Books by J. Preece

The Baader-Meinhof Group and other violent underground organizations have provided material to many novels by leading German and international writers. This book is the first to examine this rich literary corpus, treating it as a political unconscious which expresses submerged anxieties and moral blind-spots in Europe's most powerful country.

It shows in particular how his experiences as a teenage Nazi shaped his thinking, both in his novels and his role as critic and campaigner, from The Tin Drum (1959), his most famous novel, to My Century (1999), from his public protest against the building of the Berlin Wall (1961) to his diatribes against Helmut Kohl in the late 1990s.