Title: Re-Reading the RAF: The Literary Nature of Terrorist Propaganda
Abstract: The critical exploration of what modern state security entails in its defense against “terrorism,” who benefits from increased securitization, and at what costs existed before 09/11/2001 (Krause and Williams 1997, Huysmans 1998, Wyn Jones 1999). The increased attention on terrorist attacks in mainstream media in the intervening sixteen years has resulted in a reactionary increase of broad support for right wing politics in Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom, the United States and elsewhere, accordingly rekindling a growth of interest in leftist action. The questions and criticisms surrounding the legitimacy of both German leftist politics in today’s public conscience mirrors that of early 1970s West Germany, when the Red Army Faction began its “armed struggle” against western capitalism. The RAF has often been explored in the context of political science (Kraushaar 2006, Hess 2006) and social philosophy (Habermas 1977, Colvin 2009, Passmore 2011, Scribner 2014). The literature and films inspired by the RAF explored in terms of their relation to artworks as a whole (Gerhardt 2010/2011/2014, Scribner 2014) and to the historical RAF (Tremel 2006, Kreimeier 2006). Using Critical Security Studies alongside theories grounded in the New Frankfurt School as a synthetic framework, this dissertation will show how a critical literary analysis of RAF political texts can help reorient what security should accomplish and how Critical Security Studies readings provides a nuanced understanding of RAF inspired literature and film. The main political texts that this dissertation will focus on are the Texte der RAF as well as Ulrike Meinhof’s Die Würde des Menschen ist antastbar: Aufsätze und Polemiken. The main literary works that this dissertation will focus on are the novels by Heinrich Böll, Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, and Friedrich Christian Delius, Ein Held der inneren Sicherheit, and the respective film adaptations by Völker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, and Christian Petzold. In order to create a nuanced analysis and synthetic understanding of the RAF, I will explore the following set of research questions:
- How do the “schools” of Critical Security Studies and the New Frankfurt School inform a critical understanding of the RAF rhetoric in relation to the counter rhetoric produced by mainstream news organizations?
- How the RAF employs violence and how their terrorism functions as communication and performance. The gaps between language and action, as well as the interconnection of language as action, creates a unique affective space in which the RAF is imagined.
- How the trial of the core RAF members reproduces limited affect of their terrorism, and how the West German judicial system performs affect as an institution of justice.
- How film and literary productions based on the RAF creates a meta-discourse with the RAF’s own propaganda texts, and how these reflect back on the RAF discourse and discourses surrounding West Germany’s security apparatus.
Committee: David Gramling (Chair), Katja Kanzler, Barbara Kosta, Ilse Nagelschmidt (Co-chair), Chantelle Warner
