Double-mediated Terrorism: Gerhardt Richter and Don DeLillo’s ‘Baader-Meinhof’

In his article on Don DeLillo’s novel 'Ratner’s Star' G. S. Allen describes terrorism as a language that is constantly dismissed by society’s interior discourse as incomprehensible and “insane“. It rejects any concerted idiom and does not belong to the sphere of possible enunciations. Although terrorism – like any other communication – is a manipulation of symbols, it therefore has to be mediated in order to become audible/visible. In the first instance this allows to retrace the close interdependence of terrorism and media representations, the impact of reports and images trying to “translate” the violent statement, as well as the terrorist tactics of staging their acts for media consumption. In addition Allen’s thesis implicitly calls on the arts and literature as inter- and possibly transdiscoursive tools “that produce a vent in the canopy of conventions and beliefs in order to admit a little free and windy chaos.” Thus, artistic practice might realize the bridging between the otherwise indiscernible fact of terrorism and public perception and at the same time is essentially qualified to reflect on its own strategies of visualization. While certainly all of DeLillo’s fiction is characterized by such critical reflection, his early short story 'The Uniforms' foregrounds the respective mediation process in an outstanding way. The text does not directly refer to terrorism but to an intermediary representational system; it is a loose “transcription” of Jean-Luc Godard’s movie 'Weekend' (1969) whose protagonists happen to be kidnapped by a band of antibourgeois and ultra violent Hippie-terrorists. The film’s random atrocities, its main motifs, distanced narrative attitude and fragmented montage style are unvariably adopted by DeLillo. However, the story does not simply repeat the movie but inserts a referential stance by emphasizing its derivational and meta-character. Moreover, it accentuates the rhetorical as well as ideological implications of mediating terrorism by turning Godard’s “theoretical rifle” (R. Stam) against the director himself: 'The Uniforms' hyperbolizes the formal traits of 'Weekend' in such a way that Godard’s movie is shown to transform terrorism – or any political action – into pure aestheticism and thereby ironically becomes a terrorist act itself. Similarly, Don DeLillo’s latest short story 'Baader-Meinhof' deals with terrorism as a phenomenon filtered by visual media and then re-mediated by literature. In order to display the inexpressible content of terrorist and state violence and at the same time install an allegory for the failure of interpersonal communication, it refers to the 'October 18, 1977' series of paintings by Gerhard Richter which in turn is based on newspaper and police photographs of the RAF-terrorists killed at Stammheim. But in contrast to the earlier text that exposes the aspect of aesthetic trivialization in any artistic rendition of violence as well as in terrorism itself, Baader- Meinhof seems to advance another view: here, painting and literature appear as paradoxical amplifying systems which – precisely because they abstract from the “real” – are predestined to reach out for its unrepresentable chora.