TERRORISM IN THE 1970S in Germany looked very different from the terrorist attack of 11 September 2001 on the World Trade Center in New York. Whereas the 2001 attacks originated in religious and nationalist beliefs, the German left-wing terrorists acted like Marxist revolutionaries whose “war” aimed to overthrow the German government from within, with little or no support from the people.

In 1967, at the same time that the students' movement was beginning, several small Marxist and extreme-left splinter groups were also being founded. Neo-Marxist groups, such as the Rote Armee Fraktion, the Bewegung 2. Juni, and the Revolutionäre Zellen, greatly influenced the political scene in Germany, particularly during the 1970s. Unlike the student movement itself, these groups did not concentrate on social, university, feminist, and pacifist issues. Rather than trying to change German society through “der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen,” that is, through legal protest, these militant groups resorted to violence. The most important and notorious of these groups was the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion; RAF), also known as Baader-Meinhof-Gruppe. In her play Leviathan (1993), Dea Loher presents us with the dilemma of Marie, a character who draws on Ulrike Meinhof. Focusing on the beginnings of terrorism, Loher depicts a Marie who decides to use violence only because she is convinced that there are no legal ways to change the “fascist” West German state.