Terrorism as Third Front: The Radicalization of the New Left in Italy and West Germany

Which factors were responsible for the radicalization of the 1968 protest movement? Why did Germans and Italians develop such a fascination with the notion of guerilla warfare? And why were the terrorist organizations that developed there so long-lived? The reasons are partly to be found in unresolved problems of postfascist societies. New Left activists criticized the lack of domestic democracy and idealized the “anti-imperialist” fighters in the global south. But as this chapter shows, radicalization also developed through transnational interaction in the European public spheres, specifically through a mixture of solidarity and rivalry between the Red Army Faction and the Red Brigades. The history of German and Italian left-wing terrorisms was, therefore, closely connected by multiple symbolic ties from the first shootings to the final showdown of the kidnapping and murder of Hanns-Martin Schleyer during the German Autumn of 1977 and of Aldo Moro just a few months later.

The Politics of Art and Censorship

Chapter 5 traces how art deemed outside of the state’s civilizing discourse is met with censorship. It expands the definition of censorship beyond explicit bans and suppressions of artworks by the state, as such bans have become technically speaking difficult to enforce and somewhat unnecessary. Instead, it highlights processes of (partial) silencing, including incentives for self-censorship and delegitimization as well as modes of foreclosure that authoritatively frame the production and reception of art. At the center of the chapter are the attempts to censor the exhibitions Regarding Terror, thematizing media perceptions of the Red Army Faction (Berlin, 2005), and Freekick (Istanbul, 2005), mainly featuring works on the “Kurdish question” and other instances of state violence. Under the shadow of the “global war on terror” and each country’s historical challenges with “security politics,” critics of both exhibitions construed arts and politics as incommensurable. Outlining how freedom of expression is circumscribed by official memory regimes in Turkey and Germany, the chapter analyzes different modes of censorship and the variety of actors engaged in it. It highlights that silencing efforts use the argument of the autonomy of art not to shield art from political intervention but to suppress political expression through the arts.

Proliferating Angst

This chapter examines proliferating fears in the wake of the student movement and during the 1970s. This period saw the establishment of an expressive emotional culture within West German culture at large. The proliferation of fears was therefore not simply a reaction to the onset of the economic crisis in 1973 but rather resulted from broader sociocultural changes. The open and public expression of emotions increasingly appeared as an indication of a healthy and authentic personality, partly as a result of the considerable expansion of psychotherapy and the emergence of a “therapeutic society.” Fear also no longer appeared as a predominantly negative emotion but rather as a reflection of a “new subjectivity.” The new expressive emotional culture was practiced and enacted especially within a left-alternative milieu. But it eventually shaped mainstream society as well. The chapter also analyzes the emotionalization of public life with respect to the public reaction to the TV series Holocaust in 1979. This allowed large segments of German society for the first time to express publicly their empathy with the victims of Nazism. Finally, the chapter focuses on the escalation of political fears in response to the left-wing terrorism of the Red Army Faction. The dialectics of political fears reached its apex in the late 1970s.

"Imprecision, uncertainty, transience, incompleteness": Gerhard Richter’s "October 18, 1977" and Don DeLillo’s "Baader-Meinhof"

<p>This article explores the relationship between Gerhard Richter’s <em>October 18, 1977 </em>and Don DeLillo’s short story “Baader-Meinhof”. Richter’s depiction of the deaths of members of the Red Army Faction draws from original photographic sources. Richter blurs these images thereby questioning aspects of obfuscation and the paradoxical clarity of incompleteness. DeLillo’s story is centred on a discussion about the paintings which quickly transforms into a narrative of coercion and stalking. This paper considers how visual art can be represented in fiction finding parallels between Richter’s and DeLillo’s use of repetition, haziness and uncertainty to problematise the act of viewing.</p>