Film reconstructs German terror of '70s

[3 articles]

Film reconstructs German terror of '70s

http://www.starbulletin.com/features/20091018_film_reconstructs_german_terror_of_70s.html

By Burl Burlingame
Oct 18, 2009

An open window. Ulrike Meinhof stares at it, fascinated. She's in a
room with bleeding victims of a terrorist jailbreak; the terrorists
have leapt through the window. She had secretly engineered the
jailbreak, but no one knows that. Does she stay in the room, in the
strictures of the petty bourgeoisie life she had built as a leftist
columnist, or does she leap through the window, join the romantic
revolutionaries on the run?

She jumps, and it's the beginning of the great postwar trauma in
modern German society, the spasmodic political terrorism outbreaks of
the 1970s that killed innocent people and made populist Robin Hoods
of the so-called Baader-Meinhof Gang.

They actually called themselves the Red Army Faction, a dissolving
series of terrorist brigades striking at what they perceived as
endemic fascism in the West German government. It had only been a
couple of decades since the end of World War II, after all, and most
of the people in charge were former Nazi officials, and the kids who
grew up as home-grown terrorists were raised in the war's rubble. The
experience colors everything.

"The Baader Meinhof Complex" is an extraordinary, thorough retelling
of the events of the period, based on a memoir by writer Stefan Aust
(who helped rescue Meinhof's children on their way to a Palestinian
terrorist training camp) and poured on the screen by director Uli
Edel, who maintains a strict psychological distance from the events
but pumps the film with the chilly brio of a thriller. He understands
that terrorists not only act because of political conviction, but
because they simply get off on the sexy violence.

The movie will send you right off to Google the actual events, and it
does a fabulous job of connecting the dots without slowing down. As
near as I can tell, it's dead-on, not just in re-creating the events,
but in deconstructing the mood of the period. It's frightening and
fascinating, but more than that, it's instructive.

Writer Ulrike Meinhof was the best known of the gang, but Andreas
Baader was the undisputed leader, a swaggering, psychotic action
junkie. Girlfriend Gundrun Ensslin was the real zealot of the group,
acting out against her clergy parents with the fury of a Joan of Arc.
Indeed, one of the things about the terrorists that appealed to the
German public was their passion, in an age when anomie ruled.

The movie covers roughly a decade, including their bizarre trial and
mysterious fates that still have Germans debating.

Where are they now? The fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union
had a real dampening effect on the leftist terrorists.

Along with "John Rabe," German cinema has been mining recent,
unpleasant history with great effect. An arrest was made just last
month in Germany for a Red Army Faction murder that occurred more
than 30 years ago.

--------

Movie review:
The Baader Meinhof Complex (Der Baader Meinhof Komplex)

It's simple, really.

http://www.pegasusnews.com/news/2009/oct/17/movie-review-baader-meinhof-complex-der-baa/

By John P. Meyer
October 17, 2009

There's nothing particularly complex about The Baader Meinhof
Complex. Nor does the "complex" of the title refer to a pattern of
behavior, such as Stockholm Syndrome. Rather, the movie is a fairly
straightforward (if long-winded) chronological dramatization of the
active history of the titular urban guerrilla group, which was also
commonly referred to as the Baader Meinhof Gang.

The movie has a distinctly Traffic-like feel, as it follows a set of
key characters involved in the creation of the band of
communist-inspired activists (Terrorists? Freedom fighters?
Murderers? Take your pick) who carried out bank robberies, bombings,
hostage-takings, and outright shoot-'em-ups in West Germany beginning
around 1970. The film runs to 150 minutes with the dialog being
primarily in German, with English subtitles.

The story initially focuses on the character of Ulrike Meinhof
(Martina Gedeck), a middle-class, married-with-children journalist
whose coverage of student protests and leftist social activism brings
her into close contact with a loosely-organized group of
revolutionary brothers and sisters led by Andreas Baader (Moritz
Bleibtreu) and his compatriot/lover, Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna
Wokalek). This crew hangs out taking communal baths and building
bombs while quoting the writings of Che and Mao. They promulgate a
code of ethics under which anyone wearing a uniform is fair game,
while ordinary civilians are to be considered off-limits. (Ain't
collateral damage a bitch, though?)

Already harboring anti-establishment leanings, and with her husband
on the outs for flagrant cheating, Meinhof soon finds herself
actively involved in the law-breaking pursuits of the Baader group.
The band's structure tightens up considerably and attains a degree of
heretofore absent focus as a result of Meinhof's philosophical
viewpoints and manifesto-writing abilities -- though her journalistic
integrity goes to Hell in a handcart.

