Ghosts of the RAF

Once you've looked at Emmy/Anwyn/a_'s poetry in Overland, click through to Andrew McCann's article on the "literary afterlife" of the Red Army Faction. Or "Militancy and Melancholia," as he titles it.

Put together before the release of Baader Meinhof Complex, the article focuses instead on a couple of RAF books.

It opens, though, with the image of Gerhard Richter's October 18, 1977 series of RAF portraits hanging in New York's MoMA, mere months after the 9/11 attacks.

Richter’s sequence was finished in the late 1980s, and sold to MoMA in 1995. At that point, it might have seemed as if the moment of its relevance had passed. Today, the sequence is merely the most prominent manifestation of a recent artistic infatuation with the political subcultures that developed in the wake of 1968. In Germany, the contemporary fascination with the Red Army Faction has led to a flood of films, artworks and biographies. In an Anglophone context, the same trend is evident in relation to the American urban guerrilla group, the Weather Underground. And, of course, the academy is never far behind the market: academic work on these subcultures and their ambivalent afterlife also seems to be burgeoning.

The timing is hardly coincidental. With the West paralysed by a fear of terrorism that is also driving its military adventurism, the spectres of the 1960s and 1970s appear as uncanny projections of political disquiet that doesn’t quite know how to articulate itself. Hence the utterly confused and extremely variable forms of affect that attach to these images of left-wing militancy: from the ambivalently celebratory, James Dean-like portrait of Andreas Baader in Christopher Roth’s 2001 film Baader, to the often shamed, somewhat abject responses of academics eager to rethink their youthful identifications in the wake of more recent events. At both poles, the earlier radical subcultures appear as avatars of defeat and error. In them, we see the disaster of an ideology that didn’t have the rigour or the patience or the tactical know-how to actualise itself, and became irrationally violent as a result. As Emily Apter puts it, ‘a revolutionary stance of ethical militance’ was thus ‘compromised by the impetus towards militarisation’.