Margrit Schiller was an early member of the Red Army Faction, the West German urban guerrilla group. In 1971 she was captured and charged with a murder she did not commit, and upon her release she returned to the underground, being captured again in early 1974. She would spend most of the 1970s in prison, enduring isolation conditions meant to break the human spirit, and participating hunger strikes and other acts of resistance along with other political prisoners from the RAF. In Remembering the Armed Struggle, Schiller recounts the process through which she joined her generation’s revolt in the 1960s, going from work with drug users to joining the antipsychiatry political organization the Socialist Patients’ Collective and then the RAF. She tells of how she met and worked alongside the group’s founding members, Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, Jan-Carl Raspe, Irmgard Möller, and Holger Meins; how she learned the details of the May Offensive and other actions while in her prison cell; about the struggles to defend human dignity in the most degraded of environments, and the relationships she forged with other women in prison. Also included are a foreword by Ann Hansen, who situates the draconian prison conditions inflicted on the RAF within the context of a global counterinsurgency program that would help spawn the plague of mass incarceration we still face today, an afterword by the late Osvaldo Bayer, and an appendix by J. Smith and André Moncourt summarizing the politics and history of the RAF in the 1970s. What People Are Saying “Margrit Schiller’s life story Remembering the Armed Struggle, is not meant to mark a hard break with the Red Army Faction, but is more of a critical reflection in the spirit of solidarity. Even those who do not share Schiller’s perspective well find it interesting to join her as she looks back on her years underground and in prison.” diesseits “Schiller’s recollections are profoundly honest and to the point. She neither glorifies the Red Army Faction nor does she repent or distance herself from her past.” taz “I am moved by the honesty of this story, showing the limits, doubts, and uncertainties. Margrit is far from pretending to be a hero or providing a heroic tale. May Margrit’s experiences and those of her comrades help us to continue the battle for the freedom of political prisoners in any corner of the world. May they also allow us to radically question the prison system, which is used as a space to discard the excluded and to criminalize poverty. . . . Memory, freedom, and desire are part of the experience of resistance of our bodies, of our lives. And Margrit, stripping away her own history in this book, with pain but with courage, helps us to continue spinning colors, flavors, sounds and aromas in this mild time of attempts.” Claudia Korol, author of Las Revoluciones de Berta (2019) from the Prologue to the Spanish edition “The book challenges prejudices and dares to address subjects that are taboo, especially in these latitudes so plagued by silences about the human aspects that mark the reality of the struggle to free ourselves. This story is the story of hundreds of antisystem militants . . . [It] contains that old but not perished left-wing argument from the 1960s about how words should have some connection to actions . . .” Grupo de ex presas politicas: Memoria v testimonios
Margrit Schiller was an early member of the Red Army Faction, the West German urban guerrilla group. In 1971 she was captured and charged with a murder she did not commit, and upon her release she returned to the underground, being captured again in early 1974. She would spend most of the 1970s in prison, enduring isolation conditions meant to break the human spirit, and participating hunger strikes and other acts of resistance along with other political prisoners from the RAF. In Remembering the Armed Struggle, Schiller recounts the process through which she joined her generation’s revolt in the 1960s, going from work with drug users to joining the antipsychiatry political organization the Socialist Patients’ Collective and then the RAF. She tells of how she met and worked alongside the group’s founding members, Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, Jan-Carl Raspe, Irmgard Möller, and Holger Meins; how she learned the details of the May Offensive and other actions while in her prison cell; about the struggles to defend human dignity in the most degraded of environments, and the relationships she forged with other women in prison. Also included are a foreword by Ann Hansen, who situates the draconian prison conditions inflicted on the RAF within the context of a global counterinsurgency program that would help spawn the plague of mass incarceration we still face today, an afterword by the late Osvaldo Bayer, and an appendix by J. Smith and André Moncourt summarizing the politics and history of the RAF in the 1970s. What People Are Saying “Margrit Schiller’s life story Remembering the Armed Struggle, is not meant to mark a hard break with the Red Army Faction, but is more of a critical reflection in the spirit of solidarity. Even those who do not share Schiller’s perspective well find it interesting to join her as she looks back on her years underground and in prison.” diesseits “Schiller’s recollections are profoundly honest and to the point. She neither glorifies the Red Army Faction nor does she repent or distance herself from her past.” taz “I am moved by the honesty of this story, showing the limits, doubts, and uncertainties. Margrit is far from pretending to be a hero or providing a heroic tale. May Margrit’s experiences and those of her comrades help us to continue the battle for the freedom of political prisoners in any corner of the world. May they also allow us to radically question