"Baader-Meinhof" shoots its way onto American screens
Downright diabolical:
Moritz Bleibtreu and Johanna Wokalek as
terrorist lovebirds Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin
WAS WESTERN INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY in the late 1960s and early 1970s really just inches away from a return to open fascism? The very notion sounds quaint today, even absurd. And yet those years saw the rise of a generation of idealists who were prepared to give their lives – and take as many others with them as they needed – to prevent this scenario from occurring. This is the backdrop to Bernd Eichinger’s Oscar-nominated film The Baader-Meinhof Complex, which is finally opening in American cinemas.
In West Germany the situation seemed dire enough. Nazi war criminals walked the streets in freedom and several of them held high posts in government and industry. The young democracy was making sweetheart deals with Third World dictators, such as the Shah of Iran. Germany’s supposed liberator and ally, the United States, was napalming civilians in Vietnam. “The Jews” were in the process of transforming themselves from victims into “imperialists” by occupying the West Bank. Through all of this, the German population was being progressively dumbed down by trashy pop culture and materialism. Could the Fourth Reich be far behind?
This time around, the younger generation didn’t want to get caught supporting the wrong side. Ulrike Meinhof, an ambitious left-wing journalist and frustrated housewife, shared the outrage of millions of other “Nazi children” when the student Benno Ohnesorg was shot to death by a West Berlin policeman during a demonstration against a state visit by the “fascist” Shah. Soon afterward the revolutionary Rudi Dutschke was gunned down by an anti-communist assassin. When the charismatic terrorist couple Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin – the Bonnie and Clyde of the Beetles generation – captured the headlines by exploding bombs in two Frankfurt department stores, Meinhof knew she had found her true calling.
The Baader-Meinhof Complex shows all of this and more. In fact, it shows pretty much the entire story, from 1967 to 1977. It goes on to present Baader’s and Ensslin’s arson trial, Baader’s subsequent liberation with Meinhof’s assistance, their training in a Palestinian terror camp in Jordan, the Red Army Faction’s terror spree across Germany, their ultimate arrest and interminable public trial, and the rise of the so-called second and third generations of their movement. These new and exponentially more violent groups transformed the “revolution” from the RAF’s original “anti-fascist” struggle against the Federal Republic’s capitalist order into an increasingly single-minded and desperate effort to extort the release of Baader, Meinhof, and Ensslin themselves. This de facto civil war culminated in a bloody attack on the German embassy in Stockholm, the kidnapping of industrialist Hans-Martin Schleyer, and the legendary hijacking of a Lufthansa airliner by Palestinian terrorists.
Producer Eichinger and director Uli Edel based their two and a half hour-long epic on journalist Stefan Aust’s bestseller of the same title (a longer version will be broadcast on German TV in late 2009). It is by far Germany’s most ambitious film production to date, making use of 140 locations in Germany, Italy, and Morocco, and 123 speaking roles. It also brings together some of Germany’s finest acting talent, particularly Martina Gedeck as an alarmingly masochistic Meinhof, “bad-boy” actor Moritz Bleibtreu as Baader, and a suitably sociopathic Johanna Wokalek as Ensslin. It also offers a horrifically icy performance by Nadja Uhl as the assassin Brigitte Mohnhaupt.
Official North American movie poster
The film has only one clear hero (depending on your point of view, of course): Horst Herold, head of the Federal Criminal Police Office, Germany’s version of the FBI (played by Swiss star Bruno Ganz, who played an equally impressive Hitler in Downfall). He is not only efficient in his anti-terrorist campaign, but is also the sole voice of reason. While his colleagues fantasize about crushing the RAF and clamping down on the entire society – i.e. establishing the “fascist” regime the RAF had been warning about – Herold seeks to understand what motivated the terrorists in the first place and does everything he can to avoid transforming their warped idealism into a modern myth. Parallels to today's “war on terror” are hardly coincidental.
Eichinger made authenticity his highest priority. 1970s Germany comes alive again. Whenever possible he recreated dialogues word for word and filmed many scenes at their original locations.
