Baader Meinhof Complex

“Baader Meinhof Complex” by Uli Edel is a complex, riveting film about a group of six young Germans who set out to change West Germany; they succeeded, though not in the way they dreamed of doing, thus setting in motion one of the biggest antiterrorist manhunts in modern history and leaving behind a bitter legacy.

This is German filmmaker Uli Edel’s most interesting film and was nominated for the Golden Globe award as well the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. His previous credits include Last Exit from Brooklyn and Body of Evidence. ‘Baadder Meinhof Complex’ is based on the 1985 book by the same name by West German journalist Stefan Aust, who later became editor of the magazine Der Spiegel. He did exhaustive research before writing this definitive account of what the German press nicknamed the ‘Baader Meinhof gang.’ Aust covered the terrorist group’s activities as a young reporter and even went into hiding at one point after receiving death threats.

The Baader-Meinhof gang, or the Red Army Faction (RAF) as it officially called itself, revolved around three young radicals – Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Holger Meins. The fourth leading member, Ulrike Meinhof, was a mainstream journalist and a left-wing intellectual from a relatively welloff background. As the film starts, we see her with her family on a nudist beach. That’s 1967, when Germany was divided into two and the Western part becomes affluent once again. But its young left wing radicals who are increasingly malcontent. Young hotheads like Andreas Baader call the country the ‘Raspberry Reich’ and claim that many politicians and bureaucrats are ex-Nazis who once served Adolf Hitler. On June 2, 1967, during a visit by the Shah of Iran and his wife to West Gemany, protesters were attacked viciously by agents of the Iranian secret police (SAVAK) posing as pro-Shah Iranians. They were supported by the West German police, and a 26-year West German student was killed by a bullet.

In 1968, things turn grimmer, as Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ennslin bomb a Frankfurt shopping mall in protest against the Vietnam War. This was the opening salvo of what was to become the RAF. Ulrike Meinhof is shown in the film as a reporter at the scene of violence. This is her first introduction to urban violence by the radical young as a retaliatory measure.

Baader and Ensslin were arrested and convicted on arson charges. Badder skips bail and escapes, but is re-captured. The group now plans to free him from jail. By now, Ulrike Meinhof is sympathetic to her cause. The film shows her husband being unfaithful to her, which prompts her to leave home with her two girls. Whether this had anything to do with her definitive break with society is not clear. But she became the key figure in the plan to free Baader, which succeeds. With that action, she voluntarily becomes a terrorist.

The film, while faithfully chronicling the RAF’s early successes, its shock tactics followed by gradual decimation as West Germany virtually becomes a police state in reaction to the threat, stays away from a lackluster documentary style of story-telling. It surges on like a thriller, revealing that the group’s female members were as energetic and violent as the males when it comes to murder and kidnapping. The best sequences include the killing of a senior West German police official and the kidnapping of industrialist Hans-Martin Scheyer (a former SS officer) in which women play a prominent role.

But the film never degenerates into a Hollywoodstyle thriller where violence is meant to be entertaining, though it could have easily done so, given the personality of the handsome Baader. As Stefan Aust wrote in his book: “The Baader-Meinhof Gang drew a measure of support that violent leftists in the United States, like the Weather Underground, never enjoyed. A poll at the time showed that a quarter of West Germans under forty felt sympathy for the gang and one-tenth said they would hide a gang member from the police. Prominent intellectuals spoke up for the gang’s righteousness (as) Germany even into the 1970s was still a guilt-ridden society. When the gang started robbing banks, newscasts compared its members to Bonnie and Clyde. (Andreas) Baader, a charismatic, spoiled psychopath, indulged in the imagery, telling people that his favourite movies were Bonnie and Clyde, which had recently come out, and the Battle of Algiers. The pop poster of Che Guevara hung on his wall, (while) he paid a designer to make a Red Army Faction logo, a drawing of a machine gun against the red star.”

Balancing a true-to-facts approach with a sympathetic attitude to the gang’s raison d’etre though not the actual violence, the film surges on at a frenetic pace but gives us time to think. “Baby, this is getting out of hand,” Ensslin tells Baadder in the final stages of the film, when even they could see that attempts to free them by group members at large evolve into blind terror achieving no positive result. Even the ruthless Baader seems to be troubled by all the bloodshed at the end, even though Meinhof was the only RAF member ever to be deeply troubled by a conscience.

The West German state, at first dazed by the violence, reacts swiftly and firmly. Horst Herold, its new chief of the Federal Criminal Police (BKA) (played by Bruno Ganz), introduces computerization and builds a massive database of German citizens, making the following of leads much simpler. But he isn’t just another mindless bureaucrat. The films shows him as a man capable of understanding the basic social ills which led to radicalism and violence, and urging the state to redress injustices as much as possible. The film has a very interesting interlude when RAF is shown training with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) group in Jordan. In contrast to the grim Palestinians, the Germans have a sunny, almost carefree attitude, and director Edel shows how both the men and women insensitive to cultural differences as they insist on nude sunbathing on rooftop terraces in an all-male guerilla training camp.