http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/08/hitchens-guerrillas200908
Movies have often romanticized Communist revolutionariesthink
Benicio Del Toro as Che. But a new action thriller, The Baader
Meinhof Complex, counterpunches, exposing the violent psychosis that
gripped the young militants of the Red Army Faction in 1970s West Germany.
By Christopher Hitchens
WEB EXCLUSIVE
August 17, 2009
The number of Communist revolutionaries in the world has declined
much faster than the number of gangsters and stickup artists, but at
the movies it's still a fairly safe bet that such stories will be
portrayed in such a way as to inspire at least a twinge of penis
envy. You will know what I mean, even if you didn't actually bother
to watch Benicio Del Toro playing Che, or Johnny Depp taking the part
of John Dillinger. It's a trope that goes back at least as far as
Viva Zapata!: the quasi-sexual charisma of the outlaw.
So don't miss the opportunity of seeing the year's best-made and most
counter-romantic action thriller, The Baader Meinhof Complex. Unlike
earlier depictions of the same events by German directors such as
Volker Schlöndorff and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Uli Edel's film
interrogates and ultimately indicts (and convicts) the West German
terrorists rather than the state and society which they sought to overthrow.
It does this in the most carefully objective way, by taking the young
militants, at least in the first instance, at their own face value.
It is Berlin on June 2, 1967, and the rather shabby and compromised
authorities of the postwar Federal Republic are laying down a red
carpet for the visiting Shah of Iran. A young journalist named Ulrike
Meinhof has written a mordant essay, in the form of an open letter to
the Shah's wife, about the misery and repression of the Iranian
system. When students protest as the Shah's party arrives at the
Berlin Opera, they are first attacked by hired Iranian goon squads
and then savaged by paramilitary formations of brutish German cops.
It's the best 1960s street-fighting footage ever staged, and the
"police riot" element is done with electrifying skill. On the fringes
of the unequal battle, a creepy-looking plainclothes pig named
Karl-Heinz Kurras unholsters his revolver and shoots an unarmed
student, named Benno Ohnesorg, in the head.
That is only the curtain-raiser, and the birth of "the Movement of 2
June." Not much later, the student leader Rudi Dutschke is also shot
in the head, but in this instance by an unhinged neo-Nazi. Now the
rioting begins in earnest as West German youth begin to see a pattern
to events. The shaky postwar state built by their guilty parents is
only a façade for the same old grim and evil faces; Germany has
leased bases on its soil for another aggression, this time against
the indomitable people of Vietnam; any genuine domestic dissent is
met with ruthless violence. I can remember these events and these
arguments and images in real time, and I can also remember some of
those who slipped away from the edge of the demonstrations and went,
as they liked to think of it, "underground." The title of the film
announces it as an exploration of exactly that syndrome: the cult of
the urban guerrilla.
There was a prevalent mystique in those days about the Cuban and
Vietnamese and Mozambican revolutions, as well as about various vague
but supposedly glamorous groups such as the Tupamaros in Uruguay. In
the United States, the brief resort to violence by the Black Panthers
and then by the Weather Underground was always imagined as an
extension of "Third World" struggles onto the territory of
imperialist North America. Other spasmodic attempts to raise armed
insurrectionthe so-called Front for the Liberation of Quebec, the
I.R.A., and the Basque etawere confined to national or ethnic
minorities. But there were three officially democratic countries
where for several years an actual weaponized and organized group was
able to issue a challenge, however garbled and inarticulate, to the
very legitimacy of the state. The first such group was the Japanese
Red Army, the second (named partly in honor of the first) was West
Germany's Red Army Faction, led by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof,
and the third was the Red Brigades in Italy.
You may notice that the three countries I have just mentioned were
the very ones that made up the Axis during the Second World War. I am
personally convinced that this is the main reason the phenomenon took
the form it did: the propaganda of the terrorists, on the few
occasions when they could be bothered to cobble together a manifesto,
showed an almost neurotic need to "resist authority" in a way that
their parents' generation had so terribly failed to do. And this was
also a brilliant way of placing the authorities on the defensive and
luring them into a moral trap. West Germany in the late 1960s and
1970s is not actually holding any political prisoners. Very well
then, we will commit violent crimes for political reasons and go to
prison for them, and then there will be a special wing of the prison
for us, and then the campaign to free the political prisoners by
violence can get under way. This will strip the mask from the
pseudo-democratic state and reveal the Nazi skull beneath its skin.
(In a rather witty move that implicitly phrases all this in reverse,
the makers of The Baader Meinhof Complex have cast Bruno Ganz as the
mild but efficient head of West German "homeland security," a man who
tries to "understand" his opponents even as he weaves the net ever
closer around them. It requires a conscious effort to remember Ganz's
eerie rendition of the part of the Führer in Downfall five years back.)
