Antigone Agonistes: Urban Guerrilla or Guerrilla Urbanism?
The Red Army Fraction, Germany in Autumn and Death Game

Thomas Elsaesser

1. I want to thank Michael Wedel (Berlin), Ulrich Kriest (Stuttgart) and Peter Kramer (Norwich), as well as Eric Ames (Berkeley) and Kay Hoffmann (Stuttgart) for their assistance with source material and additional research.

2. The best-known English-language account is Jillian Becker, Hitler's Children? The story of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang (New York/Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1977).

3. Among the studies of terrorism in an international, historical perspective, see Anthony M. Burton, Urban Terrorism: Theory, Practice, Response (New York: The Free Press, 1975); Martha Crenshaw (ed.), Terrorism, Legitimacy, and Power (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983); Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism (Boston: South End Press, 1988); Edward S Herman and Gerry O'Sullivan, The 'Terrorism' Industry (New York: Pantheon, 1990).

4. A complete filmography can be found in P.Kraus, N. Lettenewitsch, U.Saekel et al. (eds.), Deutschland im Herbst: Terrorismus und Film (Munich: Münchner Filmzentrum, 1997), pp 118-133.

5. Among the many essays on Germany in Autumn mention should be made of Miriam Hansen, 'Alexander Kluge's Contribution to Germany in Autumn', New German Critique no 24-25, Fall/Winter 1981-82, pp 36-56; Felix Guattari, 'Like the Echo of a Collective Melancholy' in Semiotexte, vol 4, no 2, 1982, pp 102-110; Marc Silverman, 'Germany in Autumn' in Discourse no 6, Fall 1983, pp 48-52; Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp 22-28; Joachim Paech, 'Zweimal "Deutschland im Herbst": 1977 und 1992', Kinoschriften (Vienna), no 4, 1996, pp 87-105.

To much of the world, the RAF is mostly remembered as the Baader-Meinhof group, after Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, two key protagonists of the so-called 'first generation'. (2) At the time of the 'hot autumn' Ulrike Meinhof was no longer alive; she had hanged herself on May 9th, 1976 while awaiting trial. Since Baader, Horst Mahler, Gudrun Ensslin, Jan Karl Raspe were also in prison, it was the 'second generation' who claimed responsibility for a series of 'political' actions in 1977: foremost among them the kidnapping (on September 5th) of Hans Martin Schleyer, Chairman of the German Federation of Industry and a Director of Daimler Benz; the hijacking (on October 13th) of a Lufthansa flight of German tourists, forced to land in Mogadishu, Somalia, with a demand to free the RAF prisoners. The 'hot autumn' was the aftermath of these actions: the storming of the plane by a German elite unit, the discovery of Schleyer's body in the trunk of a car in France, and three presumed suicides inside the Stammheim maximum security prison near Stuttgart, where Raspe, Baader and Ensslin took their lives (on October 18th), after learning of the failure of the Mogadishu hijack in forcing their release. Although acts of violence continued to be attributed to RAF members not rounded up or killed in the subsequent dragnet searches, arrests and shoot-outs with the police, by Christmas of 1977 the German government was confident enough to declare the 'terrorist threat' to be over and for public life to return to 'normal'.

As we know, however, the tremor of the events lingered on, not only in Germany. Because both the State and its youthful opponents had, for however brief a moment, shown themselves capable of ruthlessness, violence and open confrontation so extreme that it had torn the unexpectedly flimsy fabric of the post-war political consensus, the RAF episode became a turning point also for armed militant action elsewhere. (3) In Germany, the recoil and the soul-searching went deeper than the events of May 1968 had done, as if a different kind of 'knight's move' had been made, backtracking into German history but also forward into an altogether discontinuous political space. Thanks to a number of films identified with the then still relatively 'New' German Cinema, this crisis of West German self-understanding and self-presentation was thematized on an international platform as well: art-cinema audiences saw or read about The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975), Knife in the Head (1978),Mother Kuster's Trip to Heaven (1975), The German Sisters (1981),The Third Generation (1979), Stammheim (1986). (4) Above all the omnibus film Germany in Autumn (1978), shot partly during the funeral of Schleyer, was a first response among the filmmaking community, meant to bear witness to the impact the kidnap and the suicides were having, across a number of contextualising narratives. (5)

8. In Breloer's Wehner - die unerzählte Geschichte (1993) Herbert Wehner, a king-maker and wily tactician, comes across as a sort of Iago to Willy Brandt's Othello, masterminding Germany's role in the Cold War as well as shuttle-cocking for the so-called Ostpolitik, thanks to the contacts he had kept with his former Communist comrades from the days in political exile in Moscow and Stockholm.

Heinrich Breloer is one of the top television makers in Germany, a specialist in political thrillers, and known for suspenseful storytelling. He established his reputation with a number of docu-dramas, combining archive footage, dramatic re-enactments and interviews, often picking political scandals or high-profile corruption cases, such as a notorious tax subsidy housing scam by Co-op officials (Kollege Otto, 1991). Sometimes called 'the Oliver Stone of Germany', his most famous film prior to Todesspiel was an investigative tv-portrait of Herbert Wehner, party chairman and éminence grise behind the social-democrat government of Willy Brandt. (8)

9. For a critical assessment of Breloer's film, from the political left, see Ulrich Kriest, Rember Hüser, 'Rechtzeitig', in P.Kraus, N. Lettenewitsch, U.Saekel et al. (eds.), Deutschland im Herbst: Terrorismus und Film (Munich: Münchner Filmzentrum, 1997), pp 48-60.

