WEST GERMANY’S NEUE FRAUENBEWEGUNG AND THE PRODUCTIVE POTENTIAL OF FEMINIST (GEGEN)GEWALT

This article explores the feminist potential of (Gegen)gewalt ((counter-)violence) during the founding years of West Germany’s neue Frauenbewegung: firstly, as a discourse and practice which helped create the discursive space to start imagining feminist identity in the late 1960s, when, it has been argued, no such identity existed; secondly, as a militant practice in the early 1970s, through which women were able to change their gendered behavioural scripts in positive feminist ways; finally, as feminist self-defence, understood as enabling women to continue to imagine an active subject position in the mid-1970s, when women as the victims of patriarchal violence had become the predominant idea of the movement. Reading feminist flyers, publications and other documents of the period, as well as more recently published accounts of the movement, alongside the wider discourse on (Gegen)gewalt of the 1960s and 1970s, I trace a cultural history of feminist (Gegen)gewalt.


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Transforming oneself was an important notion in the wider context of antiauthoritarianism in the late 1960s, in West Germany and beyond. 3 It has been argued that women were far more successful than their male counterparts in this regard: according to 68erin Sarah Haffner, 'Frauen [waren] der revolutionärste Teil dieser etwas revolutionären Bewegung [...], weil sie wirklich ihre eigene Situation stark infrage gestellt haben.' 4 Ute Kätzel supports this reading: 'Tatsächlich wollten die Frauen nicht nur die Gesellschaft verändern, sondern in erster Linie sich selbst und ihre eigene Rolle, im Gegensatz zu den meisten Männern.' 5 Whilst there was a wider discourse on violence as (personally) transformative within the antiauthoritarian movement, (Gegen)gewalt could be particularly productive and transformative for female subjects, as this article will demonstrate in three ways. In the first section, I explore (Gegen)gewalt as feminist discourse and practice which helped create the discursive space to start imagining feminist identity in the late 1960s -a time when, it has been argued, no such identity existed. In the second, I consider (Gegen)gewalt as a militant practice in the early 1970s, through which women were able to change their gendered behavioural scripts in positive feminist ways. Finally, in the third section, I look at feminist self-defence as a redisciplining of the gendered body that enabled women to continue to imagine an active subject position in the mid-1970s -a time when the neue Frauenbewegung overwhelmingly understood women as the victims of patriarchal violence.
Whilst I acknowledge that acts of violence are of course very different to talking or writing about them, I shall not be differentiating between actions and discourse: following Foucault, I understand words and discourse as, themselves, an event or a kind of 'doing', with real material effects, albeit that those effects are usually less immediate.
My sources are a combination of feminist flyers, publications and other documents of the period, as well as more recently published accounts of the movement by (former) activists.
Although some of these documents are relatively well known, the vast majority are not: some are accessible through published collections of feminist texts; others can be found in various feminist and social history archives. 6 Whilst it would be interesting to have considered other sources, such as feminist fiction of the 1970s -and my thoughts on feminist (Gegen)gewalt could be equally well applied here -this was unfortunately beyond the scope of this article. I read my material alongside the wider discourse on (Gegen)gewalt of the late 1960s and 1970s, a discourse inspired by theorists such as Frantz Fanon and Herbert Marcuse,7 and championed in the late 1960s by student leader Rudi Dutschke 8 and -at this point still left-wing journalist -Ulrike Meinhof. 9 In broad terms, Gegengewalt was posited as a legitimate and necessary response to the Gewalt of the state and of Western imperialism, seen as both physically violent (the war in Vietnam; the police killing of student demonstrator Benno Ohnesorg in June 1967), and systemically and/or structurally violent, with capitalism itself understood as violent. Gegengewalt, used alongside terms such 'Notwehr' and the heroically-connoted 'Widerstand', was thus posited as a reactive rather than active force, even as self-defence. 