http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article4950915.ece
A film about the Baader-Meinhof Gang shows how radical politics
descended from chic to deadly
October 19, 2008
Bryan Appleyard
In 1971 in Cambridge, I sat in a room listening to people plotting to
blow up the Corn Exchange and steal the Rubens from King's College
Chapel. In the latter case, baseball bats were to be used to quell
the porters. It was a joke, stupid late-night babble. But why, I
later wondered, that particular joke? Why, in 1971, was the babble
about violence and not about failed sex, bad parties, loud music and
crass politics, the usual student preoccupations?
Because violence was in the air. Because among our contemporaries
around the world were people who were prepared to kill, maim and
kidnap in the name of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. And,
crucially, because in the recesses of even the most pacific student's
imagination was the suspicion that, just maybe, these people had a
point. Those were different times, as Lou Reed crooned to us in those
late-night rooms, many decorated with Alberto Korda's hyper-romantic
photograph of Che Guevara. Now, the word "terrorist" evokes an
Islamist militant, not a western student. Between, say, June 2, 1967
and October 18, 1977, however, it meant a young citizen of a
democracy who, for complex and usually opaque reasons, had decided
appalling violence was the answer to the condition of society, or
perhaps just the conditions in his head.
On the first date, Benno Ohnesorg, a student pacifist, was killed by
a police bullet in Berlin during a protest against a visit by the
American-backed repressive Shah of Iran (the policeman who shot him
was later acquitted of wrongdoing). On the second date, prison guards
found the bodies of the terrorists Andreas Baader and his girlfriend,
Gudrun Ensslin, in their cells at Stammheim prison, in Stuttgart.
They had killed themselves, Baader with a gun smuggled in by his
lawyers, Ensslin by hanging herself with a length of speaker wire.
One more prisoner, Jan-Carl Raspe, was just about alive, but died
later in hospital from self-inflicted gunshot wounds. A year earlier,
their co-conspirator Ulrike Meinhof had hanged herself in her cell in
the same prison.
It was the decade in which the postwar German economic miracle became
the German political nightmare. The death of Ohnesorg was followed a
year later by the attempted assassination of the student leader Rudi
Dutschke by a young man shouting anti-communist slogans. Dutschke was
the charismatic spokesman for a movement that opposed state
repression, American-dominated global capitalism and, above all, the
Vietnam war. His shooting sparked a wave of radicalism that resulted
in the creation of what was known first as the Baader-Meinhof Gang,
then as the Red Army Faction (RAF).
Meinhof, Baader, Ensslin and a few new fellow travellers went to
Jordan to train with the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine. Now officially the RAF, they drew inspiration from the
Brazilian Marxist Carlos Marighella, treating as their bible his
Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla, which recast Che Guevara's idea of
the peasant revolutionary in an urban environment. They returned to
Germany with their new name, a manifesto written by Meinhof and a
symbol: a red star crossed by a Heckler & Koch submachinegun. Over
the next two years, they carried out an "anti-imperialist struggle",
robbing banks for funds and bombing US military bases, police
stations and offices of the right-wing Springer press empire. Six
people died and dozens were wounded.
The West German police launched their biggest manhunt and, in June
1972, the ringleaders were captured. They were placed in solitary
confinement in the new maximum-security prison of Stammheim, awaiting
trial. During the lengthy preparations for the trial, a "second
generation" grew up on the outside that, with increasing violence,
continued the campaign of kidnappings and bombings. After repeated
attempts to secure the release of the RAF members, in July 1977 four
Arab terrorists hijacked a Lufthansa plane en route to Germany from
Mallorca. It was full of tourists. The hijackers demanded the release
of Palestinian prisoners and the RAF detainees. The plane ended up in
Mogadishu, Somalia, where it was successfully stormed by elite West
German special forces. That same night, after the news had been
broadcast on German radio, the RAF leaders were found dead in their cells.
The RAF terrorised the Bundesrepublik, although with increasingly
less effect, for another 20 years. On April 20, 1998, the group
issued a statement saying the RAF had been disbanded. Lest we be
lulled into complacency, the statement concluded with a quote from
Rosa Luxemburg "The Revolution says: I was, I am, I will be." The
events spawned a profound cultural myth that of the romantic
terrorist, the justified and brutal outsider one that to this day
haunts and provokes the western imagination.
