KRIMI-TIPP 49
August - Dezember 2007

Liebe Leser des KRIMI-TIPP,
auch dieser KRIMI-TIPP erscheint wieder in zwei Teilen.
KT 49 berichtet über die Sekundärliteratur des Genres,
Teil 2 (PKT = Primärliteratur Krimi-Tipp) weist auf die im Archiv eingetroffenen Kriminalromane und Thriller hin (hierzu bitte den ständigen Hinweis Click-Tipp beachten).

Im vorliegenden KRIMI-TIPP wird wieder (einmal) auf 3 Titel der herausragenden englischsprachigen Reihe "Crime Files", herausgegeben von Clive Bloom hingewiesen. Die inzwischen vorliegenden Bände sind in einem separaten Block aufgeführt. Wer sich ein sinnvolles und in die Tiefe gehendes Nachschlagewerk zu den verschiedenen Themen der Kriminalliteratur zusammenstellen möchte, sollte unbedingt auf die Reihe "Crime Files" zurückgreifen!
Am 11.10.1987 wurde Uwe Barschel tot in der Badewanne eines Genfer Hotels aufgefunden. Zu diesem, bisher nie restlos geklärten, Todes- oder Mordfalls sind im KRIMI-TIPP zwei Neuerscheinungen und ein Kriminalroman zu finden.
Vor gut 30 Jahren stand die Bundesrepublik Deutschland geschockt im Bann der Anschläge der RAF (Roten Armee Fraktion). Der KRIMI-TIPP listet eine Auswahl von Büchern zu diesem Thema auf, verzichtet aber auf die entsprechenden Verlagstexte (u.a. aus Platzgründen). Zum Thema "Deutscher Linksterrorismus im Kriminalroman" hat der Literaturwissenschaftler und freie Journalist Carsten Würmann freundlicherweise seinen (englischsprachigen) Vortrag "How It All Is Coming to an End - The Representation of German Left-wing Terrorism in Mystery Novels" (September 2005, Cardiff University, Wales) für das Kapitel "Unter der Lupe" zur Verfügung gestellt.
Dies ist der letzte KRIMI-TIPP des Jahres 2007 - rechtzeitig vor Weihnachten und für den persönlichen Wunschzettel des Krimi-Aficionados (so hoffe ich jedenfalls), und daher auch etwas umfangreicher als gewöhnlich.
Wie immer hoffe ich, daß ich Sie wieder auf interessante Sekundärliteratur, spannende Hörbücher und unterhaltsame Krimis (PKT) aufmerksam machen konnte. Die Bezugsanschrift für alle hier vorgestellten Titel finden Sie am Schluß der KRIMI-TIPP (bitte geben Sie bei Bestellung stets die KT-Nummer an, die sich am Schluß jedes Hinweises befindet - danke). Ich würde mich freuen von Ihnen zu hören, bis dahin
mit besten Grüßen
Ihr Thomas Przybilka

Den Lesern des KRIMI-TIPP wünsche ich
Frohe Weihnachten und alles Gute für das Neue Jahr
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
Joyeux Noël et meilleurs voeux pour la Nouvelle Année
Los mejores deseos de una Feliz Navidad y un próspero Año Nuevo afectuosamente

Hier die Tips zur Sekundärliteratur:

Die Sekundärliteratur

NACHWEISE
Interessante Sekundärliteratur, die trotz Anforderung das Archiv nie erreichten
– Schade –
(tp = Thomas Przybilka / vt = Verlagstext)

AUSGELESEN
von Gisela Lehmer-Kerkloh (Berlin)

ABGEHÖRT von Gitta List (Bonn)

UNTER DER LUPE

1.
According to the 'Twenty rules for Writing Detective stories', as S.S. Van Dine formulates them in 1928, terrorism should definitely not be a subject:
'Secret societies, camorras, mafias et al. have no place in a detective story. A fascinating and truly beautiful murder is irremediably spoiled by any such wholesale culpability.' And in Rule 19 he states: 'The motives for all crimes in detective stories should be personal. International plotting and war politics belong in a different category of fiction - in secret service tales, for instance. But a murder story must be kept 'gemütlich', so to speak.' ¹ Indeed it is hard to fancy the terrorist as a seemingly law abiding citizen living in a picturesque English village finally discovered by the detective.
The rule could as well be the other way round: Where else, if not in the mysteries should one be told in a literary way about terrorism, about men and women and their actions by which the rules and social order of a state are challenged and violated. Although these men and women might commit their deeds for the purpose of an ideology, a revolution or a better world, their deeds are for the time being and as long as they did not succeed, crimes against the law of the existing power and could, for example, be called murder, robbery, and kidnapping - and as such become the subject of mysteries.
From the beginning of its career, crime fiction as a popular genre diversified and developed a plethora of subgenres with various perspectives. ² These subgenres included different strategies of narration and constructions of heroes and settings in which terrorism and its protagonists easily find their literary place.
Plots dealing less with the detection of a crime and more with the hunt of the culprit, be it for the prosecution or the prevention of a crime, offer the possibility to describe the life of terrorists by following the tradition of exposing secret and exotic worlds unknown to the ordinary citizen.
Various approaches to the mystery novel can expose different aspects of terrorism. For example, some novels can illustrate the successful working of the police, secret agents or private detectives in preventing terrorist threats and point out the great danger and evil nature of these men and women. By focusing on the terrorists, other authors might show the dynamics of the socio-psychological development of clandestine groups and their ideological motivation. As well, if one concentrates on the innocent bystander, it gives the opportunity to show how the introduction of violence caused by terrorism or the state can effect the daily life of ordinary people.
Normally in these novels the threatened social order will be reinstalled by the rules. At the end, as the genre demands, there is a denouement, but even if often the 'good guys win and the bad ones get what they deserve' the genre does not necessarily provide a happy ending. Often the reinstated and reconfirmed order might just as well be the unjust one from the beginning.

