Baader Meinhof Complex
The movie explores the dark
period in German history during 1967 to 1977 with a drama detailing the rise
and fall of the Red Army Faction. It is the Left-wing terrorist organization
that became increasingly active following the World War II which was also known
as the Baader - Meinhof Group, the Red Army Faction that was formed by the
radicalized children of the Nazi generation with the intended goal of battling
Western imperialism and the West German establishment.
June 2, 1967, Berlin, the rather shabby and
compromised authorities of the postwar Federal Republic are laying down a red
carpet for the visiting Shah of Iran. A young journalist named Ulrike Meinhof
has written a mordant essay, in the form of an open letter to the Shah’s wife,
about the misery and repression of the Iranian system. When students protest as
the Shah’s party arrives at the Berlin Opera, they are first attacked by hired
Iranian goon squads and then savaged by paramilitary formations of brutish
German cops. It’s the best 1960s street-fighting footage ever staged, and the
“police riot” element is done with electrifying skill. On the fringes of the
unequal battle, a
creepy-looking plainclothes pig named Karl-Heinz Kurras unholsters his revolver
and shoots an unarmed student, named Benno Ohnesorg, in the head. Not much
later, the student leader Rudi Dutschke is also shot in the head, but in this
instance by an unhinged neo-Nazi. Now the rioting begins in earnest as West
German youth begin to see a pattern to events. The shaky postwar state built by
their guilty parents is only a façade for the same old grim and evil faces;
Germany has leased bases on its soil for another aggression, this time against
the indomitable people of Vietnam; any genuine domestic dissent is met with
ruthless violence.
One of the main
recruiting grounds for the gang was an institution at the University of
Heidelberg called the Sozialistisches Patienten Kollektiv, or Socialist
Patients Collective, an outfit that sought to persuade the pitifully insane
that they needed no treatment save social revolution. Among the star pupils of
this cuckoo’s nest was Ralf Reinders, who was arrested after several violent actions
and who had once planned to destroy the Jewish House in Berlin.
More arrests and more
hostages were taken, often in concert with international hijackers, so that
ever more exorbitant “demands” can be made. It required money, which in turn
demanded more robberies and extortions. There were doubts or disagreements
within the organization; these could always be attributed to betrayal or
cowardice, resulting in mini-purges and micro-lynchings within the gang itself.
And lurking behind all this neurotic energy, and not always very far behind at
that, is the wish for death and extinction. The last desperate act of the gang a
Götterdämmerung of splatter action, including a botched plane hijacking by
sympathetic Palestinians and the murder of a senior German hostage was the
staging of a collective suicide in a Stuttgart jail, with a crude and malicious
attempt to make it look as if the German authorities had killed the prisoners.
In these sequences, the film is completely unsparing, just as it was in
focusing the camera on official brutality in the opening scenes of more than 10
years before.