"Talk without action is wrong," declares one of the more
straightforward tenets of the group's manifesto, and so they start
robbing banks, kidnapping government officials and bombing newspaper
offices with a vengeance. (They refer to the bank robberies as
"expropriation": It's all in the labeling.) The movie makes clear
that this crew operate by the seat of their pants with very little
planning or deliberation involved beforehand. For a while they run
quite amok, evading capture only because the police are so
ill-prepared to deal with such blatant criminal acts.

There's a strong whiff of the Keystone about this komplex; in a case
straight out of the dumb crook files, Baader is nabbed after being
pulled over for flagrant speeding when he was already wanted for
violating parole.

Once the police catch on that the group's actions will be continuing
and widespread, a task force is organized to put them out of
commission. Leading it is a particularly sharp and socially conscious
individual named Horst Herold (Bruno Ganz). Herold's officers succeed
in catching and killing Baader Meinhof gangsters in record numbers,
until eventually all the major (surviving) players are behind bars.
However, Herold seems well aware that the conditions which spawned
the captured crop of revolutionaries will continue to spawn new ones,
until those who are disenfranchised are given a fair shake. Or
something like that.

Director Uli Edel devotes the last half-hour or so of the film to the
manner in which the gang members -- housed rather cushily in a
separate wing of a Berlin prison -- become increasingly contentious,
with rifts developing between factions and Meinhof ending up
particularly alienated from the group. Meanwhile, in the open court
proceedings, Ensslin and Baader make a fool out of the presiding
judge and win the sympathy of courtroom spectators via populist
rhetoric and acid wit. For a while, they even get televisions and
radios in their prison quarters. Then, an airliner is hijacked in Baghdad ...

The acting is uniformly accomplished and the actors themselves are
attractive -- it's refreshing to get a look at some of the rising
stars of European cinema, with not a single Hollywood mug in the
bunch. Those who don't know the story of the Baader Meinhof Complex
will probably find it interesting to discover how big an effect they
had on German society: The ubiquitous presence of
submachinegun-wielding police squads and closed-circuit video cameras
probably stems directly from this group's long-term violent actions.

A theme running through the film seems to be that those who don't
learn from history are doomed to repeat it, with the implication
being that the repressive regime which brought about the Baader
Meinhofs has parallels in various western institutions to this day.

As 150-minute films go, this is a fairly enthralling one -- but you
might want to order your popcorn extra large.

--------

The Baader Meinhof Complex

http://spectator.org/archives/2009/10/02/the-baader-meinhof-complex

By James Bowman
10.2.09

The title of Uli Edel's The Baader Meinhof Complex (Der Baader
Meinhof Komplex) suggests a psychological rather than political
origin of terrorist violence, and this is borne out by the portrayal
of Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu), leader of the 1970s German
terrorists who called themselves the Red Army Faction, as a
borderline psychopath. In general Mr. Edel -- who also, with Bernd
Eichinger (Downfall), adapted the screenplay from a memoir by Stefan
Aust -- appears to believe that the R.A.F. did not adopt
revolutionary methods to create the socialist paradise envisaged by
Lenin or Mao; rather, they adopted the then- and, to a somewhat
lesser extent, now-glamorous imagery of Lenin and Mao -- and, of
course, Che and Fidel and Ho Chi Minh -- as a kind of shortcut
rationalization for their revolutionary methods, which they found
thrilling for their own sake. Their terrorist murders, including the
murders of American soldiers at military bases in Germany, really do
seem to have been an example of the contemporary Yippie ideal of
"revolution for the hell of it."

Yet the film does go so far towards an attempt at some kind of social
and political analysis -- and, incidentally, glamorizing the
terrorists -- as to suggest three causes of the violence not having
to do with the narcissism, vanity, and lust for excitement (among
other things) of the participants. It begins on a nude beach in
Germany, sometime in the 1960s, which is both a good way to get our
attention and to suggest a link with a German revolutionary tradition
dating back to the pre-Nazi era. More importantly it introduces the
narrative germ of the breakup of the marriage of the radical
journalist Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck) who, it is intimated, made
the transition from words to deeds partly as a reaction to that
breakup. Eventually she breaks up with her children as well -- though
not, perhaps, without a pang of regret.

The personal was political, it seems, even in those pre-feminist
days, which are also evoked by Baader's unapologetic
"male-chauvinism" -- "You c***s! Your only liberation is screaming at
men," he shouts at one point -- which is looked at unblinkingly.
Nowadays, that kind of pre-revolutionary consciousness must make it
seem a bit paradoxical, to say the least, when he and the other
would-be revolutionaries appear to share the hippie doctrine that the
revolution is advanced by aggressive sexual promiscuity in both
sexes. "F***ing and shooting are the same," proclaims Baader to a
shocked group of Palestinians at a guerrilla camp as they look
wonderingly at the female German guerrillas sunbathing in the nude.
He also refers disparagingly to the leader of the Palestinians as "Ali Baba."

