ARD – RAF: Against the sharks

The Red Army Group (RAF) is far away, its history has almost become almost a German folk saga. If her alleged former member Daniela Klette had not been arrested in vain for decades last year, many would not know what that was ever, the so -called armed struggle.

Founded in 1970 as an experiment whether, according to the Latin American model, a “city guerrilla” could be built up in the Federal Republic, “to take the conflicts to the extreme”, the RAF was only resolved in 1998 when it had long been clear that it had been completely failed. Instead of reaching the “reorganization of the proletariat”, the armed struggle developed into a bloody and bleak disaster, which strengthened and did not weaken the state. Anyone who has spoken of revolutionary survey and the like in this country since then is not entirely tight. The RAF did that.

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A life -threatening attitude

The constitution of the uncompromising state took place in Stuttgart-Stammheim, in the high-security prison and in the criminal trial against the captured RAF founders as representatives of the extreme left, which they did not survive. That is precisely why they developed a very special radiance. Regardless of whether Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, Andreas Baader and Jan-Carl Raspe killed themselves in Stammheim (very likely) or not (as their followers said), their death showed that it is also life-threatening in prison to want to fight the state.

The documentary drama “Stammheim – Time of Terror” by Niki Stein and Stefan Aust, which is now running in ARD, deals with the course of this confrontation. The lawsuit against the first generation of the RAF began on May 21, 1975. It was, as the RAF, correctly said, a political process, precisely because the state claimed that it was carrying out a normal procedure according to the criminal code against criminals that had stolen and murdered in its actions. However, he did this in a newly built, windowless courtroom, right next to the high security prison, in which the Rafler appears under special conditions. It negotiated according to new laws created shortly before: Above all, both the accused and their lawyers could be excluded from the procedure, but which then continued.

Against such a state, the RAF saw itself in the war and its detainees as prisoners of war, which is why Andreas Baader said that the RAF was “not justiciable”. The political conflict should also be taken to the extreme in the courtroom, which you can watch in the television film »Stammheim«. Explained you don’t get the political argument, it is about atmosphere and individual psychology – unfortunately.

Knock on the sky

At the beginning, Ulrike Meinhof (Tatiana Nekrasow) and Gudrun Ensslin (Lilith Stangenberg) flew into prison by helicopter, which appears like a fortress, filmed in black and white, to the sounds of Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’on Heaven’s Door”. In between, there are original recordings from the 60s (Martin Luther King, bombs on Vietnam, Rudi Dutschke, Demos, Benno Ohnesorg, but also the original Ensslin and the original Meinhof on television). Skip on the door of the sky: pictures between utopia and death with a claim to reality: “This film is based on minutes and memories of people acting” can be read in the opening credits. Collected, prepared and assembled by Stefan Aust, the RAF chief explanator, since he wrote the bestseller “The Baader-Meinhof complex” in 1985, a kind of “We Children from Zoo station” in political.

When entering the prison, the film is colored. Meinhof calls in her cell: »Where is my typewriter? I have to work. ”And Enssslin taps the group’s new code names in her cell, derived from the novel» Moby Dick «by Herman Melville:» Andreas is Ahab … and the Smutje is myself. The cook sermons on board. «Later Andreas Baader (Henning Flüsloh) and Jan-Carl Raspe (Rafael Stachowiak) are also brought to Stammheim. All in the same wing, at the top. In the middle of the hall is a table in front of a wall with a glass modules. Then they meet and work on any papers, cetermous.

The state of knowledge of the movement

You can learn what all of this is about later: “It is about saving the knowledge of the movement of 67/68 historically and not leaving the class enemy.” But she gets on the lid from Ensslin that she should “reflect on her socialization as a fascist as a” former star journalist “. Raspe remains friendly to her, but the lovers Baader and Ensslin tramples on her. She takes it very well and she is the first to die: in 1976 she was found hanged in her cell. Bullied, even though, according to Ensslin, she is “the voice of the RAF”, or maybe because of that? These are the questions that the “Stammheim – Zeit of Terror” raises, the political is only briefly indicated. Once Meinhof says in the trial: “Practice is the death of the prisoners”, and Raspe reads an explanation in court: “It is impossible not to see the analogies on the judiciary of the Third Reich.”

If you want to know what the RAF actually wanted, you have to watch other films about them instead. In “Baader-Meinhof-complex” (2008) by Bernd Eichinger you get the development of this strict group from the anti-authoritarian 68 revolt, in “Stammheim” (1986), with which Reinhard Hauff won the Berlinale, the struggle of the prisoners is explained in court.

It is noteworthy that Stefan Aust also wrote the script for these films or acted as a content advisor. The former editor -in -chief of the “Spiegel” knows how to get Ulrike Meinhof from the old “concrete” of the 1960s and he brought her little daughters from Sicily in 1970 so that they did not come to the PLO when her mother went underground.

Aust’s perspectives on the RAF and its acting characters vary over the decades, you can see the change in social climate. Politically the strongest is »Stammheim« from the 80s of Hauff. This film is not interested in the group -dynamic processes in the wing, but almost exclusively plays in the courtroom, in which the Rafler, as a radical intellectual, meet a conservative judge who fails to do as if it were a normal process.

Ulrike Meinhof in the change of time

The figure of Ulrike Meinhof is drawn here as a strong, clever personality and Andreas Baader as a ingenious analyst. A film from the clear 80s, when it was assumed that there is a left and a right camp (which was not interested in the legendary center today) and the RAF was historically one of the left, even if is isolated and peripheral. Their so-called armed politics was condemned as nonsensical and misanthropic, but their prisoners were often solidarized because their prison and judicial conditions were found as a scandal.

In the neoliberal frosty Merkel era of the zero years, Eichinger’s “Baader-Meinhof complex” reminded that strong political heat had been generated on the street, in culture and university at the end of the 1960s-from left. As in an action film, this was shown in the second part that changed into a chamber game that played in Stuttgart-Stammheim. In this film, Meinhof looks a bit broken and baader like a mercury rebel. But dramaturgical and content, however, were still very interesting figures.

The new film “Stammheim-Zeit der Terror” is a remake of the second part of the “Baader-Meinhof complex”, only that Meinhof is now portrayed as a completely unsettled person and Baader as a scream that does not seem particularly bright, but Ensslin is more intelligent but jealous. This is presented in a purely cinematic manner, but it remains just a mood. In the style of the current zeitgeist to refrain from socially political issues and preferably to deal with all problems. Baader can only be happy once, then when the RAF kidnapped Hanns Martin Schleyer to free the Stammheimers. The RAF rejects the kidnapping of an Air Hanamaschine to Mogadischu by commanding the PflP with the same goal, explains Baader to a representative of the federal government who visits him.

Nevertheless, the RAF appears in the latest Aust film in the latest Aust film only as a meeting of sloping birds, whose moods are warned. The enforcement officer Horst Bubeck (Moritz Führmann), who is supervising, must then pay for it, who is granted most of the empathy here, for example when he is pushing with the prisoners when they are forced to nourish during a hunger strike and he looks like a hose in the throat.

Showing this form of state violence is new to Aust. Likewise, the monitoring of the prisoners in their cells, including their self-made communication system, until their death on the night of October 18, 1977, after the Lufthansa machine in Somalia was stormed by the German GSG 9. In the credits it says: »Whether the cells were listened to on the night of death and in the days before that is still controversial. The responsible authorities deny this. «This is the rest of Aust’s political criticism of the state.

“Stammheim-time of terror”, May 19th, ARD, 8:15 p.m. and in the ARD media library