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European Studies
RAF revivalism in German fiction of the 2000s
Journal of European Studies 2010 40: 272
DOI: 10.1177/0047244110371915
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RAF revivalism in German
fiction of the 2000s
Journal of European Studies
40(3) 272–283
© The Author(s) 2010
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co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0047244110371915
http://jes.sagepub.com
Julian Preece
Swansea University
Abstract
The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest among German novelists in the political violence
associated with the Baader-Meinhof Group or RAF in the 1970s. Much of this has been from
writers who were young adults during the student movement and its aftermath. A trio of writers
born between 1956 and 1973, Ulrich Peltzer in Teil der Lösung (2007, Part of the Solution), Thomas
Weiss in Tod eines Trüffelschweines (2007, Death of a Truffle Pig), and Thilo Bock, Die geladene Knarre
von Andreas Baader (2009, The Loaded Shooter of Andreas Baader), depict, in very different ways,
politically motivated violence or planned violence in the present. Each time the cause is globalized
capitalism and each time links are made with the 1970s. There the similarities between them end.
In Peltzer’s highly accomplished novel, whose plot echoes Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, what the
‘solution’ might be is left open. Weiss, in contrast, appears to justify the murder of an American
investor, who furthermore may be Jewish, whose company’s purchase of a formerly German firm
will result in profit for him and job losses for the Germans. Bock, on the other hand, shows
terrorism to be a dark fantasy, for which his narrator pays with his life.
Keywords
‘Agenda 2010’, anti-Semitism, Baader-Meinhof, Thilo Bock, globalization, Ulrich Peltzer, private
equity, Red–Green Coalition, surveillance, Thomas Weiss
The German Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, was
the subject of a number of well-known films associated with the New German Cinema
Movement made in the late 1970s and early 1980s (see Elsaesser, 1999). Novelists, in
contrast, generally held back from putting these self-styled urban guerrillas into either
literary or more popular fiction. While there were exceptions, literary works associated
with ‘the years of lead’ or ‘the German Autumn’, as the period came to be known after
two of the most influential films,1 tend to be personal and introspective or to deal with
the effects of the state response on society at large (e.g. Vesper, 1977; Böll, 1974).2 This
Corresponding author:
Julian Preece, Swansea University, Swansea SA2 8PP, UK
Email: [email protected]
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Preece
has all changed in the last decade. Veteran ‘68ers’, such as Peter Schneider and Uwe
Timm, who originally emerged as writers from the student movement, dealt with the
subject of politically motivated left-wing violence for the first time directly in novels
(Schneider, 2006; Timm, 2001). Popular novelists also turned to the RAF in political
thrillers or detective and crime fiction (Brenner, 2000; Schorlau, 2003; Matthiesen,
2007). Using violence, suspense and sex, in the time-honoured tradition of their genres,
they showed a licence in their use of recent history which would have been unthinkable
in the 1970s and 1980s when the events and their interpretation were still energetically
contested. Yet the substance of their novels is contemporary politics. A political moral,
whether ostensibly radical (Schorlau), conservative (Matthiesen), or harmonizing (Brenner),
is never far from the surface. Mainstream literary novelists are less interested in conspiracy theories or counterfactual history, which are the stuff of genre fiction, but they
use episodes from the history of the RAF to explore the current ‘state of the nation’
(Hein, 2005; Delius, 2004; Krausser, 2006; Schlink, 2008). After all, the RAF itself
depended on the notion that its actions challenged the prevailing system head-on with a
view to replacing it with an alternative revolutionary social and economic order. This
political simplification and the personal courage of individuals prepared to give their
lives for a cause, not to mention their readiness to take others’ lives, can be useful to
novelists needing to personalize complicated political processes.
This article is dedicated to three recent novels set in the first decade of the new century,
which stand out in numerous ways from the bulk of the fiction published since 2000. They
are Teil der Lösung (2007) by Ulrich Peltzer (b. 1956), which is set in Berlin over the hot
summer of 2003, Tod eines Trüffelschweines (2007) by Thomas Weiss (b. 1964), which is
an intervention into a contested area of contemporary economic policy, and Die geladene
Knarre von Andreas Baader (2009) by Thilo Bock (b. 1973), a comic student novel also
set mainly in Berlin in which the action spans the election summer of 2005. All take
German political realities of the 2000s as their starting point. All are by writers at least one
generation younger than the student protestors of 1968. They feature activists or student
protesters who believe themselves to be disenfranchised from decision-making and take
direct steps, ultimately including violence, even murder, to make a difference or to show
defiance. Sometimes, perhaps, they have other less upright or more confused motives.
