In 18.Oktober 1977 – a cycle of fifteen paintings about the German Autumn and the Baader-Meinhof Gang – Gerhard Richter deals with the trauma of terrorism confronting himself with the crystallized memory of the “crime scene” – specifically, the photos of the dead bodies in Stammheim taken by the police and then published in Stern – that he recomposes, giving us back an experience of blurred, vague, enigmatic vision, therefore forcing us to look in a different way and to search for what is hiding from our sight.The work of Richter is a gesture of rewriting archival images that thus becomes an act of redemption. He opposes to the obscene visibility of the death showed in the photographs of the police – exhibited as proofs of guilt or exploited to satisfy a desire of revenge – the spectral vision of an elementary truth: death, even in the exceptional form of terroristic violence, represents a mysterious and utter horizon that no political gesture can recompose. It is exactly in the death, experienced as a common but unspeakable fate, that Richter finds the humanity of the terrorists, helping us to approach the comprehension of trauma.
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“Wir wollen uns mit den Bildern unseres Landes befassen”:*
Documents, Fetishes, Icons, Relics: the Reconstruction
of the German Autumn as an Image
Luisella Farinotti, Libera Università di Lingue e Comunicazione IULM




Abstract

    In 18.Oktober 1977 – a cycle of fifteen paintings about the German Autumn and
    the Baader-Meinhof Gang – Gerhard Richter deals with the trauma of terrorism
    confronting himself with the crystallized memory of the “crime scene” – spe-
    cifically, the photos of the dead bodies in Stammheim taken by the police and
    then published in Stern – that he recomposes, giving us back an experience of
    blurred, vague, enigmatic vision, therefore forcing us to look in a different way
    and to search for what is hiding from our sight.
    The work of Richter is a gesture of rewriting archival images that thus becomes
    an act of redemption. He opposes to the obscene visibility of the death showed
    in the photographs of the police – exhibited as proofs of guilt or exploited to
    satisfy a desire of revenge – the spectral vision of an elementary truth: death,
    even in the exceptional form of terroristic violence, represents a mysterious and
    utter horizon that no political gesture can recompose. It is exactly in the death,
    experienced as a common but unspeakable fate, that Richter finds the humanity
    of the terrorists, helping us to approach the comprehension of trauma.


               So-called “memorial-photography,” which was popular in the United States
                    in the nineteenth century, saw not life but death as the only motivation
                       for capturing a person in a picture. We shy away from looking death
                     in the face, so we mask its visage with an image of life. A dead person
                                                       in a picture seems to us doubly dead.
                                                   Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images


  18.Oktober 1977 is the title of a very well-known work by Gerhard Richter,
realized in 1988 and now part of the MoMA collections in New York.1 The


(Translated by Filippo Pennacchio. I would like to thank Pierluigi Ercole, Mara Logaldo and
Marianne Harris for their final reading)
*
  “We want to concern ourselves with the images of our country.” This is the statement expressed

                                                     Cinéma & Cie, vol. XV, no. 24, Spring 2015
                                        Luisella Farinotti


work consists of a series of fifteen paintings of different sizes devoted to the
Baader-Meinhof Gang – the group of terrorists belonging to the RAF (Rote
Armee Fraktion) whose “urban guerrilla” actions dramatically marked the Fed-
eral Republic of Germany in the 1970s. In its referential neutrality, the title
takes the viewer back to a specific historical context, to a day and a chain of
events which are still very vivid in the German collective memory. This is the
day in which Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe died in the
top security prison of Stammheim, near Stuttgart. The dead bodies of the three
RAF members were found just a few hours after the special troops of German
police assaulted the Lufthansa airplane hijacked to Mogadishu by a group of
Palestinian terrorists, who were claiming the liberation of their imprisoned
German comrades. In turn, the assault – in which all the hijackers died, except
for one woman, and that finally brought the release of all the hostages – pre-
ceded the execution of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, who was kidnapped in Septem-
ber by a commando of the Rote Armee Fraktion and whose body was found
on October 19 in the trunk of a car in Mulhouse. Also Schleyer, who was the
President of the Bundesverband Deutschen Industrie (the German Employers’
Association) and head of the Daimler-Benz corporation, had been kidnapped
to negotiate the release of the three RAF members.
   Amidst this dramatic sequence of shocks, with its fatal twist of actions and reac-
tions, where victims and executioners seemed to continually change roles, it is the
alleged collective suicide in Stammheim which raises the most passionate reac-
tions: the suspicion that a “state murder” has been committed seems to resurrect
the ghost of Nazism, the traumatic unconscious of a “past that never passes away,”
as the police state-like practices of the federal government seem to prove.2


