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In 1968, a year of worldwide social revolutions, a coalition of young terrorists called the Baader-Meinhof group bombed two Frankfurt department stores after store hours. A culmination of the protests that had begun in 1958 with demonstrations against nuclear weaponry, this incident marked a new split between the established Left in West Germany and the new revolutionaries. The terrorists were caught immediately and charged with arson; three members of the group were sent to jail and soon released under amnesty for political prisoners. They spent time in jail intermittently throughout the next several years for kidnapping and murdering members of the German government, and on October 18, 1977, some of them committed suicide in the Stammheim prison.
Richter's Baader-Meinhof paintings display his disillusionment with any kind of strict ideology. He described his paintings of the dead terrorists as a way of dealing with the horror, not so much to work through it as to "generate the will to change" and to work towards "a better reality."
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