10 It was also framed as something positive; activists applied terms such as 'aufklärerische Gewalt' and 'befreiende Gewalt' to their political practice. 11 I seek to gender the notion of (Gegen)gewalt, as well as to uncover a specifically feminist discourse on it. (Gegen)gewalt, I argue, was a transformative and empowering force for female and/or feminist subjects. This needs acknowledging, particularly in a context in which the ambivalence of West German feminists' relationship to Gewalt tends, to be 'written out' of the historiography and cultural memory of the neue Frauenbewegung with, at times, far-reaching scholarly, political and ethical implications, as Patricia Melzer has recently demonstrated. 12 According to Melzer, primarily as a result of the cultural feminist position that developed from the mid-1970s onwards in West Germany -a position that sees violence as inherently masculine and patriarchal, and women as inherently non-violent -the idea emerged that the only feminist resistance possible is a non-violent one, in a context in which 'women's relationship to violence is necessarily one of oppression' (DSYG, 233). 13 As Melzer argues, this position has led to 'the historical separation of feminist politics and violence' and to 'the necessary discounting of any violent resistance as nonfeminist' (DSYG, 36 and 235). One result of this is that certain women, such as those of the militant feminist group Rote Zora, have even been written out of feminism. 14 Perhaps more significantly, the notion that feminist politics can only be non-violent has meant that for a long time West German feminists, amongst others, did not reflect on their own racial and class privilege and engage with women in other contexts, for whom violent resistance might be a more urgent need. 'An assumed peaceful disposition,' Melzer argues, 'releases Western women from examining calls for solidarity and their own privilege, which allows a pacifist strategy. Instead of constituting an ahistoric, universal truth, women's presumed nonviolence is actually a discursively produced assumption based on the privileging of specific voices and actions' (DSYG, 234).
As well as contributing to the important scholarly, political and ethical task of writing violence back into the neue Frauenbewegung, this article is situated in the context of research into violence that focuses on violence's productive, rather than merely destructive tendencies, and which seeks to engage with the question of why the practice of violence might be attractive. 15 In this way the article is concerned with what have been termed expressive or phatic uses of violence, where violence is understood not just as aimed at an enemy but also as 'affirm[ing] a way of life'. 16  Conflating one's own position with that of those persecuted due to their race/ethnicity was a common and problematic technique in the antiauthoritarian movement, indicative not least of the enthusiastic interest in militant black Americans in the late 1960s and beyond. This interest can be partly explained by the presence of black American GIs stationed in postwar West Germany, but there was more to it than that. As Detlef Siegfried explains in a quotation which, though attentive to race, is gender blind: 'Since a revolutionary subject was hardly to be found in West Germany, aspirations were commonly projected onto African-American ghetto dwellers, who, during the summer of 1967 […] renewed their violent confrontation with the state' after certain activists had formed the militant organization the Black Panther Party in 1966. 19 Although Schrader-Klebert equates the situation of women and Afro-Americans -referring to the latter using the racist term 'Neger' 20 -she does at least acknowledge differences in their respective positions. 21 These differences notwithstanding, Gewalt clearly plays an important role for Schrader-Klebert in the process of women and people of colour becoming subjects and historical and political agents. Women and people of colour must turn the Gewalt that supposedly constitutes them back on the oppressor, she argues.
