Art and Terror

JW-6 GERMANY Jill Winder is a Donors’ Fellow of the Institute studying post-reunification Germany through the ICWA work and attitudes of its artists. LETTERS Art and Terror By Jill Winder Since 1925 the Institute of FEBRUARY 2005 Current World Affairs (the Crane- BERLIN–There is something inherently private about the scene of a crime. If vio- Rogers Foundation) has provided lence occurred in the victim’s home, we are haunted by the fact that personal long-term fellowships to enable space has been transgressed. If the site is public, as in the case of street violence, outstanding young professionals the private element is connected to experience of the victim’s confrontation with to live outside the United States his own mortality. The threat of ill-fated death is unique and intimate. Conversely, and write about international the reproduction of a crime scene is often grotesquely public. Whether broadcast areas and issues. An exempt on the ten o’clock news or featured on the front page of a daily, the reporting of a violent crime neutralizes its tragic dimension by inviting viewer to be voyeur. The operating foundation endowed by obscene reproduction of violence is macabre, but only in a generic and imper- the late Charles R. Crane, the sonal way. We see reproductions of crime scenes daily, but pray to God or Fate or Institute is also supported by Luck that we never find ourselves in one. contributions from like-minded individuals and foundations. In the middle of the main exhibition hall in Kunst-Werke, a contemporary art space in Berlin, surrounded by wall-to-wall documentation of the activities of the West German left-wing terrorist group the Red Army Faction (RAF), hangs Die TRUSTEES Toten (The Dead) by artist Hans-Peter Feldmann. It is one of the central artworks Bryn Barnard in the controversial exhibition “Regarding Terror: the RAF-Exhibition”, central Joseph Battat because it encapsulates all the interesting opportunities and risks associated with Mary Lynne Bird making a show about politically motivated violence. Steven Butler Sharon F. Doorasamy Die Toten (1998) comprises 90 William F. Foote sheets of paper each measuring Peter Geithner approximately 8” x 11”. On each Gary Hartshorn sheet is an image of a person killed Kitty Hempstone between 1967 and 1993, repro- Katherine Roth Kono duced from newspapers, accom- Cheng Li panied by a name and date of Peter Bird Martin death, such as ‘Andreas Baader, Dasa Obereigner 18.10.1977,’ ‘Heinz Herbert Karry Chandler Rosenberger 11.5.1981,’ ‘Siegfried Bubak, Edmund Sutton 7.4.1977,’ or ‘Holger Meins, 9.11.1974.’ Some of the photos are HONORARY TRUSTEES portraits or mug shots. In others, David Elliot a murdered person lies at the scene David Hapgood of a crime: on a street, in a jail cell, Pat M. Holt in an office or an empty field. The Edwin S. Munger images are both gruesome and Richard H. Nolte poorly reproduced, grainy, awk- Albert Ravenholt ward and somehow unrevealing. Phillips Talbot The 90 people included in Die Toten can, and I will argue should be, divided into two categories: Institute of Current World Affairs victims of RAF violence and mem- The Crane-Rogers Foundation bers of the RAF who were killed Four West Wheelock Street by the police. Feldmann, however, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755 U.S.A. refuses to make such a distinction: Detail from Hans-Peter Feldmann, Die Toten victims and criminals are placed (The Dead), 1998. side by side, mixed together to form a problematic chain passionate struggle and a of attackers and those who were attacked. new, unchecked political extremism. Their images Brief Background: The RAF and the “German Au- were famous, reproduced tumn” of 1977 in magazines, on wanted posters and in broadcast The “German Autumn” of 1977 was a time filled with news. They had already bombings, hijackings, kidnappings and terror by left- become the stuff of legend, wing extremist groups from within Germany itself. These so their suspicious deaths attacks utterly divided the already divided country, and could only serve to trans- Andreas Baader, co-founder of illustrated the painful convulsions of post-war transition form them into martyrs the Baader-Meinhof group in felt by the generation who were born in the Nazi period. and pop icons. Holger Stammheim Prison near Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gundrun Ensslin, Meins was the first to die Stuttgart, 1977. A fellow Holger Meins and Jan-Carl Raspe were left-extreme so- a horrible death by starva- prisoner photographed him in cial activists who came to be known as the Baader- tion as a result of a prison his cell with a smuggled Meinhof group. They were affiliated with a loosely hunger strike in 1974. In camera. Photo: Astrid Proll aligned group of anarchists, Maoists and social radicals 1976, Ulrike Meinhof was who called