Spaces of exception and unexceptionability in the "German Autumn" of 1977"

Agamben’s suggestion that the ‘state of exception’ is becoming the norm at many different scales implies that ever more territory is being restructured as an assemblage of ‘spaces of exception’. To explore what this might mean in concrete geographical terms, this paper considers the events in West Germany in the autumn of 1977, when the deadly escalation of conflict between the Red Army Fraction (RAF) and the West German federal state reached its bloody apex. The intense efforts by the Federal Criminal Bureau (BKA) to render visible the network of places and modes of travel used by the RAF in its terrorist activities, and the impacts this effort had on ‘normal’ social spaces, highlight the importance of the geographical and epistemological prerequisites that underlie the possibility of a ‘nationalization’ of spaces of exception. Keywords: terrorism, space of exception, state of exception, state, West Germany