Imagining Oktober

"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." (1 Corinthians 13)

German Spectre

Sometimes seeing less, or trying not to overcome the obscurity, reveals more about the subject. This is precisely the case for the subject matter of Gerhard Richter’s collection, 18 Oktober 1977. It is perhaps one of the most controversial works of fine art in modern history because it forces us to revisit a violent chapter of the recent history whose reverberation is still strongly felt today. These sombre monochrome paintings represent the images relating to the deaths of the masterminds of the notorious radical left militant group, Rote Armee Faktion (the Red Army Faction), or better known as the Baader-Meinhof group. They were all found dead in Stammheim secure prison near Stuttgart with the notable exceptions: the group’s de facto spokesperson, Ulrike Meinhof, was found dead in her cell earlier on 9 May 1976; and Holger Mains who died of starvation earlier as the result of a hunger strike over the prison conditions. Whilst the police reported the suicide, the public suspicion has persisted over the cause of their untimely death. Aside from the general distrust of authority in Germany at the time, there are some grounds to support the suspicion amongst the public: 1) the experts who analysed the forensic reports regarding their deaths cast doubts on the claim of suicide; and 2) the only survivor, Irmgard Möller, spoke of having been attacked and stubbed on the night when three other inmates died. Yet with the impossibility of re-examining concrete forensic evidence at the site means that the truth about their death is always shrouded in obscurity despite the intense public interest.

As if to reflect on the darkly ambiguous nature of the subject, these intentionally obscured monochrome images are based on the photographic images Richter gathered from newspapers and police reports on the incidents in question. With the ghastly brushstrokes on the canvases, the collection reminds us of the most traumatic chapter from German history since the collapse of the Third Reich, that is, the series of bloody terrorist attacks carried out by the RAF and its allies during the 1970s. To raise the fund for their operation, the RAF members conducted a string of bank robberies and at one point Baader likened themselves to the protagonists of a Hollywood movie, Bonnie and Clyde. They also engaged in a series of deadly bombings. Their targets include: American government facility in Frankfurt am Mein, West Berlin British Yacht Club in support of the IRA, Campbell Barracks in Heidelberg and Axel Springer Verlag. Responding to the arrest of its leaders, the so-called second generation RAF and its allies engaged in a series of bloody campaigns: Munich Massacre which claimed the lives of 11 Israeli Olympic athletes in 1972 by the Black September; Lufthansa Flight 615 hijacking in 1972 by a Palestinian group; the assassination of Günter von Drenkmann, the president of German Supreme Court by the 2nd June Movement, a splinter group of the RAF; the kidnapping of Peter Lorenz, a Christian Democratic candidate for the Mayor of West Berlin, by the 2nd June Movement which successfully exchanged hostages with the members detained for nonviolent offences; the RAF storming and hostage-taking of the German Embassy in Stockholm, Sweden, which ended with the execution of two hostages and the death of two terrorists by the bomb-explosion; the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181 by Commando Martyr Halima, four members of the group called Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; the assassination of the attorney general of West Germany, Siegfried Buback, by the RAF; the botched kidnapping and the resulting murder of Jürgen Ponto, the head of Deutsche Bank, by the RAF; and the kidnapping and the subsequent murder of Hanns Martin Schleyer, a former SS ranking member and the president of the German Employers’ Association by the RAF, to name a few.