In 1985, a German journalist, Stefan Aust, who was to become
editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel, produced the standard work on the
RAF. His book, The Baader Meinhof Complex, has been updated and is
republished here next month. It has also been made into a film of the
same title, produced by Bernd Eichinger, who was also the producer of
the 2004 film Downfall, the gruelling dramatisation of Hitler's last
days. I ask Eichinger if there is a link between the two movies.
"Yes," he replies at once. "We never could cope with the immense
disaster of Nazism. It was not over just because the war was over."
Aust agrees that Nazism hangs over the RAF's grim decade like a black
cloud. These young people had convinced themselves they were in
danger of making the same mistake as their parents, that conditions
in Germany in the late 1960s echoed the conditions of the early 1930s
that brought the Nazis to power. They wished to overthrow the state
because the state was becoming fascist. And he makes a crucial point
about the level of violence in Germany compared to that of radical
movements in Britain and elsewhere. "The Japanese Red Army were very
cruel, also the Red Brigades, in Italy at least as murderous as the
RAF. These radical movements in countries with a fascist past were a
little bit different from the others, because everything they did
against the system they did by comparing the system to the fascist
past." In the words of Ulrike Meinhof: "I really see no difference
left between the police terrorist methods we have already seen in
Berlin and that threaten us now, and the terrorism of the S\A\ in the 1930s."
Aust himself knows this all too well. He was a young journalist on
the radical magazine konkret edited by Meinhof's husband, Klaus
Rainer Röhl, and for which she was a columnist when the killings
started. But Aust was a fairly gentle liberal, a posture that later
almost cost him his life. When Meinhof went underground, along with
the rest of the group, and travelled to the terrorist training camp
in Jordan, she decided to hand over her two daughters to a
Palestinian orphanage. Appalled, Aust and a friend took the children
from Sicily, where they were staying, and returned them to Meinhof's
estranged husband. She wanted revenge, she wanted Aust and his fellow
kidnapper killed. Somehow, it never happened.
The story is horrific and significant. Meinhof was a radical, though
highly respectable, journalist, a member of the increasingly
comfortable German middle class. In the film, we see her being
hypnotised by the passion of Baader and Ensslin. She cared for the
poor and the oppressed, but increasingly came to believe that caring
was not enough. Finally, she stepped over the line in May 1970, when
she was involved in the "liberation" of Baader who, along with
Ensslin, had been imprisoned after the fire bombing of a department
store in Frankfurt an operation that entailed the shooting of an
old man. Meinhof the middle-class professional had become Meinhof the
urban guerrilla, prepared to abandon her children in the name of the
revolution. Soon after she went underground, she wrote The Concept of
the Urban Guerrilla, the bible for young terrorists around the world.
Baader was charismatic, but basically a young thug, an ill-educated
car thief and building worker from Bavaria; his girlfriend, Ensslin,
a smart, pretty philosophy student whose father was a Lutheran
pastor, became a cold psychotic; the rest of the RAF seemed simply
dazzled by their certainties. It is Meinhof's story that is at the
heart of the matter. Indeed, it is a story that forms a perfect
circle. A careful reading of the transcripts of the trial of the RAF
leaders at Stammheim indicates that, in prison, she cracked, her cold
certainties evaporated and her conscience kicked in. Broken and
confused, she asked how it was possible for anybody to show they had
changed in the conditions of the prison. "I was amazed when I read
that," Aust says. "I realised it was the moment she left the group."
The question Meinhof leaves behind is: how was it possible for a
well-off citizen of a liberal democracy to sink into the corrupt
belief that utopia could be born of random episodes of appalling brutality?
Part of the answer was "radical chic", a phrase coined by Tom Wolfe
in a 1970 book to describe a party at Leonard Bernstein's house, at
which the composer entertained the Black Panthers, a sporadically
violent Maoist group. The party was a distillation of the mood of the
bien pensants of the time. They were embracing every cause, from
migrant workers to Native American Indians and, of course, the
Vietcong. Abbie Hoffman's Yippies had won the hearts of the radically
chic by their brutal disruption of the Chicago Democratic convention
in 1968; that same year, Mick Jagger described the violent demo
against the Vietnam war on Grosvenor Square as a "turn-on". Violence was cool.
