There are flowers everywhere - bunches of red roses, white lilies, carnations...The grey tomb slab on the Dornhaldenfriedhof in Stuttgart says, in purple letters: “Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe”. This is the last resting place of the terrorists of the Red Army Faction (RAF), who committed suicide on October 18, 1977, in Stammheim prison.
...Three decades after their bloody heyday, when they terrorised Germany with assassinations, bombings and kidnappings, the left-wing terrorists of the RAF - popularly known as the Baader-Meinhof gang - still haunt the nation. The secret worship, and overt scorn, evident at the cemetery are echoes of the trauma that accompanied the darkest chapter in West German history.
...The Baader Meinhof Complex, a feature film [is] based on the group's founders. It...has provoked fierce criticism from the victims' families, historians and the daughter of the terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, Bettina Röhl, who long ago decried her mother's violence. “It glorifies brutal killers as good-looking idealists. It trivialises their terror,” she says.
The film's director, Uli Edel, disagrees vehemently: “It does not take sides at all; it is just historically accurate.” The widow of Jürgen Ponto, a banker who was murdered by the RAF, was so enraged about the film - which was co-financed with state funding - that she has returned her Order of the Federal Republic of Germany.
And she finishes up, writing:
The film-makers said that they wanted to debunk the myth of the RAF and be historically accurate in doing so. Fact-wise they are - right up to the number of bullets that hit each victim. However, in casting such popular and attractive actors as Moritz Bleibtreu (as Andreas Baader) and Martina Gedeck (as Ulrike Meinhof), they simultaneously revive the nostalgia of “radical chic” with which the RAF has long been surrounded, and that led years ago to German boutiques offering shirts by “Prada Meinhof” and bags featuring the RAF logo with the machinegun.
As the credits rolled and the lights went up at a screening I attended in Munich, one member of the audience raised his fist in a gesture of sympathy.
He was barely 20 years old, munching popcorn and wearing a hooded jumper. The assiduously factual debunking of the “Baader-Meinhof myth” obviously did not work for everyone in the audience.
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