South Dakota Politics: The Baader Meinhof Complex

If you are looking for something very real and fascinating and available through Netflix Instant Watch, have I got a film for you Comrade! The Baader Meinhof Complex, directed by Uli Edel, is as gripping and resonant as an historical drama can be. It is also penetrating enough to count as a significant document of political science precisely because it sticks scrupulously to the surface of things. Martina Gedeck (Ulrike Meinhof), Moritz Bleibtreu (Andreas Baader), and Johanna Wokalek (Gudrun Ensslin) all provide masterful performances. If there were any justice in the world, Wokalek would have received an Oscar for best actress.

The Baader Meinhof Gang, or the Red Army Faction as they called themselves, carried out bombings, assassinations, bank robberies and kidnappings in West Germany from 1967 to 1977. The group was led by Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Ulrike Meinhof. In 1972 they were captured but remaining RAF members continued the terrorist campaign, then focused on securing their leader's release. The RAF established an alliance with an extreme Palestinian faction and many of their members were trained in camps in the Middle East. In 1977 four Arabs hijacked a plane bound for Frankfurt and demanded the release of the RAF leaders and a couple of Palestinians. The plane was eventually stormed by an elite unit of the German police. Baader, Ensslin, and Meinhof all committed suicide in prison.

The RAF probably never amounted to more than a few hundred members, with a much smaller core. It did, however, have the sympathies of large numbers of Germans. Christopher Hitchens wrote a much better review than I am capable of producing, and he has this:

There were three officially democratic countries where for several years an actual weaponized and organized group was able to issue a challenge, however garbled and inarticulate, to the very legitimacy of the state. The first such group was the Japanese Red Army, the second (named partly in honor of the first) was West Germany's Red Army Faction, led by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, and the third was the Red Brigades in Italy.

You may notice that the three countries I have just mentioned were the very ones that made up the Axis during the Second World War. I am personally convinced that this is the main reason the phenomenon took the form it did: the propaganda of the terrorists, on the few occasions when they could be bothered to cobble together a manifesto, showed an almost neurotic need to "resist authority" in a way that their parents' generation had so terribly failed to do.

Hitch may well be right here but I suggest another, not necessarily exclusive motive: anger against the United States. Those who came of age in the former Axis in the 60's could not very well hate the U.S. for defeating them in WWII. Still, it's the kind of thing that leaves a bad taste in one's mouth. Vietnam gave them a legitimate excuse to hate and wage a guerrilla war (or more accurately, a monkey war) against America. In the film, Ensslin's mother explains that her daughter's actions have left her feeling liberated.

Bruno Ganz plays Horst Herold, a kind of national security Dumbledore who orchestrates the police action against the RAF while serving soup to the people who carry out his strategies. While he is no nonsense about the manhunt, he keeps expressing pious liberal opinions about changing the political conditions that he supposes encourage the terrorism. That his efficiency can be combined with such naiveté says a lot about the political culture then and now.

The Baader Meinhof Complex, as the title reveals, suggests that a psychological dysfunction was behind the group's terrorism. To be sure, the German police were brutal. In 1967 police joined a pro-Shah goon squad in clubbing down unarmed protesters. That movement triggered the RAF's campaign. However, police brutality does not add up to a police state, which is what the Baader Meinhof gang wanted to believe that the West German government was. It wasn't. So they set out to make it one.

They committed crimes precisely so that there would be arrests. Now there were political prisoners. The prisoners staged hunger strikes and otherwise committed suicide in order to make the case that the regime executed its enemies.

All this was not political action, it was political theatre. They had very little in the way of a coherent program beyond the most abstract communist dogmas. They were searching for something that would give their lives meaning in the way that totalitarian ideologies had done for the previous generation. They turned their lives into a drama that was at least compelling enough to hold their interest. For that, they were willing to kill people.

Ulrike Meinhof's suicide was probably the result of psychological collapse. Not so that of Baader and Ensslin. Theirs was very deliberate and had a double purpose. The lesser purpose was to encourage their comrades at large to believe that they had been executed. They hoped that new generations of the RAF would emerge, and they would be immortalized as martyrs. The primary purpose was to be in control of their fate. They brought the curtain down at the moment of their choosing.

The Baader Meinhof gang were not the conscience of their generation, they were its bad conscience. They were monsters, worse than thugs and worse in a sense than most terrorists. Their motives were neither venal nor uplifting in any way. They are fascinating enough, but not deserving of the least bit of sympathy.