Recalling Baader-Meinhof

The Times has a series of articles today linked to the film The Baader-Meinhof Complex. The film opens in the UK this week. I went to the press screening yesterday and discussed it on Radio 4's Front Row programme.

In the newspaper, Claudia Fromme of Süddeutsche Zeitung notes that in Germany the film "has provoked fierce criticism from the victims' families, historians and the daughter of the terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, Bettina Röhl, who long ago decried her mother's violence. 'It glorifies brutal killers as good-looking idealists. It trivialises their terror,' she says."

I can of course understand the objections voiced by the victims' families. But the film does not trivialise terror or glamorise its practitioners. It's a fascinating picture whose detailed historical reconstructions are extraordinarily convincing. The actors do not romanticise the characters they play. Andreas Baader is portrayed accurately as a man of impetuous cruelty and little intelligence. The violence is remorseless but it's not comic-book action: it's often sickening, and it amply illustrates the brutality of the Red Army Fraction and related groups. The film seeks to depict rather than exhort, but it does so in the main with - as far as I can see - scrupulous accuracy. And it works well.

There is only one episode where I suspect the drama is not quite in accord with the facts - though I may simply not know the full facts. The film depicts the murder at his home of Juergen Ponto, the chairman of the board of Dresdner Bank. The terrorists had been let into the home because the parents of one of them, Susanne Albrecht, were friends of Ponto and his wife. The film suggests that Albrecht was distraught that her colleagues had killed Ponto rather than kidnapped him. I know of no evidence that this is true; Albrecht may not have fired the shots, but she was always regarded as the principal agent of the murder. She fled to East Germany, and was eventually arrested after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

My principal reservation about the film - which overall I strongly recommend - is in what it omits. There is an unsatisfactory characterisation of the federal police chief, Horst Herold (played by Bruno Ganz, who was Hitler in the film Downfall). Herold insists that an adequate response requires understanding the issues that give rise to revolutionary violence. But the film doesn't provide that understanding, because it can't: why Ulrike Meinhof went from newspaper punditry to active engagement in terrorism remains a mystery. But the implication of the drama is that ideals - related to Vietnam, and to oppressive police violence in a Republic whose functionaries were deeply implicated in the Nazi regime - became corrupted by barbarous methods. And this is in my view a misreading.

It is clearly true that the politics and administration of the Federal Republic were stuffed with people who had served Nazism - and in the highest offices of state. Kurt Kiesinger, who became Federal Chancellor in 1966, had been an important figure in Hitler's propaganda ministry. But the RAF's ideology from the outset had its own echoes in the xenophobic nihilism of that earlier generation.

The RAF's lawyer, Horst Mahler, who was tried for conspiracy in 1972, is still politically active - as a prominent figure in a neo-Nazi organisation that is widely suspected of being implicated in the firebombing of the homes of Turkish immigrants. His views have been consistent in at least some respects over the years. He strongly supported the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Ulrike Meinhof, who was a witness at his trial, exulted in the massacre, and even maintained that its anti-imperialist character was enhanced by its having taken place on German soil.

The methods of the RAF didn't corrupt the message. The message of the terrorist Left was corrupt from the outset. When a revolutionary group bombed a Jewish community centre (the Gemeindehaus) in West Berlin in 1969, it did so not coincidentally on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. In The Times today, Astrid Proll - a former member of the RAF who served a prison sentence for bank robbery - concludes that: "Those who died in Stammheim were people who committed inhuman acts not because they were criminals, evil or monstrous, but because they could not endure the unfairness and oppression of this world." I do not share this judgement.

Those who died in Stammheim prison in October 1977 - by their own hands, with weapons smuggled to them by their lawyers - were Baader, his lover Gudrun Ennslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe. And this is where the film ends. But the RAF continued operations and committed murders till it disbanded a decade ago. There is one aspect of its later existence that ought to be better known than it is, and that provides some context to Astrid Proll's judgement. (By the way, I think it's reasonable to say that Frau Proll probably did suffer psychological torture during her incarceration. I certainly don't defend that treatment.)

In 1986, the RAF murdered an official of the Foreign Ministry, Gerold von Braunmühl. His brothers responded with a remarkable open letter, published in a left-wing newspaper, taz. They challenged the RAF's ideological premises and sought an explanation for their brother's death. No answer was ever forthcoming. But the brothers then contributed the proceeds of a literary award that they won for the letter to the legal defence costs of an RAF member. This was Peter-Juergen Boock, who had been convicted for taking part in several murders, including that of the banker Juergen Ponto. Boock protested his innocence, and claimed that there had been numerous violations of his rights during the trial. The von Braunmühl brothers went further than donating money to Boock's defence: they even petitioned the President of the Republic for Boock to be pardoned.

Later, in 1992, Boock confessed that he was indeed guilty and had been lying all along. He declared: "I have brought shame on myself." I've taken this account from a book by an American historian, Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies, 2004. Varon remarks (p. 303): "With [Boock's] confession, the RAF reached a new ethical low." I disagree with some of Varon's interpretations in the book, but it's difficult to regard that judgement as anything but an understatement. (Boock as a young man is well portrayed in the film: a thuggish escapee from youth detention centres, who gravitates to political murder.)

The Red Army Fraction was a terrible episode in recent history. In recent years (through an initiative of the former Interior Minister, Klaus Kinkel) there has been a move to release long-incarcerated terrorists, not all of whom renounce their past activities. There are grounds for dispute about how a liberal state should respond to a terrorist group; but there can be no reasonable dispute on one point. Society requires the state; and the state must be able to defend itself. All other social goals for democrats, liberals and progressives, depend on it.

