This study analyses the response of filmmakers to the left-wing terrorism of the Red Army Faction (RAF) experienced by West Germany in the 1970s, and its legacy. At the height of its activity, the RAF violently shook the foundations of postwar German democracy with a string of politically motivated attacks against the Federal Republic which brought the state's democratic credentials into question. The first part of this thesis considers the intervention of the New German Cinema on the underlying political crisis that the RAF unleashed, examining the filmmakers' attempt to catalyze a labour of mourning which connected contemporary left-wing terror to the unresolved legacies of the Nazi past, but which the state had tried to close down. Ultimately, however, the filmmakers were unable to contest a wave of contemporary repression which threatened to engulf the memory of the RAF, and so by the mid-1980s, when not altogether forgotten, a dominant consensual understanding of the immediate past which spoke from the perspective of the state had been set. However, in recent years there has been a renewed explosion of interest in this brief yet turbulent period in history, at the vanguard of which has stood the nation's filmmakers. The second part of this examines how postunification filmmakers have responded to this ostensibly dead socio-political and, for artists, aesthetic phenomenon. I examine how new films have engaged recent cultural implications and manifestations (such as the `Prada-Meinhof' clothing phenomenon) of the terrorist legacy and seek to innovate the ideologically entrenched cultural terms of remembrance which had settled around the group in order to offer a more nuanced, complex reading of the past.

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This study offers a cultural studies reading of race, gender and nation as represented in three thematic sub-genres of contemporary German film production. The aim of this study is to demonstrate that each of these thematic sub-genres offers a unique insight into the cultural construction of a distinct, yet problematic and porous umbrella identity enjoying a particular cultural currency in post-Wall Germany. It should be noted that, in this respect, this study represents a move away from these traditional diachronic analyses of German film, which attempt a snapshot of an entire history filmic production, towards a more clearly delineated, synchronic analysis of a single contemporary moment – namely, the 1990s. The first of these thematic sub-genres concerns the ambiguous romantic narratives of the sexually autonomous yet avowedly post-feminist New German Comedy women. As a significant sub-genre of the popular New German Comedy film of the early 1990s, these films embody a clear structural reliance on the narrative norms of a classic, mainstream cinema. In contrast, the cinematic representations East(ern) Germany, past and present, incorporate a myriad of generic forms and registers in their explorations of the meaning of reunification for eastern German populations, from up-beat comic road movies to psycho-allegorical tales of internal disquiet. The third area of this study concerns itself with the representation of Turkish-German populations in 1990s German cinema. As eclectic as the cinematic representations of the East, the work of these Turkish-German filmmakers appears to offer a troubling cinematic trajectory from abused and exploited first generation Gastarbeiter to self-assured and recalcitrant street-tough Kanaksta.