The multiple perspectives make for high drama and intense human interest, but they also cunningly disguise a significant absence. Death Game shifts attention almost entirely away from where twenty years earlier writers and filmmakers had found their natural locus of identification: the 'terrorists' and their relatives (The German Sisters), 'innocent' bystanders and reluctant protesters (Katharina Blum, Mother Kuster, Knife in the Head) the 'political' prisoners (Stammheim) and their funeral (Germany in Autumn).

Death Game was a hit, a Strassenfeger, the name for a tv programme that sweeps the streets clean of people on the nights it is broadcast. It appears to have been especially popular among younger audiences, for whom the terrorists were by now political dinosaurs, but who became fascinated by ex-Chancellor Schmidt's narrative. Identifying with the State, possibly not as a political entity, but as an institution whose mechanisms of power are rarely laid as bare as during such a crisis, viewers could follow the unfolding events with a technocrat's appreciation of complex institutional and legal processes, a stance also adopted by the pragmatist Schmidt himself at the time, and in his retrospective tv-interview that allowed him to relive the drama.

10. The best general account is still Stefan Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Complex (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1989). Aust, a left-wing journalist and friend of Alexander Kluge, later became editor of the news magazine Der Spiegel. He had himself been a pro-Meinhof sympathizer, but later became embroiled in public rows with Horst Mahler and other ex-RAF members. See Die Zeit, 6 June 1997, p 44.

11. 'Ausgrenzung' (isolating the 'terrorist' element) became the key word. See Heinrich Böll, 'Diese Art der Stimmungsmache', in H. Boencke, D. Richter (eds.), Nicht heimlich und nicht kühl (Berlin: Ästhetik und kommunikation, 1977), pp 75-82.

12. Some of the documents are to be found in Henner Hess (ed.), Angriff auf das Herz des Staates (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988).

As can be surmised, little of this ambivalence has made it into Breloer's film. With an apparently wider distribution of attention and interest, Death Game works hard to create a special space of empathy around ex-Chancellor Schmidt, his intricate reasoning and calculus of consequences, taking time to dwell also on the personalities of the men Schmidt relied on when reaching for a decision whether to buy Schleyer free and risk letting the prisoners go, whether to abandon the victims of air-piracy to their fate or send a potentially abortive and (in terms of human lives) costly rescue mission. The docu-drama exudes the gravity of the reason of state, ponders the agonising hours of lonely men at the top, and circles around the problem of how a democratic state manages the mass media. Hence one topical interest and source of appeal: Death Game is about spin-doctors and government spokesmen, about how to contain a 'situation', where in the end, it does not seem to matter whether the crisis is a burst oil-tanker, a sex scandal or this particular story of hostage-taking, kidnap, murder and multiple suicide. The fascination is with how men in positions of power deal with emergencies while seemingly keeping cool in public, which is another reason why the film naturally drifts towards Schmidt's advisers, his Krisenstab.

They turn out to be partly recruited from among old war-time comrades of Schmidt, when he was a Wehrmacht officer on the Eastern Front. In one of the most astonishing turns, the film is able to invoke the spirit of Stalingrad and 'the Russian campaign' as naturally as a British politician might invoke the spirit of Dunkirk, or an American President the national resolve after Pearl Harbour. Asked to describe what it was like to wait for the next message from Schleyer's kidnappers or worry if the decoy messenger in Geneva would make contact, State Secretary Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski recalled the dawn mornings on the Eastern Front, waiting for Polish or Russian 'partisans' to attack, while Klaus Bölling, another member of the Krisenstab argues that he kept a cool head only because of the soldierly virtues of the Wehrmacht had been drilled into him, in contrast to some other politicians, who foolishly demanded that a RAF prisoner should be publicly executed for each hostage murdered in Mogadishu.

13. For a stunning account of one such Seilschaft, extending all the way into the foundation of Der Spiegel, see Lutz Hachmeister, Der Gegnerforscher (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1998).

14. Reference to the exhibition "die Wehrmacht im Osten", Hamburg 1997, curated by Philip Reemtsma jr.

15. For different evaluations of this masculinity and its (gender) politics, see among others, Karlheinz Bohrer, Aesthetik des Schreckens (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990) and Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct (University of California Press, 2002).

With such a re-focusing on ex-Chancellor Schmidt and his wartime comrades, doubling the twenty years after the Hot Autumn with the fifty-five years after Stalingrad, itself echoing the 'storms of steel' of Verdun in 1917, Death Game not only tried to 'redress' the moral balance and level the empathetic score, but actually inverted the dominant mythologies that had already at the time given the events of Autumn of 1977 their dramatic shape. With Death Game it was as if a major player had come back to claim the hero role in a piece of theatre which at the time had cast him as the villain. The 1977 play was called Antigone: the 'return' of 1997 traded on this knowledge, suggesting a re-reading of the mythic constellation which the re-staging set out to repeal.

Sophocles' Antigone has a long and involuted history in Germany, especially since G.W.Hegel's commentaries on the play in his Philosophy of the Spirit had made Antigone the epitome of an irreconcilable opposition between the discourse of the state and the demands of the family:

since the community only gets an existence through its interference with the happiness of
the family, and by dissolving self-consciousness into the universal, it creates for itself in
what it suppresses and what is at the same time essential to it an internal enemy – womankind
... the everlasting irony of the community. (16)

18. The idea came from a distributor, the Filmverlag der Autoren, which had just changed hands. After having been owned by a number of filmmakers, among them also Wim Wenders and R.W. Fassbinder, the Filmverlag was bought out and baled out by Rudolf Augstein, the editor of Germany's powerful newsmagazine Der Spiegel.

