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The past as it wasn’t insidestory.org.au /the-past-as-it-wasnt/ 15/04/2009 2679 words Books & Arts Klaus Neumann 15 April 2009 Lauded overseas, The Baader Meinhof Complex is a flawed account of an important part of modern German history, writes Klaus Neumann Stellar performance: Moritz Bleibtreu (foreground) as Andreas Baader. THE Baader Meinhof Complex may not be the worst of the many films about the German Red Army Faction, but it would have to come close. It achieves this distinction despite the resources available to director Uli Edel and producer Bernd Eichinger – the film had a budget worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster – and despite a stellar performance from Moritz Bleibtreu (playing Andreas Baader) and solid contributions from three other lead actors: Martina Gedeck (as Ulrike Meinhof), Johanna Wokalek (as Gudrun Ensslin) and Bruno Ganz (as the head of the German Federal Police, Horst Herold). And it does so despite the film’s high entertainment value: it is an action-filled drama with an intriguing plot that leaves audiences on the edge of their seats. In fact, The Baader Meinhof Complex would be a genuinely interesting film if it did not aspire to be “as authentic as possible” (in Edel’s words) – if it did not pretend to be a true representation of facts. And even that might not be such a big problem if it were not for the significance of these “facts” in postwar West Germany, and for the crucial role their memories have played in Germany over the past three decades. The film tells the story of Andreas Baader, a small-time crim, and Gudrun Ensslin, the daughter of a Protestant priest, who in 1968 carried out an arson attack against a Frankfurt department store to protest against the American war in Vietnam. They were caught, tried and sentenced to three years in jail. After a year in prison, they were released after their lawyers appealed the conviction. In November 1969 the Federal Court rejected the appeal, and Baader and Ensslin went into hiding to avoid being rearrested to serve the remainder of their sentence. A few months later, Baader was caught and returned to prison. On 14 May 1970, Ensslin, the prominent left-wing journalist Ulrike Meinhof, and several accomplices engineered Baader’s escape from an academic institute he had been allowed to visit under guard, ostensibly to co-author a book with Meinhof. One of the institute’s employees was shot and seriously injured. The day of Baader’s escape marks the birth of what became known in Germany as the Baader Meinhof gang (or Baader Meinhof group). In 1971, in a manifesto describing the group’s aims, Meinhof first used the term Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction). The acronym RAF stuck and survived her and the group’s other founding members. Initially the group, which in 1970 included more than twenty people, travelled to Jordan to a training camp run by the PLO’s Fatah faction. Unwilling to submit to the Palestinians’ military discipline, they soon returned to Germany the same way they had left it: via East Berlin. They now saw themselves as urban guerillas. Their role models were the Tupamaros – the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional in Uruguay – which since the late 1960s had resorted to kidnappings and assassinations in its fight for social justice. Over the next two years RAF members robbed banks to fund their life on their run and otherwise tried to evade 1/4 arrest by the police force, which was throwing all its resources at hunting them down. In the course of this unprecedented search, several people who either belonged to the RAF or were wrongly thought to be terrorists were shot dead by police. In October 1971, the first police officer was killed by a member of the RAF. In May 1972, the group intensified its activities. When the American air force used mines to shut down North Vietnamese ports, the RAF began targeting the American army, which then had hundreds of thousands of GIs stationed in the former American zone of West Germany. Bombs exploded at American facilities in Frankfurt and Heidelberg. Four American soldiers died and many others were injured. As revenge for the group members shot by the security forces, the RAF also detonated bombs in police stations. Several people were injured after the group hid a bomb in a building housing editorial staff of newspapers belonging to Axel Springer, whose mass circulation tabloid Bild had a long tradition of stirring up hatred against the left and which was held responsible for the shooting of Rudi Dutschke, the charismatic leader of the West German student movement. In June, soon after the largest police operation in German history, when the president of the German Federal Police was, for a day, put in charge of the republic’s entire non-military security personnel, Baader, Ensslin and Meinhof were