the prison system, which is used as a space to discard the excluded and to criminalize poverty. . . . Memory, freedom, and desire are part of the experience of resistance of our bodies, of our lives. And Margrit, stripping away her own history in this book, with pain but with courage, helps us to continue spinning colors, flavors, sounds and aromas in this mild time of attempts.” Claudia Korol, author of Las Revoluciones de Berta (2019) from the Prologue to the Spanish edition “The book challenges prejudices and dares to address subjects that are taboo, especially in these latitudes so plagued by silences about the human aspects that mark the reality of the struggle to free ourselves. This story is the story of hundreds of antisystem militants . . . [It] contains that old but not perished left-wing argument from the 1960s about how words should have some connection to actions . . .” Grupo de ex presas politicas: Memoria v testimonios
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the vocabulary of civility and civilization is very much at the forefront of political debate. Most of these debates proceed as if the meaning of these words were self-evident. This is where Civilizing Emotions intervenes, tracing the history of the concepts of civility and civilization and thus adding a level of self-reflexivity to the present debates. Unlike previous histories, Civilizing Emotions takes a global perspective, highlighting the roles of civility and civilization in the creation of a new and hierarchized global order in the era of high imperialism and its entanglements with the developments in a number of well-chosen European and Asian countries. Emotions were at the core of the practices linked to the creation of a new global order in the nineteenth century. Civilizing Emotions explores why and how emotions were an asset in civilizing peoples and societies - their control and management, but also their creation and their ascription to different societies and social groups. The study is a contribution to the history of emotions, to global history, and to the history of concepts, three rapidly developing and innovative research areas which are here being brought together for the first time.
This work analyzes texts by contemporary Swiss writer Gertrud Leutenegger in regard to the interrelationship of literary freedom and social constraints by applying different discursive variants of literary discourse analysis. How do the enigmatic texts written in an idiosyncratic and unique style, filled with myths and codes of dream and life sequences relate to the Swiss environment? Are they just free associations and combinations constituting an esoteric utopia? Is Gertrud Leutenegger ortslos as Martin Roda Becher defines postmodern writers? Critical approaches of several schools of literary criticism; feminism, male gender studies, psychoanalysis, mythology, theory of style, linguistics, and sociolinguistics contrast the functional textual differentiations. A wide interdisciplinary need in literary projects is thus disclosed. Therefore, this volume is of interest for scholars of all branches of social and literary sciences. Unprecedented are the models of masculinity and the images of men derived from a first person singular narrative by a Swiss woman writer. She works through the ontological process of subjectivity reflected in the image of a patriarch governor and an Italian immigrant. The chapter on Swissness in the Text is of crucial importance concerning the categorization of German Literature and questions about minor literature. This socio-critical analysis shows that there is a transcendence between the writing subject-(author) and literature. Yet, the body can be retrieved from literature since das Herz muß im Körper belassen werden, als Sitz der Erkenntnis, as Gertrud Leutenegger says. All her texts are body writings; her words originate in the female body experiencing constraints in Switzerland.
Emotions are as old as humankind. But what do we know about them and what importance do we assign to them? Emotional Lexicons is the first cultural history of terms of emotion found in German, French, and English language encyclopaedias since the late seventeenth century. Insofar as these reference works formulated normative concepts, they documented shifts in the way the educated middle classes were taught to conceptualise emotion by a literary medium targeted specifically to them. As well as providing a record of changing language use (and the surrounding debates), many encyclopaedia articles went further than simply providing basic knowledge; they also presented a moral vision to their readers and guidelines for behaviour. Implicitly or explicitly, they participated in fundamental discussions on human nature: Are emotions in the mind or in the body? Can we "read" another person's feelings in their face? Do animals have feelings? Are men less emotional than women? Are there differences between the emotions of children and adults? Can emotions be "civilised"? Can they make us sick? Do groups feel together? Do our emotions connect us with others or create distance? The answers to these questions are historically contingent, showing that emotional knowledge was and still is closely linked to the social, cultural, and political structures of modern societies. Emotional Lexicons analyses European discourses in science, as well as in broader society, about affects, passions, sentiments, and emotions. It does not presume to refine our understanding of what emotions actually are, but rather to present the spectrum of knowledge about emotion embodied in concepts whose meanings shift through time, in order to enrich our own concept of emotion and to lend nuances to the interdisciplinary conversation about them.
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