Svea Bräunert
Gespenstergeschichten: Der linke Terrorismus der RAF und die Künste.
Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2015. First edition. 9783865992789 564 pages.
Softcover volume, measuring approximately 6" x 9.25", is like new.
"What significance does the Red Army Faction have within German history? Is it suitable as a prism for thinking about art, trauma and memory after 1945? And what does it tell us about German society and its conscious and unconscious mechanisms of self-understanding ?
Svea Bräunert approaches these and other questions about art: literature, film and fine art have felt addressed and challenged by the RAF from the beginning. With left-wing terrorism, they take up a topic that opens up a wide range of historical, political, media and mnemonic questions. In addition to the canonical positions of Richter, Kluge and Enzensberger, more recent works by Demand, DeLillo and Dumas are also used to consider them.
The engagement with the artistic approaches is in the context of a thematic-theoretical reflection on the RAF, which understands left-wing terrorism as a special form of trauma and makes the ghost strong as an expression of this peculiarity. The ghost is the form that a trauma can still take, even though it should actually elude any form of representation. This is made possible by its metonymic and subsequent impulse. It allows the ghost to visualize something in a displaced way that would otherwise remain unseen or unspoken. By tracing these shifts, the book makes a contribution to the cultural history of the Federal Republic as well as to the discussion of memory theory."