Stefan Aust on the New Baader-Meinhof Film Based on His Book

Enlarge image Stefan Aust (© picture-alliance/dpa) Even before its release in September 2008, Germany nominated a true story about the 1970's Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang known as the Red Army Faction (RAF) for consideration for an Oscar as best foreign film of the year.

Stefan Aust, the former editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel, wrote a definitive book on the subject which was recently updated and served as the basis for the film.

We caught up with him at the East Coast US premiere of The Baader Meinhof Complex at the AFI Silver Theatre in Washington.

Are you satisfied with the film?  How accurate is it?  Would you have done anything differently, had you been the director?

I'm not only satisfied with the film but I think it turned out exceptionally well.  The great thing about it is that (producer) Bernd Eichinger and the director, Uli Edel, trusted the story.  This means that they did not do what so many producers and directors have done before them, which is take the historical material and then create an artificial story on top of that.

Instead, they put their faith in the existing material and they told the story the same way the book does, namely relatively simply.  I wanted to tell a story and they wanted to tell a story.  And we all agreed from the beginning and it was clear that we wanted to tell the story of the three main characters – Baader, Meinhof, Ensslin – over a time period of 10 years following their path through violence into an underground movement.  And in that sense we were all in agreement.

As the author of a book of over 900 pages of which some 100 pages are filmed – that is about the appropriate proportional comparison – well of course there are many things that were important to me that did not make it into the movie.  But that’s just the way it is, unless you want to make a movie that is 10 hours long.

Enlarge image A film poster advertising The Baader Meinhof Complex in Germany. (© picture-alliance/dpa) What is the response in Germany? How has the film been received there?

The film has been really well received there, even better than I had ever expected.  So far (since it was released in late September) we've had about 2.5 million viewers, and I think we will soon reach the 3 million mark, which would put it among the top five films of the year.

There is also an intense level of interest abroad.  The film is showing in almost every country in the world.  It's showing in France and has just opened in England.

The 30th anniversary of the "German Autumn" (of 1977) – the Schleyer kidnapping, the hijacking of the Lufthansa plane and the suicides of the imprisoned RAF members in Stammheim (prison) – was last year, when there were a lot of documentaries and articles on the subject.

But we can really say that the response to the film this year is even bigger than the anniversary marking 30 years since the German Autumn.  And I think that's pretty impressive.  The film has generated a real buzz and led to many more discussions.

Everything is accurately portrayed and there is a lot of action shown in fast-paced sequences.  But do you think the film could be confusing to American or other non-German viewers who may not know very much about who, for instance, (student leader Rudi) Dutschke, and who Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof and the other RAF terrorists – as well as their victims – were?

I think it is not really that relevant to know who every single person is and to put them in their precise historical context.  Modern movies, including movies made in Hollywood, are often made in a similar manner.  Syriana, for instance, is an extremely fast-paced film, in which you may not follow the sequence of scenes right away and so you will only piece these scenes together in your mind during the course of the entire film.

Enlarge image A still from the film (a portrayal of student leader Rudi Dutschke speaking out in Berlin). (© Courtesy of Constantin Films) This film is made in a similar way, and for that reason I don't really have a problem with people not knowing the whole story, as I believe they can still relate to it because the individual figures in the film not only represent the real figures which they are based on – they represent prototypes.

So you don't really need to know the story of Rudi Dutschke to see that he is a student leader who obviously exudes a certain appeal and who is shot by a right-wing radical, which leads to a massive student protest.  Anyone who has never even heard the name "Rudi Dutschke" will understand that.

And if violence escalates and later this same figure pops up again, then you will also recognize him … then he is standing there saying "the fight goes on!" and then you understand.

So at least on an emotional level you understand what is happening, even if you do not know about every precise historical detail.

True.  I'm in my mid-thirties and must confess that I did not know the full story of Rudi Dutschke myself, even though I did know who he was …

In the beginning a lot of people said: "That's all fine and dandy what you're doing there, but no one will be interested in it except people who lived through it at the time."

So they were basically saying only the old "68ers" (as Germans call the generation of '68) would want to go see this movie.  But this was a really big mistake – mostly young people have gone to see the film, young people who are the same age now as the main characters in the film.