Although the mystery has been a well (but not too well) accepted subject of study for academics, the representation of German left wing terrorism in the mystery has not been thoroughly examined.
Thomas Hoeps states in his analysis of terrorism in German novels and stories that the

Entdeckung des Terrorismus-Stoffes als Sujet für das Genre des Kriminal- und Unterhaltungsromans ist zweifelsohne ein starkes Indiz für seine zunehmende Institutionalisierung. Einmal seiner akuten gesellschaftlichen Brisanz weitgehend ledig, wird er freier verfügbar, und es ist nun möglich, fern von politischen Implikationen und Erzählmotivationen eine über ihren Horizont kaum hinausweisende Geschichte eines terroristischen Anschlags zu erzählen.³

Without going beyond their limits, these novels are hardly part of the supposed literary project he calls 'literarische 'Arbeit am Widerspruch'' ⁴ , 'die in verschiedenste Richtungen wirkt und viele Formen kennt - und sich den einfachen Antworten verweigert'.
Hoeps concedes with reference to Jorge Semprun's 'Netschaiev est de retour' (1987) that 'Suspense und die Darstellung komplexer Sachverhalte einander nicht ausschließen müssen' ⁵ , however, he produces the impression that he is not really interested in the genre and its specific literary potential. He seems to be quite happy that he can elegantly withdraw himself from a further discussion by following the judgement of Reinhard Jahn. ⁶ In 1986 Jahn writes that he could not find any representation of terrorism in German mystery novels published until 1980. In the novels that were published afterwards he searches in vain for political issues like 'die studentische Protestbewegung, die ersten gegen das US-Engagement ausgerichteten Konzepte der deutschen Stadtguerilla'. ⁷
In these plots, according to Jahn, terrorism does not seem to be connected with ideological or political theory. In the worse of these plots terrorism is reduced to confused and failed ideas to improve or even save the world. The authors who were using terrorism as a topic simply added some thematic details and did not try to consider the deeper thoughts.

Mit der Beschränkung auf die problemlos in das von Aktion und Spannung gebildete Koordinatenkreuz des Krimi- und Thriller-Genres zu übernehmende Versatzstücke der Realität wurde nur eine thematische, nicht aber inhaltliche Entwicklung vollzogen. ⁸

In Jahn's opinion, the German mystery authors in the 1970's who claimed to represent a new sense of the social reality in their novels, in fact failed to do so. His verdict is harsh and clear:

Der populäre Unterhaltungs- und Spannungsroman hat sich die von den Sicherheitsbehörden verbreitete Interpretation zu eigen gemacht, die Terrorismus als pervertierte Gewaltkriminalität kennzeichnet und damit den dem Genre oft unterstellten systemkonformen und -erhaltenden Charakter belegt. ⁹

It is not that I want to negate the importance of literature in general and of mysteries in particular to enforce a critical public conscience and I do not want to deny its illuminating potential, but in my view Jahn's way of screening a number of mysteries for meeting these expectations misses a main point.
I do agree with Hoeps that these novels attest to a certain 'Institutionalisation' of the 'terrorism-matter'. It is this institutionalisation I am interested in. I regard the mystery novels dealing with terrorism as parts of a popular and contemporary discourse on this subject. In the novels, the conflict between the terrorist and their sympathisers on the one hand and representatives of the state and mainstream opinion on the other is transposed into the formulas of a literal genre that is by tradition popular and contemporary. ¹⁰
By analysing a number of these novels that have been published since 1979 I will point out how these popular narratives interlock terrorism with known structures of knowledge and literal traditions. I will also discuss how they portray visions and ideas to end the conflict that shook German society for more than two decades.

