Complexities of Baader-Meinhof

I have been mulling over a fascinating new German film on the strange phenomenon of ultra-leftist violence during the 1970s in Europe, specifically the Red Army Faction (RAF) popularly known as the ‘Baader-Meinhof Gang’ for its two most notorious figures. I went to the movie assuming that I knew something about the mentality and politics of this group as a version of the Weather Underground and by extension an outgrowth of the social upheavals of that epoch that I lived through.

But the account in The Baader Meinhof Complex suggests instead that the two phenomena were so profoundly different as to be almost unrelated. Although they both emerged from the largely student-based anti-Vietnam war movement and the facile identification with marxist-inspired Third World rebellions from Angola to Bolivia, Andreas Baader comes off as an absurd blowhard who couldn’t have sat still for a class in dialectical materialism, a wild delinquent inspired more by John Dillinger than Franz Fanon.

The film skates rather superficially over the group’s main characters, allowing only former journalist Ulrike Meinhof a bit of development before she bolts out the window and into the life of a political assassin. But considerable attention is dedicated to plumbing an even more interesting facet of the period: the enormous resonance the group generated among German youth.

It is hard to fathom, from our distance, how this band of half-baked kids with guns turned the heads of an entire generation. Baader is shown at one point getting nabbed by the cops because he—one of the most wanted figures in all of Europe—attracts their attention by joy-riding down a highway in a stolen car. He’s an avatar of Oedipal revolt, an arrested adolescent with Daddy issues and a moral zombie who doesn’t seem to notice the bodies piling up around him, both his victims’ and his glazed-eyed minions’.

The logic of violent attack on the institutions of Western power was easy to peddle at a time when Nixon and Kissinger were raining down destruction on the Vietnamese civilian population. Yet at the heart of the film is something entirely different, a psychological response that does not have its U.S. counterpart.

In a courtroom scene one bomber’s middle-aged parents express their sympathy for her ideals, the dazed, mousey wife telling a reporter that her daughter’s department store firebombing has caused her to ‘feel myself liberated’ while Dad chimes in with something about ‘holy self-realization’.

The odd moment, taken from a true account, is revealing. It suggests that the German state, run by Baader and Meinhof’s parents’ generation, is ineffectual in response to their reign of terror in part because it is still atoning in silence for Adolf Hitler, for having allowed him into power and for having survived his 13-year festival of death worship. And it cannot crack down with the usual police-state tactics because that would only confirm the metaphor in the eyes of the young--that the Nazis were back.

The irony, of course, is that for all their alleged liberationist sympathies, the RAF are also legatees of recent German history and especially the indifference to human life that the Nazis made into a state ideology. ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ is certainly an apt title for this reminder that trauma, papered over and hidden away, inevitably resurfaces, and that the result is rarely pretty.