The Baader Meinhof Complex

There’s a scene early in ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ in which a group of German citizens are protesting a visit to their country by the Shah of Iran. Although theirs is a peaceful demonstration, the Shah’s supporters start in on them. The ensuing clash attracts police attention and things really get nasty. It’s all truncheons and jackboots and water-cannons and fired shots.

It put me in mind of Jim Sheridan’s ‘In the Name of the Father’, a powerhouse movie but one so determined to stir up outrage in the viewer that the cumulative effect is like being lectured by a coke-fiend for two hours while occasionally getting beaten around the head with a blunt instrument. Heads down, see you at the end, I thought to myself; this one’s going to be a long haul.

Two and a half hours later, still glued to the screen as the end credits rolled, I was in a different frame of mind. ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ impressed and provoked me. But it left me with mixed feelings. Subtle it isn’t – with Uwe Edel directing, it was never going to be – yet somewhere beyond Moritz Bleibtreu’s sneering, swaggering rock star take on Andreas Baader and numerous scenes of brutally realistic violence, some unexpected nuances emerge.

Martine Gedeck’s portrayal of Ulrike Meinhof is one of the film’s grace notes. She effortlessly maps Meinhof’s transition from outspoken journalist to political activist as well as inhabiting her vulnerability, particularly in the trial sequence which provides a gruelling final act.

Bruno Ganz’s thoughtful turn as Horst Herold, seeking to understand the reasons behind the Red Army Faction’s outrages even as his colleagues in the government call for swift and harsh countermeasures, demonstrates the film’s even-handedness. Nor does Edel lionise the Baader Meinhof gang. Their actions are brutal. There are casualties – on both sides. Although Edel lends weight to their ideologies and motivations, he doesn’t try to present a revisionist version of the Red Army Faction as noble, pure-minded freedom fighters. Make no mistake about it: this is a film about a terrorist organisation.

Nor is it all about politics. While Ulrike Meinhof comes across as a woman of intellect driven to desperate action after she discovers that words alone won’t change the world, Andreas Baader is shown as being equally in it for the good of the cause and the perks of the lifestyle: statuesque blonde on his arm*, gun in his hand, cool leather jacket and joyrides in stolen Mercs. Oh yeah, and a few acts of terrorism.

I know very little about the Baader beyond his leadership of the gang. But if the film is even partially accurate, he must have been an insufferable arse. Scene after scene has him throwing a wobbly, either refusing to listen to reason when Meinhof posits ideas and proposals contrary to his (never mind if hers are better thought-out), or getting into a slanging match with PLO members at a guerrilla training camp in Jordan where the Red Army Faction’s free-living ways angers their hosts. It’s beautifully ironic – whether an intended irony or not – that the Red Army Faction seems to get more motivated, and their campaigns more focused, after Baader, Ensslin and Meinhof are arrested and held pending trial.

There’s almost as much nudity and free love as there is revolutionary activity, and it would be almost too easy to accuse Boll of edging into exploitation territory. But I’d like to think it’s part of the aesthetic. ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ is set in the ’70s, and it has an authentic ’70s look and feel to it. Not ’70s-by-design à la Steven Spielberg’s ‘Munich’, but something much more in tune with the edgy, on-the-streets style of film-making of that decade.

Based on Stefan Aust’s non-fiction study of the Red Army Faction, ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ hurtles through a decade of civil unrest, making few concessions to anyone who doesn’t have a decent working knowledge of that period of time. Yours truly, for instance. Supporting characters pop up for key scenes and then disappear. I’m sure some of them aren’t even name-checked. Brigitte Mohnhaupt (Nadja Uhl), a major player in the second generation of the Red Army Faction, doesn’t take the stage until the movie is nearly over.

I’m looking forward to seeing the film again when it makes its appearance on DVD in April, but I’ll be sure to have read Aust’s book first. With the timeline and the key players more firmly defined in my mind, I’m sure I’ll get a lot more out of ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ second time around.



*Gudrun Ensslin, played by Johanna Wokalek - actually co-founder of the group, longer before Meinhof’s involvement.