Germany in Autumn premiered in March 1978, only six months after the fatal events. (18) They in turn had brought to a head eight years of often violent and occasionally tragi-comic encounters between the RAF, the press, the German government, its security authorities and police forces. Of these encounters, only the period of the last weeks in October and the beginning of November 1977 appear in Germany in Autumn, with the documentary footage mainly centred on two funerals: that of Hans Martin Schleyer and that of Ensslin, Baader, Raspe. Also included are parts of a television interview with Horst Mahler in his prison cell, where he condemns the hostage taking but tries to give the RAF a context and a history: as long as German fascism survives in the guise of West German capitalism, there will be people desperate enough in their protests to put themselves above the law.

19. Heinrich Böll, 'Will Ulrike Gnade oder freies Geleit?', Der Spiegel no 3, 1977.

20. Hans Egon Holthusen, Sartre in Stammheim: Literatur und Terrorismus (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982).

21. T. Botzat, E. Kiderlen, F. Wolff (eds.), Ein deutscher Herbst. Dokumente. Berichte. Kommentare (Frankfurt: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1978).

Self-censorship of television is explicitly connected in the film to the Antigone story. At issue in the Schlöndorff episode of Germany in Autumn is the decision of a Broadcast Commission Meeting whether to allow the production (made for a series called 'Youth meets the Ancient Classics') to be aired, or whether in view of current events, the play is an 'incitement to violence' and ought to be shelved in the interest of public safety. In the exchanges that lead to the decision to ban it, the sketch is able to evoke some striking contemporary parallels: a state funeral and a contested burial; a woman hanging herself in a prison cell; two sisters; a state in a state of emergency suspending civil rights and curtailing individual freedom; acts of resistance and violence committed out of fiercely held convictions are among the major echoes that provide the episode's central dramatic irony: that a classic tragedy from the canon of Western civilization cannot be shown in a democratic society because it turns out to be 'too political'.

However, the irony cuts both ways, and the film exhibits its own sort of impasse: it implies the relevance of the parallels, but then denounces the officials who act on the recognition of this relevance - Schlöndorff's intended ideological critique either risks evaporating in self-contradiction or it is itself an element that stabilises the film's myth-making about German history, with its turns and returns, creating a sort of mise-en-abyme by which the self-staging of the RAF and the media-management of state institutions are allowed to take on the stature, gravity and allure of an ancient tragedy.

22. As indicated in Jillian Becker's title Hitler's Children? The story of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang, cited above.

Once primed by the Sophoclean Ur-text and its Hölderlin-Hegel-Brecht hermeneutic, other aspects of the political crisis depicted in Germany in Autumn begin to reverberate in the symbolic-theatrical space that the film sets up to echo down the years of recent German history. For instance, the trope 'State Funeral and Suicide' returns in Germany in Autumn when we learn that the Mayor of Stuttgart, the site of the double funeral, happens to be Manfred Rommel, son of Field-Marshall Erwin Rommel, better known as the Desert Fox. In a WW2 newsreel included in the film, the young Manfred can be seen standing beside the coffin of his father, who after the defeat of El-Alamein had been ordered by the Nazis to commit suicide, so that Hitler could give him a State Funeral and celebrate a National Hero. Now Rommel Junior in 1977 found himself in the part of the benevolent counter-Creon, for it is he who as Mayor orders - 'a quick decision and clean choice', he calls it in the film - that the three terrorists should have a dignified funeral in one of the city's more prestigious cemeteries, rather than be handed to the Stuttgart vox pop, who had demanded that the bodies be disposed of 'down the sewers'.

On the other hand, beyond more repetitions and reversals, what sort of cynicism, hypocrisy or expediency is the Rommel reference supposed to imply about the State funeral of Hans Martin Schleyer? The camera lingers on further parallels between the Rommel State Act and that given to Schleyer. The same forest of flags: the Swastika in the newsreel then is replaced by the Mercedes Star now; the same rows of uniformed men: in 1944 in SS uniform, now in sober black suits, but not a few of them with scars on their cheeks, tell-tale signs of having once belonged to the ultra-conservative, duelling student fraternities which since the Wilhelmine Reich have supplied Germany with its judiciary, military and industrial elite. Continuities across the rupture, repetitions and returns: that the framing episodes consciously build on these and other dramatic ironies becomes evident when we see shots of the Mercedes Benz assembly line, where the workers down their tools for three minutes of silence, in honour of the dead Schleyer, whose portrait looms over them. As the voice-over commentary informs the viewer, 85% of the workers present are foreign 'guest workers' - a reference that points forward and backward at the same time - oblique reminder of the slave labour that firms like Mercedes Benz requisitioned from Nazi armament minister Albert Speer, and forward towards the workers becoming undesirable aliens stealing scarce jobs, the future target of right-wing Neo-Nazi resentment in the 1980s. To this can be added another (unstated, but no doubt implied) irony that undercuts both: the workers are now enjoying, albeit for only three minutes, the right to down-tools which the dead Schleyer, as notorious trade-union basher, had fought hard to eliminate from the statute books.

25. The sense of official hypocrisy - strongly felt by the members of the Schleyer family at the funeral itself - was also alluded to by the Federal President Walter Scheel, who in his funeral oration said: 'the face of terrorism makes us blanch. But we ourselves may have to look more often into the mirror.'