These characters direct their efforts each time against globalized capitalism and the effects
that they believe this has on German social cohesion, employment or urban space. In all
three the novelists make direct links between the violent activism in the present, which is
fictitious, and the historical violence of the 1970s. Then the main cause was the Vietnam
War and there were a number of bloody attacks on the West German judiciary, American
military bases, and the Axel Springer publishing house, whose newspapers took a demagogic anti-communist and anti-student movement line. In this respect the politics of these
three novels is closer to Hans Weingartner’s internationally acclaimed film Dei fetten
Jahre sind vorbei (released internationally as The Edukators) (2004) than other RAF novels of the 2000s. In Weingartner’s film the trio of activists repeat the slide from playful
violence against property (by re-arranging the expensive furniture in rich people’s houses
while they are on holiday) to endangering human life and taking a hostage. The film has a
double ending. First it appears that they will be caught when a heavily armed police unit
storm their flat. Then it turns out the flat is empty and they are free to plan another more
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worthwhile ‘action’. This is the reverse of the double ending in Bock’s The Loaded
Shooter of Andreas Baader when the narrator pays with his life for his sexually charged
flirtation with violence, which he has already put behind him. In the other two novels,
however, as in The Edukators, violence is seen if not to pay, then to be justified.
There is a nationalist dimension in Death of a Truffle Pig, which tips over into covert
anti-Semitism.3 Here what began in the 1970s as a left-wing cause, however distorted
and misguided, is co-opted by the chauvinist right, whose allegiance to capitalism crumbles when it takes an apparently alien shape and threatens interests identified as German.
Bock is most perceptive on the question of ideological volatility. The bizarre plan in The
Loaded Shooter of Andreas Baader is to assassinate the Social Democrat Chancellor
Gerhard Schröder in order to re-elect the ‘Red–Green’ coalition, which he has led since
1998, on a tide of sympathy votes. This is part of a patriotic mission to save German
town centres from the uniformity that the multinationals with their identical chain stores
and fast-food outlets will impose if the opposition Christian Democrats win back power
and implement their radical manifesto. One of the characters insists: ‘We are doing it in
the end for our country … Our deed will help Germany!’ (Bock, 2009: 277). By the end
of the novel, before he is taken to a psychiatric hospital, Leander, who supplies the murder weapon which allegedly once belonged to the RAF leader Andreas Baader, emerges
as a mentally unstable neo-Nazi thug.
Political fiction underwent something of a renaissance in Germany in the 2000s
because politics was polarized once more. The broad consensus on matters of economic
and foreign policy which had prevailed through the 1980s and 1990s began to crumble.
Helmut Kohl’s 16-year term as Chancellor, which included the historic achievement of
national reunification in 1989–90, ended in 1998 with the election of Schröder’s Red–
Green coalition of Social Democrats and Greens. The new government became associated with two policies, however, which seemed more right- than left-wing. Six months
after taking office it supported the NATO attack on Serbia over Kosovo and, two and a
half years later, the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of the atrocity in
New York on ‘9/11’. Red–Green then changed tack and owed its re-election in 2002 to a
decidedly nationalist opposition to American and British plans to topple Saddam Hussein
in Iraq by military force. This was by some way the greatest defiance of American policy
by a democratically accountable German government since World War II. Once reelected Schröder embarked on a programme of economic reforms called ‘Agenda 2010’
in an attempt to make the German economy more competitive and to bring down stubbornly high unemployment figures. Economists from inside and outside Germany had
been calling for these reforms for a decade. Schröder’s implementation of them split the
German Social Democratic Party, however, as the grassroots believed he was dismantling key components of the welfare state. ‘Agenda 2010’ also fostered a sense that globalized neo-Liberal Anglo-American capitalism, which put profit and shareholder value
above long-term investment and social wellbeing, was set to replace the cherished solidarity which underpinned the German ‘social market economy’. If the trio of novels
discussed in this article are reliable seismographs of the national mood, then the anger
and thwarted violent protest in Peltzer’s Part of the Solution gives way to cold-blooded
murder in Weiss’s Death of a Truffle Pig. The novels were published either side of
the thirtieth anniversary of the German Autumn, in September and December 2007
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respectively. Two years later, in Bock’s ‘historical novel set in the present’ (to paraphrase
slightly his subtitle, ‘historischer Gegenwartsoman’) a confused flirtation with violence
rebounds fatally on the would-be assassin, who has already thought better of his plan.
