understandings that the New Left had of their conditions. As I noted earlier, she presents violence as interactional. This is, however, not the same as suggesting that violence was exercised through an intentional logic of retribution. Rather, Gilcher-Hotley elaborates the relationship, which at times was one of escalating violence, between the movement and state apparatuses as more situational than intentional.24 Of particular significance here is Gilcher-Hotley’s distinction between the New Left movement and guerrilla cells. She observes that guerrillas “used the forms of actions of the 1968 movement but radicalized them, because they did not share the basic values of the New Left, and rejected its strategy of transformation.”25 As Klimke and Scharloth observed, the movements that roughly fall under the New Left were primarily engaged in tactics of prefigurative politics,26 which involves the intention to achieve either a return to an imagined sensibility or the production of a radically new sensibility that has to be traced in advance; hence, as I have contended, it involves a measure of rational calculation. The radical negativity that guerrillas eventually adopted was devoid of the constellation points that define the means and ends that prefigurative politics demand. As Smith-Prei observes of negativity, it “cannot be understood as the flip side of affirmation; negation cannot be used as a positive remedy.”27 As I have attempted to show, the monstrous and multi-nodal incarcerated guerrilla body steeped in negativity neither aimed for, nor dreamt of, the realization of a particular alternative future.28 Unlike the movements of the New Left, urban guerrillas did target violence at living beings, not primarily at property, words, or meanings. While there are, as Gilcher-Hotley notes, many strategies

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that activists and guerrillas shared, the guerrillas shared neither the goals nor the values of the New Left. Rather than asking how guerrilla violence can be reconciled, I have wondered why we feel the need to reconcile it or to find some kind of redemption in it, even if that redemption comes in the form of plausible meanings within the parameters of guerrillas’ ostensible goals. I have argued that the calculation of means and ends stands outside of guerrilla negativity. In his essay on violence, Walter Benjamin established that all violence deployed as a means was either law-making (legislative, founding) or law-preserving (administrative, policing, and repressive of counterviolence). These two forms of violence stand in mutual oscillating relation and pertain to law as inherently violent.29 He insisted that this relation can be broken by the manifestation of pure violence, an anarchistic violence that strikes from a place outside of the law. Such violence has no purpose or end; therefore, it is irrational and destructive, not creative. Benjamin also specifies that this violence that strikes from outside is not identifiable in retrospect, due to – and this has been part of my point all along – the tendency or imperative to align it with its supposed outcomes, successes and failures, and so on.30 Žižek’s sustained elaboration of violence leads to consideration of precisely this predicament – one that was foreshadowed at the outset of his essay, when he stated that a direct examination of violence “prevents us from thinking.”31 Žižek ultimately draws from Benjamin’s critique, as well as from the Old Testament story of Job (whose friends attempted to furnish meanings and reason for his suffering), to illustrate that, in cases of traumatic violence, meaning must be resisted. Even more bluntly, Žižek suggests that the hermeneutic temptation to give meaning in such cases is obscene.32 In the relationship between subjective and objective violence, Žižek finds that “violence is not a direct property of some acts, but is distributed between acts and their contexts, between activity and inactivity. The same act can count as violent or non-violent, depending on its context; sometimes a polite smile can be more violent than a brutal outburst.”33 For the purpose of this discussion, what is at stake for Žižek in this remark is not only its implications for emplacement but the assertion that the evaluation of guerrilla tactics for their political effectiveness demands that we take a preemptive move against think-

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ing. At first glance, this may appear to be an astonishingly flippant statement. But I think the key point resides in Žižek’s understanding of subjective violence as “a sign without meaning,”34 which suggests that, rather than asking set questions about particular outbreaks of violence, we need to think about what criteria inform the questions that are asked, which in turn shape the answers that the questions already assume. When those criteria are not evident, appear to be neutral and obvious, and are taken for granted, thought has already met its end. Treatment of the urban guerrilla remains too often in the trap of either/or ‘choice’: the guerrilla program of action was either the same as or different from that of the activists; guerrilla violence either taints or is indifferent to the legacy of the New Left and 1968; or, perhaps more precisely, it either taints or is indifferent to the identity or success of the Greens in Germany; and so on. There are other questions to ask, but many of them may not have ready answers and certainly not ones that promise immediate use-functions. While the approach taken in this book excludes a straightforward structural analysis of guerrilla violence, its attention to guerrilla aesthetics and emplacement, or, at times, to something like Gordon’s “inert furniture,” makes small gestures in the direction of a perceptible shift in cultural theory that Ben Highmore has called “new materialism” that is attuned to “the senses and with the experience of such seemingly nebulous phenomena as time and memory in the name of a more general social aesthetics.”35 Regrettably, the passage of time, as well as the ephemerality and devaluation of things that are not, or cannot be, documented according to the norms of knowledge production, stand as obstacles to a fuller unfolding of emplacements relevant to this book’s subject matter.36 Simultaneously, however, these challenges lend themselves to the performative gestures in this book; this is at its most vivid in chapter five’s coda and the general intimation towards a politics of negativity and the senses. Patricia Ticineto Clough has invited methodological considerations of an infra-empiricism that “has just begun to rethink subjectivity, the unconscious, bodies, technologies and populations more fully in terms of the sociality of affective backgrounds”37 and is linked with a different intonation of politics. She insists that an empiricism that is alert to pre-conscious

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affect “necessarily become[s] entangled” and, thus, it can neither interpret nor represent but must be performative.38 I have approached urban guerrilla enactments in terms of their negative disruption of recognizable subject performances, while also being troubled by the question of how the amorphous figure of the urban guerrilla has become culturally mobile and animating as well as a site of struggle over memory and meaning. This may have much to do with Felix Ensslin’s observation, noted in chapter five, that the artistic projects curated for Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Die RAF / Regarding Terror: The RAF Exhibition may be engaged in a fight against a public feeling that could be described as the loss of significance. Simultaneously, the figure of the guerrilla and its negative aesthetics may nostalgically haunt a present marked by the absence of the kinds of collective political projects of the twentieth century that Claire Bishop traces. By doing so, Bishop underlines the implications of a current neoliberal “‘post-political’ consensus”39 that frustrates hopes for collective possibilities in the forms that were sought during the twentieth century, while perhaps still generating fascination with profound commitments, some of which were negative. I have not sought to evaluate the effectiveness of guerrilla tactics for a political strategy to achieve certain ends. The normative task of evaluation would demand that I submit to the kind of rationalization process that has been the target of my critique. Observers who undertake a pragmatic evaluation of guerrilla tactics have tended to impose a retroactive argument that takes their interpretations of outcomes as evidence with which to judge processes unfolding in the past. To the extent that words, imagery, affect, interpretations, ostensible facts, and artifacts associated with the movement still circulate and amass, I have been motivated by their animating force, particularly given – or precisely because of – the stubborn illegibility that characterizes many of them and that has motivated commentators to explain and, therefore, to manage them.

Notes

i ntro duct i o n 1 The “Red Decade” is Gerd Koenen’s formulation. See Koenen, Das rote Jahrzehnt. My adoption of it, however, serves as a rough tracing of events that have figured prominently in the particular instances of West German urban guerrilla memory-making and cultural formations relevant to my discussion. This time period provides a productive point of departure for considering the struggles of guerrilla subjectivity and aesthetics because it saw not only the emergence of the West German urban guerrilla as a social figure but also the imprisonment and deaths of several of the most notorious participants. Therefore, I have mobilized it without attachment to any existing normative analyses of its subjects. Therefore, I do not bring with it the demographic, postmaterialist, and generational aspects of Koenen’s analysis as he defines the decade. In brief, he emphasizes that the West German student movement was of the first postwar generation. This generation came of age alongside the most rapid expansion of economic, technological, and social mobility in concrete terms realized in social infrastructure, employment, and wages. Their unrest and radicalization, he argues, was more existentially than materially motivated. He observes that a key characteristic of the existential motivation towards political radicalization was their moral critique of their parents’ generation. See Koenen, “Armed Innocence, or ‘Hitler’s Children’ Revisited,” 23–38. I acknowledge that, although I use the marker of the Red Decade differently than Koenen does, Wolfgang Kraushaar has questioned the value of bracketing these years, according to Cornils, “Joined at the Hip? The Representation of the German Student Movement and Left-Wing Terrorism in Recent Literature.” 2 Martin Warnke quoted in Kraushaar, “Zwischen Popkultur, Politik und Zeitgeschichte.” 3 See King and Worley’s Prada Meinhof in Biesenbach, Zur Vorstellung des Terrors, 222, 224. For a discussion of the branding of the raf’s imagery, but with a particular emphasis on the raf’s own design of a brand, see Sachsse, “Prada Meinhof,” 1260–9. 4 See Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum, 468. 5 Baumann, Wie alles Anfing / How It All Began, 59–73.

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Notes to pages 4–6

6 Huffman, “Audio Podcast 16.” 7 While most of the actions I have listed are common knowledge, the 2nd of June Movement’s attack on the (West Berlin) British Yacht Club in 1972 as a reaction to ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Northern Ireland is rarely noted. The bomb killed a boat-maker, and Verena Becker served time in prison for this action. See Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 2: Dancing with Imperialism, 62. 8 Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 220–3. 9 See Hans Joachim Klein’s detailed account of this in Bougereau, The German Guerrilla. 10 Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 262. 11 Ibid., 470–1. 12 Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 292–4. 13 Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 165. 14 See Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum, 430–6, and Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 439–41. 15 See Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum, 443–9, and Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 481–5. 16 Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 2: Dancing with Imperialism, 343. 17 Paul Smith characterizes Rohwedder’s assassination, by rifle shot while he was in his study, as “an expression of the belief that the takeover of East Germany can ultimately be seen as a form of capitalist imperialism consistent with a recognizable postwar project” in Millennial Dreams, 73. 18 There are conflicting accounts of the prison bombing. Officials claim that the raf logo was planted at the site; the communiqué that followed the explosion claimed that warning posters were left at the site to prevent injury. If there were warning posters, this was not mentioned in official reports. See Mickolus and Simmons, Terrorism, 1992–1995, 356–7. 19 Here I cite only a few examples of what I consider to be a general consensus of approach to the problem that the urban guerrillas pose to scholars operating within a liberal framework, which demands that we make sense of incomprehensible things by either assessing their internal logics or attributing meaning and reason to them. See, for instance, Colvin, Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism, and Passmore, Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction, respectively. West German urban guerrilla cells are commonly assessed in terms of the effectiveness of strategy, in particular, by evaluating perceived outcomes. For instance, Scribner, “Buildings on Fire,” 35–7. Scribner’s analysis of the si’s and the raf’s different conceptualizations of autonomy tends toward a comparative evaluation of their respective successes or failures, which on her account can be determined by the results. In the case of the raf,

Notes to pages 7–11

20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

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their failure is evident in the strengthened institutions of repression left in their wake: “The least we can say about the raf is that they left Germany with a hulking paradox: Stammheim endures as the most concrete precipitate of their actions” (32). The above-mentioned works make very strong and valuable contributions to the study of urban guerrillas and they do so in insightful and exciting ways, but I am striving here to step outside of the liberal and radical liberal frameworks, which inform much of the literature (not just these works), to explore the negativity of urban guerrilla aesthetics. Klimke and Scharloth, “Utopia in Practice,” 46–56. Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body, 104–5. My use of the word ‘enactment’ rather than ‘act’ in some contexts throughout is deliberate and theoretically informed by poststructural ontological assumptions, which are elaborated subsequently in this introduction. Enactment breaks from the grammar of liberal discourse that supposes a ready-made and coherent subject who proficiently brings interior motivations into being through action that is relatively independent of others, surroundings, and context. In contrast, the poststructural assumption holds that the subject is the effect of enactments rather than the competent author of them. Howes, Sensual Relations, xi. Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” 6. Highmore, Everyday Life, 20. Ibid. Highmore’s book is a provocation to seek an aesthetic “for registering a world that appears chaotic, disrupted and radically new” or the everyday in modernity. Ibid., 22–30. Fletcher, “Dystoposthesia,” 380–96. All of the works in this section make contributions towards the recognition of emplacement, but not all of them explicitly use the concept. Feld and Basso, Senses of Place, 3–5. Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 129. Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place,” 14. Geertz, “Afterword,” 262. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, 4. Ingold, Being Alive, 214. Ibid., 215. Following Vilém Flusser, Ingold draws a distinction between an object’s stability and a thing’s path or ‘going on.’ While I am not adopting this distinction here, the concept of emplacement suggests the movement emphasized in Ingold’s characterization of a thing. Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place,” 23. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 162.

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39 Foucault, “Different Spaces.” 40 Soja notes that the “assertion of (social) spatiality shatters the traditional dualism and forces a major reinterpretation of the materiality of space, time, and being, the constructive nexus of social theory” (120). 41 See Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the walking stick in Phenomenology of Perception, 165. 42 Bissell, “Inconsequential Materialities: The Movements of Lost Affects,” 97. 43 In Lefebvre, Love & Struggle, Shields finds in Henri Lefebvre’s attunements to space the opportunity “to reunite over-specialised areas of knowledge by substituting or giving an overriding emphasis to the spatiality of action, objects, laws, semiotic codes, economic processes and cultural practices rather than analysing them in terms of the priorities prescribed by the specialised domains of knowledge, which tend to attach themselves to different phenomena and processes” (151). See 152–3 for elaboration. 44 See a challenge to this conception in Mol, “I Eat an Apple,” 30. 45 The tendency to reduce relations to the presumed singularities of supposedly discrete entities is addressed in Actor Network Theory, which shares a number of conceptual considerations implicated in the concept of emplacement. See Law, Aircraft Stories, for a representative text that intervenes into this reduction and pushes further to elaborate the heterogeneity of objects and the fractional incoherence of things in his study of a proposed military aircraft. 46 Mol, “I Eat an Apple.” 47 Mol, for instance, provokes: “Does my apple only start to have subjectivity once it has become a part of me, after I have digested it, or should we be widening the category of potential subjects in such a way that it comes to include apples, too? In other words: is the subjectivity of my apple a matter of finding a good way of drawing boundaries around me – boundaries that include the apples I have eaten or may eat – or is it a matter of reframing the category of the subject in such a way that an apple may be recognized as yet another me, a subject in its own right?” (Ibid., 30). It ought to be noted that not all of the works that I draw upon here are in agreement about what the implications of agency are for elements of an emplaced assemblage. For instance, Ingold’s discussion runs against the suggestion in some instantiations of Actor Network Theory that objects may have some agency. Part of this objection is tied to his distinction between the settled character of objects and the life of things, but this discussion requires more unpacking to give it justice and stretches beyond the scope of this book. 48 Law, Aircraft Stories, 34. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., 35.

Notes to pages 15–21

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68 69 70 71

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Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 327. Basso, “Wisdom Sits in Places,” 55. Casey, “Space to Place,” 23. The things that places gather include animate and inanimate objects, as well as experiences. Ibid., 25. Till, “Wounded Cities,” 10. Ferzacca, “Learning How to Listen,” 335. Ibid., 334. Ferzacca, “Somaphoric Organizations of Self and Society in Java,” 42. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 328. Clough, “(De)Coding the Subject-in-Affect,” 141. Basso, “Wisdom Sits in Places,” 56. On memory and emplacement, see also Connerton, How Modernity Forgets, 33. Stewart, “An Occupied Place,” 139. Highmore, Ordinary Lives, 66. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 65–7. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 167. The concept of emplacement as corrective of embodiment is described in Howes, Empire of the Senses, 7. Also influential in contributing to recognition of emplacement over the restrictions of the concept of embodiment is, for instance, Pink, “From Embodiment to Emplacement,” 343–55. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 100–40. Shields, “Knowing Space,” 147–9. Teufel, “Fritz Teufel Before the Court: From A-libi to B-libi,” 144. Langston, Visions of Violence. Langston argues that, while German fascism consigned avant-gardes underground, they resurfaced after the war and found new purpose. For sources that link avant-garde practices with those of countercultural and/or guerrilla formations in West Germany, see Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties, 11; Lee, “The Gruppe Spur: Art as a Revolutionary Medium during the Cold War,” 11–30; Klimke, The Other Alliance, 3–4; Hakemi, “Terrorismus und Avantgarde,” 604–19; Hecken, Avantgarde und Terrorismus; and Scribner, “Buildings on Fire.” Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 325, 334. Langston, Visions of Violence, 134. Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, ix. Marcuse, Negations, xviii–xx. Ibid., xxii. Ibid., xxiv. Ibid., 13. This formulation appeared in the essay “The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State,” which was written in 1934. It is of considerable historical significance due to this timing, but

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Notes to pages 21–5

also the nuanced link drawn between liberalism and totalitarianism was of import to Marcuse’s analyses that followed WWII and to his call for the “Great Refusal.” Kellner, “Marcuse and the Quest for Radical Subjectivity,” 88. Ibid., 87. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, xiv. Ibid., x. Ibid., 59. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 144. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 10. Ibid., 9. Marcuse quoted in Smith-Prei, Revolting Families, 20. Ibid., 21. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 63. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 70. With respect to Marcuse’s influence in West Germany, the United States, and their collaborative communication, see Klimke, The Other Alliance, 89–90. Also see the Preface to Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics. On the accusation that the Frankfurt Institute was responsible for the rise of guerrillas in West Germany, see Swindal, “Second Generation and Critical Theory,” 232. Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, x. See also Langston, Visions of Violence, 128–9. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 69. Koenen, “Armed Innocence, or ‘Hitler’s Children’ Revisited,” and Siegfried, “Understanding 1968: Youth Rebellion, Generational Change and Postindustrial Society.” Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 362–3. Ibid., 363. Ibid., 364. Author W.G. Sebald speaks of it as a “conspiracy of silence” and as a “taboo zone” that he doubts even intimate partners would have entered. See interview (recorded in 1997) in Wachtel, “Ghost Hunter,” 44. With respect to postwar German literature, see Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 31–3. Also see Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body, 101–7, where she discusses the scandal of radical negativity’s rejection of the choice. Shahan, Punk Rock and German Crisis, 1. Ibid. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 4.

