as Norman Mailer, John Updike and E. L.. Doctorow âinvoked hip . . . to consolidate the voting constituencies of postwar liberalismâ on behalf of the Democratic ...
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on DeLillo’s short story “Baader–Meinhof” (2002) brings together two people in an art gallery, looking at Gerhard Richter’s cycle of paintings “Oktober 18, 1977” (1988). Richter’s title refers to the date on which three founder members of the terrorist Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) were found dead in their cells in Stuttgart’s Stammheim prison. The fifteen canvases, derived from photographs and painted in blurred monochrome, present scenes from the lives and deaths of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Jan Carl Raspe and their associate Ulrike Meinhof, who had hanged herself in Stammheim eighteen months earlier. It’s not always easy to discern what the paintings show, at least at first. Laconic individual titles – “Tote”, “Erschossener”, “Zelle” – describe but do not explain. The man in DeLillo’s story is unimpressed. He sees “No colour. No meaning”. The woman, who has returned to the gallery for three consecutive days, disagrees: “What they did had meaning. It was wrong but it wasn’t blind and empty. I think the painter’s searching for this. And how did it end the way it did? I think he’s asking this. Everybody dead.” “How else could it end?”, the man asks. What gives “Oktober 18, 1977” its melancholy power and makes it one of the most subtle and enduring responses to the events of the so-called German Autumn is precisely Richter’s refusal to speculate as the woman in the story does, his insistence that the defining narratives and images of German terrorism remain endlessly mediated, fragmented, hard to read. But that exchange between DeLillo’s unnamed characters – the search for meaning, the uncomfortable awareness of the disparities between ends and outcomes and means – goes to the heart of the discussion about the RAF. That discussion was given fresh impetus by the success of Uli Edel’s blockbuster,
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ichael Szalay holds critical office where politics and literature merge. He insists that literature captures and manufactures the political reality of America. His engrossing book, Hip Figures: A literary history of the Democratic Party, sets out to correlate post-war American fiction with concrete political consequences. According to Szalay’s delicate thesis, novelists such as Norman Mailer, John Updike and E. L. Doctorow “invoked hip . . . to consolidate the voting constituencies of postwar liberalism” on behalf of the Democratic Party. Szalay reads the invocation of “invigorating black hip” as an attempt to “reconcile white suburbanites and working-class African Americans”, and therefore to “improve the product” of a party out of step throughout the 1950s. Because “success or failure in political life . . . depends on cultivating particular styles”, hipster novelists were “the most important political strategists of their time”. The success or failure of Hip Figures depends on whether readers accept this causal relationship. Central to the book is Mailer, “the voice of liberal members of the PMC [professional managerial class]”, educated, north-eastern WASPs who replaced labour unions as the Democratic Party’s most powerful base. In order to secure the allegiance of African Americans and represent all things liberal in post-war America, the
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RAF stories IAN B R UNS KIL L Julian Preece BAADER–MEINHOF AND THE NOVEL Narratives of the nation/fantasies of the revolution, 1970–2012 214pp. Palgrave Macmillan. £55 (US $85). 978 0 230 34107 4
Oscar-nominated film Der Baader–Meinhof Komplex (2008). An often heated debate accompanied the film’s release. Was it accurate? Was it fair? Did it glamorize or trivialize the terrorists? Did it exploit the suffering of their victims? Should the state have helped to fund it? Should it have been made at all? (Related questions had been asked of Richter’s work two decades earlier.) Clearly the subject continued to divide and preoccupy Germans even thirty years after the grim days of 1977. Baader–Meinhof and the Novel examines the subject’s grip on the modern literary imagination. Julian Preece, who uses “Baader–Meinhof” (at times a little awkwardly) to refer not just to the RAF itself but “to all the left-wing terrorist groupings over the whole of the period in question”, argues that “politically motivated violence . . . has become a defining theme in contemporary German literature”. He observes that the original leadership of the RAF have “been depicted in more novels than any other Germans from the second half of the twentieth century”. His book is at once an exhaustive survey of those novels, an oblique study of terrorism, and a thoughtful account of the German terrorists’ place in
the history of a nation they undoubtedly helped to shape. Preece is shrewd in his assessment of the political and intellectual vacuum at the heart of Baader–Meinhof. The group’s early actions, as it emerged from the student protests of 1968, were an adolescent attempt to provoke the state into acting as the “fascist” coercive apparatus of radical caricature. Once the original leaders were imprisoned, the RAF’s only real objective was to get them out; for all its rhetoric, it was little more than a lethal personality cult. Violence acquires its own logic. When the bloody campaign to secure the release of Baader, Ensslin and Raspe ended in failure with the Stammheim suicides, the surviving members devoted a further futile twenty years to a murderous memorial campaign. The lack of political substance secured the RAF a depth and breadth of support it could never have enjoyed had it had coherent aims. Preece sees this as central to its literary appeal. “To a considerable degree, novelists have been able to add their own political content. ‘Baader–Meinhof’ is a semi-blank screen on which they project ideas, scenarios and fantasies.” Among the ideas and scenarios most often projected by the novelists Preece discusses are the conflict between generations, the compact between the individual and society, the limits of conscience and responsibility, and questions of personal and collective guilt. Above all, there is the confrontation with the past: the immediate past of Baader–Meinhof itself, a subject which gained resonance as contemporaries and former close associates of the terrorists completed their march through the institutions of German public life; and, of
