Graphics Essay

My Final Major Project is an exploration of the Red Army Faction, a far-left terrorist group prominent in West Germany in the 1970s. I aim to explore their history and legacy, focussing on portraying a specific narrative through design. My project is therefore not rooted in a design that I will adapt and harness to give meaning, but a specific theme that I will work towards finding a voice for through design. My early experiments in finding that design were screen printed posters, photograms, and digital posters/images. The common thread throughout all of those, aside from the thematic connection of the Red Army Faction, was the prominent basis in contemporary photographs capturing the story of the RAF; such as photos of members on the run, their arrest, and their enigmatic deaths in prison. Every experiment portrayed their narrative through existing photographs of them.

The style of the project began to take more and more shape with the continuation of my early experiments. A distinct visual style developed as I progressed: a primarily black and white colour scheme with occasional highlights of red, a grungy aggressive tone, an emphasis on the contemporary photography of the RAF, a use of prominent captions, and a highly politicised nature.

The reason for centring my project on the Red Army Faction was out of an interest about them as a group. There are many things that make them fascinating, but the most significant is the irreconcilable contradiction inherent in them. They were a vicious terrorist organisation that killed almost forty people (including police officers and civilians) and injured many, many more, ensnaring the political culture of West Germany at their height. They were also a compassionate ideological fraternity dedicated to social and economic justice, international cooperation, human rights, anti-fascism and pacifism. There is an enormous disparity between what they said they were fighting for and the way they fought for it. To put it simply: a contradiction between ideal and action. The theme of division is one of the most prominent in my project, resounding in not only the contradiction between ideal and action, but also bearing relevance to the wider political context of the RAF. Germany was a society divided between East and West, the recent Student Movement had highlighted deep political divisions, and the intoxicating appeal of the RAF’s campaign was rooted in countercultural opposition to the establishment.

To understand the RAF and their contradictions it is important to understand their origins. Their members were part of the first generation growing up after Hitler’s rise to power. They were taught about the innumerable Nazi atrocities, but they saw, not entirely untruthfully, that many of the same people who were in power during the Nazi regime were still in power today. They were growing up questioning the allegedly fascist West German state, with no moral figures to look up to as every previous generation had been tainted by that fascism, and no faith in the legitimately democratic institutions of their country, as the same democratic principles had not long ago crumbled into fascism. They grew up in a country they believed had no moral authority, with no faith in its systems, and thought that attempting democratic change was futile. They were young, and swept up in an intoxicating political movement with a fashionable countercultural self-image. In this context, their actions start to make more sense.

I first found out about the Red Army Faction in late 2020 after discovering an album about them, ‘baader meinhof’ by Luke Haines. The album’s tone and the way it presented the narrative (which continues to be an inspiration for parts of my project) made me curious about the group it was based on. From there I eventually got two books about them: ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ and ‘Everybody Talks About The Weather… We Don’t: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof’. The former is a comprehensive account of the group by Stefan Aust. The latter is a collection of columns by Ulrike Meinhof, a prominent left wing journalist turned founding RAF member, translated into English and with a biography by Karin Bauer. Meinhof’s columns especially have been insightful to read, seeing her increasingly radical worldview form from her own point of view. Most interestingly is that a significant amount of her columns were reasonable analyses of social issues deeply rooted in the time and place they were written but still relevant today, adding more intrigue to the idea that what she was saying did, and does, resonate with a huge number of people. This all makes the central question ‘is it acceptable to sympathise with a group like this’ one that is both difficult and immensely uncomfortable to answer.

I am drawing on the narrative of the RAF and all the associated questions, implications, and events for my project. Originally I was planning on developing on the series of photograms I did using photos of the members, but lockdown prevented this, so I kept playing around with various digital experiments while looking for any inspiration. Eventually I settled on a short video about the RAF, some of which was inspired by an advertisement for The Today Programme utilising kinetic typography and politicised motion graphics depicting war, diplomacy, terrorism, suppression. I also drew inspiration from Kyle Cooper’s opening credits to Se7en, with a grungy and enigmatic tone that’s both unpleasant and intoxicating[1]. My project would combine those elements from Se7en and The Today Programme, rooted in my developing style of politicised distortions of the contemporary RAF photographs.