Notes to pages 25–31

105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119

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Ibid., 23. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 4. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 257. Smith-Prei, Revolting Families, 22. Ibid., 103. Ibid., 16–19. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 17. Ibid. Ibid., 98. It ought to be clear that, while Guerrilla Aesthetics takes a poststructuralist perspective, does not itself offer a positive program of resolution to the hauntings of the West German urban guerrilla, and refuses to rationalize it, this book is not in itself an instance of negativity. My point has been that the empty content of the concept of negativity is implicated in guerrilla communications; hence, they are shocking, incomprehensible, and plagued by contradictions. As I have noted, negativity was posited as a possible exit from modernity, but does not constitute a theoretical lens through which this study is produced. Nevertheless, the Frankfurt scholars who popularized negativity share with poststructuralism a Nietzschean challenge to values and origins. A significant disjuncture between the Frankfurt School scholars and poststructuralism resides in the former’s tendency to point to a pre-industrial (Romantic) human essence that they claim has been amputated by industrial capitalism (this is very evident in Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, for instance). Poststructuralism is skeptical of such nostalgic conceptions of a more true or faithful human existence. From the perspective of poststructuralism, the “success” of negative gestures cannot be determined without presupposing too much about agency, consciousness, and objective reality. Mair, “Itinerant Memory Places.” LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 1–8. While LaCapra is critical of self-sufficient approaches, he is also critical of the radical constructivist approaches to which he polarizes documentary, or selfsufficient, ones. Ibid., 113. LaCapra distances his approach from radical constructivism and advocates a third position that mediates between these two models. Ibid., 3. Ankersmit, “Historiography and Postmodernism,” 144. It should be

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Notes to pages 32–6

noted that LaCapra characterizes Ankersmit’s approach as approximating a radical constructivist one. Ankersmit, “Historiography and Postmodernism,” 145. Ibid., 145–6. Jackson, “The Ethical Space of Historiography,” 473. Jackson’s discussion intervenes well into the polarization of approaches, while emphasizing a deconstructive ethics. Law, Aircraft Stories, 189. Ibid., 193. Jackson, “The Ethical Space of Historiography,” 473–4. For instance, LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 13. He notes that radical constructivist approaches find structural similarities between historical and fictional statements, which he finds too radical. An explicit example of this is White, Metahistory, xii. White gives a formalist typology of historiographical styles, insisting that history is a form of intellectual activity imbued with poetic, as well as philosophical and scientific, interests. With respect to Sebald’s novel, The Rings of Saturn, Jackson observes that “[a]lthough it highlights the fictional and constructed nature of writing history, the novel exhibits a very traditional historiographic motivation, namely that of attempting to demonstrate a more ‘real’ or phenomenologically resonant experience of history. History is not experienced, in so far as each of us is manifest through it in the present, as a linear series of ‘now’ moments tied together in some rational narrative of cause and effect. History is experienced as a heterogeneous flux of change, decay, mourning, apathy and pleasure. It is very much a felt or lived experience” (477–8). A normative analysis of guerrilla violence would call for a shift away from the concerns that shape this particular work and towards a liberal normative theoretical framework. For an elaboration of the theoretical problems involved, see Nancy Fraser’s (rhetorical) critique of Foucault’s (or poststructural) normative confusions (which I am perhaps guilty of as well) in her 1981 essay “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions.” In the conclusion, I will return to the problem of offering a normative analysis of guerrilla violence. White, Metahistory, xii. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 26. Highmore, Ordinary Lives, 140. Ibid., 141. Sebald, Campo Santo, 200–1. Law, Aircraft Stories, 191. Law’s book incites a pinboard approach to research rather than an arborescent one. The arborescent approach, which is hegemonic in scholarship, aims for a singular, more or less lin-

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ear, narrative that sets out origins and conclusions, which together are usually implicitly redemptive in force. The pinboard approach operates through the logic of “juxtaposition, of pastiche, and yes, it claims that somehow or other these bits of paper, these posting, are more or less equivalent” (189). I do not claim to have performed a pinboard approach, which would take a highly visual, fragmented, and unrecognizable form for a book such as this one (Law himself notes that the incompleteness implicit in it pushes against academic norms especially in its challenge to the view of the world as a coherent container that the scholar is tasked to describe), but only that this work has been informed by some of its methodological incitements. 141 Neither my use of poststructuralist theory, nor my argument that West German urban guerrillas attempted to break from the disciplining conventions of liberal subjectivity, is intended to attribute a ‘postmodern identity’ to them. I am not, for instance, claiming that West German urban guerrillas uniquely exhibited pastiche personalities, styles, or postmodern forms of political organization. The relationship between poststructuralism and postmodernity is more complex than this kind of formulation would suggest. Postmodernity, as a marker, generally denotes a speculative break in the project of historical periodization – either as an advanced stage of modernity (e.g. Callinicos, Against Postmodernism; Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity; and Best and Kellner, The Postmodern Turn) or as a definitive rupture and end to modernity or history itself (e.g. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation). Poststructuralism is often understood as the social theoretical accompaniment to the speculative historical period of postmodernity and its aesthetic counterpart of postmodernism. Incidentally, when Lyotard insisted that “[a] work can become modern only if it is first postmodern” (The Postmodern Explained, 13), he made a seemingly paradoxical move, but it was one that playfully disrupted the cultural preference for linear articulation (of relevance to my broader endeavour, he brought attention to that which is unpresentable and demands new rules, genres, and language games for its presentation). Any discussion of the existence of a break or an outright rupture in history is beyond the scope of this project, so I will not weigh in on it beyond noting that I use historical markers only in a weak sense; I have no investment in the acceptance of a period called ‘postmodernity’ however conceived; and I have a tentative attitude toward the attribution of the historical concept of postmodernity as distinct from modernity. In noting that poststructuralist theory informs my endeavour, I am signposting that I assume a poststructuralist ontology of subjects, surroundings, history, social reality, and so forth as a point of departure. 142 Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. 1, 92–7. 143 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 292.

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144 Given that poststructuralism rejects the one-to-one relationship between signifier and referent, assuming that signifiers continue to signify other signifiers in a ongoing slippage, I avoid treating or evaluating urban guerrilla performances, artistic or popular formations, or even ostensible historical facts produced through scholarship as representational or reflective of an external reality. Instead, I understand these things as performative, as making new objects and contributing to new distributional effects. For these reasons, I do not distinguish between different forms of representation, such as self-representations and, for instance, media representations. For a treatment of the raf that does make such interventions, see Kraushaar, “Mythos raf,” 1186–1210. He insists on distinguishing between different operations as well as between several different spheres of myth production. While this is the basis of the work as a whole, he provides a breakdown on p. 1189. 145 Gergen, The Saturated Self, 77–80. 146 Butler, Excitable Speech, 2. 147 Law, Aircraft Stories, 152. 148 Fritsch, “The Performative and the Normative,” 88. 149 Butler, Excitable Speech, 11. 150 This is the process of interpellation or hailing. 151 Butler, Excitable Speech, 39. 152 Ibid., 5. 153 Lloyd, “Performativity, Parody, Politics,” 210. 154 Butler, Excitable Speech, 26–7. 155 Fritsch, “The Performative and the Normative,” 88. 156 See also Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body. Felman gives sustained attention to serious and felicitous statements in her performative engagement with Austin and Don Juan. 157 Lloyd, “Performativity, Parody, Politics,” 197. 158 Nealon, Alterity Politics, 171. 159 Fritsch, “The Performative and the Normative,” 103. 160 Ibid., 95. 161 Butler, Excitable Speech, 28. 162 Ibid., 158–9. 163 Ibid., 159–60. 164 Ibid., 163. 165 Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body, 5. 166 Fritsch, “The Performative and the Normative,” 94. 167 Ibid., 87. 168 Ibid., 95. 169 Klimke and Scharloth, “Utopia in Practice,” 52–3. See also Klimke, The Other Alliance, 54. Scarloth, 1968: Eine Kommunikationsgeschichte, has addressed the performative turn in more nuance and detail, drawing

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from Turner and the others, as above, and from Goffman’s dramaturgical theory. Turner, Process, Performance, and Pilgrimage, 65. Judith Butler has specifically addressed at length the common confusions between phenomenology and her performative theory of gender constitution, the latter of which shares the ontological assumptions with which I am working. See Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.” Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962–1968, 53. Klimke and Scharloth draw from Breines’s conception of prefigurative politics in their analysis. Colvin, Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism. Passmore, Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction. Žižek, Violence, 76.

ch ap t e r o ne 1 Manfred Grashof in a letter to his lawyers, quoted in Bundesministerium des Innern. My translation. 2 Red Army Faction, “Die Rote Armee aufbauen.” In its first communiqué, in which it calls for the building of the Red Army, the raf advocated the use of arms and dismissed other efforts for political change as only leading to a reformism that would result in better means of capitalist exploitation and discipline. The raf’s activities spanned a 28-year period, from 1970 to the announcement of its disbanding in 1998, with unsettled membership and organizational structure throughout its duration. 3 The treatment of student direct action and some guerrilla practice with respect to phenomenological performance studies and prefigurative politics can be found in Klimke and Scharloth, “Utopia in Practice.” Also see Colvin, Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism, and Passmore, Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction. 4 Langston, Visions of Violence, 18. Note that Langston does not address urban guerrillas specifically in this work. 5 Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962–1968, 55. 6 Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution, 122. 7 For an analysis of guerrilla incarceration through the lens of Agamben, see Hannah, “Spaces of Exception and Unexceptionability.” 8 Žižek, Violence, 76. 9 See, for example, Koenen, “Armed Innocence, or ‘Hitler’s Children’ Revisited.” For comparison, see Siegfried, “Understanding 1968: Youth Rebellion, Generational Change and Postindustrial Society.” Siegfried’s emphasis on generational change via economic and demographic characteristics of 1968, which is couched in a postmaterialist thesis, high-

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lights that this generation arrived into relatively greater affluence than previous generations, noting that class distinctions lost some of their definition. Yet Siegfried’s observation does not lead him to draw a stark comparison between 68ers or guerrillas and the conservative youth movements of the 1930s as it does for Koenen, himself a former participant in radicalized politics. Slobodian, “Corpse Politics: The Third World and the Politics of Gore in 1960s West Germany,” 61–2. After WWII, the spd had opposed a foreign policy of integration with the West and instead focused inward in the hope for German reunification. At the level of economics, the spd emphasized the benefits of the nationalization of industries and did not support neoliberal economic policies. The spd was able to attain political acceptance at the state level, gaining strong representation after state elections, but it did not perform well in federal elections. The party’s Godesburg Programme of 1959 overturned its previous positions in exchange for an increasingly comfortable attitude toward Western integration and free market economics, which paved the way for the spd to join with the conservative cdu in a coalition in 1966. Hockenos, Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic, 54. See, for instance, the personal accounts in Baumann, Wie alles Anfing. See also Hans Joachim Klein’s personal observations in Bougereau, The German Guerrilla. Baumann, Wie alles Anfing / How It All Began. See Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 20–1; Klimke and Scarloth, 1968: Handbuch zur Kultur- und Mediengeschichte der Studentenbewegung, 16; and Preuss, Intermedia: Künstlerische Experimente und Vermittlungsprozesse, 43. Meinhof’s [1967] “Napalm and Pudding” in Bauer, Everybody Talks about the Weather, 230–1. Ibid., 229. Hockenos, Joschka Fischer, 59. Ibid., 88. Havel, “Anatomy of Reticence,” 318. This is, indeed, what Meinhof charged in 1962 in her konkret column “Human Dignity Is Violable,” in Bauer, Everybody Talks about the Weather, 144–9. Braunthal, Public Loyalty and Public Service in West Germany, 22–3. Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 55. This is the major subject matter of Braunthal, Public Loyalty and Public Service in West Germany. Ibid., 161. See Hockenos, Joschka Fischer, 63.

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27 “Stasi Archive Surprise: East German Spy Shot West Berlin Martyr,” Spiegel Online International. 28 Quoted in Hockenos, Joschka Fischer, 78. 29 Bauer, “In Search of Ulrike Meinhof,” 42. 30 Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties, 338. 31 Baumann, Wie alles Anfing / How It All Began, 13. 32 Braunthal, Public Loyalty and Public Service in West Germany, 42. 33 Koenen, “Camera Silens: Das Phantasma der ‘Vernichtungshaft.’” Koenen sees, among other things, the infamous photograph of Holger Meins’s corpse (he died as a result of sustained participation in hungerstriking) as enabling and reinforcing a connection between the West German state and Auschwitz. The hunger strikes were used to gain support and to recruit subsequent generations of the raf. Kraushaar makes similar claims when he argues that the myth of isolation, for instance, was deployed to build legal support on the outside. He also takes up the messianic appearance in the circulated photo of Meins in “Mythos raf,” 1193. For a more nuanced consideration with more depth, but one that also assigns instrumental objectives to some of this imagery, see Passmore’s chapter “The Art of Hunger” in Ulrike Meinhof, 61–82. As Harun Farocki has noted, images do not have stable meaning, and the state also deployed the photograph of Holger Meins’s starved corpse: “The exhibition of the dead man was to prove power, and by doing so, the distance from the prisoner was eliminated. He was exhibited like a trophy. This evoked memories of the magical and ritualized prehistory of punishment, of lingering tortures that led to death staged for an audience of the curious” (Farocki, “Staking One’s Life: Images of Holger Meins,” 84). 34 Slobodian, “Corpse Politics: The Third World and the Politics of Gore in 1960s West Germany,” 59. 35 An English translation is reproduced in Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 79–82. 36 Proll and Dubbe, Wir kamen vom anderen Stern. 37 Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 40. This has prompted Aust to observe a religious or eschatological dimension in the raf, particularly later during the hunger strikes in Stammheim prison. 38 See Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 51–2. 39 Proll, Baader-Meinhof / Pictures on the Run 67–77, 9. 40 See Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 58. 41 Meinhof’s 1968 column “Setting Fire to Department Stores,” in Bauer, Everybody Talks about the Weather, 244. 42 Ibid., 247. 43 Bauer, “Ulrike Meinhof and the Transatlantic Movement of Ideas,” 182. 44 Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 60.

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45 This building is located at Miquelstraße 83 but it is no longer owned by the Institute; it was later purchased for a private residence. The remaining building is located directly behind it, at Bernadottestraße 94. A tall fence separates the two buildings. After freeing Baader, the group escaped by running behind the building, alongside the second one, and towards Bernadottestraße, where their getaway car was parked. I am grateful to the staff at the Deutsches Zentralinstitute für soziale Fragen, who kindly provided an impromptu tour, access to their raf collection, and tracing of the Baader getaway path on the property in June 2007. 46 Conversation with staff at the Deutsches Zentralinstitute für soziale Fragen. 47 See Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 65–71, and Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 57. 48 Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties, 337. 49 Ibid. 50 Kraushaar, “Rudi Dutschke und der bewaffnete Kampf.” 51 Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties, 338. 52 Koenen, “Armed Innocence, or ‘Hitler’s Children’ Revisited,” 29. I acknowledge that Koenen and Kraushaar do address the avant-garde influence. The crucial theoretical difference here is that their analyses focus on what they tend to see as the abnormal, morally and/or intellectually defective charisma of individuals and groups. This approach, coupled with what appear to be motivated rhetorical interventions into contemporary German politics, at times leads to sweeping characterization. In the present case, Koenen’s careless and pejorative use of the divisive language of disability, such as “blind” and “autistic,” to describe what he sees as the underdeveloped morality (29) of the postwar generation’s activism is an illustrative example of how at times these formulations might have been composed with more haste than thoughtfulness. The fact that these authors are implicated in the ethos and the movements that they criticize does not, in my view, grant either more or less authority to these kinds of assessments. 53 “Flugblatt Nr. 7 der Kommune 1” is reproduced in Proll and Dubbe, Wir kamen vom anderen Stern. Über 1968, 8. My translation. 54 Teufel, “Terrorism with a Fun Face,” 144, 148. 55 Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 154. 56 Teufel, “Fritz Teufel Before the Court,” 144. 57 Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 49. 58 Ibid. 59 Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 30. 60 Langston, Visions of Violence, 133. For another description and discussion of this testimony, see Scribner, “Buildings on Fire,” 35–7. 61 Langston, Visions of Violence, 132.

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62 Mahler in Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 39. 63 Red Army Faction, “Das Konzept Stadtguerilla.” “The Concept of the Urban Guerrilla” is translated into English and reproduced in Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 83–105. 64 Red Army Faction in Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 92. 65 This assumption was realized in the hostage-taking and execution of Hanns Martin Schleyer by the second-generation raf during its 1977 Offensive; by then, direct violence was a prominent mode of its concrete actions. Schleyer exemplified for the raf Germany’s failure to break with the Third Reich and the way in which social democratic interventions could be incorporated into projects that strengthened the capitalist structure. Schleyer was the director of Daimler Benz and chair of the German Federation of Industry; therefore, the selection of Schleyer as the target of a hostage-taking was as symbolic for his current posts as it was for his past membership in the National Socialist ss Army. Schleyer’s biographical history could be seen, then, as a manifestation of the Federal Republic’s twentieth-century history. The raf saw Schleyer as working toward the same economic goals that were pursued by the Nazis: the end of class struggle in Germany to be achieved through the elimination of resistance to capital, and for Germany to lead Europe as an economic region. Schleyer’s prominent industrial role in the Federal Republic under the spd’s social democratic model involved continued adherence to these goals. The raf wrote: “As the chief of industry, Schleyer was continually building up a system to contain social resistance to the conditions of capital – for example, by locking out workers – and to integrate workers into the system by means of negotiated contracts for social security … The continuity of the system which Schleyer embodied – in the 1970s during the period of the social democratic model – was a crucial moment in the building and development of the Federal Republic of Germany.” See Red Army Faction, “Die Abschiedserklärung der Roten Armee Fraktion März 1998,” 251–2. My translation. 66 Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum, 285–6. 67 Ibid., 289. 68 Ibid., 286. 69 Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 164. 70 “Holger Meins am 5. Juni 1973” is reproduced in Conradt, Starbuck, 147. My translation. Meins called this code of behaviour the “human method.” 71 Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 269. 72 Commission on the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, “Council of Europe Decision of 8 July 1978.”

