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.