WORLD HISTORY : THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX
The Baader Meinhof Complex
The Movie
Germany in the 1970s may be a period less well documented in the history books, but this looks to be redressed with the groundbreaking new film The Baader Meinhof Complex, recently chosen as Germany’s entry for the ‘Best Foreign Film’ category at this years’ Oscars.
Charting a turbulent decade between the 1967 summer of love and the so-called ‘German Autumn’ of 1977, writer Bernd Eichinger explores the chain of events that brought the three figures of Andreas Baader, Gundrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof together and led to the formation of one of Germany’s most notorious terrorist gangs, The Red Army Faction. Basing his script on the definitive book by Stefan Aust, who personally knew many of the figures involved, the film pursues historical accuracy above all else, down to basing dialogues on recordings and even having the same number of bullets in the action scenes as recorded in the police reports.
As such The Baader-Meinhof Complex is part action-thriller, part historical account. Its task is to present us with a picture of the decade and while it focuses on the story of the terrorists, there is no central character with whom we can sympathise with. This was a deliberate decision of Eichinger, who wanted to concentrate on portraying the facts, letting ‘the monstrosity of events’ lead the audience along. Arguably, this is where the film may fail to engage some viewers, particularly those who are not familiar with the history of the period.
There are moments however when we are invited to engage with the characters, most strikingly with that of Meinhof of who the crew had access to original footage from her time as a well-known journalist before she joined the group. Played by a remarkable Martina Gedeck (The Lives of Others), her trajectory from successful journalist, wife and mother to the finally broken woman serving a life-sentence is the most shocking and intriguing of the three.
The film has proved to be controversial in Germany, where some family members of those affected by the real events fear an action-thriller portrayal of the RAF members will only glamorise them. But for most it is seen as a welcome addition to the recent wave of German films that confront their nation’s recent past. The film is challenging to watch at times, but that is because the subject matter is not diluted to be easily palatable. Whilst the terrorists are immortalised on the big-screen, they aren’t action heroes and it is their brutal actions that loom larger. Outside Germany the themes of terrorism and Middle East conflict will resonate strongly with international audiences. An important film examining a hitherto sidelined period in German History, one hopes it will receive the exposure it deserves.
The Baader Meinhoff Complex is released in cinemas from 14th November.
The Truth Behind the Movie
June 1967. Post-war West Germany was as yet a fragile democracy and many important government posts were held by ex-Nazis. A chunk of young people felt alienated from both their parents and the state institutions. The legacy of fascism had drawn a wedge between the generations where those on the right, aligned with the authoritarian establishment, stood in opposition to the left, who felt affinity with the Vietnamese cause and those of the Middle East in conflict with Israel.
On 2 June 1967 a peaceful protest against the visit of the Shah of Persia to Berlin became violent and a student Benno Ohnesorg was shot dead by a policeman. The policeman was later acquitted and the event became the point of focus for those already dissatisfied with what they saw as an authoritarian government and society’s acquiescence, reminiscent of the indoctrination under the Nazi regime. In the spring of 1968 Andreas Baader and Gundrun Ensslin set fire to a department store in protest against the Vietnam War and were subsequently arrested. Journalist Ulrike Meinhof wrote a series of sympathetic articles and met with Gundrun Ensslin whilst she was in custody and the pair became friends.
In November 1969 Baader and Ensslin lost their court appeal and fled the country for a brief time. When they returned, Baader was arrested and jailed. Meinhof, using her position as an accredited journalist, organised a meeting with Baader outside the prison and from there an escape plan was carried out, marking Meinhof as an outlaw and giving rise to the official creation of the Red Army Faction (RAF).
The group subsequently launched a series of attacks as part of an “anti imperialist struggle” through a type of urban gorilla warfare, carrying out bank robberies, bombings and kidnappings of authority figures. It wasn’t until June of 1972 that police authorities managed to arrest all three of them along with other key RAF figures. They were imprisoned in Stuttgart-Stanheim prison.
Although kept in solitary confinement, Ensslin had devised a code by which they communicated with each other and those on the outside. Through this the group managed to coordinate a series of hunger strikes, one of which resulted in the death of a RAF member, Holger Meins, which the group declaimed as murder at the hands of the state. By this time the RAF had a so-called ‘second generation’ of members continuing to carry out attacks and it was they who on 24 April 1975, seized the West German embassy in Stockholm with the aim of forcing the release of the prisoners. But the then Chancellor Helmut Schmidt refused to give in to their demands and the siege was brought to an end leaving three dead but no demands met.
On 21 May 1975 Baader, Meinhof, Ensslin and Raspe were put on trial in what would prove to be one of the most controversial and divisive criminal trials in German history. A year into the trial on 9 May 1976 Ulrike Meinhof was found dead in her cell, hanging from a rope made from towels. Her death triggered numerous conspiracy theories that she was murdered and many still refuse to believe the official verdict of suicide. After 192 days in court, on 7 April 1977, the remaining three prisoners were sentenced to life imprisonment.
