Books

Old favourites: The Baader-Meinhof Complex by Stefan Aust (1987)

It’s hard to feel much sympathy for the Red Army Faction by the end of this terrific book

Ultimately, the Red Army Faction fall prey to a danger faced by all revolutionaries: they murder their humanity in the name of humanitarian ideals.

Rob Doyle
Sat May 4 2019 - 06:00

This terrific book by the longtime editor of Der Spiegel magazine, Stefan Aust, was turned into a gripping 2008 film which made the trail of mayhem wreaked by the terrorist Red Army Faction in the 1970s seem rather sexy. Clad in a short skirt, Gudrun Ensslin cradles a submachine gun between her suggestively parted legs, and says, “Screwing and shooting are the same”.

This collision of post-sixties Dionysianism, radical chic, and anti-authoritarianism was indeed crucial to the emergence of the RAF, which waged guerrilla war on what its members believed was a resurgent fascism within the German state.

As Aust’s unflinching book shows, however, the reality was more grim and sordid. By the end of The Baader-Meinhof Complex, it’s impossible to feel much sympathy for the charismatic Andreas Baader and the damaged, middle-class acolytes he led on a campaign of bombing, shooting, arson and kidnapping. The curious titular word choice comes to seem apt: the RAF was pathological.

Ulrike Meinhof was an establishment journalist who, radicalised during protests against the Vietnam War, crossed a line of no return by assisting in the escape from prison of Andreas Baader. From then on, she becomes the intellectual mouthpiece of the group (her underground writings were later published as Everybody Talks About the Weather… We Don’t). They move around Europe, rob banks and plan attacks, and receive combat training in the Middle East. A massive manhunt ends in 1975 with the capture of the group’s leaders.

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It is at this point that sympathy begins to dwindle. During a lengthy trial, RAF supporters on the outside resort to brutal means to secure the group’s release. It’s no longer about world revolution: it’s about them. A passenger plane is hijacked; innocent people are slain. Ulrike Meinhof hangs herself in her cell. Ultimately, the Red Army Faction fall prey to a danger faced by all revolutionaries: they murder their humanity in the name of humanitarian ideals. The morning after another failed bid for release, the ringleaders are all found dead in their cells.