They confront similar questions, at least initially.  Very few people probably ever ask themselves "should I become a terrorist?"  But a lot of younger people do ask themselves "what role do I play in society … how do I relate to the Vietnam War" – or today, the Iraq War?

Young people of all generations ask themselves these kinds of questions over and over again.  And that's why, while a lot of people cannot relate to them going underground, they can I believe relate to some of the questions they were asking themselves, even if they drew the wrong conclusions by turning towards violence.

And by the way we cannot overlook that we're living in societies right now that are far more influenced by terror than their society was at the time.

Enlarge image Moritz Bleibtreu as Andreas Baader and Johanna Wokalek as Gudrun Ensslin. (© Courtesy of Constantin Films) This is all represented realistically and you cite the interest of a young audience.  But does this not lead to the danger of a kind of glamorization of the terrorists?  The female characters are portrayed as quite vibrant and glamorous – at least in the beginning.

You see you've already observed this correctly and answered your own question – "in the beginning."

It's like this: You help every criminal, every terrorist, ever gangster along a little bit further towards achieving immortality if you make a movie about them.  But you should not make a movie about them if you do not want to take this risk.

Yet we also view films as an examination of figures … and these figures could initially come across as glamorous.  And of course we hired very good actors for these roles, including some quite famous actors … But you need to portray these figures the way they really were, and they were initially kind of glamorous. 

I even knew some of them.  I knew Ulrike Meinhof, and she was a very impressive personality.  I did not know (Andreas) Baader and (Gudrun) Ensslin, but they also must have exuded a certain charisma and a certain pull on people, otherwise they would not have gone down this path with them.  They tempted people to take this path, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

If you do not present these people how they really were, they will not seem that believable, and that only works if they have a certain charisma.  Otherwise we would misrepresent the story and it would be hard to understand them – then people would not follow them into such a battle because they would find them too dumb or too boring or too misguided.  We have to show what it was, what kind of glamour, what kind of radical chic it was that led people to follow them along this path into insanity.

Enlarge image A still from the film (Nadja Uhl as RAF terrorist Brigitte Mohnhaupt). (© Courtesy of Constantin Films) And I think that the strength of the film is that it is made this way … that at the beginning certain sympathies are stirred up in the viewer but then these sympathies get stuck in your throat. And when you leave the movie theater you see these people differently than you did in the beginning, so that you practically go through a kind of development with them. 

I have often noted during screenings of this film how people just stay seated when it's over like they are deeply affected by it, like the film has really weighed heavily upon them.

And this is the same trajectory these people were on themselves at the time.  We have to show why they did arouse so many sympathies initially, why they could make the whole (West German) Republic hold its breath.  And it's because in the beginning they did exude a certain kind of charisma and high-minded motives, which all collapsed in the end.

So you're saying there is no danger that young people today could still find these people somehow glamorous or attractive?

I think that when you see the film you can understand why people went down this path, but you can also very quickly recognize how very wrong this path was, how a sharpened sense of morality and rage about social injustice suddenly turned into a gruesome disregard for humanity.

Enlarge image A still from the film. (© Courtesy of Constantin Films) Do you find it ironic that they wanted to combat this supposedly "fascist state" – West Germany – as well as the United States, with its war in Vietnam, and all the related interconnections of the time but that they themselves moved ever more towards fascist behavior?  Moritz Bleibtreu, who plays Andreas Baader, for instance, starts screaming at people, like a hot-headed "mini-dictator."

Yes, that's exactly how it was.  They start out by acting as if they were battling fascism and militant structures and violence and dependency and brutality and terror.  And then they themselves very quickly subsume this very role.

Even the way that they deal with their own kind reflects this, the way that they treat Ulrike Meinhof.  She is not just a victim of course as she was also a culprit who is responsible for many terrible things the group did, but at the end of the day she is also destroyed by them.  It is really the revolution that eats its own children.

You see that in the film, played very well by Martina Gedeck as Ulrike Meinhof, and you really have the feeling that she is losing her strength, when they're all sitting in prison together in Stammheim and where Ensslin still wildly and bitterly kicks at a chain-link fence when a police helicopter flies by.  This really seems to symbolize that she still has the will to fight.

In the end she really was the last one who had that iron will and that really did seem to be the case, at least according to all the existing research and everything one has heard about it.  She was the least affected of all by self-doubt.

