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Article: Death-trips, power-trips and head-trips: Bernard Vesper's Die Reise (The Trip).
- Article from:
- Borderlines
- Article date:
- July 1, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 International Relations Center. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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bernward Vesper's novel-essay, Die Reise [The Trip], was first published in 1977. At the time, it was touted as the "legacy of a generation." This generation was both that of `68 and, in a more extended sense, that of the Nazi period (its members were sometimes called Hitler's Children). Vesper, one time boyfriend of Red Army Faction co-founder, Gudrun Ensslin, and father of her son, Felix, had been a relatively minor figure in the "Extra-parliamentary Opposition," the blanket term used to refer to the more or less loosely organized student radicals of that time. After splitting from Ensslin, Vesper worked on his book, slowly drifted into depression and eventually killed ...