The election of 2005, which state serves as the narrative backdrop to The Loaded
Shooter of Andreas Baader, is a turning point in recent German politics. At the outset of
the campaign, a coalition of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and Guido Westerwelle’s
Liberals in the Free Democrats, which was indeed formed after the next election in 2009,
seemed a foregone conclusion. In the end, on election night, when Bock’s novel reaches
its dramatic climax, Schröder lost by a whisker, but reacted as if he had triumphed and
vowed to stay on as head of government. He had confounded the opinion polls. Yet the
result was a grand coalition of Christian and Social Democrats, headed by Merkel, who
put her radical manifesto to one side. Consensus on the big questions returned. This is the
perspective from which Bock was writing his novel. The following summer saw the World
Cup staged in a unified Germany. For the first time since 1945, the whole nation, it seemed,
rallied behind the national flag to cheer on the national team and welcome the rest of the
world to Germany. A popular documentary film of the tournament was called Deutschland
– Ein Sommermärchen (Germany – A Summer Fairy Tale, dir. Sönke Wortmann) in a
reversal of Heinrich Heine’s 1844 coruscating satirical poem on the pre-revolutionary
state of the nation, Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen (Germany. A Winter’s Tale). The link
with the 1970s era of domestic terrorism is the omnibus film, Germany in Autumn, (1978,
dir. Kluge et al.), which adapted Heine’s poem, and the conclusion is that the dark era
associated first with Nazism, then with the RAF, is over.
The most ambitious of the three novels is Part of the Solution, which is a significant
work on a number of counts.4 Peltzer starts from the basic proposition that most experience in the contemporary world is mediated. What we say and do has been said and done
already by others who have produced images or written descriptions of their experiences
and utterances which are known to us. Originality and authenticity with respect to either
action or expression are thus in decline, but there is still limited space for them. This
space is, however, tightly controlled and likely to be corporately owned. The epitome of
the modern mediated and controlled world is Berlin’s new Sony Center, which is built on
the site of the historic pre-war Potsdamer Platz, the former hub of the bustling pre-war
city. At the Sony Center spontaneous action, performance, protest, even street-selling
which is not sanctioned by the multinationals who pay the rents are all forbidden.
Infringements are quickly spotted by security personnel through closed-circuit television.
The prologue to the novel, which is set here, enacts its plot in miniature. The group of
protesters, which include Nele, one of the two central characters, dressed as a circus ring
master in a bowler hat, a clown, and two ballerinas, draw the attention of the passers-by
to the presence of the cameras which are filming them. They use mime and a series of
hand-held placards to make their point. Their slogans are in the Situationist tradition of
Paris 1968: Everything is only a game! Is the world not beautiful? You are not allowed to
laugh, Protection for everyone, Thank you–thank you–thank you, You are being watched,
Thank you for your mercy, I want my picture, Hey, we are here, Everything all right, Mr
Inspector? (Peltzer, 2007: 10–13). The ballerinas produce digital cameras to film the
guards who come to expel them from the private property. This is a contest for space:
‘“Public space”, says the clown. “We have rights.” “This is not a public space” … “This
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is private property”’ (2007: 16). The protesters depart peacefully, the shoppers and tourists
who have played their role in the performance by watching and clapping will soon forget
the incident. For next time the protestors will reconsider their options.
