2008
150 minutes
directed by Uli Edel
The Baader-Meinhoff Complex is a 2008 film directed by the German director, Uli Edel, who I otherwise only know from a mediocre 1989 film adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr’s novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn. In this film he creates a partial and fragmented dramatic history of the Red Army Faction which serves to display them as violent freedom fighters without much critique of their methods. The result is that quasi-Marxist terrorists are portrayed as the heroes of an action movie. Whether or not this was the director’s intention was unclear, but this film conveys a similar cinematic vocabulary to the Star Wars films.
The Red Army Faction were a group of West German based Marxist rebels active during the 1960s into the 1970s. The RAF believed in armed struggle and may be interpreted as a European analogue to a similar American group called The Weathermen. The title of this film referrs to the alternative name for the group, the Baader-Meinhoff gang, referring to its two best known members, Andreas Baader, and Ulrike Meinhoff. The film depicts these two figures as engaged in a dialectical struggle of thought vs action which is a perrennial issue manifest in the rhetoric of activism. Ulrike Meinhoff was a brilliant journalist with far-left leanings who became the intellectual voice of the group while Baader was a criminal with little education, and formed the id of the group consciousness. Baader is represented as uninterested in political concerns in any way that does not appear superficial, and rather appears to sense that action is the most important course to take.
While Baader and Meinhof appear to represent the two poles of the group, (and serve as metaphors for the two poles of all of radical politics) there is a third major character, Klassen Grundun, poised between the two best known group members, who may actually represent the axel of the unstable unit. In Edel’s film, Grundun nurtures Baader’s will to violence, even if its directed towards ridiculous gestures such as an arson attack on a department store. Grudnen also shames Meinhoff into committing to violent revolutionary action by ridiculing her profession. Finally, Gruden pacifies Baader when he succumbs to his rage at group meetings, and recalls the exact perfect Mao Tse-Tung quotation to recite to the group to steel their resolve in a hard time. She is the unacknowledged force that drives the group, while Baader is portrayed as the same kind of reckless wildman archetype that propels every movie.
The film goes from scene to scene depicting the most dramatic periods of the group’s existence, without getting bogged down in any socio-political details that might take away from its pace or action. Bombings, retaliations, the capture of the RAF by police, trial and deaths as well as a few episodes from the 2nd and 3rd generations of the RAF are all depicted, transposed into movie convention reasonably well by Edel. The origins of the group are uncertain in the film, Ulrike Meinhoff appears to join the Red Army Faction sometime after an encounter with an incarcerated Gunden, but otherwise the terrorist cell appeared to have already existed, already bombing things that have no connection to their political cause. So any reason for its existence is left unstated, and they appear to commit acts of politically motivated violence for unspecified or poorly articulated reasons. Occasional quotes from Meinhoff’s writings aside, the intellectual side of the group is subsumed in the film by the spectacle of explosions. The RAF’s prehistory, the allusion that these were the children of the Third Riech, generation, is a mere statement on the back of the DVD case. It may be something worth exploring, but it’s not given any meaning in the film. Instead, the group’s post-formation history is mined as a source of action packed scenes with the terrorists poised as heroes.
Edel’s film displays a terrorist group that is active in a Western democracy without justifying its existence. Still, Edel constructs his RAF characters as sympathetic figures simply by humanizing them while portraying the police they fight with as nameless hordes. The Red Army Faction appear as youthful, energetic fighters, while their enemies are the anonymous henchmen of old men who sit and dryly plot at a conference table.
The historical significance of the RAF can be set aside, really, as this film is little more than an action movie that unfortunately takes a complicated semi-Marxist terrorist organization as its subject matter. In real life, police authority and liberal-democratic social organization continues to dominate western countries. Recent films that use countercultural groups, if not armed rebel movements such as the RAF, as their subject matter, consistently portray such groups sympathetically, if not outright heroically. Why is there such disparity between dramatic representations of such subject matter, and actual social attitudes towards the sorts of groups being represented?