Comments

[Tony Francis]

All these groups are violent and fringe. They are populated with lunatics who want a "better world", which they intend to inflict on the "sheeple" by force, ignoring and intimidating the rule of law. They will never gain much popular support. Perhaps the Nazis in Germany were an exception. Had it not been for extreme economic disruption and an inglorious end to WWI, they would never have come to power. They never revealed their true nature until later- posing as warm hearted technocrats with good intentions. One honest thing about these fringe groups is that they tell us who they are right from the start. The SDS and the Weathermen they spawned were always far left and advocated violence. Interestingly, Obama either "palled around with" (or didn't) - or "consorted with" (or didn't) Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn who were prominent in the Weathermen:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weatherman_(organization)
Now these fringe groups have gone in different directions such as Earth Liberation Front (ELF).
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Liberation_Front
So far, the only Marxist things Obama has proposed is to spend $25 billion of US taxpayer money to prop up the the economically moribund unions in Detroit, and to borrow Red Chinese money to pay for US backed abortions in Africa. In other words, borrowing money from Communists to shove down various left wing fantasy rat holes.

[Mona]

I saw The Baader Meinhof Complex when I was in Germany and was blown away. Very powerful stuff. A totally radical, intelligent piece of filmmaking.

From what I've read, Susanne Albrecht was very depressed after Ponto's murder and had to be closely watched by the others. Aust actually wrote about it in his book.

What I find so absolutely shocking, and the film alludes to this, is the anti-semitism inherent in the radical Left of the 70s and even now. The RAF tried to avoid the mistakes and crimes of their parents, yet they were actually mirorring their parents with their actions. They were truly Hitler's children. There's a very thin line, if none, between anti-semitism and anti-zionism and unfortunatly that line has been crossed again and again.

I wish we as democrats, liberals and progressives would learn from the past, but The Baader Meinhof Complex makes you realize that so far very little learning has been done.

[Conor Foley]

An extremely interesting review Oliver. I would be interested in your take on Hunger. (I have yet to see either film.)

[dirigible]

An excellent article.

Conor - The Times has already reviewed Hunger. And the reviews I've read all indicate that the film is more about aesthetics than ethics.

[ACH]

I’m looking forward to seeing the film and am also pleased that Stefan Aust’s book has at last been re-published in English. It would be nice if someone could see fit to put ‘Hitler’s Children’ by Jillian Becker back into print, too. It doesn’t feel as ‘close’ to the group as the Aust book does, but it has a lot more style and is splendidly scornful of the fellow travellers who sought to justify the RAF’s actions.

[rb]

I haven't seen this movie, but I shall probably watch it at some point; certainly I thought Downfall was a very nearly flawlessly executed film and have watched it several times.

However, one thing that I noticed while looking at the poster on the Tube this morning was that the English version carries a strapline along the lines of 'Revolutionaries or Criminals?'.

This looks to me like an implication that being the former absolves you of being the latter, which I don't care for: whether or not the RAF were revolutionaries (if so they were certainly extremely unsuccessful, does being a wannabe revolutionary count?), it is completely and unambiguously clear that they were murderers and criminals. The idea that some people have access to a superior truth which excuses otherwise criminal behaviour has proved almost universally disasterous, and clarity in rejecting this is important.

PS Tony - whatever one thinks of the policy of using public money to prop up moribund companies (not much in my case), I'm pretty sure that it isn't Marxist.

[Tony Francis]

Hi RB: I agree that Obama's desire to funnel money into moribund companies is not Marxist per se. His key economic advisers (of which there are seventeen), also deny any fondness for Marxism. An example is taken from the Wiki article on Robert Reich (references omitted):

"Robert Reich holds a left of center political stance. In an interview with The New York Times, he explained that 'I don’t believe in redistribution of wealth for the sake of redistributing wealth. But I am concerned about how we can afford to pay for what we as a nation need to do.'

"In response to a question as to what to recommend to the incoming president regarding a fair and sustainable income and wealth distribution, Reich said, 'Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit — a wage supplement for lower-income people, and finance it with a higher marginal income tax on the top five percent. For the longer term, invest in education for lower income communities, starting with early-childhood education and extending all the way up to better access to post-secondary education.'"

"He also holds an altruistic stance with regards to financial risks,'So let’s help families stay in their homes and continue to pay mortgages that are refinanced so they can afford to pay them. And let’s have better financial oversight so the next time money is cheap, mortgage lenders don’t shove it into the hands of people who don’t know what they’re getting into.'"

"Reich is of the opinion that moral hazard and risk are inherent to laissez-faire capitalism, and he favors a more regulated economic system that subsidizes those lower on the income scale."

This is typical of what I call neo-Marxism. They have revamped the language of Marx to make it palatable and compatible with an advanced economic system. Obama even ran as a conservative "tax cutter". Income redistribution was cast as "tax cuts" for those who pay no taxes. Besides income redistribution, the neo-Marxists plan on confiscating the income producing part of the economy with regulation. It works. 40% of voters thought Obama was a tax cutter.

So far, Obama's plan for fixing the economy has been to borrow money from Red China and funnel it into faithful Democrat voting constituencies. "Change we can believe in." And to find every Clinton retread and hire them in his administration. "We are the people we have been waiting for."

They should forget about "wealth distribution" and concentrate on "wealth creation." We haven't had the kind of laissez-faire capitalism that Reich fears since the 1920s. We shall see if his plans work. They never have. If they do, I will be most happy to tell you I was wrong.

[Lee]

I'm unconvinced that "Hunger" doesn't at last attempt to raise some principled ethical questions. Certainly its central scene is an 18 minute exchange between Bobby Sands and a Catholic Priest about the ethics of violence, sacrifice and political "martyrdom." Whatever one makes of this scene, it is deliberately stripped of any "aesthetic" or self-consciously cinematic quality; it is, in fact, stripped down to the bare fact of dialogue itself.