(Crawling titles rise from bottom of frame, white-on-black:)
In May, 1972, bombs exploded […] In all, thirty-six people were injured and four died. The Red Army Faction claimed responsibility. In the following month you were surrounded by police as your lover cut your hair by a country road near Cologne. Your activity – along with the sticks of rhubarb lying on the back seat of your car – marked you both as suspicious characters…
On Tuesday, June 7, 1972, at 1:30 P.M., Gudrun Ensslin was captured in Hamburg.1
Yvonne Rainer, ‘Working Title: Journeys from Berlin/1971’
Alice Mellings, the protagonist of Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist (1985), hates sex and likes domestic renovation. She’s organised. She doesn’t read books. She buries shit in her squat’s garden, negotiates with council officials and electricity board employees, fixes toilets, places flowers in makeshift vases, cooks stews in giant pans, buys a boiler, gets someone in to do the plumbing, and steals luxurious curtains from the bourgeois family home she grew up in. She slowly and laboriously makes the squat she inhabits more closely resemble the kinds of dwellings she claims to oppose on ideological grounds. Lessing devotes much of her novel to flat descriptions of the minutiae of Alice’s domestic travails; the long, mundane prelude to a bungled terrorist attack that inadvertently kills passers-by and one member of Alice’s tiny political group. If Lessing seems to have a grudging admiration for Alice’s domestic capacities, her evident disdain for her naive jargon-spewing characters means that the novel’s account of the sheltered domesticity of their squat underlines the irresponsibility of their ill-conceived public act of violence. They’re just small people, foolishly believing they can make meaningful change in a world they evidently don’t understand.
Released within a year of one another, Marge Piercy’s novel Vida (1980) and Margarethe von Trotta’s film Die Bleierne Zeit (literally The Leaden Time, released in Britain as The German Sisters and in America as Marianne and Juliane, 1981) are two representations of politically militant women that share The Good Terrorist’s emphasis on undramatic domestic scenarios but lack its deflated cynicism. They explore the aftermaths of fictionalised versions of the Weather Underground and the Red Army Faction (RAF), militant left-wing political movements that erupted in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Both works follow one woman involved in those movements, and each makes a point of dwelling less on flash points of intense political activity than on their aftermaths. They pay attention to these women’s lives when they are doing things other than bombing department stores or the offices of multinational corporations. Vida, the eponymous protagonist of Piercy’s novel, has been living as a fugitive in the US for seven years, wanted by the FBI for bombing an oil company’s headquarters in New York City. Die bleierne Zeit focuses on Juliane (Jutta Lampe), who works for a feminist women’s magazine, and her relationship with her sister Marianne (Barbara Sukowa), an activist in a West German left-wing organisation, who is arrested, imprisoned in solitary confinement and finally found hanged in her jail cell. Juliane, wracked with grief, sets out to prove that this was not suicide but a murder orchestrated by the state.
Both works draw out the tensions and overlaps between militant political groups and the contemporaneous Women’s Liberation Movement and chart a change in political atmosphere from the euphoric collectivity of the Sixties to the more austere, paranoid and schism-ridden Seventies. Piercy was herself active in Students for a Democratic Society and later in the Women’s Liberation Movement, and she drew on her own political experiences when writing Vida. By painting a portrait of Vida’s life as a fugitive, she emphasises the political impasse Vida has reached, and highlights how aspects of feminist thought her protagonist had previously expressed hostility towards have come to have a bearing on her situation. In an introduction to a recent screening of Die bleierne Zeit at the Berlinale, von Trotta declared that she, like many others on the left at the time, had assumed that the state was responsible for the deaths of RAF members in prison – something which implied that she sympathised with Juliane’s response to her sister’s death in the film. Yet in a later interview, she stated:
My first aim is never to make a political film. It’s to make a film about people who live in a certain time, and I am portraying the time. [Ingmar] Bergman chose my film Marianne and Juliane [Die bleierne Zeit, as one of his 11 favorite films], and that is a political film too if you look at it. But it’s also a film about two sisters and a priest as a father who is earnest and harsh.2
Eschewing linear narratives that culminate in dramatic terrorist attacks, Vida and Die bleierne Zeit instead shuttle backwards and forwards in time to place those events in the contexts of lives unfolding unspectacularly alongside those of others. It’s worth asking, however, whether Piercy and von Trotta developed distinctly feminist aesthetic approaches to the history of left-wing militancy and if so, why; and it’s worth interrogating the political implications of their decision to present that history in a quotidian register.