The second source of the Baader-Meinhoff violence is represented as
springing from the riots of June 2, 1967, when the then Shah of Iran,
visiting Germany, went to the Berlin Opera to a performance of
Mozart's Magic Flute. A German student demonstration against the Shah
-- whose repressive government was a favored leftist cause in those
days because he was allied with the United States -- turned into a
riot and a student, Benno Ohnesorg (Martin Glade), was shot and
killed by a policeman. The film was made before the revelation
earlier this year that his killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was an East
German mole in the West German police -- which, given the
semi-mythical status that the death of Ohnesorg (whose name in German
means "without sorrow" or, perhaps, "carefree") was later to be
accorded, at the least adds an interesting geopolitical element to
the subsequent history of German radicalism.

The third element in the radicalization scenario was the shooting of
Rudi Dutschke (Sebastian Blomberg) by an assassin who is allowed to
say only one thing by way of explanation: "I hate communists." So, by
the end of the movie, might others. Not that our heroes describe
themselves as communists in the movie. If they have read Marx or have
any post-revolutionary economic program in mind, there is no evidence
of it here. Just before Dutschke is shot -- he lived on, but in a
brain-damaged state -- he is shown addressing a big anti-war,
anti-American rally and chanting Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh. The war in
Vietnam and the existence of the state of Israel as examples of what
they see as American "imperialism," are the only things mentioned
throughout the film as the reason why these people do what they do.

Why, you may ask, should American imperialism, assuming for the
moment that any such thing existed, cause Germans to kill other
Germans? But if the killers have an explanation it is never offered
to us. Apart from the psychological ones, if any, their reasons are
simply taken for granted -- as it appears the terrorists themselves
took them for granted. The absence from the movie of even an
attempted rationalization of "the armed struggle against imperialism"
is telling both cinematically and politically. It suggests the extent
to which the hippie-yippie ethos out of which these self-loathing
bourgeois revolutionaries emerged in the 1970s -- America had its own
version of them, but they had fewer and less spectacular terrorist
incidents to their credit -- still survives in the movie culture of today.

That is why, too, at two and a half hours (it's even longer in the
German version) the movie is much too long and doesn't appear to know
where it's going. It would have profited by a little more ironic
distance from its terrorist heroes, a little bit of historical
perspective of the sort that the rest of the world, outside the
academic, cinematic and media industries, must have on domestic
terrorism by now. In the movie, it's not even clear that we're
supposed to find it funny when the clergyman father (Michael Gwisdek)
of Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) describes her firebombing of a
department store as an act of "holy self-redemption." Always with the
self, these baby-boomers, who include Mr. Edel, the director. "This
is the story of our generation," he has said of his movie. What else
would it be? But those of another generation might have a hard time
understanding how the killing or kidnapping of a banker or a
policeman could amount to a blow struck against imperialism even if
they thought it appropriate to strike such blows.

In other words, audiences today are quite likely to notice what was
not so much noticed at the time, namely that the "revolution" doesn't
make any sense. So far as we can tell, these naughty children don't
even know what "imperialism" means, apart from identifying it with
anything America or Israel do -- and not with anything that the
Soviet Union or China did. It is whatever they say it is. Their
narcissism even extends to the deaths of the leadership -- Meinhoff
first, then Baader and Ensslin -- by suicide in prison. These are the
solipsist revolutionaries -- though, like Bill Ayers, they still
command respect at the New York Times. There, Manohla Dargis
proclaimed The Baader Meinhof Complex a "Critic's Pick," noting that
"Mr. Eichinger lets the group do its own talking, as does the film's
director, Uli Edel, who gives it the pulse and music of a thriller.
(The propulsive score echoes those of the 'Bourne' movies.) This
probably accounts for why some have accused the film of glamorizing
terrorism, which misses the point that all terrorism is performative."

Call me unhip, but that seems to me to be a complete non-sequitur. No
one doubts or refuses to recognize that all terrorism is
performative, but what has that got to do with either its
glamorousness or its unglamorousness, still less with the moral or
political principles by which we approve or disapprove of these
things? I see from the international pages of Tuesday's Times that
the parties of the left in Europe have fallen on hard times, which
seems a bit puzzling to the paper's correspondent, Steven Erlanger,
in view of the "Bad Times for Capitalism" that he presumably thinks
ought to be throwing up one, two, many Obamas in the paradoxically
progressive "Old Europe." Meanwhile, in the fantasyland of his
paper's cultural sections, as well as in the European and American
film industries, we can confidently say that the revolution lives on.

.