Enlarge image A still from the film (Johanna Wokalek as Gudrun Ensslin in prison). (© Courtesy Constantin Films) And then she still killed herself like all the others.

Yes, you could certainly say that.  But you also cannot forget that suicide was always part of the overarching plan of the RAF (Red Army Faction).

"It is terrible to kill.  But not only others; we kill ourselves if pressed to do so.  Because it is only through violence that this world that is a killer can be changed," these words from Bertolt Brecht’s Die Maßnahme (The Measure) are quoted by them again and again.  This means that the concept of rebellion always contains the concept of suicide too.

They always tried to pressure the state and society to the point that they themselves became victims.  They provoked the state for so long until it really hit back and then they could play the victims themselves.

And was Ensslin the strongest person?

Enlarge image A still from the film. (© Courtesy of Constantin Films) It is totally clear that it was Gudrun Ensslin.

But you still have to realize that when you analyze the power of this group, the power of this insanity and break it down to the level of individuals, then it is by no means every single person by themselves who really plays such a big role.  Some of them might have gotten on your nerves with their revolutionary babble … or Baader with his hyperactivity. But taken by themselves they were not that impressive. 

They achieve this destructive force through a combined effect and through the times that they live in.  They are like an explosive mixture where every single person is one kind of chemical that is not particularly dangerous on its own – but when all of these substances come together in a certain dosage, you suddenly have a highly explosive product.

And in my view that was the case here.  The proportion of the mixture is determined by the times and by the political context.  All of it could only work in a time during which there was a large mass movement. 

And it could only happen in a country where people reacted extraordinarily sensitively when individuals were imprisoned under questionable circumstances, because for us (in Germany) there is always an immediate comparison to the Third Reich.  If there is one brutal police mission, we say "that’s just like with the SA," and if there is one secret service operation, we say "that's just like with the Gestapo."

Enlarge image A still from the film. (© Courtesy of Constantin Films) And these people became so deeply fixated on the idea that this country, the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1960's and 1970's, was a counterpart to the Third Reich – but it was not … to compare it to the Third Reich would be to extremely play down the Third Reich itself.

Yet still there was always this allusion to the notion that we were living in a fascist police state.  And if you really believe that, then you open every moral door for yourself to combat that in unbelievable ways.  If you really believe that you are living in a fascist state, then you allow yourself to do anything against this state and this system.

There was a very interesting scene in the beginning of the film in which Ensslin, wearing a flashy patent red jacket, is apprehended for the first time and you are portrayed as a young journalist with a microphone interviewing her parents.  And her mother says she feels somehow "freed" through the actions of her daughter.  And they don't even seem so disappointed in their daughter – even the father, who was a pastor.

I think that you have recognized the key sentence of the whole story here. 

In reality I was not the journalist who did this interview … but I found a transcript of it.  And it really impressed me unbelievably at the time, less what she said but more what he – the pastor – said, namely when he speaks of a "holy self-realization."  He says that his daughter views what she did as a "holy self-realization" in the sense of holy humanity.

And if you analyze that there are two possible explanations for what he says.  The first is that he takes the individual blame from her and ascribes a certain religious motivation to her. 

But I think there is also another aspect that is much simpler and much more true, namely that holy self-realization through violence is narcissism.  Today  you would say "violence is hot," and that can be expressed differently, less preacher-like than he does.

He did discover a determining factor in his daughter.  And this is the same factor that always crops up again and again with these people, namely a kind of self-importance, of finding oneself by making yourself lord over life and death – by putting yourself above others.  This is a form of vanity and narcissism that is defined by harming others and even killing them, by wanting to make yourself a lord of history.

This plays a very important role … It is a shocking sentence.

Enlarge image A still from the film (Moritz Bleibtreu as Andreas Baader in the Stammheim prison). (© Courtesy of Constantin Films) But the father is not really critical in saying it?

No.  He does not criticize what she says at all.  He even says later in the interview that staying in jail will not change his daughter in any way.  So this comment about holy self-realization is a key experience for me.

And he says that at a point in time where in reality not much has happened yet.  Alright so they torched a department store, but no one died yet although they were correctly punished for committing potentially life-threatening arson.

But the way he describes it is just like it eventually happened.  He recognized at a very early point in time what kind of egoism was behind it.

And still he is not that critical, perhaps because it is his own daughter?  Or can we ever really know that?