The film provoked powerful reactions when it came out in Germany last year. The wounds of the past are still too fresh for many viewers. While I never had any experience with the Baader-Meinhof Gang myself, the film gave even me a tiny frisson of recognition. I had been a student in southern Germany in the early 1980s, when the RAF was still a force to be reckoned with and had many sympathisers among the student body (it only formally dissolved itself in 1998). Wanted posters hung in every post office. Supporters hung up banners denouncing the prisoners’ “isolation torture” and demanding their release (competing with neo-Nazi placards demanding the release of Hitler’s henchman Rudolf Hess from Spandau prison). During my stay, an RAF group held up a bank in a nearby village, shooting the teller dead. Around the same time, terrorists planted a bomb at a nearby American tank base. The bomb went off early, killing the terrorists. I later learned that these RAF members had been living in the dormitory right across from mine. The fire extinguisher they used as a bomb casing had been stolen from that building. A friend of mine saw the contents of just such a fire extinguisher sprayed out on the lawn one morning, just days before the bombing. Watching this film brought those days back to me like no other.
When all of this is combined with non-stop action of the Terminator variety, the film is utterly overwhelming - too overwhelming for many critics. The most common objections are that the film tries to do far too much in too little time, providing no explanation and even less analysis of the events it depicts. Many reviewers have complained that the film provides no new information or interpretations and that it glamorizes a group of marauding sociopaths (“hot girls in miniskirts carrying machine guns”). Finally, many have accused the film of trivializing the RAF’s victims and refusing to take a clear moral stance.
Responding to the charge of vagueness, Eichinger told the newsweekly Der Spiegel that “People reveal themselves through their deeds. The decisive thing is that they do it, not why.” The film clearly depicts the terrorists as psychopaths and ethical train wrecks. Bleibtreu’s Baader and Wokalek’s Ensslin are downright diabolical. (One of the film’s most memorable lines comes from Baader, who tells an exasperated Palestinian trainer in Jordan: “Screwing and shooting are the same.”) Baader's utter inability to recognize how he is progressively turning into precisely the sort of fascist mass murderer he claims to despise is practically a running gag throughout the film. There is nothing to admire here, except perhaps for the terrorists' taste in clothes and (stolen) cars. This refusal to pass out cheap judgements recalls Eichinger’s 2004 film Downfall, which chronicles Hitler’s last days in the bunker. In both films Eichinger has chosen to lay out the facts and let the audience decide for themselves.
A natural born killer:
Nadja Uhl as RAF assassin Brigitte Mohnhaupt
This parallel is not the only similarity to Downfall. In fact, the two blockbusters almost seem like two episodes of a longer series. This is not least due to the fact that the films share many of the same actors. Other parallels include the cult of personality that develops around two clearly insane male leaders (Hitler and Baader), the extreme radicalization of the two movements, and above all the surreal and suicidal bunker environment, which in Baader-Meinhof now takes the form of the special ward of Stammheim Prison, where the terrorists attempt (with remarkable success) to continue stage managing their revolution from behind bars by means of smuggled messages and secret codes.
Yes, Baader-Meinhof does try to do too much too fast, and it does so with glee. But there’s always time to go back and read up on the details. For those genuinely interested in the origins and consequences of terrorism, there is no better introduction than this.
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No, Americans overseas were at considerable of a hazard, all this long time gone, between the end of the Vietnam War until the bombing of the USS Cole. The occasional hijack, or airline bombing; all that was just a sad case of being in the wrong place, or on the wrong flight at the wrong time. American military and state department employees could never, ever draw that cosy illusion around themselves like a fluffy comforter, thanks to the constant trickle of incidents such as these I have listed. Since most of the victims were military or diplomatic personnel stationed overseas, bad things happened to them without anyone much noticing, save their family and friends in their home-towns. It made a depressingly long list, here duplicated. I was reminded of all this, because this weekend was the anniversary of the bombing of the Marine Barracks in Lebanon.
Item: 30 May, 1972. Members of the Japanese Red Army Faction, acting on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, open fire at Ben Gurion Airport, killing 26 and wounding 78. Many of them are American citizens from Puerto Rico
Item: 2 March 1973. Two American diplomats are taken hostage and murdered by at the US Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan; it is thought members of the Fatah faction were responsible, and that PLO leader Yassir Arafat gave the order for the murders.
Item: 23 December 1975 : Richard Welch, the CIA Station chief in Athens is murdered in front of his house by the Greek N17 terrorist group.
Item: 11 August 1976. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine attacks the El Al terminal at the airport in Istanbul, Turkey. An American citizen is among the 4 killed.
Item: 1 January, 1977. The ambassador to Lebanon and the US Economic counselor are kidnapped by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine at a checkpoint in Beirut, and later murdered.
