Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction

Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction
Author: L. Passmore
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2011-11-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0230370772

With a communicative approach to the phenomenon of terrorism and new archival sources, the book documents Meinhof's journalism and terrorism (1959-1976) and challenges many of the established narratives that have calcified around the story of Meinhof and the history of Germany's most infamous terrorist group.

Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction

Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction
Author: L. Passmore
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2011-11-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0230370772

With a communicative approach to the phenomenon of terrorism and new archival sources, the book documents Meinhof's journalism and terrorism (1959-1976) and challenges many of the established narratives that have calcified around the story of Meinhof and the history of Germany's most infamous terrorist group.

Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism

Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism
Author: Sarah Colvin
Publisher: Camden House
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2009
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1571134158

In 1970 Ulrike Meinhof abandoned a career as a political journalist to join the Red Army Faction. In an effort to understand how terrorism takes root, the author seeks a dispassionate view of Meinhof and a period when West Germany was declaring its own 'war on terror'. Ulrike Meinhof always remained a writer, and this book focuses on the role of language in her development and that of the RAF.

Everybody Talks About the Weather . . . We Don't

Everybody Talks About the Weather . . . We Don't
Author: Ulrike Meinhof
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2011-01-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 160980046X

No other figure embodies revolutionary politics and radical chic quite like Ulrike Meinhof, who formed, with Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, the Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader–Meinhof Gang, notorious for its bombings and kidnappings of the wealthy in the 1970s. But in the years leading up to her leap into the fray, Meinhof was known throughout Europe as a respected journalist, who informed and entertained her loyal readers with monthly magazine columns. What impels someone to abandon middle-class privilege for the sake of revolution? In the 1960s, Meinhof began to see the world in increasingly stark terms: the United States was emerging as an unstoppable superpower, massacring a tiny country overseas despite increasingly popular dissent at home; and Germany appeared to be run by former Nazis. Never before translated into English, Meinhof's writings show a woman increasingly engaged in the major political events and social currents of her time. In her introduction, Karin Bauer tells Meinhof's mesmerizing life story and her political coming-of-age; Nobel Prize–winning author Elfriede Jelinek provides a thoughtful reflection on Meinhof's tragic failure to be heard; and Meinhof ’s daughter—a relentless critic of her mother and of the Left—contributes an afterword that shows how Meinhof's ghost still haunts us today.

Hitler?s Children

Hitler?s Children
Author: Jillian Becker
Publisher: Author House
Total Pages: 427
Release: 2014-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1491844388

First published in 1977 in the US and Britain to universal critical acclaim, Hitler's Children quickly became a world-wide best seller, translated into many other languages, including Japanese. It tells the story of the West German terrorists who emerged out of the 'New Left' student protest movement of the late 1960s. With bombs and bullets they started killing in the name of 'peace'. Almost all of them came from prosperous, educated families. They were 'Hitler's children' not only in that they had been born in or immediately after the Nazi period - some of their parents having been members of the Nazi party - but also because they were as fiercely against individual freedom as the Nazis were. Their declared ideology was Communism. They were beneficiaries of both American aid and the West German economic miracle. Despising their immeasurable gifts of prosperity and freedom, they 'identified' themselves with Third World victims of wars, poverty and oppression, whose plight they blamed on 'Western imperialism'. In reality, their terrorist activity was for no better cause than self-expression. Their dreams of leading a revolution were ended when one after another of them died in shoot-outs with the police, or was blown up with his own bomb, or was arrested, tried, and condemned to long terms of imprisonment. All four leaders of the Red Army Faction (dubbed 'the Baader-Meinhof gang' by journalists) committed suicide in prison.

Terrorist Propaganda

Terrorist Propaganda
Author: Joanne Wright
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 291
Release: 1991-06-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1349117145

Examining the propaganda of two European terrorist groups, the Red Army Faction and the Provisional IRA, this book aims to demonstrate how terrorists exploit and manipulate societies' sensitivities, media channels and government responses.

After the Red Army Faction

After the Red Army Faction
Author: Charity Scribner
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2014-12-16
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0231538294

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 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? 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.

Red Army Faction, A Documentary History

Red Army Faction, A Documentary History
Author: J. Smith
Publisher: PM Press
Total Pages: 789
Release: 2013-07-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1604868937

The long-awaited Volume 2 of the first-ever English-language study of the Red Army Faction—West Germany’s most notorious urban guerillas—covers the period immediately following the organization’s near-total decimation in 1977. This work includes the details of the guerilla’s operations, and its communiqués and texts, from 1978 up until the 1984 offensive. This was a period of regrouping and reorientation for the RAF, with its previous focus on freeing its prisoners replaced by an anti-NATO orientation. This was in response to the emergence of a new radical youth movement in the Federal Republic, the Autonomen, and an attempt to renew its ties to the radical left. The possibilities and perils of an armed underground organization relating to the broader movement are examined, and the RAF’s approach is contrasted to the more fluid and flexible practice of the Revolutionary Cells. At the same time, the history of the 2nd of June Movement (2JM), an eclectic guerilla group with its roots in West Berlin, is also evaluated, especially in light of the split that led to some 2JM members officially disbanding the organization and rallying to the RAF. Finally, the RAF’s relationship to the East German Stasi is examined, as is the abortive attempt by West Germany’s liberal intelligentsia to defuse the armed struggle during Gerhard Baum’s tenure as Minister of the Interior. Dancing with Imperialism will be required reading for students of the First World guerilla, those with interest in the history of European protest movements, and all who wish to understand the challenges of revolutionary struggle.

