PUBLIC LECTURE: It�s better to burn a department store than to own one�: The Baader-Meinhof Gang

The Institute of Advanced Studies and the History Discipline at UWA present a series of ten public lectures attached to a new History Honours seminar. The series aims to present a context for contemporary terrorism by inviting lectures from scholars working on historical and contemporary terrorism movements. The lectures are open to all with an interest in political and social movements and their methodologies and repercussions.

Abstract: This lecture will explore the origins, political aims, and social composition of the German Red Army Faction (also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang), which came into existence in the late 1960s. The lecture will focus on the so-called ‘first generation’ of activists, starting chronologically with events in 1968, when Andreas Baader and his girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin, set fire to a department store in the city of Frankfurt. Furthermore, what will be highlighted are the cumulative processes of radicalization within the RAF that led to the assassination of several prominent German politicians and economists, their relationship with the 1968 student movement and the German state as well as their cult status in the German media. The lecture will end with the collective suicide of the main activists of the RAF in the German high security prison of Stammheim in 1977.

Biographical note: Dr Robert Gerwarth is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and Faculty Lecturer in Modern European History at Oxford University. He was educated at Humboldt University Berlin (MA, 2000) and Oxford University (DPhil, 2003) and has held visiting positions at the NIOD in Amsterdam and at Harvard University. His first book (The Bismarck Myth. Weimar Germany and the Legacy of the Iron Chancellor) was published by Oxford University Press in 2005. Dr Gerwarth is currently working on the history of terrorism in twentieth-century Germany.

ALL WELCOME. NO RESERVATION REQUIRED.