Many of these attacks were carried out in order to win a concession from the German government, namely, the release of the prominent members of the RAF: Andreas Baader, Gudrun Enslin, Ulrike Meinhof and Jan Carl Raspe. West German government resisted the repeated demands and finally, after the release of the passengers of Lufthansa Flight 181 by GSG 9, a special task force of West German police formed in response to the Munich Massacre, the series of events called German Autumn culminated with the deaths of Baader, Enslin and Raspe on ‘Death Night’, on 18 October 1977. The murky circumstances of their deaths spawned various conspiracy theories and the German authority did not help the matter: there were many unanswered questions based on forensics, yet the government stuck with their suicide theory without attempting to comprehensively defend it scientifically. The autopsy concluded that Baader shot himself in the neck, 3 cm above the hairline in a direction that made the bullet come out through the forehead from a straight trajectory, yet repeated tests demonstrated that it was impossible for someone to have held a gun and shot himself in this way. The forensic report stated that there were a total of three shot fired in Baader’s cell, which has been deemed suspicious. Some attempted to explain by suggesting that Baader shot twice to signal his ‘comrades’ to commence ‘the suicide pact’, yet the cell was soundproof. One bullet was found on the wall, one in the mattress and the fatal one on the floor. Moreover, according to the findings of a ballistics expert, Dr Roland Hoffman, the bullet must have been fired from a distance of between 30 and 40 centimetres. Hoffman also contended that, given a small amount of gunpowder that was found, the gun must have been equipped with a silencer, which was not present in the cell. There were a few other anomalies regarding gunpowders. Firstly, there was no gunpowder trace on Raspe's hands, despite him having held the gun used for his alleged suicide. This must be considered unusual, since one cannot shoot a gun without a trace of gunpowder on one’s hand. Secondly, Baader had gunpowder on his right hand, despite his being left-handed. In addition, there were no fingerprints found on either Raspe's or Baader's guns or the kitchen knife with which Möller allegedly stubbed herself. Ensslin’s death also raised many unanswered questions. The chair which she allegedly used to hang herself was too far away from her body, and the cable used to hang her body was not robust enough to withstand the impact of hanging. Yet, as detailed as these findings were, none could draw a clear conclusion.

To add to the confusion, there were contradictory informations about the mental states of the inmates: some revealed Enslin’s fear of becoming a victim of extrajudicial killings, the fate she believed had befallen upon Meinhof, whilst others supported the suicide theory: they entered voluntarily a suicide pact and decided to kill themselves in case where the hijacking of Lufthansa 181 should end in failure. As for Meinhof, she made it explicit to her sister that she had no intention of ending her life and warned of the possible extrajudicial killing in prison. The second autopsy of Meihof's body sponsored by her sister found that the first one omitted the histamine-test which must have been employed in normal circumstances to establish whether a person was alive when she/they/he was hanged. The hand nails were cut, and thus the team was unable to establish whether there was a struggle. And Meinhof’s face and body lacked some common signs of death by hanging. Yet, the team was unable to conclusively establish the facts regarding the death, for several vital organs, including Meinhof’s brain, were removed, and they were denied access to the first autopsy report.

Given the opacity surrounding the circumstances of their deaths, it is important to examine the ambiguity that dictates Richter’s method and his intent behind it. These pictures were based on publicly available images from police reports and newspaper articles. Whilst Richter is known for his photorealistic paintings, on this occasion, he resorted to blurred monochrome, his signature mode for historic subjects such as the ghastly portrayal of warplanes exemplified by a famous picture of a scrambling F-4 Phantom squadron. These are subtle paintings: unlike earlier historical paintings such as the bloody scenes from the Peninsular War by Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, whilst the very choice of the subject matter is provocative, and the mode of presentation is undoubtedly eery, Richter’s work remains ambiguous regarding his intent: it allows various interpretations by the viewers. Its overall effect is distressing, yet the exact nature and the scope of critique expressed by each painting remain obscure. The ambiguity is still greater regarding 17 Oktober 1978: they are enigmatic paintings about the unresolved events shrouded in secrecy. The centrality of the factual ambiguity of the events and the resulting uncertainty over our ability to interpret the happening is clear from the fact that Richter presented two distinct versions of the scene from Baader’s cell: Richter presented two paintings identically titled ‘A Man Shot Down’. Each version is based on the same photography representing the body of Andreas Baader in his cell, yet two exhibit different degrees of obscurity: whilst the first painting is more detailed and thus Baader’s face is recognisable, the second one is almost completely washed-out and the effect is terrifying; paradoxically the death becomes much closer to us with Baader’s white-out visage.

The fact that there are two distinct versions based on the same photograph means one thing: these are the interpretation of historic events by the painter. Yet, the effect of his paintings further obscures already enigmatic events. Unlike Goya, Richter is not taking a stand or making an explicit statement or a commentary on the events in question. The enigmatic nature of this circle irritated the German public, who felt the need to take a clearly defined position on the issue at hand. The state has been quite defensive regarding their official view: the fact that an independent newsletter was fined on account of promoting the theory of state-extrajudicial killings of Meinhof, Baader, Enslin and Raspe demonstrates just how sensitive the issue remains to Germans. Moreover, the Left regarded Richter’s ambiguity as a typical bourgeois anesthetisation of contentious historical issues. They accused Richter of side-stepping the subject in its entirety whilst framing these events as ‘mere art’, that is, the commodity to be exhibited and consumed by the affluent elites of the post-WWII European/American establishments. The ideological contention in Germany regarding the series became so intense that Richter finally gave up the idea of keeping the series on German soil and accepted the proposal from MOMA, who purchased the entire project with undisclosed sum: he stated that the paintings and its meanings may be better appreciated from a certain distance. An unexpected return of German spectre by the hands of one of the most celebrated contemporary painters was, and still is, impactful: it not only stirred the forgotten wound and forced the public to face uncomfortable questions about German identity, but also has raised an uncomfortable question regarding the general use of force as the means to resolve social and political ‘divisions’.