by the filmmakers involved in the collective film Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn,
Fassbinder, Kluge, Reitz, Schlöndorff, Brustellin et al., 1978), shot after the events of October
1977; in Petra Kraus (ed.), 1977-1997. Deutschland im Herbst. Terrorismus im Film, Filmzentrum,
München 1997, p. 80.
1
  Exhibited for the first time in 1989 at the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, during the same year
18.Oktober 1977 was presented in Frankfurt, in London and in Rotterdam. The next year the
whole series was exhibited in the USA and in Canada, before it was entrusted to the Museum für
Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt on a long-term loan, and it remained there until 2000. Right from
the beginning Richter imposed some constraints: the work should not be split; furthermore, the
whole series must be displayed only in museums, not in private art galleries. In 1995 he decided
to sell it to MoMA in New York. This decision caused a controversy: Richter was accused of
selling a part of German history. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that the paintings
represented the trauma of a still unresolved period of history and Richter, by selling them, re-
moved a critical focus for the continued ideological struggle over German history and its memory
(Eduard Beaucamp, “Exportiertes Trauma,” in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 8 June 1995, p.
35). However, the decision to move 18.Oktober 1977 far from Germany and its ghosts is Richter’s
deliberate action: it expresses the will for a change of perspective, the attempt to escape an only
historical and political interpretation of his work.
2
  On the morning of 18 October, Gudrun Ensslin was found hanging from the bars of her cell’s
window, while Baader and Raspe lay on the floor of their own cells, in a pool of blood, each with
a gunshot in the head. It was alleged that Baader had shot himself in the back of his neck (three
cartridge cases were found in his cell), while Raspe had used a 9-caliber gun. These circumstances,

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                   “Wir wollen uns mit den Bildern unseres Landes befassen”




                  Fig. 1 – Gerhard Richter at work for 18.Oktober 1977 (1988).



   In the paroxysm of those days, a whole season of clashes and conflicts between
state and terrorists seems to emerge. At the same time, though, an even more
distant, but still painful and never healed, collective wound seems to re-open.
In fact, the increasingly violent actions of the RAF find a counterpart in the au-
thoritarian and repressive reaction of the institutions, which as early as 1968 had
introduced measures and special laws as well as exceptional actions of preven-
tion and control, thus fuelling a fear connected both to terrorists’ actions and to
the operations of the police.3 The concern that democratic rights and individual


along with the quite unlikely presence of weapons in a maximum security prison have since then
instilled many doubts and suspicions in the left-wing as well as in the moderate public opinion. In
his now classic biography on the Baader-Meinhof Group, Stefan Aust suggests that it was a “co-
ordinated” suicide, a political gesture of attack rather than surrender to the state. See Stefan Aust,
Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex, Hoffmann & Campe Verlag, Hamburg 1985 (2008).
3
  The emergency laws of 1968 represent a reply to the protests of youths’ movements and to the
struggles against the Vietnam war and “capitalist imperialism.” In 1972 the Extremistenbeschluss
was launched, which prevented people suspected of sympathizing with the extreme left to access
public employment; in 1974 the laws on anti-terrorism allowed the police to search, keep tabs,
bug the telephones, and more generally to look into the private lives of German citizens. This
strong reaction of the institutions, which struck also the “sympathizers” and involved from the
beginning the police and military apparatus, solicits, due to its lack of proportions, a comparison
with Nazi practices. As is known, the truest core of young people’s protests in Germany is rep-
resented mainly by the historical-generational struggle. See Thomas Elsaesser, German Cinema:
Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory since 1945, Routledge, New York-Abingdon 2014, p. 122.
The bibliography on the German Years of Lead is endless. Besides the study of Stefan Aust,
the main texts used in this section are Margit Meyer, “The German October of 1977,” in New
German Critique, no. 13, Winter 1978, pp. 155-163; Wolfgang Kraushaar (ed.), Die RAF und die

                                                                                                   65
                                       Luisella Farinotti


freedom were in danger in the name of the State’s own security dramatically
increased; moreover, the threat that a real “emergency dictatorship” could be
established – that is, a dictatorship not only based on control and supervision,
but also supported by approval from the frightened majority of the population
– forced the public opinion to judge the RAF “as an understandable if not justi-
fiable, traumatized (over)reaction to the official Germany’s lingering and latent
Nazi legacy.”4
    This feeling of distrust and enduring emergency, a sort of defensive withdrawal
tinged with paranoia, is well-suited to describe the “German collective malady,”
the block of a country hanging between repression and an excess of memory: a
“country unable to mourn,”5 prisoner of its own history whilst trying to escape
it. As Miriam Hansen suggests,

     the catastrophic concatenation of events provoked other reactions besides the aggrava-
     tion of prevailing tendencies; it seems to have lifted, for a moment at least, the veil
     of historical amnesia which had protected the growth of German self-confidence since
     the early 1950s. Associations of the current events with “war,” or “1945,” were wide-
     spread, confirming […] the observation that such a moment of shock briefly illumi-
     nated the falsely integrated elements of German history as a fundamentally impossible
     relationship. It was the historicity of the whole situation – not only of the officially
     chronicled events of Mogadishu and Schleyer’s death – that was perceived before all
     analysis. Confusion, along with feelings of grief, despair, powerlessness, overwhelm-
     ingly struck intellectuals from left to liberal.6

   It is into this setting, where time is experienced as catastrophe and where
present and past collapse and trade their own meanings, that Gerhard Richter
comes back eleven years later. In its pure evidence as a ‘fact,’ 18.Oktober 1977
suggests an historical order and represents an act of memory as well as a return
to the past. However, this process has nothing to do with historical painting
and its commemorative or celebratory intent – from whose rhetoric Richter
seeks to distance himself, –7 nor is it an example of political art. Richter’s
anti-ideological standing, as well as his hostility towards political dogmas
and faiths, are well-known.8 Furthermore, the fact that his work has been


