An Eloquent Body – Andreas Baader and a Choreographic Intervention Into Historical Memory
An Eloquent Body – Andreas Baader and a Choreographic Intervention Into Historical Memory
Can a body that has been dead for more than a half- century be recreated through movement rather than traditional narrative, that is, through breath, gesture, internal stirring, external motivating force, heroic zeal, erotic appeal, revolutionary commitment, and devastating openness to both criminality and suffering? In 2011, the German choreographer Christoph Winkler, who dares to challenge which subject matters can be grappled with through the medium of dance, created a masterpiece: a 60-minute solo for the brilliant dancer Martin Hansen, entitled Baader – A Choreography of Radicalization.
On the 2nd of September 1977, a little more than a month before the suicide of Andreas Baader in the Stammheim prison, Jean Genet wrote an inspired article for Le Monde. He courageously juxtaposed the violence of the red terrorists with the unapologetic brutality of the carceral system. Like the choreographer almost a half-century later, Genet took embodiment literally. For him, the affective bodies of the revolutionary terrorists spoke directly to the brutality of the Western democratic government’s suppression of an embodied opposition. Paradoxically, Genet’s literalism remained philosophical and poetic rather than plebian and commonsensical. It appears that the body with its apparent materiality, potential exposure through nudity, felt anatomy, sensual appetites, desires, the ability to obey and disobey – the law, the inner moral imperative and ethical principles, remained a controversial field in the society dominated by images, and rendered comprehensive through meta-narratives. L’Allemagne, qui a aboli la peine de mort, conduit à la mort par grèves de la faim et de la soif, isolement par la « dépréciation » du moindre bruit sauf le bruit du cœur de l’incarcérée qui, sous vide, est amené à découvrir dans son corps le bruit du sang qui bat, des poumons, enfin son bruit organique afin de savoir que sa pensée est produite par un corps.[1]
The icon of the New Left, Andreas Baader was reduced to the organic movement of the body – the circulation of the blood, the pumping of the air, the chaotic production of the thought in a weakened organism. And, perhaps, even that fragile, oscillating, starved physical existence presented a moral challenge to the government of the chancellor Helmut Schmidt, himself under the attack from the conservative parties for leniency towards the left-wing terrorism. So, in the fall of 1977, the middle-class intellectual coquetry with the awe-producing youth movement, which exploded in the fervent, impulsive violence, came to an urgent halt – Contact Act Ban. The ban completely cut off the communication between the prisoners and their lawyers. Handsome, charismatic, street smart Baader was finally crushed. Like a clownish comic book character, to whom different readers ascribe opposite traits – a rare sense of communal goals imbued with heroic consciousness vs. devilish malfeasance with the roots in the early childhood; he frequently lost temper, made a mess out of his cell, and even “worse,” read Wittgenstein. Urlike Meinhof who had previously passionately defended Baader from what she named the “psychological warfare”, was already dead. She hung herself in May 1976. In the text written close to her suicide “Fragment on the structure of the group,” she pointed out that Andreas had exactly what the Red Army Faction needed: “awareness of the goal, determination, collectivity”. She declared that the prosecution hated Andreas not because of his alleged crudeness, but because he knew that there was no weapon of the bourgeoisie that could not be turned against it. However, at the time right before his suicide, Andreas’ attitude, style, theatrical bravado, rhetorical skill, and talent for melodrama could not anymore attract serious public attention. The spectacle, that ensued when the president of the German Employers’ Association and former SS officer got kidnapped[2] and the plane on the route from Maiorca to Frankfurt packed with tourists re-routed; the latter event was followed by the black-mail that involved demand to free the Stammheim inmates, and government’s false willingness to negotiate with the terrorists; overpowered the stark theater of perpetual hunger strikes in the prison cells. The last revolutionary miracle performed by Baader was apparently his death – a dead 34-year-old man, shot in the back of the neck with the pistol that was supposedly hidden in a record player. His death has been deified by Odd Nedrum in the work entitled The Murder of Andreas Baader (1978) with a covert intention to challenge the official claim that prisoners committed suicide upon pact, and in a more subtle way, re-iterated in Gerhard Richter’s take on the documentary photos of dead Baader — Man Shot 1 and 2 ( in the series 18. October 1977, 1988).
