Revolutionary Men and the Feminine Grotesque in the West German Media of the 1960s and 1970s

Summary

In an article written shortly after the arrest of the Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorist Andreas Baader in June 1972, the tabloid newspaper Bild am Sonntag published three images of Baader in various “disguises.” The images are arranged to resemble one of the famous “wanted” posters that appeared in the Federal Republic in the 1970s. Striking is the photograph placed in the middle, which depicts Baader with pouting lips, bare shoulders, and a long platinum blonde wig superimposed on his head. Baader is being styled as a drag queen; his masculinity and, by extension, his sexual orientation are radically called into question. There is no evidence that Andreas Baader ever wore such a wig, nor that he ever dressed in women's clothing. Nor is there any reason for the newspaper to alert the reader to how Baader might change his appearance, and show how he can be recognized (the rationale behind many of the “wanted” posters). After all, as the article reports, he has already been captured. Such an image, then, is gratuitous, designed to mark out Andreas Baader as a feminized figure; as grotesque and abject.

This is an extreme example of how revolutionary masculinity is rendered both feminine and grotesque in the German print media of the 1960s and 1970s, the better to undermine or defuse the threat that the man himself and the radical politics with which he is associated pose to the West German cultural order. In The Female Grotesque, Mary Russo discusses typically grotesque figures. Alongside the crone, the bearded lady, and the hysteric, she identifies the “female impersonator” as grotesque, as well as makeup, prostheses, and wigs: accoutrements that appear frequently in depictions of male revolutionaries and German terrorism. According to Russo, the term “female grotesque” threatens to become a tautology: “in many instances,” she continues, “these terms seem to collapse into one another in very powerful representations of the female body as grotesque.” I wish to argue that the same can be said of the feminized male grotesque. Media representations of male revolutionaries are often grotesque or abject, whether the figure is feminized in an exaggerated form (as with Baader in my opening example) or more subtly.