The Baader Meinhof Complex

dir Uli Edel

Viewed at the London Film Festival, Edel's controversial film finally opens across the UK. Based on Stefan Aust's book of the same name, this is the long-awaited cinematic telling of the campaign in the late 60s and 70s against the West German state by the Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader Meinhof Gang, which resulted in firebombings, assassinations and several questionable deaths in German prisons.

Onscreen this becomes a lot of smoking, shooting and yelling with the odd anti-US slogan but little coherent vision, either for the group or the film. At the end, the transgressors die, and so the morality is quite conventional.

Much has been said as to whether the film glamourises terrorism and cultivates a cult of personality around such figures as Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu), Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck), and Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek), the three leading figures in the film. More on that later.

For me, there is a huge void at the centre of the film and that is Ulrike Meinhof. As portrayed by Gedeck (marvellous in The Lives of Others), Meinhof is tentative, anxious, indecisive and held in no great esteem by the rest of the group, who consider her bourgeois. She has so little presence and appears so passive, that one wonders how she came to be a figurehead: she displays no leadership qualities whatsoever. What she does contribute, as a recognised left-wing journalist with access to the media, is good PR: her typed missives gain a following for the RAF. In short she is the PR mouthpiece rather than leader.

The driving force within the RAF rather seems to rest with the power couple of Baader and Ensslin. Here is a symbiotic relationship, with Baader's adolescent swagger egged on by Ensslin's revolutionary fervour combining to form zealotry. At times they are a comical duo, with him purring "Baby" to her and the two cuddling in strategy meetings or in prison.

Baader and Meinhof have very little interaction, other than him bellowing at her when she suggests more planning in their actions and her responding with a baleful stare. One waits in vain for her to assert herself in the film, and she strikes a rather pitiful figure, as if she can't understand how this terrorism thing happened to her. Most odd. In fact, Ensslin and Meinhof display more chemistry---their dynamic ranges from mutual suspicion to camaraderie to betrayal, with the two squabbling in prison like an old married couple, while the men look on, bemused.

As for Baader, he is invested by Bleibtreu with a lot of gusto, charisma and ridiculous bravado, brandishing a cigar as he plays to the gallery in his first trial. Early in the film, as he swaggers around in his leather jacket, driving at excessive speeds and firing a pistol out of the car window, one senses his role model is Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless. Indeed, in Jürgen Teipel's book, Verschwende deine Jugend, one finds that a lot of German punks identified with Baader and that he sought inspiration from Belmondo's role in Pierrot le Fou.

Ironic, then, that 31 years after his death he finally becomes a leading man. But Baader comes across as a bit of a buffoon. A quintessential alpha male, he expresses himself by throwing chairs and torrents of verbal abuse rather than any reasoned arguments or political theory, in a manner more Basil Fawlty than Che Guevara. Casually peppering his antagonists with racist and homophobic slurs and posturing arrogantly, he offers no coherent explanation for his actions. The film is, in fact, remarkably lacking in providing a theoretical framework for the group's actions, with the exception of tiny extracts from Meinhof's tracts.

The participation by women in RAF remains a fascination. That so many women were drawn to a terrorist group and achieved leading positions is unusual. The film depicts many women coming and going, but Astrid, Ingrid, Petra, Susanne, et al are indistinguishable and their motivations remain unexplored, which is a pity.

The exception comes two thirds of the way through the film when a key figure suddenly appears: Brigitte Mohnhaupt (Nadja Uhl), who becomes the new leader of the second wave of the RAF. Released from prison, she quickly arranges a sexual assignation and then sets about planning the next stage of the group's activities. Her steely determination and efficiency in martialling the troops are in stark contrast to the ineptitude of the first wave, whose leaders managed to get arrested for breathtakingly stupid lapses. Mohnhaupt is quite a striking figure, and the actress bears a disconcerting resemblance to Nico. Should a biopic ever get made on the singer's life (and why hasn't that happened?), surely Uhl would be a leading candidate.

If the film does provide opportunities to glamourise the RAF leader, it also shows the cost of the group's actions, with gory, bloody, bullet-ridden assassinations depicted, balanced by police brutality and an attempted assassination of student leader Rudi Dutschke. The message seems to be: violence begets violence.

Dutschke's shooting in 1968 is an interesting inclusion. Not a member of the RAF, he is shown as inspiring many youth to protest against the Vietnam War and there is a long sequence showing his attacker stalking, confronting and shooting him several times. Blood spurting from his mouth from several wounds, Dutschke stumbles, falls and appears an absolute goner, but miraculously survives and promptly disappears from the film until much later on when he appears at the funeral of Holger Meins, an RAF member who died on hunger strike.

