Embodied Narration in Post-War West German Autonomie

The German Autonomists (Autonomen) formed in the shadow of the student protests of 1968, the long “red decade” from 1969-1977, and the terrorism of the Red Army Fraction (RAF) and affiliated cells in the 1970s. Rejecting the Marxism of 1960s Italian Operaismo and Autonomia, and coalescing in the Berlin house squatting movement from 1981 to 1984, German Autonomie became a multifaceted movement concerned with embodied praxis, squatting, self-determined politics of the first person, personal militancy, and the use of symbolic violent protest. Hamburg’s autonomous movement flourished after the Berlin squatting scene waned in the mid 1980s. After the iconic Rote Flora cultural centre was squatted in 1989, it became the centre of radical German left-wing protest identity, and has come to represent an utter refusal of all state interaction, even extending to communication, contracts, discourse, and language. Within this negation, the Autonomists sought to develop physically embodied ways to symbolically express their resistance of state ideology. This paper juxtaposes Autonomie in the 1980s and 90s to the more explicitly violent RAF terrorist attacks in the 1970s. Relying on Foucault (1981-84), it offers a contrast to this standard history of post-war violence by arguing that the Autonomists instead imagine themselves to be engaged in political negation via self-formation as symbolically resistant political subjectivities. It considers whether this imagined refusal of state power is merely solipsistic, or if their embodied negation of political power and language can actually be read as a new aesthetic form of fruitful political protest and communication after the refusal of language. Overall, the paper focuses upon Autonomist violence, which Dieter Rucht (2003) explains has largely transformed into ritualized theatre and performance. It thus investigates not how scholars of narration can represent violence, but rather how representative violence itself has become a form of embodied symbolic narration.