| Abstract | The 2000s saw a flurry of biographies in German of figures in the Baader-Meinhof Group (the Red Army Faction or RAF) or associated with it in one way or another. This is remarkable for a number of reasons. Germans, especially on the Left, are traditionally suspicious of this genre of life-writing because of its association with nationalism and related tendency to personalize rather than politicize complex questions and historical processes. Recent RAF biographies have contributed, however, to our understanding of the causes of domestic German terrorism in the 1970s and beyond in various ways, showing in particular personal continuities with the Nazi past that inflected the RAF’s thoughts and actions. The prevalence of ‘novelistic’ approaches, including the dual or triple biography contrasting two or more lives (such as political outlaw and detective, perpetrator and victim, terrorist and legitimate campaigner) shows how the need for new narratives of the recent past often outweighs the value of new research, which, given the paucity of biographical material covering the time ‘underground’, can be hard to conduct. The competing interpretations of the life of Ulrike Meinhof, the subject of by far the highest number of biographies in the survey, shows also how far Germans are from a consensus on the significance of the RAF.
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