Vote cool MIC HAE L L AP OINT E Michael F. Szalay HIP FIGURES A literary history of the Democratic Party 324pp. Stanford University Press. $24.95; distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £22.50. 978 0 8047 7635 6
PMC associated with the “charismatic darkness” of hip, a white fantasy of black cool. Mailer’s essay The White Negro: Superficial reflections on the hipster (1957) pointed white males away from the dulling condition of square, secure, suburban life. The White Negro (which Ralph Ellison called “the same old primitivism crap in a new package”) argued that the threat of nuclear holocaust rendered whites and blacks equal: “all now labor under the threat of sudden death as a result of actions not their own”. In this tantalizing proximity to annihilation, Mailer saw an opportunity for the political and sexual liberation of the square PMC. “White Negroes” were empowered to seek “the freedom of the body and the democracy of the flesh”, culmi-
nating in an “apocalyptic orgasm”, a ludicrous phrase Szalay employs as a sounding board for all the old “primitivism crap” of post-war liberalism. Hip style was subject to what Marx terms “derealization”, the “required forgetting of the relations that organize production”, in this case the PMC’s forgetting of the class from which its cool – and wealth – derived. In one ingenious reading, Szalay draws an analogy between be-bop jazz and de-realized hip, as be-bop “coupled a ‘hot’ virtuosic style with a ‘cool’ detached demeanor”, thus eliding the complex relations organizing the music’s production. Hipsters such as Mailer, Updike and William Styron acted as something akin to be-bop novelists, effacing the source of hip until it became palatable to the powerful PMC bloc of the Democratic Party. Szalay is strong on the subject of advertising. Following the paper trail through Madison Avenue’s major agencies, he shows how techniques in market segmentation – discovering, or in some cases, generating niche markets – influenced campaign techniques, especially in the fashion-forward Democratic Party. “Whether selling cars or Democrats,
course, the Nazi past which overshadows all German discussion of these themes. The specifics of the literary response to Baader–Meinhof might have been illuminated by historical comparison (with Conrad, Dostoevsky and some of the early twentieth-century German writers who grappled with the ethics of political violence), or by analysis of writers’ approaches to other kinds of terrorism, such as the right-wing extremism in Uwe Tellkamp’s 2005 novel Der Eisvogel (The Kingfisher). And there are books which may have a claim to more space than they are given by Preece. Rainald Goetz’s extraordinary, infuriating Kontrolliert (1988), for instance, seems to ask just how far it is possible to write meaningfully about this subject at all. But Preece’s range is commendably wide, taking in non-German novels as well as German, and thrillers and crime stories as well as “serious” fiction. Of the books he regards highly and treats at greater length, three may show how responses to Baader–Meinhof have changed during the decades under review. Heinrich Böll’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1974) dramatizes (from within) the process of social polarization which terrorism provoked in Germany in the early 1970s. F. C. Delius’s rather programmatic Deutscher Herbst trilogy (1981–92) lays bare (with growing detachment) the dangerous mutual dependency of terrorism and the state. Ulrich Peltzer’s Teil der Lösung (2007; Part of the Solution) suggests, tellingly, that Baader–Meinhof and their contemporaries may be of little more than academic interest to the generation of radical anti-capitalist protesters who might be seen as their modern counterparts. As Preece concludes, “The narratives from Baader–Meinhof history that have been fictionalised reveal the stories that the fractured German nation wanted and needed to tell itself”. advertisers faced the same problem: how to appeal to blacks without alienating racist whites.” Hip provided the solution, a way to be “white at the office . . . black at the shopping mall”. John F. Kennedy embodied this new Democratic brand, and in the hipster equivalent of purple prose, Mailer dubbed him “the Hipster as Presidential Candidate”. Kennedy had the “patina of that other life, the second American life, the long electric night with the fires of neon leading down the highway to the murmur of jazz”. Kennedy, Mailer wrote, “was In”. Ronald Reagan’s ascent signalled the death of the post-war hip figure. The Democrats again rebranded themselves, this time around neo-liberal tenets, which rejected state activism and embraced big business. But the white fantasy of hip still informed the party’s style, manifested in the saxophone of Bill Clinton – “our first black president”, Toni Morrison wrote – and of course the first “hip-hop president”, Barack Obama. A study of these two latter-day Democrats lies beyond Szalay’s remit, however: Hip Figures ends where “the once literary making of the Democratic Party winds up in the hands of marketing execs and brand managers”. It is a reluctant tribute to a more literate time, when Szalay’s thesis, always compelling if not always convincing, was at least plausible.
