German cultural responses to the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion)

This work aims to assess the content and impact of the 'terrorist' in German cultural forms, more specifically to its reception in the German media and academic literature. In mapping the ideological discourses of reception, the main area of focus will be examining how cultural productions help conceptualise the difficult issues which 'terrorism' raises, and how they are intended and used to make sense of, and 'come to terms', with political violence. There are three main questions to be addressed. Firstly, how these cultural productions have been used in order to conceptualise the phenomenon of the Rote Armee Fraktion ('Red Army Faction', or RAF) in the Federal Republic of Germany. This will be indicated by the way the productions were received. The second question is that of attempting to discern a pattern of reception, developments and changes over time. The third main question this work raises is, from the above analysis of cultural productions, which discourses of 'terrorism' became predominant. There are three specific reasons for doing this study. Firstly, there has been no systematic study on this subject either in Britain or Germany. Two related works on the subject have been published. One is a journal article about 'terrorism' in the 'New German Cinema'. This is limited in that it tackles only one film in depth - Margarethe von Trotta's Die bleierm Zeit - and as a journal article adopts a specific theoretical focus, in this instance examining elements of these films from a feminist perspective