Jean-Luc Godard said that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. If so, The Baader-Meinhof Complex, released on 14th November, is some movie. The Red Army Faction (RAF) was essentially a collection of women alongside the charismatic Andreas Baader. The gang so glorified violence that it used a Heckler & Koch machine gun, against the background of a red star, as a logo. Automatic weapons fire, most of it from women, is the film's central motif.
Based on Stefan Aust's 1985 book of the same name (for a long time extremely difficult to get hold of in English, but just re-issued in November 2008), the movie whizzes through the events of what author Gerd Koenen has called the "red decade." This began with the 1967 killing of a student by the west Berlin police, and ended with the RAF's plane hijacking and kidnapping spree that later became known as the "German autumn" of 1977.
This violent decade is recounted at such breakneck speed that the viewer gets the cinematic equivalent of concussion. Little time is given to the causes, and endless paradoxes, of the struggle of Germany's 1968 generation. Screenwriter Bernd Eichinger, who also produced Downfall, hints at several uncomfortable truths about the left-wing terrorism of the 1970s, but misses others.
The implicit parallel, though, is between 1970s left-wing terrorism and twenty-first century Islamism. Insofar as there is a hero in the movie, it is Horst Herold, played by Bruno Ganz, who also starred as Hitler in Downfall. Herold is the head of Germany's police agency who pleads for more understanding of terrorism, in effect making the case against a war on terror.
There is something to the parallel. The RAF in the 1970s shared some methods with al Qaeda today: both were tiny groups with little public support who nonetheless conceived of themselves as a revolutionary vanguard, aiming to rouse the apathetic masses. Their choice of targets—in particular the United States and Israel—is also similar. Abu Hassan, the leader of the early Arab terrorist group Black September, also features in the film, appearing as the commandant of a Jordanian PLO training camp in Jordan where the West German wannabes are taught to fire Kalashnikovs. And the film's best scene is the comic, nudist revolt of the sexually liberated German terrorists against their prurient Islamic tutors—a terrorist culture clash.
What the movie omits, however, is the bizarre communiqué Meinhof—the designated "voice" of the RAF—wrote from jail celebrating the killing of the Israeli athletes as a model for the West German left. Meinhof's weird logic illustrates the arc of anti-semitism on the German New Left that began well before the RAF, with the bombing of a Jewish Community Centre in West Berlin on November 9th 1969, the anniversary of Kristallnacht. This left-wing anti-semitism culminated in the Entebbe hijacking in 1976, in which two German members of the Revolutionary Cells—another terrorist group to emerge out of the West German student movement—and two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked an Air France jet, flew it to Entebbe and separated the Jewish passengers and the non-Jewish passengers before Israeli commandos stormed the aircraft. And all of this from a student movement that began as a rebellion against the "Auschwitz generation."
In truth, if not in this movie, what begins as resistance to Nazism ends up itself mimicking the worst of Germany's past. Horst Mahler, the actual founder of the RAF who was ultimately squeezed out by the iconic popularity of Baader, is perhaps the best example. Mahler appears on screen, first in a suit and tie as Baader's lawyer in a Frankfurt courtroom, and then in fatigues and a Castro-style cap, in a PLO training camp. Mahler was arrested in 1970, and subsequently spent a decade in prison before being released. He is now a neo-Nazi. Perhaps Germany still isn't ready to confront this aspect of its recent past.
To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect's blog
