Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex is a very neatly shot big-budget German film about the first and second generation of Rote Armee Fraktion terrorists, the most famous of which were Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. Made by at least partly the same team that made Der Untergang (aka Downfall in English), the 3-hour action film is bound to attract international attention, although it may be hard to follow for those unfamiliar with the RAF.
As said, the film is pretty much an action film. There’s more than a bit of violence (although actually the gore wasn’t bad; the only scene I found hard to watch was the one showing force-feeding) but it is used with a very specific purpose in mind.
The RAF is apparently mostly ignored in German schoolbooks, even though they were incredibly violent and had a significant impact on the West-German state: the RAF required special and far-stretching anti-terror laws that shocked neighbouring countries and one of the relatively largest police actions of all time was undertaken to weed them out, which saw the mobilisation of, apparently, every West-German police officer to stop and inspect every single car on the road at the time.
Perhaps a part in this apparent memory loss is played by the union of the BRD and DDR, the two Germanies, and as the DDR (the commies, basically) were to some extent supporting the RAF against the western BRD it was in the interest of their union to just forget about it. The total absence of the DDR in the film at all may be a late reflection of that (the film doesn’t even hint at the existance of two Germanies).
The film starts in the second half of the ’60s, showing the conflicts between students and state getting out of hand. There was a public explosion in ‘69 in much of the western world, and although most states (including Western Germany) made an accord with the students to some extent, a spirit of violence and anti-state feelings remained among a very small part of youths. Angered by the assassinations of their heroes, such as JFK, Martin Luther King and, in Germany, the 1968 near-assassination of student leader Rudi Dutschke, there were those who argued that it was the state that had started the violence, and threw down the gauntlet. Or at least that is the (really quite plausible) explanation offered by the film in an impressive montage of historical and dramatised scenes showing the birth of the RAF. As the film progresses the original pro-communist and anti-capitalist attacks grow more and more absurd and out of touch with the ideology that caused the struggle in the first place. As the youths fight against what they perceive as a police state, they actually create one.
Even though, as in the controversial Der Untergang, we almost exclusively follow the ‘bad guys’ (in this case the terrorists), this actually makes the state officials seem more sympathetic. The ideological inconsistency of most of the terrorists as well as, in many cases, their useless ruthlessness, makes them lose the sympathy of the viewer quite early on. What remains is an feeling of surprise at how easy it is for just a few people to create terror and potentially destabilise a state, something also demonstrated by the recent Mumbay attacks.
