Baader-Meinhof Returns: History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism

This volume is dedicated to the study of artistic and historical documents that recall German left-wing terrorism in the 1970s. It is intended to contribute to a better understanding of this violent epoch in Germany’s recent past and the many ways it is remembered.
The cultural memory of the RAF past is a useful device to disentangle the complex relationship between terror and the arts. This bond has become a particularly pressing matter in an era of a new, so-called global terrorism when the culture industry is obviously fascinated with terror.
Fourteen scholars of visual cultures and contemporary literature offer in-depth investigations into the artistic process of engaging with West Germany’s era of political violence in the 1970s. The assessments are framed by two essays from historians: one looks back at the previously ignored anti-Semitic context of 1970s terrorism, the other offers a thought-provoking epilogue on the extension of the so-called Stammheim syndrome to the debate on the treatment of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay. The contributions on cultural memory argue that any future memory of German left-wing terrorism will need to acknowledge the inseparable bond between terror and the artistic response it produces.

Gerrit-Jan Berendse is Professor of Modern European Literature and Head of the Department of German at Cardiff University. Research interests in contemporary German poetry, and in the relationship between aesthetics and terrorism. Publications include: with Mark Williams, eds., Terror and Text. Representing Political Violence in Literature and the Visual Arts (2002) and Schreiben im Terrordrom. Gewaltcodierung, kulturelle Erinnerung und das Bedingungsverhältnis zwischen Literatur und RAF-Terrorismus (2005).
Ingo Cornils is Senior Lecturer in German and Head of the Department of German, Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Leeds. He has published widely on the history and literary representation of the German Student Movement, on German Science Fiction, and on Hermann Hesse. Recent publications: with Osman Durrani (eds.), Hermann Hesse Today / Hermann Hesse Heute (2005), with Frank Finlay (eds.), (Un-)erfüllte Wirklichkeit. Neue Studien zu Uwe Timms Werk (2006), (ed.), Utopie, Fantasy und Science Fiction in Deutschland, special edition of literatur für leser 29 (2006) 4 and ’Literary Reflections on ’68’, in: Stuart Taberner (ed.), Contemporary German Fiction. Writing in the Berlin Republic (2007).