The Stammheim Complex in Marianne and Juliane
The Stammheim Complex in Marianne and Juliane
This chapter examines Margarethe von Trotta's 1981 feature film Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne and Juliane). Based on the lives of Gudrun Ensslin and her sister Christiane, the film depicts the feminine face of the social forces that were changing West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. It reenvisions the circumstances that Ulrike Meinhof describes in her writings, the concrete constraints of the prison complex, and the psychological strictures of forced isolation from 1972 to 1973, when she was held in solitary confinement in the Women's Psychiatric Section of the Cologne-Ossendorf Prison. Marianne and Juliane explores the divide between the public programs of the Frauenbewegung and the Red Army Faction's (RAF) underground machinations. In revealing the broader social frameworks that coexisted with the RAF, von Trotta touches on issues of sexuality, labor, and militancy that were fiercely debated in the years of the group's first generation. Making Stammheim into a metonym of German authoritarianism, von Trotta blurs the margins between police state and nation-state.
Keywords: militancy, Margarethe von Trotta, Die bleierne Zeit, Marianne and Juliane, Gudrun Ensslin, West Germany, Ulrike Meinhof, prison complex, Red Army Faction, Stammheim
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