Medien, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 2008.
4
  Thomas Elasesser, German Cinema, cit., p. 120.
5
  This formula is taken from the title of a now classic study on repression mechanisms in the
Germany of the second postwar period: Alexander and Margarethe Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit
zu trauern. Grundingen kollektiven Verhaltnes, Piper Verlag, München 1967.
6
  Miriam Hansen, “Cooperative Auteur Cinema and Oppositional Public Sphere: Alexander
Kluge’s contribution to Germany in Autumn,” in New German Critique, no. 24-25, Fall-Winter
1981-82, p. 44.
7
  On the rejection of celebratory art see: Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Divided Memory and Post-
Traditional Identity. Gerhard Richter’s Work of Mourning,” in October, no. 75, Winter 1996,
pp. 61-82.
8
  The attack on ideology as a faith in a universal truth is one of the most important themes for
Richter as a painter who grew up in the DDR. See Gerhard Richter, Notes, 1988, in Dietmar Elger,

66
                  “Wir wollen uns mit den Bildern unseres Landes befassen”


realized several years after the historical events took place is it itself an act of
distancing, as it shifts the attention from the militant action to more general
considerations which transcend the historical details of the events portrayed.
Since the first presentation of the Oktober cycle, Richter has underlined the
“purely human”9 urgency behind it, the “speechless emotion […] the almost
forlorn attempt to give shape to feelings of compassion, grief and horror (as if
the pictorial repetition of the events were a way of understanding those events,
being able to live with them).”10 “Dismay, pity, grief”11 establish the horizon
of the sorrow and explain the need for a return and a farewell, now finally
possible after many years. Yet in this tragedy, in its specific determination,
Richter discovers a more general condition which becomes the truest centre
of his work: the fatal bond of hope and failure, courage and cruelty, faith and
violence which marks the actions as well as the course of history and the sense
of the self getting lost within an ideology, in the collective dream of a change
and its tragic re-emergence in death.

   The tremendous strength, the terrifying power that an idea has, which goes as far as
   death. That is the most impressive thing, to me, and the most inexplicable thing; that
   we produce ideas, which are almost always not only utterly wrong and nonsensical but
   above all dangerous. Wars of religion and the rest: it’s fundamentally all about nothing,
   about pure blather – and we take it utterly seriously, fanatically, even unto death.12

   This sense of history as a senseless, cruel order is depicted in 18.Oktober 1977
starting from a series of concrete details, as in a brutal photographic recording of
the events. The starting point for Richter’s reconstruction is once again the pure
factuality of a datum, as the extremely simple title which indicates a day – at the
same time exceptional and ordinary – shows.
   In the introductory notes for the first exhibition in Krefeld, in 1989, Richter
uses these words to illustrate his work:

   What I have painted. Three times Baader, shot. Three times Ensslin, hanged. Three
   times the head of the dead Meinhof after they cut her down. Once the dead Meins.
   Three times Ensslin, neutral (almost like pop stars). Then a big, unspecified burial – a
   cell dominated by a bookcase – a silent, grey, record player – a youthful portrait of
   Meinhof, sentimental, in a bourgeois way – twice the arrest of Meins, forced to sur-
   render to the clenched power of the state. All the pictures are dull, grey, mostly very
   blurred, diffuse. Their presence is the horror and the hard-to-bear refusal to answer,
   to explain, to give an opinion. I’m not sure whether the pictures “ask” anything; they
   provoke contradiction through their hopelessness and desolation, their lack of parti-


Hans Ulrich Obrist (eds.), Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961-2007, D.A.P., New York 2009, p. 200.
9
  Gerhard Richter, Notes, 1989, ivi, p. 213.
10
   Gerhard Richter, Notes for a Press Conference, November-December 1988, ivi, p. 202.
11
   Gerhard Richter, Notes, 1989, cit., p. 213.
12
   Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker on 18.Oktober 1977, in Benjmin H.D. Buchloch et al. (eds),
Gerhard Richter: Atlas: The Reader, Whitechapel Gallery, London 2012, pp. 20-21.

                                                                                              67
                                         Luisella Farinotti


     sanship.13

    Although only half of the paintings show the dead terrorists, death is the cen-
tral theme of the whole cycle and it defines its tone: that is, a general sense of fail-
ure and loss. The dead bodies painted by Richter not only represent the defeat of
an idea, they also give evidence of its tragic foolishness.
    The paintings showing the dead bodies of Ensslin and Baader – Erhängte
(Hanged), Erschlossene 1-2 (Man Shot Down 1-2) – are based on the photographs
taken by the police in Stammheim when the bodies were found. The photos were
published in Stern in October 1980.14 The issue of 16 June 1976 of the same mag-
azine contained the photos of Meinhof, who had hanged herself in Stammheim
on 9 May of the same year.15 These shocking photos function as a blueprint for
the three pictures titled Tote (Dead Person), another “neutral,” coldly objective
title, as in the case of the other paintings in the series.16
    If death has always been the object of artistic representation and the anal-
ogy between death and image is as old as the power of representation, the
model Richter refers to and adopts in every detail is the cruel and pitiless gaze
on the “crime scene.” However, if “the photograph provokes horror, […] the
painting – with the same motif – something more like grief,”17 and doing so
it radically alters our visual experience. As we will see in a moment, it is on
the very thin boundary between obscenity and revelation that Richter sets
his gaze as well as ours, giving to that specific vision of death the form of a
farewell, showing “how the aesthetic form of a memorial work amounts to a
strategy of forgetting.”18
    We shall start from here: it is in the desire to re-animate, at once and at the
same time, the body and the image that we can find our way.