Item: 4 November 1979. A radical Islamic student faction seized the US Embassy in Tehran, and hold 66 diplomats and American citizens hostage. Thirteen are released, but the others are held until January of 1981.
Item: 17 December 1981: Italian terrorist group “Red Brigades” kidnaps a senior US army officer in Italy, BG. James Dozier; he is rescued by Italian police forces.
Item: 19 August 1982. Two American citizens are killed when the PLO bombs a Jewish restaurant in Paris, France.
Item: 18 April 1983. A truck-bomb kills 68 at the US Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. Hizbollah, with backing from Iran is held responsible.
Item: 23 October 1983. A truck bomb destroys US Marine HQ in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 241 Marines. Hizbollah, apparently with the assistance of Syrian intelligence, and Iranian financing.
Item: 21 January-20 September 1983. In Beirut, Lebanon, the president of the American University (an American citizen) is assassinated. The head of the CNN news bureau is kidnapped, but escapes. A political officer from the US embassy is also kidnapped, but he was never released, and his body never found. A suicide bomb on the US Embassy killed 23. A van full of explosives detonated near the US Embassy annex in Aukar, Lebanon kills 2 Americans and a number of local employees and bystanders.
Item: 15 November 1983. The head of the Joint US Military Aid Group-Greece, US Navy Captain George Tsantes, along with his Greek driver is murdered on his way to work by the terrorist group N-17.
Item: 3 April 1984. A US Army NCO, Robert Judd is attacked while driving between JUSMAGG and the American air base at Hellenikon by the terrorist group N-17. He is injured, but survives.
Item: 12 April 1984. A popular restaurant near Torrejon AB, Spain is bombed. 18 US service members are killed. Hisbollah, again.
Item: 4 December 1984. Hisbollah hijacks a Kuwait Airlines flight en route from Dubai to Karachi. Two American passengers are murdered.
Item: 2 February 1985. Bobby’s in Glyphada, a bar popular with American service personnel in Athens is blown up with a small suitcase bomb. No one is killed, but many injuries.
Item: 14 June 1985. TWA Flight 847, from Athens to Rome was hijacked by Hisbollah. A US Navy diver returning from a TDY was murdered and his body dumped on the runway.
Item:8 August 1985. A car loaded with explosives is driven into a busy parking lot at the American base at Rhein-Main, and detonated. Two are killed, twenty injured. The Red Army Faction claims credit. It is thought the murder of an American soldier several days previous was done to secure his ID card, and facilitate moving the car bomb onto a guarded installation.
Item: 7 October 1985. The cruise- ship Achille Lauro was hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. They threw an elderly disabled American man into the ocean. His wheelchair was thrown in afterwards.
Item: 27 December 1985. Terrorists from the Abu Nidal organization shoot up the El Al offices at Rome’s international airport. Seven Americans were among the 87 killed and wounded.
Item: 30 March 1986: A bomb exploded on a TWA Rome/Athens flight. Four Americans were killed, although the aircraft landed safely in Athens. The Fatah group was held responsible.
Item: 19 June 1985. Four off-duty Marines assigned to the American Embassy in San Salvador are murdered by local terrorists, while sitting at a table at a sidewalk café. They were in civilian clothes at the time.
Item: 5 April 1986. An explosion at a nightclub in Berlin popular with American service personnel kills three and injures 191. Two of the dead and 41 of the wounded are service personnel. The Libyan government is held responsible.
Item: 5 September 1986. Abu Nidal terrorists hijack a Karachi/Frankfurt Pan Am flight, and divert it to Cypress, demanding the freedom for three convicted murderers in exchange for the lives of the passengers. They eventually kill 22 of them, including two Americans.
Item: 9 September-21 October 1986: Three American citizens, two of them associated with the American University in Beirut are kidnapped. Two of them are held for 5 years by Hisbollah.
Item: 20 October 1987. An Air Force NCO and a retiree are murdered just outside Clark AB, in the Philippines.
Item: 27 December 87. An American civilian employee is killed in the bombing of the USO Club in Barcelona, Spain.
Item: 17 February 1988: Colonel William Higgins, USMC, while serving as part of the United Nations Truce Supervisory Organization in Lebanon, was abducted by Hisbollah. The US refused to negotiate, and Colonel Higgins was excecuted.