This paper is not the place to look in detail for explanations why the treatment of German left-wing terrorism in mysteries started only in the late 1970s in contrast to other genres and fields of (West) German literature. Maybe some of the mystery writers thought the topic was 'too hot' and were afraid of negative consequences particularly when they were interested in a dialogue that did not go along with the 'official' standpoint of the mass media. Maybe the stories told in the press and on television were already loud enough and fulfilled the public's need for excitement and entertainment better than any mystery would have.
Jahn was not quite correct when he stated that none of the mystery authors of that time who stood for the 'neue deutsche Kriminalroman', a mystery less shallow and closer to the realities of everyday life and its problems, devoted him or herself to the subject of terrorism. In 1979, two years after the height of terrorist activities, -ky, one of the most successful German mystery writers of the 1970s and 1980s published 'Kein Reihenhaus für Robin Hood'. ¹¹ This novel dealt with the execution and the effects of an unusual terrorist plan. It enacts two questions that were crucial at that time at least for the people of the political left: Under which circumstances would they be ready to join terrorist activities? Could terrorist action be under some circumstances be a legitimate method to promote societal improvement?
In 'Kein Reihenhaus für Robin Hood' a young academic couple moves from Berlin to Bramme, a fictitious town somewhere in the north west of Germany. ¹² They are totally discontented with the lives they have led so far. Benno is an unemployed political scientist and Britta has just left her husband and a terrace house in the suburbs of Berlin. In Bramme they run the cigar and magazine store of Benno's grandfather. They quickly become established and a part of the academic left milieu, but after a few months they already have the feeling that: 'Das kann doch nicht alles gewesen sein'. They soon get their chance to change things. The biggest employer of the city, who had just announced the closing down of his factory, was kidnapped by the terror group AKK ('Anti-Kapitalistische Kampfgruppe') and released after being paid a ransom of one million Deutschmarks. Britta and Benno accidentally find one of the terrorists. She is badly wounded, the victim of a rapist, and has with her the ransom sum. Benno and Britta - as the woman demands - do not call the police or an ambulance. They bring her to their apartment, where she dies of her injuries. They decide to execute her plan to deliver 5000 Marks to each of the dismissed workers. After several years of experience with general police measures - it is the year 1978 in Germany - they are well prepared to manage all obstacles and difficulties: they avoid the police checkpoints and street blockades and succeed in burying the corpse and distributing the money to the workers by mail. At first, it seems like they succeeded with the plan. Many people secretly felt happy about the scheme, but in a concerted action the establishment manages to discredit this Robin Hood myth. Most of the workers who profited from the money distribution end up voluntarily giving back their share.
This mystery illuminates a sort of terrorism, which is close to our ideas of the just hero of Sherwood Forest who fights against the evil powers on behalf of the miserable and oppressed. It is easy to accept - no murder; the victim of the kidnapping is an evil capitalist and the right people profit from the money. Benno does not need many arguments to execute the plan. The message laid out in the leaflet of the AKK appeals to him: 'Das Ganze war überschrieben mit der grundlegenden Forderung Jedem das, was ihm gehört und wies eine Vielzahl von Absagen an Carlos Marighela und seine Stadtguerilleros wie an alle Roten Terrorbrigaden und Armee-Fraktionen auf. Kein Schießen und kein Blutvergießen.' (98). 'Klug gemacht!', Benno states, 'so machten sie den Bild-indoktrinierten Arbietern überhaupt erst möglich, das Geld auch anzunehmen - die schätzten Robin Hood und Schinderhannes, die Baaders und die Meinhofs haßten sie.' (Ibid.) Benno already sees himself as the 'Robin Hood von Bramme' (76). ¹³
He tells the story retrospectively from his prison cell and there are some hints that he is a narrator who cannot be trusted. Not only does he have an interest to diminish his role in the whole affair, but he also was emotionally and mentally in an exceptional state and under the effect of heavy sedatives during the events. The reasons for his taking part turn out to be a conglomerate of various motivations which seem to be above all of a private nature. Benno feels frustrated and is disappointed by society. According to his perception, society has failed to make him a real offer to be part of it. For him it is more important that he meets the expectations of his partner - she is, in his view, much more sure of her engagement to the plan. He wants to please her and he wants to take a chance to escape from the ordinary daily life he led before: the emotional and sexual addiction to his lover merges with the fascination of the illegal acting.
The mystery does not solve his speculations about the role of his partner - is she a member of the terrorists, is she a secret agent? The speculations are hardly more than fantasies of a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But Benno' s view remains clear enough to perceive that society is too complex (and too contingent) to be shaken effectively by such a terrorist action. People's reactions are unpredictable. This is true of sympathisers to the cause as well as those who would benefit from the action. The established order is able to ward off these terrorist actions by being flexible. By the end of the novel Benno is under arrest and Britta has disappeared. However, the flexibility needed to discredit the Robin Hood myth has its price: to pacify the situation the politicians and businessmen of Bramme had to promise new jobs for the unemployed workers.