I think that he is even proud of his daughter, along the lines of "at least she is doing something."

The key sentence which I once found in a letter from Ulrike Meinhof to Gudrun Ensslin was also a quote from Bertolt Brecht's Die Maßnahme (The Measure): "What base act would you not commit to eradicate base acts?"

This means that they were aware that they were doing terrible things, but they were doing these things in the service of higher morals.  That is the idea that lies behind that.  But at the same time they elevate themselves through this base act which they commit insofar as they view this base act as holy self-realization.

So it is the opposite of Gandhi’s "turn the other cheek" …

Absolutely.  It is more like in the Old Testament, when Abraham is told to kill his own son.

Enlarge image A still from the film (Martina Gedeck, in green dress, as a young Ulrike Meinhof). (© Courtesy of Constantin Films) You mentioned that you knew Meinhof – did you know other members of the RAF?

Yes, although I did not know Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin.  I knew Horst Mahler and I knew Jan Karl Raspe, and I met others from the group later when they were in prison or after they were released from prison.

Viewers of the film may develop the greatest amount of sympathy for Ulrike Meinhof, when she is in prison and when Ensslin was still so tough.  Would you say that Meinhof's is the most reflective, the most intelligent or sensitive character?

Yes.  I think that Ulrike Meinhof is the most broken figure of all.  First of all I believe that she only went underground because she was in a serious state of crisis.  She did not go underground because of pure political conviction.  She was already pretty worn out, as we'd put it today.  And she had a lot of doubts about her work and doubts about the impact of journalism.

Enlarge image A still from the film (Martina Gedeck as Ulrike Meinhof, crying when she is arrested). (© Courtesy of Constantin Films) In the book I write endless pages about her film project and why she found her film so terrible and why she wanted to do the whole thing, why she was so fascinated by "the task" itself – as many people were by the way at the time.

Some went to work in the factories to be closer to the working classes and others threw bombs to become revolutionaries.  They were basically no longer satisfied with their own roles as intellectuals.

And during this phase, especially in jail but even before, Ulrike Meinhof seems to exhibit the most doubts about what she is doing.  This does not mean that she still didn't go along with it, but she does have doubts, which are later enormously reinforced.

For me the most touching scene in the film is when she is apprehended, and she cries.  I had totally forgotten about that, but Bernd Eichinger said that is was written like that in the book.  Except on paper it comes across much more soberly than it does when you see it on the big screen, when someone is crying and really breaking down.  I think that for the first time she is really aware of what she did, how bad it really was.

Enlarge image A still from the film (Bruno Ganz, who played Hitler in the acclaimed Downfall, as German top cop Horst Herold). (© Courtesy of Constantin Films) What about the allegedly missing tapes from the prison in Stammheim, which could shed light on the last night of the prisoners before their collective attempt at suicide?

If they exist, I will find them.  I put forward a lot of evidence in the new edition of the book (The Baader Meinhof Complex, published in 2008) that the bugs they installed in their prison cells were activated at the time.  It's quite sure that there were listening devices in at least two of three cells where they talked to their lawyers and probably in five out of a total of seven cells – meaning several of the cells where the prisoners slept (individually) must have been bugged too.

It's rather logical that when you have a kidnapping like the one of (West German industrialist Hans Martin) Schleyer (in 1977) that you would use such devices … They (the RAF prisoners) had their own communication system, so it's for sure that they talked to each other.

It is not totally certain that recordings exist, but there are very many indications that they do.

Enlarge image A still from the film (Stefan Aust, played by Volker Bruch, makes a few cameo appearances as a young journalist early on in the movie). (© Courtesy of Constantin Films) And what will be your next project – a book about the case of Uwe Barschel, the German politician who was probably murdered in the 1980s?

It only makes sense to write about Barschel if you know what really happened.  I'm not going to write a book about it unless I can prove what I really know.  So I'm not going to write a book about it at all.

Besides, it takes a lot of time to write a book … I spent more than three years working on the first edition of The Baader Meinhof Complex.  So you can spend a lot of time on a project like that and then you never know how many copies you will sell.

But if a book you have written more than 20 years ago is made into a movie and then people are discussing this – that is the best thing that can happen to you as a journalist.

I will never find such a subject again.

Interview conducted by Karen Carstens