Understanding oneself as a self-consciously female political subject, let alone as a feminist, was by no means self-evident in the late 1960s, as members of the neue Frauenbewegung have since discussed. Ute Kätzel, editor of Die 68erinnen (2002), describes how there was no established female political identity, so little discursive space to imagine political women as women at the time: 'eine neue, positive Frauenidentität musste erst geschaffen werden'; 'Ein positives weibliches Rollenmodell existierte damals noch nicht. Daher identifizierten sich viele Aktivistinnen nicht als Frauen, sondern -vermeintlich geschlechtsneutral -als Menschen.' 22 Numerous West German feminists have reflected on how they were unaware of an earlier 'first wave' of feminist women in Germany who, according to Alice Schwarzer, had been written out of history and so had to be 'rediscovered'. 23 Helke Sander demonstrates this lack of awareness in one of the earliest texts produced by the Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frau, the left-wing women's group that formed in West Berlin in late 1967/early 1968 and constituted 'one of the first efforts to organise more broadly around women's issues' (DSYG,59) in the postwar Federal Republic. As Sander explains in February 1968: [Der mann] hört noch den ruf der geschichte, denn sie ist bisher von ihm und für ihn gemacht worden. die frauen irren heimatlos in diesem system umher [...] sie sind niemals dazu aufgefordert worden, geschichte zu machen. 24 Whilst men are interpellated as historical subjects in the Althusserian sense here, women have no direction, no sense of progress, no discursive space in this patrilineal construction of historythey wander aimlessly around ('umherirren'); they are without 'Heimat'. Sander would later reflect: 'Viele von uns wussten gar nicht, dass es schon einmal eine Frauenbewegung gegeben hatte.' 25 As Alice Schwarzer argues, using naturalistic imagery to naturalize the feminist collective 'wir', this erasure of women's and feminist history is no small matter when it comes to the question of feminist subjectivity: 'Geschichte ist nicht nur Vergangenheit, sie ist auch Zukunft. Ohne Geschichte sind wir wurzel-und identitätslos. ' 26 In her article, then, Schrader-Klebert starts to create that discursive space, and women's use of Gewalt plays a key role in this. Though she does not mention him, Schrader-Klebert is clearly influenced by the work of Frantz Fanon, the theorist and psychiatrist who treated both mentally and physically traumatized patients in French colonial Algeria. His 1961 text Les Damnés de la terre was published in German (as Die Verdammten dieser Erde) in 1966, and his theoretical importance for the antiauthoritarian movement was immense. 27 Fanon's ideas on colonial Algeria and the particular experience of colonized Algerian men, however, were too often applied in unreflected ways to the very different context of West Germany. In the text, Fanon discusses how the native Algerian has internalized the colonial violence of the French oppressor and must use violence to reclaim a sense of self or subjectivity. Violence, here, is conceived of as a cleansing, humanizing and emancipatory force. Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote the preface, asserts: 'The native cures himself of colonial neurosis by thrusting out the settler through force of arms. When his rage boils over, he rediscovers his lost innocence and he comes to know himself in that he himself creates his self.' 28 Fanon writes, drawing attention to the productive and transformative dimension to violence: 'because it constitutes their only work, [this violence] invests their characters with positive and creative qualities'; 'violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.' 29  [hat] die Gewalt verinnerlicht, die auf sie ausgeübt worden ist' (KRF, 7). That violence, however, lacks those immediately physical dimensions that Fanon also emphasizes with regard to colonial violence. The patriarchal Gewalt of 1960s' West Germany is clearly less immediately physical.
As for the female Gewalt put forward in response, Schrader-Klebert stops short of explicitly ascribing to it a humanizing, cleansing quality, but this quality is implicit: Gewalt is certainly posited as something empowering, emancipatory and transformative for women, as key to their  [43][44] In this way, Schrader-Klebert is positing a change of emotional and affective scripts for women.
A flyer likely to have been the first produced by the Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frau in January 1968 creates a strong sense that the potentially productive emotions and affects of anger and aggression in women at this time were lacking, or at least mischannelled. The wording of its title, 'wir sind neidisch und wir sind traurig gewesen', and the focus on these emotions, is strikingly non-combative, though the use of the perfect tense here does create a hint of feminist optimism that things might be changing. 36 Nonetheless, the tone differs from the dynamic, combative, Bachmann's attempted assassination of Rudi Dutschke in April 1968 and the escalation of violence which followed. 39 In this discursive context, it is possible that Schrader-Klebert means only symbolic Gegengewalt, but she could also mean 'Gewalt gegen Sachen', something 'widely accepted' by protesting students in the late 1960s. 40 Whilst it is unlikely, it is also possible that she might even mean 'Gewalt gegen Personen': Colvin has shown that the possibility of committing acts of Gewalt against people was being discussed by figures at the very centre of the '68 movement, including Meinhof, in the 'Gewalt' article of June 1968. 41 It is a few months later that a feminist critique of masculine/macho militancy starts to develop. In a letter addressed to women comrades in the west, written in November 1968, the Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frau assert, invoking Freud: '[M]ilitante demonstrationen sind derart, dass sie bisher nur für männer sinnvoll sein können. aber auch dort scheint die militanz eher eine überich-funktion zu haben.' Interestingly, though, the group does not rule out the possibility of feminist forms of militancy in the future: 'wir sind noch nicht in der lage, militant -besser effektiv -auf eine entsprechende weise zu sein' (my italics). 42 By referring to the 'Problem der Gegengewalt', Schrader-Klebert perhaps gestures towards an ethical understanding of the highly problematic nature of violence. However, she remains abstract and elusive, failing to take responsibility for her words: claiming that her text is merely 'agitatorisch' (KRF, 4), rather than a thorough and prescriptive analysis, does not seem enough given this wider context. Whatever her position, Schrader-Klebert's article is important for setting out a specifically female, even feminist, form of Gegengewalt that is emancipatory and productive: a means through which women can start to gain a sense of their own agency and subjectivity as women. Violence or Gegengewalt, as theorized here, has transformative potential for the nascent feminist self.