The Rommel reference is, however, an instance of another trope, related to the Antigone story and central to several other interpretative strategies implemented in Germany in Autumn. A farewell letter by Schleyer to his son, written immediately prior to his death opens the film. In it the doomed hostage gives a candid assessment of his predicament, warning the son against harbouring illusions about any possible lack of resolve on the part of the terrorists, and implicitly accusing the Government of having sacrificed him out of clearly political calculations. (25) This double father-son nexus, linking Rommel and Schleyer, both victims of the Fatherland the better for it to posthumously honour them, also echoes in the Antigone television production which ends with the messenger describing how Haimon killed himself, out of hatred and disgust when he saw his father Creon cowardly turn and run, after the son had raised his sword against him.

26. Bernward Vesper, Die Reise (Reinbek: Rowohlt, [repr 1995]).

27. Michael Schneider, 'Fathers and Sons Retrospectively', New German Critique, no 31, Winter 1984, pp 11-12.

28. That this distrust did much to shape the forms the protest movement took in West Germany is made clear in another autobiographical essay, Christoph Meckel's Suchbild (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1983). There, among the most traumatic memories are instances where the father projected his own insufficiency onto his children, abusing parental power to confirm himself and strengthen his own battered ego, setting a pattern which in the son provoked violence against both himself and seemingly 'innocent' targets.

29. Schneider, p 23.

30. Paul Kersten, Der alltägliche Tod meines Vaters, quoted in Schneider, p 41.

31. Schneider, p 9.

Schneider sees the RAF's theatrical metaphor as apt. The bombings, hostage takings and terrorist acts were nothing less than 'murderous and suicidal' attempts to 'tear off the mask' of official authority behind which they had reason to suspect the guiltily fretting faces of their own fathers. To take Schneider's analogy further: the Schleyer kidnap was the RAF's staging of 'The Mousetrap' to catch the conscience of a king by the name of Helmut Schmidt, while Schleyer is himself a Claudius who has the bad luck of being guarded by someone more resolute than Hamlet, for his captors did not spare him the way that Hamlet spared Claudius when he overheard him praying. Such an emphasis on the father-son axis in literature, in political activism and in Germany in Autumn suggests that the German protest movement was anti-authoritarian rather than egalitarian, that despite a Marxist political discourse, it was caught in the ruses of patriarchy: a feature from which the women's movement had to extricate itself, perhaps by countering this 'Hamletigation' of German post-war history with its own (agonising) 'Antigonising'?

This might indeed be the 'feminist' aspect of Germany in Autumn, even if the majority of its directors were men. Against it, one could argue that, paradoxically, the part that most challenges any kind of Oedipalization is not the Schlöndorff/Böll segment, but the one directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, featuring Fassbinder himself, along with his lover Armin Mayer and his mother Lilo Pempeit. The episode shows Fassbinder, alternately naked and wrapped in an untidy bathrobe, restless and sweating, in his sombre Munich apartment, frantic about the news blackout, cynically incredulous about the Stammheim suicides, in fear of possible police-raids and house-searches, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, finally collapsing on the floor in a fit of uncontrollable hysterical weeping.

At the heart of the politics of the segment is a heatedly impromptu but in fact meticulously scripted interrogation Fassbinder subjects his mother to in the kitchen, where he thematizes the duties of dissent for citizens in a democracy under siege; the human rights of murderers; the special horror provoked by terrorists in ordinary men and women, because they might have reasons for their acts one could not disagree with. As Fassbinder hectors and lectures his mother, he extracts from her the common sense caution of the 'normal' German about not wanting to risk one's neck, and finally, the admission that she would much prefer in such a situation to be ruled by an authoritarian Führer, 'but a gentle benevolent one', rather than face the responsibilities of free speech. Challenging his mother, berating his homosexual lover, phoning his former wife for comfort, after denouncing in an television interview marriage as an artificial coupling, Fassbinder stages a series of encounters meant to cast doubts on the fictional-narrative closure on which a founding myth of West German democracy was built, namely that (masculine) ideals of self-discipline, responsibility and citizenship had done away with the authoritarian personality - the Helmut Schmidt values which Death Game was to revive nostalgically twenty years later.

Considered as such, Fassbinder's self-display is an act of resistance, and a double Antigone gesture, partly directed at the film that Alexander Kluge has bound him into. For ultimately, three perspectives intersect also in Germany in Autumn, though they do not segue into or even complement each other, as they do in Breloer's film. Firstly, Kluge's generational line from 'fathers to sons cross-wise' most explicitly evokes the Hamlet-Claudius intertext; in Schlöndorff-Böll's 'Antigone' sister confronts sister, in the encounter of Antigone with Ismene, a theme that Margarethe von Trotta (then married to Schlöndorff and his collaborator on Katharina Blum) was to take up in The German Sisters, while in Fassbinder's episode there is an exchange between mother and son, as if to make the primary incestuous mother-son bond so over-explicit that it effectively de-Oedipalized the lineage from (guilty) father to (guilty) son, as analysed by Schneider.