The period that followed was later known as ‘The German Autumn’ of 1977. In July Jurgen Ponto, head of Dresdner Bank, was shot and killed in a botched kidnapping. Shortly after powerful industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer, a former officer of the SS and NSDAP, was kidnapped and in the process of capturing him the five masked assailants shot and killed three policeman and Schleyer’s driver. They sent a letter to the German government demanding the release of eleven prisoners. Rather than acceding to demands, the Chancellor formed a crisis committee in Bonn, determined to bring an end to the terrorism.
Whilst Schleyer remained hostage, on 13 October 1977, a group of four Palestinians hijacked Lufthansa Flight 181, holding the passengers hostage and demanding the release of the eleven RAF prisoners, as well as two Palestinians held in Turkey. However, the Bonn committee held firm and instead organised a rescue operation, storming the plane and shooting all four hijackers. News of the rescue was broadcast shortly after and the next morning Baader, Ensslin and Raspe were found dead in their cells. The official inquiry concluded that this was a collective suicide, but again conspiracy theories abounded. None of these theories however were ever put forward by the RAF itself. The day after the deaths were announced, Hanns-Martin Schleyer was found dead in the trunk of his car and his kidnappers announced the shooting as an execution.
After 1977 the RAF continued to exist, but was no longer viewed as a serious threat to national security. Whilst the fall of the Berlin Wall drastically dented support for the left-wing cause, the group continued terrorist activity into the 1990s, officially disbanding in 1998.
Interview with Bernd Eichinger, Writer and Producer
The film concentrates not so much on the RAF’s theories but on the group's actions. Why?
That was an absolutely conscious decision. First of all, I share Stefan Aust’s main concern as a historian, which is to ask: what actually happened here exactly? Secondly, the RAF decided to turn their back on political debate and to resort to violence; therefore its only logical that the film follows suit and concentrates not so much on what the RAF said but what they did.
Do you think there is a danger of the film glamorising violence by focusing on it?
If you put people in the centre of a focus there is always a danger. But then if you want to do a film about history, what else can you do. It was the same thing people said when I made ‘Downfall’ that in giving Hitler so much screen time I was making him big again, which I think is nonsense. That means you can’t talk about very important aspects of our history. There is perhaps a certain danger in the BMF because they were young people and good-looking and in the beginning you could say they were young, they had a cause and they felt they were avant-garde and had this rock-star element. But then they had these crazy ideas that they are the ones to change the world and I think this is a very vain concept, to say who can live and who can die. And this is where they lose my sympathy right away and you can see this in the movie. It’s a very fast journey into something where you don’t want to follow them into the abyss.
How much artistic license does the script take?
When you are dealing with historical events where people have been killed and others have become killers, you have the responsibility as a filmmaker to be as precise and as thoroughly researched as possible. Wherever possible I based the dialogues on original documents and eyewitness reports. However I did reduce the amount of political jargon that was used amongst the members of the German Left in the 70s in order to make the dialogue intelligible to today’s audience.
Without a central character to sympathise with, do you worry audiences may struggle to relate to the film?
We tried to do a very modern movie. I don’t go into any psychoanalytical explanation, I don’t care why they did it, I care what they do. And so we were very careful about the facts. Rather than go the ‘normal’ way where you build up an emotional identification with your central character and they lead you through the movie. That’s the normal technique but we put that aside for what I call the ‘shredded’ drama in which you rip out pieces or shreds of the history and put them together again.
Do you think the story has different connotations now as we are now engaged in the global war on terror?
That is a point, but I think one must not overstress it. This kind of terrorism was possible then because it was a very overheated situation politically. We were the first generation who grew up after the war, we wanted to make a real difference from our parents and from the generation that was involved in the war and the whole Nazi horror. And it was the late 60s, which was the case in every other country where young people were deciding not to live as their parents lived. But in Germany you didn’t just have the student revolution, it went further into terrorism because we had this Nazi trauma and this guilt, and so all the questions of what is right and what is wrong were much more overheated. And there were many people who thought the German state was going back to facism and our parents were sleeping, they let Hitler happen but this time we would fight against the facist state.
Interview with Martina Gedeck who played Ulrike Meinhof
How did you prepare for the role of Ulrike Meinhof?
I read everything I could get my hands on by and about Ulrike Meinhof. I talked to people who knew her, watched interviews and films about her and studied her radio and television work. And I also studied the way she talked and the way her voice changed over the years.
Did you find yourself having some sympathy for Meinhof after playing her?
She took life and everything very seriously. The material I saw was before she went into the group, when she was a journalist and quite young. We saw the private videos of her husband when she was happy and quite sweet, and she was a very soft woman, I could relate to her. The way she tried to influence society was with a very soft, sweet voice. But she became very full of aggression, in the late pictures her features had changed, she was very distorted at the end. I could relate to her sense of justice that she devoted her life to, she had this kind of mission but it turned into fanaticism and terrorism.