Item: 28 June 1988, a defense attaché to the American Embassy in Athens, US Navy Captain William Nordeen is murdered by the N-17 terrorist group, using a car bomb
Item: 21 December 1988. Pan American Flight 103, from Frankfurt to New York, was blown up over Scotland by agents of the government of Libya. Most of the 259 passengers are Americans. Another 11 people are killed on the ground.
Item: 21 April- 26 September 1989. An American army officer is assassinated in Manila, and two military retirees are murdered just outside the gates of Clark AB, the Philippines.
Item: 13 May 1990. Two young enlisted men are found murdered, outside Clark AB, the Philippines.
Item: 7-18 February 1991: Members of a far-leftist Turkish group kill an American civilian contractor at Incirlik AB, and wound an Air Force officer at his home in Izmir.
Item: 12 March 91: Air Force NCO, Ronald Stewart is killed by a car bomb in front of his house, in Athens, by the N-17 group.
Item: 28 October 1991. An American soldier is killed, and his wife wounded by a car bomb at a joint Turkish-American base in Ankara. The Turkish Islamic Jihad claims responsibility. at October 28, 1991, Ankara, Turkey. Victor Marwick, an American soldier serving at the Turkish-American base, Tuslog, was killed and his wife wounded in a car bomb attack. Two more car bombs in Istanbul kill an Air Force NCO, and an Egyptian diplomat. The Turkish Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Item: 5 July 1992. In a series of incidents in southeastern Turkey, the Kurdish PKK kidnaps 19 Western tourists, including one American. They are all eventually released unharmed.
Item: 26 February 1993. A bomb in a café in downtown Cairo kills three. Two Americans are among the injured.
Item: 8 March 1995 Two gunmen armed with AK-47s open fire on a van belonging to the US Consulate in Karachi, Pakistan. Two embassy staffers are killed, one injured.
Item: 4 July 1995. A Kashmiri militant group takes six tourists, including two Americans hostage, demanding the release of Muslim militants held in Indian prisions. One of the Americans escapes, and the militants execute a Norwegian hostage. Both the American and Indian governments refuse to deal. It is assumed the rest of the hostages were killed in 1996 by their captors.
Item: 13 November 1995. A car bomb in the parking lot of a building that houses a US military advisory group in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia kills seven person, five of them American citizens.
Item: 25 June 1996. An explosive-laden fuel truck explodes outside the Khobar Towers housing facility in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. 19 American military personnel are killed, and 515 persons are injured. A group identified as the Saudi Hizbollah is held responsible.
Item: 12 November 1997. Four American employees of an oil company and their Pakistani driver are murdered by two unidentified gunmen, as they leave the Sheraton Hotel in Karachi, Pakistan.
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Item: 7 August 1998. Car bombs explode at the US Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, and at the US Embassy in Dar es Sala’am, Tanzania. 292 are killed in Nairobi, including 12 Americans and injured over 5,000. The Dar es Sala’am explosion kills 11 and injures 86. Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network claims responsibility.
Item: 28 December 1998. Sixteen tourists, including two Americans are kidnapped in Yemen. One hostage and a Yemeni guide escaped, and four hostages were later killed when local authorities closed in.
Item: 12 October 2000. A small boat laden with explosives rammed the USS Cole. The explosion kills 13 sailors and injures 33.
A day or so after 9/11, a State department employee mused on a Slate thread, that well, now everyone else knew what it was like to live with the threat, and the aftermath of terrorist acts. Everyone else on the thread immediately jumped all over him for inappropriate schadenfreude, but my daughter and I rather agreed. 9/11 was huge, was horrendous… but in a way, to some of us, it was already something familiar. We had already been there, for a long, long time.
And about Private Edward Pimentel? He was a young soldier, disco-hopping and having a good time. He was seen leaving a club with a young woman who was later identified as a member of the Red Army Faction. His body was found within a day or so; it was noted in the military newspaper Stars & Stripes, that he was murdered specifically for his military ID card, which may have been used by the Red Army Faction to get a car bomb into a well-guarded Rhein-Main AB in 1985.
I was only 10 years old in April 1977 when federal public prosecutor Buback was murdered yet remember the gloomy atmosphere in Western Germany, with terrorists hitting now and then (the parents of one of them, whose name I forgot, lived only a few houses from us in Hamburg in a very luxurious villa) and the Warsaw Pact just on the other side of the border.