An incident that took place a few months prior to the publication of Schrader-Klebert's article, and which has gone down in history as the founding moment of West Germany's neue Frauenbewegung, 43  Als die Männer darauf nicht eingehen wollten, kriegten sie Tomaten an den Kopf. Sie haben nicht rumgejammert und sich nicht als Opfer dargestellt, die Mitleid beantragen und Verständnis. 46 Meinhof does not use the term Gegengewalt here, but she had used it to designate very similar practices -or symbolic uses of Gewalt -a few months earlier, in her 'Gegen-Gewalt' article of Certainly, former 68erinnen have retrospectively discussed how they found the flyer to be in very bad taste at the time. 55 Either way, the group describes how the flyer and the discussion surrounding it had an impact on their political agency and how they were perceived by male comrades: Wieder zu Hause wurde weitergearbeitet. Zum ersten Mal setzten sich die Genossinnen bei einer SDS-Mitgliederversammlung alle in einer Ecke zusammen und man konnte beobachten, daß dies von den Genossen wohl als Machtdemonstration begriffen wurde. Wenn eine Genossin einen Beitrag brachte, wurde ihr zugehört. Außerdem war sie selbst viel sicherer, weil sie die anderen Frauen hinter sich wußte und weil sie wußte, daß ihr notfalls eine andere weiterhelfen würde. 56 The Tomatenwurf and flyer have been mythologized in feminist and more mainstream discourses as the founding moment of West Germany's neue Frauenbewegung. 57 They appear to have had quite an effect on the possibilities certain women saw for their own political agency and political practices as women, empowering and mobilizing them to found their own women's and feminist groups, providing the discursive space to start to imagine political female and feminist identity in the earliest phase of the movement. With Schrader-Klebert, this can be read as feminist Gegengewalt which had productive and transformative potential for women and for nascent feminist subjects.

Militant violence as feminist '(Gegen)gewalt'
The idea that the Tomatenwurf and events of 1968 constitute the founding moment of the neue Frauenbewegung, however, has been continually challenged by Alice Schwarzer, as well as by lesbian-feminist activist and filmmaker Cristina Perincioli. Both women tell a different storyone that tends to emphasize their own role. According  For Perincioli, then, when women 'do' violence, it allows them to break out of their typically feminine socialization as passive, demure and decorative; it allows them to change the gendered scripts for women in highly productive feminist ways. Repeated use of the pronouns 'wir' and 'uns' here suggests that this militant violence is productive beyond the individual woman, at the level of the feminist group. Further, the second sentence, with its alliterative 'z' and sense of crescendo in the listing of what violence was 'doing' for women, reaching a climax in the alliterative and aggressive 'zeigen Zähne', evokes Perincioli's pleasure and investment in militant violence, at least as it is retrospectively narrated.
These qualities are arguably part of the reason why female militancy had such infectious, thrilling appeal for other, even non-political women, perhaps with the potential to politicize them.
