Terrorists and their victims on film; Das Todesspiel

[selenak]

One of the most anticipated films this year in Germany is Der Baader Meinhoff Komplex, which has its premiere this week and will start in the cinemas next week. There already has been a lot of articles in advance, and the film is guaranteed to revive, among other things, the discussion about presentations of terrorists. It deals with the most prominent cases of terrorism we had, originating in the late 60s, and culminating in what is usually referred to as the "German autumn" over here, the weeks in the fall of 1977 during which two abductions took place, of an individual (Hans-Martin Schleyer) and of an airplane full of passengers, the Landshut. The airplane passengers (83 passengers, I think) could be liberated and saved in the end; Schleyer, after over 40 days of imprisonment (with a lot of messages, so one knows he was alive that long), was killed. And the original leaders of the terrorist organisation in question all committed suicide in their cells. The RAF ( = Rote Armee Fraktion, which is why the Royal Airforce isn't the first thing that comes to mind over here if you use those initials) officially didn't dissolve until the early 90s - 1992, I think - but the 70s is what everyone focuses on and frankly is interested in. There are multiple reasons for this, not least that the three most prominent terrorists back then - Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhoff - were all products of the middle class; Ensslin's father was a Lutheran pastor, Ulrike Meinhoff used to be highly regarded journalist. Which meant the most prominent reactions were "why them?" or "this could have been me" (especially among the journalists, a good deal of whom knew Ulrike Meinhoff very well) for a long while, though the degree of identification and sympathy lessened during the mid-70s when the killings started in earnest and ended for good in 1977). That is, among the journalists who weren't loudly speculating about whether or not one should reintroduce the death penalty and were complaining about the imprisoned terrorists living "in luxury"; our version of Rupert Murdoch, Axel Springer, and his newspapers.

The relevance today hasn't got anything to do with the aims the RAF claimed they had, but everything with the question of how a democratic state can or should deal with terrorism, which is probably why we got a lot of new books in recent years as well as republication of old ones, and a tv two-parter which was excellent and which I recently rewatched, Das Todespiel ("The Death Game") by Heinrich Breloer, a docudrama with both restaged scenes and interviews with the surviving actual participants - Helmut Schmidt, who was chancellor of Germany back then, Schleyer's family, some of the Landshut passengers, the stewardess and the co-pilot, Wischnewski, who masterminded the rescue operation, J-H. Book and Silke Wittke, two of the terrorists. While the new movie which is about to be released is based on Stephan Aust's book of the same name which focuses on the terrorists and their background, the tv two-parter focused both on the politicians and the victims; you see the terrorists from their perspektive. (Though all the Schleyer scenes obviously are based on the interviews and debriefings with the terrorists that followed their later capture, as well as some recordings.) In terms of sheer drama, it's amazing how incredibly suspenseful this comes across because on the one hand, most viewers know what will happen - Schleyer will die, the passengers will not - but on the other, both the recreated scenes and especially the interviews convey the emotional reality in a way that doesn't allow a safe distance. What "we don't deal with terrorists" means when it comes to the family of the kidnapped, who of course hope that a deal will be made; meanwhile, the goverment - and the opposition, because in a step which I'm not sure would be possible today, Schmidt (who was a Social Democrat) went to the then leader of the conservative opposition (and later chancellor), Helmut Kohl, shortly after the news of the kidnapping came in, and included him and the other prominent conservatives in a crisis comittee, so that the politicians of the two major parties presented a united front in those days - had to face the decision they made and continued to make each day anew while photos and recordings of the increasingly desperate Schleyer arrived and then from the abducted airplane. Listening to the pleas to negotiate and fulfill the demands, again and again and again. Schmidt says in the interviews he stands by his decision today, but that he would have stepped down as chancellor if the rescue operation for the passengers had resulted in the later's deaths instead of their liberation; the praise later for being tough towards terrorists would have been universal condemnation if anyone in addition to Schleyer had died, he has no illusions about that.

