Screening the Red Army Faction by Christina Gerhardt

Author:Christina Gerhardt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

4

Diverging Trajectories:

The RAF and Political Alternatives in New German Cinema, 1972–82

While West Germany experienced an increasingly tense atmosphere as a result of the repressive laws and surveillance mechanisms implemented in the 1970s, during the same decade the nation also witnessed an upsurge in labor, women’s and environmental movements, often with very successful outcomes in the struggles—at least in the short term. Due to the ramped up security apparatus described in Chapter 3, the majority of the first generation of the Red Army Faction (RAF) was imprisoned or dead by the decade’s end. New members of the RAF, the so-called second generation after the imprisonment of the majority of the first generation by 1972, were often politicized decidedly less by the international solidarity with Third World self-determination and self-liberation struggles or the Vietnam War, which ended with the Fall of Saigon in 1975,1 and radicalized more by the domestic political landscape and, in particular, prisoner solidarity work. Issues revolving around prison conditions became a focal point. Journalists depicted the conditions, while intellectuals wrote letters and imprisoned members carried out hunger strikes to protest them.

Internationally, too, the sense of Third World solidarity that had loomed large in the 1950s and 1960s dissipated in the 1970s for various reasons. As historian Vijay Prashad argues:

By the 1970s, the new nations were no longer new. Their failures were legion. Popular demands for land, bread and peace had been ignored on behalf of the needs of the dominant classes. Internecine warfare, a failure to control the prices of primary commodities, an inability to overcome the suffocation of finance capital, and more led to a crisis in the budgets of much of the Third World. Borrowings from commercial banks could only come if the states agreed to “structural adjustment” packages from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.2

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