7 - Ghostly Sisters: Feminist Legacies in Second-GenerationPerspectives on West German Terrorism; Judith Kuckart’sWahl der Waffen (1990) and Kaiserstraße (2006)

Summary

IN NICOLETTE KREBITZ's SHORT FILM Die Unvollendete (2009; The Unfinished), sixteen-year old Helene Hegemann is witness to an imaginary encounter between two of the most controversial, well-known, and enigmatic women of the second half of the twentieth century: journalist and leading member of the Red Army Faction (RAF) Ulrike Meinhof and writer and public intellectual Susan Sontag. Although the film premiered well before the scandal surrounding Hegemann's novel Axolotl Roadkill (2010) — with its debate over plagiarism and discussion of the Berlin Left's children, (post-)feminism, and the ways in which (male) critics patronize young (female) writers — Hegemann's presence as a young female writer in the film is crucial to the narrative. The encounter between Meinhof and Sontag is the product of her imagination, ultimately shifting the focus away from terrorism to feminism, and thereby creating an image of Meinhof and Sontag as ghostly sisters.

Krebitz's episode is paradigmatic for the ways in which a new generation of authors, filmmakers, and artists has come to address 1970s West German terrorism since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The film is part of the project Deutschland 09 (Germany 09), in which thirteen filmmakers living and working in Germany bring the 1977 authorial film Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn) into the present. By making reference to the RAF film, Deutschland 09 vividly demonstrates how recent treatment of West German terrorism is not only about reworking the story of the RAF but also addresses other histories, such as film history. Krebitz's film and its connections between the past and the present, terrorism and feminism are indicative of a larger trend in post-Wall Germany, witnessing a renewed interest in the history of the Red Army Faction, pursued predominantly by a new generation. Born in the 1960s in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), this “second generation” encountered the RAF from a biographical and geographical distance, seated in front of the parental television set. Growing up with the images of omnipresent wanted posters and ubiquitous mass media reports, this newer generation's memories of the violent events possess a highly visual quality that sets the scene for their own imaginative investments, identifications, and fictionalizations.