The Oscar-nominated Baader Meinhof Complex is the latest German film on the Red ArmyFaction, following illustrious predecessors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation and VolkerSchloendorff’s Legends ofRita. Little wonder German filmmakersand writers have been so preoccupied with the subject. During the ’70s theFaction held their nation in a grip of ambivalent anxiety as they bombed,killed and kidnapped. Unlike the suicide terrorists of nowadays, their targetswere specificusually judges and prosecutors, captains of industry, Americansoldiers stationed in Germany.But in playing God with the lives of people they hated and dehumanized as“pigs,” they took other lives as well. Many Germans refused to wholeheartedlycondemn Baader-Meinhof, feeling they were making a valid point even if theviolence was increasingly disturbing.
Writer/producer Bernd Eichinger, whose lightlyfictionalized drama was adapted from an account by a one-time sympathizer, hasbeen accused of glamorizing Baader-Meinhof. In truth, the Gang glamorizedthemselves by playing to the media and treating revolution as avant-gardetheater, erasing the distinction between actor and audience with bombs and bullets.As a good storyteller, Eichinger’s contribution was to infuse the material withthe tense pulse of a cinematic thriller.
The Gang’s namesake, Andreas Baader, is depicted asa bigoted, misogynistic psychopath, a coddled child acting tough and pushinghis circle toward the grim, always-receding horizon of his bloodstained visionof Utopia. He rationalized his actions through an embrace of Marxism-Leninism,but he was closer to Clyde Barrow than Che Guevara, a reckless thrill killerwith a self-rationalizing ideology.
Ulrike Meinhof is the more fascinating of the pair,albeit, as the film shows, she was less Baader’s partner than Gudrun Ensslin, apastor’s daughter who came to value action over pious words. Meinhof began asan observer rather than a participant. As a columnist for a radical chicmagazine, she covered the inception of the youth revolt in Germany and wasdrawn by steps toward the fiery Baader and Ensslin. She made her final breakwith society, trading typewriter for tommy gun, during a gun battle in anoffice, slipping from behind her desk and escaping with the radicals through anopen window. She never turned back, even abandoning her children to anorphanage run by Palestinians allied with the Red Army Faction in the globalconfederacy of leftist radicals during the ’60s and ’70s.
The Palestinian militants, at whose camp the Factiontrained, viewed Baader-Meinhof as poseurssunbathing tourists on a dangerousholiday cruise. And yet, the Germans were determined to prove themselves asguerilla fighters, severing all ties of biology and affinity, becoming adysfunctional family unto themselves. To understand them, The Baader MeinhofComplex maintainsa running track of contemporary news footage from Vietnam and other trouble spots,and reminds us that the parents of the Baader-Meinhof generation were seen ascomplicit with Nazism. A kernel of genuine outrage at injustice coexisted witha lust for kicks. As the West German intelligence chief (played by the greatBruno Ganz) explains to his hardheaded colleagues, the Red Army Factioncontinued despite all setbacks because they possessed “a mythology.”
Unlike Hollywood,The Baader Meinhof Complex doesn’ttell us what to think or how to feel about the Red Army Faction. It allows theGang’s words and deeds to speak for itself and treats us as adults, capable ofdrawing our own conclusions.
The BaaderMeinhof Complex opens at the Downer Theatre onDec. 4.n