Broken Mirror

As we have seen, it is a gross understatement to call the public reactions to 17 Oktober 1978 contentious. Whilst one may be overwhelmed by the sheer intensity of such public engagements over these paintings and the events interpreted by them, there are two aspects to all of these contentions: one is specific to the historical context of modern German history; the other is relevant to all modern democratic societies. In what follows, I shall examine the reasons why these contentions arose and the reasons why they are relevant to us today.

Firstly, the reason why Richter’s circle induced such a heated reaction amongst the public, especially in Germany, is the contradictory character of the RAF as a political movement. Unlike its counterparts in the USA and Japan, the RAF enjoyed in its heyday a strong public support. This phenomenon cannot be understood without situating it within a context of modern German history. Whilst many, even amongst the student protest groups, opposed the RAF’s tactics and/or rejected their ideology, they sympathised with their grievances. Firstly, the young intellectuals in Germany were reacting against the legacy of Nazism. Whilst Germany went through de-Nazisation after the war, it was clear that the scope of de-Nazisation was severely limited. Many former Nazis, including the ranking members of organisations such as the SS, were not only assimilated to the republic but also held prominent positions: Hanns Martin Schleyer was a former ranking member of the SS and the president of German Employers’ Association at the time of his kidnapping and one of the surgeons appointed by the state to conduct the autopsy of Meinhof, Hans Joachim Millach, was a corporeal of the SS Panzer Division. The fact that prominent positions such as these in post-WWII German society were occupied by the former SS members underscores the angst of German youth of 1960s and 1970s: they saw the ‘Grand Coalition’ of 1966 brokered between SPD and CDU, headed by a former Nazi party member Kurt Georg Kissinger as the chancellor, as the proof that West German government was ‘an extension of the Nazi police state’. Whilst calling West Germany a ’Nazi police state’ is neither correct nor accurate, they belong to the generation of Germans who had learned the nature and the scope of Nazi crimes, and thus were correct to question the degree and the sincerity of de-Nazisation in post-WWII Germany. In response, a loose coalition of socialist, communist, anarchist, and anti-imperialist formed a unified front against the establishment, hence the formation of Extra-Parliamentary Opposition, the student protest movement which organised many peaceful protests and demonstrations in Germany. Whilst many leftist students turned to Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse for the ideological inspiration to resist the superstructure of conformity through consumerism in high-capitalist societies (they were by no means glib ‘flower children’; they were serious about their ideological justifications for their politics), they were not about to turn into a band of bloody militants. As we see later in the example of Rudi Dutschke, many resisted the temptation to retaliate violence directed against them. Still, the fact that the RAF spawned from the serious yet peaceful student protest movement with their shared ideological foundations and political grievances guaranteed widespread sympathies for their cause, whilst many criticised or rejected their actions. In addition, with America’s war in Vietnam escalated, the hostility toward the government who supported the US war effort was becoming dangerously pointed. The acquiescence of the older generation only bolstered their view: the former Nazis were running the show, and they needed to take a stand against the social conformity that allowed the Nazi to have taken over Germany in the 1930s. Whilst Christopher Hitchens pointed to a ‘collective psychosis’ of the youth from former-Axis nations, that is, the compulsive needs to break from their elders’ conformism, the radicalisation of what originally began as peaceful protests reveals the second reason why there have been enduring interest, which consists of intense sympathy and opposition, in the radical left from the 1970s including the RAF. In order to understand this phenomenon, we must first recognise that there was a universal element to their story, the aspect which encompasses diverse historical backgrounds and social conditions. This element of their story makes them urgently relevant, for it presents us a view into the heat of historical struggles such as the violent struggles in the USA and the Northern Ireland during the 1970s as well as in contemporary Middle East, Northern Africa and Hong Kong. Whilst it represents an ironic twist to the RAF's violent legacy, this aspect of their story must not go unacknowledged: namely, the use of excessive force that spawns the cycle of violence.