No one likes a traitor and someone who sits in a maximum security prison is not the most ideal hero for a mystery. Yet the terrorist who quits terrorism, but remains at large and keeps equidistant to the state and their ex-comrades has the potential to be an interesting literary character. Since the time when Bommi Baumann or Hans-Joachim Klein professed in the media and in books their good-bye to terrorists action, the ex-terrorist has become a well-known character of the debate on terrorism. These 'Aussteiger' showed that at least some of the terrorists could be reached by arguments and could be convinced intellectually to lay down their arms. Their examples strengthened the position of the ones who were insisting that to open a dialogue with the terrorists could be a successful way to de-escalate the conflict.
In his 1982 novel 'Katenkamp und der tote Briefträger,' ¹⁴ Detlef Wolff mingles the destiny of the ex-terrorist Karsten Welowczyk (formerly known as Günther Viehland) with the murder of a drug courier. Viehland used to be a member of the 'Aktionsgruppe Absoluter Anarchismus'. Friends offered him a new life, with real identification papers: a new identity. Now he lives in an apartment in the suburbs of Hamburg and works as a stock keeper in a company that produces pharmaceuticals. The cover is perfectly arranged. Even the books on his shelf attest to a totally apolitical petit bourgeois conscience.
The man who arranged this illegal reintegration is presented as an idealistic pacifist, an academic working in the law department of the city of Hamburg. His moderate arguments, once published in a weekly magazine, were the initial impetus for Viehland to quit terrorism. In the first place this arrangement seems to work, Viehland gets used to his overground life. Then he witnesses the killing of a postman and this brings him under police investigation. When Kommissar Katenkamp investigates, he finds that this murder is linked to the activities of a drug-dealing organisation. Viehland then finds himself involved in this drug business against his will. The need to hide his identity has made him vulnerable to all sorts of coercion and blackmailing.
In this novel the search for terrorists appears to be a matter between terrorists, who had lost their sense for the political situation, and squads of police, who permanently are violating the rules of the society they still claim to protect. Katenkamp and his colleagues of the 'normal' Kriminalpolizei keep their distance to this way of acting. These special police forces do not promote the solving of the committed crimes - i.e. the real problems the society should cope with - they are more likely to obstruct them. Considering the above trend of obstruction of justice, there appears to be one option left in dealing with terrorists. This preferred option would be to create a dialogue with them and it is told as a possible way to resolve the conflict. However, this kind of unofficial amnesty fails because of unforeseen circumstances.
A similar starting setting is presented in Horst Boas' 'Steig aus, wenn du kannst!' ¹⁵ where a journalist offers a new legal life to a top-terrorist, member of the 'Rote Anarchistische Avantgarde'. This new legal life turns out to be a trick and part of a campaign led by the widow of an industrial leader who had been kidnapped and killed by a terrorist group. While the police in this novel are not able to reach the terrorists, this private death squadron sets the ex-terrorist against his former comrades. In the end they all die together in a big explosion. This is an effective, if unethical, solution, which is told with a certain inner logic.

As I laid out before terrorism requires a clear standpoint. In a conflict both sides prefer to know on which side someone is. In the history of German leftwing terrorism many who tried to keep a critical view on both parties were accused of creating a climate of opinion that was stimulating terrorism and sometimes had to face defamation or even prosecution. Werner Waldhoff's novel 'Schattenboxer', ¹⁶ published in 1984, focuses on the character of the intellectual who is drawn into terrorist activity more or less by accident, but who cannot restrain himself from sympathising with them because their criticism of society does not differ so much from his own.
Long ago the leader of the terror group in 'Schattenboxer' stopped dreaming of successful political changes as consequences of his fight. Now he just dreams of a quiet life in a white house looking over the ocean in South America. He does this dreaming while negotiating the release of his imprisoned comrades in exchange for money and the leader of the opposition party whom he has kidnapped. His group of four hides with their hostage in the summer residence of the writer Bernhard Stroga - an old castle by the sea. Initially the terrorists forced Stroga to help them, but after discussions with the leader, who calls himself Godot, Stroga decides to support them voluntarily by negotiating with the police. Before that, he was a writer who went along with some of the political demands of the terrorists, in his books and in public statements, but kept distance from their actions.
At first Stroga is charmed by the young woman, who is the latest member of the group, and then he is charmed by the attraction of real action. He does not want to be a hesitating theorist, he wants to act, wants to be a shaker, someone who moves things. Meanwhile, the kidnapped politician has already realized that neither the government nor his party friends and colleagues have any interest in liberating him. The police are well informed about what is going on, because one of the terrorists is a police informant. The police are just waiting for the order from the minister to assault Stroga's little castle. Only Stroga, euphoric with love and the exciting action he is involved in still believes in the deceptions and proclamations. He manages to successfully organize the delivery of the money and then he returns to his castle. Stroga and the hostage end up mistakenly shot by an over-zealous police officer. Godot makes his way to Montevideo, with enough money to afford the life he has dreamed of in the white house by the sea. The sympathising writer and the young idealistic woman were the last ones who did not understand that the whole issue was not about noble and sublime ideals but about vested interests. The final chapter shows that society has established ways to regain its inner balance and return to normal: the dead politician gets his honourable obituaries, the under cover informant is found executed under a bridge and the well-meaning left intellectual is posthumously awarded the literary prize. Waldhoff adds an ironic tone to the story by interrupting the exit of his author character by writing about how Stroga has to negotiate the details of the divorce from his wife and must get rid of his publisher who wants the manuscript of his new book.