Klaus Witzke has worked for the state security police (‘Verfassungsschutz’) since
the late 1960s, infiltrating such protest groups as the wandering Hash Rebels
(Umherschweifende Haschrebellen). He shows more than a hint of sympathy for the
protestors of 2003 and explains some of their motives to a colleague from the Federal
Criminal Bureau (Bundeskriminalamt):
If you were young, dissatisfied with the way the world is, angry about poverty and hunger,
increasing unemployment, and you realise that in fact you do not have any legal means to
change anything. No mass movement, no party that you can join. Instead bent deals between
the politicians and the people you think are responsible, the bankers, who earn as much in a
month as a million Africans in a year. That by itself is radicalizing. (Peltzer, 2007: 349–50)
This, in a nutshell, was the anti-capitalist agenda of the 2000s as Peltzer presents it.
Nele’s older lover Christian is a typical representative of what came to be known in postunification Germany as the ‘Prekariat’: that is, a creative or ‘brain’ worker who depends on
scraping a living from short-term or part-time contracts, one of an army of freelancers
dependent on Berlin’s cheap rents. As a journalist, however, he is part of this same world
that Nele protests against, turning reality into verbal patterns in return for money. He is also
trying to write a novel, which stands apart from the media-saturated world that he inhabits,
and is researching the extradition from France to Italy of former Red Brigade militants or
‘terrorists’. Both his research and his novel are forms of rebellion, but both are also eminently susceptible to co-option into the mediated world that Nele protests against and which
provides him with his bread and butter. This is the contradiction in which Christian lives.
Nele’s clandestine activities as an anti-globalization protester, which threaten to escalate out
of control before her cell is broken up by the police, are more direct gestures of defiance.
If Peltzer as a novelist has anything in common with his two main characters, it is an
abhorrence of cliché. Essential details about birth and background, which a realist author
delivers in a first paragraph, emerge as incidentals in subordinate clauses. Peltzer proceeds similarly with respect to the connections between the present of Nele’s cell of
activists, Christian’s precarious professional existence, and the RAF of the 1970s. Using
the Red Brigades instead of the Red Army Faction as the reference point in the 1970s is
original. German readers are likely to recognize the novel’s title from a prison communication written by Holger Meins just before his death from self-induced starvation in
November 1974. Meins is replying to a fellow prisoner who is considering giving up his
‘hunger strike’. His words, which have been much quoted, are strangely poetic in the
brutality of their crude binary logic:
either person or pig
either survival at any price or
struggle to the death
either problem or solution
there is nothing in between. (Conradt, 2001: 155)
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No-one refers to the phrase ‘problem or solution’ in the novel or even mentions Meins or
any of the other RAF by name. One of Nele’s activist comrades is called Holger, however. Nele herself used to play the cello and studies German literature, as the RAF leader
Gudrun Ensslin did. In an argument between Holger and an unnamed female comrade in
the cell over ways and means, the purpose of carrying out actions, and the way forward,
Holger does quote another famous line. His comrade’s point has been that revolutionary
action has to have an effect: ‘Signs are emptied of meaning if they do not have consequences’ (Peltzer, 2007: 390). For Holger it is more a question of personal probity, of
showing where you stand:
Because some time or other you have to draw a line of separation. Perhaps that is the only
reason.
And perhaps that is not enough.
You have to decide that for yourself. (2007: 391)
The Maoist notion of ‘drawing a line of separation’ (‘einen Trennungstrich ziehen)
between the activist and the oppressive ‘pig system’ was an essential tenet of RAF doctrine. The consensus view on the left in Germany is that Meins and the rest of the RAF,
while undoubtedly brave, did not point the way forward for radical protest or revolutionary action. To give a novel a title which brings to mind one of their best-known phrases
must suggest that the novelist has found an answer to the question of what being ‘part of
the solution’ in real life is. As the narrative focus throughout the novel is on Christian and
Nele it seems reasonable to assume that it must lie with them and their actions.
The most significant missing information relates to the novel’s ending. After Nele has
accompanied Christian to Paris to carry out an interview with a Red Brigade veteran, she
discovers by text message that two of her comrades back in Germany have been arrested.
In anger and frustration, she accuses Christian of exploiting the Red Brigade survivors
for a newspaper story. If Christian is to be ‘part of the solution’ then he must have another
purpose for the information or abandon the interview. After separating from him, we last
see her return to the café where he is sitting, which suggests a reconciliation between
them. What will happen to her as a result of her cell being broken up is left open. Neither
do we know whether he will carry out his interview. He is met as arranged by a contact
and then apparently dropped before the interview can take place, perhaps because his
concern for Nele have led him to disregard an instruction, perhaps because he has taken
Nele’s advice.