Saying that fulfilling the demands of the terrorists - to release Baader, Ensslin, and nine others (Meinhoff being dead already at this point) - was never a question for anyone in the crisis committee is one thing, but where it gets both chilling and comforting is when some of the people interviewed, like conservative politician Zimmerman, mention that the idea to take reprisals was voiced. When asked directly whether or not the famous quote attributed to the late Franz Josef Strauß ( =Bavarian conservative politician, governor of Bavaria for decades, caused one of our more celebrated scandals when getting two journalists from the Spiegel arrested abroad and by this probably lost his chance of ever becoming chancellor for good), the suggestion to actually shoot the imprisoned terrorists until Schleyer (and later the Landshut passengers) were released, was in fact true and voiced, Helmut Schmidt says he can not comment, but that this of course was always regarded as unthinkable for him. "There are things you cannot do and still call yourself a Rechtsstaat - a state in which law is upheld, a democratic state. You do what you have to to defend the state and the people you're sworn to protect; these kind of measures would go directly against that oath."

The interview excerpts with Book are both illuminating and chilling as well. "We thought we'd bring Schleyer to the Volksgerichtshof" - then he realizes which term he has just used (the Volksgerichtshof was what the supreme court was called during the Third Reich, and it's injustice was infamous ) and corrects himself - "what I mean is, he was in the people's prison." But the people didn't know anything about it, says the interviewer, or rather, once they did they rejected this. You had no mandate from them. "We did not define "people" as meaning the citizens of West Germany. We defined it as meaning the surpressed masses everywhere, especially in the Third World." But you had no mandate from them, either, says the interviewer. "But we saw it differently. We thought we had it." And then we get to Schleyer as their embodiment of not just the German industry (he was president of the German employer's organization as well as being a CEO for Mercedes Benz) but of the German past; he used to be a member of the Nazi Party, not just a member, but he headed the Nazi student's organization. "So to you, he was the evil Nazi father and you were the good sons." Yes, says Book, yes. Exactly.

The fact that back then, the Third Reich was only a generation away and most people in charge of the main industries as well as many a politician had been participants in the system is of course what is named most often as a reason why those disaffected products of the middle class became terrorists in the late 60s to begin with, along with the Vietnam war, police brutality during demonstrations against the Shah in Berlin where one non-violent student was killed, and so forth. But the irony of these young people now applying the same type of dehumanization to their enemies is glaring: the refusal to acknowledge the other person as human, as equally deserving of life. The arrogance of deciding who deserves to live and how. When Ulrike Meinhoff, after officially joining Baader and Ensslin, wrote "policemen are pigs, and of course you can shoot pigs", the attitude displayed to me isn't any different from the Nazis calling the Jews "pigs".

(Schleyer's son, Hans-Eberhard, gets asked by Breloer whether he and his siblings talked with their father about the Third Reich. "Yes. We had harsh discussions about it. We said, you lived in Munich, so close to Dachau, you weren't just in the party but you were an official, how could you not know? And they" - his parents - "said we knew some, but not all of it. Not about the genocide. You have to believe us. We didn't know. You have to believe us." He doesn't say whether or not he believed, but it's an archetypical scene for this particular generation, the one growing of age in the 60s and confronting their parents. In a recreated scene, one of Schleyer's kidnappers after he talks about his children and says his oldest son is a lawyer, "a very capable young man", replies "well, he's the son of a capable father. Such a capable generation. Oh what a generation you were." You don't understand, says Schleyer, you weren't there. "And then", the young woman he's talking to says, ignoring him, "then you just went on, as if nothing had happened. How do you to that? Mountains of dead bodies, and you just go on?" This, too, is a pretty typical conversation of that time, but most people asking and accusing weren't responsible for murder of their own at the end.)

Gaby Dillman, who was a stewardess on the abducted air plane, had an absurdely Hollywoodesque happy ending - her fiance was a pilot and insisted on flying the plane carrying Wischnewski to the three places the Landshut was flown to, so he was there when the hostages were freed, and they are married to this day - but the story she tells of the five days in that plane is as harrowing. (And also with shadows of the past. In this case, the terrorists were Palestinians - working in tandem with the RAF - and their commander took every depiction of a star on someone's watch or pen as an indication that this person was Jewish, and yelled at them they would be executed. So you had various passengers and the co-pilot, on their knees, desperately declaring "I'm not Jewish, I'm not Jewish..." which coming from Germans carries its own horrible irony.