'Der Eintritt in die Gruppe, das Aufsaugen ihrer Norm und die Knarre am Gürtel entwickeln ihn dann schon, den 'neuen Menschen'. ¹⁷ The political scientist Herfried Münkler took this quotation of Volker Speitel's report of his experience with Westgerman leftwing terrorism to confirm his speculation that terrorist acting is less about political ideas but more about the fascination of a certain manner of living, the fascination of going underground ('Die Faszination des Untergrundes'). ¹⁸ The 'neue Mensch' who is going to build up a new and better society shall emerge from a terrorist group living underground.
One aspect of the mystery novel traditionally is to give insights to and report from the strange and foreign worlds of delinquents and villains, gangs of robbers, the mob or the Mafia. Peter Schmidt's 1984 novel 'Die Regeln der Gewalt', ¹⁹ tells the story from the point of view of the terrorists Ralf Werders, Angelika Zeitler and Richard Fall. These three are a part of the group Kobra. The other members of this group are in prison or are dead. However, these three are now well trained for all kinds of illegal activities. They do not hesitate to shoot when danger is in sight and do not care much about their victims. The accidental shooting of the future Nobel Peace prizewinner during a bank robbery is bad publicity but no reason to rethink their strategy. They have no qualms about acting as contract killers for the interest of some big business. The money they make is needed to finance the hiring of a computer expert. The state, on the other hand, disposes of a special police squad, which chases terrorists without regarding the rules of legislation. The terrorist's coup against the powerful computer hidden underground succeeds, but remains oddly without further consequences. The big plan to strike the finishing blow against the parliamentary system fails because of a large miscalculation of political support. In fact, they find little support. The sympathisers must be forced by violence to remain loyal. Those who try to betray or report to the police are executed. The ideological convictions of the three remain unclear - they seem to have forgotten them. Their thoughts and thinking are dominated by the logic of violence and the search for ways to escape from it. Physically and psychologically exhausted, they react merely instinctively. Fall is shot while trying to collect important information and Zeitler discloses the last project to the BKA. She does this as revenge after she found out that the group was infiltrated and manipulated from the beginning by secret agents from East Berlin. Werders finally decides to trade his knowledge about the Palestinian terror infrastructure to the CIA for a new life somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. The terrorists are presented as pawns in the game, which is led by the secret services of the East and the West and the financial interests of the international companies. In this novel the strategy of terrorism destroys all hopes for a better world. It is not even possible to return to the lives they led before. The dynamic of violence levels all ideological premises of the armed struggle ²⁰ and leaves no space for heroes or any sympathetic characters. In the end there is just death and betrayal.

At the beginning of the 1990s terrorism seemed more anachronistic than ever. The fall of the Berlin wall and German reunification were the most visible evidences that the political situation in Germany definitely had changed. The mythic space of terrorism that Peter Jürgen Boock did reconstruct once more in his 1988 novel 'Abgang', ²¹ now definitely belongs to a world of the past. ²² There remains just one question to be answered: how to put an end to it all?
Amigo Steiger in Lars Becker's novel 'Amigo' ²³ of 1991, finally must admit to himself that the old comrades have dropped him. He was a member of the 'Revolutionäre Front'; they were committing bomb attacks against military factories and were robbing banks. Amigo was discovered and had to flee while his comrades stayed on in Hamburg. For four years he lived on a fruit farm in northern Italy, most of the time drunk on Grappa. Eventually, money transactions that had come regularly as a pension stopped. When instead of money a man arrives and tries to kill him, Amigo leaves his farm and returns to Hamburg. He finds the hiding place where the 700.000 marks earned from their last bank robbery was hidden and he discovers the money gone. Two of his former comrades now have remarkable careers. Bosch, the professor, lives with his much younger girl friend in a fancy loft with a view of the Elbe. Cäsar Fährmann, the lawyer, now works for the city. The third member of the group, Jonas, is still part of the political scene and he lives in the squatter houses of the Hafenstraße - the centre of the militant left. He is a throwback, without money, with an Iroquois hair cut and already in his thirties. Amigo is not interested in any explanations from his former comrades. He shoots Bosch in a Yuppie Restaurant without any precautionary measures; the lawyer is killed as well. Amigo spares the life of Jonas, although he was the one who has sold him out to the police - under pressure. The police threatened to block visits with his son if he did not cooperate. The attempt to arrest Amigo alive fails and a policeman shoots him because he would not surrender. Eventually it is only betrayal and the reckoning, which remains of the hopes and high expectations that, marked the beginning of their revolutionary struggle.
Lars Becker, who was born in 1954, enacts the end of an era and dismisses central characters of a political era according to formula used in gangster or western movies. He does not bother with psychological explanations or moral reasoning. With a few words he sketches some characters that have just the right dose of clichés to fit in this effective roman noir. The popular tradition of this setting is underlined by the character of Bruno, an ex-legionnaire, and a truly stylish bartender whose fate led him from elegant bars in Paris to the lowest dives in Hamburg. This man who reminds one of characters of the French Film noir, has nothing to do with the terrorist actions - he is just a friend of the family and escorts the anachronistic hero to his heroic end. The new times have their new heroes and ways of fighting the system. Becker presents one of them to accentuate the difference. Teddy, 20 years old, combines established ways of living - a steady partnership, a regular job as a mechanic - with a militant and subversive political acting. He is still part of the political left scene and works legally as a mechanic, but he has no scruples about breaking into cars in public parking garages when the chances are good. He is someone who succeeds in subversively dodging society instead of confronting society directly and failing heroically. He keeps a form of solidarity to his 'ancestor' Amigo who he only knows by hearsay. After he had found out that Amigo was going to walk into a trap, he takes the risk to warn him but is too late. He manages to escape from the Chinese restaurant where the final shoot out takes place. At the end the same sequence turns over and over in front of his inner eye:

Immer wieder hatte er diesen Amigo vor Augen, für zwei Sekunden, ein Filmschnipsel, ewig wiederholt. Teddy schlotterten die Knie. Ein paar Stunden Schlaf und er würde Amigo vergessen haben. War ja nicht seine Story. So leid es ihm tat. (116)