While Kluge's segments explore, as we saw, the echoing parallels of a double funeral symmetrically inverted, and across the axis of two fathers and two sons creates a story intended to hold together the disparate moments of this film of many voices, they also effectively 'contain' German history, by setting up a more or less orderly series of mirrors which balance the two periods, Germany in the 1940s and the 1970s. But as Fassbinder's episode makes clear: neither such doubling for the sake of structure, nor the proliferation of situations alluding to the classical Antigone can 'domesticate' the fantasmatic power emanating from the events. Fassbinder in a sense tries to write a different kind of asymmetrical exchange into the representations, offset in turn by Kluge's own anti-Antigone in a minor (tragi-comic) key, his heroine Gabi Teichert, a teacher who, at a loss where to find German history, goes out, instead of burying a body, to dig for it with a shovel in the frozen ground. Fassbinder's episode puts before us not an absence or an unburied body, but 'a body too much': violent, obese, naked, grossly material, he confronts the viewer, indeed assaults the viewer - demanding an Antigone to mark the site where mourning has not taken place, to remind us of the irreducible singularity involved in her predicament.

In a sense, Fassbinder's staging is in the spirit of Sophocles' Antigone more than is the Antigone sketch of Schlöndorff/Böll. By thematizing both of Antigone's impossible choices - that of the unburied body and that of her angry confrontation with Creon, Fassbinder enacts an almost classical reciprocity, as expressed in the play's stychomythia - the exchange of sentences - when he argues with his mother, recreating and at the same time inverting the encounter between Creon (power, state, future father-in-law) and Antigone (individual, female, daughter), where formal equivalences more strongly underline different orders of non-equivalence, inequality, in-justice, while all the time keeping before our eyes the fact that the power, the potential for resistance comes from this non-equivalence between son and mother, between male and female subjectivity. Fassbinder's own (terrorising) self-righteous intransigence and his mother's moral candour of the sensible, if cowardly pliable 'pragmatist' confront each other, while - emphasised by the abrupt cuts and montage effects - a retching, weeping, shaking Fassbinder remains 'uncovered' by the symbolisation or representations offered to him by his lover Armin. Unless one takes the excess that takes the place of representation as an act of exposure that undoes the uncovering, Fassbinder's sexualized self-exposure enforces, by its frontality towards the spectator, an impossible convergence of 'look' and 'gaze'. What seems an unselfconscious display of shameless vulnerability is in fact a form of exhibitionism that tries to turn the machinery of surveillance - in Germany in Autumn the State is present through patrol-car sirens wailing at night and mounted policemen wielding camcorders filming the mourners at the Ensslin funeral - into 'showing itself' and thus allowing Fassbinder to manifest a kind of defiant compliance in which the spectator is necessarily implicated as much as s/he is excluded.

When (re)turning to the Antigone episode of Schlöndorff/Böll after Fassbinder's, one cannot help wondering if the former does not subtly 'hand over' its own heroine. By placing the discussion of the television production at the centre of Germany in Autumn, and making the metaphoric links between Sophocles' play and a version of political events ('rebellious women', 'a suicide', 'a Government that stands firm') the ironic hinge between the classical play and the contemporary events, Schlöndorff/Böll's Antigone is drawn into Alexander Kluge's mirror mazes of uncanny repetitions and doubling symmetries - a mirroring also evidenced by the 'doubles' inside the episode, for instance, letting Ismene and Antigone speak a number of 'distancing prologues' as if with one voice. Where the play, as well as Hölderlin, Hegel, Brecht or Straub/Huillet's renderings, speak of the radical incommensurability of the subject and the state, Kluge and Schlöndorff are seduced by symmetry, balance and repetition. They allow their narrative to achieve almost 'classical' closure, which contaminates their version of German history, since such a spirit of heavily underscored dramatic ironies and structural parallels seems remote not only from the singularity of Antigone's act, and contrary to the direction in which her ethical narrative propels her: twice having to make a choice, where each time she has to take sides against herself. It also 'masters' the German past by letting it metaphorically slide into the master-narrative of fathers and sons.

That Germany in Autumn is thus finally more conciliatory than its makers might have intended also highlights a historical problem - one that the reversal of perspective so deftly effected by Death Game makes explicit. Rewriting the very tropes of tragedy, it lets Creon take control of the play and with it, of the 'hot autumn'. Here, too, an act of handing over was on offer, the tacit reconciliation with the previous generation, where former soldiers 'father' future captains of industry, as the television-nation unites in sympathy with the necessarily sacrificial victim Schleyer and the patriarchal-patrician Schmidt, attentively listening to the latter's case on behalf of his conscience, his plea for letting pragmatism prevail over dissent and his categorical 'no' to the terrorists also in retrospect, which is to say, for now and in the future. After this coup d'état par l'état, where might the ground be located from which the RAF could have continued - even within the law? But then, what jagged terrain has been abandoned in such a suture, such a progress towards closure?

32. Gerhard Schroeder, at the time of writing the SPD Chancellor-candidate is of the generation of Baader and Meinhof, and he models himself consciously in the image of Schmidt. Furthermore, he has taken into his shadow-cabinet the ‘Green party’ deputy Otto Schily, who in 1977 came to prominence as one of the lawyers who defended the Stammheim prisoners.

33. 'Nachruf' (signed: 'a Mescalero from Göttingen'), ASTA: Göttinger Nachrichten, May 1977.

34. Stefan Aust, The Baader Meinhof Complex. But see also the report of the prison guard's account in WDR Info, November 1996.

35. Herold, who once claimed that one had to be able to sympathize with a terrorist in order to fight a terrorist, is himself one of the tragic-comic victims, having been confined for the past twenty years to a life inside an army compound, for fear of reprisals. Dirk Kurbjuweit, 'Gefangen für alle Zeiten', Die Zeit, 8 August 1997, p 8.