With the focus in the video initially being using material from the time, I wanted to find more photographs and footage to use. This led me to three films: Bambule, Die Patriotin, and Deutschland Im Herbst. Bambule is a unique film as it was created by Ulrike Meinhof herself. It’s a 1970 TV film about an oppressive public home for young women in West Berlin, and follows the stories of various girls in the institution. Active in documenting the poor conditions of foster homes in West Germany, Meinhof interviewed many institutionalised girls and often let them stay in her home (at this point a single working mother, this would have eased the burden on her too). She created this film as a way of raising awareness about the conditions those girls lived in. Bambule provided me not only with more material to use in my video but also crucial inspiration for what the video should be. The film is absolutely fascinating as it offers a perfect window into the mind of Ulrike Meinhof, when watching it you get a crystal clear picture of exactly how she was feeling and where she was in her life when it was made. Despite no ostensible connection to the real life story of the RAF, which had yet to be founded, it serves as an exquisite allegory for Meinhof’s radicalised descent into terrorism, and is the piece of media I have seen that best reconciles the contradiction between ideal and action. The last scene of the film shows two main characters, feeling trapped and repressed, contemplating how they can transition from protest to resistance (‘Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too.’ -Ulrike Meinhof)[2], after the former failed them. They contemplate what to do, and the very last shot is one of the girls realising that she needs to resist. ‘Who’s guarding tonight?’ she asks before the film cuts to black. Bambule was to be released in May 1970, but only two weeks before its scheduled release Meinhof helped to break Andreas Baader out of prison, going underground with others to form the Red Army Faction. The release was put on ice, and it was only shown in 1994. This approach of having the narrative end with the beginning of the militancy, rather than start with it, struck me as interesting. Going forward the video wouldn’t show the RAF from their 1970 founding until German Autumn in 1977, it would have a wider time span so I could show their ideological origins: from roughly 1967 to 1977, but starting as far back as 1945.

Die Patriotin (The Patriot) is a 1979 film by Alexander Fluge. It is about a history teacher with an unorthodox approach to Germany’s troubled history, contextualising the past as part of living society. There was only a tangential link to the RAF, with this narrative following on from Alexandre Fluge’s section in Deutschland Im Herbst, a film about the RAF. There wasn’t as much material in this film that I took inspiration from other than individual shots or lines that I could incorporate as part of the video.

Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn) is a 2 hour 1978 omnibus film created by a variety of German filmmakers. The film is, loosely, an exploration of the Red Army Faction as it was in late 1977 and a window into the political climate of West Germany at the time. It spawned the term German Autumn, referring to the series of terrorist attacks in late 1977 culminating in the kidnapping and murder of Hanns Martin Schleyer, the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181, and the simultaneous deaths in prison of RAF founders Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe. It combines disparate vignettes, traditional scenes, and real world footage (including an interview with Horst Mahler, a prominent RAF member) in a way that captures the political mood of the time, showing the moral questions leftist terrorism raised, the tension and fear it created, and how it fits into German society in the wake of Hitler. There were many more aspects from this than in Die Patriotin that I drew inspiration from, including various individual moments but also the way the story was told: a fragmented collection that comes together with no ostensible throughline other than the thematic, yet builds clearly and communicates effectively.

I also got a photobook titled ‘Hans und Grete: Bilder der RAF 1967-1977’ (Hans and Grete: Photos of the RAF 1967-1977), containing over a hundred pages of photos capturing the narrative of the RAF from their beginnings to their climax in 1977. The photos were fascinating, with the book being formative in my project: I took the same style of using the photos sequentially to tell the story, and many of the photos I used in my video were taken directly from the book.

One of the last sources of material I got for the project was a physical set of twelve small photos taken in Bonn in roughly 1950. This was still at the stage in my project where I didn’t know exactly how the video would turn out, so I was continuing the experiments concurrently with formulating a concrete plan for the video. I wanted to make use of the fact that I had the physical copies of these photos, but I also wanted to be able to play around with them without risking ruining the only ones I had. I scanned them digitally so I could play around with those digital versions. Before I started though, I had the idea to scan one again, but this time breaking the scanning process; moving the photograph as it scanned, lifting the lid so the background didn’t scan properly. I loved the result, and repeated this with all the photos multiple times. After that I took some text (a letter written by Ulrike Meinhof in prison and a signature from Andreas Baader) from photos in the photobook and composited them onto the images. I liked how it turned out and started developing multiple sets of these, later including coins from various periods in German history and a gold necklace with a cross, highlighting themes of the political and historical context through the coins (as well as themes of division, with the use of contrasting East and West German coins), and the necklace drawing on connotations of various RAF members being part of a holy crusade, with their deaths making them religious martyrs (this comparison could also be shown to some extent in images of protests during the Student Movement, with photographs of protestors carrying crosses while sprayed with water cannons by police[3], and is highlighted in the baader-meinhof album in lines such as ‘Christ was an extremist’). The resulting images were built on the style that I had been developing and were my favourite of all the various experiments I had done.

