Woman, Violence, Nation: Representations of Female Insurgency in Fiction and Public Discourse in the 1970s and 1980s.

Germany in the 1970s was subject to a wave of terrorist activities in which women such as Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin played a significant role. The mass media and public discourse in general struggled with women's participation in these cases of extreme physical violence. In this article, I explore the articulations of the discourses of gender, nation, and violence in the German news magazine Der Spiegel, Ulrike Meinhof's television play Bambule, and Traude Buhrmann's Fluge uber Moabiter Mauern (Flights over Moabit's Walls), in order to illuminate representations of female insurgency. My argument centers around their different uses of deviance and the changing character of social criticism in the 1970s and 1980s. (BTB)

In 1977, at the height of the terrorist scare, the German news magazine Der Spiegel published two articles under the headlines "Frauen im Untergrund: `Etwas Irrationales'" (Women in the Underground: Something Irrational) and "`Die Tater leben in absoluter Unzucht'" (The Perpetrators Live in Absolute Immorality). The articles express bewilderment about women's involvement in the Red Army Fraction (RAF) and their leading role in terrorist circles. Indeed they consider female insurgency to be deviant behavior, explaining women's involvement in radical opposition movements by referring to and drawing connections between liberation movements, sexuality, and female violence. In its attempts to cover insurgency, Der Spiegel struggles to create and stabilize dichotomies, such as male/female, legitimate/illegitimate violence, and rational/irrational behavior,(1) dichotomies which themselves were radically questioned by the terrorist movement. The dichotomization of legitimate and illegitimate violence was challenged, for example, when the RAF protested the continuation of high-ranking Nazis in positions within the government and administration during the 1960s and 1970s. Terrorist uses of the media, described at length by Schlesinger, led to a broad circulation of such criticism in public discourse. As a consequence, media representations of terrorism themselves become highly charged and ultimately unstable (Schlesinger).

Whereas political terrorism in general undermines dichotomies, female insurgency in particular exacerbates the resulting crisis of representation. The question I pursue in this essay is therefore: How does female insurgency disrupt definitions of gender and violence as they structure the national identity of postwar West Germany? The underlying assumption is that even though questions of gender and violence are central to any national imaginary, postwar Germans seem to have struggled with these issues more than others. Due to a fascist past and a history of fascist constructions of femininity and violence, postwar Germans seem to be especially concerned with articulations of gender and the legitimization or illegitimization of violence.(2)

At the center of this discussion is the question of deviance from accepted norms of feminine behavior. Deviance in general functions, as Foucault reminds us, as a "segment [of discourse] whose tactical function is neither uniform nor stable [and which] can come into play in various strategies" (Foucault, History 100). The link between female noncompliance with traditional roles and political insurgency becomes apparent in many representations of female terrorists as sexually as well as politically deviant. The variable tactical functions of deviance pointed out by Foucault, however, allow such representations to serve a multitude of strategies depending on their political and historical/critical position.

In exploring these issues, I will examine several texts from different political arenas and historical/critical junctures: articles from the political magazine Der Spiegel, which emerged as one of the major liberal contributors to sociopolitical debates in the postwar era; Ulrike Meinhof's Bambule, a television play in the tradition of radical leftist journalism that influenced the political climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s; and, finally, Traude Buhrmann's Fluge uber Moabiter Mauern (Flights over Moabit's Walls), a feminist novel published in the late 1980s by a small feminist press. Each of these texts creates different connections between notions of deviance, gender, and terrorist violence. Positioned by their ideological and historical backgrounds at different points within the "mobile field of force relations" (Foucault, History 102), these texts reflect the changing critical perspectives that developed during the 1970s and 1980s.

In the 1970s, the political press, especially Der Spiegel, strove to maintain traditionally gendered dichotomies, such as hero and victim. Although many of the human targets of terrorist violence were men associated with the public sphere--Axel Springer, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, Jurgen Ponto--Der Spiegel often described them within private contexts, in which women came to stand in as representatives for the male victim. In a photograph of Ponto's funeral ("Frauen" 23) neither the victim's body nor his coffin is featured in the image. Instead, his widow, occupying the center of the photo, looks into a space off to the right side of the frame. Hence, the male victim is displaced and replaced by a female image. This displacement of the male by the female in the representation of victims of terrorism serves to protect a relationship between femininity and victimization, which, as a consequence, reaffirms the traditional link between heroism and masculinity.

Der Spiegel's coverage of the hijacking of an airplane in 1977, the notorious Mogadishu Crisis, makes this link explicit. Here, the hero's masculinity and his position as a representative of the state, as the head of GSG-9,(3) is juxtaposed with the fragility of one female victim, who, confined to a wheelchair, remains powerless and immobilized. In the written text, the opposition of hero and victim serves to postulate a national identity that was to be "copied by the rest of the world" ("`Deutsche'" 5). National identity is based here on male strength, epitomized in an equation between the GSG-9, the exclusively male sport of rugby, and humaneness. According to the text, this combination caught Germans and the rest of the world by surprise. The headline quotes the Wall Street Journal: "'Deutsche konnen stark und menschlich sein" (Germans Can Be Strong and Humane), and the text points out that Germans were rewarded for their rescue efforts with "unexpected solidarity" (4). Ratified by the "praise of the civilized world" ("`Deutsche'" 5), the self-image of the West German nation as powerful and compassionate could prevail. Various scholars of nationalism(4) have pointed out that the stability of gendered differences is essential within the complex dynamics of any national imaginary. The above-mentioned texts from Der Spiegel reflect how, in postwar Germany, gendered difference is employed for the reaffirmation of national power within a patriarchal paradigm. Reified concepts of femininity and masculinity are reiterated and used in an attempt to create a stability of representation that mirrors the integrity of the nation.