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73 Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 190. 74 For example, “Baader distanziert sich von Wahlverteidiger Schilly. Angeklagter halt politische Argumentation für unzureichend – ‘Unser Prozeß ist der Volksaufstand,’” Stuttgarter Zeitung, 27 August 1975, EA/107 Bü 346 Baader-Meinhof Prozeß in Stuttgart-Stammheim, 1975– 1977, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. 75 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 59. 76 Ibid., 10. 77 Ibid., 79. 78 Ibid., 60–74. 79 Ibid., 172. This discussion is part of Marcuse’s critique of positivism, which accounts for his description of one-dimensional thought as positive thinking, characterized by self-sufficiency and intolerance towards contradiction and clash between different modes of thought. 80 Ibid., 245–56. 81 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 101–4. 82 Ibid., 99. 83 Ibid., 101. 84 Illustrated hand card responding to Axel Springer, who had recently called the students Nazis and described himself as a Jew in relation to them. The card depicts Springer in his Nazi uniform in 1933 and draws comparison with him in 1968. Illustriertes Flugblatte gegen die Nazi vergangneheit von Springer. “Wer ist hier Nazi und wer Jude?” February 1968, Rep VIII/BRD1/F11/M2 (27) Do2 95/4178, Druckschriften Flugblätter/Handzettel, Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin. 85 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 107–8. 86 Passmore, Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction, 21. 87 Bergson, Laughter, 22. 88 Baumann, Wie alles Anfing / How It All Began,61. 89 Ibid., 80. 90 Teufel, “Fritz Teufel Before the Court,” 136. 91 Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 167–9. 92 Gruppe Spur, “Manifesto.” 93 Ibid. 94 Hockenos, Joschka Fischer, 75. 95 Undated diary entry from the autumn of 1964 in Dutschke, Jeder hat sein Leben ganz zu leben, 21. 96 Hockenos, Joschka Fischer, 75. 97 In chapter three, it will be shown that k1 and the fun guerrilla became a social source for various guerrilla enactments and cell structures, culminating in the 2jm and crossovers into the raf. 98 Lee, “The Gruppe Spur,” 22. 99 Gruppe Spur, “Manifesto.”

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100 Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, 46. 101 Jean Baudrillard’s (“Our Theatre of Cruelty”) response after the fallout of the thwarted hijacking at Mogadishu, the raf’s assassination of its hostage Schleyer, and the deaths at Stammheim (the latter of which he insisted were state murders), makes explicit reference to Artaud’s manifesto. While Baudrillard refers to the raf’s terrorism as “our theatre of cruelty,” Artaud’s influence on Baudrillard suggests that (both in this case and in other works) Baudrillard’s own writing production is designed to make contact with the reader in an Artaud-inspired fashion. Baudrillard’s provocations, including his assertions that “[e]verything in terrorism is ambivalent and reversible,” “[t]he death of the terrorists is equivalent to the deaths of the hostages” (52), and “[w]hat’s the bloody difference, anyway – suicides or victims of liquidation?” (55) can only be understood in the contexts of Baudrillard’s theoretical treatments of the related concepts of simulation, the event, and deterrence. Baudrillard’s sharp words abuse the reader to provoke feeling. Of relevance to the main argument that I am making against the tendency towards a rationalizing consensus is his point that the exhaustive arguments motivated for clarification operate in the simulation of either/or, true/false, and so on. 102 Socialist Patients’ Collective, SPK Turn Illness into a Weapon, 3. 103 Ibid., 15. 104 Ibid., xv. 105 Ibid., 17. 106 Ibid., 3–4. 107 Ibid., 19. 108 Ibid., xvii. 109 spk/pf(h), Patientenfront/Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv (H): List of Dates. 110 Commission on the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, “Council of Europe Decision of 8 July 1978.” 111 See Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum, 303, 307. 112 Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, 10. 113 Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 302. 114 Ibid., 351. 115 Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum, 344. For instance, the guerrillas wanted to call Nixon as a witness to their trial. 116 Manfred Geist, “Kein Vogel kann sich unbemerkt der Zelle nähern,” Die Welt 36 (12 February 1975), EA 1/107 Bü 345 Baader-Meinhof Prozeß in Stuttgart-Stammheim, 1974–1975, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. 117 Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 231–2. 118 Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 352–3.

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119 Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 83–4. Artist Franz Ackermann produced a construction of the proposed freedom mobile in 2003; it appeared in Zur Vorstellung des Terrors (Regarding Terror). 120 This reconstruction of the story of the rocket launcher relies heavily upon the dramatic description provided by Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 295–8. 121 Boock came to be distrusted by the guerrillas. He was perceived to have been unreliable and also to have betrayed the group (although the rocket launcher incident does not seem to have been a significant point of contention in this regard). He is reported to have taken a large financial donation to his legal fund from the family of diplomat Gerold von Braunmühl, who was assassinated in 1986 by the raf. See Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 2: Dancing with Imperialism, 328–32. 122 Media reported that the bka had claimed that the lawyers were the greatest security risk. There were worries that the lawyers might be capable of participating in an escape attempt. The bka suspected that the lawyers were mediating communication between the prisoners and underground terrorist organizations, using the raf’s self-chosen code names. “Bundeskriminalamt: Anwälte der Baader/Meinhof–Bande sind ein Sicherheitsrisiko – 22 Juristen arbeiten für Gudrun Ensslin,” Die Welt Hamburg, 23 November 1974, EA 1/107 Bü 348: TerroristenAnwälte, 1974–1980, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. Discussion of the possibility that lawyers assisted in smuggling weapons into Stammheim: “Fast alle Spuren führen in das Büro von Croissant. Häftlinge führen die Ermittlungen in die Wälder um Stuttgart,” Badische Zeitung (Freiburg), 13 January 1978, EA 1/107 Bü 657: Justizvollzugsanstalt Stuttgart-Stammheim: Verwahrung und Selbstmord von raf-Mitgliedern, Untersuchungen, Sicherheitsmaßnahmen, 1977, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart; “Zweiter Baader-Anwalt ausgeschlossen. Nach Croissant auch Groenewold / Entscheidung des Oberlandesgerichts,” Frankfurter Allgemeiner 7 May 1975, EA 1/107 Bü 345 Baader-Meinhof Prozeß in Stuttgart-Stammheim, 1974–1975, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart; “Anwälte als Kuriere der Baader-Meinhof-Gefangenen. Die Außchließungsgründe gegen die Wahlverteidiger Croissant, Groenewold und Ströbele,” Frankfurter Allgemeine 23 May 1975, EA 1/107 Bü 345 Baader-Meinhof Prozeß in Stuttgart-Stammheim, 1974–1975, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. 123 Dan van der Vat, “Is the Baader-Meinhof Trial Making a Sham of Justice?” Times, 2 September 1975. 124 Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 372. 125 Regarding Schily, see Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum, 304. Regarding both Schily and Ströbele, see Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 246–7. 126 Quoted in Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 233. Also, Baader accuses the court of using the microphones to listen in on their discussions with their cho-

Notes to pages 89–93

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137 138 139 140

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sen defence lawyers, reported in “Überraschung im Baader-MeinhofProßess,” Der Tagesspiegel, 22 May 1975, EA 1/107 Bü 345 BaaderMeinhof Prozeß in Stuttgart-Stammheim, 1974–1975, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. Quoted in Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 235. Also, it was reported that Ensslin remarked: “[I]f these swine over there speak, then we are leaving!” in “Die Terroristen: ‘Entweder diese Schweine oder wir!’” Stuttgarter Nachrichten 11 June 1975, EA 1/107 Bü 345 Baader-Meinhof Prozeß in Stuttgart-Stammheim, 1974–1975, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. My translation. To the compulsory defenders, Ensslin demanded to know: “For whom do you speak?” reported in “Streit um die Pflichtverteidiger in Stammheim,” Stuttgarter Zeitung 11 June 1975, EA 1/107 Bü 345 Baader-Meinhof Prozeß in Stuttgart-Stammheim, 1974–1975. Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. My translation. See Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 237–8, 245–9. By 1977, health conditions were much worse; see “Baader Prisoners in Intensive Care,” Times, 20 August 1977. Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 372. Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 236–49. Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 266–7. Ibid., 372. Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 239. Passmore, Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction, 87. Colvin, Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism. Originally written in 1977, this quotation came from a circulated pamphlet used to furnish evidence that Antonio Negri was an organizer and leader of an insurrectionist armed band (the state assumed his involvement with the Red Brigades). The offending materials are published in Negri, Books for Burning, 238. Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 320. Ibid., 321. Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 243. Ibid., 250. These comments from Meinhof are often interpreted as signalling her growing distance from Baader and Ensslin, with whom she was frequently in conflict over the production of a written account of the raf. The remarks follow a question she posed to the courtroom: “How can a prisoner kept in isolation show the authorities, supposing he wanted to, that his conduct has changed? How? How can he do it in a situation from which every, absolutely every expression of life has been cut out?” (ibid., 250). While there is textual support for the assumption that Meinhof was increasingly isolated from Baader and Ensslin, who had been rather ruthlessly criticizing her and substantively editing her writing, I am less interested in speculating on her thoughts about defection and more concerned with this articulation as part of an emergent

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realization of the precarious situation that she may have been occupying at this time. That is, she was perhaps increasingly residing in a space of social unrecognizability not only from the outside world of legality but from within the guerrilla cell itself. She died of hanging six months later in her prison cell, ostensibly by suicide. Ibid., 336. Passmore, Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction, 28. Passmore presents Meinhof as a relatively settled human subject, casting her struggle with language and identity in terms of developmental trajectories (Ibid., 29–30, 119), constants (13, 16, 20), and consistencies (115). Ibid., 1–2. Colvin, Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism, 228. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 169. Ibid., 14, 233. Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 373. It was reported that the prisoners stood up and refused to take part in proceedings. Meinhof said, “I want to leave, you asshole.” Baader called Prinzing a “fascist old asshole,” reported in “BM- Verfahren wurde Phantom-Prozeß. Vernehmung zur Person und Verlesung des Anklagesatzes ohne Angeklagte,” Badische Neweste Nachrichten (Karlsruhe) 20 August 1975, EA/107 Bü 346 Baader-Meinhof Prozeß in StuttgartStammheim, 1975–1977, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. My translations. “Frau Meinhof Removed from Court,” Times, 18 September 1974. Meinhof is reported to have asserted in court that Prinzing’s sense of justice “stands in the tradition of the Third Reich” in “Vernehmung zur Anklage nächste Woche,” Stuttgarter Zeitung 29 August 1975, EA/107 Bü 346 Baader-Meinhof Prozeß in Stuttgart-Stammheim, 1975–1977, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. My translation. Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 243. Ibid., 246. Marighella, “Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla,” 29.

ch ap t e r t wo 1 Conradt, Starbuck, 143. 2 “Holger Meins, Bericht zur Zwangsernährung, Wittlich 11. Oktober 1974,” in Conradt, Starbuck, 148–50. 3 Foucault, “About the Concept of the ‘Dangerous Individual’ in 19thCentury Legal Psychiatry.” 4 Koenen, “Camera Silens: Das Phantasma der ‘Vernichtungshaft,’” and Kraushaar, “Mythos raf.” 5 Passmore, Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction, 82.

Notes to pages 101–7

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Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 463. Ibid., 344. Braunthal, Public Loyalty and Public Service in West Germany, 46. Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 266. Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 119. Hockenos, Joschka Fischer, 114–15. Ibid., 112. Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 465. Sartre had met with Baader in prison after receiving a letter from Meinhof. Of Baader’s greeting, Sartre wrote: “He seated himself across from me and then, after three minutes, the first thing he said, a little as if it were a greeting, was: ‘I thought I was dealing with a friend, but they sent me a judge’” (“The Slow Death of Andreas Baader”). For instance, Meinhof was not pleased with Böll’s article, “Will Ulrike Gnade oder freies Geleit?” (“Does Ulrike Want Mercy or Safe Conduct?”), published on 10 January 1972 in Der Spiegel. The article mobilized a critique of the news media, accusing it of forging a climate of fear and suggesting that it was creating an unfavourable environment for leftist dissent. In an internal raf communiqué, Meinhof referred to it as “shit.” See Bakker Schut, das info, 204. Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 457. The letter is reproduced on pages 457–63. Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 189. Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 458. “Holger Meins 1. November 1974” is reproduced in Conradt, Starbuck, 154. For instance, an article published in the Stuttgarter Zeitung on 6 February 1975 contained excerpts of an raf statement on the hunger and thirst strikes that emphasized them as the last weapon that the prisoners had in the mobilization of anti-imperialist politics. “Der Durststreik war ein Schlag ins Wasser,” Stuttgarter Zeitung, 6. February 1975, EA 1/107 Bü 655 Zwangsernährung von Strafgefangen, Hungerstreik der Baader-Meinhof-Häftlinge, 1974–1975, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. Meins in Conradt, Starbuck, 156. My translation. Ibid., 154. My translation. Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 238. Ulrike Meinhof. “Ein Brief Ulrike Meinhofs aus dem Toten Trakt” (25 February 1974, Köln-Ossendorf), published in Krebs, Ulrike Meinhof: ein Leben im Widerspruch, 242–3. I am indebted to parts of Paul Buck’s translation of this letter, as it is published in Barnett, Last Days of the World and Other Texts for Theatre, 43–4. I used some of this translation’s constructions where they seemed to capture better than mine the sense of Meinhof’s writing. I chose to leave the hissing sounds (which only appear in some reproductions of the letter in German and, incidentally,

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Notes to pages 107–13

not in Krebs’s version) untranslated because the significance of their reference – to language, to the multiplicity of speech, and to its emphasis on the gap between what is spoken and what is heard – is lost in the translation into English. Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 273. Ibid., 239. Commission on the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, “Council of Europe Decision of 8 July 1978,” para. 19. Ibid., para. 20. Ibid., para. 20. Hebb quoted in McCoy, “Science in Dachau’s Shadow,” 407. Schiller, Remembering the Armed Struggle, 128–9 (my emphasis). It ought to be noted that there has been much speculation with regard to the neurological source of Meinhof’s turn to guerrilla violence. In 1962, Meinhof was pregnant with her twin daughters but suffering from severe headaches and blurred vision; physicians suspected a brain tumour was the cause. Worried about the implications for her unborn children, Meinhof refused surgery and awaited the birth. After the twins were born, she underwent brain surgery. Instead of a tumour, the surgeon found a hemorrhaging blood vessel and implanted a metal clamp to suspend the bleeding. The hemorrhage, the surgery, and the metal clamp have often been discussed as possible biological explanations for Meinhof’s move from journalist to guerrilla. Such speculations, however, fail to address the rise of several urban guerrilla cells in West Germany and around the world in the 1960s and 1970s. Kalekin-Fishman, “Sounds that Unite, Sounds that Divide,” 36. Ibid., 37. Berendse, “Aesthetics of (Self-) Destruction,” 335. Berendse’s reference to literary tropes in this quotation is an allusion to the guerrillas’ use of Melville’s novel Moby-Dick in the coding of their internal communications. Bakker Schut, das info, 203. Colvin, Ulrike Meinhof, 165. Ibid., 165. Ibid., 165. Schiller, Remembering the Armed Struggle, 167. Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 282–3. There are numerous examples of this. The exchanges that Baader and Ensslin had with Meinhof have been of particular interest. See, for instance, Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum, 347, and Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 203–5. Bauer, “Ulrike Meinhof and the Transatlantic Movement of Ideas,” 185. In this essay Bauer argues against the supposedly one-directional trans-

Notes to pages 114–27

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national movement of civil rights and protest movement concepts and practices in the 1960s and 1970s, illustrating the complexity of flows and shifting usage of concepts, particularly the use of the concept of resistance. Smith-Prei, Revolting Families, 17. Ibid., 98. Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum, 309. Bakker Schut, das info, 57. Schiller, Remembering the Armed Struggle, 135. Marighella, “Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla,” 26–7. Socialist Patients’ Collective, SPK Turn Illness into a Weapon, xii. Sartre, “The Slow Death of Andreas Baader.” See, for instance, Socialist Patients’ Collective, SPK Turn Illness into a Weapon, ix; also see Bakker Schut, das info, 48. Socialist Patients’ Collective, SPK Turn Illness into a Weapon, 152. Bakker Schut, das info, 46–7. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 34. Barthes speaks of systems of language (e.g. Marxism and psychoanalysis) in terms of their tendency to produce images that complete and constrain subjects: “This is how on any object, a good language-system functions, attacks, surrounds, sizzles, hardens, and browns. All languages are micro-systems of ebullition, of frying … The language of others transforms me into an image, as the raw slice of potato is transformed into a pomme frite” (The Rustle of Language, 355). de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 148. Elias, The Civilizing Process, 56. Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 271, 277. Feldman, Formations of Violence. Yuill, “The Body as a Weapon: Bobby Sands and the Republican Hunger Strikes.” Ibid., 5.3. Feldman, Formations of Violence, 165. Ibid., 169. Ibid., 181. I have already noted several examples of this in the literature. For further brief discussions of outcomes in other sources, see, for instance, Elsaesser, “Antigone Agonistes: Urban Guerilla or Guerilla Urbanism?” 293. See also Braunthal, Public Loyalty and Public Service in West Germany, 27. Hockenos, Joschka Fischer, 3–8, 324–7. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 36. Feldman, Formations of Violence, 175. Smith and Moncourt, Vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, 240. Feldman, Formations of Violence, 196.

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Notes to pages 128–39

Ibid., 195. Oesterle, Stammheim, 69. Schiller, Remembering the Armed Struggle, 176. Feldman, Formations of Violence, 217. Quoted in ibid., 164–5. Yuill, “The Body as Weapon,” 3.6. Ibid., 3.8. Feldman, Formations of Violence, 236. Ibid., 232, emphasis added. Yuill, “The Body as Weapon,” 5.16. Marighella, “Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla,” 26.

ch ap t e r t h re e 1 On terrorist psychology, see Stout, The Psychology of Terrorism. Also see Gerrits, “Terrorists’ Perspectives: Memoirs.” On the organizational management of terrorist organizations, see, for example, Shapiro and Siegel, “Moral Hazard, Discipline, and the Management of Terrorist Organizations.” 2 Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties, 352. 3 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 195–200. 4 de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism. 5 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 200–1. 6 Ibid., 214–18. 7 Warner, The Pragmatics of Literary Testimony, 3–4. 8 Ibid., 4. 9 de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 69. 10 Quoted in Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 214. 11 D’Hoker, writing about confessional discourse in novels, notes that its performativity is accepted in literary contexts but acknowledges that the legal system seeks referentiality (“Confession and Atonement in the English Novel,” 42n2). 12 I note further down that the court effectively used Régis Debray’s book Revolution in the Revolution? as evidence against him. 13 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. 14 Warner, The Pragmatics of Literary Testimony, 121. 15 Ibid., 17. 16 Ibid., 121. 17 Ibid., 122. 18 Barthes, Image Music Text, 146. 19 Huffman, “Audio Podcast 16.” 20 Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties, 352. 21 Pulp Press statement from 1978 English edition of Baumann, Wie alles Anfing / How It All Began, 7. 22 Ibid., 10–11.

