The Baader-Meinhof Complex

The Red Army Faction, the German Greens, and a chronicle of terrible left-wing ideas.

Over the weekend, I finally got around to watching the German film the Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008). The movie, which was directed by Uli Edel, is about the Red Army Faction, the leftist militant group that terrorized West Germany during the 1970s. It is an excellent dissection of a uniquely German post-war pathology, one I also detected while researching the radical origins of the now thoroughly establishment German Green Party: Both the RAF and students that went on to form the Greens had been horrified by their parents’ failure to resist Nazism. As part of their individuation from their parents, they pledged that they would never stand idly by in the face of injustice and oppression. They vowed that they would always “do something”. But that something was sometimes very dark, and wildly missed the mark. The West German members of RAF believed they were engaged in armed struggle with contemporaneous movements for decolonization in the Global South, though it was often unclear exactly how, and on at least some occasions, those disciplined movements wanted nothing to do with their will to self-destruction via drug abuse and boundless casual sex. The RAF bombed the offices of media company Axel-Springer and killed diplomats, hitting a great many other targets along the way. Meanwhile, the German Greens openly endorsed pedophilia as part of their broader project of promoting sexual liberation, which they believed was the antidote to totalitarianism.