Pre-Visions of Terror/After-Images of Love. Gudrun Ensslin, Bernward Vesper and the Roots of West German Terrorism

This paper examines the pre-life of West German terrorism through the recently published correspondence between Bernward Vesper and Gudrun Ensslin, Notstandsgesetze von Deiner Hand (2009). I claim that as historical and literary documents, these texts offer a unique insight into the relationship between art and the historiography of West German terrorism before its climax in the 1970s. This historiography is heading backwards into the future, while surveying the destruction and barbarism of the past, while the personal and public spheres collide. Using the concept of the after-image, the essay analyzes the narrative residue of that collision. The correspondence provides insight into the failed romance set against the backdrop of the nascent terrorist group, the RAF. The argument is that there is a strong Romantic impulse in Vesper’s work and that the letters take part in the broader Benjaminian gesture of the 1960s, heading backwards into the future and while surveying the destruction and barbarism of the past. It is in this very moment that their representations expose the roots terrorism in the tensions between theory and practice, intellectual and physical protest, personal and public history, and between the generations. Vesper was himself the son of unrepentant Nazi poet, Will Vesper, and as such embodied the deepest fears of his own generation, namely: that not only are ‘the murderers among us,’ but they are our parents