Notes to pages 139–47

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Ibid., 8. Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s statement, ibid., 124. Ibid. Baumann, Wie alles Anfing, 66. Ibid., 19. Ward, “Material, Image, Sign.” Ibid., 286. Baumann, Wie alles Anfing, 19. Bauer has commented on a tendency of guerrillas to romanticize subaltern struggles; see “Ulrike Meinhof and the Transatlantic Movement of Ideas,” 178. Siegfried has suggested that there was an assumed relation between racialized otherness and perceptions of authenticity; see “White Negroes,” 191–214. This tendency towards identification with a sense of subordinated white ethnicity can be seen within countercultural movements and even in academic analyses of countercultural or subcultural groups comprising white working-class youth in the 1960s and 1970s. See for instance Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, which not only gives an account of this but reinforces it throughout its argument. Siegfried, “White Negroes,” 192–3. Siegfried discusses the West German reception of Norman Mailer’s essay (originally written in 1957, but translated into German in 1963) that introduced the term “white negro” to describe “an oppositional habitus through an alliance with blacks.” Siegfried notes how “rebellious young West Germans used blues music, long hair, and an identification with the Black Panthers to recreate themselves” (192). Baumann, Wie alles Anfing / How It All Began, 20. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 25. For more about the transformation from The Roaming Hash Rebels to the 2nd of June Movement, see interviews with members of the 2jm in Reinders and Fritzsch, Die Bewegung 2. Juni, particularly 11–44, which includes a more detailed discussion of the program of the 2jm. Baumann, Wie alles Anfing, 25. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 24. Ibid. Schiller, Remembering the Armed Struggle, 14. See Varon, Bringing the War Home, 32. Schwarz, Listening Awry, 85. Ibid., 88. Schwarz’s argument draws on Žižek’s notion of “interpellation prior to identification.” Baumann, Wie alles Anfing / How It All Began, 23.

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Notes to pages 147–52

48 Smith-Prei’s examination of how the postwar state conceived of “the private sphere as national space” (31) and thus “articulated the family as a site for the re-establishment of norms in the postwar period” (26) is crucial to her study of the corporeal negativity in New and Black Realisms in West Germany in the 1960s, but it also indirectly provides contextualization for, and correction to, Baumann’s observations about violence in families, which he sees as primarily a working-class phenomenon delinked from official discourses and particular historical conditions. See Revolting Families. 49 Baumann, Wie alles Anfing / How It All Began, 78. 50 Ibid., 106. 51 For discussions that elaborate the flow of concepts and practices, see for instance: Bauer, “Ulrike Meinhof and the Transatlantic Movement of Ideas”; Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties; Slobodian, Foreign Front; and Trnka, “The West German Red Army Faction and its Appropriation of Latin American Urban Guerilla Struggles.” 52 This action does suggest that some of the countercultural critiques of Zionism had not been conceptually formulated with enough breadth and depth, the lack of which may have contributed to acts of anti-Semitism. More work needs to be done to gain insight into this, as this bombing, as well as the Entebbe action, lend fuel to comparisons between the 68ers and the 33ers. See a qualified comparison that aims to show shared totalitarian tendencies between these generations in Aly, Unser Kampf: 1968. Kraushaar, in “Hitler’s Children? The German 1968 Movement in the Shadow of the Nazi Past,” rejects the generation argument for generalizing the differences between groups in 1968. He characterizes the raf as having poisoned the political fabric and having falsely announced themselves as representative of a broader workingclass struggle. 53 Communiqué “Shalom and Napalm,” reproduced in Baumann, Wie alles Anfing / How It All Began, 66. 54 Quoted in Bougereau, The German Guerrilla, 31. 55 For a discussion of the West German urban guerrilla and peripheral guerrilla struggles, see Trnka, “The West German Red Army Faction and its Appropriation of Latin American Urban Guerilla Struggles.” 56 Klimke and Scharloth, “Utopia in Practice,” 52. 57 Ibid. 58 Kraushaar, “Rudi Dutschke und der bewaffnete Kampf.” 59 Baumann, Wie alles Anfing / How It All Began, 60. 60 Ibid., 40. 61 The street on which Axel Springer Publishing is located in Berlin, a portion of Kochstraße, has more recently been renamed after Dutschke. The renaming of the street illustrates the way in which this history still ani-

Notes to pages 152–62

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mates everyday life in some German cities; this is addressed in chapter six. Baumann, Wie alles Anfing / How It All Began, 40. The concept of a collective body became central for some members of the West German urban guerrillas imprisoned in the 1970s, particularly in the discussions surrounding group hunger strikes. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself. Austin, How to Do Things with Words. Huffman, “Audio Podcast 16.” de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 69. Although Fischer, with his emphasis on “autobiographical voices,” gives a different set of devices in the form of three voices to consider in autobiographical narratives, this is particularly of value in cross-cultural contexts. See Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice, 179. Baumann, Wie alles Anfing / How It All Began, 115. Egan, Patterns of Experience in Autobiography, 146. Baumann, Wie alles Anfing / How It All Began, 116 (emphasis added). Ibid., 117 (emphasis added). Ibid. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 95. Donahue, “Elusive ’68.” Baumann, Wie alles Anfing / How It All Began, 41. Ibid., 122–3. Ibid., 120. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 92. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 93. Pier, “Gérard Gennette’s Evolving Narrative Poetics,” 9. Pier is following Monika Fludernik’s analysis of second-person narration. Radical negativity – the refusal of the opposition structured in the either/or, not the content of the refusal – is the scandal. “Radical negativity (or ‘saying no’) belongs neither to negation, nor to opposition, nor to correction (‘normalization’), nor to contradiction (of positive and negative, normal and abnormal, ‘serious’ and ‘unserious,’ ‘clarity’ and ‘obscurity’) – it belongs precisely to scandal; to the scandal of their nonopposition.” See Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body, 104. Yanoshevsky, “Three Decades of Writing on Manifesto,” 263. For a discussion of nuanced scholarship on the manifesto as a genre see ibid., 257–86. Yanoshevsky notes that Marcel Burger did distinguish

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between political, literary, and avant-garde manifestos but found in all of them a discourse that was combative (259). Ibid., 261. I acknowledge that the dominant reading of Machiavelli’s The Prince remains at the level of denotation – that is, as a straightforward text that sincerely advises the prince on how to maintain his principality. Others (most notably perhaps Antonio Gramsci in The Prison Notebooks) have posited other interpretations consistent with its potential as a manifesto or, at the very least, an instructional manual indirectly addressed to anyone other than the prince. Yanoshevsky, “Three Decades of Writing on Manifesto,” 261–3. Baumann, Wie alles Anfing / How It All Began, 120. Ibid., 122–3. Ibid., 41.

ch ap t e r f o ur 1 See the discussion of criticism in Storr, Gerhard Richter. Doubt and Belief in Painting, 200–2. 2 Kramer, “Telling Stories, Denying Style,” 4–8. 3 Hell and von Moltke, “Unification Effects,” and Usselmann, “18. Oktober 1977.” 4 Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh; Crawford, “Gender and Terror”; and Usselmann, “New Audience.” 5 Buchloh, “A Note on Gerhard Richter’s ‘October 18, 1977’”; Saltzman, “Gerhard Richter’s Stations of the Cross”; and Usselmann, “New Audience.” 6 Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting, 174 (emphasis added). 7 Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, 139. 8 In the re-counting or story-telling about the German Autumn, I rely upon the circulations of these tales, mostly through popular media, guerrilla source materials, art exhibit catalogues, and journalistic renderings. Many of these stories are not treated with detail in scholarly sources, with the ironic exception of state security and counter-terrorist literatures. 9 Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 297. 10 See chapter one for a discussion of the rocket launcher incident. 11 Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 299–300, 305. 12 Ibid., 307–8. 13 Ibid., 379. 14 Ibid., 377–8. 15 Ibid., 403–8. 16 Ibid., 346–7. 17 Kluge et al., dir., Germany in Autumn / Deutschland im Herbst. 18 Note that Storr, in Gerhard Richter. Doubt and Belief in Painting, makes

Notes to pages 174–8

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observations with respect to this, but his observations reference the cinematic approach visible in the works: “The ordering and repetition of some images in the cycle evoke cinematic techniques as well; action or stop-action sequences in Arrest 1 and Arrest 2, and Confrontation 1, Confrontation 2, and Confrontation 3, the close-up and the fade-out in Man Shot Down 1 and Man Shot Down 2, and three versions of Dead. Overtly dramatized narrative is thus introduced or implied by reference to film effects to which the viewer will almost involuntarily respond” (243). Much of my description of the arrest is indebted to the information offered in Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 165–8. See also Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum, 294–6. Elsaesser, “Antigone Agonistes.” EA 1/107 Bü 656: Justizvollzugsanstalt Stuttgart-Stammheim: Verwahrung und Selbstmord von raf-Mitgliedern, Untersuchungen, Sicherheitsmaßnahmen, 1977, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. See, for instance, Oesterle, Stammheim, which attempts to address accusations about prison conditions giving the primary voice to Horst Bubeck, the deputy prison officer at Stammheim, who claims that the Stammheim prisoners enjoyed liberal conditions of detention there. Bubeck also gives account of the guerrillas’ surly and disrespectful behavior towards prison staff. In particular, see 79–90. See discussion of this relationship in Elsaesser, “Antigone Agonistes.” See Storr’s discussion of criticism in Gerhard Richter. Doubt and Belief in Painting, 200–2. Sophie Schwarz quoted in ibid., 200. For instance: “These paintings shockingly reveal that painting is dead, incapable of transfiguring events, of giving them sense. Painting in the present tense becomes the victim of the historical reality that it had sought to examine. They state pictorially that any attempt at the constituting of meaning via aesthetic means would be not only anachronistic but cynical … If nothing can be altered, because all representation must necessarily end up asserting the inadequacy of the medium, what is the point of these paintings?” Stefan Germer quoted in Storr, Gerhard Richter. Doubt and Belief in Painting, 202. An example of a more contemporary artwork that takes this up with photographs of the victims is Die Toten (1998) by Hans-Peter Feldmann. This work was included in the exhibition Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Der RAF . For scholarship addressing the figure of the urban guerrilla in literary works, see Shahan, Punk Rock and German Crisis; Cornils, “Joined at the Hip?”; and von Dirke, “The raf as Trauma and Pop Icon in Literature since the 1980s.”

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Notes to pages 179–88

29 Art and exhibition practices in relation to the raf are addressed in chapter 5. 30 Proll, Baader-Meinhof / Pictures on the Run 67–77, 7. 31 More than suggesting movement, the works invite movement. While interviewing Gerhard Richter about the October paintings, Jann Thorn Prikker observes: “Yesterday I was watching the visitors to your exhibition. They were constantly trying to find the right viewing point, walking up and down, trying it from every angle, sometimes close up, sometimes standing well back.” Quoted in Richter, Daily Practice of Painting, 199. 32 Storr, Gerhard Richter. Doubt and Belief in Painting, 199. 33 Sayer, Going Down for Air, 52. 34 Ibid., 53. 35 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility. Second Version.” 36 See, for instance, Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics.” 37 Ibid., 22. 38 Bakhtin, Speech Genres. 39 Sontag asserts that what is often referred to as collective memory is instead the product of collective instruction. See Regarding the Pain of Others, 85–6. For this reason, the raf images evoke the collective recognition that they do in Germany only in response to the regime of reiteration that familiarized the public with these images within a particular set of discourses. The set of discourses that would surround these images could be expected to shift over time. 40 Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 100. 41 Richter quoted in Storr, Gerhard Richter. Doubt and Belief in Painting, 53. 42 Hell and von Moltke, “Unification Effects,” 74. They observe the Orphic structuring of imaginary space, underpinned by a logic of return, in other immediate post-1989 media, including Sebald’s essay Air War and Literature (1999) and Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand (2001). 43 Ibid., 91. 44 Ibid. See p. 75 where the curatorial ordering of the paintings is made central to the elaboration of their interpretation. 45 Crawford, “Gender and Terror,” 220. 46 Hell and von Moltke, “Unification Effects,” 76. 47 Ibid. 48 Usselmann, “18. Oktober 1977,” 6. 49 Ibid., 24. 50 Kramer, “Telling Stories, Denying Style.” 51 Buchloh, “A Note on Gerhard Richter’s ‘October 18, 1977.’” 52 Ibid., 103.

Notes to pages 189–98

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Ibid. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 103. Kligerman, “Transgenerational Hauntings,” 48. Ibid., 43. Sontag observes that we learn from the images that are circulated within our culture; those images that are presented to us contain repeated elements. Although some people speak of a collective memory to which iconic images belong, Sontag stresses that memory is individual and not reproducible. For this reason, she observes that, rather than collective memory, what we share is collective instruction. See Regarding the Pain of Others, 85–6. Sayer, Going Down for Air, 165–6. Storr, Gerhard Richter. Doubt and Belief in Painting, 236. Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh, 4. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 175. Ibid., 206. Ibid., 179. Agamben, Homo Sacer. For instance, Foucault, “17 March, 1976,” 239–63. Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh, 14. Silverman attributes this metaphor to Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, its call to read the real, and its promise to be the book of what happened. Ibid., 251n41. Usselmann, “New Audience,” 25. Crawford, “Gender and Terror,” 211. Richter, Daily Practice of Painting, 175. Ibid. See Elsaesser, “Antigone Agonistes,” 290. Richter quoted in Storr, Gerhard Richter. Doubt and Belief in Painting, 161. Ibid. Ibid.,160. Although they have since been released from prison, demands for expressions of remorse from raf members Christian Klar and Brigitte Mohnhaupt played a large part in discussions surrounding their release. See, for example, “Setback For raf Killer Klar: Politicians Say ‘Incorrigible’ Terrorist Should Stay in Jail.” Barthes, Image Music Text. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” Law, “Objects and Spaces,” 93.

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Notes to pages 199–205

ch ap t e r f i ve 1 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 178. 2 Storr, Gerhard Richter. Doubt and Belief in Painting, 198. 3 Quoted in Smilly, “Germany Debates ‘Terrorist Chic’; Art and Fashion Stir Memories of Leftist Violence in ’70s.” 4 Quoted in ibid. 5 Gisbourne, “‘Regarding Terror’ at Kunst-Werke.” 6 My description pertains specifically to the exhibition as it was at Der Neuen Galerie am Landesmuseum Johanneum Graz, Austria, in the summer of 2005. 7 Usselmann, “18. Oktober 1977,” 24. See chapter 4 in this volume. 8 Kraushaar, “Zwischen Popkultur, Politik und Zeitgeschichte.” 9 Significantly, Kraushaar’s critique is motivated in part by his observation that there remain several significant, even urgent, “knowledge gaps” in the history of the raf and terrorism in West Germany. He outlines several problems and questions that remain unanswered (particularly as they relate to the internal structure of the raf, communications between groups, and the international connections between West German groups and externally situated guerrilla organizations such as the pflp, which was itself fractured). There are several structural obstacles to the completion of this sort of research because access to information is controlled, for obvious reasons, by the individuals themselves who are implicated in the relationships and by state departments that have sealed records. German courts have restricted access to several files pertaining to the relevant period. A resurgence of guerrilla activity in German cities (with the activities of, for example, the Militante Gruppe) in 2007 has made some of the state’s covert procedural changes in response to the raf in the 1970s desirable to officials in contemporary neoliberal policing practices. The Militant Gruppe is discussed in chapter six of this volume. 10 Spreen, “Leuchtreklame für den Terror.” 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Storr, Gerhard Richter. Doubt and Belief in Painting, 198. 15 Ibid., 202. 16 As a performative coda, this chapter does not programmatically set out its argument but performs it with, perhaps, some opaque attributes. Nevertheless, it is intertwined with the conceptual thread of this book. As I note later in the conclusion, while each of the chapters treats a different aspect or site of consideration, all of the chapters in this book share and reinforce two operations that are crucial to my response to the imperative to find reason in incomprehensible acts: 1) the challenge to a unified conception of a subject motivated by self-transparent inten-

Notes to pages 205–17

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tions; 2) the refusal to anchor meaning, reason, and explanation to neutralize enactments that stretch the limits of socially recognizable (or normative) communicative formations. I have discussed this very significant film elsewhere. See Mair, “Itinerant Memory Places.” On the popular cultural appropriations and adaptations of guerrilla imagery in t-shirts, hip-hop, and so on, with respect to the selective and decontextualizing discrepancies presented in the aestheticization of the urban guerrilla phenomenon, see Kraushaar, “Mythos raf.” For a critique of The RAF Exhibition (although as an aside in another broader argument aiming to dispel the myth of isolation and the dead wing in prison) for reinforcing the myths and propaganda of the raf with the selection of particular artworks and the discourse in the catalogue, see Koenen, “Camera Silens.” Other instances of popular culture are addressed in this work as well. Worley, “Come the Revolution, We’ll All Be in Combats,” n.p. Ensslin quoted in Bell and Ensslin, “Debate: Regarding Terror,” 77. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 5. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 2. Ibid. Ibid., 212. For Lacan, stupidity is the product of analytic discourse, and this new subject is situated at the level of the unconscious. Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality. The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 12, 22. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 61. Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change. Foucault, Discipline & Punish. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 71. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, and Lacan, “The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis.” Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 67. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 18–21. Ibid., 193. Ayto, Dictionary of Word Origins, 536. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 22. Dennis Adams quoted in Doroshenko, “An Interview with Dennis Adams.” Storr, Gerhard Richter. Doubt and Belief in Painting, 272. Ibid., 272–3. Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 355. Ibid., 361–2.

