“The longest period of fasting was fixed by his impresario at forty days, beyond that term he was not allowed to go, not even in great cities, and there was good reason for it, too. Experience had proved that for about forty days the interest of the public could be stimulated by a steadily increasing pressure of advertisement, but after that the town began to lose interest, sympathetic support began notably to fall off.”
–Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist
By the tenth and final collective hunger strike in 1989, the West German public had grown tired, and the Red Army Faction (RAF) prisoners, for their part, had grown sick and tired. The hunger strike declaration from February 1989 combined familiar demands with a new tone of desperation and a recognition of the physical toll the campaign of self-starvation had taken: “We have embarked on nine hunger strikes, two prisoners have died as a result, the health of many of us has suffered. Now this eighteen-year-long torture must end.” Exhaustion had dulled, and historic circumstances had marched by the RAF strategy of political self-starvation, but for a decade and a half the collective hunger strike shaped West German terrorism and counterterrorism. The carefully choreographed spectacle of hunger dragged the organization up from its knees after the arrest of its leaders, it helped underpin a RAF prison identity, and it allowed the group to confront what it saw as a mainstream medicalization of terror. The performative strength of the hunger campaigns rested on Meinhof’s ability to tailor the RAF struggle to the prison environment by encoding the starving prisoner with the group’s established rhetoric and victimhood during the three major strikes of the first generation.
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leith passmore 