Terrorism as Performance: The Assassinations of Walther Rathenau and Hanns-Martin Schleyer
According to Martin Juergensmeyer, terrorist acts are always defined by their performative character. This chapter connects this “performance violence” with the question of control. It is assumed that the language of violence speaks with its own attraction irrespective of the political field into which it is inserted. To test this assumption, the author asks how the reading of terrorist acts can be compared over time and across political divides, finding surprising family resemblances between the narratives of the Freikorps killers in the Weimar Republic and those of the street guerrillas of the Red Army Faction, although they seem to be worlds apart in politics and ideology. Ulrike Meinhof herself has rejected any idea of such a genealogy, but it can be shown that in categories of symbolic performance the voluntarism of violence appears to provide some common ground for the escalation or the control of these violent acts.
The Art of Hunger
By the tenth and final collective hunger strike in 1989, the West German public had grown tired, and the Red Army Faction (RAF) prisoners, for their part, had grown both sick and tired.2 The hunger strike declaration from February 1989 combined familiar demands with a new tone of desperation and a recognition of the physical toll the campaign of selfstarvation had taken: “We have embarked on nine hunger strikes, two prisoners have died as a result, the health of many of us has suffered. Now this eighteen-year-long torture must end.” 3 Exhaustion had dulled it, and historic circumstances had marched by the RAF strategy of political self-starvation, but for a decade and a half the collective hunger strike shaped West German terrorism and counterterrorism. The carefully choreographed spectacle of hunger dragged the organization up from its knees after the arrest of its leaders, it helped underpin a RAF prison identity, and it allowed the group to confront what it saw as a mainstream medicalization of terror. The performative strength of the hunger campaigns rested on Meinhof’s ability to tailor the RAF struggle to the prison environment by encoding the starving prisoner with the group’s established rhetoric and victimhood during the three major strikes of the first generation.4
Emotional arousal in the facilitation of aggression through communication
Publisher Summary This chapter presents a report of a program of research on emotional arousal in the facilitation of aggression through communication. It focuses on emotional arousal that many communication messages, especially those presented in highly dramatic format, can elicit in most viewers, and suggests that this arousal can play a significant role in the degree to which the individual will engage in aggressive behavior. Because a major factor motivating the present research is to test an alternative model to account for previous findings, the same basic methodological format has been adopted in the research program as well. The chapter discuses the elementary arousal model, which focuses on the degree of emotional arousal, and it contends that physiological excitation serves to activate or energize behaviors without channeling itself toward any particular behavior. It proposes a more sophisticated theory to incorporate the various cognitive and arousal factors into a single model and demonstrates more specifically how they interact to determine the behavior. As this program of theoretical speculation and research has evolved, three different facets of the problem of the effect of communications on subsequent aggressive behavior have arisen. Each addresses a different phase of the experimental procedure, thus focusing on a different component of the process.