“Festnahme 1” (1988) by Gerhard Richter (left) is a painting of a photo of the 1972 arrest of Andreas Baader, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Holger Meins. The arrest is also depicted in the 2008 film Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (right)

Terrorism in general has long been recognized as a medial event. In the context of the West German terrorist group the Red Army Faction (RAF), there has been a broad recognition that the group was rather photogenic, with the visual component of 1970s terrorism in West Germany only receiving the scholarly attention it deserves in recent years. Despite the methodological shift in the humanities known as the ‘visual turn’ only now coming to the history of the RAF, its historiography has always turned on visual culture. This paper track these ‘visual turns’ in the debate surrounding the RAF and West German terrorism from Gerhard Richter’s 1988 painted mourning to film director Uli Edel’s 2008 attempt to produce an ‘illustrated history’ of the victims.

Leith Passmore, “Another New Illustrated History: The visual turns in the memory of West German terrorism,” EDGE 1(1) (2009), article 2.