The Baader Meinhof Complex

The Baader Meinhof complex, aka the RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion) were a collective of violent political activists who operated throughout the 1970s (at least, these are the years focussed on here) primarily in Germany. After watching the film, I wasn’t surprised to learn that it was based on a book, because scripts aren’t commonly as dense as here unless a literary adaptation is involved. The film charts the origin and operations of the group, progressing the story rapidly with a discernible emphasis on extracting as much as possible from the book. A corollary of this emphasis is that the film is intensely event-driven and races through the explosive history of the group. A further corollary is that little is divulged or suggested, with the possible exception of Ulrike Meinhof, relating to the origin of the members’ motivations for their strong political feelings: What was it in their personal histories that inculcated their incandescent appetites for violent action against the society they were brought up in?

We get the impression that most is understood about Meinhof, who, when we join her, is a young married middle-class mother with a yen for pamphleteering and a highly developed social conscience. Perhaps it is through her sustained activity of writing, propaganda and otherwise, throughout the RAF’s career, that grants us so much insight into her psyche. She is portrayed here as passing along the most radical arc of any character, eventually, it appears, becoming overwhelmed by the terrible dawning realisation of her situation as one of the most sought after and high profile enemies of the German state, if not the Western World. Of what was a large and infamous group, the other characters we get to know best are Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, who were lovers at the time. Both are more resilient and driven than Meinhof, both utterly scornful of words without action, wild and ruthless and, evidently, willing to die for their beliefs.

What exactly the group believes is not always obvious, given that they are seen performing at least as many bank robberies as overtly politically oriented activities. (The debonair Baader seemed to have a taste for expensive sportscars). In a key sequence a montage of their bombings and their activites is displayed over the soundtrack of a reading of some of Meinhofs propaganda, from which we learn that the group’s enemies are any and all agents of the state : “anyone in a uniform”, as she puts it. The montage includes footage from the Vietnam war, the 1968 Mexico Olympics, Robert Kennedy’s assassination, and other instances of cultural import, all of which begs the question whether the RAF shaped or was shaped by the era it existed in. In any case, much of Meinhof’s epistolaries sound like so much self-serving spin, where every apparent atrocity and instance of botched violence is defended with backpedalling hindsight. Confusion is highly evident as the group career around Germany (following sojourns in Italy, Africa and Iraq) pursuing their anarchic dreams, but achieving ultimately not a great deal, arguably, and often appearing like a troupe in the thrall of Baader, the charismatic totem around who orbits the loosely bound collection of ideologues.

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