Review: Der Baader Meinhof Complex

More than a year after this film was released in Germany it finally became available on NetFlix, so those of us living in the US provinces could finally get the chance to see it.  Der Baader Meinhof Complex is the most important film to come out of Germany since Das Leben der Anderen, and it is fitting that Martina Gedeck, who starred in Das Leben here portrays Ulrike Meinhof, the intellectual leader of the terrorist RAF.  In the film, however, she is upstaged by the l'amour fou relationship of Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin (wonderfully portrayed by Moritz Bleibtreu and Johanna Wokalek).  The film does a good job of taking us back to those chaotic and terrible times, cutting to news reports on the carpet bombing of North Vietnam, the assassination of Martin Luther King, etc. We see how Ulirike Meinhof is radicalized by a demonstration against the Shah of Iran, where protestors are beaten up by the Shah's thugs with the help of the Berlin police.  The attempt to kill Rudi Dutschke turned out to be the tipping point. We catch a glimpse of Gudrun Ensslin holding her infant son arguing politics with her conservative father - a Lutheran minister.  Baader, however, simply appears on the scene as a force of nature, a born anarchist who revels in terrorist acts more for the adrenaline rush than out of any coherent political conviction.  It is his charisma and sheer energy that seems to hold the group together.

Using the same rapid cutting technique that was so effective in the Jason Bourne movies, Uli Edel is intent on capturing all of the key terrorist acts committed by the group.  This works well until the three protagonists are captured and imprisoned. Their followers go on to perform even more spectacular acts of terror - climaxing with the kidnapping of Hanns Martin Schleyer - but there is little understanding of who these people are and what is motivating them.  Edel loses the narrative thread in his effort to squeeze as much history as possible into his film.

What is very effective, howeve, is the running commentary of Horst Herold, the real-life chief of the Federal German police, brilliantly played here by Bruno Ganz.  The Herold character provides some perspective on the "Baader Meinhof Complex", even while he employs - - at the time - revolutionary data mining techniques to tighten the noose on the terrorists.  He also seems to warn against the police state tactics that later became a reality in the "German Autumn" of 1977. 

As a footnote to the movie, Sign and Sight reviews a collection of letters between Gudrun Ensslin and her lover Bernward Vesper, whom she left for Andreas Baader.  The letters are important artifacts of a turbulent lost time.  The two had a son - Felix Ensslin - who wrote a postscript to the letter collection.

Comments

[hattie]

Many people I knew in Germany hated the Baader-Meinhoff Group and thought they should be hunted down and killed.
I never heard anyone express sympathy for them.
Germans then wanted Germany to be a "normal" country with no troublemakers.