a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Wednesday, April 27, 2005 Faces of Terror Germany in the 1970s suffered from shootings and bombings and bank-holdups by the so-called Red Army Faction (RAF), or Baader-Meinhof Gang, which wanted to hurry up Late Capitalism and tip the corrupt, imperialist, European free market into socialism once and for all. In the name of Marxist revolution and opposition to the Vietnam War they killed dozens of people, even after the glamorous ("radical chic") young faces of the gang -- including Ulrike Meinhof -- died in jail. Kunstwerk's Representing Terror: The RAF in Berlin was yelled about for months before it opened; not even the curators could agree on how to display German art from that period. The (slightly tedious) idea that resulted is to show different images of the RAF: on the one hand newspaper accounts and magazine features; on the other hand a lot of contemporary art, from self-indulgent video installations to the famous, ambivalent series of paintings by Gerhard Richter (pictured above). The exhibit's hugely popular, but what people seem to love is just reading the old articles mounted on the wall. No one seems to notice that the point of the exhibit -- the contrast between press reports (fearful, alarmist, shrill) and most of the art (pretentious, "questioning," often pro-RAF) -- is predictable. A friend of mine told me about meeting Manfred Grasshof, a former RAF member, who spent years in jail for shooting a German cop. "He's very kind and sweet, not angry at all," she told me. "He lives a quiet life and has a job in Berlin. He designs lights in a theater." What's missing from the Kunstwerk show is that sense of transformation. The simple fact that a man might commit an ugly crime in the name of his romantic politics, but still age into a decent and likable human being, trashes clichés on both sides of the RAF debate. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:00 AM
Comments:
That was what fascinated me about watching the Weather Underground documentary. Seeing all these people who could be my parents, mild and articulate, who had gone on to have families, jobs, mortgages. And the two who are still in jail seemed as sweet and even-tempered as you can imagine.
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Although admittedly the WU kids were not as violent as the RAF, and went to great pains to only bomb buildings and offices when there wasn't anyone around. | |
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