36. Hellmuth Karasek, 'Deutschland im Herbst,' Der Tagesspiegel 25 June 1997, p 21; Heinrich Breloer, quoted in WDR Info, November 1996; Mariam Lau, 'Der Deutsche Herbst als Exorzismus,' Merkur no 585, December 1997, p 1092.

37. The literature charting these changes is now too vast to more than signal in a footnote. Besides classics such as Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961) Manuel Castells, The Informational City (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) and Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye (London: Faber & Faber, 1990) one could mention recent collections such as M. Sorkin (ed.), Variations on a Theme Park (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992), R.T.Le Gates and F. Stout (eds.), The City Reader (London: Routledge, 1996) and N.R. Fyfe (ed.), Images of the Street (London: Routledge, 1998).

Listening to the RAF 'live' must have been embarrassing to some of their sympathizers, even in 1977: arrogant, jargon-ridden, self-obsessed, their pronouncements seemed to lack all playfulness or the marks of the political prankster. Instead of leaving room for possible irony when baptising the foam-padded closet in which Schleyer was kept 'the people's prison', the phrase merely appeared irritatingly pompous, while the truly appalling words used to announce that Schleyer had been assassinated were rightly judged 'contemptuous' not only of his life but 'of human life'. When journalists recalled these moments in 1997, they easily managed to sustain moral distance by quoting the RAF's more outrageous statements, talking of hubris, bathos, or sniggering at the convoluted rhetoric. (36) But with the sound turned off, as it were, the tv-footage of mass demonstrations, the newspaper pictures of barred faces, or the grainy photos of bombed cars in leafy side-streets spoke a different language. True, they speak of violence, of crowds, of confrontation, but they also bring into view something that makes keeping distance a more difficult task, because the distance in time makes the proximity in another register all the more striking. What becomes evident is that the RAF's preferred theatres of action - the street, public buildings, department stores, nondescript underpasses - designates a topography of visual signs now omnipresent: the city, the urban scene on the move. One suddenly becomes aware to what extent these 'urban guerillas' - and the police that controlled the crowds - were not only part of the more general transformation of the civic realm and the public sphere, but actually played a leading role in making the changes visible. This public sphere in the making has, as we know, radically re-coded the cities of the developed world, producing new kinds of mobility, reflecting changed working conditions and leisure habits, imposing new ways of inhabiting and using the domestic environment, in short, making space itself a political category. (37)

38. Alexander Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn (London: Tavistock, 1975) and Alexander Mitscherlich, Die Unwirtlichkeit der Städte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1965).

39. See 'Der Herbst der Terroristen', Der Spiegel no 38, 15 Sept 1997, p 43.

40. Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995).

The irony is poignant also for my argument. Are we, with these sites, still in the world of the tragic stage? I do not mean that Death Game belongs to the genre of the television docu-drama while Germany in Autumn still follows a distinct film aesthetic. Rather, an additional doubt arises about the latter's Antigone parallel, but also about my claiming to detect the return of Creon in the former: the parallels and contrasts rely too confidently on the pertinence and validity of the theatrical metaphor. True, its cultural currency gives the 'drama' of the hot autumn a powerful pathos, but it also hides a number of historical blind spots emerging from these representations of urban mutations. For instance, by ignoring the blurry iconicity of identikit photos, the gaudy language of the slogans, posters and graffiti, or the terrorists' irruptive presence in the urban fabric, the theatrical analogy can be accused of dignifying 'common criminals' with the gravity of a high tragedy. But perhaps more to the point, it also risks mis-identifying the medium in which the events not so much unfolded but were subsequently to take on a good deal of their historical significance.

The street not as metaphor for the stage, but as synecdoche for urban space: this does not mean that the 'Antigone' and 'Hamlet' effects discussed above did not exist - they clearly did, since they were so readily seized upon. But could such interpretative moves themselves have become mere vestiges of a political culture that in its cognitive map had made the theatrical stage central, rather than the city, the media, and the urban scene? Put more pointedly, was the RAF in 1977 harbinger also of a shift from the (elite) politics of stage/parliament/agora to the (street) politics of an event-and-entertainment culture, across the switch from literature and drama to the photographic, print and electronic media?

42. See Mariam Lau, 'Der Deutsche Herbst als Exorzismus,' Merkur no 585, December 1997, pp 1080-1092.

The dilemma is illustrated by an autobiographical essay published in Die Beute, a neo-left 1990s magazine, in which articles on Raymond Williams, 'Manhattan after Warhol and Nan Goldin' and Courtney Love stand alongside pieces dissecting German museum culture or the demise of radical German filmmaking. In 'Fractures from the Field Hospital of an Undeclared History' Michael Dreyer describes how he first reacted to the RAF as a schoolboy, or rather, how in the cotton wool world of a protected family life, he tried to make sense of the radio bulletins and the television news as he sat in his room or walked the streets in the evenings. (43) For Dreyer, the RAF's street violence was not only street theatre, it was a kind of 'music' ('no more/mere words'). He felt their political violence as a percussion cutting into the monotone of his everyday, a form of bodily 'sensation' which, rather like rock music, delivered non-verbal expression and opened up a new subjective space. He also compares their actions to Walt Disney's definition of animation: 'plausible impossibility'. Such recollections are doubly surprising, for their endorsement of aestheticised violence, but also for remembering the RAF as non-verbal, when in fact, with their pamphlets, statements, messages to the press they were hyper-verbal. This slip of memory would, however, confirm that the verbal was not perceived as words, but as material signs, and the signs not as messages, but as shapes, sounds and colours.