As a Berlin novel, Part of the Solution was inevitably compared with Alfred Döblin’s
1929 classic Berlin Alexanderplatz, but its most significant intertext is George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four. There are superficial similarities in the plot, and in the age and
profession of the central male characters, both of whom are older than their female lovers. Both Winston Smith and Christian have a failed marriage or long-term relationship
behind them. For both, writing is a means of retaining integrity. Each time the love
affairs are a locus for defiance and the younger woman takes a lead with respect to protest: like Winston and Julia, Christian and Nele need to find a location out of view of the
CCTV cameras to make love. Each time too the security services have them in their
sights and take them by surprise. In Nineteen Eighty-Four the acts of terrorism are
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Journal of European Studies 40(3)
committed by the state and blamed on an enemy superpower with the aim of keeping the
population in a state of war readiness. By the end Winston is not only crushed by
O’Brien’s Thought Police, he is worked over by them to the point that he believes what
he is told, that ‘two plus two equals five’. He not only has no will of his own, he has no
memory of ever having had one. He also betrays Julia, as she betrays him. Christian and
Nele, in contrast, appear to be together at the end, bowed but not defeated. Nele has survived to fight another day. Christian, if anything, will be radicalized by her and will reassess his activities as an investigative journalist.
Thomas Weiss’s Death of a Truffle Pig is a briefer, altogether more prosaic and more
doctrinaire piece of fiction about the buyout of a once German firm by an American
investment company. It consists of 63 sections, varying in length from a paragraph to
four or five pages, which are either segments of narrative or purportedly documentary
sources, such as a newspaper article, a transcript of an interview or a court judgment. The
nearest the book has to a controlling narrative presence is a journalist on a local newspaper called Wolfgang Marx. This results in what amounts to the book’s nicest conceit:
recent German economic history is being reported back to Marx. The ‘truffle pig’ in
question is an American of Austrian descent (who is possibly Jewish) called Marc
Schworz. His investment company finances the purchase of a former German manufacturer of bathroom equipment by borrowing against the company’s assets. Its intention is
to make a high return after closing down the German factory and relocating abroad where
labour is cheaper. Weiss bases part of the action on the real-life case of the Grohe company, which also made bathware equipment and which, after being sold by a British
consortium to the Texas Pacific Group for an estimated 1.5 billion euros in 2005, closed
its factory in Herzberg in the former East Germany, resulting in the loss of 300 jobs.
Weiss changes Grohe to Grothe, Herzberg to Nierenberg, Pacific to Atlantic, doubles the
number of job losses, and post-dates the action to nearer the time of publication. The
book is linked with a number of more general questions which had dominated the political and economic news in the first half of the 2000s. In the build-up to the 2005 election
the SDP chairman Franz Münterfering referred to private equity firms such as the Texas
Pacific Group as ‘locusts’. He was looking for votes: the Red–Green coalition was on the
point of collapse after the SPD suffered a string of humiliating regional election results
on account of ‘Agenda 2010’. Outside Germany Münterfering was accused of using antiSemitic rhetoric. This was probably unfair since there was no evidence that he was aware
he was attacking anybody or any institution of Jewish origins. Weiss, however, makes up
for this.
The case at the heart of Weiss’s book is invented: the murder of Marc Schworz by
Klaus Heuser, a Grothe employee of nearly 30 years standing who is now set to lose his
job. Before he joined the company as a chauffeur Heuser was a member of the GSG9
commando. This crack force played a crucial role in the denouement of the German
Autumn in 1977 by storming the passenger jet at Mogadishu in which some 80 German
tourists were held hostage by Palestinian hijackers, who demanded the release of the
RAF leadership from prison in Germany. This link between a politically inspired murder
in 2006 and 1970s terrorism is underscored by reports of the impending release from
prison of two RAF prisoners, Christian Klar and Brigitte Mohnhaupt, who led the
German-based campaign to release their imprisoned comrades in 1977. For some, Klar’s
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anti-capitalist statements were a sign that he was not fit for a presidential pardon, as they
show he has no remorse and cannot distance himself from his past. For Weiss’s citizens
of Nierenberg, the analysis of the situation that Klar provides is correct.