History as background
After the release of Die bleierne Zeit in the US, New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin expressed frustration that certain key episodes had been omitted from the film’s narrative, implying that this was an oversight on von Trotta’s part, rather than a deliberate strategy.3 Most glaringly, the film does not depict Marianne’s arrest; nor does it show the process of her political radicalisation, despite featuring other flashbacks to the sisters’ childhood. A tense domestic scene in which Marianne and two of her male comrades burst into Juliane’s house in the middle of the night demanding coffee cuts abruptly to a shot of Juliane in a cab in the West German countryside – on her way, we soon see, to visit Marianne in prison. The circumstances of Marianne’s arrest remain obscure.
Die bleierne Zeit differs from von Trotta’s more recent films that focus on historical figures and all star Barbara Sukowa – Rosa Luxemburg (1986), Vision (2009, in which Sukowa plays Hildegard von Bingen), and Hannah Arendt (2012) – in that Marianne is not actually the film’s protagonist; the significance of her actions registers only indirectly, through their effects on Juliane. We see nothing of Marianne’s cell, know nothing of the other group members imprisoned alongside her, witness nothing of her interactions with the prison guards when she is alone with them. The only scenes in the prison take place in spaces Juliane is permitted to enter. We learn less about Marianne’s political commitments or their broader social impact than we do about the terrible consequences those commitments had for people close to her. Given that Marianne herself would presumably have balked at a presentation of her actions that emphasised their intimate and immediate ramifications over any consideration of their world-historical stakes, the effect of these absences is to produce a gentle critique of her tactics. In contrast to Uli Edel’s Baader Meinhof Complex (2008), which is structured around the RAF’s most infamous demonstrations, bank robberies, sieges and abductions and which is shot in a style reminiscent of a Hollywood action movie, von Trotta refuses to render this history as spectacle. Her emphasis on the damaging effects of Marianne’s decisions – on her former partner, her child, Juliane, and their parents – feels politically ambivalent. At the end of the film, Marianne’s son, who has come to live with his aunt after being violently attacked by people who had learned his dead mother’s identity, tears a photograph of Marianne from the wall, rips it up and glares at Juliane defiantly. Juliane meets his gaze and tells him Marianne was an “exceptional woman”, asking if he wants to know about the mother who abandoned him. He demands she tell him everything and the film ends on this inconclusive note. It feels as though both characters are doomed to go on suffering, and von Trotta leaves open the question of where the blame lies.
Vida likewise pushes its protagonist’s militant actions into the background in order to focus on her life underground. The novel is interspersed with sections that flash back in time, gradually providing a context for Vida’s fugitive existence. The activities of the Little Red Wagon and ‘The Network’ are only slowly revealed. This non-linear narrative contrasts with most memoirs written by members of the Weather Underground and also with the 1976 documentary Underground, directed by Emile de Antonio, Mary Lampson and Haskell Wexler, in which interviews describe a chronological process of radicalisation and culminate in a discussion of the tactic of property destruction, with lists of bombings displayed on-screen. Piercy includes as much detail of the meals prepared and eaten before or after bombings or demonstrations as she does of the events themselves. After one anti-Vietnam War demonstration Vida snuggles close to her lover and thinks immediately of returning home with him: “By and by they would be home again together, at rest under the Cretan embroidery.”4 She later reprimands herself for allowing herself to become distracted by domestic questions (“If I were a real revolutionary I wouldn’t see the paint on the ceiling”).5 But this kind of self-castigating sentiment is undercut in the book by a portrayal of revolutionaries for whom such seemingly trivial things are constantly looming into view.
In a scene set in the late sixties, Vida remarks to her sister Natalie:
When I was in high school, remember, Natty, I had this idea of history concentrating in moments of decision. Like 1890 was the time to be in Paris and 1917 in St Petersburg. It feels that way now – as if things are happening faster than we can understand. As if we’re pushing on some corner about to turn the whole thing over! We’re making history…6
But just as von Trotta withholds scenes of violent political action, the events that constitute this kind of history barely appear in Vida, and if they do it is only in the most smudged and indistinct forms. They remain in the background, almost incidental. As one of Vida’s friends retorts in an exchange: “History’s a myth. A million things happen in every moment. Each historian selects certain [sic] to stress.”7 In Vida the stress is placed on momentary happenings rarely deemed worthy of chronicling. If these militant women’s lives unfold within history, it is the enveloping and muffled history of everyday experience. This amounts to a subtle feminist redefining of history and politics: the works foreground interpersonal relationships, domestic spaces and routine activities, implying that these are just as historically and politically significant as highly visible public events. In Die bleierne Zeit Juliane attempts to convince a newspaper editor to run a piece on her sister after she finds evidence that could prove the death was not suicide. He rebuffs her by saying that the news cycle has moved on, “like last year’s snow”, and tells her that “topicality means the right news item at the right time. The rest goes to history’s dung heap or into history books.” Piercy and von Trotta are more interested in the dung heap than either the news cycle or the history books. Rather than presenting militant leftist women in terms consistent with masculinist traditions of history-writing and their focus on the dramatic public actions of individuals, they seek to show how the events and actions that make their way into historical record are both accompanied by and precipitate long, quiet and diffuse reverberations; the bed is as much a political site as the barricade. Yet there is an extent to which this risks undermining armed struggle or movements with revolutionary demands by downplaying the possibility for large-scale sociopolitical transformation, emphasising instead visions of ongoing everyday life that seem impervious to change.