The quotation above is preceded by the following: 'Und das weibliche Publikum war begeistertauch unpolitische Frauen ließen sich hinreißen von dem Kitzel, dass es in der Stadt Frauen gab, die zuschlugen.' 70 Violence, constructed again as a sort of cultural performance here (it has a 'Publikum'), is accorded an overwhelming and uncontrollably affective power through the verb 'hinreißen' and the noun 'Kitzel', which could also suggest that these women did not take militancy seriously enough, or fully understand its intended political meaning.
The affective investment in violence narrated here is, I would argue, gender specific, at least in part: the 'female public' are 'begeistert' and 'hingerissen' precisely because women are not socialized to be criminal or violent, arguably unlike men. 71  Hence the seductive appeal of violent militant activism ('Militanz'), it would seem, was not just the preserve of West German men. 75 Although Perincioli does not use the term (Gegen)gewalt herself, the militant violence she describes can be understood as feminist (Gegen)gewalt in three ways: first, in the sense of women directing physical violence/force against individual men, but also against capitalism/the state, increasingly being read as misogynistic and patriarchal but not yet gendered in a systematic way; second, because her ideas on militancy and its transformative potential are so clearly inspired by Fanon; third, on a symbolic level in the sense of the Gewalt of transgressing gendered social norms that can be read as both physically and symbolically/structurally/systemically violent in and of themselves. 76 Indeed, Patricia Melzer suggests that we understand West German women terrorists precisely in terms of 'counterviolence' along these lines. Drawing on French phenomenologist Jean-Luc Nancy, Melzer explains: rarely recognized to be at play here is their [women terrorists'] 'violent truth' [Nancy] -which assaults the gender regime, the system of meaning that explains and organizes gender norms […]. Their 'violent truth' can […] be understood as a very particular form of 'counterviolence,' as the gender regime's disciplinary technologies already inflict violence on lives. (DSYG, [11][12] For Perincioli, the progressive potential of militant violence was specific to the historical time and place she describes: once the RAF and Bewegung 2. Juni had escalated their use of violence, feminist militant violence was no longer an effective feminist practice.

Violence against women and feminist '(Gegen)gewalt'
By the mid-1970s, feminist (Gegen)gewalt can be identified in women's responses to violence against women in the context of the feminist 'discovery' of the pervasiveness of patriarchal violence in all its forms -physical, psychological, systemic, structural, symbolic, linguistic, state.
The feminist practice of self-defence, but also the example of a planned retaliation to an incidence of rape, reveal how (Gegen)gewalt and the cultivation of an -at least potentiallyviolent body 77 can be productive in feminist ways. This is particularly so in a context in which women are overwhelmingly positioning themselves as victims of violence, which, it has been argued, takes away their sense of agency. At least that was how socialist feminist Frigga Haug understood what would become the at times totalizing claims of women's victim status 78  Bild-Zeitung capitalized on this subject, with a series titled 'Mein Mann schlägt mich'. 84 Not surprisingly, women's self-defence and retaliations to instances of male violence do not tend to be described as Gewalt or Gegengewalt by feminists at this point; they prefer terms such as 'Gegenaktion' or 'physischer Widerstand', 85 although interestingly the Ihns-Andersen case is referred to as Gegengewalt on occasion. (Gegen)gewalt, in this later context of terrorist violence and the RAF's self-declared war against the state, is overwhelmingly connoted negatively for feminists as patriarchal or as Mackermilitanz. 86 However, the leftist notion of Gegengewalt had always had a reactive, rather than active, quality, used alongside terms such as 'Notwehr' and 'Widerstand', as discussed above. Furthermore, the bodily and political practices of women in this later context seem to be drawing on those same ideas of (Gegen)gewalt as transformative, discussed by Schrader-Klebert and Perincioli: the cultivation of a violent female body can be read in similarly productive and emancipatory ways for the female and feminist self at this point. Here we can identify not only the rewriting of gendered behavioural and emotional/affective scripts, but also the recoding or redisciplining, in the Foucauldian sense, 87  Amongst the plethora of articles on the different forms of violence that women are subjected to, 89 however, is an article on self-defence, 90 the reproduction of a poster on self-defence that shows a woman kicking a man directly in the groin, 91 and six pages devoted to the 'violent' porn film Geschichte der O and feminist militant activism around screenings of it: activism that, according to the reproduction of an article from the Abendpost zum Samstag, is no less violent/militant than that of the early 1970s described by Perincioli. 92 Against this positioning of women primarily as victims/objects of violence, these three examples of women fighting back produce some muchneeded space to imagine feminist agency.
