Death in Stuttgart: revisiting Germany's 1970s war on terror.

• Author: Hockenos, Paul
• Position: On political books - Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. - The Baader Meinhof Complex - Movie review - Book review

Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F.

by Stefan Aust, trans. Anthea Bell

Oxford University Press, 456 pp.

The Baader Meinhof Complex

Uli Edel, director

Vitagraph Films, 2008

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

For forty-four harrowing clays in the fall of 1977, which came to be known as the German Autumn, the urban guerrillas of the Red Army Faction (RAF) held captive a major German industrialist, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, demanding in exchange for him the release of their imprisoned leadership. The West German government launched an obsessive manhunt that shut down train and bus terminals, posted police checkpoints on roads across the country, and tapped the phones of thousands of leftists. The ordeal ended with the spectacular liberation of a hijacked jumbo jet, the collective suicide of the RAF prisoners, and the cold-blooded murder of the kidnapped businessman.

The images associated with Germany's left-wing terrorism of the 1970s remain vivid for anyone who lived through it: Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's grave television addresses to the nation; the "Wanted" handbills with blurry black-and-white photos of the fugitives, among them the group's leaders, Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, and Gudrun Ensslin; and the eerie maximum-security Stammheim Prison near Stuttgart, the seventh floor of which held the political prisoners. The violence of the urban guerrillas rattled the state and terrified ordinary Germans. It is no exaggeration to say that the trauma experienced by many West Germans during that time can be likened in intensity to that endured by Americans in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. But most of the meaningful parallels between the two periods stop there.

Three decades later, this grim chapter in the republic's history still remains remarkably present in the culture and consciousness of contemporary Germany. Marking the thirtieth anniversary of the German Autumn a couple of years ago, some of the country's magazines reprinted (yet again) the images now seared into the memory of the Federal Republic: Baader in leather jacket and sunglasses pinned to the asphalt by police, Ensslin hanged in her cell, and an array of smashed, bullet-riddled BMWs with sheet-covered corpses lying next to them. This epoch and its most spectacular episodes have generated a regular stream of cultural material, including feature and documentary films, novels, exhibitions, plays, and even techno T-shirts sporting the RAF logo--a machine gun set against a red...