In contrast, Christoph Winkler’s kinetic exploration of Baader does not dwell on the stasis of death. The dancer Martin Hansen, uses virtuosic bodily transformations to sketch a spatial trajectory and gestural vocabulary of: a sensitive, fatherless man from the left- leaning, bourgeois circle in Munich; later, a bohemian who struggled with social conventions and made a living as a model; finally, a fearless, risk taking intellectual whom the urban machinery which Guy Debord famously named the society of spectacle, turned into a political icon, synonymous with the violence of the New Left. The choreography seamlessly interweaves the thought and action of a young terrorist through a dazzling display of, momentarily tormented, but nevertheless, life-affirming, incessant motion. It indicates multiple potential identities of the young Baader – as a bisexual man, talented performer; a formative influence, on the young boy was his uncle Michael Kroecher, who was a well-known actor and dancer; later, Baader studied with Aktions Theater at the time when Fassbinder took it over; a visual artist, writer, and a sharp political thinker. But it also suggests that he was prone to transgression, addiction, and narcissistic aggression.
In the few words about the piece, the choreographer explains what makes Andreas Baader “a particularly interesting object of study in dance”. Baader’s intense attention to the body eventually turned that body into a tool of the revolutionary struggle. Baader’s reductive intellectual understanding of how the system worked, that is, through criminalization of its victims and subjection of democratic values to the profit making enterprises, turned his attractive, impatient body into an instrument that could reveal injustices lurking behind the happy consumerism of the new democratic Germany. Both a criminal preaching social justice, and a tortured, starved prisoner, Baader rendered what was supposed to stay invisible to the public, real. The few words about the piece ends with a poignant question, which is subsequently elaborated in the solo: “Is this an evil body?”
The metaphysical question of evil, especially in regard to the body itself, overpowers the much more prosaic question of the role of violence in the democratic West. Jean Genet cited Baader’s own words: “ Violence is an economic potential.” (La violence est un potentiel économique). Perhaps, the moral evil for the secularized Christian population resides in linking personal aggression with an economic imperative necessary for the survival in the normal, civil society. If Baader recognized that the monopoly over violence allowed for the imperial wars to continue unpunished and for the war industry to remain a lucrative business, he also knew that a burst of violence from the margins of the society could have an economic impact. Thus, he boldly utilized his knowledge of the different strata of the society ( e.g. middle-class, intellectuals, proletarians, bohemians, petty-criminals, recent immigrants, and civil servants) to destabilize the status quo.
Christoph Winkler courageously destabilizes the status quo of a field much less covered by the press than terrorism – modern dance. In an informal interview conducted in September 2025, he pointed out that the history of dance lacked the portrayals of villains ( with an exception of Wigman’s Witch Dance from 1914/1926. But, it is useful to remember, that the witch Wigman chose to dance was not necessarily a bad character in the context of the German Ausdrucktanz, with which, early on, Nazi officials sympathized). In the 1990s and early 2000s, as a dance artist working in the West, originally from East Germany, Winkler posed a germane question. “Why is there such a gap between acting and the dance world?” He wanted to make a solo about Adolf Eichmann, but that project fell through, due to the lack of interest. Winkler felt lucky that he found a dancer, who was able and willing to take on the role of Andreas Baader. Without a recourse to method acting, instead by evoking states and going through the gestures of a revolutionary, Hansen awakened the memory of Baader as a visceral, kinetic presence.
In “Art, Society, Aesthetics,” Adorno proposed that “[i}f art works are answers to their own questions, they themselves thereby truly become questions” (1970:6). Although, in the twentieth century, theoreticians often excluded dance from serious consideration in regard to aesthetic problems, mainly due to its ephemerality, but also because they habitually linked it to fitness, athleticism and shallow beauty, as a highly kinetic medium, dance already showed a potential to render palpable the questioning nature of the modern artistic work. In the beginning of the 21st century, Winkler’s choreography welcomed embodied change and transformed the photos and textual fragments into a felt space for a historical reflection. In that way, it echoed, the ripple effect of a revolutionary action.