Finding the image

13
   Gerhard Richter, Notes, 1988, cit., pp. 203-204. This list includes four paintings subsequently
removed from the cycle. Among them, there is the painting which portrays the dead body of
Holger Meins, who died in prison after a hunger strike in 1974.
14
   The photos were published after the investigations on the death of the three terrorists were
reopened. See “Der Fall Stammheim,” in Stern, 30 October 1980, pp. 24-25.
15
   The title summarizes in a symbolic date a series of events connected with the Baader-Meinhof
Gang; those events occurred during many years: for example, the arrest of Baader and Meins on
1 June 1972, after a gunfire, or the suicide of Meinhof a year before. There is even a portrait of a
young Meinhof, derived from a agency photo.
16
   Each painting has a title: Jugendbildnis (Youth Portrait); three canvases bearing the title Tote
(Dead Persons); Erhängte (Hanged); Gegenüberstellung 1-2-3 (Confrontation 1-2-3); Erschlossener
1-2 (Man Shot Down 1-2); Zelle (Cell); Plattenspieler (Record Player); Festnahme 1-2 (Arrest 1-2);
Beerdigung (Burial).
17
   Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker on 18.Oktober 1977, in Dietmar Elger, Hans Ulrich Obrist
(eds.), Gerhard Richter, cit., p. 229.
18
   Gerhard Storck, Ohne Titel (Gemischte Gefühle), in Gerhard Richter: 18.Oktober 1977, Walther
König, Köln 1989, p. 13.

68
                   “Wir wollen uns mit den Bildern unseres Landes befassen”



   The paintings included in Oktober are all Fotobilder: each painting is obtained
from a photographic model.19 For years, Richter had been collecting a large
amount of photographs on the Baader-Meinhof Gang: these were documentary
photographs, including press photographs and pictures taken by the police. Pri-
vate photos, taken from family albums, went hand in hand with the public im-
ages portraying the operations carried out by members of the RAF as well as
with mug shots and rogues’ galleries. Richter’s examination of the photographs,
mainly from newspapers’ archives, is reflected in Atlas (sheets 470-479) – the
vast work archive in which Richter has stored and organized all the materials
he used –20 and in a separate study album. He collected more than one hundred
pictures related to the RAF in these two albums.
   It is not merely an attempt at philological recovery nor an act of compulsive
accumulation; this gesture, which is very frequent in contemporary art, is rather
aimed at searching and reinterpreting existing materials. Here the action of ar-
chiving is very close to the Foucauldian idea of an “archaeology of the present.”
It resembles the order of a promise, rather than that of a return. Richter is inter-
ested in the presence of a ghost, in investigating our relationship with a “way of
seeing,” which is at the root of our gaze.
   As Benjamin Buchloh writes, Richter “seems to consider photography and its
various practices as a system of ideological domination, and more precisely, as
one of the instruments with which collective anomie, amnesia and repression are
socially inscribed.”21 It is after all the very ambiguous quality of the photographic
image, which at the same time presents itself as a trace of documentary truth and
ideological falsity, to define its testimonial value.
   To Richter, photography is also a sort of figurative ready-made which gives
him the chance of not losing the immediacy of what it represents as well as the
opportunity of gaining a ‘neutrality’ of the gaze warranted by the obliteration
of any expression of boasted artistry. For Richter, photography – in its most
common, banal and mechanical form, such as the pictures contained in a fam-
ily album or in a newspaper – is, literally, “almost nature,”22 a “pure” image,


19
   “I’m not trying to imitate a photograph; I’m trying to make one”: Gerhard Richter, Extracts from
Writings and Interviews 1962-2003, in Benjamin H.D. Buchloh et al. (eds.), Gerhard Richter: Atlas:
The Reader, cit., p. 14.
20
   The Atlas is a vast work in progress started in 1962 as a simple collection of iconographic mate-
rial, including amateur photos, images taken from newspapers and magazines, advertisements,
sketches and drawings; it is a sort of inventory of models that Richter collects for his pictorial
activity. Since then the collection has evolved in an organic archive, revolving around themes and
motives, which aims at accounting specific visual forms. This image-diary covering fifty years of
activity is also a real cartography of the visual culture of an age. A sort of mix between collection
and work, the Atlas is a huge archive of “visions” that, since 1972, has been exhibited all over the
world following a spatial organisation rigorously decided by Richter himself. On the Atlas see
Benjamin H.D. Buchloh et al. (eds.), Gerhard Richter: Atlas: The Reader, cit.
21
   Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive, ivi, p. 96.
22
   Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker on 18.Oktober 1977, cit., p. 228.