I once saw then-chancellor Helmut Schmidt from only a few meters away in 1979 when he came to visit his friend, the writer Siegfried Lenz, then a neighbour of ours; Schmidt seemed to bear a tremendous burden on his shoulders, he looked like an old man, walking with slow, heavy steps. Almost nobody is worshipped today in Germany as Schmidt is, and nobody wants to be brought into circumstances to take the kind of decisions he had to take.
A few years later, my father bought the "Baader-Meinhof Complex" by Stefan Aust, one of the most famous and long-lived German political books, now completely revised in 2007. I do not know to what extent the RAF changed Germany, but the added fear certainly helped tie the FRG to the "West".
There are many paradoxes. One of them is: Much of the radical movement began with the murder of student Benno Ohnesorg in 1967. But only 2009 it was revealed that the policeman who shot him, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was not the extreme right guy we all had been thinking he was but that in fact he then worked with or for the Eastern German "Staatssicherheit". Very strange times they were indeed. Many facts still rest in locked archives. Even Buback's son still does not know who actually killed his father and is currently in the media because he wants to know.
Stellaa, 68'ers are "Achtundsechziger" in German. You are proficient with the Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte, so I know you can pronounce that without flinching.
I'm looking forward to the film.
Oh, yes I remember all that very well - police with machine guns jaunting around airports and public buildings. The U.S. consulate in Frankfurt was an armed camp (a bomb had gone off a few weeks before my visit there in the mid-1980s). It's funny, though - I walked past the American and British embassies on my way home from work this evening and realized that they once more look like armed camps. It was an ironic feeling.
The silver lining to this film is that German society did survive all this violence and hatred intact and probably even stronger by finally learning how to react sensibly to dangerous but hardly existential terror threats. I think that's the true "moral" of the film that so many critics seem to miss.
i am reminded of the boogeymen of my youth: geronimo and others who resisted manifest destiny. we all had a good time hating them in the saturday movie matinees. they were monsters. and indeed, they didn't fight fair, and they didn't confine their bad manners to the long knives, either.
but geronimo and baader were willing to fight, while 'family men' never were. when the odds are long, the issue survival against a remorseless enemy, it is easy to see why a 'desperado' mentality would emerge.
and the nazis won: they live in washington now, at the ministry of love, as we will soon come to know the cia complex.
But even with all the badnes, in the form of terrorism that the Badder Meinhoff did, at least these young people were doing something besides tuning out like the present gerneration seems to be doing. Blame their lack of action on there being no draft, but I remember when Medicare was on the table that it was the young who spured it on.
I guess this is part of the mythology of my youth.
Thanks for your comment, which helps to underscore just how fascinating this story is. Here's an anecdote you'll like: The actual story starts at the University of Munich in early 1943. Baader's father was a young historian there who attended an unprecedented student demonstration against the local Nazi party boss. (The group around Hans and Sophie Scholl were encouraged by this uprising to launch their ill-fated leaflet action.) Some time later, Baader Sr. told his wife that he too wanted to help overthrow Hitler. She sat this upright family man down and told him that he would do no such thing. After all, if he did and he got caught, what would become of poor new-born Andreas? So Baader Sr. kept his mouth shut, played by the rules, and later vanished without a trace along with hundreds of thousands of other doomed soldiers on the Russian Front.
Today we all know what became of poor new-born Andreas...
Sgt Mom, recall that the Khobar Towers bombing followed the Beiruit bombing in that it was a dumb error to quarter so many men in such a bomb-able space. And that after the Beiruit bombing Reagan et al lobbed VW-big sized shells over the city at random. Quite the strategy.
Actually quite a few items on your list are false-flag operations... the Cole was bombed with an explosive which only the US and Israel had... oh well. Probably not important...
I try to keep the long game in mind, but I always end up questioning this given that the long game costs far more innocent lives than the overnight coup. Surely there is some previously undiscovered path that requires neither the abandonment of those principles/actions required for the foundation of a just society nor the sacrifice of so many individual lives over the centuries while the long game plays out? One can dream.
I don't normally watch movies with overt violence, but after reading this post I simply had to. The splice in of old footage from the 60s and 70s was great. The amazing lead actors and fascinating view of underground culture had me completely hooked.
Ulrike Meinhof's story was particularly gripping.
I am so glad I watched this. Thanks for the post, and for your blog--it is one of the most unique I've read.