Even more brutal and bloody, with disgusting details such as splattering brains and blood that pulses out of faces bitten off by dogs, Michael Wildenhain finishes the era of revolutionary fights. The Berlin author, born in 1957, became with his novels 'Prinzenbad', ' Erste Liebe, Deutscher Herbst' and 'Die Kalte Haut der Stadt', a sort of literal chronicler of the militant squatter movement of Berlin Kreuzberg in the early 1980s. The reflection of the militant and activist heritage of German leftwing terrorism is one of his main issues. In his mystery 'Exit Berlin', ²⁴ published under the pseudonym of Carl Wille in 1994, he tells, as the book cover text puts precisely: 'Ein Berlin-Thriller über die Abwicklung des bewaffneten Kampfes in den neuen und alten Ländern' about the execution of the armed struggle in the new and old lands. It is Berlin shortly after unification. Winter in Kreuzberg is dirty, the backyards are dark, a group of anarchist women are chasing a rapist, and neo Nazis are trying to throw a black man out of the S-Bahn. A former leftwing lawyer collects a fortune by convincing old Berlin Jews to sign over to him their formerly nationalized property. In this Berlin, a bunch of killers try to murder a group of ex-militants. What this group did exactly in the old days is left unsaid. They were part of a left scene that includes despite all differences the terrorists as well. Lara, who hid for years in the EX-GDR, and her old comrade Birdy are called by a third person from their group from Oberhausen to Berlin. They start to search for explanations as well as the people behind the attacks. Seeing people from their former scene it becomes clear that there is no longer a shared political base. The old networks function, if at all, out of habit or sentimentality. Ex Stasi officers are somehow involved and the police are present but are just loosely linked to the actual story. Lara turns out to be a fighter who shows no mercy and does not even stop at brutal torture to get the information she wants. The man behind all this is a godfather of the Berlin underworld; but had once been their comrade. They had left him behind after a bomb detonated too early. They thought he was dying so they left him under the high-tension pole they had tried to fell. This internal affair remains to be put in order. Consequently they kill each other. Only Birdy survives the shoot out between the former comrades. In the end he pushes the corrupt lawyer (and rapist) in front of an U Bahn and flees into the tunnel of the underground.
Becker and Wildenhain both need not much more than 100 pages to put a final end to a discourse that was held for years. In their novels the old ideals and reasons for once having started the armed struggle against the state stay only as a smouldering residue. The connections and implications of terrorist violence, sympathising sentiment and state repression are merely faint echoes of the former ideological controversy. In the end, there remains just the day of reckoning with friends and enemies, often executed in a final showdown. For them there remains nothing more to tell about the terrorists of the 1970s and 1980s.

Beyond the political discourse it is the character of the terrorist itself that fascinates. This character is a kind of male role model. This tendency can be found at least in traces in most of the afore-mentioned novels despite the fact that in reality the number of women in the terrorist groups was significantly high. This does not come out of the blue - without any exception the authors of the mysteries dealing with terrorism are men.
The way of living as a terrorist could be similar to being a soldier, a secret agent, a legionnaire, a criminal, or a policeman. In other words it gives men an opportunity in the modern world to act and prove themselves in a stereotyped heroic traditional male way. The terrorist as role model characterizes the novel 'Durch die Nacht' by Wolfgang Schweiger of 1981. ²⁵ He sticks to his theme in the totally reworked version, published in 1992 under the title: 'Abschied in der Nacht'. Kostial, a man in his forties and a journalist, meets by accident his comrades from the old militant days. They were hiding in the GDR and are now back in business with the kidnapping of the daughter of one of the most powerful businessmen in Germany.
At first he is curious and simply looking for a good story. Then after he had been discovered and arrested he decides to join the group again: escaping from the police gives him the intense emotion of being alive again. One of his old friends claims that this was Kostial's secret wish for all these years and his genuine destiny. When Kostial gets the chance to knock out the unscrupulous head of the gang, in the intimate moment of sexual intercourse, he does not do it. Once more an author draws the parallel between the attraction of being a terrorist and of having sex with a woman.
As the terrorist conflict becomes more a part of history, the terrorist or ex-terrorist even can become a broken but positive hero like in Robert Lynn's 'Die Meute im Nacken' of 1998. ²⁶ Nikita Arp is a dream of a man, a boxer, handsome, smart, an excellent artist and musician, and intellectually gifted. As a teenager he fled from the GDR by swimming through the Havel from Potsdam to West Berlin. He joined a terrorist group, was trained in Yemen, killed a German general, and now he lives as a sort of sleeper in Paris, disguised as an artist. Before the leaders in Lebanon could call him to service again he quits. From this starting point Lynn spins a yarn that intertwines a love story with a family saga. There is, for instance, the district attorney who is responsible for the terrorist search but cannot forget her former lover of twenty years, Nikita. The old German terrorism and the new international terrorism, the Staatssicherheit and the history of the two German states has become the stuff, thrillers and mysteries are made off.

