THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX: review

Rock and roll politics in 70s West Germany
THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX
Dir: Uli Edel / 2008

Uli Edel’s film is about the German Red Army Faction (RAF), an urban guerrilla organisation which grew out of the radical politics of 1968. Group members were largely middle class left wingers who, from the late sixties to the “German Autumn” of 1977, were responsible for actions that escalated from arson attacks on empty department stores in protest at the Vietnam War, to bank robberies, bombing campaigns on US military bases and finally to the assassination of key members of the German ruling class.

The organisation was also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, named after two of its more prominent members, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. Andreas Baader was a drifter and petty criminal. Ulrike Meinhof was a respected left wing journalist who worked for konkret, a left of centre magazine. The third prominent member of the Group was Gudrun Ensslin, a philosophy graduate and pastor’s daughter. In contrast to other terrorist groups of the time, women in the RAF were centre stage in the Group’s leadership.

The cataclysmic event in the film which radicalises a generation is the visit of the Shah of Persia to Berlin in 1967. During a peaceful demonstration protestors are brutally assaulted by pro-Shah demonstrators helped by the police. A student, Benno Ohnesorg, is shot dead. The policeman who shot him is later acquitted. Another catalyst is the assassination attempt in 1968 on student leader Rudi Dutschke. He was shot in the head by a far rightist, an event shown in graphic detail in the early part of the film. Dutschke never fully recovered and died of causes related to the injuries in 1979.

From then on the film is a rollercoaster ride of bombs, bullets and bank robberies. Edel conveys the mix of hedonism, anarchism, frustration and anger from which this Bonnie and Clyde style of West German terrorism arose. His approach is to cram everything he knows about the Baader-Meinhof years into a running time of two and a half hours. In doing so, he squanders the opportunity to fully develop the characters of the main protagonists and explain the group’s political ideas.

It is a sprawling seventies period drama that never pauses to consider individual motivation. It just ploughs through the gang’s robberies and assassinations, bullets flying left, right and centre – although mostly to the right.

In Germany there have been criticisms of the film as “terrorist chic”. The scene with Ensslin in a bath reading a volume of Trotsky in hand (surely unlikely reading for a Maoist!) and looking like a Playboy centrefold is just one example. The countless scenes of Baader – as Belmondo-style master of fag-in-mouth insolence, as sexist, ranting, anti-intellectual with hardly anything political behind his actions beyond a desire to shake up the establishment – add little to the film.

It is a film that is unsatisfactory on both a political and interpersonal level. Apart from peppering conversations with phrases like “fighting the oppressors” and “anti-imperialist” there is scant discussion of the motivation and tactics of the group. Unlike Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom, for example, there is no real dialogue in this film that develops a political theme or understanding.

As the film progresses, individuals who are already hazily defined, become even less important than their actions. At the beginning of the film Meinhof is torn between being a mother and revolutionary, vowing not to go anywhere without her two young daughters. Yet she later forfeits care of them without a murmur, electing to send them to an orphan’s camp run by the PLO where she will never see them again.

How did this happen? We are given no understanding. When arrested Meinhof breaks down and weeps but this is never explained or developed. Has she broken down as a person, is she disillusioned with the group’s politics?

In the same way the last part of the film examines the implosion of the group inside Stammheim prison. Ulrike Meinhof complains that her courtroom statements have been censored by her comrades but the reasons for this are obscure. The vicious arguments between her and Ensslin are never contextualised either.

What the film does convey is what a different world West Germany was in the seventies: apparently awash with easily accessible machine guns and explosives, supporters able to smuggle guns and ammunition into a high security Stammheim prison, cars easily driven inside US army bases with bombs aboard, industrialists kidnapped and state judges and prosecutors assassinated with relative ease.

It makes Al Qaida’s efforts in Europe look almost pathetic.

Of course, the major difference was that the Baader-Meinhof group tried to avoid attacking workers. It aimed its wrath, not at civilians, but at US and German state forces.

Who’d be a terrorist? The film is graphic in its depiction of the adrenalin rush of the bank robberies and kidnaps as well as the tedium of drifting from one safe house to another in the company of angry neurotics. There was an arrogance in the air as well: turning up in the middle of the night and expecting to take over people’s homes as “safe houses”.

This arrogance also appears in an entertaining sequence of the group’s time in a PFLP training camp in the Middle East. The “clash of cultures” that the film presents is an opportunity for more shots of beautiful naked Germans sunbathing on roofs, to the bemusement of the Palestinian guerrillas and the horror of their commanders.

In Stammheim Gudrun Ensslin talks of the gang’s “historical responsibility to act”. The film certainly explains how a group of young people could be led to take up arms against a repressive state. It also portrays the heady atmosphere of 1968 well, but it does not get to the core of their actions – a desire to shock a quiescent working class out of its torpor. Like the People’s Will terrorists in Russia in the late nineteenth century, the Baader-Meinhoff Group believed their actions would inspire rebellion, incite a revolutionary mood amongst the masses.

It had the opposite effect on the working class, pushing it to one side with ever more state repression and surveillance measures, isolating the far left and the RAF even more from the only class that could have led a real struggle against US imperialism and its collaborators – the working class.

The film does make the period in which the RAF flourished come alive for a new generation who might regard it as prehistoric. Its portrayal of the gang’s members is of young people who are raw and idealistic, trapped and inspired by the logic of their political beliefs.

However, the major flaw for the RAF was its isolation. It had no roots, or much contact, with ordinary workers and people. Its social make-up ensured that it started out as, and largely remained, an elitist organisation.

Linda Wilde

 

Mon 09, March 2009 @ 18:19