The life of a bandit, like that of a sacred man, is not a piece of animal nature without any relation to law and the city. It is, rather, a threshold of indistinction and of passage between animal and man, physis and nomos, exclusion and inclusion: the life of the bandit is the life of the loup garou, the werewolf, who is precisely neither man nor beast, and who dwells paradoxically within both while belonging to neither.[3]
In this passage from Homo Sacer – Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), Giorgio Agamben problematizes the ghostly presence of the criminal in the Western society since the Roman times. He who has transgressed the law of the polis or the modern state, is expelled from the city and its social life. His life, devoid of social value, is reduced to its biological existence. He is always on the go and can be killed without a corresponding punishment. As an outsider surrounded by superstition, he abides in the liminal zone between humanity and animality. In 2004, Christoph Winkler grappled with Agamben’s concept of bare life, with references to the late 20th century refugee camps in which human life was devalued (e.g. Guatanamo Bay, concentration camps in Bosnia).[4] The result was a powerful kinetic exploration of what does it mean to be alive in the modern world, which under the state of exception can suspend all political identities. and render the anonymous population victim of brutal control. In 2011, with the Baader solo, Wilken returned to the related philosophical examination, but with a singular historical figure in mind – a figure that was able to awaken two national phantasies: one, of catching a bandit – a real criminal pretending to be a revolutionary and aspiring towards sovereign power; two, of witnessing the dramatic demise of a charismatic leader who acted outside the confines of the legal system, too sacred to be assimilated back into the bourgeois society. Winkler coined the term “evil body”, and together with the dancer Hansen developed a unique perspective on what the body itself can do to communicate on the edge of the normative, social understanding. Winkler’s Baader becomes a breathing, pulsating icon.
From the outset of Baader – Choreography of Radicalization, the viewers are faced with a stark juxtaposition between the sentimental value of preserved, frozen memories, and the breathing, moving, gesturing man enclosed in the circle of light. On the one hand, spectators can attempt an escape from the reality of the body by contemplating the black and white, nostalgic photos from his childhood and youth; the almost naïve excursion into modeling, the film-star gaze suggesting an attractive mixture of melancholy and machismo; Baader — the bohemian and a father of a girl child, soon a charming boyfriend to the beautiful, sophisticated Gudrun Ensslin, then a political activist absorbed in his new role; a man who had a huge library in the prison (circa 1000 books), and who was supposedly on the night of the October 18th able to hide a pistol with which he committed suicide from the watchful gaze of the prison guards. On the other hand, Hansen’s polycentric, accentuated gestures accompanied by a repetitive weight shift, stubbornly interrupt any disembodied narrative. Progressively the gestures get more complex, the body more expressive. With a disappearance of the documentary background (photos from Baader’s life) the stage space opens for Hansen to show how a singular dancing body can fill it with the erotic appeal, street culture glamour, virtuosic skill, affect verging on catharsis. Hansen’s startling mobility acts as a metonymy to the loss of the solid, normative identities following the 1968 revolution. It could be wrongly assumed that Hansen/Baader, due to the narcissistic obsession with his own embodied experience, does not have a clear direction or is not able to critically observe the social scene he frequents. Rather, the dancing, charismatic Baader is able to take/ ride many different paths but does not seem to have the patience or external support to stay on one. When the music stops, he finally looks at the audience. He smiles, as if becoming aware that he is being watched. Then, he pronounces tendentiously “fucking is shitting”, referring perhaps to the raw physicality of both. Next, he pulls down the scrolls covered with the dense text. The spectators witness the making of a revolutionary. A loosely translated citation illustrates the radicalization Baader’s thinking has undergone. “If it is true that the American imperialism is a paper tiger i.e. that it can be defeated in the end, and if the thesis of Chinese communists is correct that the victory over American imperialism has become possible by the fact that in all corners of the world the fight against it is being led; so that the forces of imperialism are being fragmented and by their fragmentation it is becoming beatable; it is correct. then, that there is no reason that any country or any region would be excluded from the anti-imperialist struggle because revolutionary forces there are particularly weak, because reactionary forces are particularly strong.” The text continues to argue that the revolutionary movement in the capitalist West German state is possible. Revolutionary manifesto fills the room with the intensity of the aftermath of the peaceful student protests. For the urban guerilla, stepping in between is no longer possible. Slogan “You are either part of the solution or you’re part of the problem,” [5] comes to mind. Music starts again. Hansen now puts on a blond wig,[6] and sunglasses. His movements become slow and deliberate. He reads aloud. Gradually his physicality becomes extreme. There are, perhaps, glimpses of guerrilla warfare, and the training Baader, Meinhof, Ensslin, and the lawyer Horst Mahler undertook in Jordan.[7] Next stirring moment happens when Martin strips down to his underwear. The action exposes the vulnerability and suffering of his hyperactive stage body. Andreas Baader-Martin Hansen is seen literally struggling to breathe and yet is still moving with a stunning mixture of grace and grotesque.
