Karin Bauer, McGill University
Karin Bauer is professor of German Studies at McGill University and co-editor of Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies. She has published in the areas of critical theory, Adorno and Nietzsche, Herta Müller, Ulrike Meinhof, contemporary German literature, and the New Berlin. She works on actual and virtual literary publics in contemporary Germany and is currently finalizing a manuscript on Meinhof and the ways in which works of art, literature, theater, and film respond to the challenge of her radical and violent politics.
TChallenging Terror: Ulrike Meinhof, Critical Publics, and the Aesthetic Imagination.
According to Friedrich Kittler, every system of power has the enemies it produces. This talk traces the transformation of Ulrike Meinhof, one of the most intriguing and divisive icons of the German Left, from ‘critic’ to ‘enemy’ of the state. Addressing urgent political and social problems plaguing postwar German democracy, Meinhof’s work—her columns in the magazine konkret, radio and television features, and the film script Bambule—sought to push a shift from a culture of consent to a culture of dissent. Examining the strategies she developed in the 1960s to foster critical public debate, the talk contextualizes Meinhof’s work within the political, intellectual, and cultural environment from which it arose. Drawing on works by Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Heiner Müller, Elfriede Jelinek, and Anselm Kiefer, it then investigates how Meinhof’s turn to violence occasions a radical iconography, while simultaneously challenging the artistic projects that respond to her radical politics.