Regarding the inception of the RAF, many point to two significant incidents as the culprits of the rise of militancy in Germany: the bloody suppression of a peaceful protest against the visit of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, to West Berlin in 1967, and the attempted assassination of one of the student leaders, Rudi Dutschke, by a lone right-wing gunman in 1968. The first flashpoint came on 2 June 1967. The Shah of Iran was considered a reformer and an important ally of the USA and its NATO allies, yet many intellectuals opposed his oppressive policies and the brutal violation of human rights at home. When the protesting students joined the members of the general public who greeted the Shah, his security personnel violently attacked the protesters. Instead of intervening, the German police force unleashed a full-on attack on the public present, assaulting the panicking crowd. The mounted cavaliers rode them down, and the on-foot officers battened them indiscriminately. The event turned to its head completely when one of the protesters, Benno Ohnesorg, was shot dead by an officer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, who was later identified as a Stasi agent operating within the West Berlin police force. Ohnesorg was unarmed and nonviolent, and the unprovoked shooting and the subsequent acquittal of Kurras enraged the public and galvanised the nascent militancy on the radical left. Whilst German student protests remained peaceful, as the social tensions over America’s war in Vietnam intensified, the frustration and the anger amongst concerned youths were reaching the boiling point. Then next came the attempted assassination of a student leader, Rudi Dutschke, who advocated the ‘long march through the institutions’, the doctrine of radical social and political change from within the existing political structure through peaceful protest. He was the charismatic spokesperson of the student movement and the staunch opponent of political violence, whether it is employed by police, the state, or protesters. On 11 April 1968, he was approached by a young man and asked whether he was indeed Dutschke. Upon the affirmation, the man shot him in the head. The shooter was subsequently arrested and identified himself as an anti-communist. Dutschke survived the incident, relocated to London, studied at the University of Cambridge until Edward Heath expelled him from the UK. After relocating to Denmark, he continued his work with the coalition of peaceful protest movements in the Third World countries and the communist blocs in Europe. He worked closely with Robert Havemann, Wolf Biermann, Milan Horáček, Adam Michnik et al until he met the untimely death from an epileptic seizure caused by the gunshot wound. At the time of his death, Dutschke returned to German politics as one of the leaders of anti-nuclear energy protest. Despite Dutschke’s commitment to non-violence, which is demonstrated by the fact that he kept correspondence with his shooter until the latter committed suicide in 1969, the assassination attempt of his by the hands of an anti-communist appeared to tip the scale toward violent retaliation for the radical and militant-minded demographics amongst the Left. By then Enslin and Baader had already committed with their first terrorist act: the arson of a department store in Frankfurt am Mein. Whilst the attack was not far off from the juvenile act of rebellion, it carried a potent message: for every Ohnesorg and Dutschke, a bomb would explode. The message was delivered: with that fire emerged what would become the most notorious European terrorist group of the time, along with the IRA.

One cannot help but note the irony of it all. The police violence against peaceful protesters in an unjustified attempt to restore ‘law and order’ which ended with an extrajudicial killing of Ohnesorg and the assassination attempt on one of the most prominent promoters of peaceful protests in the world had given rise to a violent militant group who, incidentally, brought about the police state by staging bloody terrorist campaigns. It is crucial to note before proceeding further with our inquiry here: both incidents have direct links to the Baader-Meinhof group and its German allies’ identity. The bombing attack on Axel Springer Verlag was a retaliation to the publisher’s personal attack on Dutschke, which many viewed as the culprit of the assassination attempt, and the 2 June Movement, a splinter group of the RAF, was named after the bloody police violence against the peaceful protest that culminated with the lethal shooting of Ohnesorg. After encountering or learning of brutal police response to the student protest movement and the all-out assault of conservative media against them, some on the Left decided: we cannot negotiate with people who built Auschwitz; it is time for direct action. As Hitchens aptly observed, this sentiment was identical to their counterparts both in Japan and Italy: the youth movements in the former Axis saw themselves as the agents of political justice who were fulfilling their historic duty of fighting the resistance that should have taken place decades ago by their parents’ generation. Whilst these characteristics are specific to these nations’ respective historical contexts, the picture emerged from the history of the German militant movement is not entirely made of the variables that are specific to West Germany: there are constants which make the history of the German radical Left relevant to people from all spectral of social and political dispositions today.