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Notes to pages 217–32

44 Quoted in Vague, televisionaries, 78. 45 For discrepancies in these reports (e.g. range of 30–40 cm vs. directly against the skin), see Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 423–4. 46 Dennis Adams quoted in Doroshenko, “An Interview with Dennis Adams,” n.p. 47 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 173. 48 Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 358. 49 Ibid., 411. 50 Except where specified otherwise, this discussion is informed primarily by two texts: Aust, Baader-Meinhof, and Tolmein, RAF – Das war für uns Befreiung. 51 Note that Irmgard Möller insists that there was no communications system. Of the supposed communications system, Möller says: “That is all very imaginative but it doesn’t make any sense.” Quoted in Tolmein, RAF – Das war für uns Befreiung, 126. My translation. 52 Hans Joachim Klein in Bougereau, The German Guerrilla, 53. 53 Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 424–5. 54 Ibid., 410–12. 55 Quoted in Tolmein, RAF – Das war für uns Befreiung, 132–3. My translation. 56 Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 420–5. 57 Quoted in Tolmein, RAF – Das war für uns Befreiung, 133. My translation. 58 Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 422–3. 59 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 178. 60 Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting, 174. Richter’s comment is given with regard to his October 18, 1977 cycle of fifteen oil paintings in shades of grey dealing with the subject matter of the raf, particularly that of the Stammheim deaths. 61 Storr, Gerhard Richter. Doubt and Belief in Painting, 44. 62 See previous chapter. 63 Incidentally, or not, the word “atlas” entered into English-language usage in reference to a person conceived as a “supporter,” as an elaboration of the Greek myth of the Titan Atlas, who had the burden of carrying the heavens. See Ayto, Dictionary of Word Origins, 41. 64 Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 138. 65 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 136. 66 Terranova, “Futurepublic,” 140. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Liebert, “A King, a Ballerina, and a Nurse,” 14. 70 Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 381, 392. 71 Ibid., 393. 72 Ibid., 401.

Notes to pages 233–48

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Liebert, “A King, a Ballerina, and a Nurse,” 21. Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 202. Quoted from Huffman, “Interview with Director Bruce LaBruce.” Ibid. Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 18. Ibid., 23. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 1–2. Ibid., 122. Ibid., 121–2. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 260. Storr, Gerhard Richter. Doubt and Belief in Painting, 234–5. Lacan, Écrits, 677. Riemack, an art historian, was a close friend of Meinhof’s mother. Both of Meinhof’s parents died while she and her sister were young. Riemack had shared an apartment with Meinhof’s mother (then already widowed) and the two girls, so she had taken on a significant parenting role in Meinhof’s young life even prior to her mother’s death. Riemack continued to take care of Meinhof and her sister after their mother passed away. Later, Riemack became a significant figure in the lives of Meinhof’s own twin daughters, taking care of them while Meinhof had to have brain surgery following their birth and again when Meinhof went into hiding underground after participating in the operation to free Andreas Baader from prison. Riemack’s letter is published in Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 134–5. Aust was acquainted with Meinhof from her time with konkret. He also knew other members of the group. Controversially, Aust claims that he played a central role in retrieving Meinhof’s daughters, who had ostensibly been kidnapped by guerrillas and were to be sent to a plo training camp. The assertion that the group’s plan was to send the girls to a training camp has been challenged. The twins were in the care of a commune in Sicily when they were found. See, for example, Ulrike Meinhof’s 1962 column “Human Dignity is Violable,” in Bauer, Everybody Talks about the Weather, 148. Meinhof seems to support a complete ban on weapons as the only way to ensure democracy. In addition to a number of laws that provided a means for the authorities to bypass civil rights in dealing with suspected sympathizers, it was the raf that was used to justify the large-scale expansion of the Bundeskriminalamt (bka), the Federal Criminal Investigation Office, which went from dealing with border control to being the headquarters of terrorist tracking. Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 136–7. Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 18.

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Notes to pages 248–57

Ibid., 19. de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 54. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 136. Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting, 194. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 7. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 34.

ch ap t e r s i x 1 Derrida, Archive Fever, 2. 2 Toni Morrison’s Beloved, quoted in Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 165. 3 Gordon’s book Ghostly Matters is a methodological intervention that insists we must be attuned not only to the “monumental social architectures” suggested in disciplinary concepts but also to the “inert furniture” of everyday life, the marginal, and the banal. We must move “between that sad and sunken couch that sags in just that place where an unrememberable past and an unimaginable future force us to sit day after day and the conceptual abstractions,” 4. The figurative call for attention to the force of “inert furniture” resonates with Ben Highmore’s elaboration of the habitual and affective distributions rendered by the addition of a new chair to a household in his book Ordinary Lives, briefly discussed in my introduction to the conception of emplacement. 4 Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 9. 5 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xvii. 6 That a nomological principle provides the logic for the formal archive (as Derrida observes) may be the case, but it is equally the case that a different yet still nomologically saturated logic governs access to unofficial collections of these materials. On the one hand, this is a matter of selfprotection, given the nature of the materials and potential for incrimination of former guerrilla members and/or sympathizers. On the other hand, this justification cannot explain the obscurity of access for all materials. What it suggests is that everyone has a stake in gatekeeping or in a particular governance over the domiciliation of archives – the stake is this: to be the one who knows by being the one who possesses and circulates the supposed truth as a currency. 7 Smith-Prei, Revolting Families, 36. 8 Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 290. 9 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 7. 10 Derrida, Archive Fever, 1. 11 Highmore, Michel de Certeau, 37. 12 Derrida, Archive Fever, 99. 13 Seremetakis, “Memory of the Senses,” Part I, 9. 14 Aoki, “Remembrances of Love Past,” 7. 15 Freud, The ‘Wolfman’ and Other Cases, 251. While I am not invested in drawing a distinction that underlines whether there exists an original

Notes to pages 257–61

16

17

18 19

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and concrete originating occurrence for a memory, psychoanalytic theory addresses this to accommodate the uncertain status of memory in the first place. For instance, in his study of the Wolfman, Freud argues that the Wolfman’s first anxiety dream could not have referenced the patient’s accidental witnessing of his parents having sexual intercourse, as the patient himself insists. In his explication of the dream, Freud refers to memory imprints as connected to events that occur around which subjects weave stories. The Wolfman’s assertion that he witnessed this primal scene prior to his dream of six or seven wolves in a tree is, according to Freud, a reconstruction based upon specific memory imprints from the Wolfman’s early childhood, none of which are related to the witnessing of a primal scene as such. Nevertheless, and significant for generalization to the concerns of my project, is the extent to which, from a psychoanalytic perspective, it matters little whether in fact the scene was witnessed but that the patient believes that it was. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 85–6. Drawing from Sontag’s critique of the term ‘collective memory,’ Assmann’s “Transformations between History and Memory” affirms that memory is shared through social interaction and advocates for distinctions between interactional memory, which dies with its bearers, and political and cultural memory, which is grounded in symbols and representations that exceed the lives of their carriers. With particular attention to the painful and traumatic memory of the Holocaust, Assmann, in “History, Memory, and the Genre of Testimony,” has addressed the potential of video testimony for a transgenerational memory that carries living memories where the difficulties of representation are inherent to history and remembrance. “Figures take shape as long as we can recognize, in passing discourse, something that has been read, heard, felt. The figure is outlined (like a sign) and memorable (like an image or a tale)” (Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 4). Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 166. In its initial form, The German Autumn in Minor Spaces was exhibited in a group show entitled “Small” held at the Art Gallery of Alberta (19 January–24 March 2008) and then in expanded form as a solo show at Harcourt House Gallery for the Arts in Edmonton (19 February–21 March 2009). Sennett, The Uses of Disorder. Red Army Faction, “Die Abschiedserklärung der Roten Armee Fraktion März 1998.” Mair, “Arrivals and Departures.” I wonder whether we can distinguish between ourselves having stories to tell about the city or the city having stories to tell us. It could be said that there are scenes of address between spaces and human subjects in particular contexts. The directionality of targeting in such address is not

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27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

Notes to pages 261–70

one-directional from an interpellative point of view; spaces hail us or sometimes they tell us to retreat. I am interested in how spaces tell us who we are by intervening into our movements. I am also concerned with how we deploy narratives (both verbal and extra-verbal) about what spaces are in order to affirm what we want to be. I think that this is what occurs, or becomes materialized, in practices of memorialization. Mair, “Arrivals and Departures.” Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka. Bakker Schut, das info, 159–60. Colvin gives a compelling discussion of Meinhof’s prison writing. For a discussion of Meinhof’s new writing see Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism, 168–70. Colvin also analyzes Meinhof’s texts with respect to her shifting relationship to feminism and gender consciousness, 188–224. Derrida, Archive Fever, 90. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 53. In the spirit of the urban guerrilla fighter’s turn from the countryside to the city as the site of attention, I will refunction Gaston Bachelard’s observations about temporal dimensions of the forest to speak of the city because I think they are true of the city as well. In terms of our imagination, we cannot enumerate – we cannot know – the temporal dimensions of the city. In the following quotation, imagine that the word “forest” is replaced with the word “city”: “[H]istory is not enough. We should have to know how the forest experiences its great age; why in the reign of the imagination, there are no young forests … I was told this, and I have not forgotten it. It happened in a past before I was born. My oldest memories, therefore, are a hundred years old, or perhaps a bit more,” 188. Third, “Imprisonment and Excessive Femininity,” 98. Broomby, “Red Army Faction Brains ‘Disappeared,’” n.p. “Open Letter to the Generalbundesanwaltschaft,” Einstellung der §129(a)-Verfahren – sofort! Holm and Roth, “Anti-Terror Investigations against Social Movements,” 50. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 49. I am indebted here to William Ramp for this observation and for many fascinating conversations about collecting and absences. Hockenos, Joschka Fischer, 111. Vasagar, “Hamburg Prepares for War of Worlds.” Bernd Rabehl quoted in Hockenos, Joschka Fischer, 91. Aust, Baader-Meinhof, 33. Derrida, Archive Fever, 36. Barclay, in “Benno Ohnesorg, Rudi Dutschke, and the Student Movement in West Berlin,” has described some of the debate that surrounded

Notes to pages 270–1

43

44

45

46

47 48

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the naming of the street after Dutschke, noting that “throughout this whole discussion it became evident that lots and lots of younger Berliners, including natives and recent arrivals, had no idea who these people were. Nor did they care” (133). Ironically, the suturing of wounds on a marked city like Berlin can be achieved even where the impetus to remember is sharply foregrounded in a museum. Boym, in The Future of Nostalgia, observes that “in the exhibit on fifty years of Germany there is a hall dedicated to the Green movement where real trees grow through the floor, meant to authenticate the experience of the museum tour, making it more ‘natural.’ The everyday of the gdr is presented in the lower rooms with low ceilings and dim lighting; the anarchist and terrorist groups of the 1970s are represented by flickering lights in the video in the staircase. Witty design focuses on the superficial dramatization of the experience, not on a complex reflection on it, which might be less fun and take more time” (217). My objection would not be to a lack of explanation, though, as my observations in chapter four suggest, but rather to any assumption of neutral or settled meaning that might be conveyed. Observe Till’s discussion of the politics of memory in “Wounded Cities,” where she remarks that “some memorialization projects attempt to close off public discussion by bounding time through place, while others seek to keep open the process of historical reflection” (7). Nora’s attempts in “Between Memory and History” to come to terms with the distinction between institutionalized and imposed memory formations and collective living memory brought his notion of lieux de mémoire. Lieux de mémoire (memory places) are both memory and history, remain mutable, and are simultaneously functional, symbolic, and material. While the notion of lieux de mémoire presents a useful methodological device that interrogates the congealing and hegemonic functioning of institutional memorialization, its theoretical construction is wrapped up in nationalistic, classed, and colonial concerns that impose their own problems. Hence, its adoption requires an awareness of, and response to, the interests – subaltern in one respect, hegemonic in others – that it conceals. The senses are too often disavowed in memorialization processes, yet, as Low illustrates, state institutions do make use of the senses to shape national memory and that “the senses provide clues to the structure of knowledge and social relations” (“Summoning the Senses in Memory and Heritage Making,” 108). Jameson, Postmodernism, 28. With this assertion, I do not intend to say something definitive about photographs and their capacity to speak outside of limitations associated with other communicative formations. If one is to look towards the series of images circulated repeatedly in association with the raf, what

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becomes visible is the extent to which these images, even singularly, are accountable to, and resonate with, the hegemonic constructions around these phenomena. The reason for this is that the sites for their circulation – daily newspapers and glossy newsmagazines – have already successfully anchored these photographic images so that they no longer need their didactic captions in order to encourage (rather than to determine) preferred readings. What we attempted with the production of these photographs was the less recognizable, or – to follow Deleuze and Guattari – the flight, or escape from the photographic grammar of the iconic images associated with these phenomena. Several of the images refuse the recognizable in relation to this particular context, yet some viewers would have several completely different associations with, and attachments to, the sites depicted, and this is consistent with the emphasis on the multiple or fractal character of the social significance of spaces. 49 Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, 19. 50 Ibid., 25. 51 Ibid., 29. co ncl usi o n 1 Low has been instrumental in advocating the study of the senses in qualitative research methodologies. See, for example, “Olfactory Frames of Remembering.” 2 With respect to critique of ideology, Highmore’s observation of a turn in cultural inquiry towards “immaterial material” of affect, sensual life, and habit recognizes “a partial abandonment of the stalwarts of critical inquiry so central to cultural studies (ideology critique and discourse analysis, predominantly), as investigation moves towards arenas less obviously ripe for critical purchase: the body, everyday life and the sensorial” (Ordinary Lives, 140–1). 3 As the philosopher Agamben noted in the 1990s, and as the past decade has concretely demonstrated, spatial arrangements that are governed by administration rather than law are more prevalent than ever. In Canada today we can look to immigrant detention centres and to the Ashley Smith case (the young woman who died in a Canadian federal prison in 2007) for examples of these arrangements. In the latter case, the public discourse that attempts to explain Smith’s predicament with frequent reference to her supposed mental illness misses the mark entirely. Smith (whose time in youth detention centres and eventually in the women’s prison system fell outside of her sentence and even outside legal jurisdiction, so that she could be kept in indefinite solitude in what is called administrative segregation) was completely removed from any recognizable social arrangement. Extending points I’ve already made earlier in this book about this kind of incarceration to Smith, I suggest that her

Notes to pages 277–83

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28

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sensorial capacities would have been completely reordered, and her social resources would have become alien to the outside community as well as to the internal prison community. As I have discussed, sensorial reordering associated with these forms of segregation makes it difficult for subjects to perceive the contours of their own bodies relative to surrounding space and objects. Therefore, pain and violence can become crucial ways of knowing and mapping the coordinates of one’s own body relative to other entities understood to be separate in hegemonic, Western epistemologies. Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.” Law, Aircraft Stories, 15. Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body, 104–5. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 8. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 3. Smith-Prei, Revolting Families, 3. Ibid., 166. Ibid., 164. Žižek, Violence, 76. Ibid., 10–11. Ibid., 12–13. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 61. Gilcher-Hotley, “Transformation by Subversion?” She responds critically to the treatment of guerrilla violence in Kraushaar, Wieland, and Reemtsma, Rudi Dutschke Andreas Baader und die RAF . Gilcher-Hotley, “Transformation by Subversion?” 158. Ibid., 157. Also addressing the complexity of the concept of violence in the transnational context of 1968, with attention to West Germany, is Arendt, On Violence, in which she casts violence and power as opposites, insisting that non-violence is not the opposite of violence. Gilcher-Hotley, “Transformation by Subversion?” 158. Ibid., 159. Ibid., 163, 165. Ibid., 164. Klimke and Scharloth, “Utopia in Practice.” Smith-Prei, Revolting Families, 21. Although written well before the days of guerrillas in Stammheim, Arendt’s contemplation of how some violent enactments are irrevocable and can usher subjects into a community of violence does resonate with the improvisational constitution of the raf that I describe in chapter one. A further note brings the hunger strikes of incarcerated guerrillas

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31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39

Notes to pages 284–6

to mind, as Arendt posits that the death of a member of this community can be viewed as a contribution to the immortality of the group. See On Violence, 67–8. “We are above all obligated to note that a totally nonviolent resolution of conflicts can never lead to a legal contract. For the latter, however peacefully it may have been entered into by the parties, leads finally to possible violence. It confers on both parties the right to take recourse to violence in some form against the other, should he break the agreement. Not only that; like the outcome, the origin of every contract also points toward violence.” Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 287–8. “[N]evertheless the violence of an action can be assessed no more from its effects than from its ends, but only from the law of its means” (Ibid., 292; see also 300). Žižek, Violence, 4. Ibid., 180. Ibid., 213. Ibid., 200. Highmore, Ordinary Lives, 166. For this reason, perhaps, the concept of emplacement has gained the most traction in ethnographic research, which enables more direct observations. Nevertheless, the considerations that the concept raises, as well as the ontological intervention that it makes, suggests that the limits of hegemonic methodologies are obscuring to our understanding. Therefore, if consideration of emplacement in historical research may be troubled by absences, the challenges it poses are certainly no more fraught than the more or less neutral acceptance of conventional research findings. Clough, “The New Empiricism,” 54. Ibid., 49. Bishop, Artificial Hells, 275–84.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. 2nd of June Movement (2jm), 49, 101, 104, 133, 155, 288n7; emergence of, 3–4; and ki, 302n97; membership in other groups, 80, 116; derivation of name, 59–60, 151; raf criticism of, 148. See also Wie alles Anfing 68ers / 1968 movement, 25–6, 52, 67, 74, 139, 282–3, 285, 297– 8n9, 312n52 Abastado, Claude, 162 absences, 52, 190, 195, 251–3, 257–8, 267, 272, 275–6, 286, 328n36 abstract radicalism, 210 Ackermann, Franz, 304n119 acoustic isolation, 106–13, 277 acoustic vulnerability, 146–7 Action Theatre, 63 activists, contemporary, 263–4 Actor Network Theory, 290n45, 290n47 Adams, Dennis, 51, 210, 215–23 Adorno, Theodor, 20–5, 72 aesthetic choreographies, 18, 133, 249 aesthetic convolutions, 18, 97, 99, 126, 129–32, 249, 254 aesthetic cynicism, 197 aesthetic modes of action, 6–9, 18

aesthetics: etymology, 8; use of term, 8–9, 101 affect, 24, 34, 36, 56, 134, 227, 229, 233, 285–6; affective attachment, 242, 244; and emplacement, 16–17; and guerrilla imagery in pop culture, 206; negative aesthetics of, 28, 114; and social control, 238 affection, 206, 218, 245–6, 248, 253 Africa Addio (1966), 62 Agamben, Giorgio, 193, 326n3 agency: and emplacement, 13–14, 290n47; and language, 38, 42–3 Agit 883, 62 Air France hijacking (Entebbe), 5, 149–50, 229, 312n52 Aktion Kobra, 235 Albrecht, Suzanne, 167 alienation, 23, 73 Allensbacher Institute of Public Opinion, 102 Allied neo-occupation, 56, 58–9, 67, 143 Althusser, Louis, 18, 41 analysis: use of term, 35–7 Ankersmit, F.R., 31, 33, 36 anti-authoritarian struggles, 55 anti-fascism, 92, 149 Antigone (Sophocles), 169–70, 176–7 anti-Happening, 75 Antin, Eleanor, 229–33, 238

