Much has been said about the relationship between RAF terrorism and pop culture. About the terrorists’ preferences with regard to fashion, music and film, about specifically West German reinterpretations of radical chic, and about the fact that, at Andreas Baader’s death, Eric Clapton’s »There is One in Every Crowd« was on the turntable. Many of these cross-connections were also to be found in the exhibition »Zur Vorstellung des Terrors« (On the Representation of Terror),1 even if often in allegorised and »over-meaningful« form, as in the works by Jonathan Meese, Lutz Dammbeck or Johannes Kahrs.
Bettina Allamoda’s visual study »Vom Happening zum Deutschen Herbst«, which revealed amazing synchronicities and asynchronicities of the seventies, seemed less mythomaniac, and was all the more appealingly unpretentious because of it. The wide spectrum at this heatedly discussed exhibition also included historical reassessments with the assistance of pop-musical material, as in Michaela Melián’s multimedia installation.

What was missing, however, were echoes of the RAF complex in the (pop) music of these leaden years themselves. At the time, idioms, moods and media loops were repeatedly used, allowing the »representation of terror« to influence the musical sphere as well. Needless to say, this was brought to bear in a newly politicised form of German rock music - for instance, with Ton Steine Scherben or in a number of later projects. At first, milieu-related affinities dominated, but objectivity and withdrawal later set in.2 Over the years, the anarchist slogan »Destroy what is destroying you« turned into a more reflective, if still Messianic approach to political themes, which also largely involved a refinement of musical means. »When the night is deepest, day is close« the Scherben sang in 1975, and issued rallying calls in all directions. »There’s land in sight« was the catchphrase back then – a claim that could be maintained only with difficulty in view of the real historical situation.

The events in the German Autumn of 1977 in the end prompted some musical catastrophic fantasies, which met with a specially keen – or, better said, dull – reception in both punk and industrial circles. Sampled news reports about the dead in Stammheim provide the basis material for Cabaret Voltaire’s »Baader-Meinhof« (1978)3 – whereupon the band once more spells out the news of their deaths against a cacophony of electronic interference. In a collage from the time, one sees pictures of RAF members, all of them either »shot« or »hanged«, and, in the middle, photos of the musicians: »Cabaret Voltaire – They still resist«. Brian Eno also used police reports on the abduction of Hanns Martin Schleyer for the piece »RAF« (1978),4 under the project name Eno & Snatch. Here, the phantom of lack of freedom and terror is treated musically in a rather more casual, and above all funkier, way. A dialogue between two female singers that describes the situation in a hijacked aeroplane is inserted in between – Mogadishu as a relaxed cocktail chat, while the bass pumps on tirelessly.

The German Kraut punks S.Y.P.H. called their news collage about the Schleyer abduction »clandestine«. Here, it is not funk that dominates, but electronic coolness and frustration, as with Cabaret Voltaire. On the EP »Viel Feind, viel Ehr« (1979), which has unfortunately not been reissued to date, could be seen the picture of the famous pram used in the abduction, while the record stickers bore such juxtapositions as »Heldentum – Eigentum« (heroism – property) or »Eigenheim – Stammheim« (one’s own home – Stammheim). The Australian hardcore industrial band SPK was not going to let itself be outdone when, having just moved to Europe, it took up the Baader-Meinhof theme. »Germanik« (1979) was their first bitter homage to the terrorists; »Stammheim Torturkammer« on the record »Information Overload Unit« (1981) was another contribution to the topic.5 Western music has seldom sounded darker or more cryptic.

It seemed altogether to be only a question of time before the RAF myth found its way into more conventional song writing. Something of the kind was already suggested in the piece »Terror Couple Kill Colonel« (1980) by the British Goth rockers, Bauhaus. Years later, the agit-pop group Chumbawamba were already able to project an openly Caribbean mood onto the German Autumn with songs like »Ulrike « or »Meinhof« (1990). By the time the British pop bard Luke Haines brought out a whole album, for the most part neat and sugary, with the title »Baader Meinhof« in 1996, there was little more to be felt of the irreconcilability and apocalyptic mood of the seventies. Here as elsewhere – and this is proven by the many RAF references in current music as well -, the revolution seems long ago to have been swallowed up by a noncommittal, happy-go-lucky sound.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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