The two-parter ends, after showing the hostages arriving home safely, with the funeral service for Schleyer and two last interview excerpts, from Helmut Schmidt saying that during that funeral service, he sat next to Waltraud Schleyer and knew that in her head, she had to blame him at least partly for the death of her husband, and then with Waltraud Schleyer saying that what she remembers of this awful day was the way he gripped her hand afterwards, and that this was why she didn't blame him, because she could feel in that grip that he carried that burden and felt it deeply, but did make his choice in the belief he could not make another.

Comments

[shezan.livejournal.com]

The RAF main actions took place just before I started to work; but one of my very first stories, as a cub reporter, was on the kidnapping and killing of Aldo Moro by the Brigate Rosse in Italy. The common wisdom (stupidity, perhaps? at any rate, fed by books and films like Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum) at the time was that Italy eventually managed to get rid of its terrorists while remaining a fully-fledged democracy, but that Germany's Years of Lead hadn't been so nice (those prison "suicides", etc.) Still, you describe a bi-partisan and actually respectable political handling at the time.

What's certain is that Italian popular support for the BR vanished with the Moro kidnap, even before poor Moro was found dead, when the kidnappers killed 5 young carabinieri who were all from working class families, which exposed the joke of the "people's mandate" you describe. There was a HUGE crowd attending the cops' funeral, and after that the BR's support was a things of the past.

Recall that one year before the RAF planejacking, there was the 1976 hijack of an Air France Paris-Tel Aviv jet to Entebbe in Uganda, in which German hijackers triaged Jewish from non-Jewish passengers; this had already outraged public opinion.

... have you read Hans-Joachim Klein's memoirs? I only know the title in French, "La Mort Mercenaire". Former RAF terroristn highly enlightening on the state of mind inside. I was pointed to it by a French friend who'd been pretty close to RAF circles in the early 70s; h said it was perfectly accurate.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Still, you describe a bi-partisan and actually respectable political handling at the time.

Which it was. Mind you, there were also some more questionable things going on - such as occasional listening devices for lawyer/client conversations, listening devices in cells, though those in turn make you wonders, since they used them on Baader, Ensslin etc. and their attorneys, why on earth didn't they manage to capture any conversations where terrorist activities were going on? Anyway. When the lawyers found out about the devices, that more or less collapsed the entire trial. All of which took part before events in this tv two parter, so it's not part of the action.

I always thought it was one of those ironies of fate that Gudrun Ensslin's lawyer, Otto Schily, became our minister of the interior in this decade and is all for listening in on terrorists now...

Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum has a point about the mass hysteria of the average Bildzeitungsleser - different from outrage about the murders. There were a lot of letters telling them to kill themselves, sometimes complete with garotte, letters declaring them worse than pedophiles etc.

Klein's memoirs: no, I haven't read them.

Working class: which Schleyer's chauffeur and his bodyguards were as well, and they got gunned down without hesitation. (Something Schmidt points out.)

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Very good book, Klein's; he sort of woke up from the madness midway through. He has a sense of distance, a sense of history, and a nice line in irony. The guy who recommended it had too, although he was far less into the whole movement than Klein.

[bagheera-san.livejournal.com]

I've seen the trailer for Der Baader Meinhoff Komplex in cinema and wasn't very happy with it - it looked to me as if they were trying to sell it as Hollywood action cinema, milking the subject both for its violence and shock value and the general interest in terrorism. Bringing the RAF into the terrorism/security debate reeks to me of trying to justify restrictions of personal freedom by saying: Look, it could happen right here at home. It already did happen! And it was horrible, you don't want that to happen again, don't you? It's scare tactics, just like the Republican Party constantly revoking 9/11.

Personally, I believe Book when he says that they thought they were doing the right thing. I've been to Antifa and Anti-Castor Transport meetings, and my father was a sympathizer long after the seventies. That dynamic really exists: people think that the ends justify everything from crime to propaganda (and the far left isn't all that far from the far right when it comes to propaganda) to dehumanisation of the police (really crass things are being said there, and if you object, everyone has a story about the horrible about the mean things policemen have done to them or people they know.) Some of it is the thrill of doing something forbidden and rebelling, but at the same time these are people who're honestly invested in doing something about their liberal guilt and changing the world for the better. I don't mean this justifies anything, just that terrorists are sometimes adressing real problems, and it's not security we should be worried about (because if they're smart and determined, total security is just not possible) but those problems.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

if they're smart and determined, total security is just not possible

Total anything doesn't exist, but there's a HUGE difference between imperfect security and no security. Also, every memoir about special ops, terrorism etc. makes it so very obvious that Murphy's law applies again and again...