Earlier in the film Juliane goes on holiday to Italy, where she learns of her sister’s death. Juliane’s relationship with her partner has been strained due to her preoccupation with Marianne, whose actions and behaviour he condemns. In an early scene Juliane accuses him of being attracted to her sister, and although he rebuffs the accusation, Marianne, however absent, threatens the integrity of the couple from the very beginning. Later he reads out a letter from Marianne demanding a long list of clothes, toiletries and – to his evident horror – make-up, while Juliane packs up a box of things to send to prison. He emphasises the callous tone of the letter, but Juliane stands with her back to him. On holiday, though, they laugh lightheartedly and display affection in ways that seemed impossible in their claustrophobic apartment. A shot of them walking through smoke on volcanic rock recalls Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1953), an archetypal cinematic representation of a bourgeois heterosexual couple in crisis. But history soon interrupts this interpersonal drama in the form of a television broadcast glimpsed during a meal in a busy restaurant, which announces the discovery of Marianne’s corpse. Intimacy is cracked open by distant violence. Back at the hotel, Juliane calls Germany while her partner waits outside the phone booth. A young woman in a bridal gown passes him in the corridor, a ghostly reminder of the kind of normative romantic relationship unavailable to him.
Times out of time
Vida and Die bleierne Zeit both portray women whose political actions lead them to be ostracised or excluded from mainstream society. Dramatic militant political action is followed by long periods of endurance, boredom and inactivity. The two works not only depict spaces of exile and imprisonment, but also meditate on two distinct temporalities: the time of the fugitive and the time of the incarcerated. Fugitive life is slow. Vida spends a lot of time waiting around, killing time before she moves on to the next safe house, receives her next payphone call, or meets her next host. Even her walking pace must be kept in check to avoid drawing attention to herself: “She could never rush but must ooze circumspectly.”8 Her disconsolate, aimless meandering is always accompanied by the ambient thrum of gnawing anxiety. She inhabits a strange time outside of time, often having no access to newspapers, radio or TV, and is preoccupied instead with immediate and mundane questions of survival: “Few people could imagine the limited options that existed [underground], but the fact remained that there were always options and daily problems of something to eat, something to wear, someplace to sleep, somebody to talk to, somebody to sleep with, work to do and rest to seize.”9 Though Vida differs formally from the linear narratives of memoirs written by former Weathermen and members of the Weather Underground, Piercy’s descriptions of the temporality of Vida’s fugitive experience resonate with Cathy Wilkerson’s reflections on life on the run:
My life continued in the same amorphous state of suspension for the next couple of months. I spent enormous amounts of time alone […] The ensuing friendships were suffused with a kind of dreaminess caused by our complete ignorance of where each other came from or what relationship each had to the organization; we provided a kind of tender comfort to one another in the midst of our confusion.10
Vida’s life underground often involves constructing provisional forms of domesticity. In a safe house in the countryside she stays in her room, “reading an old Natural History magazine about parasites in Western Africa and then about the life of the tree frog”.11 She quietly performs socially reproductive tasks on the edges of the society she wants to destroy: scrambling eggs in unfamiliar kitchens and sewing buttons by other people’s firesides. She occasionally stumbles on fleeting moments of intimacy with lovers whose real names she cannot always safely utter. She reads old picture books.
