In times of increased police violence and street protest, the need for an academic analysis of the memory and myth of left-wing terrorism and state surveillance, of the 1960s civil rights movements and suppression of rebellion, is especially needed. Therefore, Christina Gerhardt's book on media, art, and cinematic representations of the West German terrorist group the Red Army Faction (RAF) is timely. “The discourse surrounding terrorism touches upon vital questions,” Gerhardt maintains, “such as the rights, limits, and failures of liberal democracies; the points of relationships, overlap and difference in armed struggle groups operative in so-called First, Second, and Third World contexts; and the possibilities and limitations of solidarity alliances” (3). Gerhardt's analysis not only contributes to existing research on the role of violence and authority in postfascist West Germany, but also positions the RAF within transnational global movements. In six chapters, a comprehensive introduction, and an epilogue, Gerhardt shows that depictions of the RAF not only reflected the failure of West German democracy to represent citizens’ (especially workers’ and labor migrants’) political positions, but also how it was undermined by overbearing state surveillance, inability to carry on a nonviolent dialogue, and complicity in a media monopoly.

Gerhardt's introduction lays out her chronological approach to the investigation of the RAF's representation in film and media: from contemporaneous depictions in the West German press and film of the 1970s to post-2000 German cinema. Most films and art that she discusses were made by contemporaries of the student protests and the RAF, such as Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta, and Gerhard Richter. Given the focus on contemporaries, one wishes for a more detailed explanation of broader theoretical concepts, such as memory, remembering, terrorism, and violence. Such a distinction would be useful, for instance, in Gerhardt's discussion of films by younger directors, such as Christian Petzold, whose 2000 The State I Am In Gerhardt examines alongside Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1975 Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven and von Trotta's 1978 The Second Awakening of Christa Klages. Nevertheless, the promise of the book's introduction to expand “the historical lens to encompass international relations among 1960s and 1970s social and terrorist groups” and to thus provide “a more nuanced account of West German domestic political events” (13) is consistently attended to in the book.

The first four chapters span the political and historical genealogy of the RAF from the 1960s antiwar protests and the global social movements in Africa, Asia, and the United States to the decline of the group's activities by the early 1980s and the end of the “first generation of the cultural memory of the RAF” in 1982 (199). Chapter 1 traces domestic and global events that shaped West Germany's social movements. Focusing on the “long sixties” (roughly 1957–1972), Gerhardt positions Germany's domestic struggle with democratization and denazification, immigration and rearmament vis-à-vis the cultural revolution in China, the anticolonial wars in Africa and Southeast Asia, and the US civil right movements. Here, we find an eloquent overview of West German media outlets and alternative imprints and their response to such global social movements. Chapter 2 discusses negative depictions of the RAF in corporate media as juxtaposed to those in underground publications. Gerhardt revisits the leftist papers konkret and Agit 883 to contrast them to the “consensus journalism” (70) practiced by corporate media (the Springer publishing house), such as Bild, Die Welt, Berliner Morgenpost, and BZ am Sonntag. The chapter ends with the journalist Ulrike Meinhof (one of the RAF founders) and underground papers’ exploitation of the Frankfurt School theory for their own radicalization.

Chapter 3 focuses on New German Cinema directors’ engagement with violence and the impact of state surveillance on private lives. Gerhardt discusses feature, documentary, and short films by filmmakers who studied at the dffb (German Film and Television Academy Berlin, founded in 1966). Dffb films by Harun Farocki and Helke Sander reflected on the self-liberation wars and revolutionary movements in Algeria, China, and Vietnam. Gerhardt compares these works to Schlöndorff's and von Trotta's The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975). These films share an interest in Germany's domestic landscape and critique confinement, surveillance, and the infringement on RAF members’ human rights while in custody. The chapter ends with a discussion of Germany in Autumn (1978), an omnibus film by eleven New German Cinema directors who openly protested the oppressive control by the state that curtailed not only terrorist violence but also leftist social engagement.

