Zur Vorstellung des Terrors Die RAF

In two ways, the curatorial principle of the exhibition takes account of the perception of the RAF formed in and through the media. On the one hand, by citing and displaying examples of this media presence in the form of 29 dates tied to the history of the RAF's terrorism in the 1970s. Here one can see what one could see at that time and what, in this "being seen", decisively molded the "imagining of terror and the imagining of the RAF" in West German society. On the other hand and at the same time, it is made clear to the viewer that the artistic grappling with this perception of a reality created by the media is multi-dimensionally differentiated and makes it more directly and differently experiencable. This is especially visible in a work like Gerhard Richter's "Atlas". Plates 470-479, which deal with the theme of the RAF, are not "preparatory works" for the famous serial "October 18, 1977", but an autonomous work revealing the tension between media reality and artistic perception, in both the objective and the subjective sense. The exhibition will thus show that it is precisely artistic works that, through their whole relationship to history and the present, make decisive contributions to illuminating from various perspectives the abstract "reality-sign RAF", as Klaus Theweleit has termed it.