Marianne’s existence underground, meanwhile, is interrupted by her experience of incarceration. Von Trotta based Marianne loosely on RAF member Gudrun Ensslin. Her film was inspired by an encounter with Ensslin’s sister Christiane in Stuttgart at the state-sponsored funeral of Ensslin, Andreas Baader and Jan-Carl Raspe. Von Trotta had accompanied other members of the New German Cinema movement, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Alexander Kluge, who at that time were shooting Germany in Autumn (1978).12 Ensslin and other RAF members had been held in solitary confinement in Stammheim Prison, kept in ‘dead wings’ empty of other prisoners. During one of her visits Juliane tells Marianne, who has been on hunger strike, that she looks emaciated. Marianne retorts that her sister cannot understand what it means to endure solitary confinement in a cell where the lack of windows and constant glare of artificial light make it impossible even to differentiate night from day. “Silence is different here,” she says. “You lose all sense of time and, ultimately, of self.” Ulrike Meinhof wrote in a letter from the dead wing of the terrifying psychic effects produced by solitary confinement. She emphasised her temporal disorientation:
The feeling that time and space are encapsulated within each other—
The feeling of being in a room of distorting mirrors—
Staggering—
Afterwards, terrifying euphoria that you’re hearing something—besides the acoustic difference between day and night—
The feeling that time is flowing away, your brain is expanding again, your spinal column slipping back down, for weeks.13
The poet and theoriest Jackie Wang, who has spoken of the “detemporalisation” of solitary confinement and “the weaponisation of time” by prisons, has said that she began to think about carceral time after reflecting on the distinct temporalities she and her incarcerated brother inhabit, her sense of how their “lives had diverged in the years since he’d been locked up”.14 Die bleierne Zeit does not attempt to convey the experience of imprisonment itself, yet by focusing on a relationship between siblings it conveys something of this sense of temporal divergence.
Paths not taken
It’s the thesis of Juliet Mitchell’s Siblings: Sex and Violence – and who would argue? – that lateral relationships between siblings are simultaneously loving and hostile.15 That dynamic propels von Trotta’s film and skirts the edges of Piercy’s novel. Die bleierne Zeit was the second of three films focused on sisterly relationships, released between Sisters, or The Balance of Happiness (1979) and Three Sisters (1988). In both Vida and Die bleierne Zeit, sisters act as counterparts to the militant protagonists, almost like a controlled experiment demonstrating a counter-narrative to violent political struggle. At one of their last meetings Marianne has been transferred to a prison where Juliane must speak to her through a glass partition. Their reflections briefly overlap and, for a moment, it is as if their fates are united. Is von Trotta implying that either sister could have been in the other’s place? In flashbacks to their childhood Juliane is shown to have been the more rebellious sibling, while Marianne was close to their father, a conservative Presbyterian minister.
Juliane and Marianne’s first meeting in the film is at a museum watched over by grey stone statues of ancient deities and long-dead men. Marianne is critical of Juliane’s work for her feminist magazine and implicitly dismisses her involvement in campaigns for reproductive justice. Juliane tells Marianne that her former partner has killed himself, leaving Marianne’s young son without a guardian. Though Marianne reacts coldly to the news of his death – “How can someone end his life without having made some use of it?” – she is agitated to learn about her son and begs Juliane to care for him. Juliane refuses, berating Marianne for attempting to force her to lead the life her sister has chosen to abandon. She throws Marianne’s dismissal of feminism back at her, suggesting that the kinds of issues she claims to find trivial trouble her nonetheless. A shot shows the sisters’ drinks sitting next to each other on the table between them, but skins have formed on the surfaces of the cooling liquids. The scene is clumsy in its implication that the otherwise icy Marianne harbours irrepressible maternal feelings, but effective in highlighting the tensions between the sisters’ political positions.16
In Vida the relationship between the sisters is less antagonistic (though, as in von Trotta’s film, dialogues between the two siblings often serve to play out debates between Marxist-Leninist militancy and nonviolent feminism). Both Vida and Marianne dismiss their sisters’ engagements in feminist campaigns as apolitical – but in both cases they have ironically wound up unable to engage in political activity themselves, even if they both resist seeing it in those terms. Both Piercy and von Trotta seem keen to emphasise how Vida’s and Marianne’s lives are shaped by the very issues they had sought to dismiss as negligible. As Piercy reflected in an interview in 2012, despite her scepticism towards feminism “Vida finally does learn from her own experiences and from her sister that she needs feminism, something she dismissed as trivial before she went underground.”17