It doesn't take long for the sinister ramifications of the "complex"
to become plain. Consumerism is equated with Fascism so that the
firebombing of department stores can be justified. Ecstatic violence
and "action" become ends in themselves. One can perhaps picture
Ulrike Meinhof as a "Red" resister of Nazism in the 1930s, but if the
analogy to that decade is allowed, then it is very much easier to
envisage her brutally handsome pal Andreas Baader as an enthusiastic
member of the Brownshirts. (The gang bought its first consignment of
weapons from a member of Germany's neo-Nazi underworld: no need to be
choosy when you are so obviously in the right.) There is, as with all
such movements, an uneasy relationship between sexuality and cruelty,
and between casual or cynical attitudes to both. As if
curtain-raising a drama of brutality that has long since eclipsed
their own, the young but hedonistic West German toughs take
themselves off to the Middle East in search of the real thing and the
real training camps, and discover to their dismay that their Arab
hosts are somewhat … puritanical.
This in turn raises another question, with its own therapeutic
implications. Did it have to be the most extreme Palestinians to whom
the Baader Meinhof gangsters gave their closest allegiance? Yes, it
did, because the queasy postwar West German state had little choice
but to be ostentatiously friendly with the new state of Israel, at
whatever cost in hypocrisy, and this exposed a weakness on which any
really cruel person could very easily play. You want to really,
really taunt the grown-ups? Then say, when you have finished calling
them Nazis, that their little Israeli friends are really Nazis, too.
This always guarantees a hurt reaction and a lot of press.
Researching this in the late 1970s in Germany, I became convinced
that the Baader Meinhof phenomenon actually was a form of psychosis.
One of the main recruiting grounds for the gang was an institution at
the University of Heidelberg called the Sozialistisches Patienten
Kollektiv, or Socialist Patients Collective, an outfit that sought to
persuade the pitifully insane that they needed no treatment save
social revolution. (Such a reading of the work of R. D. Laing and
others was one of the major "disorders" of the 1960s.) Among the star
pupils of this cuckoo's nest was Ralf Reinders, who was arrested
after several violent "actions" and who had once planned to destroy
the Jewish House in Berlina restoration of the one gutted by the
Brownshirts"in order to get rid of this thing about the Jews that
we've all had to have since the Nazi time." Yes, "had to have" is
very good. Perhaps such a liberating act, had he brought it off,
would have made some of the noises in his head go away.
The Baader Meinhof Complex, like the excellent book by Stefan Aust on
which it is based, is highly acute in its portrayal of the way in
which mania feeds upon itself and becomes hysterical. More arrests
mean that more hostages must be taken, often in concert with
international hijackers, so that ever more exorbitant "demands" can
be made. This requires money, which in turn demands more robbery and
extortion. If there are doubts or disagreements within the
organization, these can always be attributed to betrayal or
cowardice, resulting in mini-purges and micro-lynchings within the
gang itself. (The bleakest sequence of the film shows Ulrike Meinhof
and her once seductive comrade Gudrun Ensslin raving hatefully at
each other in the women's maximum-security wing.) And lurking behind
all this neurotic energy, and not always very far behind at that, is
the wish for death and extinction. The last desperate act of the
ganga Götterdämmerung of splatter action, including a botched plane
hijacking by sympathetic Palestinians and the murder of a senior
German hostagewas the staging of a collective suicide in a Stuttgart
jail, with a crude and malicious attempt (echoed by some crude and
malicious intellectuals) to make it look as if the German authorities
had killed the prisoners. In these sequences, the film is completely
unsparing, just as it was in focusing the camera on official
brutality in the opening scenes of more than 10 years before.
Two real-world developments have made this movie even more relevant,
and helped to vindicate the critical attitude that it manifests. Of
the surviving members of the Baader Meinhof circle, one or two went
the whole distance and actually became full-blown neo-Nazis. The
gang's lawyer and co-conspirator, Horst Mahler, has been jailed
again, this time for distributing CD-roms inciting violence against
Jews. Contempt for German democracy can't be taken any further than
that. And Ulrike Meinhof's daughter Bettina Röhl has published files
from the archives of the East German secret police, or Stasi, showing
that subsidies and other forms of support flowed regularly to the
group from the other side of the Berlin Wall.
Most astonishing of all, perhaps, in May of this year it was revealed
from the same files that Karl-Heinz Kurras, the twitchy cop who shot
Benno Ohnesorg on June 2, 1967, thus igniting the whole train of
events, was all along an informer for the Stasi and a card-carrying
member of the East German Communist Party. (Herr Kurras, now 81, was
interviewed and made no bones about it.) This doesn't necessarily
prove that the whole sequence of events was part of a Stasi
provocation, but it does make those who yelled about the "Nazi" state
look rather foolish in retrospect. (Rudi Dutschke, it now turns out,
left a posthumous letter to his family stating his fear that "the
East" was behind his own shooting. Dutschke's family has called for
an investigation.) What this means in short is that the Baader
Meinhof milieu, so far from providing a critique of German society,
was actually a sort of petri dish in which bacilli for the two worst
forms of dictatorship on German soilthe National Socialist and the
Stalinistwere grown. It's high time that the movie business outgrew
some of the illusions of "radical" terrorism, and this film makes an
admirably unsentimental contribution to that task.
--
Christopher Hitchens is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. Send
comments on all Hitchens-related matters to hitchbitch@vf.com.
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