HAMBURG (dpa) – Germans are being treated to a rose-tinted cinematic celebration of one of the country’s darkest post-war episodes – the era of the Baader-Meinhof and Red Army Faction leftwing terror gangs.
The films are heady tales of men and women who devoured the political tomes of Karl Marx and Chairman Mao, hurled paving stones and Molotov cocktails at police and finally went to prison in their struggle against state “oppression”.
Recent releases include “Black Box BRD”, the parallel biographies of Deutsche Bank boss Alfred Herrhausen who was murdered by the RAF and terrorist Wolfgang Grams who died in a police shootout. Another is Volker Schloendorff’s “Legends of Rita” – a thriller inspired by the life of former RAF fugitive Inga Viett. A film about Baader- Meinhof ringleader Andreas Baader is due out soon.
It seems as if the RAF is on the way to becoming part of German popular culture and the latest film to plough this furrow is a hagiography of Holger Meins, a young militant who died in 1974 while on hunger strike at a German prison. He was aged only 33.
Pictures of Meins as a bearded, shrunken corpse shocked Germans at the time, provoking a fierce debate on the forced-feeding of hunger strike inmates. Just before he died officials had said his medical condition was no cause for alarm.
Whether fictionalized or collage-like with archive footage and interviews with former terrorists and their associates, all the films offer a more or less romanticised view of desperados combatting what they saw as an “neo-fascist” state during the turbulent late 1960s and early 1970s.
Little if any mention is made of the dozens of victims who died in the terrorist violence and kidnappings and there are few words of regret.
The film “Starbuck Holger Meins” – his terrorist associates named Meins after the ship’s helmsman in Hermann Meville’s whaling epic Moby Dick – might easily carry the subtitle: Portrait of the Terrorist as a Young Artist.”
Most of it is taken up with Meins’ arguable talents as a painter and young filmmaker before his radical views led him to the notorious terror gang led by Baader and journalist-turned urban guerrilla Ulrike Meinhof.
A thoughtful and sensitive youth, Holger is a boy scout for 13 years before attending film school where he makes a short about assembling petrol bombs and rubs shoulders with cameraman Michael Ballhaus who later worked with Fassbinder and director Wolfgang Peterson, both destined to achieve fame rather than notoriety. Peterson is best known for the WWII submarine feature “Das Boot”.
Viewers see Holger messing about in front of a super 8 camera held by his girlfriend, gazing moodily from black and white photographs and a brief sequence of him spouting unintelligible Maoist political rhetoric. The terrorist crimes of which he is accused are never mentioned.
Director Gerd Conradt, who knew Meins, said he felt compelled to make a portrait of his former political wayfarer so that “people would see not just the RAF man but the creative person as well.”
“It is a very subjective portrait,” said Conradt who last saw Meins before he was imprisoned. “I’m fascinated by the ‘conceptual aspect’ of his detention and his death.”
He was also moved by the staunch attitude of Meins’ late father, a Hamburg artisan, who far from being repelled by the media image of his son as a terrorist monster, remained fiercely loyal to him right until the end, lambasting German authorities for alleged police brutality and inhuman jail conditions.
These sequences are among the film’s few artistic strengths along with comments from Rainer Langhans, the easy-going former communard who lived with Meins and Baader in Berlin’s Kommune 1 – one of the icons of the 1968 student protest movement in Germany.
Recalling Meins as an ultra-serious young man prone to violent mood swings, Langhans tells the camera candidly: “I think Holger was actually fighting a battle against himself.”
