Baader-Meinhof and the Novel

The Baader-Meinhof Group and other violent underground organizations, which had their roots in the protest movements of the late 1960s, have provided material for a great number of novels by leading German and international writers, ranging from avant-garde fiction to detective thrillers. They explore the emotional character of postwar Germany, its uneasy relationship with its own past, the Allied victors in World War Two, finance capitalism, and the authority of the state. This book is the first to examine this rich literary corpus, treating it as a political unconscious which expresses submerged anxieties and moral blind-spots in Europe's most powerful country.