There are two points which are relevant to us today beyond the confine of German history. Firstly, there is an unresolved sociopolitical discontent on the global scale, which first found its expression through the student protest movement during the 1960s and 1970s. As seen in the tense relationship between the RAF and the likes of Dutschke, student groups did not enjoy a cohesive ideology or a strategy, yet there was a broad recognition of their common sociopolitical grievances against the authorities. They were concerned with the ethics, or sociopolitical justice of global scale, and thus rejected the traditional notion of Realpolitik in its entirety. This commitment to justice ahead of politics is still carried on by diverse political spectrums today, such as the politics of the environment, race, sex and gender, to name a few. That being acknowledged, there is a critical difference between the heydays of popular protest in the 1970s and today: the rise of populism on the right and the religious fundamentalism. Toward the end of the 20th century, some religious fundamentalists began to play prominent roles within a sphere of international terrorism with a greater scale and violence. Unlike Palestinians from the 1960s and 1970s, they have been driven by the hard-line religious doctrines, and they do not form a collation with leftists and/or anarchists from the developed countries. The resulting military conflicts displaced millions, and the large numbers of refugees helped the rise of xenophobic right-wing reactionaries such as Neo-Nazis in the USA and Europe. In the developed industrial nations, since the Great Recessions of the 2000s, the element of class struggle such as Occupy Wall Street has emerged. Aside from the distrust and resentment toward the economic and political elites, the participants of such protests have originated from the broad and diverse political spectrum: in short, it consists of both political Left and Right as well as anarchists and Autonomen, environmentalists and radical feminists, and other non-affiliated activists. Whilst these grievances against the authorities are at once local and global and their roots are found in the popular protests of the 1960s and 1970s, it is close to impossible to find a thread that forms a common political vision or a singular narrative. Whilst we share the common grievances against the political and economic system, and we still demand ‘justice’, we can no longer assume that what we think ‘just’ would look like ‘justice’ to our fellow protesters. All we have in common today with our predecessors and our contemporary is the disgust, distrust, and anger against the system. Add to the misinformation campaign engaged by some major media outlets, including social media, the politics of discontent pushes social ‘division’ or ‘polarisation’ dangerously further. In fact, the contemporary sociopolitical landscape is not ‘divided’ or ‘polarised’: it is fragmented. Due to the ease of access to the information and the media outlets’ ability to self-generate ‘news’ which act like contagious viruses, the contemporary politics, as it were, simultaneously exists in all possible worlds. As the result of this fragmentation, the contemporary politics of discontent concerns itself more with the righteousness or correctness of their political demands than the ethics. In fact, we may have already reached the point of no return and the restoration of ‘goodwill’ and reconciliation may not be possible at all. We have forgotten that the world is an objectively verifiable entity within which all of us exist. Instead, we see the world as pieces of a broken mirror: none would attempt to see the whole picture by re-integrating them. Still, there is a persistent narrative that easily pushes the general public to commit violent actions: the corrupt powers-that-be are rigging the system and ‘people’ are deprived of the ‘truth’ and ruthlessly exploited. Whilst the grievances may be essentially the same, the way in which various strands of protests play out betrays the confusions. Like the broken pieces of glass, each movement is insular to the other. To make matters worse, now that there are countless fragmented narratives, each of which has the ability to self-perpetuate, the task of painting an objective state of affairs is far more difficult now than the yesteryears. The politics of discontent is thus at its worst: the most contagious, toxic and enduring in the brief history of humankind.

