Episode Details

In this bonus episode, cohosts Jason Christian and Anthony Ballas speak with the literary critic Ryan Ruby about New German Cinema, particularly the directors Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Alexander Kluge, and the film movement's fascination with the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion) A.K.A. the Baader–Meinhof Gang, an ultra-left militant group in West Germany that existed in various forms from 1970 to 1998.

Ryan Ruby is the author of Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry (Seven Stories Press, 2024) and The Zero and the One: A Novel (Twelve Books, 2017). For his essays and reviews, which have recently appeared in such venues as Harper's, Bookforum, and the New Left Review, he has received the Silvers Prize in Literary Criticism. He lives in Berlin, where he is working on a book of creative nonfiction about the city's mass transit system, tentatively titled Ringbahn: On Berlin Time, which will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in late 2027.

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• Ryan Ruby's forthcoming book on the cultural history of Berlin, with particular interest in the music scene and cinema of the 1970s
• The films Germany in Autumn (1978) and The Third Generation (1979)
• The Red Army Faction and 1960s/'70s militancy
• The political climate in Berlin today
• V.I. Lenin's critique of "adventurism"

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We love to give recommendations on the podcast, so here are ours for this episode:

1. Tony recommends the two-volume book The Magic of Robert-Houdin An Artist's Life The Watchmaker, Mechanician and Conjurer by Christian Fechner
2. Ryan recommends the books Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. by Stefan Aust and Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman
3. Jason recommends Bruce LaBruce's 2004 satirical RAF film The Raspberry Reich. [Warning: the film contains explicit sex scenes]

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Find past guest Andrew Nette's Letterboxd list of films inspired by or about the Red Army Faction here. Check out our interview with Nette

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