Wolfe had defined an exotic dance involving high fashion and lethal
politics. His insight was vindicated in 1974, when the American
newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by a group called the
Symbionese Liberation Army. Hearst went native and was photographed
wielding a gun in an SLA bank raid. The line between the liberal
democratic good life and revolutionary slaughter had become
desperately fragile.
It may be more robust now, but the radically chic are still dancing.
Coverage of the Baader-Meinhof decade has tended to embrace a
romantic view of the urban guerrilla. Terrorism may be a much more
alien phenomenon now, but that hasn't stopped fashion designers from
experimenting with urban guerrilla wear. In the early 1990s, "Prada
Meinhof" became a cult phrase for those who treated political causes
as fashion accessories. The Prada Meinhof Gang was a self-proclaimed
"all-female Art Terrorist Group", active from 2002-04. Its apparently
valedictory website bears the slogan: "History repeats itself, first
as tragedy then as fashion." This, after you have seen the film, will
make you sick; as, I hope, did the spectacle of the curiously brutal
model Naomi Campbell interviewing Hugo Chavez, the revolutionary
president of Venezuela, for GQ magazine earlier this year.
On the whole, however, current radical chic is herbivorous, embracing
softer causes such as the environmentor HIV. And it is noticeable
that the protests against the invasion of Iraq never became as brutal
as those against the Vietnam war, and certainly never fired radical
underground movements as Vietnam did. There remains, though, that
reflex anti-Americanism among the radically chic that can shade all
too easily into sympathy for the devil.
There's a further point to be made about Baader-Meinhof. From
Seattle, Richard Huffman runs a comprehensive website,
www.baader-meinhof.com, which details the group's history and sells
posters of the era, as well as a bumper sticker displayed by
long-haired young Germans of the time who didn't want to be pulled
over by the police. "I do not belong to the Baader-Meinhof Group," it
says. Huffman, 40, was drawn into this because his father was the
head of the US army's bomb-disposal unit in Berlin in the early
1970s, and involved with defusing RAF bombs. He is writing a book
called The Baader-Meinhof Gang at the Dawn of Terror.
"They were the first modern terrorists," Huffman says. "They were the
first ones who seemed to see the power of personality, the power of
the media, and to use terrorism as an end in itself, not something to
achieve some other goal. They were the first terrorist group to
effectively use mass communications to become powerful and popular
and prominent. They were ahead of their time." Perhaps the greatest
virtue of the Aust-Eichinger film is that it dramatises the
technological topicality of the RAF's reign of terror we see them
using a cine camera to film their hostage, the industrialist
Hanns-Martin Schleyer (whom they later executed), for distribution to
the media, in a chilling presaging of the modern jihadist video as
well as the grim psychological logic of the gang's slide into a
vacuous orgy of slaughter for its own sake.
Also ahead of his time was the man who tried, in the end
successfully, to destroy them, Horst Herold, the chief of police
(portrayed in the film by Bruno Ganz, who played Hitler in Downfall).
Herold virtually invented modern counterterrorism measures with his
use of computers, publicity and, at one point, a mighty operation
that deployed almost every cop in the Bundesrepublik to, as he puts
it, slap the water and make the fish move. On both sides, the German
decade of terror foreshadowed the world in which we live.
Is there now a more alarming foreshadowing? Aust and Eichinger both
remark on the amazement of young Germans when they see the film how
could this happen, they ask, in modern Germany? But the financial
meltdown, when it hits, as it must, the real economy, carries with it
high risk of social disorder; 1970s-style brutalities and
polarisations may now lie ahead of us. The angry young will dream
new, violent utopian dreams and the radically chic will buy their
little ceramic busts of Mao and once again pin up that poster of Che
to remind them of their youth.
The bitch that bore Baader-Meinhof is in heat again.
--
The Baader-Meinhof Complex opens on November 14; Stefan Aust's book
is published by The Bodley Head on November 6
.
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