In an informal correspondence about the piece, Winkler explained the moment when Martin goes into the pistol postures and merges them with the Nijinsky’s choreography for the Afternoon of a Faun, 1912. Martin “takes a few words from Baader as a text source. The words are not understandable, but you see what they do to the body. Last, but not least, Martin speaks some of the words of Baader in German, but with a notable English accent. He makes poses and postures of offering and innocence, for example the open arms towards the audience. In this moment the identification reached 100%. People thought OK, this is Baader speaking now.” Martin Hansen – a subtle, refined dance artist who performs both in Australia and in Germany, “researches economics of time in the theatre and is invested in sculpting affect as a felt experience of being in the world”[8]. His transformation into the legendary West German left-wing terrorist, is a temporal as well as kinetic experience. He stirs the past and reavels a particular instance of revolutionary consciousness for a renewed consideration. A moving, sensing, performing body arises in the gaps between the iconic images, and revolutionary proclamations.
In her incisive study of pain and the effects of power on embodiment, Elaine Scary points out:
…to have a body, body made emphatic to being continually altered through various forms of creation, instruction (…), and wounding, is to have one’s sphere of extension contracted down to the small circle of one’s physical presence. Consequently, to be intensely embodied is the equivalent of being unrepresented and (…) is almost always the condition of those without power.[9]
Here, Scary directly refers to the Judeo-Christian tradition, but suggests a strong link to the modern, secular context. Winkler’s Baader corresponds to Scary’s evocative description. Literally encircled in a small puddle of light, from the outset, Hansen/Baader imposes his twitching, extending, emoting body upon the audience’s gaze. Baader’s initial lack of academic success, a solid socio-economic standing and political influence, intensifies his flamboyant, charismatic bodily presence. Baader, as re-imagined by Winkler, cannot but share choreographer’s understanding of the relationship between physical action and image making – creation of spectacle, with the dispossessed at its center. It is the dispossessed of the world that Baader the leftist revolutionary identifies with. But, paradoxically, as a child of the middle class Western European parents, he cannot fully represent the poor and the marginalized. Thus, dramatic subjectivity surfaces. Baader’s dancing and modeling knowledge of the controlling, erotic gaze of the economically superior other, leads to a tragic intensification of his embodiment as a revolutionary and later, prisoner on a hunger strike. Each breath, each gesture tells of the primary, animalistic aggression of a singular, palpitating existence, struggling for bare life, beyond any ethical concern for human rights. And, that inherent aggression of life itself, is met by systemic brutality; the latter choreographer with a profound artistic intelligence only suggests, never illustrates. The dancer Hansen, articulates, almost entirely through the eloquence of his highly expressive body, what Scary so clearly pointed out – an intense embodiment as a condition of those divested of power.
In Septembar 2025, I was lucky to have a prolonged conversation with Winkler in regard to the work he had made fourteen years ago. His responses to my inquiry suggest how primarily non-verbal dance performance can open the space for a reflection on the historical events still shaping the political imagination today. Christopher Winkler’s dance does not shun the exploration of the often-obscured psychosomatic experiences; in particular, those produced on the crossroads of vigorous physical practice and mediazation. I conclude with the excerpts from this encouraging exchange.
Your choreography for “Andreas Baader”(2011) impressed me on two levels – as a formally fascinating exploration of embodied expression on the margins of normative society, and in-depth research of the creation of an iconic image with contradictory connotations — a fearless urban guerrilla fighter, and a criminalized, erotically charged leader of the radical left gone wild. I am very curious about your artistic process… How did you develop the work? Did memory — historical and personal, play a role?
The project was part of a thematic series entitled ‘Evil Bodies’.
It dealt with the portrayal of ‘evil’ characters in dance and why, unlike in films, there are hardly any villains in dance. Many actors enthusiastically play the ‘bad guys’, but in dance this is rather strange. Before ‘Baader,’ I had done a production called ‘evil bodies.’ It was a kind of experimental laboratory and got a little lost in the many possible perspectives on the subject. After that, it became clear to me that I had to deal with the subject specifically in relation to one character. I can’t really remember how it came to be Andreas Baader, but I know that it was clear to me that Martin would dance the role.
