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.
Anti-Democratic Terror in the Weimar Republic: the Black Reichswehr and the Feme-Murders
‘Direct action’ is the renunciation of politics. Both individuals and groups may employ extreme forms of political protest. Individuals who resort to ‘direct action’ often feel themselves to be divorced from and superior to the society around them, like Hamlet who, as Harley Granville Barker observes, ‘is a man adrift from old faiths and not yet anchored in new’.1They are Nietzschean individuals who by heroic efforts of will strive to create new values and so place themselves ‘beyond good and evil’. ‘Direct action’ is likewise the expedient of social groups who have lost faith in received values and institutions, and run out of ordinary solutions. Arthur Rosenberg writes of the crisis of German government in 1916: ‘If Germany’s ruling classes now recognized the bankruptcy of the Imperial government but simultaneously rejected parliamentary government, what further possibility remained?’.2 It was this disorientation of German conservatism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries which led stability-loving groups to espouse radical political action.
Pioneer 10 Observations of the Ultraviolet Glow in the Vicinity of Jupiter
A two-channel ultraviolet photometer aboard Pioneer 10 has made several observations of the ultraviolet glow in the wavelength range from 170 to 1400 angstroms in the vicinity of Jupiter. Preliminary results indicate a Jovian hydrogen (1216 angstrom) glow with a brightness of about 1000 rayleighs and a helium (584 angstrom) glow with a brightness of about 10 to 20 rayleighs. In addition, Jupiter appears to have an extensive hydrogen torus surrounding it in the orbital plane of Io. The mean diameter of the torus is about equal to the diameter of the orbit of Io. Several observations of the Galilean satellites have also occurred but only a rather striking Io observation has been analyzed to date. If the observed Io glow is predominantly that of Lyman-α, the surface brightness is about 10,000 rayleighs.