Chapter 4 engages with the upsurge in labor struggles and the feminist movement in West Germany as dovetailing with the student movements of the late 1960s and offering a nonviolent alternative to armed struggle. Gerhardt argues that “the German Autumn of 1977 marked a decisive turning point, both politically and culturally, in the cultural memory of the RAF” (197–98). The chapter opens with an analysis of Fassbinder's 1975 Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, an adaptation of Phil “Piel” Jutzi's worker melodrama, Mother Krause's Journey to Happiness (1929). With a critical eye on anarchist militant action, Fassbinder exposed the pitfalls of Fordism and yet denied communism the promise of a better future. The chapter then discusses Margarethe von Trotta's The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1978) and Marianne and Juliane (1981)—both focusing on the feminist movement. Gerhardt concludes with an analysis of Christian Petzold's The State I Am In (2000), thus introducing a shift to “new vantage points, those of former RAF members, now middle aged and looking back at history, or those of surviving family members” (198).

Chapters 5 and 6 draw on representations of the RAF in the two decades after the German unification of 1990. Chapter 5 shows how the international context of the RAF became marginalized in newer renditions of the group on screen. Gerhardt continues to examine films by RAF contemporaries, notably New German Cinema directors such as Volker Schlöndorff's The Legend of Rita (2000). Inspired by former RAF member Inge Viett's 1998 memoir, Never Was I More Fearless, Schlöndorff tells the story of Rita, who embodies RAF members Susanne Albrecht, Silke Maier-Witt, and Inge Viett. Gerhardt compares the literary source to Schlöndorff's screen adaptation and exposes the director's intentions for reconciliation between East and West while downgrading Viett's self-proclaimed struggle for class and gender equality. By comparing The Legend of Rita to The State I Am In, Gerhardt reaches the conclusion that “both films eclipse intensely the external political context” (231). She warns that such biased narratives may dominate the cultural memory of the RAF in future. This claim, however, begs an analysis of a more diverse body of films, beyond the oeuvre of New German Cinema directors. For instance, Gerhardt barely touches upon Uli Edel's controversial depiction of RAF members in The Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008). Such a discussion could further Gerhardt's point about the post-2000 representation of the RAF as a German domestic fantasy.

The sixth chapter focuses on ways in which art mediates the memory of both RAF perpetrators and victims of their terrorist actions. Gerhardt analyzes two controversial art exhibits that brought back West Germany's suppressed trauma and inability to rework the 1970s manifestations of terrorism. The first one, Gerhard Richter's 1989 series of oil paintings commemorate the RAF cofounders found dead in their prison cells in 1976. Gerhard reads this cycle of “photo-paintings” (240) as an appeal to reevaluate the RAF's legacy. In contrast, the second exhibit that she discusses, Regarding Terror: The RAF (working title: The Myth RAF), revisits in 2005 media debates about the representation of victims and perpetrators. Gerhardt concludes that both exhibits “reveal the unresolved and traumatic legacy of the RAF” that ultimately challenges (West) German “democracy writ large” (255).

In her epilogue, the author poses the question: “What are the legacies of 1968 and of 1970s terrorism?” and summarizes her findings about the links between the RAF and the global social movements of the twentieth century. Here and throughout the book, a deeper engagement with the continuous cinematic, television, and artistic engagements with the RAF would have strengthened the argument. One thinks of the large body of films that remains unmentioned in the book, such as the 1972 West German/Italian coproduction Bloody Friday by Rolf Olsen, Ebbo Demant's 1981 documentary Airport Mogadishu, Christopher Roth's Baader (2002), Bruce LaBruce's Raspberry Reich (2004), Maurice Philip Remy's Mogadishu—a Documentary (2008), or Andres Veiel's Who If Not Us (2011).

Screening the Red Army Faction provides a solid engagement with 1970s print media and selected reflections on the RAF, mostly in New German Cinema. Gerhardt's monograph is a particularly apt introduction to readers ready to dig deeper into the 1960s and 1970s as marked by postcolonial wars, civil right movements, and violent responses to the failure of liberal democracies in the twentieth century.