What kind of images does terrorism generate? I
Since the end of January there is a debate going on in Germany about the possible amnesty of two ex-RAF terrorist Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Christian Klar. Actually, the last weeks there was written and discussed less than at the beginning of February, but two very interesting articles appeared last Thursday in the German weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT.
Everything was discussed very controversial, but, if you had a closer look at the debate that was going on – touching issues like freedom of speech, criticising capitalism or even fields like “morality” – the whole discussion seemed redundant and very superficial: On the pro-amnesty site, people tended to conventionalise them to (left-)ideological icons, as they had always been in certain circles in Germany; on the other site, people saw them as “special” prisoners, because they were the first after 1945, who attacked the German state (=law).
It was not a very intellectual debate and no-one really thought about the role of the RAF today or how one could re-think its position in the contemporary terrorism discourse, primarily after 9/11. (I am sorry, for generalising, but the main debate followed this scheme…)
Now, there has been a little change of course with two brilliant articles: 1. Jan Philipp Reemtsma, German essayist and editor, wrote in DIE ZEIT an article titled LUST AUF GEWALT (http://www.zeit.de/2007/11/RAF), where he argues that we should not misunderstand the attacks and murdering as political act, but we should see it as acts of megalomania and eagerness of power. It is the form of the article and how his argumentation is working that makes this article so brilliant. He analyses the structure of the RAF with the aid of Dostojewskij’s DEMONS, where he finds many parallels to the RAF movement. 2. The other text is by Peter Schneider, who writes in RÄCHER WOLLEN SIE SEIN (http://www.zeit.de/2007/11/Politische-Moerder) about the structural similarities of Osama Bin Laden’s terrorist and the European terrorism (RAF). This does not only position the RAF in a new and less ideological light, but also and above all Al-Qaeda terrorism.
For me, one point about the similarities of the RAF and Al-Qaeda was oversight – essentially in Peter Schneider’s article – and this is the aesthetics and images both terrorist movement are generating and how similar they are. To me, this became obvious, when the two pictures of RAF prisoner Hanns Martin Schleyer and Al-Qaeda prisoner Sussane Osthoff were put side by side. This is something that has to be analysed (most likely in this blog in a few days):
How – and even more important: what kind of images – does terrorism generate?
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