An RAF novel: completely without a trigger warning

Actually, the Red Army Faction (RAF) has recently only interested historians. But now the story of the urban guerrilla, which disbanded in 1998, is drawing many people to readings in bookstores or art institutions. The novel “Narration to the Matter” by Stephanie Bart ensures this. The writer, who was born in Esslingen am Neckar in 1965 and now lives in Berlin, attracted attention with her second novel, published in 2016 under the title “Deutscher Meister”. At that time she wrote about the boxer Johann Rukelie Trollmann, from whom the Nazis first took away his titles and then his freedom because, as a Sinto, he did not fit into their racial ideology. A pioneering work in literary historical education – what can also be said of her new book.

In this she uses declarations and writings from the RAF as well as statements made by its protagonists at court hearings as a basis for reflection. The studied political scientist demonstrated in-depth knowledge of the anti-imperialist scene of the time. She studied in Hamburg, a stronghold of the radical left then and still today. The author is familiar with the debates and criticism of the content of RAF statements as well as their complicated, difficult to understand language in left-wing circles. In the novel you read: “Of course, the Red Army Faction, instead of nipping every conversation with like-minded people in the bud, could have learned to speak, worked together and sometimes written statements that people would enjoy reading.”

One chapter begins with the death of RAF prisoner Holger Meins as a result of his hunger strike in 1974. Stephanie Bart deals with allegations that the prisoner was responsible for his own death: he could have eaten. »Of course he could have eaten. Of course they could have lifted the isolation.”

The novel is like a fact-filled history book. Some RAF attacks, the arrests of several of its members, the controversial, sometimes heated discussions among the prisoners and the laborious trial in the bunker of the high-security prison in Stuttgart are described meticulously, down to almost the smallest detail. The book will be particularly informative for younger readers and will help them find their own approach to this dramatic chapter of Germany’s post-war period. But older readers who perhaps still remember the years when wanted posters with the likenesses of the wanted RAF members were hanging in all train stations will certainly gain insight from reading the novel. A history lesson in literary garb. You can also learn, among other things, how the prisoners had to fight for the most minimal rights in court, how their lawyers were criminalized and, often, arrested themselves. This gives you a slightly different perspective on the constitutional state of the Federal Republic, which is often romanticized today by some leftists. Stephanie Bart compares politicians’ claims that solitary confinement has never been opposed to quotations from reports and studies by human rights and medical associations. It objectively describes the damage to health caused by the extreme prison conditions.

No, the novel does not defend violence, either from one side or the other. Instead of a trigger warning, the author makes it clear at the beginning of her book: “All criminally relevant insults and defamations of people from contemporary history, living or dead, contained in this novel, as well as calls for criminal acts, and anything else that is punishable under the Criminal Code, are either According to the literary method, unmarked verbatim or edited quotations from the RAF or represent their position.«

Stephanie Bart: Story on the matter. Novel. Verlag Secession, 678 pages, hardcover, €28.

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