346

anti-Semitism, 149, 312n52 anxiety, 75, 276 Aoki, Douglas, 256–7 arborescent approach, 294–5n140 archives, 7, 252, 263, 269–70, 322n6; limitations of, 254–6 Arendt, Hannah, 272–3, 327n21, 327–8n28 Arndt, Olaf, 109 Arrest series (Richter), 173–4, 182 arson, 63–5, 67–9, 157, 264 Artaud, Antonin, 74, 79, 303n101 artistic and curatorial works, 6–7, 50–1; criticism of, 6; either/or framing and accusation of wrong politics, 52, 177–8, 204–5 assassinations, 5, 52, 303n101, 304n121; attempt on Dutschke, 61, 151–2, 268–9; in Italy, 265; of police informants, 155–7; retaliatory, 104 assault, 76 Assmann, Aleida, 323n16 Atlas (Richter), 51, 64, 191–2, 210, 223–7, 225 attachments, 242, 244–5, 248–9, 256, 263, 275 Aunt Marianne (Richter), 195–7 Auschwitz. See Nazi Germany Ausgrenzung, 169. See also counter-insurgency Aust, Stefan, 84–5, 221–2, 226, 299n37, 321n87 Austin, J.L., 39–40, 42–3, 45–6 authenticity, 134, 271, 274 authorization, 44–5 autobiography, genre, 134–5, 164 avant-garde, 291n71; historical, 68–9; influences on, 19–20; postwar ethos, 19–20, 54, 67–9; strategies, 26 Axel Springer Publications. See Springer Publications

Index

Axel Springer Straße, 268–9 Baader, Andreas: arrest (1972), 173–5; body (anti)language, 98– 9; brain of, 265; burial, 176–7, 219; death at Stammheim prison, 4, 30, 168–9, 175–6, 183, 215– 23; and Frankfurt department store arson, 63–5, 69, 157; gravesite, 177, 271; hiding underground, 245; identification with, 226; incarceration, 98–9, 108, 128; influence over das info, 117; prison escape (1970), 63, 65–6, 170, 247; record player, 215–19, 223; Sartre’s observations of, 113, 115–16, 307n14; at Stammheim trial, 83, 88–93, 306n151; and terrorism, 67 The Baader-Meinhof Affair (Cosgrove), 239–40 baader-meinhof.com, 206 Baader-Meinhof Gang. See raf BaaderMeinhof / Pictures on the Run 67–77 (Proll), 242 Baader-Meinhof Wagen. See bmw Bachelard, Gaston, 263, 324n28 Bachmann, Josef, 269 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 135–6, 182–3 Baldessari, John, 240 Ball, Allen. See German Autumn in Minor Spaces Bambule (alternative community), 268 Bambule (Meinhof), 171, 268 Barclay, David E., 324–5n42 Barthes, Roland, 137, 197, 199, 210, 255, 309n56; Barthesian figures, 205, 211–15, 249, 257, 323n17; A Lover’s Discourse, 51, 211–15 Basic Law, amendments to, 88, 90 Basso, Keith H., 16

Index

Battle for Grüneburgweg, 267–8 Baudrillard, Jean, 303n101 Bauer, Karin, 113, 308–9n43, 311n31 Baumann, Bommi (Michael), 4, 76; capture and trial, 153–4; “Friends, Throw Away the Gun” (interview), 157–8; identity, 136– 7, 142–3. See also Wie alles Anfing Baumgarten, Alexander, 8 Becker, Verena, 288n7 behavioural science, 110 Benjamin, Walter, 25, 181, 284, 317n69; gravesite, 272–3 Berendse, Gerrit-Jan, 111, 308n35 Bergson, Henri, 76 Berlant, Lauren, 244 Berlin: demonstrations in, 4, 57– 61, 151; East, 268–70; memorials in, 270–1; photographs of urban guerrilla sites, 258; street names, 268–70, 324–5n42; Stuttgarter Platz, 250–1; West, 58, 140–1, 151 Berlin Wall, 141; fall of, 5, 264; memorialization of, 270 Berufsverbot (Radicals Edict of 1972), 59, 102 Beuys, Joseph, 51, 210, 245–6 Bild (newspaper), 75, 152 Bishop, Claire, 73–5, 286 bka. See Bundeskriminalamt Black and White Room (Draeger), 227–9, 228 Black Rats, 149 Black Realism, 27, 113–14, 280 Blacks: counterculture identification with, 311n33; social exclusion of, 142 Blanketmen, 121–30 blanks, textual, xvi, 28, 113–14, 280

347

B-libi, 77 Blues (group), 151 blues music, 140, 148, 311n33 bmw, 235 body, 6–7; and discourse, 212–13; and emplacement, 9–19; gestures and movements, 98–9, 119–20; and guerrilla posture, 142–3, 145–7, 152–3; and language, 45, 253–4; (anti)language, 98–9, 132; malleability of, 123; as positive resource, 122–30; sensations and language, 27–8; and speech, 40; vulnerability of, 110, 123–4; as weapon, 29, 48–9, 53, 79, 122–4, 130–1 Bolivian urban guerrilla movement, 145, 163 Böll, Heinrich, 104, 139, 169, 178–9, 307n15 bombings, 4–5, 52, 57–8, 70, 104, 149 Boock, Peter Jürgen, 86–7, 304n121 Book of Life, 192–3 bourgeois subjectivity, 19, 24, 69, 82; negation of, 73, 95 Boym, Svetlana, 252–3, 325n43 Braunmühl, Gerold von, 304n121 brd. See West Germany Brecht, Bertolt, 68 Breines, Wini, 54–5, 297n172 Brockmann, Heinz, 155–6 broken histories, 136–7 Brown, Timothy Scott, 60–1, 67, 133 Buback, Siegfried, 5 Bubeck, Horst, 315n22 Buchloh, Benjamin, 188–9 Buck, Paul, 307n24 Buck-Morss, Susan, 8, 181–2 Buddenberg, Wolfgang, 5 built environment: and the body,

348

260–1; and emplacement, 12, 256 Bundeskriminalamt (Federal Criminal Investigation Office – bka), 222, 226, 304n122, 321n89 Bundesrepublik Deutschland (brd). See West Germany Butler, Judith, 38–44, 47, 96, 153, 254, 297n171 Camera Silens (Moonen and Arndt), 109 Canada, 326n3; Defence Research Board, 110 capitalism: and class struggle, 301n65; and illness, 80–1, 115; technical rationality of industrial, 20–3, 73 carceral emplacement: aesthetic convolutions of, 122–32; effect on instrumentality, 100–2; sensorial reordering, 49, 55, 82, 93, 99–102, 106–16, 127, 131, 277. See also incarcerated guerrillas Casey, Edward S., 10–11 cdu. See Christian Democratic Union Cell (Richter), 175–6 censorship, 169–70; laws, 59, 139 Chapman, Jake and Dinos, 199 Christian Democratic Union (cdu), 4, 56, 200, 298n11 city streets, 51, 131, 250–1, 256–8, 263–70 civility, 119 civil rights, suspension of, 58–9, 124, 264, 321n89 Clapton, Eric, 215–18 class struggle, 70, 301n65, 312n52 Clifford, James, 255 Clough, Patricia Ticineto, 16–17, 285 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel (Red Danny), 139–40

Index

Cold War, 5; experimental research during, 110; West Germany as site of, 57–8, 83, 135, 143 collection, 225–6; official practices of, 226–7, 264–7 collective body, 313n63 collective identity, 118, 134, 146 collective instruction, 189, 240, 245, 257, 264, 275, 316n39 collective memory, 186, 257, 316n39, 317n58 Colvin, Sarah, 47, 96–7, 112 Commission of Inquiry, 98, 220–2 Committees Against Torture, 103 commodification of guerrilla imagery, 206–8; see also Prada Meinhof common sense, 7–8, 12–13, 24–5, 48, 97, 253 communal living, 57, 143–4, 250, 267–8 Commune I. See Kommune I communication: corporeal circumvention of, 6–8, 118–20, 125–6, 131, 254, 279 (see also aesthetic convolutions); and emplacement, 18; refusal of conventional modes of, 6–7, 20, 23, 29, 45, 49, 53, 55, 71–2, 79–82, 90–5, 98–9; social norms of, 19. See also das info; speech communication genres, 46 comportment, 119 concentration camp photographs, 189, 192, 224 Confrontation series (Richter), 175, 182, 185, 194–5 constative statements, 40, 94, 153, 204, 254 constitution, 58 consumer society: critiques of, 20– 3, 72–3; fun guerrilla critiques of, 67–9

Index

contact bans, 81–2, 101, 113, 131, 168–9, 217, 221 contestation, 44–5 coordinating strategies, 14 corporeal choreographies of subjectivity, 253–4 corporeality: negation of, 6 (see also negativity); of workers, 144– 5, 147–8 Cosgrove, Erin, 51, 210, 239–45 countercultural movements: aesthetics, 6, 74–8; divisions in, 245–6; influence of Frankfurt School on, 23, 72; mainstream campaign against, 142–3; materiality, 140–52; militarization of, 56–62, 101; opposition to rational subjectivity, 74–5, 77–8, 82, 97; political differences from raf, 103–5; situationist ethos, 77–8, 95; and subordinated white ethnicity, 311n32 counter-insurgency/counter-terrorism, 55, 59, 83, 103–4, 109, 139, 159–60, 178–9, 258, 321n89; Aktion Kobra, 235; collection practices, 226–7, 264–7; effects on dissent, 246; extension of state power, 264–8; during German Autumn (1977), 167–9; raf as victims of, 202–3 (see also Stammheim deaths) court-appointed defence lawyers, 87–90 Crash! exhibition, 210 Crawford, Karin, 194 Criminal Code: amendments to, 87, 90, 95; section 34, 168; section 129, 83, 90, 139, 264 critical Reason, 22–3 Croissant, Klaus, 88 Crystal Night, 149 cultural image repertoire, 205, 210 cultural memory, 30, 32, 50–1

349

cultural products based on raf, 178–9, 205–10, 215–46 Daase, Christoph, 200 Dadaism, 19, 68, 78 das info (covert communications system), 82, 112–14, 116–17, 128, 216, 261 ddr. See East Germany Dead series (Richter), 171–3, 172– 3, 180, 182, 185 dead wings, in prisons, 106–8, 110–11, 113, 115, 123, 127 Debord, Guy, 77 Debray, Régis, 63, 149, 163, 310n12 de Certeau, Michel, 118–20, 125, 256 defecation, 76, 123 defence lawyers, 87–90, 95, 304n122 Deleuze, Gilles, 261–2, 325–6n48 de Man, Paul, 135, 154 democratic centralism, 117 Derrida, Jacques, 42–3, 45–6, 250, 255–6, 269–70, 322n6 Der Spiegel (magazine), 157 de Sade, Marquis, 74, 126 detention centres, 326–7n3 Deutsche Demokratische Republik (ddr). See East Germany Deutsches Zentralinstitut für soziale Fragen (German Central Institute for Social Questions), 65, 170 Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn), 169–70, 176, 178–9 D’Hoker, Elke, 310n11 Die Riese (The Trip – Vesper), 136 Dillmann, Gabi, 232 direct action, in student movement, 46 Direct Democracy, 245 Dirty Protest. See Blanketmen

350

discourses, 37–8; lover’s, 211–14 disruptions, 6, 26, 28, 42, 49, 91– 2, 154, 230, 286; corporeal, 107–10, 116; instrumental, 128, 168 dissensus, 165–6, 197 dissenters, 22–3; contemporary, 263–4; state violence toward, 60–1 Documenta 5, 245 documentary approach, 31–2 Donahue, William C., 158 Dornhaldenfriedhof cemetery, 176 doubt, 250–2 Draeger, Christoph, 227–9 drug use, 136, 143, 148, 161 Dürer, ich führe persönlich Baader+Meinhof durch die Dokumenta V (Beuys), 51, 210, 245–6 Dutschke, Rudi, 56, 150; attempted assassination of, 61, 151–2, 268–9; counterculture activities, 78; street named after, 268–70, 312–13n61, 324–5n42; and terrorism, 67 East Berlin, 268–70 Easter Attacks, 269 East Germany, 5, 147; political asylum in, 202; spies, 60–1; support for raf, 102 Eder, Liselotte, 169 effectiveness, of guerrilla actions. See under evaluation Egan, Susanna, 155 Eiermann, Egon, 141 Eight Student Nurses (Richter), 224 either/or ‘choice,’ 52, 177–8, 204, 239, 285 Elias, Norbert, 119–20 embodiment, 18 emergency laws, 56, 124, 168–9;

Index

in Europe and North America, 276–7; suspension of basic rights, 58–9, 264 emplacement, 9–19, 38, 46, 52, 159, 249, 275–81, 284–5; and absences, 252; and aesthetic communication, 49; in historical research, 328n36; linguistic dimensions of, 183; and performativity, 95; subjectivity and space, 114–15, 131, 261; and violence, 281. See also carceral emplacement enactment: use of term, 14, 289n22 Enlightenment thought, 20 Ensslin, Felix, 136, 210, 244, 248, 286 Ensslin, Gudrun: on armed struggle, 60; arrest, 174–5; and Baader’s prison escape, 66; brain of, 265; burial, 169–70, 176–7, 219; death at Stammheim prison, 4, 30, 168–9, 175, 217, 219–21; and Frankfurt department store arson, 63–4, 69, 157; gravesite, 177, 271; hiding underground, 64–5; incarceration, 108; influence over das info, 117; as model for LaBruce’s film, 233; as mother of Felix, 51, 210; relationship with Bernward Vesper, 136; in Richter’s work, 192–4; at Stammheim trial, 83, 89, 305n127 Entebbe. See Air France hijacking epistemology, 14–15, 35 Epstein, Barbara, 55 ethical concerns, in historiography, 35 ethnographic research, 328n36 ethnomethodology, 46 evaluation, 35; of effectiveness of guerrilla tactics, 48, 52–3, 124–

Index

351

5, 277–8, 284–6, 288–9n19; of guerrilla aesthetics, 55; of guerrilla violence, 52, 276, 284, 294n133 examined: use of term, 36 excitable speech, 44 exhibitions, 7; criticism of, 6; curatorial arrangements of October 18, 1977, 185–6. See also Regarding Terror explore: use of term, 35–6

Freud, Sigmund, 322–3n15 Freudian parapraxis, 190 Friedrichstraße, 268–9 “Friends, Throw Away the Gun” (Baumann interview), 157–8 Fritsch, Matthias, 43, 45–6 Funeral (Richter), 176–7, 185 fun guerrilla, 19, 67–9, 77–8, 276, 302n97 futurism, 19, 68 futurity, 43

Fabio, 240 Farocki, Harun, 299n33 fascism, 69–70, 75, 149–50, 250, 291n71. See also Nazi Germany fashion, 200, 205, 208, 242 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 169 fear, during German Autumn, 169– 70 fecal waste, 123–4, 126–9 Feldman, Allen, 122–4, 126–8, 130 Felman, Shoshana, 45 Ferzacca, Steve, 16 fiction, as source material, 34–5 figures, Barthesian, 205, 211–15, 249, 257, 323n17 films, on urban guerrillas, 205. See also Deutschland im Herbst finitude, 190–3 Fischer, Michael J., 313n69 fluxus, 68 force feedings, 100, 108, 115, 120 Foucault, Michel, 9, 11, 153, 193, 197–8, 294n133 Frankfurt, 70; department store arson, 63–5, 67–9, 157; squatter movement, 267–8 Frankfurt School, 20–7, 72–3, 293n119 freedom, 20–1, 77, 155–6 “freedom mobile,” 85–6, 304n119 free-market economics, 56

G., Eric (raf associate), 85–6 Gaelic language, 128 Garfinkel, Harold, 46 Gedächtniskirche (Berlin), 140–1 Geertz, Clifford, 10 gender, 230 genres, concept of, 183 gentrification, 266–7 German Autumn (1977): and Die Reise, 136; echoes of, 165–6, 264; events of, 4, 167–70, 184, 219; public feelings of shock, 276; story-telling about, 314n8. See also Stammheim deaths German Autumn in Minor Spaces, The (Ball and Mair), 84, 177, 251, 258, 259, 261–3, 262, 270, 270–2, 273, 323n19 German Expressionism, 19 Germany: reunification of, 5, 165, 184–6, 298n11. See also East Germany; West Germany Germer, Stefan, 315n26 gestures, 119–20, 211, 213 Gewalt (violence and power), 282 Gilcher-Hotley, Ingrid, 281–4 Godesburg Programme of 1959, 298n11 Goergens, Irene, 65 Goldfarb, Shirley, 74 Gordon, Avery, 257, 261, 279–80, 285, 322n3

352

Gradiva, 256 grammar of conduct, 7, 272 Grams, Wolfgang, 5 Gramsci, Antonio, 114, 314n91 Grashof, Manfred, 105–6, 113 gravesites, 177, 252, 272–4 Great Refusal, the, 23, 26 Green, Leo, 129 Groenewold, Kurt, 88 Gross, Jan, 109 gsg 9, 168, 219, 232 Guattari, Félix, 261–2, 325–6n48 guerrilla aesthetics, 5–6, 9, 50–2, 55, 133, 164, 275, 285–6 guerrilla identity, 82, 105–6, 115, 147, 150 guerrilla negativity, 6, 24, 28–9, 48–9, 251–4, 275–8, 283–4, 286 guerrilla subjectivity, 7–8, 48, 99, 115, 120, 132, 254 guerrilla tactics. See under evaluation guerrilla violence, 56–62, 66–7, 150, 283–4; evaluation of, 52, 276, 284, 294n133; and New Left, 52, 281–4; normative analysis of, 294n133; operations, 4–5, 52–3, 70–2, 102–4, 149, 168, 184, 301n65, 303n101, 304n121. See also arson; assassinations; bombings; hijackings; hostage-taking; kidnappings; specific operations Guevara, Che, 145, 149–50 guilt, 24 habit, 16–18 Hamburg, 70, 128, 175, 267–8 Hamburg-Eppendorf University Hospital, 109 Hand Grenade Law (1970), 59 Hanged (Richter), 175, 190 Happening, the, 68–9, 73–5 Harkema, Reginald, 242

