Katharina Karcher's monograph covers untrodden ground: the use of violence by feminists in West Germany. The new women's movement emerged out of the new left and the student movement of the mid-to-late 1960s in the Federal Republic of Germany. Initially, the student movement and the new left advocated disruptive but ultimately nonviolent forms of protest. Members of the movement began to challenge this approach after a police officer killed twenty-six-year-old student Benno Ohnesorg during a peaceful demonstration in June 1967. The subsequent attempted assassination of SDS leader Rudi Dutschke in April 1968 further radicalized and galvanized the student movement. In turn, as factions of the broader new left movement became more open to aggressive, violent tactics, so did groups of militant feminists.

Karcher points out that militant feminists traditionally have been ignored in the historiography because they were considered too militant to be feminist by the German women's movement, which remains largely pacifist to this day. One of the most fruitful outcomes of Karcher's study is her deconstruction of the binary of militant/nonmilitant feminism. A whole spectrum of behaviors and tactics was sometimes characterized as nonviolent and at other times was considered confrontational. This distinction is critical and drives Karcher's narrative. Furthermore, she points out repeatedly that many West German feminists intentionally silenced discussions of militant violence because they wanted to be remembered as nonviolent and nonconfrontational.

Karcher's story begins in September 1968, at the SDS conference in Frankfurt, where Sigrid Rüger famously threw tomatoes at SDS board members in protest of their sexist behavior. The incident led to women mobilizing independently, outside of the confines of the SDS. In Berlin, for instance, the Berlin Action Council organized public discussions about childcare and set up collectively run storefront daycare centers. Feminists created spaces separate from men. Meanwhile, the Frankfurt Crones’ Council set up collective kindergartens, passed out provocative flyers, and performed topless protests (including one before a shocked Theodor Adorno).

In many ways, this retelling of 1968 does not stray far from conventional narratives. But Karcher rapidly changes gears, exploring the links between terrorism and feminism. She recounts the birth of far-left terrorist movements such as the anti-Zionist Tupamaros West Berlin and the better-known Red Army Faction (RAF), notably spearheaded by Ulrike Meinhof and several other women. But did the high number of female members make the RAF a feminist movement? Karcher argues—in an important distinction—that the public image of RAF women as feminists had little to do with their politics, which rarely tackled gender-based oppression. Rather, they gained this reputation as militant feminists when antifeminists held up RAF women as proof of the pitfalls of women's liberation. Paradoxically, while the RAF was attacked by antifeminists for its “feminism,” other, lesser-known militant feminist groups existed, such as the Women's Liberation Front, which advocated violently overthrowing the patriarchy. These groups never attracted the same attention as the RAF. Contemporary academics revived the longstanding image of militant women as “deviant” and connected RAF terrorism to feminism. Some feminists, then, scrambled to distance themselves from the RAF. Others, however, such as the Revolutionary Cells and the Red Zora, openly embraced the feminist politics with which the RAF refused to engage.

Meanwhile, some mainstream feminists embraced militancy in protesting the abortion ban. Karcher analyzes the famous 1971 Stern magazine cover and article in which 374 women outed themselves as having had abortions. Most scholars have described this moment as exemplifying nonviolent tactics to achieve the decriminalization of abortion. According to Karcher, however, contemporary feminists (including Alice Schwarzer) believed that the Stern manifesto was expressly militant. The Stern cover provoked further aggressive action, culminating in the bombing of the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe in 1975 by the Women of the Revolutionary Cell. Despite the radicalism of the incident, other feminist groups and the media quickly obscured news of the bombing. A few years later, in 1977, the Red Zora carried out a similar attack on the German Medical Association in Cologne.

Although Red Zora's goal was to attract attention to the abortion debate, instead their actions fueled interest in combating violence against women, which ranged from domestic violence to harassment. Much as they had earlier, women's groups responded to these issues by going outside of existing legal frameworks. Rather than pursuing legal justice for survivors of domestic violence or rape, for instance, women's groups set up women's shelters and taught self-defense courses. They also occasionally attacked law offices that defended rapists. This struggle against patriarchal violence became further entangled in debates about pornography, sex shops, cinematic depiction, and sex trafficking, which many contemporary feminists saw as expressions of gendered oppression. While addressing these myriad problems in West German society, feminists also attempted to forge “global sisterhood” (117). Karcher finally examines the work of West German feminists of Jewish, migrant, and Afro-German backgrounds in a woefully short but important section that gives a voice to West German women of color, who scholars have previously excluded.

Karcher's richly researched study is a much-needed breath of fresh air in a field that has too long privileged narratives of white, peaceful female protestors. Karcher demonstrates that a strain of militant feminism always existed and played a significant role in the West German women's liberation movement. She restores the histories of groups such as Red Zora and transnationally minded West German feminists concerned with issues affecting women of color (namely sex trafficking, poor working conditions, and sexual harassment) that have been largely absent from conventional narratives about West German feminism. Although these contributions are extremely significant, they sometimes make a central argument difficult to trace throughout the book. However, moments of disorganization and authorial ambition merely reflect the complexities of writing feminist histories. These stories often contain overlapping and conflicting discourses. Karcher has done a masterful job of parsing a wide array of sources to retell these moments for her readers. Karcher's book provides significant and long overdue insights that broaden our understanding of the history of West German feminisms.