The images from Baader’s childhood seen on the screen establish an intimate milieu from which Baader emerges as a controversial figure — sensitive, existentially driven, narcissistic, and cruel. What is your relationship as an artist to the historical Baader? (I noticed that following the arson in the aftermath of the murder of the student Benno Ohnesorg, the pronoun “we” became increasingly popular amongst the future members of the Baader-Meinhof group) … In your choreography, the spectators get a rare chance to re-think the evolution of Baader from a rather apolitical, artistic anarchist to the leading terrorist of a group relying on the Marxist-Leninist theory to justify violence. Did you have a particular intent when staging Andreas Baader as a virtuosic soloist, taking over the entire stage?
The main focus was on questions of ‘embodiment’, i.e. how I could lend my body to the portrayal of such a multi-faceted character as A. Baader. Movements are not simply ‘readable’ and require context. So we asked ourselves how much additional material or how much context in general is necessary to get the audience on board with the idea of “Hey, I’m going to dance Andreas Baader now, but everyone knows it’s just a game, but that doesn’t matter.”
Then we had various materials such as the 100 photos at the beginning, the beard and wig, the manifesto and the original recordings, as well as the record collection found in the cell. The sequence of the play was then developed based on these materials.
I have been reading about Baader-Meinhof group and the artistic works that followed. It is apparent that the problematic sexuality, and erotic attraction constituted a major driving force on the left in the 1960s and ‘70s. However, it is rare that this aspect gets fully addressed. In creating a work that goes far beyond mere historical re-telling, you invited the spectator to reflect on: a dandy body that rebels against the bourgeois order and turns destructive; as well as on the dystopian aspect of a utopia aiming for the better world. After seeing your thought provoking dance work, I cannot help but wonder what your view would be of the role that critical insight could take when making art? Do you find that theory informs your work and/or that a work itself acts as a theoretical intervention?
Martin is one of the few dancers who are able to dance ‘characters’. He has the ability to incorporate gestures into dance movements. So, I left most of the movement creation up to him. He makes Baader’s presence felt. Through his ‘youthfulness’, he also expresses these aspects of Baader’s life. Theory informs the whole thing, but it needs to be put into practice through dance.
Last but not least, I would like to learn more about your trajectory. How does your artistic biography and cultural/historical background shape your perspective? Finally, what is your view of the relationship between art/artists and politics in today’s world?
I grew up in East Germany and began my dancing career there. That’s why I later tended to take on more of an observational role in the Western cultural scene, which is reflected in my biography and work. For a long time, I was labelled a ‘political artist,’ which I find rather problematic. I prefer the term ‘contemporary’ because it comes from con tempus – with time. I have great faith in dance, and that is the basis from which I develop my projects. Over the years, it has become apparent that this approach allows numerous socially important issues to be reflected in my work. Not everything has always worked, but pieces such as ‘Baader’ and projects such as the environmental dance website are successful examples of how dance can be combined with socio-political issues.
[1] “Germany, which had abolished the death penalty, leads to death through hunger and thirst strikes, and isolation through “suppression” of even the slightest noise, except for the sound of the heart of the incarcerated person, who in this vacuum, is led to discover within their own body the noise of the beating blood, of the lungs, and finally their own organic noise, in order to learn that their thought is produced by a body.” In the article by Jean Genet: “Violence et Brutalité“, Le Monde, September 2, 1977.
[2] Hanns Martin Schleyer
[3] “The Ban and the Wolf”, Ch. 6 in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life by Giorgio Agamben, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 105.
[4] Homo Sacer (2004), a work for 7 dancers.
[5] Famous quote cited by the members of the Red Army Faction, but credited to an American activist- Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver.
[6] Apparently, Andreas Baader had bleached hair at the time of his arrest. However, the image of Baader with a blond wig which made him resemble a drag queen, was fabricated by the tabloid publication Bild am Sonntag (June 1972). See, “Revolutionary Men and the Feminine Grotesque in the West German Media of the 1960s and 1970s” by Clare Bielby, Cambridge University Press, 2023.
[7] In June 1970, members of the first generation Red Army Faction trained with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Fatah. The attempt at collaboration was reputably a fiasco.
[8] From the biography of Martin Hansen on Christoph Winkler’s website.
[9] “The Structure of Belief and Its Modulation into Material Making”, in The Body in Pain by Elaine Scary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985: 207.