The second point is the use of force as a means to resolve sociopolitical ‘divisions’ in an existing Form of Life. Whilst every use of force to achieve a sociopolitical end is accompanied by retroactive justifications to legitimise what is already done, these attempts to defend the use of force are rarely convincing to all parties involved. Whilst the use of force is seldom justifiable on ethical ground, there are also practical points to be considered: the repeated use of force that is perceived as excessive by recipients creates a cycle of violence by initiating bidirectional retaliations. Whilst generally the public remains nonviolent unless the situation descends into a war, be it civil or transnational, we all eventually reach a breaking point for the tolerance of abuse. In addition, the police force and military generally are not trained for crowd control and ill-equipped for negotiating political solutions, either because they are not granted the necessary authority and/or it is simply not their primary function. The brutal crackdown may achieve a perceived end ‘quickly’, yet it does not necessarily appease the root cause of the unrest, namely, sociopolitical grievances and general discontent amongst the public. Erica Chenoweth’s PhD dissertation for University of Colorado, Boulder, (The preview of the paper is accessible on this link) suggests that the competition between the conventional interest groups and existing terrorist groups compels them to outbid one another with still more violence. Chenoweth concludes that this competition eventually spawns a new terrorist group to emerge, hence the further escalation of violence which threatens to become a full-blown civil war in some contexts. This finding explains the reason why a splinter group such as the 2nd June Movement emerged out of the violent struggle between the RAF and the West German state, the way in which various violent commandos spawned within the RAF, and the manner in which their violent tactics escalated over time. The benefit of a nonviolent approach does not only apply to the state: it equally applies to the public. Chenoweth, who now works at Harvard as a political scientist, went on to publish a groundbreaking study which demonstrates that nonviolent movements are vastly more successful than the violent ones. Chenoweth studied popular protests around the globe from the 20th century and found that nonviolent protests are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. Whilst there are many variables that contribute to the success of popular movements, generally speaking, if about the 3.5% of the population actively participate with a nonviolent protest, they will achieve a serious and lasting political change. It is not difficult to see the reasons why the RAF eventually lost popular support and became defunct: as Chenoweth noted, we all have a threshold of tolerance for violent actions and sustained violent campaigns eventually alienate the public. If continued, such a prevalence of violence may turn the public against the perpetrators, be it terrorist groups or the state. In the present context, thus, the eventual demise of the RAF was a foregone conclusion. Yet, this does not mean that the state policy of confrontation worked as it planned. The human and socio-political cost was immense: many lives were senselessly lost and the legitimacy of the state was undermined. One must also note: the RAF was simply replaced by other radical militant movements such as Autonomen, who pioneered the Black Bloc tactic against the police force. German Autumn remains a painful chapter of modern history, and it conveys us of a vital lesson: When confronting a large popular protest, the best course of action is a principled restraint and engaging with a sincere dialectic. Lamentably this knowledge remains counterintuitive and thus largely ignored.

A Portrait of a Youth

As we have established the reasons why these paintings have been intensely controversial in a wider historical context, we now must confront Richter’s personal motivation for facing the painful memory of German Autumn as well as the reason behind his mode of representation of the events. Whilst it is unlikely for us to obtain a candid explanation by the painter himself as to what motivated him to engage with this subject after so many years, Richter did leave a clue. Whilst many accused him of avoiding clarifying his public position regarding his sentiment toward the RAF and their founders’ deaths, there is another way to understand his choices regarding both the subject matter and the mode of representation: by emphasising the opaqueness of the truth and the history regarding the represented events, the painter is asking us to suspend our preconception of the individuals and stand face-to-face with them in life and in death. To elaborate on this point, I wish to draw your attention to the first painting of the series: ‘Youth Portrait’.

It is the visage of Ulrike Meinhof before she had become known as the leading voice of the RAF. A prominent writer and a journalist by training, Meinhof was a well-known leftist intellectual and a social activist before she joined the rank of the RAF and became the de-facto spokesperson for the group. The youthfulness of the picture suggests that the date may go back even further: It is perhaps dating back to the 1950s, when she joined the Socialist German Student Union. Whilst the ghastly scenes from Stammheim prison dominate our attention, this single portrait of a young woman betrays Richter’s motivation: he is asking us to ‘meet’ this young woman for the first time, as it were. Here is a young person with an intense direct gaze expressing a strong, if not stubborn, determination. She is not easy to be persuaded and rejects ready answers. It must be based on a picture taken before the German Extra-parliamentary Opposition became prominent, the murder of Benno Ohnesorg or the attempted assassination of Rudi Dutschke. Her will and intellect promised so much, yet, like the idol of her generation, Rosa Luxemburg, she met an untimely death. Unlike Luxemburg’s case, who was summarily executed by Berlin police without a due process, the circumstances surrounding Meinhof’s death remain shrouded in obscurity. Still, this picture predates what would come to pass. This woman, named Ulrike Marie Meinhof, born in 1934 and only two years junior to Richter, is not someone we have come to know as the voice of the radical Left or a leading member of the Baader-Meinhof group. The person represented here is not yet the mother of two, who would be abandoned by her and be forced to grow up in the stark shadow of their mother’s legacy. Since this portrait has little meaning external to the historical context of whom she would become and how she is remembered, we have an obligation to ask ourselves: Why the occasion?