Index

Hash Rebellion, 161 Häuserkampf (house wars), 267–8 Heart Lies Beneath, A (Cosgrove), 51, 210, 240–5, 241, 243 Hebb, Donald, 110 Hegelian dialectics, 73, 81 Heidelberg University, 4; Psychiatric Neurological Clinic, 80 Hell, Julia, 184–5, 191 Herold, Horst, 226 Herrhausen, Alfred, 5 Hesse, Herman: Steppenwolf, 69 heteronormativity, 238–9 heterotopia, 11 Highmore, Ben, 8, 17, 36, 256, 285, 289n27, 322n3, 326n2 hijackings, 52; Air France hijacking (Entebbe), 5, 149–50, 229, 312n52; Lufthansa hijacking (Mogadishu), 4, 168, 184, 219–20, 229, 232, 303n101 historiography, 31–7, 261 history, 29–37; distinction between historical narrative and fiction, 34–5; historical “facts,” 29–33, 296n144; historical markers, 295n141; ideological dimensions of, 35 Hockenos, Paul, 58, 125, 267–8 Hoff, Dierk, 85 Hoffmann, Roland, 222 Holm, Andrej, 265–7 horizontal movements, 33, 36 Horkheimer, Max, 20–2, 72 hostage-taking, 4, 52, 168, 184, 301n65 Howes, David, 8 Huber, Wolfgang, 80–1, 116 Huffman, Richard, 137, 206 humanism, 9; and redemption, 192–3 Humphrey, Hubert, 57 hunger strikes, 20, 29, 48–9, 53, 327–8n28; as extension of nega-

Index

tive subject, 115, 131–2; force feedings, 100, 108, 115, 120; as instrumental, 105–6, 122, 307n20; as mode of communication, 82, 101–2, 120, 130; by raf prisoners, 53, 100–1, 108, 120–1, 131–2, 299n33, 307n20; by spk, 80–1 Huyssen, Andreas, 252 identity, 72, 81; collective, 118, 134, 146; instability of, 230, 233, 239–40; remaking of, 115; settled, 95; overwriting of, 202– 3. See also guerrilla identity identity politics, 238 ideology, 160, 326n2 illegibility, 118–20, 129, 252–4, 279, 286; discomfort with, 275– 6; of guerrilla aesthetics, 51–2; of guerrilla enactments, 48 illness, 80–1, 115 illocutionary speech acts, 39–40 imagination, 16–17 inanimate objects, and emplacement, 12–14 incarcerated guerrillas, 29, 53; and accommodation, 55; aesthetics of, 101–2; coded communications, 128–9, 216; collective body, 111–14, 116; conditions of detention, 100–2, 106–16, 122– 30, 176; contact bans, 217; emplacement and aesthetic convolutions, 122–32; emplacement and sensorial reordering, 49, 55, 82, 93, 99–102, 106–16, 127, 131, 277; negative subjectivity, 53, 69, 72, 79, 95, 99– 102, 118, 121, 131–2. See also hunger strikes; isolation; raf prisoners inchoateness, 6, 52, 276 incitement: to arson, 67–9; to sui-

353

cide, 217; to terror, 106, 138, 162–3, 170, 267–8 incomprehensibility, 6, 28, 48, 53, 95, 171, 253, 276, 288–9n19, 293n119, 318–19n16 incongruently-sensical formations, 7, 121, 252, 254, 272, 276 indeterminate trajectories, 118, 249 indifference, 24 industrial capitalism. See capitalism Ingold, Tim, 10, 289n36, 290n47 injurious speech, 40–2 Institute of Contemporary Arts, 210 instrumentality: in artistic works, 223, 249, 275; effect of carceral emplacement on, 100–2; of guerrilla negativity, 275 (see also guerrilla negativity); of raf, 91– 2, 95, 97; and relationships with sympathizers, 102–6; of urban guerrilla objectives, 3, 6–7, 25, 54, 129–30 instrumental language, 44, 74, 79, 118–19 instrumental rationality, 6–7, 100, 129; in academic research, 277; counterculture struggle against, 74, 82, 97–8 interanimation, 16 interpellation, 18, 42–3, 146, 161–2, 256, 323–4n23 interrelationality, and emplacement, 10–13 irrationality, 68; of guerrilla movement, 48–9; in raf performativity, 97–9 Iser, Wolfgang, 28 isolation of prisoners, 62, 93, 101, 112, 115, 127, 131, 277; acoustic, 106–11, 277; physical, 106–8; social, 109–10, 115, 127

354

Israel, 91, 149 Jackson, Mark, 33–4, 294n132 Jameson, Frederic, 271 Job, 284 juxtaposition, 36, 294–5n140; of violence in media, 62 Kaiserslautern, 83 Kalekin-Fishman, Devorah, 110 Kant, Immanuel, 10 Karlsruhe, 86, 104 Kassel, 258 Kellner, Douglas, 21 ki. See Kommune I kidnappings, 4–5, 167–8, 217, 221–2, 235 King, Scott, 3, 206–8, 242 Kirberg, Rainer, 202–3 Klar, Christian, 317n78 Klein, Hans-Joachim, 149–50, 219 Kligerman, Eric, 189 Klimke, Martin, 46–7, 150, 283 Kluge, Alexander, 169 Kochstraße, 268–9, 312–13n61 Koenen, Gerd, 48, 56, 61–2, 67, 287n1, 299n33, 300n52 Kommune I (ki), 19, 78, 143–44, 160; and avant-garde, 69; communal living, 54, 143, 267; criticism of Baumann, 157; former sites of, 250–1, 271; fun guerrilla concept, 67–8, 77–8, 302n97; pudding assassination attempt, 57–8 konkret: Meinhof’s work at, 54, 58, 64–5, 170–1, 298n21; open letter to Meinhof in, 246; violent imagery in, 62 Kramer, Hilton, 187–8 Kraushaar, Wolfgang, 48, 61–2, 67, 150, 201–2, 203, 296n144, 299n33, 300n52, 318n9

Index

Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), 50, 199, 248 Kunzelmann, Dieter, 57, 78 Kurras, Karl-Heinz, 60 kw. See Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art labour, 70–1, 80, 144, 233, 238; specialization of, 161; of women, 232–3 LaBruce, Bruce, 51, 210, 233–9, 242 Lacan, Jacques, 212, 246, 319n26 LaCapra, Dominick, 31–2, 294n131 Langhans, Rainer, 68 Langston, Richard, 20, 69, 291n71 language: and emplacement, 13– 14; form and style, 31–2; minor language, 261–2; narrative order, 255; poststructuralist perspective on, 37–8; as representational, 44; and sensoriality, 27–8; and subjectivity, 38–45, 95, 254; and violence, 281–3. See also instrumental language; speech Latin America, 148–51, 162–3 Law, John, 14–16, 34, 36, 198, 294–5n140 Lebel, Jean-Jacques, 74, 77 Lee, Mia, 78 Lefebvre, Henri, 290n43 Lettrist International (li), 19–20 Lex Baader-Meinhof, 90 liberal humanism, 21, 37–8, 120; frameworks, 288–9n19, 294n133 liberal humanist subject, 13, 53, 96, 124, 254, 278 Liebert, Emily, 230 linearity, 14–15, 115, 264 Linke, Georg, 66, 170 literary texts, and negativity, 27–8

Index

Lloyd, Moya, 42 Lorenz, Peter, 4 Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, The (Böll), 178–9 love, 51, 199, 240, 248; choice between violence and, 155–6, 158, 161; romance genre, 239–42 Lover’s Discourse, A (Barthes), 51, 211–15 Low, Kelvin E.Y., 325n46 Lufthansa hijacking (Mogadishu). See under hijackings Lullaby (Adams), 51, 210, 215–23 Luxemburg, Rosa, 56 Lyotard, Jean-François, 295n141 Machiavelli: The Prince, 314n91 Mahler, Horst, 69, 85 Mailer, Norman, 311n33 manifestos, 161–2, 210, 314n91 Man Shot Down series (Richter), 175, 180, 182, 190 manuals, 99, 131–2, 138, 158–63 Mao Tse-Tung, 114, 208 Mara with Dingbats (Cosgrove), 241 Marcuse, Herbert, 20–7, 68, 72–3, 234, 302n79; “The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State,” 291– 2n78 Marighella, Carlos, 99, 131–2, 149, 160, 163 Marx, Karl, 10, 81, 114, 162, 281, 282 McCoy, Alfred, 110 meaning, 37, 55, 226; search for, 52, 96–7, 252–3, 275–6, 280, 284–6, 318–19n16 Meanwhile in a Large Central London Apartment the Telephone is Ringing... (King and Worley), 208, 209

355

media: counterculture, 74–5; and counter-insurgency, 178–9; critique of, 307n15; reporting on political protests, 58; satire of, 169–70; violent and sexualized imagery in, 62. See also konkret; press photographs Meinhof, Ulrike: arrest, 174; and Baader’s prison escape, 65–6, 170–1, 247, 268; body (anti)language, 98; brain of, 265; death at Stammheim prison, 30, 171–3, 219, 306n140; on Frankfurt department store arson, 64–5; gravesite, 271, 274; hiding underground, 245, 321n86; incarceration, 106–8; neurological problems, 265, 308n32; open letter from foster mother, 246–7; portraits of, 170–1; relationship with Baader and Ensslin, 305n140; in Richter’s work, 192–3; on speech and torture, 93–4; at Stammheim trial, 83, 88, 91, 93, 305–6n151, 306n153 – writing by: Bambule, 171, 268; in das info, 261; on isolation in “dead wing,” 106–7, 113, 115, 127; as journalist for konkret, 54, 58, 64–5, 170, 298n21; and performativity, 47– 8, 95–7; “political fiction,” 75; in Stammheim prison, 106–7, 305– 6n140 Meins, Holger: arrest of, 173–4, 183; as art student, 85; code of conduct for raf prisoners, 71, 301n70; death of, 104, 190, 220, 299n33; incarceration, 100; letter to Grashof, 105–6, 113 memorialization, 7, 51, 252, 323– 4n23; institutional, 325n45; and meaning, 270–4; public space as

356

site for, 262–3; renaming of streets, 268–70, 324–5n42 memory, 185–6, 218, 250–3, 256– 8, 272–4, 286; city streets as site of, 51, 250–1, 256–8, 263–70; and cultural practices, 33; and emplacement, 16–18; lieux de mémoire (memory places), 325n45; national, 325n46; psychoanalytic theory, 322–3n15; repression of, 181–2; transgenerational, 189, 323n16 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 10–11, 15–16, 18 mfe (multi-focal expansionism), 117–18 Militante Gruppe (mg), 264–6 militarization: of countercultural movements, 56–62, 101; of student and worker movements, 268–9; of urban guerrillas, 56– 62, 66–7, 150–1 mind: and emplacement, 9–19 Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla (Marighella), 99, 131, 160, 163 minor spaces, 261–3. See also German Autumn in Minor Spaces modernity: and self-sacrifice, 130– 1; technologies of, 181 Mogadishu. See under hijackings Mohnhaupt, Brigitte, 317n78 Mol, Annemarie, 13, 290n47 Möller, Irmgard, 220–1, 320n51 moma. See Museum of Modern Art Mona Meinhof (King), 210 Monkey Warfare (Harkema), 242 Montano, Linda, 233 monuments. See public monuments Moonen, Rob, 109 morality, of postwar activists, 300n52 Moro, Aldo, 265 Morrison, Toni, 250, 257, 280

Index

movement, 180, 211, 213, 316n31; and emplacement, 10– 13 Mr. Heyde (Richter), 196 multi-focal expansionism. See mfe multi-nodal subjectivity, 20, 29, 49, 101, 111–18, 120, 272, 277 Museum of Modern Art (moma), 186–8, 198, 203–4, 218 music: and counterculture, 140; and National Socialism, 146–7; references to urban guerrillas in, 205–6, 208 My Lai massacre, 145 National Socialists (Nazis): comparisons to, 75, 302n84; family photos of, 195; former, in postwar brd, 60, 301n65. See also Nazi Germany nato, 67, 143 Nazi Germany, 272; atrocities of Auschwitz, 24, 75, 82–3, 150, 189, 195–6; concentration camp photographs, 189, 192, 224; Crystal Night, 149; legacy of, 24, 70, 82, 143, 145–7, 171, 299n33, 301n65, 306n153; postwar silences about, 24, 56, 82, 145, 189, 195–6, 292n99; use of music, 146–7. See also National Socialists Nealon, Jeffrey, 43 Negative Dialectics (Adorno), 24 negative subjectivity, 6; of raf prisoners, 53, 69, 72, 79, 95, 99– 102, 118, 121 negativity, 19–29, 278, 293n119; in guerrilla communications, 113–14; politics of, 28–9; punk, 25–6; radical, 6, 161, 164, 283, 313n87 Negri, Antonio, 92, 265, 305n136 New Left, 20, 23, 26, 52; and

Index

counterculture aesthetics, 76–8; and guerrilla violence, 281–4; and violence in the media, 62 new materialism, 285 New Realism, 27, 113–14, 280 Newton, Isaac, 10 Ngai, Sianne, 28, 233, 244 Nixon, Richard, 61, 303n115 “no future,” 25–6 nomological principles, 255, 322n6 Nora, Pierre, 325n45 normativity, 37, 238–9, 280 Nurse and the Hijackers, The (Antin), 229–33, 231, 238 objective violence, 281–2, 284 obscenity, 78, 199, 223, 284 October 18, 1977 (Richter), 50; audiences, 186–8; contextualization of, 186–8; criticism of, 165, 177–8, 197, 199, 203–4; curatorial arrangements of, 185–6; emplacements, 179–94, 198; excluded paintings, 190; first exhibition in Krefeld, 165, 177, 180, 188, 199, 203; and German Autumn, 165–79, 197; interpretations of, 165–6, 177–94; legibility of, 186–8; at Museum of Modern Art (moma), 186–8, 198, 203–4, 218; as Orphic cycle, 185–6; repetition in, 180– 3; source photographs, 166, 170–3, 175–6, 179–86, 192, 197, 224; subject matter, 170–9, 320n60; title, 167, 170, 189 – works: Arrest series, 173–5, 182; Cell, 175–6; Confrontation series, 175, 182, 185, 194–5; Dead series, 171–3, 172–3, 180, 182, 185; Funeral, 176–7, 185; Hanged, 175, 190; Man Shot Down series, 175, 180, 182, 190;

357

Record Player, 175–6, 216, 227; Youth Portrait, 170–1, 185 Ohnesorg, Benno, 4, 60–1, 151–2 ontology, 14–15; of subjects, 46–7, 278 opec action (1975), 5, 102 “Opposites” (Clapton), 216–17 optimism, 244–5 Orpheus, myth of, 185–6, 191, 193, 316n42 Ossendorf Prison (Cologne), 106– 7, 127 pain, 24, 39, 41–2, 107, 277, 327n3 paintings, 178, 181, 188–9, 315n26. See also October 18, 1977 Palestine: guerrilla training camps, 149–51; Israeli policies toward, 91 Palestine Liberation Organization (plo), 66 Passmore, Leith, 47–8, 95–7 pastiche, 294–5n140–1 Pawla, Karl-Heinz, 76 performance studies, 46–7 performative coda, 205, 249, 318– 19n16 performative subjectivity, 215 performativity, 37–48, 53–4, 96, 277–9, 296n144, 297n171; and autobiography, 135, 153; guerrilla, 20, 53–4, 97–9; and social expectations, 230 perlocutionary speech acts, 39–40 perspective, 14–16 pflp. See Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Pflüger, Friedbert, 200, 202 phantasmagoria, 181–2, 197 phenomenology, 46–7, 96, 297n171 photographs, 325–6n48; aesthetics

358

of, 173; as documentation, 181; of raf, 69, 120–1, 255, 258; of urban guerrilla sites, 261–3, 270–1 (see also German Autumn in Minor Spaces). See also press photographs physical isolation, 106–8 pinboard approach, 294–5n140 place, 214–15; and emplacement, 9–19; porosity of, 10–11; things gathered in, 291n54 pleasure, 21–2 policing practices. See counterinsurgency political agency, 122 Ponto, Jürgen, 5, 167 popular culture: appropriation of guerrilla imagery, 205–10; trivia, 240; in United States, 147 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (pflp), 102, 149–50, 168, 220, 318n9 positivism, 302n79 posthumanism, 9 postmodernity, 295n141 poststructuralism, 137, 289n22, 293n119, 296n144; overview of, 37–8; and performativity, 46–8, 96, 276, 278; and postmodernity, 295n141 postwar generation, 56, 287n1, 297–8n9; cultural identity, 27; silence of, 24, 56, 82, 145, 189, 195–6, 292n99; and spectre of violence, 54–62, 66–7 power, 279–80; formalized, 54–55; and violence, 282, 327n21 Prada Meinhof, 3, 9, 206–8, 237, 242 Prada Meinhof (King and Worley), 207, 210 prefigurative politics, 54–5, 57 press photographs: of Dutschke,

Index

269; as a form, 180, 183–4, 186; of raf, 170–1, 173 Prikker, Jann Thorn, 316n31 Prinzing, Theodor, 88, 306n151, 306n153 prison authorities, 108, 123–4, 126–8 Proll, Astrid, 63, 107–8, 180, 242 Proll, Thorwald, 63–4, 69, 157 protests, 219–20, 267–9; effectiveness of words in, 56–62; against Vietnam War, 57–8, 143, 149, 260 prove: use of term, 35–6 Provisional Irish Republican Army (pira), 121–31 psychoanalytic theory, 322–3n15 public monuments, 7, 51, 252; in Berlin, 140–1; spectre of, 270–4 public space, 51, 271; as site for memorialization, 252, 262–3 punk negativity, 25–6 queering, 238–9 racialization, 56, 142, 311n32 radical chic, 200, 206–8, 237 radical constructivist approach, 31–2, 34 radical liberal frameworks, 288– 9n19 radical negativity, 6, 161, 164, 283, 313n87 raf: aims of, 25–6, 104–6, 121; arrests, 173–4; commodification of imagery, 206–8; communiqués, 5, 62–3, 69–70, 79, 297n2; complicity with, 197; cultural products based on, 178–9, 205–10, 215–46; “Das Konzept Stadtguerilla” (The Urban Guerilla Concept), 70; depoliticized, 194; disbandment of, 5;

