The Baader Meinhof Complex - film review
Excellent account of the formation, operation and eventual demise of the Red Army Faction. Necessarily, much detail is omitted in a narrative covering a period of more than a decade during which the RAF set the political agenda in West Germany. However director Uli Edel manages to capture and portray the sentiment of the late 1960s and early 1970s well enough that it is understandable how the RAF evolved in response to the excesses of the military-industrial complex of that time, setting the context for all that follows.
Early scenes depict the brutality of an unchecked state apparatus suppressing protestors during a visit by the Shah of Persia, leading to an escalating response from the initially idealistic middle class youth who opt to sacrifice their way of life, and ultimately lose their lives in order to oppose the reactionary forces then (as now) in control of the Western world.
The well-known exploits are all here - training in Palestine, bank robberies, bombing of an American military base and the Springer-Verlag offices, executions of police and judiciary, the Stockholm embassy siege, the bloodbath at the Munich Olympics... more interesting perhaps is the realisation that the RAF must have enjoyed significant support amongst the general populace, which was both a source of new recruits (a necessity, given the rate of arrest and killing of its members) and which provided an environment in which the group could survive, permanently on the run from the authorities.
After the principals are mysteriously found dead in their cells in Stammheim, Brigitte Mohnhaupt counsels the next generation of RAF activists: "You didn't know them. Stop making them what they never were."
Essential viewing.