FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Der Baader Meinhoff Komplex 

When our video library was founded, the Baader-Meinhof organization, the RAF, was an important topic. Today, 20 years later, the older people among us are more interested, aren't they? After all, we have to take ourselves back to the 70s when the Federal Republic was kept in terror by a wave of terror. Explosive attacks, bank robbery, kidnapping, these are the means to counter U.S. imperialism and German capitalist oppression. And how did the RAF want its policies understood? Marxist. In truth, it was merely an expression of the archaic theory that acts of violence could destroy the backbone of a society. Here now comes the ambitious attempt to show the rise and fall of the RAF. This is presented in historical detail. Perhaps even too precisely. So many names and dates! Is this possibly a film, free from 65? Some figures are treated very precisely, others only superficially. The "heroes" are Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu), Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) and Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck). Baader and Ensslin are lovers, radicalized by Vietnam and German industrialism. Their conclusion: violence as the only possible way out. Meinhof, on the other hand, remains the most enigmatic figure in the film. A well-known journalist whose convictions one might share. At first she acts only as a consultant, then she leaves her family to join in. But the film can never explain this decision to us. We fail to make it. The script was written by director Uli Edel and producer Bernd Eichinger. Unfortunately, both are responsible for diluting the action with too many facts, characters and events. Sometimes you think you are swimming editorials in a mirror. Only Horst Herold (Bruno Ganz) serves as the connecting figure: a law enforcement officer trying to understand the thinking behind the RAF. In the end he understands it, even if he disagrees with it. Of course, it also helps enormously that Ganz can give his figure the necessary authenticity. Sometimes I had the suspicion that the film sympathizes with the RAF - even though their enterprise seems as murderous as it is hopeless. Isn't it bordering on insanity to condemn an ordinary citizen as guilty of the activities of his government? We are all partly guilty. We are all the system. But if you set off a bomb, you are simply executing a random passer-by. This defines the evil of terrorism in general. Although it is defended in the theory of anarchism, this kind of justification seems crazy. You have to be extremely convinced of yourself to shed blood for a theory.