After the Red Army Faction: Gender, Culture, and Militancy
Charity Scribner

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/after-the-red-army-faction/9780231168649

German Studies discount with promotional code SCRAFT

Masterminded by women, the Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorised
West Germany from the 1970s to the 1990s, and afterimages of
its leaders persist in the works of pivotal artists and
writers, including Gerhard Richter, Elfriede Jelinek, and
Slavoj ?i?ek. Why were women so prominent in the RAF?
What does the continuing cultural response to the German
armed struggle tell us about the representation of
violence, power, and gender today? Charity Scribner engages
critical theory to address these questions and analyse
signal works that point beyond militancy and terrorism.
These works of art and literature expose the failures of
the German Far Left and register the radical potential that
RAF women actually forfeited.

As Scribner demonstrates, the most compelling examples of
postmilitant culture do more than repudiate militancy; they
investigate its possibility, particularly in the realm of
sexual politics. Scribner analyses as-yet untranslated
essays by Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas, as well as
novels by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Judith Kuckart. She
also examines Johann Kresnik's Tanztheaterstück Ulrike
Meinhof and the blockbuster art exhibition Regarding Terror
at the Berlin Kunst-Werke. Scribner gives special focus to
German cinema, offering incisive interpretations of films
by Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, and Fatih
Akin, and discusses the international box-office success of
The Baader-Meinhof Complex. These readings reveal dynamic
junctures in national and sexual identities, the
disciplining of the militant body, and the relationship
between mass media and the arts.

Charity Scribner
Associate Professor
Department of Comparative Literature
The Graduate Center
City University of New York

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