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.
Alemania 1918-1919: la revolución de la violencia
This article examines the role of violence in the German revolution of 1918-1919, after the defeat of Germany in the First World War. It demonstrates that the brutal violence employed by the new social democratic government against the revolutionary left was a turning point in the history of the German state. The period between November 1918 and mid-January 1919 was marked by the persistence of war mentalities that allowed for the use of violence in politics. However, government violence was not only a simple product of the war experience. It had a performative role: demonstrating and reinforcing the authority of the new state.
VLA stereoscopy of solar active regions. 2: Altitude, relative motion, and center-to-limb darkening of 20 centimeter emission
A newly developed method of stereoscopic correlation is applied to solar radio maps at a wavelength of 20 cm. On the basis of stereoscopic correlations between radio maps obtained on 6 different days we establish the presence of 66 radio source components associated with 22 active regions. We find the following statistical results for active region source structures at 20 cm: 1. The observed lifetime is consistent with an exponential distribution having an e-folding time scale of greater than 18 days. 2. The average altitude of 20 cm sources is 25 +/- 15 Mm; 90% of the sources are found in heights less than 40 Mm. 3. The average diameter of discrete source structures is 48 +/- 15 Mm, implying a vertical/horizontal aspect ratio of q(sub A) approx. = 0.5. 4. No significant source motion has been found with respect to the standard differential rotation rate of Omega = 13.45 deg - ((3 deg (sin(exp 2)B)). 5. We find a statistical limb darkening, which can be described by the relation (T(sub B)(alpha))/T(sub B)(0)) = 0.4 + ((0.6(cos(exp 2) alpha)) for sources with T(sub B) greater than 0.5 MK. 6. The degree of source polarization is 15% +/- 10% and is independent of source location. 7. Bright sources (greater than or approximately equal to 0.5 MK), or equivalently, long-lived sources (greater than or approximately equal to 5 days) show a systematic variation of their altitude as function of the center-limb distance.