Weiss drops a couple of hints regarding the murder victim’s possibly Jewish identity,
which, as they are not picked up by any of the characters in the book, seem to be aimed
directly at his readers. ‘Schworz’ is not an obviously Jewish name but his wife has a
friend called Ruth Morgenthaler, which clearly is Jewish (and the only reason for including the name of this friend seems to be her name). New Yorkers of Austrian descent are
overwhelmingly Jewish refugees but they were born at least 30 years before 1 May 1968,
which is given as Schworz’s birthday. The symbolic date indicates that in place of the
international revolutionary solidarity that the protestors dreamed of in the year he was
born, we now have globalized investment companies funded by private equity. Schworz’s
date of birth and Austrian origins thus do not match up. There is another detail, which is
clearly not redundant, and that is the date that the Texas Atlantic Group assume ownership of Grothe: 8 May 2006. This is a month after Schworz’s murder and the sixty-first
anniversary of the unconditional surrender at the end of World War II, which was known
as the ‘Day of Liberation’ in East Germany and the ‘Day of Capitulation’ in the West.
There is no question what it signifies for Weiss. Once again, Germany has been defeated
by American forces, military in 1945, financial in 2006.
Weiss juxtaposes three historical time sequences: the present of 2006–7, the Third
Reich of 1933–45, and the ‘years of lead’ from 1972, which saw the massacre of
Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics by Palestinian terrorists, and 1977, when
Heuser took part in the storming of the passenger jet at Mogadishu. The ‘German
Autumn’ began with the kidnapping of the leading industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer,
which entailed the killing of his driver and three bodyguards. Heuser’s killing of
Schworz in a wooded area and his choice of words in his communiqué recall the killing of Schleyer on 19 October 1977, two days after the dramatic events in Mogadishu
and a day after Baader and Ensslin killed themselves in prison, wanting the world to
believe that they had been murdered. Heuser ends his communiqué: ‘we have for this
reason put an end to the nauseating action of rummaging through the brandenbug soil
in search of profit by schworz and his greedy snout’ (Weiss, 2007: 19). The association
with a pig’s snout has anti-Semitic overtones. Weiss reproduces the RAF’s communiqué dated 19.10.77 after his account of Mogadishu. It begins with a sentence which
Heuser evidently echoes: ‘we have after 43 days ended hanns-martin schleyer’s miserable and corrupt existence’ (2007: 74).
Yet Heuser’s murder is compared directly with the most famous attempt on Hitler’s
life – that carried out in Munich in November 1939 by Georg Elser. In true RAF tradition
Heuser calls his one-man ‘commando’ after Elser. Another echo of the past, which Weiss
this time did not invent but which he underlines, is that the code name for the commando
operation in Mogadishu, ‘Fire Magic’, was the same as that used by the Legion Condor
which carried out the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica in April 1937 during the
Spanish Civil War. The continuity that Weiss thereby establishes is between Hitler’s
Germany in 1937 and Helmut Schmidt’s 40 years later. Yet former Chancellor Schmidt
is mentioned in the novel as the author of articles in Die Zeit criticizing ‘predatory capitalism’. Schmidt, like Heuser, has thus switched sides.
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A number of other things have apparently changed in Germany since 1977. Heuser
joined GSG9 from conviction, having been revolted by the massacre of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics which resulted from a bungled German attempt to release
them. In the years following 1977, however, he is said to have researched the Palestinian
hijackers of the passenger jet and come to understand what motivated them. Weiss
explains too what motivated the Palestinians of ‘Black September’ who took the Israeli
athletes hostage in Munich. There are thus two reasons for Heuser’s change of sides
between 1977 and 2006: his personal experience of the effects of ‘predatory capitalism’
and his increased knowledge of the Arab–Israeli conflict.
Weiss’s invented tale of terror in 2006 is remarkable for a number of reasons. The
politically inspired murder is not based on a real case, which makes the novel unusual
among fictional treatments of terrorism which involve murder. Furthermore, the novel
presents the murder as justified, as Heinrich Böll in The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum
had presented her shooting of a tabloid journalist as comprehensible if not justified (Böll,
1974). What is even more striking is that reviewers, while stating that the murder of an
investment banker was not the most effective way of combating the threat posed by
international finance to German business and jobs, did not take issue with Weiss’s premises, nor with his presentation of the ‘facts’ of the case.