At the beginning of the 21st Century, German left wing terrorism is history. The state and the populace of Germany seem to have overcome the radical challenge of its political system posed by left wing terrorism. However, the need to write mysteries about this subject seems to be increasing. There appears to be two approaches presented.
The first approach is that some authors have picked up on the popular opinions that not all details of the past are clear. The official version of the death that night in Stammheim, the responsible person for the assassination attempts on Herrhausen and Rohwedder, the circumstances of the death of Wolfgang Grams while he was arrested in Bad Kleinen - none of these stories are totally satisfying to everyone. Mysteries, along with other genres and media, are attempting to tell the real story, the secret history behind the official history. John Sutherland calls the English or American thriller claiming to reveal unknown details of World War II 'secret histories of the Second World War'; ²⁷ by analogy to this term these German mysteries could be named 'secret histories of the fight against terrorism'.
The novel 'Die Exekution' ²⁸ written by Wolfgang Brenner and published in 2000 reveals that two of the terrorists believed to have died in Stammheim by suicide were living in Canada for the last 20 years. The staff who were in charge of that situation in Germany had secretly decided to execute the terrorists who were imprisoned in Stammheim. However, the President of the BKA did not want to play along with that and arranged the transfer to Canada. The police officer that discovers this information dies along with the returned ex-terrorist in a bomb detonation. A thrilling story indeed, however, eventually it shows up that it loses its explosive effect after all these years because none of the people in charge of this decision are still in power.
Finally Wolfgang Schorlau in 'Die blaue Liste' from 2003, ²⁹ sends out his detective Georg Dengler, a former profiler of the BKA, to solve the apparent death of an Austrian economic professor who is said to have died in a plane crash. By searching for this man he discovers the connections between the murder of the head of the Treuhand Detlev Rohwedder, the crash of an Austrian airplane in Thailand and the death of the terrorist Uwe Krems in the train station in Bad Kleinen. Rohwedder, according to the novel, was ready to try out the model of the Austrian economic professor. Instead of selling companies, which often led to their break down and caused unemployment for the employees, the professor proposed to hand it over to the people who work there. Most influential financial circles of the west were afraid of losing the expected gain of billions of marks. With the help of strange secret agents they support some of the remaining members of the RAF to kill Rohwedder. Dengler solves the case and finds the professor who went into hiding because he feared for his life. Dengler fights off all attempts to kill him and the professor. He faces the lords of big money and reaches an agreement. Dengler and the professor's silence are bought in exchange for a life without the fear of being murdered. In his postscript, Schorlau names non-fictional works like the ones of Andres Veiel as his sources. Schorlau explicitly states that it was the unsatisfying official history that intrigued him.

Der Autor kann nur eine Geschichte erzählen, aber wenn Polizei, Justiz und Politik versagt haben, muss es dem Geschichtenerzähler erlaubt sein zu sagen: Es ist nur eine Geschichte, aber vielleicht war es so.

The second approach looks at crime, past or present, as having an impact on people. Ulrich Woelk in 'Die letzte Vorstellung' ³⁰ connects German terrorism with the history of the two Germanies. The murder of a former member of the RAF forces two detectives - one from the West, the other from East-Germany - to face their own histories. In 'Die schwarzen Ränder der Glut' by Ulrich Ritzel, ³¹ it is the suicide of a former colleague which motivates the already retired Kommissar Berndorf to re-investigate the circumstances of the accidental death of a person shot in 1972 by the police. In both novels the re-investigation of formerly closed cases shows how terrorism and terrorists were such integral parts of German society and how close the relations were between the ones who were investigated as terrorists and those who succeeded in gaining well paid positions. These novels favour a point of view on terrorism that sees it (again) as a societal problem, which needs complex explanations and cannot be solved satisfactorily by the police and the law.

All of the analysed mysteries are a reflection of the times in which they were written. They represent when read in a chronological order a sort of synopsis of the shifting positions of the West German (later reunified German) debate on terrorism. This is not too surprising for a genre so closely connected with the events, debates, conflicts and settings of today. Further research would show the interference of the narratives in the different media. These novels offer representations that morally and politically differentiate. Although most of them work with formula and stereotypes of some sort, they mostly abstain from reproducing simple black and white stories of this complex phenomenon.

Diesem Beitrag liegt ein Vortrag zugrunde, den ich im September 2005 auf der Tagung 'Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism' an der Cardiff University, Wales gehalten habe.

Carsten Würmann, Berlin, Literaturwissenschaftler, Lehrbeauftragter, freier Journalist für Zeitung und Rundfunk, Studium der Geschichte und Germanistik in Berlin und Lyon, Altstipendiat der Hans-Böckler-Stiftung, arbeitet an einer Dissertation zu Kriminalitätsdarstellungen im Nationalsozialismus, Publikationen u.a. zur Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts, zuletzt als Mithg.: Deutsches Lied. Volume 1 & 2 (Bielefeld 2007); Verbrechen als Passion. Untersuchungen zum Kriminalgenre (Berlin 2004), demnächst als Mithg.: Im Pausenraum des ›Dritten Reiches‹. Zur Populärkultur im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland (Frankfurt/M. 2008).

