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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
QUICK's RESPONSE TO THE RAF MURDER of Jürgen Ponto and to the involvement of women in that operation was to bring filth into the discussion. A four-page article, published on 4 August 1977, opens with the following words in bold: “immer wenn der Terror bei uns sein schmutziges Gesicht zeigt, sind Mädchen am sinnlosen Töten beteiligt” (whenever terrorism shows its filthy face here, girls are involved in this senseless killing). Terrorism is metaphorically equated with filth and is personified — it has a face. Furthermore, it is when women are involved that terrorism shows its filthy face. By extension, terrorism perpetrated by women (or Mädchen here) is filthy. Dominating the first double page of the feature and positioned above these words are the faces of the four women suspected at the time to have been involved in the Ponto murder: Angelika Speitel, Silke Maier-Witt, Susanne Albrecht, and Sigrid Sternebeck. Their photographs take up more than two-thirds of this double page; hence, the images and the text color how the article and the murder are to be read and understood.
The four faces arguably stand for the “schmutzigen Gesichter” (filthy faces) of terrorism. Terrorism becomes a filthy woman. The caption to the photograph possibly evokes filthy menstrual blood: “Sie [the women terrorists] kamen mit einem Strauß blutroter Rosen” (they [the female terrorists] arrived with a bouquet of blood-red roses; my emphasis). In a variety of discourses, roses are imaginatively associated with the female genitals.
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