Bock’s The Loaded Shooter of Andreas Baader is a racier narrative, packed with adolescent jokes and student sex. Yet the attitude to politics it ultimately conveys is more mature
than in either of the novels by Peltzer and Weiss. The election of 2005, which provides the
backdrop for the novel, was one of the most bizarre in the history of the Federal Republic.
It centred on the fundamental question of which economic model the country should adopt.
Schröder took the unusual step of bringing forward an election he seemed certain to lose
after his party suffered a string of defeats in regional and European elections, culminating
in the loss to the Christian Democrats of the SPD’s heartland state, North Rhine Westphalia,
in May 2005. The reasons for his own and his party’s unpopularity was ‘Agenda 2010’.
Critics in the CDU, however, claimed that his reforms were half-hearted and they said the
country needed more. Angela Merkel promised an even stronger dose of neo-liberalism to
modernize the welfare state, as well as employment and tax laws. Schröder promptly positioned himself to her left. In the words of Bock’s central character Sebastian Singer: ‘he has
forgotten that he is the Chancellor, he is campaigning against his own policies’ (Bock, 2009:
315). The plan discussed by Sebastian and his friends Rieke and Leander to shoot Schröder
in order to win sympathy votes for the SPD and keep the left in government is in a sense no
more illogical than the Chancellor’s own behaviour. Its aim is from the start the opposite of
the violence carried out in Part of the Solution and Death of a Truffle Pig.
The Loaded Shooter of Andreas Baader is half Bildungs-, half Desillusionierungsroman
(novel of education or disillusionment). It chronicles Sebastian’s belated self-discovery
and process of social, sexual and political maturation, at the end of which he has rid
himself of what he took to be his ideals. Born in 1978, thus not even alive at the same
time as Baader, whose gun his friend Leander claims to possess, Sebastian voted for the
first time in 1998 when Red–Green won for the first time. He admits towards the beginning that he does not understand much about politics, the welfare state and the cuts in
unemployment benefit known as ‘Hartz IV’. He agrees that it is bad that 85 per cent of
Germans shop at Aldi, but he boycotts its rival Lidl because Lidl exploits its workers. He
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agrees with student friends that it is bad too that all high streets are the same, that it is no
longer possible to buy single postage stamps, and that there is a ban on barbecues in
Berlin’s public parks and restrictions on drinking in public spaces. The students’ politics
is confused. As the sensible Luzie says, ‘We are furious, but don’t know what with’
(2009: 377). Their knowledge of the RAF, however, comes from a mixture of books and
hearsay, pop music and consumer culture. Most of the time most of them seem well
adjusted to their environment. They fantasize about shooting the Chancellor or another
politician – ‘In the end it doesn’t matter a dam who we shoot … they’re all corrupt’
(2009: 112). When Rieke turns up in Sebastian’s bedroom with a gun, which falls out of
her handbag as they begin to make love, he is aroused. The shooter’s main function until
the final episode is as a fetishized aid to their love-making. Its connection with Baader
turns out to be a rather different kind of fantasy on the part of Leander.
Enthralled by the gun-toting Rieke’s prowess in the bedroom, Sebastian makes a
series of mistakes and misjudgments about character and situations. The novel has two
endings. The first is a harmonious conclusion which sees Sebastian begin a relationship
with Luzie, who is so level-headed she even thought of voting for Merkel. They are ready
to watch the election results on television, sitting on Sebastian’s bed, sipping Sekt and
beer, and listening to his favourite band Bright Eyes. Rieke then returns after an absence
of several days. They had last seen each other when they cleared out Leander’s ‘underground’ flat, Leander having been sectioned to a psychiatric ward of Berlin’s Charité
hospital. Contradicting his assertion that they had split up after their loud love-making
session, Rieke produces the ‘shooter’ of the novel’s title and aims it straight at her errant
former boyfriend. The last line of the novel leaves little doubt that she shoots him dead:
‘And then Rieke pulled the trigger’ (2009: 471).
