Schreiben im Terrordrom. Gewaltcodierung, kulturelle Erinnerung und das Bedingungsverhältnis zwischen Literatur und RAF-Terrorismus

This monograph focuses on the remarkable juxtaposition of political violence on West Germany's streets and in art/literature in the 1970s. The body links terror and the arts and functions as an analytical tool to assess the multiple discourses in the realm of RAF terrorism and the state's counter-terrorist measures. German culture of the 1970s was drawn to issues of corporeality, and writers, filmmakers, painters and performers attempted to cash in on this fashionable mode of communication in their artwork. Speaking through or via the body, as Elaine Scarry argues in her study The Body in Pain (1985), favours authenticity over political utopianism - one of the most significant paradigm shifts after the disillusionment of 1968 sank in. Cultural memory of German left-wing terrorism is also conveyed via corporeal processes and proved to be durable, and seems to enable easy access to the phenomenon of terrorism. In the book, Berendse investigates the various uses of body images by terrorists, for example while imprisoned in Stammheim but also in literary texts which tried to make sense of the so-called Red Decade, i.e. by Erich Fried, Ernst Meister, Elfried Jelinek, Friedrich Christian Delius, Bernward Vesper and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann. Chapters on more recent literature, the pop phenomenon 'Prader-Meinhof' and cinematic imageries in the 2000s follow. One chapter is devoted to the British perception of the terrorism phenomenon in the 1970s, Jillian Becker's book Hitler's Children (1977). Becker's publication not only tries to fuse both violent pasts, at the same time it outlines corporeal patterns of Baader-Meinhof terrorism which have been adapted by the artistic representations in decades to follow