                                                                                                  69
                                         Luisella Farinotti


immediate, free from any formal rules or figurative tradition, able to reveal the
appearance of the world. This “communal vision” is the evidence of a “way
of seeing”: a shared, albeit obliviously, perceptive system. A primeval way of
transcribing the past as well as a testimonial trace of the gaze, the photograph
works as a document not only because it preserves a content, but also due to
the form through which it describes the world. In the Fotobilder, Richter re-
appropriates the immediacy associated with photography while exploring its
modes of representation: and it is in the search of the pure appearance inside
representation that he reveals “the image as image,” thus showing how vision
may be the expression of a dominant cultural order, a device for constructing
the visibility of the world.
   For the Oktober cycle, Richter had to deal with the common and shared image
of terrorism, with the memory of the RAF built by images. It is therefore a con-
frontation with the representation of terrorists created by media over the years, a
representation that the terrorists themselves have contributed to build up. The
history of the RAF – as has been highlighted – is also the history of the images that
the group has enacted, arranged and left behind.23 The Baader-Meinhof Gang – a
media phenomenon not only because of the interest of the press and television
in presiding over public comprehension – operates in perfect awareness of the
weight of its own image. The terrorists of the RAF very consciously evaluated
media impact and exploited it in order to promote their actions. Indeed, they had
grown up in the culture of the happening, of the avant-garde street theatre, of
Fluxus performances and Situationist dérives, all forms that encouraged the insur-
rectionary and subversive use of images.24 It was also on account of this commu-
nicative ability that the State and the police apparatus tried to control the RAF’s
public image, both through the complicity of tabloids and the conservative press,
which organized whispering campaigns and resorted to every kind of manipula-
tion and shock, underscoring the violence of the terrorists through the use of vio-
lent images, particularly through an overexposure of the images of the criminals.


23
   See Astrid Proll, Hans und Grete. Bilder der RAF 1967-1977, Steidl, Göttingen 1998. Elsaesser
explains how the Baader-Meinhof Gang practices remind to the contemporary idea of terrorism
as a “war of image,” an idea which comes both from images of martyrs. Indeed, the terrorists
showed great expertise in promoting themselves as victims during the detention; their condition
was presented as akin to that of the prisoners of concentration camps, as if to underline a manifest
continuity with Nazi practices. The hunger strikes and the suicide as political gestures confirm this
kind of image. They were also images of an extremely vital avant-garde. The bank robberies, the
police pursuits, the fast cars, the transgressions, the sexual freedom and the glamorous clothes all
contribute to foster an imagination of youth and anarchism, a cool frame of outlaw eroticism that
the cinema itself contributed to reinforce, in a sort of “mediatic circle.” “In a genealogy of terror-
ism as a ‘war of image,’ […] the RAF can claim a well-deserved place – but so can its opponents.
Taking ‘propaganda by deed’ to a new level, the RAF exploited the ‘society of the spectacle’ for
their own ends, to the point where the images they produced or gave rise to, became the main ob-
jectives of their actions, with the actual victims the collateral but necessary props for a successful
staging.” Thomas Elsaesser, German Cinema, cit., p. 123.
24
   Ibidem.

70
                   “Wir wollen uns mit den Bildern unseres Landes befassen”


The mug shots of the Anarchistische Gewalttäter (Anarchist Violent Criminals)
appeared in every corner of the state, and the Wanted posters – which offered a
reward for any report – were displayed in every post-office as well as in shop win-
dows. Particularly the mug shots, which were extensively exhibited in the public
space, operate as a device of identification, as they epitomize the commonplace
image of guilt while regulating the identification of the criminal as a criminal, ac-
cording to a scheme both of depersonalization and overdetermination.

     In the case of the RAF, a reality predominantly without images was being overcompen-
     sated by a media-driven image-world, that […] counted, above all, on the shock-and-
     outrage factor of a preconditioned public sphere. […] The RAF was strategically con-
     quered and lastingly occupied through its images. It was this appropriation of a language
     of images by very diverse (partly state) powers that has shaped today’s over all perception
     of the RAF phenomenon.25

   Significantly, after the leaders of the RAF were arrested, the publication of
their declarations and the images of the prisoners were banned, according to a
strategy which seems not only to reinforce the isolation and the “sensory depriva-
tion” of identity brought about by the detention, but also, in a more banal way, to
prevent the promotion of terrorists as victims or martyrs of the system. It is not
by chance that – as a form of political counter-information – the Stammheimer
prepared a volume that also contains the self-shots taken with a Minox minicam
secretly smuggled into the prison.26 On the one hand these photographs, which
show the terrorist alive and smiling despite the many hunger strikes, are another
demonstration of their ability to act in spite of the prohibition, while on the other
they suggest an act of re-appropriation of their own images (paradoxically, this
occurred a few months before the terrorists’ deaths, which have been interpreted
as a gesture of re-appropriation of their own bodies).
   As Richter says, “there is nothing private or individual about the RAF members;
they are no more than the sensational public image that the media created of them.”27
   Hence, starting from the reality of these images and depending on their being
established as a common mnemonic horizon, Richter builds up his rereading,
with the aim to reconfigure its meaning, but also to redefine the limits and the
possibilities of representation and of our vision.
   The photographic matrix of the paintings that compose the Oktober cycle is
acknowledged not only in the choice of black, white and grey as the only chromatic
elements, but also in the faithful reproduction of the same compositional order


25
   Wolfgang Kraushaar, “Zwischen Popkultur, Politik und Zeitgeschichte,” cit., ivi, pp. 127-128.
26
   The fact is analysed by Heiko Reusch, Zur Vorstellung des Terroristen, Tectum Verlag, Marburg
2008, pp. 24-27. The volume of the RAF, published before the German Autumn, is Rote Armee
Fraktion, Texte: der RAF, Verlag Bo Cavefors, Malmö 1977.
27
   Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting, cit. in Frances Guerin, Roger Hallas (eds.), The
Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture, Wallflower Press, London-New York
2007, p. 121.