It is clear that the tone of his expression is neither celebratory nor idolising. Despite his persistent rejection of political fanaticism of any kind, he cannot be considered entirely apolitical or an ostrich. He is someone who betrayed his family secret by painting his uncle in a Nazi uniform, invoking uncomfortable memories of the past and present in highly personal terms. Whilst he did resist being swept in a current of popular protest during the 1960s and the 1970s, he presented eery images of American warplanes and the bombers in action in the sky over Vietnam. Sombre, ghostly yet blurred and ambiguous, these paintings are not to be properly called ‘political art’: the artist is neither making a sociopolitical statement nor urging the public to act in one way or another. It is also clear that he is not fetishising these sophisticated means of destruction. Since Richter is, correctly, not going to make one politically explicit statement or another regarding these blurred monochrome paintings, it is best for us not to speculate on his political position on the subjects; we need instead to focus on the effect of these painting have upon us. Instead of theorising and/or analysing politics and its historical context, Richter is proposing an entirely different way of engaging with the serious subjects from the past and the present: he is showing that it is not only possible but necessary to be politically aware and engaged affectively both prior to and in the process of intellectual and practical engagement with them. And paradoxically, only in this sphere of affective politics and history, Richter is able to meet face to face with Meinhof and part ways with her. Still, we must ask ourselves: What kind of affection is Richter pointing us toward? Wasn't it the youthful sense of righteousness and the passionate pursuit of sociopolitical justice that drove them to the destructive cycle of extreme violence? If our emotions could be so misguiding, then what kind of affection must we be attuned to and how could it help us to be aware and engaged without being consumed by it? And, finally, what is the necessary condition for this specific kind of affection to play a helpful role in our sociopolitical and historic engagement? Once again, the key to these questions is to be found in the mode in which the subjects of these paintings are presented.

Darkly Yours

The space curated by Richter for politihistoric affection is a sombre one. Facing any of these pictures should inspire sorrow and lament than rage. Whilst Richter abstains from passing his opinion of the RAF, the time in which they were active and the controversies surrounding the deaths of these inmates, and thus asking us to respect the ambiguity regarding the subjects represented, he is setting a parameter for the possible affective reactions of the audience by choosing a particular mode of representation. The resulting reaction is, quite unexpectedly, an overwhelming sense of melancholia. The lament is most strongly felt with the aforementioned portrait of a young woman: we cannot help but feel the deep sense of sorrow over the life and its potential misspent, and all the loss of lives accompanied by it. Still, Richter is in no way a sympathiser nor indulging in nostalgia: he stands face-to-face with his infamous contemporary in solemn silence with a mixture of conflicting emotions involving a certain understanding of her cause as her contemporary and rejection of her choices, including political ones. As an artist, Richter is at once expressing his own affective response to the events represented and curating ours: regardless of our respective view on the RAF and the state response to the threat posed by them, Richter’s painting determines the tone of our affective response. We must note the unique property of melancholia: it allows us to respectfully mourn without compromising our self-respect; we can lament the death of someone without offering absolution to her/their/his misdeeds and offences. The reason why the politics of melancholia allows this possibility is: it is solemnly and respectfully affective; hence it suspends our political, social and ideological concerns and allows us to be tête-à-tête with someone we profoundly disagree. The politics of melancholia becomes only possible when one recognises humanity in the Other, thereby it gives us an opportunity, albeit a narrow one, to suspend the automation of the ideological apparatus operating within us.

This is the point where Gerhard Richter comes together with two of his expatriates, namely, the late W. G. Sebald and Max Richter who, like the painter, left their place of births in self-imposed exile, and unlike the painter, crossed the Channel and moved permanently to Britain. As I elaborated on the latter’s string piece, ‘On the Nature of Daylight’, the composer has espoused melancholy as the mode of expression for his political resistance: it is deeply rooted in his ethics of sorrowful reception of the other voices.

