This is a longform review of the film The Baader-Meinhof Complex that I wrote shortly after it was released on DVD. I ran across it recently and was surprised to discover that, unlike how it sometimes goes with writings of your own that you return to later, I still stand by it completely and feel like I sort of hit the nail on the head here. Thus, reposted!
I spent an entire summer when I was in college researching left-wing terrorism in the ’60s and ’70s. This meant five or six hours a day in my school’s library, poring over every resource I could find that had even the most tenuous connection to the RAF, the Red Brigades, the Japanese Red Army, etc. I tried to put myself into the mindset of students who moved from staging protests and chanting slogans to planting bombs and taking hostages; I tried to understand the warped logic that led to grisly massacres such as the attack on Tel Aviv Airport in 1972. (If you played the last Call of Duty game, that attack is the closest real world corollary to—and the probable inspiration for—“No Russian.”)
My work had a particular emphasis on the Red Army Faction, who to me were always the most interesting group of the era. In some ways the RAF were unexceptional: they weren’t as politically potent as the Red Brigades or ETA, as bloodthirsty as the Japanese Red Army, or as psychedelically deranged as the Symbionese Liberation Army (of Patti Hearst kidnapping and brainwashing infamy). But the RAF personified the self-absorbed romanticism of the western “urban guerilla”, stretching an intellectually paper-thin justification over what was in reality a brutal crime spree. And the group’s charismatic, loudmouthed ringleader Andreas Baader (alongside Carlos the Jackal, who he resembled in a great many ways) is the closest the western New Left ever came to having its own homegrown Che Guevara.
As such, my interest was instantly piqued watching the 2009 Oscars, when I heard that a German film called The Baader-Meinhof Complex had been nominated for best foreign language film. I'd somehow missed this movie entirely, but the title alone announced the film’s historical credibility to me: it’s the name of the definitive book on the RAF, and the key source for my research paper. Written by a former Der Spiegel editor named Stefan Aust, Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex is an exhaustively detailed page turner chronicling the RAF phenomenon from the inside out, written by someone who was there. (Aust actually rescued Ulrike Meinhof’s orphaned daughters from a camp in Palestine, winning him death threats from the RAF in the process.)
Having finally seen the movie, I’m happy to say that it’s easily one of the most historically accurate films I’ve ever seen, while also managing to present a captivating yarn equal to the best thrillers. What impressed me most about the film was how perfectly the actors captured the outsized personalities of the figures in question. Martina Gedeck’s Ulrike Meinhof is the kind of engaged intellectual whose critical faculties fail her completely as she is swept in a wave of violent nihilism that she increasingly struggles to justify, both to herself and the world. As Gudrun Ensslin, Johanna Wokalek embodies the shrill, hectoring intransigence that veiled brutality in a cloak of dialectical rhetoric and self-righteousness.
But best of all is Moritz Bleibtreu, as the incomparable Andreas Baader. A surprisingly intelligent, sulky, and privileged mama’s boy, Baader was defined by his macho, anti-intellectual ferocity, dominating the group through sheer volume and bullying any dissenters into complying. While Meinhof and Ensslin both seemed to possess keener intellects than Baader, he commanded the RAF with bullying charisma and force of will, and Bleibtreu brings him to roaring, scenery-chewing life.
The film also captures the heightened atmosphere of the period perfectly, with the protest over the Shah of Iran’s visit to Berlin setting the stage for what is to come. The raw political theater of the street melee is removed from the dry accounts of newspaper archives and comes to bloody life before us; it’s as real as any battle in Lord of the Rings, and no goblin has ever seemed as menacing as the small group of smartly-dressed Iranian counter-demonstrators striding towards the barricades, snapping the handles off of their placards to use as clubs.
Inevitably, a film such as this will omit certain things, and as I mentally checked off each turning point in the RAF’s lifespan as it played out before me on screen, one major event was missing: Jean-Paul Sartre’s visit to Baader in prison. The decision here is understandable: attempting to present such a major historical personality so late in the film would risk derailing the story. But the event always stood out to me as a singular expression of the intellectual irresponsibility of Sartre and other European Communists who went to any length to apologize for atrocities committed on the road to socialism. Best of all was Baader’s estimation of the philosopher, who he said above all else gave “the overwhelming impression of age.”
In a welcome break from most films about the era, The Baader-Meinhof Complex uses period music only sparingly. When Baader and fresh recruit Peter-Jürgen Boock race down the highway to the strains of “My Generation”, the song suddenly seems fresh again—and it seems to say more about Baader’s ideological stance than any number of Frankfurt School theorists ever could.
The Baader-Meinhof Complex is an extremely graphic film, but it refuses to stylize any of its bloodshed. The violence is instead awkward and amateurish; none of the principals have been trained or conditioned to kill, but instead have chosen to, and the clumsy murders we see effectively convey the severity of the decision to “take up the gun.” At the same time, the film shows restraint, depicting the effects of the group’s actions mostly through montage and brief snatches of footage—effectively putting us into the RAF’s shoes, as they watched the fruits of their vicious labors on the evening news.
As viewers, we are left us with no easy answers. The film does not moralize, but largely because it does not need to; the RAF’s guns and bombs speak for themselves, defensible only to the most critically numb of fellow travelers. While it takes no more of an explicit stand on the issue of the first generation’s deaths at Stammheim prison than Aust’s book does, the implicit message is another story. We witness the despair over the “Dead Section” where the group is detained (in conditions that contemporary viewers raised on crime movies will likely find shockingly accommodating; the cells look more like studio apartments), and it’s hard not to see a group suicide as a fitting, final act of irrational aggression, striking out at the only target left to them.
The film ends with a sense of interruption, rather than closure. This is fitting, since the Stammheim suicides offered no closure for the families of the RAF’s victims, who didn’t even get the luxury of a verdict. And even as Baader and company are discovered dead in their cells, the next generation of the RAF—to say nothing of their contemporaries in groupls like the Red Brigades or the Weather Underground—still roamed free, plotting the next robbery, bombing, kidnapping, or hijacking. We are left with the familiar fact that terrorism didn’t die with the end of the ’70s and the ascent of neoliberalism, or even with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the purported “end of history”—it remains all too apparently with us today.
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