[kindkit.livejournal.com]

I doubt I'll get a chance to see this film (very few films not in English are ever screened in the United States) but thank you for the review. It was very informative not just about the film, but about a bit of history I didn't know much about.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

The tv two parter by Breloer probably won't make it into the US (which is what I was mostly talking about), but the film that starts next week might, because it's produced by Bernd Eichinger and some of his productions, from Das Boot to Der Untergang, did make it across the Atlantic. Though I know it's are, and at any rate I can't say what the film is like yet.

Background information: the wiki article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction) is reasonably good.

[kattahj.livejournal.com]

This was very interesting! I didn't know much about the Baader Meinhoff except that they existed, so it was very informative to read your post. Thanks!

[selenak.livejournal.com]

The wiki article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction) offers a reasonably good summary (and also mentions Breloer's tv two parter).

[thepouncer.livejournal.com]

I studied Baader-Meinhoff in school, as an example of "socialist-revolutionary" terrorism (distinct from nationalist-separatist, religious-extremist, and reactionary), but I don't have any personal memory of their actions. I seem to recall the scholarship, based on interviews and investigations, showing that the members were mostly of middle class origins, rebelling against their establishment parents? My professor tried to draw trends from that and an opposite reaction among those drawn to reactionary terrorist ideologies (like Timothy McVeigh). I remember being fascinated by the intersection between the Red Brigades and the PLO, since their aims were different on the surface, but they still managed to cooperate in a sort of fellowship of perceived (or real) oppression.

I doubt the TV docudrama will make it to the U.S., but I'll be on the lookout for the film. It was such a different era, but the choices faced with violence are never easy.

[monanotlisa.livejournal.com]

Thanks for sharing this; I love the context you provide.

[genarti]

This film sounds fascinating, and harrowing. I didn't know anything about the hostage situations, which brings sharply home to me how patchy my education is about certain things.

[tebasile7.livejournal.com]

Hi;
I`m mostly lurking on LJ (here for fic recs and all things Who) but this topic is something I feel the need to delurk ;-)

I was to young back then to actually remember it but as I`m from Karlsruhe and my parents are from that generation and where into all that `68 ideology complete with demonstrations and everything they at least knew people who knew some of the RAF members.

What I do know is that they had connections with the peace movement that became the Green Party (when they first participated at the Bundestagswahl we actually had an election party in our house).

But the RAF and those terrorist attacks kind of are for us what the Third Reich was for them an their parents: something you don`t really talk about.

I only found out about there having been terrorists in that time in secondary school where it was discussed quite often (most of my teachers where of that generation too).
The only first hand account I have is my grandma telling off one of them (can´t remember her name but is was the one they caught in the GDR after the wall came down) in an Eiscafe on Kaiserstrasse after she made deragotary remark about my uncle (both mentally and physically handicapped) that according to her went on to be a political rant as well (knowing my grandma it was probably true).

I have seen parts of "Das Todesspiel" but unfortunately not all of it and was very impressed how it showed the victims side without going into what these days can only be called "US-style" propaganda.

I want to watch it again as a companion to the movie (whose theatrical trailer didn`t impress me either) especially since I was raised with a mild sympathy for the RAF side anyway ( only stuff like the "Schleyer-Halle" being named after a bad man which I sincerely hope was ac omment about his Nazi past and not an endorsement of terrorist activities I'm pretty sure it wasn`t something my parents told me....perhaps one of their friends...).

Thanks for this ver5y interesting look at this time from todays perspective. I think I`m going to talk to my parents about it again, perhaps over 30 years are enough time to talk about such traumatic loss of innocence that it must have been.....

I hope you don`t mind me delurking with such a long comment.

Also do you mind if I friend you? I`m mostly lurking due to a lack of time but apart from fic and recs i find many of your other topics and how you write about them fascinating.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Friend away! Also, very interesting about your parents. Mine weren't very political back then, but a friend of theirs worked in the Justizministerium and for a while had to live with two bodyguards who went everywhere, even to summer parties, and I remember that much from my childhood. I also remember seeing some of the photos at the local police station when we had our school excursion to same, in the late 70s.

