Baader-Meinhoff: The Rehabilitation?

Claudia Fromme, a journalist for Süddeutsche Zeitung, published this on a new film:

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.

Remember "Radical Chic"?

"Radical Chic" stems from the famous Leonard Bernstein party that Tom Wolfe satirized.

In "Radical Chic," Wolfe describes an intriguing phenomenon of the late Sixties: the courting of romantic radicals — Black Panthers, striking grapeworkers, Young Lords—by New York's socially elite. He focuses primarily on one symbolic event: the gathering of the radically chic at Leonard Bernstein's duplex apartment on Park Avenue to meet spokesmen of the Black Panther Party, to hear them out, and to talk over ways of aiding their cause. Tom Wolfe re-creates the incongruous scene — and its astonishing repercussions — with high fidelity. But he gives us more than just a wry account of life among the Beautiful People; he also provides a historical perspective on that impulse of the upper classes to identify themselves with what they imagine to be the raw, vital lifestyle of the lower orders.

and this:-

Such apparent incongruity had been observed also in France before and during the "May Revolution" of 1968. A contemporaneous account of early disturbances at the University of Nanterre noted that "it is the girls that give the show away - culottes, glossy leather, mini-skirts, boots - driving up in Mini-Coopers ...". Similarly, in Paris, "the theatre of the barricades ... attracted its share of chic walk-ons in Saint Laurent"

Well, it has mutated.

Read on:

Mohammad Bakri will be in New York next week and he has put himself in our hands for two nights. We of Al Jisser Group and the Defend Mohammad Bakri Committee decided that two quiet dinner meeting with Mohammad would be ideal. Two nights so that we would be small groups able to talk with him directly over dinner. We hope to have between 15 and 20 people each night.

Thus we invite you to join us on either of the two nights as we circulate Mohammad from table to table to talk one on one. There are two subjects that we wish him to
talk about and they are the reasons we are doing these fundraising dinners. We want him to give us a progress report on the terrible suit that is being brought against
him by five Israeli soldiers who claim that the film Jenin, Jenin ruined their lives. And amid the troubles we want to remember that his art must continue and thus we will ask him about the film he is now working on.

Mohammad will do a small piece of one of his plays for us -- a brief solo performance and we will show one of his films late after dinner for those who might wish to stay.

This dinner will be the familiar feast that Mamlouk Restaurant provides. Salam al Rawi of Mamlouk has graciously offered us space and permission and equipment to
project the videos.

Please invite you friends, circulate this announcement. Come hungry and bring your checkbook.

The hour is 7:00 pm The dates are: Tuesday September 25 or Wednesday September 26, 2007 Dinner donation is $100 or $50 allowing people to self select what they can afford.

Mamlouk Restaurant is at 211 E. 4th St. at Avenue A If you can't come and would like to donate, you can do so in two ways: Send a tax deductible check made out to "Al Jisser Group" Mail it to: Al Jisser Group P.O.Box 255 New York, NY 10013 or go to www.aljisser.org and donate via Paypal using a credit card.

Bakri is a liar, a sued propagandist. His film was fiction yet he gets away with it because, despite his "pineapple" pocked face, he's thought of as beautiful and smart and representative of the New Arab, despite the fact that a relative of his was involved in a terrorist act.