themselves the Red Army Faction. As former found hanged in her prison cell. Her death, like those of Museum of Modern Art curator Robert Storr explains in Baader, Ensslin and Raspe in 1977, was ruled a suicide, his catalog to Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 series although it was widely suspected (and is suspected by (which I discuss later in this essay), “Roughly speaking, many to this day) that they were murdered. the coordinates of RAF’s fundamentalist view were American hegemony and German authoritarianism, ex- The Fight to Stage “Regarding Terror: the RAF- emplified by American bases and the bastions of the Exhibition” Auschwitz generation’s renewed strength.”1 Though the principal figures of the Baader-Meinhof group were in On January 29, 2005, “Regarding Terror: the RAF- custody by 1972 (charged with seven counts of murder Exhibition” opened after two years of preparation, ma- among other offenses), the terrorist violence of RAF mem- jor public debate and a one-year delay due to the with- bers continued to intensify throughout the 1970s. (The drawal of public funding for the project last summer. RAF officially disbanded in 1998.) Family members of RAF victims vociferously fought against the exhibition, claiming that it would serve only For many Germans, the Baader-Meinhof group sym- to glorify terrorist activities and to turn prominent mem- bolized the clash of generations, the lost hope of youth, bers of the RAF into celebrities. The conflation of the criminals with their victims, which can arguably be seen in works such as Feldmann’s Die Toten, was precisely what many opponents of the exhibition wanted to avoid at all costs. Two years ago, an unofficial working draft of the project was leaked to the press. It was an awkwardly worded and in many ways insensitive document, high- lighting the interest of the young generation in the RAF and the “political utopianism” of the generation of 1968, and lacking any critique of RAF-sponsored violence. A group of surviving family members of RAF victims im- mediately launched a campaign to prevent the exhibition from taking place. Ironically, the most prominent politician to demand an end to the project was Interior Minister Otto Schily, who famously acted as the defense lawyer for two RAF-members in the 1970s. One of the main points of controversy was the fact that Kunst-Werke had already been given more than 100,000 Euros ($130,000 USD) of public funding for the exhibition. Editorials with titles such as “Tax Dollars to Make Terrorists Celebrities” and “Terrorists Have the Last Say” ran in national pa- pers over the course of summer and autumn 2003. Al- The cover from Der Stern, June 11, 1972, though the staff of Kunst-Werke and then-Director Klaus recounting the capture of Andreas Baader. Biesenbach tried desperately to extricate themselves from 1 Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: October 18,1977 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2000), pg. 53. 2 JW-6 the public-relations the RAF became an object of images, quotations and ref- catastrophe, public erences in a society shaped by the mass media. In this pressure led the Ger- context, each in its own way, the exhibited artworks cre- man government to ate new systems of reference that do not remain stuck in demand a return of mechanisms of identification or emotional occupation, the seed money in but that allow the viewer to gain new access by estab- January 2004. lishing distance.” At the opening, head curator Biesenbach insistently repeated the phrase, “This is an Biesenbach de- art exhibition and not an exhibition about the RAF” no cided to delay the less than a dozen times during a half-hour press confer- opening of the exhi- ence. Yet given the premise of the exhibition—to consider bition for one year how artists have made work directly or indirectly about and to finance it in- the RAF—the distinction is disingenuous. dependent of government money to The curators argue that the main issue the exhibition guarantee the artistic deals with is the way that public perception of the RAF freedom of the cura- was formed through and in the media. In order to ex- tors and the artists in Doug Aitken, Girl in Mask, 2002, plore this, they selected 29 dates tied to the RAF’s terror- the exhibition. Al- one of the art works auctioned on ist activities during the 1970s and provided extensive though he found Ebay to raise money for the documentation from print-media sources such as Bild some funding from exhibition at Kunst-Werke. Zeitung, Spiegel, Stern, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Frankfurter typical sources such as the Mondriaan Foundation in the Allgemeine Zeitung, as well as television coverage from Netherlands and Pro Helvetica (a Swiss cultural founda- broadcasters such as ARD and ZDF.

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