Another New Illustrated History: The visual turns in the memory of West German terrorism

Terrorism in general has long been recognized as a medial event. In the context of the West German terrorist group the Red Army Faction (RAF), there has been a broad recognition that the group was rather photogenic, with the visual component of 1970s terrorism in West Germany only receiving the scholarly attention it deserves in recent years. Despite the methodological shift in the humanities known as the ‘visual turn’ only now coming to the history of the RAF, its historiography has always turned on visual culture. This paper track these \u27visual turns\u27 in the debate surrounding the RAF and West German terrorism from Gerhard Richter’s 1988 painted mourning to film director Uli Edel\u27s 2008 attempt to produce an \u27illustrated history\u27 of the victims