Abstract
The Red Army Faction (RAF) or Baader-Meinhof Group, which despite its title is the focus of this book, is the subject of a growing number of scholarly publications (including recently several by this reviewer). The self-styled urban guerrillas have fascinated and appalled in equal measure since their inception in 1970, remaining throughout an object of attention and thus fulfilling at least part of their objective. Perhaps their achievement was to make visible through reactions to them fissures in West German society which could otherwise be more easily covered up. Their relationship with the press and in particular the newspapers owned by the anti-communist magnate Axel Springer was always central. Indeed, without Springer it is conceivable that they would never even have come into existence. His journalists and editors certainly did much to make the protest movement’s natural constituencies angrier than they already were in the late 1960s. Throughout the next decade his newspapers continued to polarize society and alienate their opponents. Probably what interested them the most about the ‘terrorists’ was the number of women in their groups and the prominence of the roles that women played. The RAF and 2 June Movement may have eschewed feminism as a bourgeois distraction, but their uprising had a very female inflection. It was led by two youngish women, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof, who had done the most monstrous thing of abandoning young children in order to take up arms against the state. Ensslin was also good-looking and had appeared half naked in a student film. For reactionary redtops what’s not to like?
Claire Bielby’s book is based on a PhD written as part of a major AHRC-funded project on depictions of violent women in German culture from the Renaissance to the present day. It is one of the more original publications to come out of this enterprise, being also well researched, quite richly illustrated and cogently argued. As well as terrorist women, Bielby is very concerned with the case of Vera Brühne, who was found guilty of murdering her lover and his mistress in 1960. From the evidence Bielby assembles, Brühne’s presence in West German tabloids can only be compared with that of Myra Hindley in their British counterparts (not that she makes that link). The messages pushed by the Springer press about Ennslin, Meinhof and Brühne were misogynist, playing on fears that depended on well-worn stereotypes, and feeding off prejudices. This is, however, the currency of tabloid newspapers. Sex and violence sell. There is also an element of the tongue-in-cheek and even a debased, because commercialized, ‘carnivalesque’ aspect to their reporting on most matters, as Richard Sheppard argued 25 years ago with respect to Heinrich Böll’s short novel about the Bild-Zeitung and women, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum. As a contribution to recent cultural history and gender studies, Violent Women in Print depends on the quality of the material that it analyses. While Bielby has undoubtedly unearthed some good stuff, there is not that much of it and as a result she is obliged to spread her arguments pretty thinly. This leaves the reader wanting more. And there is more that she could have given us. If she wanted to follow the unfolding depiction of RAF women, for instance, then she needed to continue into the next three decades or to consider other media, which she does occasionally but only en passant. The Springer press has held out olive branches in recent years to many it alienated 40 years ago. It would have been fascinating to find out if its reporting on violent women had evolved significantly too.