Vida’s and Marianne’s relationships with others are constrained, shaped by absence and distance. Both end up insisting that their experience within political groups was the only really real experience of their lives; their childhoods and their present lives seem shadowy and insubstantial in comparison. Marianne shouts at her sister for publishing an account of their childhood, claiming that her real life began with her comrades. Juliane replies: “Our childhood was reality. We can’t shed our past.” The film implies that they were both shaped by their shared upbringing in a strict religious household; it also shows them reckoning with Nazism at school, both part of the first generation of German children born after the Second World War. Vida’s attachment to her activist past comes through in her romantic relationships with men. Though she still meets her husband Leigh occasionally, he has begun living with a new partner and eventually asks for a divorce. Meanwhile, she begins a sexual relationship with another fugitive, who accuses her of living in a past that no longer exists: “You’re loving people in the past. But we’re stuck here. We’re not even real to them. All you do is crawl back into your own past. That’s why you think I don’t count. ’Cause I wasn’t around then, back when you think it was all really real.”18 Later they are described as “two ghosts in a private afterlife driving on.”19
***
At some moments Vida defines history not as a series of past events but as the feeling of being enveloped in action aimed at rejecting the current state of things. “History was a sense of urgency,” Piercy writes, “a rush in the blood and a passion to make things better, to push with her whole life on what was.”20 History returns again in a more sombre guise in the final passage of the novel, when Vida narrowly evades an FBI trap and sets out alone once more:
She had to survive, even if she could not remember now just why – a life in the service of something more pressing […] I am at the mercy of history, she thought, feeling its force concretely as a steel press closing on her chest, but I can push it too a bit. One thing I know is that nothing remains the same. No great problems of this society have been solved, no wounds healed, no problems kept except that the rich shall inherit. What swept through us and cast us forward is a force that will gather and rise again…21
Vida’s final reflections are ambiguous, caught between hope and despair, conviction and defeat. History, here, seems to belong not to the past but to the future. It signals something larger than the individual, something like a moral imperative to change the world regardless of the wounds that attempts to do so have already inflicted. It takes the form of a mysterious force that is almost meteorological. When Ulrike Meinhof criticised everybody for “talking about the weather”, the weather stood for social conditions taken for granted and accepted as natural and inevitable.22 Piercy suggests that the clouds can be broken through human intervention. The question of inheritance and unhealed wounds is more fraught in Die bleierne Zeit, which does not contend with forces larger than the people in cramped rooms at its centre. At the close of the film Marianne’s son confronts his aunt: their dialogue calls Marianne’s conviction that it might be possible to cut oneself off from one’s past completely into question, while leaving open the possibility that wounds might heal in time. “Begin!”, the boy shouts, “begin!” The film ends.
1. Yvonne Rainer, ‘Working Title: Journeys from Berlin/1971’, October 9 (1979), pp. 80–106, p. 89. 2. Nicolas Rapold, ‘Interview: Margarethe von Trotta’, Film Comment, 20 May 2018, (Online). 3. Janet Maslin, ‘Margarethe von Trotta Studies Sisters Again’, The New York Times, 22 April 1982, (Online). 4. Marge Piercy, Vida, London: Women’s Press, 1980, p. 133. 5. Vida, p. 216. 6. Vida, p. 110. 7. Vida, p. 110. 8. Vida, p. 20. 9. Vida, p. 353. 10. Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman, Seven Stories Press, 2007, p. 359. 11. Vida, p. 71. 12. Germany in Autumn opens with footage shot at the funeral of industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer (kidnapped and shot by the RAF in 1977) and closes with scenes from the heavily policed press-filled funeral of the three RAF members who were buried in a common grave. See, Miriam Hansen, ‘Cooperative Auteur Cinema and Oppositional Public Sphere: Alexander Kluge’s Contribution to Germany in Autumn’, New German Critique 24/25 (Autumn 1981 – Winter 1982), pp. 36–5. 13. Ulrike Meinhof, letter from a prisoner in the isolation wing, June 16, 1972 to February 9, 1973. Cited in Karin Bauer, Introduction, Ulrike Meinhof, Everybody Talks About the Weather … We Don’t, Seven Stories Press, 2008, pp. 12–100 (p. 78). 14. Jackie Wang, ‘Carceral Temporalities and the Politics of Dreaming’, Transmediale Keynote, February 2019, (Online). 15. Juliet Mitchell, Siblings: Sex and Violence, Blackwell, 2003. 16. On debates about motherhood in relation to RAF members, see Patricia Melzer, ‘Maternal Ethics and Political Violence: The “Betrayal” of Motherhood Among Women of the RAF and June 2 Movement’, Seminar 47.1 (2011), 81–102; and Charity Scribner, After the Red Army Faction: Gender, Culture and Militancy, Columbia University Press, 2015. 17. Jennifer Carter, ‘Interview with Marge Piercy’, California Journal of the Heroine (Online). 18. Vida, p. 86. 19. Vida, p. 254. 20. Vida, p. 110. 21. Vida, p. 412. 22. Ulrike Meinhof, Everybody Talks About the Weather … We Don’t.
Hannah Proctor lives in Glasgow and mostly writes about histories and theories of radical psychiatry.