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                                         Luisella Farinotti


used in the press images: points of view, centres of focalization and different types
of framing. At the same time, ‘full evidence’ of the photographs is denied through
various forms of perceptive alteration. The shadings, flous, and large sections of
grey that cover broad parts of the paintings actually make some of the figures dif-
ficult to detect. Hence this painting style aimed at “the detriment of the image or,
at least, at the detriment of the object described”28 hinders the very act of interpre-
tation, for it forces us to look in a different way and grabs, as it were, the subjects
portrayed away from our sight. Thus a distance is created which restores “une in-
timité aux personnes dépeintes et une universalité au thème primordial du cycle.”29
   The process of veiling the scenes is progressive and inversely proportional
to our desire for looking. Tote, for example, shows three different versions of
the same image portraying the dead body of Meinhof. The photo, published in
Stern, shows a close up of half of the woman’s face. The head, slightly reclined,
is framed by short dark hair, which contrasts with the paleness of her face. The
neck is marked by a clear black line: a deep wound, with no blood. The mouth
is open; the eyes, half-closed, suggest the sense of a sudden meeting with death.
The tension that can be perceived in her face and the position of her body, lying
on a plain surface, remind us of a corpse placed on a dissecting table. Indeed,
what this photograph seems to convey is nothing but the brutal recording of a
death; in this, it is similar to a medical report. However, the three paintings that
Richter creates starting from this model differ in size, arrangement of the sub-
ject portrayed and intensity of the blurring. The smaller the paintings, the more
the human figure looks distant;30 the position of the head is slightly different
in each of the three paintings; and the background gets darker and darker. As
a result, the figures become more and more blurred: while in the first painting
the features of Meinhof’s face are still recognisable, in the last one they are so
blurred that they look totally vague and indistinct. The gradual disappearing of
the subject, its transformation into a pure shadow, on the one hand suggests the
sense of a loss connected to death, but on the other hand it drives us away from
the facts in the direction of an “indistinct” and universal dimension of suffering
for such a cruel death. From painting to painting then, Richter “also smoothes
out the texture of her face and neck and darkens the background, thereby blur-
ring the dividing line between life and death.”31 It is on this vague borderline
between life and death that our sight vacillates, challenged by a deep sense of
mystery and annihilation. Of the original photograph, with its claim of assert-
ing a ‘fact’ in a shameless and objective way, only a spectral trace remains: the


28
   Interview with Robert Storr, 2001, in Gerhard Richter la pratica quotidiana della pittura, 1962-
2001, cit., p. 223.
29
   Achim Borchardt-Hume, “Dreh dich nicht um.” Ne te retourne pas. Les peintures de Richter de
la fin des années 1980, in Mark Godfrey et al. (eds.), Gerhard Richter. Panorama. Rétrospective,
Edition du Centre Pompidou, Paris 2012, p. 167.
30
   The size of the paintings is following the order of their exhibition: 62 cm. x 67 cm.; 62 cm. x 62
cm.; 35 cm. x 40 cm.
31
   Kaja Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2009, p. 194.

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                  “Wir wollen uns mit den Bildern unseres Landes befassen”


painting destabilizes the experience of vision, giving us back not the truth, but a
standpoint for further research. This experience involves both the viewer, who
is denied an unequivocal vision, and the artist, whose work may only consist in
a series of attempts, of figural approximations, as the repetitions of the same im-
age show. After all, “by means of the blurring of his paintings, he breaks down
the symbiosis of reality and the past that exists in the photographs.”32 Death,
first recorded as the administrative banality of a public event in the photographs
of the police and then exhibited as a sort of spectacle in the press, in the Foto-
bilder finds again a dimension of blind and opaque effectiveness: a dimension
of inscrutable mystery.
   In Erhängte, the body of Ensslin hanging from the bars of her cell’s window
is almost invisible, placed as it is in a protected space, hidden in the grey back-
ground, and surrounded by a white, phantasmal light. Paradoxically, only from a
certain distance we can perceive her profile and distinguish it in the web of screens
and veils created by Richter (a cloth hanging on the left side similar to a big black
stain, the grid structure of the bars from which the body is hanging, the hair that
covers her face…). The image seems to melt, it literally ‘dissolves,’ denying us the
possibility of violating the space of death. “Richter recoups Ensslin’s ‘privacy’
when he safely sequesters the corpse behind the surface of the brushstroke, the
blurred surface of the image.”33 If the photograph taken by the police works as
a “proof of the crime,” Richter’s painting prevents us from identifying the body,
assigning to the image the function of a cover, as if it could return a denied dignity
to it. To the public exhibition of the dead body – an exhibition which satisfies a
fantasy of hate and revenge,34 or just a voyeuristic pleasure – the painting opposes
the intrinsic impossibility to show death. Exposed in its tragic brutality, through
the evident solitude of its subject, the vision of that body – a body with no com-
fort, lost in a desolate space – causes a feeling of compassion for that tragic end.
   The threshold between the visible and the invisible also corresponds to the
separation between public and private sphere, a separation that the terrorists,
by choosing a political struggle, resolutely denied. It is exactly the connection
of public and private, of life and History, that seems obscure and fatal to Rich-
ter: “the public posture of these people: nothing private, but the overriding,
ideological motivation.”35 By ‘obscuring’ the public vision of their deaths, this
division is restored and preserved in the paintings. After all, it is the elementary
truth of death, not only as an experience that denies any chance of communion
and is impossible to express but also as an event in which the subject (re)joins