46. 'We were a bit like media stars', admits Astrid Proll, one of the first generation RAF members, for most of the 1970s in hiding in London, who has called Baader a 'James Dean lookalike' in The Guardian (Weekend), August 28, 1998, p 25. Baader also recalls the Martin Sheen character in Terrence Malick's Badlands (1973), himself a reworking of the media-consciousness of Clyde in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967).

47. When a German popular culture finally did emerge towards the end of the 1980s, it was both middle-class and middle-aged: sex comedy, sit-coms, football and talk-shows, i.e. quite different from British 'pop' in the 1960s (when music, fashion, movies and art briefly fed from the same social-subversive energies), and instead directly reflecting the suburban tv culture imported from the US.

The presence in the streets, the organisation into 'cells', the lightning raids on banks or bankers' homes could thus count as part of a thoroughly ambivalent modernism represented by the RAF, helping a youth culture to take off, but which then veered off in quite a different direction. On the other hand, one wonders if the techno-fetishism of a Jan Carl Raspe or Andreas Baader did not anticipate the yuppie side of this youth culture, inventing electric gadgets, re-wiring loudspeakers to serve as radio-receivers, and mail-dropping video-tapes to tv broadcasters, even before the computer and the portable telephone made communication 'electronic', 'mobile', 'multi-media'.

Emblematically, the RAF deployed novel forms of communication also in the wider sense, in that they soldered together a great many different circuits of energy, bringing together, hot-wiring so to speak, different areas of politics, institutional life, the press. They clearly had an ambivalent relation to the new means of communication, half 'inventing' a modern communication infrastructure out of the bric-brac of minimal prison furniture, re-tooling that which, under a democracy, they were entitled to against the state, like persuading their lawyers to make statements to the media about imperialism, Zionism, police brutality. The 'secret' mode of the Kassiber that passed among the prisoners in solitary confinement, or made their way mysteriously between the high security tract and the RAF's underground 'cells' outside, strangely combined with the 'public' mode of media bulletins, press-interviews, spectacular actions. Contact in prison, among themselves and between blocks are described in detail in Stefan Aust's book (and in the film Stammheim), with the guards putting mattresses on the doors during the day but removing them at night, with radio wires used as two-way circuits for speech and messages. Baader hid his hand-gun in a record player, and he used the water pipes in his cell as a communication system, after the guards had finally found out how he had 'adapted' the prison intercom. Having trained as bomb- and booby-trap experts, Baader and especially Raspe were do-it-yourself geniuses, experts with wire, electricity, radio sets, transistors and transmitters. At the height of the crisis, even the maximum security prisons proved impossible to keep 'closed' or the prisoners 'isolated', just as the press was no longer 'independent' or the government 'leak-proof'. In the move to mediality, two public spheres, the press and the prison, temporarily may have changed place, taking over from two traditional political 'stages': the (bourgeois) parliament and the (proletarian, but also fascist) street.

48. 'Everything in terrorism is ambivalent and reversible: death, the media, violence, victory. Who plays into the other's hands?... Fascination allows no distinction to be made, and rightly so, for power finally does not make any either, but settles its accounts with everyone, and buries Baader and Schleyer together at Stuttgart in its incapacity to unravel the deaths and rediscover the fine dividing line.' Jean Baudrillard, 'Our Theatre of Cruelty', Semiotexte vol 4, no 2, 1982, p 109.

49. Paul Virilio 'The Overexposed City', in J. Crary and Feher (eds.), Zone Book.

50. Henri LeFebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991); Michel de Certeau, Heterologies (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1994); Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994).

If symbolic violence, then a further question might be: did the RAF at some level understand themselves as 'artists', engaged after all in making of West-Germany the stage for a 'learning play' in the Brechtian tradition, taking such liberties with the lives of officials because they considered them to be 'actors' like themselves? And is this what their 'sympathisers' in the style wars obliquely picked up: the spectacle of a new 'media-politics' bursting upon the scene? Perhaps the RAF was trying to produce a different kind of 'art' altogether: not spectacular, but 'conceptual', by making visible deeper, irreconcilable contradictions, articulating a series of 'deadlocks' in the body politic, in the fabric of democracy itself? If so, the deadlocks fell back on themselves, for they were denied success not only with their enemies, but also with their friends, since even for their sympathisers, they succeeded in outlining at most a moment of 'culture', an 'aesthetisation of politics' in the form of a (dangerous) life-style, complementing and facilitating a shift in (imaginary) self-representation. It would mean that their success at having created sympathisers actually connoted the failure of their intervention, both as street 'artists' and as 'political' protagonists.

Double failure, then, as artists and as political activists. In fact, this double failure could be seen to spell another kind of success for the opponent: the possibility that the RAF's actions and tactics 'played straight into the hands' of the government, their own sworn enemy. Such, at any rate, was the tenor not only of the retrospective assessments on the right. The conventional view by the left of the result of the 'hot autumn' has always been that the State cynically played up the terrorist threat, in order to usher in a 'law-and-order' society, using the RAF as intimidation against reformist social movements, a stick to beat the moderate left with, but also as justification to invest in security equipment, surveillance technology, the introduction of electronics into the bureaucracies at federal, regional and local level. It was as if capitalism shifting gears towards the information society had to invent terrorism in order to legitimate a (temporary?) curtailment of civil liberties and even human rights, as a politically expedient, broadly acceptable argument to allow the new military-industrial, electronic-surveillance complex to ease itself into place. It is a version of events endorsed, for instance, by the writer F.C. Delius in June 1997:

51. F.C. Delius, 'Die Dialektik des Deutschen Herbstes', Die Zeit, 25 July 1977, p 3.

53. Dorothea Hause, Baader und Herold - Beschreibung eines Kampfes (Berlin: Fest, 1997).

54. Fassbinder spoke of West Germans as living in a 'democracy handed to them as a present' (a common phrase at the time: 'Modell Deutschland: die geschenkte Demokratie', Die Anarchie der Phantasie, 138). This implies a question about the 'agency' the political subject can assume or put on (if only mimicry) in reply to repression: 'we're not in control, and therefore not responsible,' thus hinting at one kernel of (inverted) truth in the emergent 'victim' cultures of the 1980s and 1990s.

