Wide Angle 29 - The Baader Meinhof Complex

Today is about a very good German movie I saw a week back called “The Baader Meinhof Complex”. This movie was with English subtitles and tells the story of the left wing terrorist group called the “Red Army Faction (RAF)” or popularly known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. This group rocked West Germany through the latter part of the 1960s and most of the 1970s before it was brought under control. The movie is very balanced in its depiction of this terrorist group managing to steer clear of romanticizing the personae of the group leaders and their cause and tells the story very dispassionately. It is about a relatively less known phenomenon in history hence thought of writing it up. I am not sure whether this movie will ever play in India but if it does, go ahead and watch it, it is a good watch.
The movie begins with one of the main protagonist Ulirch Meinhof (a journalist to begin with and then one of the leaders after whom the gang is named) in a party reading out an article she has written addressing the visiting Queen of Iran criticizing her about the state of the poor and oppressed in her country. The next scene shows a group of protesters protesting against the visiting Shah of Iran near his hotel. This demonstration is brutally broken up by a gang of pro-Shah thugs first and then the police who beat the daylights out of the unarmed and innocent protesters who are mainly students. One student Benno Ohnesorg is shot in the head by a policeman and this leads to escalation of tensions between the left wing students and the government. This was the match that lit the forest fire to follow. Meinhof kept defending the students on television and through her columns and was attacked for her views by the society and the government.
The next big incident that incited the students and led to the formation of this terrorist group was the shooting of left wing student leader Rudi Dutschke by a deranged Right wing young man. The third big leader of the gang Gudrun Ensslin was the daughter of a priest but had very radical views about the supposed imperialist policies of America in Vietnam and West German support for the Americans. The BM gang started its first action with Gudrun and her lover Andreas Baader planting a bomb in a department stores. They were arrested for this but managed to convert their trial into a show and gain publicity for their cause. They were sentenced to three years in prison but were given parole post which they escaped first to France and then to Italy where they went underground. At this point, Meinhof was still a journalist and was actively writing articles supporting the BM group.
The group slipped back into West Germany and formed the RAF and started attacking different targets. Baader was arrested while driving a stolen car. At this point, the gang was staying at Meinhof’s residence, they hatched a plan there to spring Baader out of prison through Meinhof’s help without implicating her. However, when the event actually happened, Meinhof also escaped with them after they had shot a security guard at the library where Meinhof was supposed to interview Baader (this was a ruse). This marked the decision that Meinhof made about joining the RAF and become a full blown terrorist. From then on, life was on the run for her, her boyfriend and her two daughters. Before moving on, the one notable thing about these revolutionaries was the emancipation of women in the group and the complete sexual freedom that the members enjoyed. There is a scene in which Gudrun is meeting up with a new student recruit into the gang – she is in a bathtub bathing and coolly asks the recruit to strip and join her in the bathtub all the time interviewing him. Baader comes in and is totally cool about all this despite his girlfriend being in such a state with another guy.
The group next goes to Jordan to receive training from the Palestinian guerrillas who are fighting the Israelis. The cultural clash shown there is worth praise – the women leaders are in tight miniskirts which the Arab men find incredulous. In another scene, the group is sunbathing naked on the terrace of a building which the guards are enjoying. The leader of the Arabs walks in and brusquely asks the women to dress up which they simply ignore. There is also a clash between the group and the Arabs regarding the training since the Arabs are trying to teach them normal warfare and the group wants urban guerilla training.
The group then returns to Germany and intensifies its attacks, bombing cars, offices, robbing banks, buying more weapons etc. The thing that stands apart in all these acts is the more than equal participation of women. The group is hunted down by launch of the largest manhunt in West Germany and they are nabbed one by one ending with Ulrich Meinhof being arrested. They are all kept in the Stammheim prison under solitary confinement and a lengthy trial begins. The trial is very popular in Germany and the accused become heroes in public opinion. They win the appeal against solitary confinement and are allowed to gather together and are given television and books. The second generation of RAF members is now ready outside which intensifies the attacks which leads to clamp down against the leaders in prison with their rights being taken away.
The strain of prison and the trial shows on the leaders and Meinhof is slowly hounded out by the group especially Gudrun who dislikes her intellectual pretensions. Meinhof commits suicide soon after. There are a couple of efforts to get these leaders released by storming the German embassy in Switzerland but they don’t work. Another attempt is made by kidnapping one of the most powerful industrialists in Germany Hanns Schleyer. The final attempt to free these leaders is made by the RAF members in conjunction with Palestinian fighters when they hijack a Lufthansa Flight and take it to Somalia. The RAF leaders are hopeful that they would be released. However, the plane is stormed by German military and the hostages are released. The hopes of the RAF leaders are dashed and they end up killing themselves in their cells thus bringing the worst days of the RAF terrorism to an end. This sequence of events is also called the “German Autumn”. This came about in the year 1977. The second and third generation of RAF terrorists continued their activities but with lesser force and the group was formally dissolved in 1998.

Thoughts:
Most of the Western world was rocked by left wing movements especially from students on campuses in the sixties and seventies. This was the baby boomer, post war generation in the West especially Europe and US which had seen renewed prosperity and also the harmful imperialistic activities of the Western block. The anti Vietnam war movement on American campuses which was brutally broken by riot police, the French students movement which paralyzed the nation for months and the German movement just described are some examples of this great leftward surge of public opinion during the sixties and seventies. This was of course replaced by the movement towards the right in US and Europe and the victory of the West over Communism in the eighties with Reagan and Thatcher leading the “free” world.
What is it that made the students of these countries protest against the very environment that had made them prosperous to begin with. My theory is for the middle band of people who belong to the middle to upper middle class. Barring the obvious associations of class with ideology e.g. a labor union leader’s son becoming a communist or a rich industrialist’s son becoming a conservative, the ideological leanings of a person are mostly decided by the amount of struggles that the person has undergone personally in his life. More often than not, those who have grown in the lap of luxury (or relative comfort) feel the “pain” for the poor in the “liberal heart” way and often end up being leftist supporters at best or do something violent like the RAF or the founders of Naxalism. Those who have come up the hard way are usually conservative and support the right wing theory (for details of conservative v/s liberal, please refer Wide Angle 12). The clearest example is Nehru and Sardar Patel. Nehru grew up in comfort and became a leftist, Patel grew up poor and was self made, he was a right winger.
I have seen these strains in lot of people I know. Essentially, the self made folks believe in making their own destiny and are against government intervention, doles and largesse. The privileged lot bleeds in its heart and often want to help the poor and ends up supporting big government with the “jholawala” brigade. This is what happened in the West during the sixties and seventies with the students embracing leftist ideology. The leftist thought ran out of steam when their mother ship i.e. the Soviet Union was shown up for its moral and fiscal bankruptcy and folded up.
I’d love to hear contrary views to my theory above but I believe it holds good in most of the cases, it works at least in my case. It will be interesting to watch what happens to our kids when they grow up seeing that they are so much more privileged than the others – any bets?