32
   Armin Zweite, Gerhard Richter’s Album of Photographs, Collages and Sketches, in Benjamin H.D.
Buchloh et al. (eds.), Gerhard Richter: Atlas: The Reader, cit., p. 56.
33
   Frances Guerin, The Grey Space Between: Gerhard Richter’s 18.Oktober 1977, in Frances Guerin,
Roger Hallas (eds.), The Image and the Witness, cit., p. 118.
34
   On the paintings of Richter as transposition of a “fantasy of hate” see Conversation with Jan
Thorn Prikker on 18.Oktober 1977, cit., pp. 20-22. About iconization and exposure of the “body
of the enemy” see Giovanni De Luna, Il corpo del nemico ucciso, Einaudi, Torino 2006.
35
   Ibidem.

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                                   Luisella Farinotti


himself and his own history, which gives the terrorists their original quality as hu-
man beings. What Richter represents is a sort of paradoxical redemption: finding
in death the common horizon of every existence, one that no political gesture can
tame, Richter identifies in the dead body a naked humanity in all its evidence.
   The paintings unveil the photographic act as a relationship between visibility
and concealment, a relationship that is always the result of a ‘vision,’ thus un-
masking the alleged objectivity of documents and traces of evidence, the memory
crystallized in images.
   Instead of resolving the ambiguities of the visible, Richter stresses them: by
blurring the vision, he not only declares the incompleteness of the image, but
also opens a gap in the alleged capacity of media images to give shape to experi-
ence. Nonetheless, something in the process is revealed: our own gaze and its
crisis. Richter represents both photography and its off-screen: our will to see but
also our eagerness to possess, the violence of our vision. In relation to this aspect,
the use of flou and sfumato, by forcing us to focus on the painting in a different
way, breaks off with our perceptive habits and, in the case of the photographs of
the Baader-Meinhof Gang used as a model, breaks the crystallized form of the
memory and trauma, opening the possibility for a new kind of understanding.
   The same can be said about the representation of Baader’s dead body, to
whom the couple of paintings Man Shot Down 1-2 are dedicated. In this case the
difference between the two versions of the same image is overtly acknowledged.
The passage from the one vision to the other forces us to change our way of
looking, thus revealing the workings of representation and its weight in defining
our experience. It is in the unnatural position of the body, lying down diagonally
through the horizontal width of the canvas, the head tilted backwards and the
left arm abandoned with no control that death is revealed. The body, still dis-
cernible in this painting, is surrounded by indefinite objects similar to flashes of
light or black stains. In the first version, the richness of details upon which the
photograph constructs its evidence (the gun, the cartridge cases, the exact posi-
tion of the hand) has already disappeared. In the second painting, the point of
view and the type of framing have changed: the body is more in the foreground,
magnified yet more difficult to see because of the blurring effect. The distinction
between the figure and the background is weakened, the body of Baader looks
ethereal, immersed in a whitish glow. The experience of death literally becomes
here an experience of loss and the dead body is a shapeless figure of an absent-
present, the image of a passage towards ‘nothingness.’ The publication of the
photos (close-ups) of Baader’s dead body, his head surrounded by blood, gave
rise to a scandal and a debate about the obscenity of the horror turned into a
show. The image re-proposed in Richter’s paintings is not there to denounce
the cruel glance of the media, rather it invites us to look at death as a limit and a
paradox, as a mysterious evidence which becomes even more obscure when, as
in the case of the terrorists, it is bound to a political gesture.
   Each of the paintings that belong to the Oktober cycle follows the same princi-
ple: blurring the vision, withdrawing the subject from its full decipherability. The

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                    “Wir wollen uns mit den Bildern unseres Landes befassen”


world we experience is a world of ghosts, dominated by grey, the colour that,
since the 1960s, has been elected by Richter as “the only possible equivalent for
indifference, non-commitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape […]. It has
the capacity that no other colour has, to make ‘nothing’ visible.”36 Many years
later, referring to the Oktober cycle, Richter would explain that

     here the indifference of grey is charged with a new pathos. In the light of 18.Oktober
     1977, when I see the Grey monochrome paintings I realise that, perhaps, and surely not
     entirely consciously, that was the only way for me to paint concentration camps. It is
     impossible to paint the misery of life, except, may be, in grey, to cover it.37

   This association with the representation of concentration camps is sympto-
matic of the impossibility of representation. The use of a very similar formal
strategy indicates the common traumatic root of the works and the difficulty for
Richter – particularly with regard to the Holocaust – to give a shape to trauma.
It is a long research, started in the early 1960s, which finds in Oktober an ideal
achievement. Therefore, this work seems to acquire a value which transcends the
historical reality represented.
   The aesthetic choice of an undefined, ‘hazy’ vision also reminds us of the form
of the image-lacune theorized by Didi-Huberman: a place where the unveiling is
inseparable from the inadequacy to show.