Index

emergence of, 3–4; evaluation of successes or failures, 288–9n19; Frankfurt department store arson, 63–5, 67–9, 157; ideology, 160; and ki, 302n97; kidnappings, 4–5, 167–8; logo, 206, 258; May Offensive (1972), 70, 102–3; membership in other groups, 80, 116; negative subjectivity, 79; perceived as pop stars, 194–5; photographs related to, 224; popular culture references to, 205–6; press photographs of, 170–1, 173; referred to as Baader-Meinhof Gang, 4, 175, 187, 234; refusal of conventional speech, 53, 71–2, 79; remorse from, 197, 317n78; rocket launcher attack, 86–7, 167; second generation, 175; sympathizers, 102–6, 165; technical and creative capabilities, 85–7; texts as source materials, 32–3; trivia, 240, 242, 244–5; use of violence, 4–5, 52–3, 70–2, 102–4, 148, 168, 184, 301n65, 303n101, 304n121; as victims of state counter-insurgency, 202–3; wanted posters, 171. See also Regarding Terror raf prisoners: ambivalence toward sympathizers, 102–6; contact bans, 81–2, 101, 113, 131, 168– 9, 217, 221; das info (covert communications system), 82, 112–14, 116–17, 128, 216, 261; funerals and burials, 169–70, 176–7, 219; health of, 108; hunger strikes, 53, 100–1, 108, 120–1, 131–2, 299n33, 307n20; medical examinations, 71, 89, 108; refusal of speech, 45, 81, 90–5, 98–9; supposed communi-

359

cations system, 132, 219, 229, 320n51. See also negative subjectivity; Stammheim deaths; Stammheim trial Raid on Entebbe (1977), 229 Ramp, William, 324n36 Rancière, Jacques, 165–6 Raspberry Reich, The (LaBruce), 210, 233–9, 236, 242 Raspe, Jan-Carl: brain of, 265; burial, 176–7, 219; death at Stammheim prison, 4, 30, 168, 175, 217, 219–21; gravesite, 177, 271; incarceration, 108; at Stammheim trial, 83 rationality, 20–5, 238; counterculture opposition to, 77–8; within irrationality of guerilla movement, 48–9; and language, 8, 37– 8; and prefigurative politics, 54; technical rationality of industrial capitalism, 20–3, 73 rationalizing consensus, 48, 51, 124, 204, 253, 275, 286, 303n101 reconstruction, 257, 263 Record Player (Richter), 175–6, 216, 227 Red Army Faction. See raf Red Brigade, 265, 305n136 Red Decade, 3–6, 276, 287n1 redemption, 192–3, 284 Reemtsma, Jan, 48 refusal, 23; of conventional modes of communication, 6–7, 20, 23, 29, 45, 49, 53, 55, 71–2, 79, 81– 2, 90–5, 98–9; politics of, 28 refuse and rot, 98–9, 101, 128, 130 Regarding Terror: The RAF Exhibition, 286; contextualization of, 188, 200–4; critiques of, 199– 205, 210, 248–9; historical docu-

360

mentation in, 200–1; and process of falling in love, 210, 244, 248– 9; provisional title, 199; public opposition to, 50–1, 200–1; raf as loved object, 210–11, 223, 227; works in, 208–10, 304n119 reiteration, 96, 170, 180, 182, 249, 316n39 relationality: and emplacement, 10–13 representation, 28, 38, 296n144; and language, 44; prohibition of, 188–9 research: experimental, 109–10; methodologies, 251, 254, 285, 328n36; policing of, 265–6 Revolutionäre Zellen (rz – Revolutionary Cells), 3, 104–5, 116, 149, 219 Revolution in the Revolution? (Debray), 163 Richter, Gerhard, 165–98, 248; comments on works, 165, 194–8, 223, 320n60; paintings of Betty Richter, 191–3; practice of collection, 223–5; subject position, 177–8. See also Atlas; October 18, 1977 Rieck, Horst, 76 Riegl, Alois, 140–1 Riemack, Renate, 246–7, 321n86 riots, 267–8 Rivette, Jacques, 74 Roaming Hash Rebels, 143, 160–1 rocket launcher attack, 86–7, 167 rock music, 140, 143–5, 147 Rohwedder, Detlev Karsten, 5 romance genre, 239–41 Rote Armee Fraktion. See raf Rote Hilfe (rh – Red Aid), 103, 105–6, 176 Rote Zora (Red Zora), 104 Roth, Anne, 266 rz. See Revolutionäre Zellen

Index

Sand, Theodor, 86 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 103–4, 113, 115–16, 307n14 Sayer, Derek, 181, 189–90 Scharloth, Joachim, 46–7, 150, 283 Schiller, Margrit, 110, 113–14, 128, 145–6 Schily, Otto, 88 Schlem, Petra, 235 Schleyer, Hanns Martin, 4; biographical history, 301n65; kidnapping of, 167–8, 217, 221–2, 235; killing of, 169, 184, 219, 303n101 Schlöndorff, Volker, 169 Schmuecker, Ulrich, 155–6 scholarship: arborescent approach, 294–5n140; in autobiography, 134–5; pinboard approach, 294– 5n140; statist, 133; on urban guerrillas, 18, 33–4, 46–9, 51, 53, 204, 296n144 Schubert, Ingrid, 65, 219 Schwartz, David, 146 Scribner, Charity, 288–9n19 sds. See Sozialisticher Deutscher Studentenbund Sebald, W.G., 36, 82, 292n99, 294n132 self: knowable and transparent, 153–8; Romantic pre-technical, 21, 72, 293n119 self-annihilation, 29, 45, 79 self-censorship, 169–70 self-destruction, 20 self-preservation, 24 self-starvation, 62, 82, 122; death from, 190, 220, 299n33; effects of, 112–13, 115, 120. See also hunger strikes self-sufficient (documentary) approach, 293n121 Sennett, Richard, 259–60

Index

senses, 181–2; and emplacement, 8–9, 16–17, 253; and memorialization, 325n46 sensorial intervention, 127–8 sensoriality, 52, 131, 133, 278 sensorial reordering, 49, 55, 82, 93, 99–102, 106–16, 127, 131, 277, 326–7n3 sensory deprivation, 101, 131; experimental research on, 109–10 Seremetakis, C. Nadia, 256 sexual politics, 234, 237–9 Shahan, Cyrus, 25–6 Shah of Iran (Mohammed Reza Pahlevi), 4, 59–60, 151 Shields, Rob, 18, 290n43 shock, 276 Siegfried, Detlef, 56, 142, 297– 8n9, 311n31, 311n33 signifiers, 37, 296n144 silences, 263; acoustic isolation, 106–11; in historical documents, 255–6; of postwar generation (see postwar generation) Silverman, Kaja, 190–3 simulation, 303n101 singularities, 13–14 situationist ethos in counterculture, 77–8, 95 Situationist International (si), 19, 77–8, 282–3; evaluation of successes or failures, 288–9n19 Six Photos (Richter), 192 Slobodian, Quinn, 56, 62 Smith, Ashley, 326–7n3 Smith, Paul, 288n17 Smith, Sidonie, 135 Smith-Prei, Carrie, 26–8, 113–14, 280, 283, 312n48 social control, 21–2, 181–2 Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands – spd), 56, 70, 298n11; economic goals, 301n65

361

social exclusion, 142 social isolation, 109–10, 115 Socialist Patients’ Collective (Sozialistiches Patientenkollektiv – spk), 20, 79–81, 101, 115–18; emergence of, 3–4; membership in raf and other groups, 80, 116, 175 socialization, 57; resistance to, 93; theories of, 21 social movements: of 1960s, 26, 148–9, 240; efficacy of, 277; emergence of, 56; flow of concepts between, 308–9n43; identity politics, 238 social norms, 57 social production, process of, 18 social reality, 20–5, 38, 92–4 social relationships, 154–5 Söhnlein, Horst, 63, 69, 157 Soja, Edward W., 9–10, 290n40 Sontag, Susan, 257, 275, 316n39, 317n58, 323n16 Sophocles: Antigone, 169–70, 176–7 source materials, 29–37, 280; archival access, 255; categories of, 32–4 South American guerrilla movements, 148–51, 163 Sozialisticher Deutscher Studentenbund (sds), 56, 143–4, 150 spaces, 52, 211, 278, 290n43, 323–4n23; and emplacement, 9– 19; as sites of memory, 250–3, 271; social significance of, 325– 6n48 Spassgerilja. See fun guerrilla spatial geographies, 9–10 spd. See Social Democratic Party speech: conventional: refusals of, 29, 45, 49, 55, 71–2, 81–2; and state institutions, 81; in legal contexts, 38–40; limits of, 253–

362

4; as primary form of communication, 44; routine and mundane, 44; and theatre of cruelty, 79; utterances, 39–41, 182–3 “speechless emotion,” 165–6, 190, 197 spk. See Socialist Patients’ Collective Sponti anarchists, 103, 125, 139, 148 Spreen, Dierk, 202–3 Springer, Axel, 74–5, 302n84 Springer Publications, 57; Berlin location, 270; campaign against subculture, 143, 152; location of, 312–13n61; raf bomb attack on, 70; right-wing partisanship, 75; “Stop Dutschke Now” (Bild), 152, 269; violent images in, 62 Spur, 77–9 squatter movements, 267–8. See also Sponti Stammheim: conditions of detention, 98–9, 115, 176, 221, 315n22; isolation, 99, 305– 6n140; multipurpose room, 83, 94; smuggling, 120–1 Stammheim deaths, 189, 215–23, 265; photographic exhibits of, 215–18, 223; protests following, 219; as state murders, 30, 178, 217, 221–2, 234, 303n101; as suicides, 30, 84, 168, 175–6, 178, 217, 219–22, 305–6n140. See also October 18, 1977 Stammheim trial (raf defendants), 82–94, 246; and brd’s unsettled identity, 82–3; defence lawyers, 87–90, 95, 304n122; emplacement, 92; exclusion from proceedings, 89, 95; as political, 84, 89–92; refusal of speech, 90–5, 98–9; security measures, 83–5, 87, 304n122; surveillance of, 88–

Index

9, 304n126; use of physical-spatial tactics by, 98–9, 120 starvation. See hunger strikes; selfstarvation state murder. See under Stammheim deaths state power, 124–5, 264–8, 282 state security, 61, 113, 167, 261, 264–8, 276–7 Stewart, Kathleen, 17 “Stop Dutschke Now” (Bild), 152, 269 Storr, Robert, 187–8, 190, 216–17, 224, 226, 314–15n18 streets: renaming of, 268–70, 312– 13n61, 324–5n42; as site of memory, 51, 250–1, 256–8, 263– 70; urban guerrilla interventions, 74–5 Ströbele, Hans-Christian, 88 structuralism, 37 structural violence, 282 student movement, 7, 63; as bourgeois, 70; countercultural practices, 78; direct action by, 46; political consciousness in, 143–4; radicalization of, 56–62, 66–7, 287n1 Stuttgart: burial of raf prisoners, 169–70, 176; gravesites, 177, 271; photographs of urban guerrilla sites, 258; regional parliament, 220; trial of raf prisoners (see Stammheim trial) Stuttgarter Platz, Berlin, 250–1 Stuttgart-Stammheim prison. See Stammheim style, 175, 206–8 subject, rational autonomous: challenges to, 20, 37–8, 42–4, 275; and emplacement, 13, 131; in liberal theory, 37–8, 120; onedimensional, 72–3 subjective violence, 280–1, 284–5

Index

subjectivity: corporeal choreographies of, 253–4; and cultural image repertoire, 205; and language, 38–46, 95–6, 254; liberal, 7, 24, 47–8, 289n22, 295n141 (see also liberal humanist subject); and manifestos, 162; and memory, 272; and speech, 81. See also bourgeois subjectivity; guerrilla subjectivity; multi-nodal subjectivity; negative subjectivity subjects: administered consciousness, 20–7; attachments, 249; authorship of action, 38, 289n22; construction of self, 152, 271, 277; and emplacement, 18; identification, 263; and linear perspective, 15; ontology of, 46–7, 278; poststructuralist perspective on, 37–8, 47; self-reflexivity, 107 subordinated white ethnicity, 311n32 Subversive Aktion, 78 suicide: of raf prisoners (see under Stammheim deaths); of Walter Benjamin, 272 surrealism, 19, 68 surveillance, 88–9, 101, 113, 131, 169, 222, 264–6, 304–5n126 Syria: guerrilla training camps in, 149–50 Tarde, Gabriel, 227–9 Taussig, Michael, 272–3 temporality, 43, 252, 285, 324n28; and emplacement, 11 Terranova, Tiziana, 227–9 terrorism, 3, 67; raf charges, 90; redefining, 91 Terror or Love? (Baumann), 138– 9. See also Wie alles Anfing Teufel, Fritz, 19, 68, 77–8 textuality, 37

363

Theatre of Cruelty (Artaud), 79, 303n101 theatre of the absurd, 68 There’s One in Every Crowd (Clapton), 216–18 Theweleit, Klaus, 60 Third, Amanda, 265 Third Reich. See Nazi Germany Third World, 150–1; advocacy for, 62; guerillas, 67. See also South America Till, Karen E., 325n44 tire slashing, 157 topics: concept of, 214–15 totalitarianism, 21, 312n52 training camps, 66, 149–50 transgenerational memory, 189, 323n16 transgression, 74, 126 trials: comedic dismemberment in, 76–7; for incitement to arson, 67–9; for obscenity, 78; social reality and truth, 93–4. See also Stammheim trial Trikont Verlag, 138–9 triviality, 26, 133, 240, 242, 244–5 truth, 30, 32, 134, 181, 322n6 Tupamaros West Berlin (tw), 3–4, 76, 151. See also 2nd of June Movement Turner, Victor, 46–7 tw. See Tupamaros West Berlin Überbau (superstructure), 187, 201 Überfahrt (Crossing – Kirberg), 202–3 Uncle Rudi (Richter), 195–7 United States: army bases, 143; Central Intelligence Agency (cia), 109; exhibitions of October 18, 1977, 186–8, 194; popular culture, 147; revolutionary movements, 259–60. See also

364

Museum of Modern Art; Vietnam War Urbach, Peter, 61 urban environments: as site for guerrilla warfare, 260 urban guerrillas: aestheticization and glamourization of, 3, 52, 199–200, 205–10, 237, 264; boundaries between groups, 116–17; emergence of, 3–4, 148– 9; emplacement, 18 (see also emplacement); ideology, 160; irrationality, 48–9, 97–9; materiality, 140–52; militarization and use of violence, 56–62, 66–7, 150; move underground, 19, 54– 5, 64–7, 136–7, 277; naming and renaming of cells, 160–1; performativity, 20, 53–4, 97–9, 277–8; resurgence in 2000s, 318n9; specialization of labour, 161; training, 66, 149–50. See also guerrilla identity; guerrilla negativity; incarcerated guerrillas; raf; specific groups urban guerrilla enactments: as aesthetic mode of action, 6–9; comedic dismemberment, 75–7; illegible characteristics of, 48; operations, 4–5; street interventions, 74–5; as unspeakable, 152; victims of, 28, 200 Uruguay, 151 Usselmann, Rainer, 186–8, 193–4, 201 Utopathie, 115 utterances, 39–41, 182–3 values, 7, 19, 31, 37–8, 121, 156, 163, 278, 293n119; of New Left, 283–4 Verfassungsschutz informants, 61 Vesper, Bernward, 136

Index

Vietnam War, 56–7; protests against, 57–8, 143, 149, 260; as terrorism, 90–1 violence: choice between love and, 155–6, 161; community of, 327– 8n28; and construction of self, 277, 326–7n3; in families, 148, 312n48; of force-feeding, 100, 115; institutional, in prisons, 124, 126–7; against Jewish community, 149; and law, 284; in media imagery, 62; modes of, 280–1; objective, 281–2, 284; in ordinary life, 163–4; and outcomes, 284; postwar spectre of, 54–62, 66–7; and power, 282, 327n21; riots, 267–8; search for meaning in, 52, 284–5; state, 60–1 (see also incarcerated guerrillas; state murder); structural, 282; subjective, 280–1, 284–5; symbolic, 281–2. See also guerrilla violence von Drenkmann, Günter, 5, 104 von Moltke, Johannes, 184–5, 191 von Rauch, Georg, 76, 157 Vostell, Wolf, 68–9 Ward, Simon, 140–1 Warner, Chantelle, 134, 136 Warnke, Martin, 201–2 websites, 206 Weimar constitution, 59 Weisbecker, Thomas, 76 West Berlin: as Cold War site, 58; counterculture in, 140–1, 151 Western integration, 67–8, 298n11 West Germany: economic and political conditions, 56–62, 67–8, 82–3, 124–5, 298n11; state murder, 30, 217, 221–2, 234, 303n101; state power, 124–5, 264–8; state security, 61, 113,

Index

167, 261, 264–8, 276–7; unsettled identity, 82–3. See also counter-insurgency; Criminal Code; emergency laws White, Hayden, 35, 294n131 Wie alles Anfing / How It All Began (Baumann), 49–50, 133– 64; as choreography of urban guerrilla posture, 133, 147, 159, 164; as disavowing violence, 138, 158–9; as guerrilla instructional manual, 138, 158–63; as polyphonic text, 135–8, 153–8, 162–4; primacy of materiality, 140–52; as self-production, 153– 8; state suppression of, 137–9, 163 Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle), 59 Wolfman, the, 322–3n15 women: emotional labour of, 232–3

365

words: effectiveness in counterculture protest, 56–62; and power relations, 90–1 working-class experience, 144–5; and violence, 147–8; youth, 57 World War II, 140. See also Nazi Germany Worley, Matt, 3, 206–8, 242 writing: content and style, 31–2 Yanoshevsky, Galia, 162 youth movement, radicalization of, 56–62 Youth Portrait (Richter), 170–1, 185 Yuill, Chris, 122–4, 126, 129–31 Zionism, 149, 312n52 Žižek, Slavoj, 52, 55, 280–2, 284– 5, 311n46 Zur Vorstellung des Terrors. See Regarding Terror