That draws a parallel with the other particularly graphic scene: the force-feeding of Meins in prison. If one duty of the state is to give everyone a fair trial, provide representation and to protect them in custody, then clearly it fails in this instance. By including this scene, the film attempts to recognise the humanity of people, no matter their extreme ideology and to suggest that nobody deserves to be treated with such brutality. This message is especially timely, given that it is considered acceptable for states to hold suspects for indeterminate time without charge or trial. Equally trenchant is a police investigator hunting the RAF suggesting that those in power must change the conditions that lead to terrorism.

The Baader Meinhof Complex provides few insights into what turns political activists into terrorists, being more interested in action than motivation. As such, it is dramatic, powerful, violent and gripping. But the question asked so many years ago by Marianne Faithfull in "Broken English" remains unanswered: what are you fighting for?

The Baader Meinhof Complex opens in the UK on 14 November.

Baader's Angels Preview

ICA, London
6-10 December

Coming up at the ICA in London is the intriguingly (if irreverently) titled film series, Baader's Angels, looking at the role of women in the German terrorist group Red Army Faction (aka Baader-Meinhof Gang). The series covers some 30 years of work made by German directors such as Schlöndorff, von Trotta, Fassbinder and Kluge.

Coming 30 years after the notorious Deutscher Herbst and in the current political climate in which terrorism is an omnipresent buzzword, the programme is a timely arrival. I emailed curator Pamela Jahn for some comment on it. Our exchange follows.

Kunstblog: I wanted to know why you picked this topic and what the themes were that linked the films.

Pamela Jahn: Marking 30 years since the deaths of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe in Stammheim Prison in October 1977, I wanted to look back at the history of the RAF, the German Autumn and the events of that time, but not simply as a historical retrospective of what happened back then. I was interested in finding a different angle or perspective and, at the same time, I wanted to look at more recent attempts of filmmakers dealing with this topic - especially after the reunification of Germany.

On the one hand, it is striking to see the number of women who were part of the RAF, not just the leaders Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin, but many other young women. On the other hand, while researching the films, it was striking to see the great number of films which concentrate on female protagonists and the role women have played in the revolutionary struggle -- direct and indirect, politically and personally.

Given the striking number of female members of the RAF, this season revolves around questions of the roots and potential paths of women’s resistance and revolt as explored in many of the films about the RAF and German terrorism. Though some of the films are made in the 70s and responding to the paranoid political climate in West Germany 30 years ago they still feel timelier than many films made today, especially in regard to the world's current political situations.

KB: It seems to me the films look at individual stories, mostly fictional, but do not address the question of what drew women into terrorism.

PJ: By choosing these films, I am trying to create a space between both fiction and reality, that encourages people to think and to get their own idea about the whys and wherefores. Although all five films of the season have west German terrorism in common as a central theme, they do not all adopt the same position but offer a honest portrayal of the West German crisis in the 1970s and 1980s, or use their engagement with the past to suggest subtly different analyses of personal and state histories, and the role women have played in the revolutionary struggle, both politically and personally.

An idea of the atmosphere of fear, hysteria and public denunciation which was whipped up at the time, and of the role that the conservative, self-censoring media (yellow press) played in this, can be re-experienced through The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum. The film is directed by both Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta who give the film a documentary feel though the story itself is fictional (the film is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Heinrich Böll).

What is also interesting is the comparison between this earlier film by Schlöndorff and The Legends of Rita, made in 2000. In Katharina Blum you see a woman who came into contact with a terrorist but is not actually one herself. In The Legends of Rita, Rita is actually a terrorist. She is seduced into the terrorist movement through her sense of justice and she’s been involved in violent action. You would almost think that Rita is a kind of composite of various female members of the RAF. There are elements in her character that come from the real life of female members of the RAF. For example, in Rita’s story there are echoes of the life of Inge Viett, a member of the RAF who took refuge in East Germany to escape prosecution in the West and whose life is documented in detail in the documentary Greater Freedom - Lesser Freedom.

Christian Petzold’s film The State I Am In is less about history than about public memory in Germany today, which shows no sign of having resolved the social contradictions that led to terrorist violence in the 1970s. The film centers on the life of Jeanne, a teenage girl who is leading an underground existence with her former terrorist parents. For Jeanne ideological struggle has become a kind of banal reality, something that is obstructing her need to engage with the social reality around her. What remains in this film, which has won wide acclaim as one of the most powerful and controversial German films in the years since reunification, is the complex question of the personal and the political: the original German title Die Innere Sicherheit demonstrates the independence of the political (state security) and the psychological (the inner security, stable identity).

Baader's Angels runs 6-10 December at the ICA, London. The films are: Germany in Autumn (DEUTSCHLAND IM HERBST); The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (DIE VERLORENE EHRE DER KATHARINA BLUM); The State I Am In (DIE INNERE SICHERHEIT); The Legends of Rita (DIE STILLE NACH DEM SCHUSS); Greater Freedom - Lesser Freedom
(GROSSE FREIHEIT - KLEINE FREIHEIT). For further details please see www.ica.org.uk.