Post-Wall German Cinema and National History by Mary-Elizabeth O'Brien

Author:Mary-Elizabeth O'Brien [Mary-Elizabeth O'Brien]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781571138682
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Group Ltd
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

3: The Wild West and East of Eden: The Red Army Faction and German Terrorism

THE 1960S HIPPIE GENERATION produced a counterculture that has not seen its match in the decades since. Rejecting the world their parents had made, they dropped out, dropped acid, and abandoned themselves in free love and rock-and-roll. Alongside the youth who experimented in alternative lifestyles, a politically active student movement was calling for social change. International in scope, from Berkeley to Berlin, from Paris to Rio de Janeiro, students took to the streets to protest the Vietnam War, capitalism, and US imperialism, to fight for free speech, civil rights, homosexuals’ rights, and women’s liberation, and to save the environment. A direct outgrowth of the student movement was the rise of Marxist urban guerilla movements around the world. Splitting off from the more reform-based student organizations, groups such as the Weathermen in the United States, the Red Brigade in Italy, and the Revolutionary Movement 8th October in Brazil attacked national governments in the hope of inspiring a popular uprising and saw themselves as part of an international struggle against imperialism. In the Federal Republic of Germany it was no different. The Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion, RAF), left-wing radicals who took on the authoritarian West German state with such force and flair beginning in the late sixties, captured the nation’s imagination in a series of daring exploits.1 The contrast between the two sides in the battle for the nation’s soul and its future could not have been starker. On the one side was a generation of influential old men in suits and horn-rimmed glasses, who sought to uphold the prevailing power structures built upon the pillars of capitalism, a collective amnesia of the country’s National Socialist past, and complicity with other Western states that spawned the Vietnam War and colonialism. On the other side stood a generation of good-looking, trendy young men and women who brutally attacked representative individuals and institutions to draw attention to exploitation, repressed guilt, and injustice. Led by charismatic bad boy Andreas Baader, passionate doctoral student Gudrun Ensslin, and articulate journalist Ulrike Meinhof, the RAF took up arms against the state because, as Ensslin reportedly claimed: “Violence is the only way to answer violence. This is the generation of Auschwitz. There’s no arguing with them.”2 The RAF’s dramatically staged bank robberies, jail breaks, kidnappings, bombings, and shoot-outs rivaled the plot lines of a Hollywood action adventure. Their eventual incarceration followed by years of isolation and suicide turned the life stories of RAF leaders into a tragedy of mythic proportions that continues to fascinate the nation and serves as a cautionary tale of postwar German idealism gone wrong.

Ever since the Red Army Faction officially disbanded itself in 1998, its ghost has come to haunt the silver screen in Germany. Volker Schlöndorff’s Die Stille nach dem Schuss was followed in quick succession by Christian Petzold’s Die innere Sicherheit (Inner security, English title: The State I Am in, 2001), Andres Veiel’s Black Box BRD (2001), Gerd Conradt’s Starbuck — Holger Meins (2002), and Christopher Roth’s Baader (2002).

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