Page 119 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

7

Margaret he von Trotta
Leviathan in Germany

CECILIA SJÖHOLM

Leviathan

When in prison in the 1970s, the members of the German "urban
guerrilla" the RAF, the Rote Armee Fraktion, or the so-called Baader Mein-
hof group, communicated with one another through coded names taken
from Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick, Chasing the big white whale*
the members figured themselves as enemies of the Leviathan, another name
for the whale, or the beast. 1 Leviathan is also the sovereign power of the
state as named by Thomas Hobbes. The first line of Hobbes s Leviathan is
quoted in Melville's work: "For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN
called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but
an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Natu-
rall, for whose protection and defence it was intended." 2 In this creature,
adds Hobbes, sovereignty is the artificial soul, and the contracts tying the
body together are the words of creation or fiat. Of course the allusion to
Leviathan was intended to reveal the beastlike nature of modern, German
democracy. The terrorist attacks of the RAF—firebombs in warehouses,
bank robberies, kidnappings of businessmen, and then hostage-taking for
the sake of securing the release of other RAF-members—aimed to sever the
bond between modern democracy, imperialism, and capitalism (as seen in
the war of the United States against Vietnam, for instance) and to reveal the
monstrosity of the capitalist state. The RAF were in many ways more suc-
cessful in demonstrating the message of their politics from within prison
than outside of it. The imprisonment was supposed to show the violence of

109