Der Baader Meinhof Komplex – 2008 Film aus Deutschland

I highly recommend this film, even though you may never have heard of Baader or Meinhof. I saw ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ at The Broadway Cinema, Nottingham and the audience were held spellbound for the 2½ hour duration.

It may be best not to read on until you have seen the film.

This 2008 production from Germany traces the activities of the leftist terrorist group sometimes named after two of the founder leaders Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. They called themselves the Red Army Faction, or RAF for short, and must not be confused with our glorious Royal Air Force. The Red Army Faction emerged in the late 1960s, a time of much unrest in the Western World . Students and other, mainly leftist, groups, particularly in Western Germany, were worried about the abuse of power by those in authority. It seems that the Governments of the regions (Länder), the National Government and the Police contained members with suspicious (Nazi?) pasts; obviously not an ideal state of affairs.

The first time-line entry in this excellent, German language, RAF information site:

http://www.rafinfo.de/zeit/zeit67.php

reports the demonstrations outside the German Opera in Berlin against the visit of Shah of Persia (Iran) in June 1967. The heavy handed police (and Persian bodyguards / thugs) response included the shooting by a plain clothes policeman of a harmless student, the inappropriately named Benno Ohnesorg (Benno ‘Withoutworry’). Many see this clash as the flash point for the emergence of the RAF. The demo is portrayed in the film to great effect at the original site.

Ulrike Meinhof, a respected but controversial leftist journalist, had earlier protested against the Shah’s visit in the journal Konkret. A couple of years later she teamed up with Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin to form the RAF. General mayhem ensued. I found the ideology a bit woolly but the RAF rampaged angrily around planting bombs in department stores and a police HQ, robbing banks to fund weapon purchase and kidnapping and murdering leading ‘capitalists’. It seems they wanted to cause the Government and Police to ‘soften’ their authoritarian approach. The RAF had links with guerilla groups in the Middle East and members took part, in spite of clear tension / culture clashes, in guerilla warfare training.

The film takes us through some of these spectacular events to great effect. We see the other side of the conflict led by the wily old Police President, Horst Herold, played by Bruno Ganz (Adolf Hitler in ‘Der Untergang’). We see how the authorities close in on the various RAF members, leading to spectacular arrests, prison escapes and to the two year trial whilst in prison of, Ensslin, Meinhof, Baader and Jan Carl Raspe. The gang member’s mental health deteriorates and in particular Ulrike Meinhof, who is experiencing doubts and guilt about the whole fiasco, commits suicide one year into the trial. The other three are eventually sentenced to life imprisonment and this sets off two further atrocities. Firstly, the RAF kidnap the President of the ‘Employer’s Union’ Hanns Martin Schleyer. Secondly, RAF members in cohorts with the PLO hijack a plane and hold the passengers to ransom. The plan is to negotiate the release of RAF prisoners. On learning of the rescue of the plane passengers, the three prisoners sink into ultimate despair and are found dead the next morning (18 October 1977) in their separate cells. After re-enacting the murder of Schleyer (19 October 1977) this harrowing film draws to a close.

The colourful RAF story of cloak and dagger escapades continued with so-called 2nd and 3rd generation members causing steadily diminishing mayhem until they officially ceased their activities on 20 April 1998. There are a number of ex-RAF members still living and working in Germany and attempts to unravel an accurate account of history of the Baader Meinhof Complex goes on.

Footnote

To gain further impressions of the film try the following sites for a variety of articles in ‘The Independent’ (a highly regarded UK broadsheet daily newspaper):

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/the-baader-meinhof-complex-uli-edel-149-mins-18-1020248.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-sixties-radicals-are-back-but-why-1021683.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/the-baader-meinhof-complex-18-1017556.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/is-baader-meinhof-film-a-tasteless-action-movie-941216.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/columnists/thomas-sutcliffe/tom-sutcliffe-the-urbane-power-of-alistair-cooke-1027364.html