I have seen parts of "Das Todesspiel" but unfortunately not all of it and was very impressed how it showed the victims side without going into what these days can only be called "US-style" propaganda.

Yes, though presumably this is easier to do with some temporal distance. In the second part, they show some excerpts from news, interviews of people on the street, and these are absolutely chilling, as they all demand for the terrorists to be shot, and one says "auf der Flucht erschossen, jawohl, so gehört's ihnen" - which one has to take as a direct allusion to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht being executed. Breloer manages to be utterly sympathetic to the victims while also showing the baying-for-blood climate of the day and how dangerous that was/could have been, instead of using the victim's stories to call for more blood.

[tebasile7.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Friended :-)

I agree, without the temporal distance a movie such as this would be less objective even over here, but I hope it wouldn`t get exploited quite so shamelessly.

And speaking of more recent terrorist threats:
I`ve had the surreal experience of half a dozend armored cars in front of our house because someone from Verfassungsschutz was at my dad´s art gallery....

[wee-warrior.livejournal.com]

This was a very interesting read, thank you. I don't know much about that era - I was born just at the point where it was too recent to be talked about in history lessons and not recent enough to be discussed in Gemeinschaftskunde (predictably enough, we did GDR history in tenth grade and the Bosnian War in the Oberstufe).

But the people didn't know anything about it, says the interviewer, or rather, once they did they rejected this. You had no mandate from them. "We did not define "people" as meaning the citizens of West Germany. We defined it as meaning the surpressed masses everywhere, especially in the Third World." But you had no mandate from them, either, says the interviewer. "But we saw it differently. We thought we had it."

I find this so very interesting, because it is an aspect of the left in general greatly criticized by non-Western, non-white activists and intellectuals over the last few decades. I have done a bit of reading on post-colonialism and this comes up all the time. Feminism, too.
In their way, they were just as elitist and dehumanizing as the system they condemned, without remotely realizing it.

(I don't know if the interpretation is correct, because I've really only done very little on the subject, but the same notion came to me when reading texts of the Frankfurter Schule. It's all very much about how the masses are unknowing and passively dragged along, while you, the sociologist, are among the precious few who can actually see the underlying structures. It's a tad condescending, really.)

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Since I was born in 1969, we didn't learn about the RAF at school, either, but I do remember the Fahndungsphotos. Also, a friend of my parents worked in the Justizministerium and had two bodyguards for a while, and each time he wanted to visit or something like this, he had to take the bodyguards along. I remember this.

It's all very much about how the masses are unknowing and passively dragged along, while you, the sociologist, are among the precious few who can actually see the underlying structures. It's a tad condescending, really.)

It is, plus according to Stefan Aust's book at least most of the younger members hadn't even bothered to read Marx. They were just spouting phrases.

[wee-warrior.livejournal.com]

Since I was born in 1969, we didn't learn about the RAF at school, either, but I do remember the Fahndungsphotos. Also, a friend of my parents worked in the Justizministerium and had two bodyguards for a while, and each time he wanted to visit or something like this, he had to take the bodyguards along. I remember this.

I talked about the topic with a friend of mine a few days ago - she's a little younger than you, and she also remembers the pictures and a lot of the general paranoia. I guess something like Chernobyl is familiar to me in a similar sense, something I remember because of the general shift in mood it caused, but which I couldn't yet entirely grasp on an intellectual level.

[tebasile7.livejournal.com]

I don`t think we really had it on the curriculum either ( I seem to be somewhere in the middle agewise here...) but as I said most of my teachers later on where from that generation and some did fell the need to talk about it with the following one.

I just turned two back then so no direct memories....but Chernobyl had my 10 year old self in a right state:
Raised on Atomkraft-Nein Danke! and thoroughly convinced that we all are going to die.....

But later on I was glad that we didn`t have to go and search for mushrooms anymore
and the sandbox wasn`t that important at that age ;-)

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Re: sandbox: one of my classmates refused to participate in the jumping part of the Bundesjugendspiele in the Chernobyl year for that reason. She was the daughter of a teacher, and either for that reason or because the sports teachers agreed with her she got her wish, but the rest of us jumped into doom, as it were.

Watching War Games, and The Day After, on the other hand, did give me nightmares and had me convinced we would all die in a nuclear war, either by accident or in the real thing...