Red Army Faction, A Documentary History

Red Army Faction, A Documentary History
Author: J. Smith
Publisher: PM Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2009-02-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1604861797

The first in a two-volume series, this is by far the most in-depth political history of the Red Army Faction ever made available in English. Projectiles for the People starts its story in the days following World War II, showing how American imperialism worked hand in glove with the old pro-Nazi ruling class, shaping West Germany into an authoritarian anti-communist bulwark and launching pad for its aggression against Third World nations. The volume also recounts the opposition that emerged from intellectuals, communists, independent leftists, and then—explosively—the radical student movement and countercultural revolt of the 1960s. It was from this revolt that the Red Army Faction emerged, an underground organization devoted to carrying out armed attacks within the Federal Republic of Germany, in the view of establishing a tradition of illegal, guerilla resistance to imperialism and state repression. Through its bombs and manifestos the RAF confronted the state with opposition at a level many activists today might find difficult to imagine. For the first time ever in English, this volume presents all of the manifestos and communiqués issued by the RAF between 1970 and 1977, from Andreas Baader’s prison break, through the 1972 May Offensive and the 1975 hostage-taking in Stockholm, to the desperate, and tragic, events of the “German Autumn” of 1977. The RAF’s three main manifestos—The Urban Guerilla Concept, Serve the People, and Black September—are included, as are important interviews with Spiegel and le Monde Diplomatique, and a number of communiqués and court statements explaining their actions. Providing the background information that readers will require to understand the context in which these events occurred, separate thematic sections deal with the 1976 murder of Ulrike Meinhof in prison, the 1977 Stammheim murders, the extensive use of psychological operations and false-flag attacks to discredit the guerilla, the state’s use of sensory deprivation torture and isolation wings, and the prisoners’ resistance to this, through which they inspired their own supporters and others on the left to take the plunge into revolutionary action. Drawing on both mainstream and movement sources, this book is intended as a contribution to the comrades of today—and to the comrades of tomorrow—both as testimony to those who struggled before and as an explanation as to how they saw the world, why they made the choices they made, and the price they were made to pay for having done so.

The Red Army Faction

The Red Army Faction
Author: J. Smith
Publisher: PM Press
Total Pages: 693
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781604860290

The first in a two-volume series, as part of a co-publishing project between PM Press and Kersplebedeb, is by far the most in-depth political history of the Red Army Faction ever made available in English. Projectiles for the People starts its story in the days following World War II, showing how American imperialism worked hand in glove with the old pro-Nazi ruling class, shaping West Germany into an authoritarian anti-communist bulwark and launching pad for its aggression against Third World nations. The volume also recounts the opposition that emerged from intellectuals, communists, independent leftists, and then ? explosively ? the radical student movement and countercultural revolt of the 1960s. It was from this revolt that the Red Army Faction emerged, an underground organization devoted to carrying out armed attacks within the Federal Republic of Germany, in the view of establishing a tradition of illegal, guerilla resistance to imperialism and state repression. Through its bombs and manifestos the RAF confronted the state with opposition at a level many activists today might find difficult to imagine. For the first time ever in English, this volume presents all of the manifestos and communiqués issued by the RAF between 1970 and 1977, from Andreas Baader's prison break, through the 1972 May Offensive and the 1974 hostage-taking in Stockholm, to the desperate, and tragic, events of the ?German Autumn” of 1977. The RAF's three main manifestos ? The Urban Guerilla Concept, Serve the People, and Black September ? are included, as are important interviews with Spiegel and le Monde Diplomatique, and a number of communiqués and court statements explaining their actions. Providing the background information that readers will require to understand the context in which these events occurred, separate thematic sections deal with the 1976 murder of Ulrike Meinhof in prison, the 1977 Stammheim murders, the extensive use of psychological operations and false-flag attacks to discredit the guerilla, the state's use of sensory deprivation torture and isolation wings, and the prisoners' resistance to this, through which they inspired their own supporters and others on the left to take the plunge into revolutionary action. Drawing on both mainstream and movement sources, this book is intended as a contribution to the comrades of today ? and to the comrades of tomorrow ? both as testimony to those who struggled before and as an explanation as to how they saw the world, why they made the choices they made, and the price they were made to pay for having done so. With a preface by North American class war prisoner Bill Dunne, a revolutionary captured in 1979 following a shoot out with police in Seattle, Washington.