arrested. But even with nearly all of those who had made up the RAF in 1970 and 1971 either dead or behind bars, and the group’s leaders in prison, the confrontation between the West German state and the RAF was far from over. Those in prison went on a series of hunger strikes to protest against the conditions under which they were held. Initially they were not allowed any contact with other prisoners and kept in soundproof cells with white interiors lit day and night by fluorescent tubes. In 1974, one of the RAF prisoners, Holger Meins, died – he had starved himself to death. While he lay dying, his lawyer tried in vain to convince the prison authorities that he required urgent medical attention. In 1976, Ulrike Meinhof committed suicide in prison. The RAF members still at large became increasingly concerned about freeing their imprisoned comrades. In 1975, another militant group, the Movement 2 June (named after the day when police in Berlin killed the student Benno Ohnesorg during a demonstration against the state visit of Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran), abducted Peter Lorenz, a prominent conservative politician. In return for Lorenz’s freedom, the federal government released five convicted terrorists from prison and flew them to Aden. The RAF was clearly hoping that they, too, would be able to force the government’s hand. On 5 September 1977, an RAF commando ambushed the convoy of the powerful president of the German Employer’s Federation, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, killed his driver and the three police officers who acted as his body guards, and took him hostage. They demanded the release of ten RAF prisoners. This time, the government decided not to give in to the demands. To increase the pressure on the German government, on 13 October 1977 four Palestinians hijacked a Lufthansa plane on its way from Mallorca to Frankfurt. They plane eventually landed at Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. With the tacit support of the Somali government, German special forces stormed the plane, killed three of the Palestinians and freed all passengers and crew except for the pilot, who had been shot dead by the hijackers. A few hours later, Baader, Ensslin and a third RAF prisoner, Jan-Carl Raspe, lay dead in their cells in the high- security wing of Stammheim Prison. A fourth RAF prisoner, Irmgard Möller, had life-threatening stab wounds. Baader and Raspe had been shot; Ensslin was found hanged. The German government has always maintained that the three prisoners had committed suicide when they received news of the failed hijacking. Möller, who survived the stabbing and was released from prison in 1994, has always maintained that somebody had tried to execute her. The day after the deaths in Stammheim, the RAF killed Schleyer. THAT – in an abridged version – is the story told by The Baader Meinhof Complex. Eichinger and Edel clearly pride themselves on telling that story exactly as it happened. And their attention to detail is indeed amazing. In restaging the demonstration against the Shah of Iran and the death of Ohnesorg, they not only shot all scenes at the original 2/4 locations and allowed audiences to recognise a famous image, in which a woman holds Ohnesorg in her arms, but they ensured that the numberplates of the car carrying the Shah were accurate and that the magazines on sale at a newsagent’s stall were exactly those that would have been on sale on 2 June 1967. They not only rebuilt the part of the Stammheim prison where Baader and Ensslin were held, but obtained original bathroom fittings and door locks from Stammheim. According to Edel, The Baader Meinhof Complex is meant to be “a semi-documentary film.” In order to convey that sense, the camera is often static, merely witnessing and documenting the unfolding action. But while the film accurately represents the angle of every shot fired, it is equally remarkable on account of its omissions. The film is about those who belonged to the RAF, and supposedly reconstructs their perspective. But more often than not it resembles a freakshow, with Baader, Ensslin and Meinhof shown as psychopaths and fanatics. (Which is not to say that they were likeable characters: Baader, in particular, was a misogynist and bully – that he became a terrorist rather than a gangster was probably more the result of opportunism than of political conviction.) The context that gave rise to the RAF is little more than background noise; while the film features the demonstrations against the Shah’s 1967 visit to Berlin and a speech by Dutschke, the connection between the student rebellion and the RAF seems accidental. And while there are references to the war in Vietnam, there is no mention of Germany’s Nazi past, which probably loomed equally large in the student protests and in the emergence of the RAF.

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