Although they are absorbing to watch, stories about urban guerrilla groups of the Marxist variety clearly illustrate why those radical movements always crash and burn. The Baader Meinhof Complex is no exception. This lurid account of a West German terrorist organization the Baader Meinhof gang (also known as the Red Army Faction) may be obscure to most Americans, but was a major threat to stability in West Germany during the late 1960s and through most of the 1970s.
Student protests were prevalent throughout the western world during the 1960s, but those in West Germany were especially violent, targeting the political and business elite of the country and causing more deaths and injuries than with terror incidents elsewhere. The film was based on the best-selling non-fiction book by German writer Stefan Aust, published in 1985. The catalyst of the movement was the killing of a student protestor in West Berlin by a police officer on June 2, 1967. This event occurred during a demonstration against The Shah of Iran on his official visit to Germany during that period.
The protests against the Shah occurred because many German young people (mainly students) strongly disapproved of his dictatorial rule of the Iranian people. By extension, the Red Army Faction viewed the West German government to be complicit in this “fascism” just because it maintained relations with the Shah’s government and they took out their wrath against their own country to protest this. What exactly the RAF was against though, to justify escalating violence is still puzzling. First of all, the main characters depicted in The Baader Meinhof Complex seemed to harbor intense resentment against their their parents generation (who themselves came of age during the horrendous World War Two years and it’s aftermath). What the parents of these rebels and terrorists were supposed to be guilty of in 1967 to make their twenty-something children hate them so much and become terrorists is not made clear.
I got the distinct impression that much of what the RAF members were enraged and/or feeling guilty about was Germany’s Nazi past. They never seemed to grasp that raking over those coals would do nothing towards alleviating whatever current political/social issues were distressing them in the current West German state. They also harbored boiling resentment against large German corporations and the United States involvement in the Vietnam War. While their resentments and suspicions of West German industrialists and the so-called “imperialist” U.S. involvement in Vietnam were valid causes of concern, scheming and plotting violent acts against society in general is hardly excusable.
The Baader Meinhof gang claimed to be followers of Marxist ideology – which does not automatically make them arbiters of social justice for the disadvantaged or dispensers of revenge against the businesses or government agencies in Germany or elsewhere. In fact, what may have appeared as an organized and formidable movement created by the RAF was actually an anarchist mentality. They truly thought that random attacks on department stores, police stations, committing bank robberies, and attacking prominent citizens in their homes would somehow bring about the collapse of the West German power structure. Ultimately, the RAF brings about it’s own doom – as always happens with radical, militant groups.
The Baader Meinhof Complex tries to focus the attention on five main characters which are three of the main RAF members, a left-wing journalist who later joins their cause, and a leading West German law enforcement officer who is in the dicey position of having to bring them down – but also understand their psyche and motivations to capture them without further murder and mayhem. The film was directed by Uli Edel (he also directed Last Exit To Brooklyn, a gritty, fictional drama of working-class Brooklyn during the 1950s) who tried to pull together a broad story which takes place over a long period of time. Narratives of this type can make it difficult to develop the characters so the audience is better able to understand their life experiences which causes them to act as they do.
This is why the film comes in at 149 minutes for the initial cinematic release, and then the extended version of 164 minutes shown in two parts on German television. For Americans who are largely unfamiliar with the Baader Meinhof gang, aka Red Army Faction, the film will have superficial comparisons to Bonnie & Clyde or other American gangster films. The American gangster films are generally not about characters with strong ideologies compared to their European counterparts. However, both types make for a fascinating watch in and of themselves. These stories seem to have a timeless appeal even if the outcomes of the antagonists are ultimately futile.
