Film review: The Baader Meinhof Complex

Film has the unique ability to re-create periods of history – and the stories of individuals caught up in them – that the mainstream too often forgets.

A tumultuous decade in German and indeed world history is vividly replayed in The Baader Meinhof Complex, directed by Uli Edel. The film is based on the book of the same name by journalist Stefan Aust, who also cowrote the script. Its cowriter and producer is Bernd Eichinger, who produced the controversial film The Downfall.

The bloody, ruthless stalemate between the IRA and the Unionists in Northern Ireland is still strong in the collective memory. But the decade after 1967 in West Germany, when radical leftists carried out bomb attacks and bank robberies, planted car bombs and assassinated public officials has all but faded outside of that country, perhaps paling into insignificance against the darker shadow of Nazism and the Holocaust, not to mention the rise of East Germany.

The Baader Meinhof Complex covers the events leading up to and stemming from the trials of three of the ring leaders of the instigators of this violence, the Red Army Faction. This militant left-wing group of ‘urban guerillas’ believed armed resistance was the only way to stop what it perceived as a repressive German state supporting aggressive US imperialism.

The film has caused controversy in Germany but was the country’s official submission for Best Foreign Language Film in this year’s Academy Awards.

The period of 1967-68 was one of instability and revolt worldwide. The Six Day War had further dispossessed Palestinians; all over Europe and in parts of South America students were protesting against government repression; in the US, opposition to the Vietnam War was intensifying as the war escalated. Young people everywhere were terrified of the prospect of nuclear war.

In West Germany, many Nazi sympathisers still held jobs in the universities and the government, leading to conservatism and repression. A radical student movement erupted throughout Germany, demanding government change and university reforms. Students were incensed by the role of the US in the Vietnam War and their country’s hosting of US bases. It was from the mass actions of this movement that the seeds of the RAF sprang.

Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck of Mostly Martha and The Lives of Others) is a left-wing columnist living a sixties lifestyle in Hamburg with her husband and two children. As the Shah of Iran and his wife prepare to make a state visit to West Germany, she writes an open letter to the Shah’s wife, protesting about mass poverty in Iran.

Soon afterwards, at a student protest against the visit of the Shah in Berlin, police and pro-Shah forces respond with brutal violence, sparking a series of events that will rock Germany for a decade.

In the wake of the student unrest that follows the protest, Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) and her bad-boy lover Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu of Run Lola Run and Munich) decide that direct action is the only effective way to end US involvement in the Vietnam War.

Their extreme actions put them on a collision course with the police, and Meinhof meets Ensslin when she interviews her in jail. Meinhof finds herself becoming convinced that her left-wing journalism maintains the status quo and she flees her husband to join the group in Berlin.

Her decision to join forces with Ensslin and Baader will change the course of West German, and indeed world, history.

The film records the downward moral trajectory of the RAF once it commits to violence, starting with burning buildings and, as a second and third generation more ruthlessly murderous than the first take up the struggle, progressing to a reckless lack of concern for the lives of civilians.

A hell of a lot happens: this economical film takes us from graphic scenes of a burning department store and a bank hold-up, to the 1977 hijacking of a Lufthansa passenger plane to force the release of RAF prisoners. The film is important for the patience and attention to detail with which it builds the story of this extraordinary time. It’s a graphically violent film, but the violence is there to underline the effects of the RAF’s tactics. It also reveals the roots of current terrorist actions.

These events are still an emotional and political minefield for German victims and the society as a whole, and the filmmakers have tried to be objective. The film plays out in semi-documentary style with a large amount of historical detail, with the violence ramping up to the point where catastrophe is piled on catastrophe.

In such a setting the attempt to offer psychological explanations for the motivations of the protagonists doesn’t always work. Bleibtreu’s character is the most successful; he plays Andreas as the childish, impulsive egocentric he seems to have been, prone to tantrums and as much masculinist rebel without a cause as he is committed revolutionary. Ensslin might appear a tad two-dimensional, but the film suggests that her rock-solid certainties come at least partly from the influence of her pastor father, who was as committed to human rights as he was to God.

Ulrike Meinhof is a more complex character and the film strains to make us understand how, with a solid career and a more settled life, she so quickly makes the switch from objective journalist to oddly disengaged participant. Although Gedeck skilfully portrays a woman who seems to have been opaque anyway, there wasn’t quite enough material for me to fully understand her motivations.

In some ways the film reminded me of Good Morning, Night, about the communist Red Brigades in Italy and their 1978 kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, president of the conservative Christian Democratic Party. But the aims of each film couldn’t be more different. Good Morning, Night doesn’t attempt to achieve historical objectivity; it’s much more interested in imagining the inner lives of the terrorists.

But my comparison may be superficial for other reasons. Both films conjure up another era that is seductive to us in both its similarities to and differences from our own. The Baader Meinhof Complex is impressive for its evocation of 1960s and 70s insouciance and rebel chic. The film deftly contrasts images, fashions, pop culture and superficially bohemian lifestyles of this time with the deadly conflicts being played out.

The presence of veteran actor Bruno Ganz as the police chief who seeks to understand the motivations of the terrorists conventionalises the film somewhat, bringing it towards a more sophisticated version of the good-versus-evil crime film genre. But he’s also there to humanise officialdom, and here it becomes rather odd and ironic that this kindly faced man played Hitler in The Downfall: we are still human beings, the film seems to be saying, no matter the evil we do.

Indeed the film maps out the genuine and sometimes extraordinary softening of officialdom and politics that occurred in the 1970s in many parts of the Western world. This was a time when governments negotiated with terrorists and some of the community even supported them: amazingly, at one point, one in four young people supported the RAF. And when left-winger Willy Brandt became chancellor of West Germany he acceded to some of the demands of the disaffected students.

This is also pertinent to the treatment of the RAF members once they were caught, both in prison and at their trial. We witness extremes of physical privation and comfort – they firstly suffer brutal force feeding and solitary confinement in cells where fluorescent lights are on all the time but, in the wake of their demands and community outrage, are allowed to mingle and visit each other’s large, comfortable cells as they prepare for their trial. Like other films that deal with the 1970s, I’m struck by how brief the swing to genuine permissiveness was, and how far the pendulum’s swung back.

Although you don’t need a full understanding of the era to appreciate the film, the sheer scale of events leaves many questions unanswered. I wanted to know more about the assassination victims: were some of them Nazi sympathisers? Were they the organs of a repressive state, or trying to uphold the institutions of a fragile democracy? Why did the advent of 1970s radical feminism, with its calls to separatism and non-violent direct action, appear to have had no impact on the RAF women?

But I think I’m being picky. The larger sweep of the film is about the unleashing of evil. Evil begets evil, no matter what your intentions. When you choose violent means, the cycle continues – this applies to the state, of course, as well as individuals. And indeed, the ultimate result of the RAF violence was to make West Germany a more repressive state in the name of national security.

The dramatic first scene, where well meaning protesters are cruelly bashed by police and Shah sympathisers, conjures up Russell Crowe in Gladiator as he prepares to lead Roman cavalry down a hill to defeat the waiting barbarians. ‘Unleash hell!’ he roars to his men.

And they do.

Verdict: an essential film for anyone interested in the recent history of the West