Gewalt schafft Gegengewalt

Continuing my exploration of the RAF, I turned to a column by Ulrike Meinhof and the failure of the RAF's methods for inspiration.

Counter-Violence is a column by Meinhof, written in 1968 before her turn to militancy. In it she argues for methods used at university protests that some had condemned. Crucially, she makes a distinction between 'violence' and 'counter-violence', with counter-violence being justifiable as it is the only effective response to authoritarian violence and it is a means to an end, rather than being emblematic of an ideology.

This is reminiscent of the RAF's terrorism, which was justified similarly. However, rather than awakening the public and kickstarting a revolution, the RAF only succeeded in heightening the powers of the state. The public were not generally on their side, new anti-terrorism laws curbing civil liberties were introduced, and the prominence of a left-wing terror group justified a wider clampdown on the left as a whole.

Those concepts, combined with the popular phrase 'violence begets violence', were the inspiration for this. The phrase 'Gewalt schafft Gegengewalt schafft Gewalt...', or 'violence creates counter-violence creates violence...' is repeated unrelentingly, combined with an edited photo of Ulrike Meinhof's corpse. It is an attempt to capture the partisan hypocrisy of justifying violence when 'the right people' do it, showing the endless cycle it leads into, and using that phrase to point from the left of the image to the right, showing the end of that cycle; the violence leading to nothing more than her own death.

Additionally, the repetition of one phrase in a typewriter-esque font is reminiscent of The Shining: 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.' although this is largely just drawing on the aesthetic.