If Rieke is a femme fatale for the 2000s, The Loaded Shooter is not a thriller. The
genre that Bock looks back on is the 68er student novel by writers such as Uwe Timm
(Heisser Sommer, 1974) and F. C. Delius (Amerikahaus und der Tanz um die Frauen,
1995). The male central character is a student, fretting over an essay or seminar presentation, the topics of which illustrate the fusty, unimaginative way of academic life in pre-68
West Germany. In 2005 students have a wider range of specialisms. Economics students
are said to be always busy. We never see Sebastian actually studying but he does come
face to face with his tutor at a social occasion as the tutor has started a romantic relationship with fellow student, Steff. Sebastian tries to be relaxed, but his social skills abandon
him during an argument about political assassinations and he runs out of the beer garden
where they have been sitting. This is not the only time that he finds himself unequal to a
social occasion. His studies should be helping him make sense of the political world that
he spends so much time thinking about in connection with reports in the media, but on
sitting down opposite his tutor he thinks to himself ‘I cannot even get a grip on the exact
topic, something to do with the constitution and political crises’ (2009: 354). In the 68er
student novel the academics were out of step with contemporary life and politics, which
contributed to the alienation experienced by the central character. Here the alienation is
superficial, ultimately imagined because it cannot name its cause or find a referent.
After Sebastian flees from the beer garden he spends an enchanting and chaste night
walking through a park with Luzie. The conversation eventually turns to her current
topic of study. She hesitates before telling him.
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Journal of European Studies 40(3)
‘I am learning’, she said, ‘about masturbation.’
‘About what?’ I turn my head to Luzie but she is still staring at the stars, but the corner of her
mouth which is turned in my direction is pointing upwards. She must be grinning.
‘Masturbation is one of the most frequent forms of sexual activity, for which furthermore you
do not need a partner.’
‘I am aware of that.’
‘I find that reassuring’, Luzie says, and looks at me grinning in a way that could be called
suggestive.
‘And you are preparing that for an exam?’
‘Well, why not, even thwarted reproduction is part of biology and the examiners will find it a
bit different, but I know men don’t like talking about it.’
‘Really, is that true?’
‘When did you last have a wank?’ Luzie asks and I feel that she has caught me out. (2009: 382)
Sebastian’s problem with Luzie is that he can never tell her what he has been doing with
Rieke and Leander. She misreads his embarrassment over her question. He is embarrassed
about his secret life with Rieke, which centres around the gun and their shared dark fantasies. Not long before, Rieke had ordered him at gunpoint to masturbate in front of her.
Luzie’s seminar topic highlights too the real purpose of their project which is entirely selfcentred, satisfying their wants, quelling their anger or distracting them from their boredom.
Bock’s novel is a comic caper, but it has a serious point to make in the context of fiction on the RAF and its would-be imitators in the present. The novels engaging with the
RAF which appeared in the 2000s by older writers such as Timm, Schneider, Delius and
Schlink, all born in the 1940s, distanced themselves from violent protest, which seemed
an attractive and worthwhile option to some of the writers’ contemporaries and to some
characters in the novels. The younger generation of writers, exploring a political landscape which does not necessarily appear to have changed fundamentally over the previous 30 or more years, appear to have needed to learn their lessons again.
Notes
1 These are, respectively, Margarethe von Trotta’s Die bleierne Zeit (1981), released internationally as either The German Sisters or Marianne and Juliane, and Deutschland im Herbst
(Germany in Autumn, dir. Alexander Kluge et al., 1978).
2 See Hoeps (2001) for a full critical bibliography.
3 For an account of the latent anti-Semitism among at least elements of the original student
movement, see Kraushaar (2005).
4 It has already been reprinted twice in paperback.
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References
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Author Biography
Julian Preece is Professor of German Studies at Swansea University. He is the author (with
Waldemar Lotnik) of Nine Lives: Ethnic Conflict in the Polish-Ukrainian Borderlands
(1999); The Life and Work of Günter Grass: Literature, History, Politics (2001/4); and
The Rediscovered Writings of Veza Canetti: Out of the Shadows of a Husband (2007). He
has edited numerous books, including The Cambridge Companion to Kafka (2002) and,
since 1996, the proceedings of the Bradford, now Leeds–Swansea, Series on Contemporary
German Literature.
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