In the article on self-defence, the author describes how difficult it is for women to 'do' violence on account of the inhibitions they experience as a result of their socialization as women and the gendered disciplining of their bodies as non-violent bodies: 'Wir müssen unsere seit der Kindheit in uns eingepflanzte Hemmung vor körperlicher Auseinandersetzung überwinden.' 93 The naturalistic imagery here reinforces the power of those inhibitions. This is a recurring topic in feminist discussion of self-defence. In the first instalment of a Courage series on 'Selbstverteidigung' of 1977, complete with cut-out diagrams of how to carry out particular moves, martial arts teacher Martha couches this difficulty in terms of an 'unnatural' mental problem: In den zwei Jahren, die ich Frauen in Karate ausbilde, habe ich gelernt, daß es nicht nur darauf ankommt, sich mit der Technik zu befassen, sondern auch mit den psychischen Problemen, die leider Göttin in fast jeder Frau drinnen stecken. Von Natur aus wehrt sich zwar jedes Wesen, doch den Frauen wird dies schon sehr früh ausgetrieben. Deshalb müssen wir unsere Angst, dem Angreifer Schmerz zuzufügen, abbauen, also lernen aggressiver und egoistischer zu werden. 94 The author uses a discourse of pain rather than violence in a context in which the brutality of what she is describing could certainly justify the term Gewalt. 95 The idea of a 'natural' tendency to defend oneself that is 'unnaturally' expelled ('ausgetrieben') recalls the reflections of French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir in her pioneering study Le Deuxième sexe of 1949. As she sees it, at around the age of 13 something quite significant happens in the gendered socialization of individuals: boys go through 'a real apprenticeship in violence' whilst girls 'give up rough games' with far-reaching consequences at the level of sovereignty/subjectivity/agency: 'In the adult world […] brute force plays no great part in normal times, nevertheless, it haunts that world' and in such a world, a man can 'feel in his fists his will for self-affirmation', which 'reassure[s] him of his sovereignty'. She continues: Violence is the authentic proof of each one's loyalty to himself, to his passions, to his own will […]; anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination. It is a profound frustration not to be able to register one's feelings upon the face of the world. 96 Although de Beauvoir is writing twenty-five years earlier, her reflections on the link between 'doing' violence and a sense of agency/sovereignty remain pertinent for the 1970s.
In a text written in 1980 on rape and the West German legal system, Ingrid Lohstöter describes the negative and self-destructive impact of this disciplining of the female body and psyche as non-violent, as well as the gendered behaviour that that leads to: Es ist bekannt und oft beschrieben worden, wie wir Frauen in unserer Erziehung von Anfang an von körperlichen Auseinandersetzungen ferngehalten werden und zum Nachgeben, zur Höflichkeit und zur Passivität angehalten werden. Schon früh werden dadurch Aggressionen gegen andere unterdrückt, die sich dann selbstzerstörerisch nach innen richten. 97 Lohstöter's reflections on women's internalizing of their aggression recall Schrader-Klebert's observations of 1969. Through practising karate, though, women can rediscipline their bodies and change gendered behavioural and emotional/affective scripts in positive feminist ways, she claims. This can lead to an increased sense of feminist consciousness. According to Kernke, the long-term feminist effects of karate are along these lines: Karatetraining   Gegenwehr zu entwickeln. 104 Again, the women point to the difficulties of being violent due to a woman's socialization, but here that transgression induces anxiety. Ursula writes, using a discourse of pain rather than violence: 'Die Angst, jemandem weh zu tun, sitzt so tief'; and Ingrid: 'Meine Angst, alle zuvor gelernten Verhaltensweisen abzulegen, war noch größer, als mein Wille, mich zu wehren' (AV, 215 and 212). There are pleasurable dimensions, too, to this attack, at least as it was imagined.