In this respect, ‘On the Nature of Daylight’ must be understood as a protest against the ubiquitous glorification of violence. This is clear from the composer’s commentary on the music: as he defines this particular composition as a means for him to protest against the looming military conflict, its popular support and the resulting violence that would devastate lives, he reflects on just how he has always reacted to the violence by ‘internalising’ it. What he internalises is not the violence itself: it is his emotional reaction to the violence. It means that he does not respond to violence with ‘rage’. And by composing ‘On the Nature of Daylight’, the German-British composer has found the strength to thoughtfully counter the violence and the Form of Life that systematically institutionalises and glorifies it: he quietly stands against violence with the depth of his distress. The nobility of his suffering reveals a distinctly Rilkean insight: the strength belongs to a gentleness that allows oneself to suffer for the distress of others without making it an emotional drama about oneself. This affective restraint, not the repression, is supremely ethical in a Levinasian sense: by steering away from a melodrama which shifts the emphasis from the suffering of others to one’s reaction to it, one can finally begin to live ethically.

This attitude is shared by the novelist: Sebald’s engagement with the history of destructions in modern Europe is expressed in highly personal terms without drawing attention to himself: his story often moves from a personal anecdote to a shared historical experience with lucid recognition of the ambiguity regarding the manner in which the dominant narrative about these destructions emerge and are maintained. Whilst the subjects of his stories range from literary figures such as young Franz Kafka and Henri Beyle to significant historical events such as the Holocaust, the narrative seamlessly moves within a short breath from personal events such as the sudden paralysis he suffered in England to the contemplation on the bombing campaigns during the WWII. Yet, as the author covers these diverse subjects with mercurial ease, there is a distinct and constant presence of what Germans call ‘schwere’, a sense of graveness and difficulty, in his writing. And his historical sensibility is, unlike in the work of Thomas Bernhard who never failed to achieve an explosive outrageousness, expressed with a distinctly sorrowful tone. Whilst some of Sebald’s work is more academic in the mode of expression, his work never fails to express a profound and sorrowful receptiveness to the voices of the ones who were displaced, disenfranchised and silenced by the force beyond their control. The resulting effect is, like Gerhard Richter’s work, often achieved by the choice of subject for each work and the melancholia through which it is represented.

We must also note the rare recognition of the ambiguity of history in Sebald’s work. As in Richter’s 18 Oktober 1978, Sebald often engages with the way in which we fail to gain clarity about the facts of certain events. This ambiguity is most exemplarily expressed in the first section of Vertigo, the story about Henri Beyle’s obsession with the gap between his recollection on the particular battle he participated as a French soldier in Napoleon’s army and the objective assessment of his recollection later conducted by himself. It is important to note the fact that Sebald does not play detective here: his focus is rather upon the ambiguity of history itself, which is at once personal and collective. Whilst Sebald has not become the focus of controversy in a manner in which Gerhard Richter found himself with 18 Oktober 1978, the writer shares with the painter the method and the attitude toward the ambiguity of history: he draws our attention to it without forcing one conjecture or another. Their refusal to force closure and clarity is rare and must be appreciated with the highest regard: this attitude is intellectually and ethically sincere, the quality that is threatened of immediate extinction in the age of collective cognitive dissonance. And, like in Max and Gerhard’s work, the effect of Sebald’s writing is that of a sublime melancholia: like Helen of Troy, he stands alone in solemn silence upon the edge of a besieged civilisation and faces the magnitude of destructions from the past, present, and future. Unlike Cassandra, Helen has no divine access to the events in themselves; rather, she is simply staggered in the face of forces beyond her personal control. Her sorrow is for the ones who are now dead and the ones who are now dying. Her melancholia is for the frailty of human capacity for reason: with all the positive attributes and potentials, we remain our own worst adversary. Gods and demons are simply the symbols of our own impulsive forces to self-destruct. Yet, for three contemporary Germans, there are no Gods to place the blame. And thus we stand alone with our own helplessness, sorrowfully and darkly. We must remind ourselves: the strength lies in resisting the temptation to force clarity over the ambiguity. Pulling a trigger, crossing Rubicon or hurtling oneself over the wall to force one resolution or another is not going to help us at all: we will be simply trapped in the endless cycle of violence by acting on our ‘righteous’ anger and need for a closure. Therefore, once again, we must accept the fact: seeing less, or trying not to overcome the obscurity, reveals more about the subject in question.