Days
of Rage
by
Chris Dashiell
Uli Edel’s The Baader-Meinhof Complex
tells the story of a controversial radical group called the Red Army
Faction, that went on a rampage in Germany in the 1970s, robbing banks,
setting off bombs, assassinating judges, and most famously kidnapping
the head of the government’s employee union (a former SS officer),
in an attempt to free comrades in prison. The film closely follows a
book by Stefan Aust, and is ambitious in scope, covering roughly an
entire turbulent decade in the history of modern Germany.
There
are three main characters in the bloody saga. The most interesting is
Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck), a left-wing journalist who gradually
evolves from the conventional activism of protests and demonstrations
to helping out the militant group, and in one very gripping scene, suddenly
joining them. She becomes the writer of the group’s communiqués,
but she is beset by doubts, and endures a lot of pain and personal struggle
over the choices she has made, which include abandoning her children
for the cause.
Her
counterpart is the fierce, beautiful and reckless Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna
Wokalek), the middle-class daughter of a minister. Her rage at the system
undoubtedly springs from the repression of her upbringing, and her “free
love” attitudes are reflective of a prominent strain in the pre-feminist
left. She becomes the lover of Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtrau), the
arrogant and ruthless leader of the group.
German students were radicalized during the American war in Vietnam,
when resentment was aimed at the many army bases in Germany, and by
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Near the beginning of the film, a
brutal, unprovoked attack by police on nonviolent demonstrators during
a visit from the Shah of Iran is shown as instrumental in turning the
main characters from protest to armed struggle.
Edel
takes a dispassionate stance—his aim is to portray as many as
the events as possible, and there are numerous other members of the
group who are characters, even a new generation that arises after the
first ones are killed and imprisoned. This makes the storyline difficult
to follow at times. We do get a sense of Ennslin and Meinhof as characters,
but there is no backstory for Baader. He appears as a charismatic, self-centered
fanatic, and we don’t know why he became that way. The film is
more successful in portraying the half-crazed, hectic political atmosphere
in which the Baader-Meinhof gang evolved into terrorists.
The
ambivalence of the story is epitomized by the gang’s alliance
with Palestinian militants, eventually leading to the hijacking of a
Lufthansa jet in 1977. Earlier scenes with the group hanging out at
a guerilla base in Jordan are doubly ironic. Baader’s insistence
on nudity and sexual “liberation” even in Jordan contrasts
grotesquely with the Palestinians’ ascetic discipline, and this
makes the German gang look like an adolescent sideshow. At the same
time, the anti-humanist ruthlessness of the guerillas turns out to be
a corrupting influence on Baader’s group. This dynamic holds significance
for an understanding of tensions in the history of the New Left worldwide,
if you know enough to look for it, but Edel’s style is, as always,
dry and focused on action, so that ideological questions aren’t
explored fully.
Largely
because of this approach, the film has been compared unfavorably to
other, more thoughtful accounts of the Red Army episode such as Volker
Schlondorff’s The Legend of Rita (2000). It is true that
Edel spends more time on shootings and confrontations than on the political
underpinnings of the drama (occasional newsreels of Vietnam and other
catastrophic events serve as shorthand for the general sense of crisis),
but to his credit, he neither simplifies the ideological rhetoric of
the radicals nor turns their activities into an unambiguous spectacle
or occasion for our mere disapproval. The story is meant to challenge
and disturb us, and it does.
Fanatical
commitment produces conflict within the group, especially between Gudrun
and the more cerebral Ulrike. Gedeck’s performance lays bare the
conflict between her desperation, as a liberal, in trying to effect
positive change, and the rage that is impotent and self-poisonous. The
spiral of violence becomes its own self-sustaining myth, as a police
inspector played by Bruno Ganz points out late in the film. Although
the violence is an ugly dead end, Edel doesn’t minimize the rigorous
commitment involved, especially in the prison scenes, where the terrorists
pay for their actions with a gradual deterioration of spirit. The establishment,
however, remains somewhat faceless, so that the viewer who did not live
through those times may find it hard to understand what all the passion
was about. A German audience might readily assume what Americans don’t
see: that the state was run largely by ex-Nazis, and that the terrorists
were the children of liberals who had failed to stop the Third Reich.
The enormity
of the film’s attempt at dramatizing all the complex events in
an infamous political drama precludes a depth of insight that one might
better seek elsewhere, but there’s no denying the sense of engulfment
in the acute agonies of that era. The Baader-Meinhof Complex
is a riveting experience, a well-crafted film delivering excitement
and suspense grounded in real and significant historical forces that
still affect us.
©2009 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
