The Oh, Hello and

Welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. Just one guest today Christina

Gerhart, author of Screening the Red Army Faction historical and cultural

memory from Bloomsbury.

She's an associate professor of film and German studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa

and a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.

The Red Army Faction, aka the Bader-Mihoff gang, a more pejorative name, were founded

in 1970 as a revolutionary organization that was not troubled by the use of political violence.

It emerged out of the worldwide culture of

protests in the 1960s against not only a capitalist system at home, but a global

system of imperial domination that was being challenged with anti-colonial

rebellions. A particularly German angle that was that the Nazis were not much more than 20 years gone and in some

senses they never left because as we'll hear from Tina Gerhart West Germany in

contrast with the East, never fully denazified.

Nazis were all over government business and the police and it showed in the quality of German

democracy.

The R.A.F's career crested in late 1977 with the so-called German autumn.

They were big news at the time and they were a subject of paintings, books, and films.

Gerhart's book is mostly an analysis of the R.A.F's cultural depictions, but what follows is mostly about the politics of the period in Germany.

In the interview, I mentioned how Nazi intelligence got folded into the newborn CIA in the late 1940s. That thread got

lost in a productive swerve, but let me fill in that story because it's not widely

known. In 1946 the US occupation authorities in West Germany absorbed the former intelligence unit of the Vermacht, headed by Reinhart Gellen.

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