Between Identification and Documentation, “Autofiction” and “Biopic”: The Lives of the RAF

In this article, which drew on research which prepared the ground for an AHRC bid to investigate the representation of Italian and German leftwing political violence, Preece is the first scholar to examine the growing body of both literary and cinematic material on the Baader-Meinhof group in order to compare and contrast film with fiction and fiction with film. Previous scholarship had kept the two fields separate. He develops the idea of a ‘terrorist alter ego’ which both literary authors and film-makers introduce to show both their distance from and fascination with political violence in the 1970s