   1 S.S. Van Dine (i.e. Wright Willard Huntington), 'Twenty rules for Writing Detective stories', in: American Magazine 104 (1928) Sept.
   2 Georg Seeßlen, 'Wer war Abels Mörder? Genre und Megagenre am Beispiel Kriminalfilm', in: Nina Schindler ,ed., Das Mordsbuch. Alles über Krimis, Hildesheim: Claasen, 1997, pp. 26-59 (here p.26).
   3 Thomas Hoeps, Arbeit am Widerspruch. 'Terrorismus in deutschen Roman und Erzählungen (1937-1992), Dresden: Thelem, 2001, p.281.
   4 Hoeps, Arbeit am Widerspruch, p.8.
   5 Hoeps, Arbeit am Widerspruch, p.15.
   6 Reinhard Jahn, 'Die Regeln der Gewalt. Terrorismus und politische Gewalt im deutschen und internationalen Kriminal- und Unterhaltungsroman', in: Die neue Gesellschaft / Frankfurter Hefte 33 (1986) 6, 756-760.
   7 Jahn, 'Regeln', 758.
   8 Jahn, 'Regeln', 758.
   9 Jahn, 'Regeln', 760.
   10 The mystery situates its crimes and actions in a contemporary social reality that the reader is supposed to recognize or can accept as a plausible one. We expect the mystery to respect the conventions of the realist tradition insofar as the places and settings should give the appearance of being real and the actions and characters could at least be possible.
   11 ky [i.e. Horst Bosetzky], Kein Reihenhaus für Robin Hood, Reinbek: Rowohlt 1979. Taschenbuchausgabe: Reinbek 1981 (= rororo thriller 2575). Quotes follow this edition. The novel with a hardcover edition (which is not usual for a mystery at that time) and a paperback number of copies of 50.000 quite success and was adapted as movie by Wolf(gang) Gremm in 1981.
   12 Cf. Ansgar Warner, 'Sim-City zwischen Weser und Ems. Die fiktive Kleinstadt Bramme in den Kriminalromanen von -ky als urbaner Simulationsraum', in: Bruno Franceschini und Carsten Würmann, eds., Verbrechen als Passion. Neue Untersuchungen zum Kriminalgenre, Berlin: Weidler, 2004, pp.247-56.
   13 In one of the later novels 'Nieswand kennt Tag und Stunde' - Reinbek 1990 - Benno appears as the owner of the bar 'Robin Hood' which he opened in Bramme after his release from prison.
   14 Detlef Wolff, Katenkamp und der tote Briefträger, Reinbek: Rowohlt 1982, (= rororo thriller 2603).
   15 Horst Boas, Steig aus, wenn du kannst! Kriminal-Roman, Bergisch-Gladbach: Bastei-Lübbe 1983 (= Bastei-Lübbe-Kriminalroman 37010).
   16 Werner Waldhoff, Der Schattenboxer, Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1984 (= rororo thriller 2692).
   17 Volker Speitel, ''Wir wollten alles und gleichzeitig nicht'. Ex-Terrorist Volker Speitel über seine Erfahrungen in der westdeutschen Stadtguerilla (III)', in: Der Spiegel, 11 august 1980, Nr. 33, 30-36 (here 36).
   18 Herfried Münkler, 'Sehnsucht nach dem Ausnahmezustand. Die Faszination des untergrund und ihre Demontage durch die Strategie des Terrors', in: Reiner Steinweg, ed., Faszination der Gewalt. Politische Strategie und Alltagserfahrung. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 1983, pp.60-88 (here p.60).
   19 Peter Schmidt, Die Regeln der Gewalt, Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1984 (= rororo thriller 2686).
   20 Jahn, 'Regeln', 756.
   21 Peter-Jürgen Boock, Abgang. Roman, Göttingen: Lamuv, 1988.
   22 Cf. Walter Delabar, ''entweder mensch oder schwein'. Die RAF in der Prosa der siebziger und achtziger Jahre', in: Walter Delabar and Erhard Schütz, eds., Deutschsprachige Literatur der 70er und 80er Jahre. Autoren, Tendenzen, Gattungen, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1998, p.154-83 (here p.173).
   23 Lars Becker, Amigo, Berlin: Rotbuch, 1991(= Rotbuch Krimi 44).
   24 Carl Wille [i.e. Michael Wildenhain], Exit Berlin, Berlin: Rotbuch, 1994 (= Rotbuch Krimi 96).
   25 Wolfgang Schweiger, Durch die Nacht. Kriminalroman, München: Heyne, 1984 (= Blaue Krimis 2111); Wolfgang Schweiger, Abschied in der Nacht. Thriller, Zürich: Haffmans 1992 (= Haffmans Taschenbuch 172).
   26 Robert Lynn, Die Meute im Nacken, Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1998 (= rororo thriller 43305).
   27 John Sutherland, Bestsellers: Popular Fictions of the 1970s, London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981 p.167.
   28 Wolfgang Brenner, Die Exekution. Roman, Frankfurt/M.: Eichborn 2000.
   29 Wolfgang Schorlau, Die blaue Liste. Denglers erster Fall, Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2003. Quotes follow the paperback edition (Köln: Kiepnheuer & Witsch 2005).
   30 Ulrich Woelk, Die letzte Vorstellung. Roman, Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 2002. The TV-film 'Mord am Meer' based on the novel was a success and got quite a few reviews in the media.
   31 Ulrich Ritzel, Die schwarzen Ränder der Glut. Roman, Lengwil am Bodensee: Libelle, 2001.

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