Between identification and documentation, 'autofiction' and 'biopic':: The lives of the RAF (Germany, terrorism)

Since the mid-1970s the RAF has generated a variety of different forms of 'life-writing', ranging from memoirs written by ex-terrorists to autobiographical fiction by contemporaries which explores the interaction between an authorial narrator and a central terrorist character. Film-makers, echoing novelists, have often focussed on the life of an individual terrorist. While the view that an individual's turning to the RAF or one of its related groupings could be explained through biographical experience has been discredited by the evidence now available, RAF memoirs are of limited value in other respects because their authors are unable to reflect critically on their past. In fiction (by writers such as Timm, Chotjewitz, and Demski) and films (by von Trotta, Schlondorff, and Conradt) which depict the first RAF generation it becomes clear that what is made of the life is more challenging than the life itself. The same appears true of the largely non-fictional treatment of Ulrike Meinhof. Younger writers and playwrights (Dresen, Kuckart, Scholz, Loher) and film-makers (Veiel), while struggling to make links between the recent past and the present, show much greater distance to the material, sometimes to the point of incorporating the points of view of the RAF's opponents and victims. In addition to generational affiliation the gender of both author/film-maker and particular terrorist subject also determines in unexpected ways the depiction of RAF lives.