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The Baader Meinhof Complex

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Cert: 18

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Dir: Uli Edel. Cast: Martina Gedeck, Moritz Bleibtreu, Johanna Wokalek

 

Description: In June 1967, a demonstration in Berlin against the state visit of the Shah of Persia descends into chaos when baton-wielding police apparently charge the protesters, causing crowds to spill onto the streets. One young man is needlessly shot and killed by police, galvanizing mounting support for the anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist student movement. Left-wing journalist Ulrike Meinhof, who writes stirring reports on the stormy political climate, becomes disillusioned with the student movement's inability to affect lasting change and aligns herself instead with Andreas Baader and his girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin to form the Red Army Faction (RAF).

Country: GER. 2008. 149mins

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Terror and glamour in The Baader Meinhof Complex

 

Bad and Baader: Peter-Jurgen Boock (Vincenz Kiefer) and Willy Peter Stoll (Hannes Wegener) vent their frustrations in murderous fashion

Radical: Martina Gedeck as Ulrike Meinhof, who left her husband and children for a life of militancy and, ultimately, despair

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There can’t be many present-day film-goers with more than the vaguest memory of the Red Army Faction — aka the Baader Meinhof gang — who went on a killing and bombing spree in West Germany in the Seventies. But there will be very few who, after seeing it, won’t equate Uli Edel’s film with Islamic terrorism now.

That’s why the movie is relevant, thought-provoking and just a bit dangerous — since if you make such people recognisably human, and you give them causes you know to be at least partly justified, you also make them sympathetic.

This The Baader Meinhof Complex certainly does, as some German commentators have said. It opens with the bloodily put-down riots caused by the Shah of Iran’s visit to Berlin in 1967 when student Benno Ohnesorg was shot dead by a policeman. It continues with activist Rudi Dutschke being murdered by a Right-wing extremist after delivering a speech against the Vietnam war in front of thousands of cheering Berlin students.

You can’t help urging on the gang members as the student movement gains strength and there is a genuine feeling that authoritarianism and even a kind of fascism are spreading, much like in the time of Hitler. Edel suggests that what they said was often right. What a group of them did as the violence escalated was undeniably wrong.

A faithful adaptation of Stefan Aust’s absorbing book, this is no more than an ultra-competent piece of cinema from the director who made the more freeform and imaginative Christiane F and Last Exit to Brooklyn. But it deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as recent German successes Downfall, The Lives of Others and Goodbye Lenin.

The three principal characters are Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu), Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck) and Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek). Of these, Meinhof was the most sympathetic.

She was a Left-wing journalist who eventually despaired of mere words, left her husband and children and grew to feel that radical action was the only way forward. She was then gradually forced into militancy and despair, finally unable to untangle herself from the mess it led her into. This is a superb, finely graded performance from Gedeck, which is good enough for a dozen awards.

The least sympathetic was the rage-filled but charismatic Baader, the boyfriend of Ensslin. He was eventually regarded as “a fool and possibly mad” when visited by a prominent French intellectual in Stammheim prison but is still a kind of Che Guevara figure among today’s radical young in Germany. One of the most impressive moments is an interview with Ensslin’s elderly parents who put the case for her rebellion, if not for her deeds, with succinct eloquence.

The film documents the burning of a department store as a Vietnam protest by Baader and Ensslin, the formation of the Red Army Faction by Meinhof, Baader and Ensslin, the military training at an Al Fatah camp in Jordan, the ensuing robbing of banks and the capture of the trio in 1973, and the trial at which insults were thrown at the judges by the defendants with the clamorous support of those watching.

There follow the hunger strikes in prison and the final realisation of Meinhof that those outside Stammheim had made them into icons of unfettered and counter-productive violence. For her, suicide seemed to be the only way out.

Six weeks after her death, members of the Red Army Faction kidnapped a prominent industrialist and then hijacked a Lufthansa jet shortly after take-off from Majorca with 87 German tourists on board, which was eventually captured by a German anti-terrorist squad in Somalia. Edel rightly discounts the rumours of Meinhof’s murder but, as an act of revenge, the industrialist was executed.

Does this glamorise terrorism? I think not, though it skates fairly near the edge at times. What it certainly does is remind us that understandable causes are sometimes driven into impotence and thus pushed towards an escalating violence that those who espouse them never imagined.

That’s why this impressively mounted and thoroughly researched film is so watchable, whatever one’s views about its fanatical participants.

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