Conclusions

Abstract

In this book I have treated a large corpus of narrative fiction as one enormous, multifaceted literary text, which I have taken to be a kind of unacknowledged political unconscious for the 40-year period 1970-2010. While the novelists are not always in step with one another, they were working on a common, indeed national project, which developed over those 40 years in response to violence committed by left-wing extremists and developments in German history in general. The narratives from Baader-Meinhof history that have been fictionalized reveal the stories that the fractured German nation wanted and needed to tell itself. They are national, sometimes nationalist, but ultimately reassuring, featuring the renegade terrorists alongside their adversaries or principal victims, who for them represented the state or the imperialist capitalist system. The love affair between Baader and Ensslin, the drama of the German Autumn, the killing of Herrhausen and Rohwedder during the tumult of reunification, and the role of the police chief Horst Herold tell us as much about Germany’s self-image as the figures and episodes that are usually excluded from the novels: Horst Mahler, Ulrich Schmücker, and Hans-Joachim Klein, as well as Munich and Entebbe or the murder of the American soldier Edward Pimental in 1985. I have made a number of other findings.