I liked those images enough that I then decided to have them serve as the basis of my video and the final FMP outcome. The video would be a stop motion animation with each frame being one of those scans, utilising distorted scans of the fundamental RAF photography and other material lifted from the three films I watched, and other sources thematically related to the RAF like other militant political groups. Through those photos it would tell the story of the RAF from their inception to the climax in 1977.

There were various key moments in the history of the Red Army Faction that I wanted to cover. The roots of their ideology: a reaction of the new generation to the Nazi atrocities and the perception that the Federal Republic was a continuation of the Third Reich. The Student Movement in West Germany: the politicised leftist youth protesting in West Germany over events such as Vietnam, the attempted assassination of prominent Marxist Rudi Dutschke, the death at the hands of police of a protesting student Benno Ohnesorg. The mainstream Student Movement was the political movement from which much more radical groups like the RAF were spawned. The founding of the RAF: the initial militant acts by Andreas Baader and Gudrun ensslin, and then Baader’s escape from prison aided by the RAF founders who then went underground to form the group. The acts of terrorism: the various terrorist acts committed by the group 1970 and 1972. The arrest of the founding members: the drawn out capture and imprisonment of the majority of the founding members during 1972. The RAF imprisoned: the experiences of the members in prison, the hungerstrikes against the conditions they were held in, the death of Holger Meins during a hungerstrike, the extremely traumatic experiences of Ulrike Meinhof in prison and her piercing descriptions of that, leading up to her likely suicide in prison (though there is some evidence that suggests she was murdered). German Autumn: the tense climax of terrorist activity in 1977. It culminated in the kidnapping of famous high-ranking German businessman Hanns Martin Schleyer by the next generation of RAF members, and the hijacking and hostage taking of Lufthansa Flight 181 by a Palestinian terror group in demand for the release of imprisoned RAF members. After days of tension a special unit of the German police carried out a successful operation to free Flight 181, Hanns Martin Schleyer was murdered by the RAF, and three key founding members including Andreas Baader were found dead in prison on the same night.[4] (In an added dimension complicating the morality of the situation, Hanns Martin Schleyer was not only a highly successful businessman and bureaucrat, but also a former SS officer who had lied about his rank so as to go virtually unpunished following Nazi Germany’s collapse.)

It is important to consider the way I am presenting this narrative and the effect I have on it. I’m not an observer telling an impartial story, I am putting across the interpretation that I want to show. I am as much a part of this project and the story I am telling as the RAF. The story that I want to tell highlights the narrative from the point of view of the group themselves, empathising with their reasoning while showing the brutality of the conflict and the destruction it caused. In reality the group were at the very best hopelessly misguided and devastatingly insensitive, and at worst as bad as the fascism they reviled. However, in this narrative I will show a more sympathetic view to highlight the central questions surrounding the contradiction between ideal and action, the complicated legacy they left behind, and the suffering they went through.

The visuals of the video are drawn from the technique of Xerox Art, the jittery scratchy title sequences of Kyle Cooper, and the conceptual politicised photographic imagery of Barbara Kruger[5]. Part of what inspired the fast moving jittery style of the video was the notion that communication is different to legibility, and that the focus of the video was all on communication, not legibility. The video doesn’t exist in a vacuum, so the fact that it seems inaccessible without the proper context is okay: it doesn’t need to be legible for it to communicate what it needs to.

[1] Codrington, A., 2003. Kyle Cooper.

[2] Meinhof, U., Bauer, K. and Jelinek, E., 2008. Everybody talks about the weather… we don’t.

[3] Proll, A., 2004. Hans und Grete.

[4] Aust, S., 2008. The Baader-Meinhof complex.

[5] Kruger, B., Alberro, A. and Foster, H., 2010. Barbara Kruger.