The Lives of Others

Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is a Stasi surveillance and interrogation expert. Want a house bugging? Want to know a suspect’s movements? Want that suspect broken when you finally bring him in? Wiesler’s your man. He knows that the innocent will reformulate their answers while the guilty will recite the same cover story, the same lies, word-for-word. He knows how to pace an interrogation. He knows just how much sleep-deprivation to apply. He’s so good that he gives classes to the next generation of Stasi agents.

He speaks in quiet, precise tones. His face is devoid of expression or emotion; impenetrable. He’d be a shit-hot poker player if he weren’t such a Party man. Wiesler is in it for the ideological purity of it. Not so his boss, Oberstleutnant Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), a pragmatic career man whose latest promotion sees him beholden to Minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme).

Hempf is the corpulent, corrupt politician in excelsis. When he orders Grubitz to dig up some dirt on playwright Georg Dreymann (Sebastian Koch), it’s not because Dreymann has been known to associate with reactionary writer Paul Hauser (Hans Uew-Bauer) or is a close personal friend of recently blacklisted director Albert Jerska (Volkmar Kleinert) – for all his association with these individuals, Dreymann remains at one remove from their politicking, and tows the party line – no, it’s because Hempf wants him out of the way so he can stake his claim on Dreymann’s actress girlfriend Christa-Marie Sieland (Martine Gedeck), a woman he’s already co-erced into sexual favours.

This is East Germany, 1984, where They (ie. the Minister Hempfs of this world) decide who writes plays, who directs them, who acts in them; where They revoke even the privileges of the artist to practice his or her art – in a shockingly cynical scene, Grubitz tells Wiesler about a report he’s received on the most effective punishments for artists; ‘effective’ meaning a total eradication, post-release, of their artistic capabilities – should that artist fall out of favour.

Naturally, it’s Wiesler whom Grubitz entrusts with surveilling Dreymann. Wiesler’s not too happy when Grubitz reveals that the operation isn’t political, it’s simply about “getting a rival out of the way”. This isn’t what Wiesler joined up for. Nevertheless, he follows orders … for a while, anyway. It doesn’t take him long to realise that Dreymann’s as clean as a whistle. Hempf’s oleaginous pursuit of Christa-Marie sickens Wiesler and eventually he intervenes, persuading her away from a rendezvous with Hempf and back to Dreymann.

Hereafter, Wiesler’s professionalism nosedives as he falsifies reports and turns a blind eye when the hitherto unmotivated Dreymann rails against the system following Jerska’s suicide.

Essentially, ‘The Lives of Others’ is the story of two awakenings. Dreymann’s is political and takes the form of an article, which Hauser helps him get published in the West, about the high incidence of suicide in East Germany and how the Department of Records haven’t catalogued any statistics on suicide since 1977. Wiesler’s is emotional/humanitarian; a falling from his eyes of the scales of blind adherence to the Party. It takes the form of an exponential realisation, as he listens in on the world of an artist, that there are ideas and concepts and a whole world of art that expresses them which it has never occurred to him before to believe possible.

This realisation – which takes root just as his disaffection with the job, personified by Hempf and his abuses of power – leads him to a course of action which will have serious ramifications. Meanwhile Grubitz, under mounting pressure from Hempf to discredit Dreymann, takes matters in hand by having Christa-Marie arrested.

And that’s all I’m going to reveal of the plot. Not only does the film move inexorably forward with the momentum and inevitability of a Jacobean tragedy, but writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck takes it into unexpected realms in the final reel. The majority of the action takes place over a short period of time in 1984. An extended coda leaps forward to 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, then to 1991, then to 1993. It’s a little disorientating on first viewing, but it’s done for a purpose. With its scenes of surveillance, secrets and clandestine meetings, it’s all too easy to latch onto the voyeuristic undertones of ‘The Lives of Others’ – particularly with the gorgeous Martine Gedeck in a major role – but the coda, a mirrored study in aftermath, reinforces what the film is truly about: the invisible yet parallel relationship between Wiesler and Dreymann.

And while it’s as politically and historically charged as ‘Downfall’, ‘The Lives of Others’ transcends, in its final stretch, the merely political and says things about art, inspiration and the human condition. It’s von Donnersmarck’s first film, he was just twenty-eight when he made it, and it’s a straight-up masterpiece.