     The lacuna-image is a trace-image and a disappearance-image at the same time. Some-
     thing remains that is not the thing, but a scrap of its resemblance. Something – very little,
     a film – remains of a process of annihilation: that something, therefore, bears witness to
     a disappearance while simultaneously resisting it, since it becomes the opportunity of its
     possible remembrance. It is neither full presence, nor absolute absence. It is neither res-
     urrection, nor death without remains. It is death insofar as it makes remains. It is a world
     proliferating with lacunae, with singular images which, placed together in a montage,
     will encourage readability, an effect of knowledge.38

   The very idea of montage as a juxtaposition of fragments that is able to reveal
new meanings, provides further suggestions of how to interpret Richter’s work.
Oktober is a cycle, a series of paintings which cannot be split into parts. This
formal configuration invites us to read the cycle privileging simultaneity rather
than chronology. However, a ‘narrative’ order is not utterly excluded. Although
there is no prearranged plan, Jugendbildnis is usually considered the first paint-


36
   Gerhard Richter, From a Letter to Edy de Wilde, 23 February 1975, in Hans Ulrich Obrist (ed.),
The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA)
1995, pp. 82-83.
37
   Interviewed by Gregorio Magnani, “Gerhard Richter: For Me It Is Absolutely Necessary that the
Baader-Meinhof Is a Subject for Art,” in Flash Art, no. 146, May-June 1989, pp. 94-97, p. 97. Richter
is referring here to the big grey painting titled Graue Bilder and realized between 1972 and 1976.
38
   Georges Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris 2003 (Eng. ed.
Images in Spite All, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago-London 2008, p. 167).

                                                                                                  75
                                            Luisella Farinotti


ing: it portrays the young Meinhof before she decided to devote herself to the
armed struggle. This image, which “has the formal coordinates of the photo-
graphs published in high school yearbooks,”39 shows a melancholic teenager,
thus suggesting an horizon of possibilities later denied. The last painting of the
cycle is Beerdigung, the big funeral painting. This conclusion underlines an exis-
tential and political path of loss and failure. We cannot reconstruct here the very
long ordeal that preceded the authorization for the burial of the three terrorists
in a cemetery of Stuttgart, after the refusal of many cities to enable the burial to
take place. Let us just mention that the recognition of the right to be buried in a
peaceful place, as well as the possibility to receive a funeral, caused a controversy,
which prevented the mourning process from taking its course.
   The argument concerning the burial, the refusal to erect a monument thus
granting a “place of recollection,” becomes the very centre of the political and
cultural discussion of the German Autumn, with an intensity that seems to echo
Antigone’s tragic archetype. In this climate, the funerals, followed by thousands of
political militants and by hundreds of photographers and television operators, turn
into an incandescent farewell rite, resembling more a tribute paid to martyrs than a
leave-taking. In the big painting (200 cm. x 320 cm.) that Richter dedicates to this
event, the funeral procession and the crowd in the cemetery can be recognized as
such only from a certain distance: if we get closer to the painting we can see only
different shades of grey. There is no celebratory intent and no sense of an homage;
we only perceive a path where the funeral procession and the crowd trace the final
steps. It is a farewell, announced by all the images of death within the cycle.


Re-vision

   18.Oktober 1977 belongs to an historical-memorial rereading of the years of ter-
rorism where the reconsideration of terrorists as human beings prevails over their
being seen as mere political subjects. This interpretation became a recurring one
in the 1990s, when the problem seemed to concern, in particular, the legitimacy of
representing dead bodies, as well as the pornographic quality of the vision of death
and the cruelty inherent to images: a visual trauma, rather than an historical one.
   However, Richter introduces a change compared with the many representa-
tions of terrorism that other media, and cinema above all, produced: he is the
first one to show the scene of death removed from the “crime scene.” A trau-
matic, political tangle (the suicide whose circumstances were never completely
explained), the death of the terrorists of the Baader-Meinhof Group in fact re-
mains for a long time an off-screen experience: it is suggested, evoked, denied,
but never shown or represented in a fictional way. The first film to enter the
prison and show the dead bodies is, in 2008, Der Baader-Meinhof Complex (Uli


39
     Kaja Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh, cit., p. 196.

76
               “Wir wollen uns mit den Bildern unseres Landes befassen”


Edel). This resistance to show the corpses is counterbalanced by the tendency to
display, right from the beginning, the images of the bodies in the coffin, arranged
for the funeral. This can be observed in the well-known image of Holger Meins
who, after the hunger strike, looked like a skeleton – a real figura Christi, used
as a fetishized image of political martyrdom; it can also be said about the dead
body of Gudrun Ensslin, tenaciously claimed by her family, which was shown in
Deutschland im Herbst as a sort of relic in movement. Conversely, Richter avoids
any type of sanctification or heroic representation. Rather, he seems to rewrite
the images of trauma, removing them from the spectacular and disciplining dis-
course of the media and revealing to us the reality of death, within the image.
Richter dramatically reverses the image of the crime and exhorts us to look in
this “commonplace,” mysterious and banal, unimaginable and yet well-known,
and to recognize something which belongs to us.




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