55. A similar dilemma of how to respond to the symbolic mandate coming from a cult following has faced pop-stars. The black rapper of the 1990s, for instance, 'represents' a constituency which demands that his street-credibility of violence is not merely verbal and in the music. Tupac Shakur, the 'gangsta rapper' whose mother was a Black Panther militant, exposed himself to 'getting real' with fatal results. But as he is supposed to have said, 'all good niggers, all niggers who change the world, die in violence'. The Economist, October 1996.

56. As Astrid Proll put it: 'Everyone carried a gun. That was a membership card.', The Guardian (Weekend) 28 August, 1998, p 25.

One of the crucial points about the RAF is that its existence was the result of an act of separation: they started by putting themselves outside the law. It almost seems as if they undertook certain actions, committed certain offences, went 'underground', first and foremost in order to draw a line, to instantiate a break. (56) Historians are tempted to see the origins of RAF within a continuum, namely that of the post-68 movements to create alternative communities. For instance, it is often argued that the RAF emerged from the Berlin communes movement, whose social protest potential and revolutionary energies came from partly historical, partly anarchist-inspired hopes to break up the patriarchal structures of the German bourgeois family (the so-called anti-authoritarian movement), informed by the broader currents of sexual liberation and feminism. In one sense this is true, although it is worth recalling that the communes were also, more prosaically, a reflection of the specific housing situation in West Berlin, with its large student population, as well as its large 'bourgeois' apartments which, economically, were only viable through multiple occupancy (the so-called Wohngemeinschaften). The student communes - and in their wake, the 'revolutionary cells' - initially stood for opening up the nuclear family to other forms of or new experiments in group solidarity and bonding. They also promoted a new kind of body-politics, ideally acting as the vanguard of a new interpersonal proximity, pursuing ideals not only of how to share and redistribute goods and services more equitably, but also how to redefine privacy and communality, as well as the material and immaterial spaces of everyday existence.

57. It is in this sense that even the RAF can be seen as part of West German 'mourning work', by letting a set of complex forces work over the traumatic material, at once cathecting and decathecting, allowing for all the stages of Freud's 'remembering, repeating and working through'.

58. This is the gist of the conversation that Fassbinder has with his mother in Germany in Autumn about whether terrorists are criminals protected by the law or a species of perpetrator to which the law does not apply and where thus a more atavistic demand for retribution is called for.

59. See Jacques Rancière, 'The Political Form of Democracy' in documenta X- the book (Cantz, 1997), p 801.

60. Another sign of the televisiual ‘we’ was the attempt made in the media in 1997 to bring together the victims, such as the son of Hans Martin Schleyer, and ex-members of the RAF, in the hope of finding some common ground, however vain and absurd this attempt in practice proved to be. Television shows presume that there is always the space of 'talk'. No wonder it proved impossible to recover across the televisual face-to-face the displaced dialogues of German history, the generations, of responsibility and accountability.

However, perhaps the most familiar contemporary 'we' to provide a form of subjectification takes shape in an altogether different space, at once parasitic of the civic and its absolute negation because of its perfect simulation. This is the space of television, where the 'we' is always already there, whether 'we' are watching 'it' on television while it happens, or 'we' are watching it re-staged and replayed, also on television. In the face of the new 'we' of the televisual global/local community, and the virtual 'we' manufactured by the televisual media event and its mode of address, the subjectivation instanced by Death Game spelled indeed the death of the RAF, not only historically, but also in the very terms one can understand the symbolic mandate they may have thought themselves to be responding to. (60) Such a 'we' no longer needs to be able to symbolise a political entity like 'the people' or the revolutionary subject, no more than it needs an urban environment, whether inhospitable, theatrical or communal: a media event, as the German phrase indicates, is a Strassenfeger - it sweeps the streets clean, historically and politically.

The letter of April 20th, then: whether it was sent on Hitler's birthday as a reminder of his legacy, or whether the date was chosen because it was also the eve of a possible amnesty hearing for some of the RAF ex-members still held in prison must remain a matter of speculation. But in a curious sense, the RAF may never have been more true to its historical and political meaning than when it dissolved itself in the wake of the massive act of 'sympathy' or imaginary identification that the German television audience manifested with the paternal order returning to Germany across Death Game rewriting Germany in Autumn, and thus literally recuperating a piece of national history by covering it. Faced with the apparent alternatives of either the atavistic ethnic 'we', or the virtual, transitory 'we' of the television audience, not only was there no ground for the political that was not already occupied, but more crucially, the very possibility of a non-ground would appear foreclosed by the sheer proliferations of (dis-)embodiments of a ‘we’ that alone can and should found a politics, by constantly con-founding it.

This piece first appeared in Joan Copjec and Michael Sorkin (eds.), Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity (Verso, 1999).