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Masterminded by women, the Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorized West Germany from the 1970s to the 1990s. Afterimages of its leaders persist in the works of pivotal artists and writers, including Gerhard Richter, Elfriede Jelinek, and Slavoj Žižek. 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? Engaging critical theory, Charity Scribner addresses these questions and analyzes signal works that point beyond militancy and terrorism. This literature and art discloses the failures of the Far Left and registers the radical potential that RAF women actually forfeited.After the Red Army Faction maps out a cultural history of militancy and introduces "postmilitancy" as a new critical term. As Scribner demonstrates, the most compelling examples of postmilitant culture don't just repudiate militancy: these works investigate its horizons of possibility, particularly on the front of sexual politics. Objects of analysis include as-yet untranslated essays by Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas, as well as novels by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Judith Kuckart, Johann Kresnik's Tanztheaterstück Ulrike Meinhof, and the blockbuster exhibition Regarding Terror at the Berlin Kunst-Werke. Scribner focuses on German cinema, offering incisive interpretations of films by Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, and Fatih Akin, as well as the international box-office success The Baader-Meinhof Complex. These readings disclose dynamic junctures among several fields of inquiry: national and sexual identity, the disciplining of the militant body, and the relationship between mass media and the arts. Tom McDonough, Binghamton University, State University of New York, editor of The Situationists and the City:Poised between an increasingly nostalgic tendency to romanticize the violent struggles of 1970s militants and our own deeply troubled response to the brutality of contemporary fundamentalisms, After the Red Army Faction provides us with an invaluable reflection on the complexities of past leftist terrorism and its continuing ramifications. With a keen eye for the ambiguities and blind spots of ideological extremism, Scribner examines German postmilitant culture through literature, film, dance, and the visual arts. Shunning easy cliché and superficial spectacle, she reminds us of the intellectual and human costs of the German armed struggle and of the ways gender and sexuality inflected its attitudes and representation in the media. A brilliant piece of cultural history. Belinda Davis, Rutgers University, University, editor of Changing the World, Changing Oneself: Political Protest and Collective Identities in West Germany and the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s:How can 'postmilitancy' offer clues to understanding West Germany's RAF and its afterlives, all the more after 9/11? How might it suggest new directions for resistance when everyday life remains saturated with violence? Charity Scribner provides searching and compelling answers in this study that reaches across disciplines. Hans Kundnani, editorial director at the European Council on Foreign Relations, author of Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany's 1968 Generation and the Holocaust:Charity Scribner's After the Red Army Faction will be
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