Retelling the Classics: Baader-Meinhof and the German Literary Canon

  • Julian Preece
Chapter
Part of the Studies in European Culture and History book series (SECH)

Abstract

Political violence was one of a number of challenges that grew out of the protest movements associated with the year 1968 in the Federal Republic. More far-reaching battles were fought over the meaning of the national culture after the cataclysm brought about by Nazism. In literature, a crisis of tradition was compounded by the rediscovery of past radical periods, such as the pre-1848 Vormärz or even the Sturm und Drang from the decade of young Goethe. A contest for the national literary heritage thus opened up in the wake of the anti-Vietnam demonstrations as part of Rudi Dutschke’s “march through the institutions.” If the national classics were not to be tarred with the nationalist brush, they had to be rediscovered, reappropriated, and reinterpreted. It is no accident that in reimagining left-wing terrorism over the 40-year period that is our subject, German novelists often reinvented traditional forms or archetypal narratives, rewrote classics or adapted national myths. In, the 1970s the Left was showing that the classics belonged to them as much as to the Establishment they were fighting. More recently, the purpose of adaptation has been national reconciliation.

Keywords

Political Violence Protest Movement German History National Classic German Soldier 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

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© Julian Preece 2012

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