Shadowboxing the apocalypse: New Left violence in the United States and West Germany

In this dissertation, written under the direction of of Professor Dominick LaCapra, I present an in-depth study of left-wing violence in the 1960s and 70s in the United States and West Germany. Specifically, I compare America's Weatherman and Germany's Red Army Faction (RAF), the main "armed struggle" groups to emerge from the student movements of their respective countries. I argue that the two groups initially represented strikingly similar responses to new constellations of global power and to the crisis of agency felt by young radicals in advanced industrial societies. Weatherman and RAF shared an ideology of "revolutionary anti-imperialism" that opposed the military and economic power of the United States. Frustrated with the apparent inefficacy of peaceful protest and conventional mobilizing, both groups pursued guerrilla war strategies derived from revolutionary movements in the Third World. Yet "armed struggle" proved ineffective, as Weatherman and RAF falsely assumed the applicability of foreign models of protest to their domestic contexts. Mystifying violence, the groups exemplified the dangers of the New Left's ethic of solidarity with Third World movements and commitment to militant protest.; Despite the groups' similar origins, RAF's "armed struggle" proved more destructive and divisive than that of Weatherman. Germany's fascist past figured centrally in the volatility of the West German conflict. RAF and the state saw in each other the persistence of fascism. Constructing its enemy in these terms, each side felt justified engaging in extreme forms of violence. The Weathermen, by contrast, de-escalated their violence in the 1970s. This decision reflected a radical revision of their understanding of revolutionary agency and a recognition of the hazards of violence. The different trajectories of the two groups demonstrate the importance of national contexts in shaping political behavior.