False Dichotomies

The Baader-Meinhof Complex is a compelling story chaotically told. This is a shame. The historical material beats anything John Grisham could come up with, while the subject matter is of immediate relevance to the post-9/11 generation. The film, however, makes little contribution to the vitriolic conversation about the causes of terrorism. Instead, it meanders in its own confusion. The first half is well paced and exciting, with impressive recreations of the 1970s. Then the film drops down a gear, as the RAF leadership find themselves in prison, before the story trickles towards its limp climax.

It would have been better had the filmmakers made a decision. They could have focused on the plot and the authenticity of it all, or on the political/moral questions the story arouses. This is not to say that they should have presented a simple dichotomy between the ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ schools of thought regarding the causes of political violence. Still, we need to be told more about the background of the Baader-Meinhof gang, not to mention the motivations of their adversaries. The predictably brilliant Bruno Ganz plays Horst Herold, the Ephraim Halevy-esque chief of the Federal German police. He demands that his staff try and understand what motivates the terrorists, the injustices that drive their violent actions. But this is all we have. His empathy does nothing to lessen his forensic commitment to smoking the RAF out (we first see him plotting to narrow down the suspects by working out which citiziens pay their bills by cash), and other than a tantalising speech we are told nothing of what difference knowing the terrorists’ motivations would make, either in the short or long-term. 

What about the presentation of the Baader-Meinhof gang? At times, violence seems to be its own justification, action its own meaning. The complexities of the world are reduced to a simplistic demand for opposition. In an absurdly shot sequence, our anti-heroes train with the PFLP in the Jordanian desert, where their hosts are insulted by their sexual libertarianism, which is reflected in their wasteful promiscuity with bullets. Any notion of the long battle – a strategic fight – is lost. The Baader-Meinhof seem to be a generation driven by a nihilistic frustration at the world’s injustices, at a time when – ironically – a little more realism might have proven more effective.

The question of the relationship between generations is the one that most intrigued me about the story. Conventional wisdom tells us that the RAF, who were mostly born towards the later years of the Third Reich, were angered that so many former Nazis took up senior positions in West Germany (the final kidnapping victim in the movie is a former SS officer), and understood anti-imperialism to be a kind of final stage of the Denazification process. The daughter of Ulrike Meinhof, the bourgeoisie journalist turned revolutionary founder of the RAF, disputes this. “This is one of the myths that sympathisers go on and on about. The communist RAF did not care about the Nazi past at all.”

It’s interesting that Rohl assumes that the Denazification explanation is primarily peddled by sympathisers. It would surely be remiss to ignore the legacy of the Nazi era when explaining the Baader-Meinhof story. This, I think, is less an explanation for the militancy with which the RAF went about their work (some have – pace the controversial Daniel Goldhagen – suggested they represented a peculiarly German form of violent expression), than the reaction by the authorities. Throughout the film, the legacy of the police state hangs over everything, with West Germany desperate to demonstrate the strength its democracy. By the end, though, its far from clear that they’ve managed to do so, particularly when you consider that the RAF were ultimately responsible for 34 deaths, small fry for our generation.  

One writer argues that Germans are uncomfortable discussing the RAF era, just as the Germans of the 1960s and early 1970s were uncomfortable talking about the Nazis. If this is so, it is unclear that The Baader-Meinhof Complex will do much to improve the conversation. There has been the predictable outcry at the choice of ‘sexy’ and ‘glamorous’ actors to portray the RAF (would people prefer fatties with warts?), as if chuckling at a bare-breasted blonde discussing revolutionary politics with a new recruit in the bath would make us any more sympathetic when she later on blows up civilians. But this is an aside. The Baader-Meinhof Complex is scrupulous in one respect only: failing to place the events depicted in the context of post-war history. If the filmmakers had any pretences beyond a scruffy thriller, this is a disappointing failure.