Anne articulates the pleasurable affects she envisaged in 'doing' violence, even though she was unable to follow through: 'Ich wollte ihn schlagen, endlich eine sinnliche Befriedigung meines Hasses finden, es ging nicht' (AV, 206). Gisela writes of her feelings after arriving in Paris, and her -retrospectively narrated -excitement is palpable: 'Es war ein irres Gefühl: Wir sind wiedergekommen, wir werden den Kerl zu fassen kriegen, er wird diese Nacht nicht mehr lange zu seinen Erfolgen rechnen können. Wir waren auf einmal nicht nur fünf, sondern eine ganze Menge Frauen' (AV, 208). There is a breathless quality to the accumulation of clauses here, indicative of excitement. And the repetition of the pronoun 'wir' suggests the importance of the collective/communal dimensions to this attack. In fact, Gisela seems to be alluding to a sort of 'imagined community' of violent feminists created here for her. 105 The importance of and pleasure in a communal dimension to the experience is also evident in the 'Nachwort': 'Wir haben eine Woche nichts anderes getan, als die Aktion geplant, vorbereitet und durchgespielt, haben fürchterlich viel Spaß dabei gehabt' (AV, 216). The effects of this collective violent experience, it would seem, are productive and transformative at the level of the group. Ursula asserts: 'die Parisaktion hat mich weitergebracht. Sehr stark auch dadurch, daß wir immer mehr zu einer Gruppe wurden' (ibid.). Fanon had observed the same cohesive quality of violence for the group with regard to Algeria: 'The practice of violence binds them together as a whole,' he asserts, 'since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part in the great organism of violence which has surged upwards in reaction to the settler's violence in the beginning.' 106 The attack was also productive at the individual level. Anne explains that the rape had produced such an intense feeling of hatred in her, 'daß die einzige Möglichkeit, mich selbst und mein Selbswertgefühl zu erhalten, darin besteht, einfach zurückzuschlagen, endlich die Angst vor einer aggressiven Reaktion der Kerle loszuwerden, endlich ich selbst zu sein mit meiner Wut' (AV, 202). She narrates here the regaining of an authentic sense of self and of agency through the violent attack. She continues: 'Die Aktion hat mir eine ganze Portion Selbstvertrauen Männern gegenüber gegeben' (AV, 206).

Conclusion
I have been tracing a cultural history of feminist (Gegen)gewalt and argued for an understanding of that discourse and practice as transformative, empowering and productive for the neue Frauenbewegung, at the levels both of the individual nascent feminist subject and of the movement as a whole. Although (Gegen)gewalt was framed as reactive rather than active, as it was within wider antiauthoritarian discourses, feminist (Gegen)gewalt denoted an important way of addressing power; it provided an active subject position that held both strength and pleasure; it helped solidify group identity beyond victim status, with a political agenda of resistance and change; and it played an important role in determining what women could 'be' and 'do' within the neue Frauenbewegung. We may hesitate to endorse violent, militant action and words. For feminist debate and as retrospectively written accounts show, however, it was important for some women to entertain the possibility of taking violent action.
Beyond that, and as Patricia Melzer has shown, there is a scholarly, political and ethical need to write violence back into the neue Frauenbewegung, as I have been doing. West German feminists were clearly discussing and practising feminist (Gegen)gewalt long before the appearance of the militant feminist group Rote Zora, which is typically written out of the neue Frauenbewegung as discussed above, their militancy neatly bracketed off alongside that of terrorist groups: a useful technique, given how feminism is often blamed for the high incidence of women terrorists, as it was, particularly in the popular press, in the summer of 1977. 107 In fact, it is that same feminist (Gegen)gewalt, I would suggest, that feeds into the self-understanding, and feminist motivations perhaps, of Rote Zora, a group that would constitute itself in the late 1970s. This is strongly suggested in the group's retrospective account, Mili's Tanz