Jeffre Champlin. The Making of a Terrorist: On Classic German Rogues. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2015. 176 pp.

Summary

Jeffrey Champlin's intriguing new book, The Making of a Terrorist: On German Classic Rogues, represents a novel close reading of canonical works from late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German literature with the aim of explicating the appearance of excessive violence and its rhetorical and representational implications. Champlin identifies Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen, Schiller's Die Räuber, and Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas as texts that push understandings of terrorism and the political use of force to the limit by including passages that make the audience want to turn away. By dwelling on such acts and their ramifications, Champlin argues, these literary works confront their readers with the exercise of excessive violence, and thereby open up political and cultural discourses to new conceptualizations of violence and its justifications. Champlin does not, however, provide a guide according to which violent occurrences in literature can and should be identified as “terrorist”; instead, he understands and defines terrorism much more “as an indicator of a threat to political, aesthetic, and epistemological representation” (5). In this sense, Götz von Berlichingen, Karl Moor, and Michael Kohlhaas do not merely fit the description of terrorist because of the death and destruction they instigate; rather, the excessive nature of their actions radically disrupts traditional discursive conventions and representations in a way that can be understood as terrorism. In order to support his assertion that these texts represent at their very core a critique of violence and its practice, Champlin undertakes an extremely detailed rhetorical analysis of each work focused on the linguistic and literary depiction of excessively violent acts and the interpretational ambiguity they reveal.

In the first chapter of his work, Champlin thoroughly situates and contextualizes his understanding of terrorism as disruption in the light of political philosophical traditions ranging from Hobbes to the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF). Drawing on Hobbes and Robespierre, Champlin investigates the implementation and justification of excessive violence by the sovereign, a figure who represents the established power structure that attempts to dictate and monopolize all discursive meaning surrounding the exercise of violence. Turning then to Arendt and the manifestos of the RAF, Champlin interrogates the very utility of violence as a political tool.