What have you learnt from making the film?
Before making the film I didn’t know anything about this group. I was very sceptical of doing this at the start, but then I thought it's good to make a movie about this period of time in Germany because nobody knows anything about it. And what I tried to do is not to judge, not to say that I know better. Going into [Meinhof’s] life, I can never say what she did was right but I cannot say I’m better than her and through acting I want to stay back as Martina, I don’t want to judge. And so what I chose to perform were the things I knew were there like her shyness, that she loved to dance, that she was in love with her husband. These things I could put together but I had to leave blank space for the spectator to have the possibility to have his own thoughts on her.
Can you explain why you think some people are fascinated by gangsters and people that kill others?
These people don’t have personal experience with terror - anyone who has had first hand experience with it hates these films. For me I find it interesting that De Niro said of his role in ‘Taxi Driver’, “why doesn’t anybody realise that this is a psychopath? He is a horrible person who just kills people and they made me a hero”. And in movies you often have this, you are attracted by the evil, you are attracted by the abyss, you are attracted by people who take the risk by being violent. To ban [the violence] we have to tell this story over and over again. It’s such a horror, in order to cope with it you have to look at it and you do that by making movies. You want to get close to it to understand it.
Considering the nature of the subject matter, do you think the film has a hope at the Oscars whose panel is notoriously conservative?
It makes it difficult that a German film won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film only a few years ago. I can’t imagine that it will be a German film again just two years later. And if there hadn’t been ‘The Lives of Others’ I would have high hopes. Also in this film there is no sacrifice. I think there always has to be a sacrifice that happens in the Oscar winning movies, especially concerning Germany. And that was my part in ‘The Lives of Others’, a sacrificed woman. In this, the women are doers and they’re very violent, so they probably won’t like it.
Interview with Moritz Bleibtreu who played Andreas Baader
What was it like playing the role of Andreas Baader?
With this guy Baader, it’s almost an acting task that you can’t fulfil. You're standing in front of a myth, he’s more a projection of ideals and ideas than a human being. The power of the myth of Andreas Baader is stronger than anything you can find out about him as a person and to play that is almost impossible. Also there was no video footage of Baader, so all you could do was suck in all this research, that was very contradictory - every time you talked to somebody about Baader you were talking about a different person, so when you come to act it you have to say "let me do my job which is acting and acting is interpretation." I could not fulfil this idea that all these people had in their minds, that was clear from the beginning.
Andreas Baader was responsible for the deaths of many people, but also has an almost mythical status. How did you choose to interpret him?
I saw him as a very narcissistic character; he liked to be the centre of attention all the time and yet I think he was also somebody who was afraid. He wanted to be seen and recognised by everybody and yet he was not intellectual, he wasn’t very political to begin with. It was very hip to be political at this time and I think that was something that made him angry, he was like: "I know you all talk about change and revolution, but you don’t do anything, you just sit around and talk. So you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna take this stone, throw it in that window and what do you say now?" And that must have been something that was very fascinating to people as he was just doing what everybody else was talking about. And then he had this woman, Gundrun Ensslin, who was this intelligent, beautiful woman. And she glamorised him even more, peopl thought 'he’s got to have something'. I tried to find out what that was and I couldn’t find it. I think the myth was born not out of what he really was, but a projection of things he didn’t really have. It was only in Stanheim that he started reading and being political as he realised if he wanted to get out of jail, he had to live up to this political leader that everyone thought he was.
Were you concerned your portrayal may have been too charistmatic or too positive?
If at the beginning in the first days of the revolution it was not fun, how could all this have happened? Baader must have been an incredibly charismatic man to get people on his side. Without passing any moral judgement you have to show his allure and the audience needs to understand why so many people followed this man.
Will the film change people’s perception of the RAF in Germany?
There is a lot of discussion in Germany about whether this film will deconstruct the myth of the RAF. The people that idealise it up to this day they will still idealise it no matter what kind of movie you make. But in general, the period is not something you learn about in school. I hope that this might change so at least in school they start teaching it because after the war I think it’s the most important 10 years in German history. If the whole student movement hadn’t happened, Germany would not be the place that it is today.
With recent films such as ‘Downfall’ and ‘The Lives of Others’ having such success, do you think there’s more to be explored about the post-war period by German films?
There’s much more to be explored. I grew up in a country that was completely detached from its own cultural identity. I hated my country when I was young. German identity and culture, we didn’t have that. And cinema is always directly connected to your cultural identity and finally we are at this point where we start to rediscover this cultural identity and part of it is dealing with our history. I’m very happy that they’ve finally dared to do it. It’s going to give the younger generation a different view of their country and maybe at some point they can finally say that they’re happy to be German. When I was growing up it was all America, America, America and that’s finally starting to change.