Vorsprung Durch Lunatiks

A poseur who refused to use the word ‘woman’, preferring ‘cunt’, A blonde pastor’s daughter turned killing machine and The journalist who jumped out of a window to join them...   Meet The Baader-Meinhof Gang. With a little help from their friends they butchered their way through 70s Germany, invented terrorist chic and became a media sensation. They are the subject of a new film. And this is their story.

At 5.50am on the morning of June 1st 1972, a lilac Porsche coupé pulls up at a garage in a suburban Frankfurt street. Three young men get out. The driver waits beside the car while the others begin to unlock the garage doors. One is tall with long hair and a thick moustache, his companion is wearing sunglasses, a brown leather jacket and no underwear.

Suddenly the driver notices that the rooftops across the street are swarming with cops. Pulling out a pistol, he fires off a warning shot and, as the other two bolt the doors behind them, runs off into a nearby garden where he is cornered, captured and identified as terrorist suspect Jan-Carl Raspe. His two accomplices remain holed up in the garage for three hours in a stand-off with the police, who have been watching the building for several days. Inside is a cache of high explosives waiting to be deployed in terrorist activities by a group calling themselves the Red Army Faction – known to the world at large as the Baader-Meinhof Group. 

When a television crew arrives at the scene, the significance of the siege becomes clear. The man in the brown leather jacket is Andreas Baader, the group’s leader and the most wanted man in West Germany. Losing patience, the police send in an armoured car to pulverise the garage doors and a grimacing but tight-lipped Baader is dragged from the building and wrestled to the ground in full view of the cameras. He’s still wearing his sunglasses. 

In Frankfurt that day, Baader didn’t perform for the camera – unlike at an earlier trial where he and girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin were filmed joking around with smuggled Cuban cigars; he was in genuine pain, having been shot in the thigh by a police marksman. Yet the fact that his arrest was played out on national television was entirely fitting. From the outset, Baader-Meinhof had courted the FDR’s mass media. Strident communiqués that called the police ‘pigs’; bombing the offices of the right-wing Springer Press; and a certain sartorial flair, all meant the group’s advances were often reciprocated. 

Nearly four decades on, Baader-Meinhof is again making the news thanks to a new film about the group’s terror activities starring Moritz Bleibtreu (Atomised) as Baader and Martina Gedeck (The Lives of Others) as Ulrike Meinhof, the left-wing journalist who joined the group in a blaze of publicity by helping Baader make a daring escape from his prison-guards. The Baader-Meinhof Complex follows both her story and the Bonnie and Clyde-like tale of Baader’s life on the run with Ensslin. The idea of a film would have appealed to Baader. At first as much opportunist as idealist, he maintained a well-deserved reputation for personal vanity throughout his terror career, favouring a wardrobe of Italian shoes and silk shirts. 

Baader belonged to a generation of young radicals whose anger and antipathy was directed both at America, for its atrocities in Vietnam, and West Germany itself – then an apparently prosperous and liberal nation. But it was his girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin who transformed him from roué into revolutionary. 

Baader-Meinhof may have been the name which made headlines, but the relationship at the centre of the group was that between Baader and Ensslin. Ensslin was an intellectual firebrand impressed with Baader’s violent rhetoric and lean physique – he rarely wore pants, the better to “show off the arse and everything else”, as he put it – and the two quickly became not just comrades but lovers. Both had rejected the values of their middle-class upbringings – Ensslin was the daughter of a pastor; Baader, over-indulged by his mother as a boy, denounced post-war German society in typically forthright fashion as a “shithouse”. She had been radicalised when the police shot dead a fellow demonstrator at an anti-Shah rally in 1967. Already convinced that the country’s capitalist democracy was a front for a totalitarian Nazi state, she declared after the shooting: “Violence is the only way to answer violence. This is the Auschwitz Generation and there’s no arguing with them!” 

By 1968, the pair had made connections with other like-minded radicals and begun turning words into action. Inspired by pamphlets circulating from anarchistic Berlin living experiment Kommune I, their first attacks were directed against symbols of the capitalist economy rather than individuals, as when they left timed explosive devices at two Frankfurt department stores that April. When Ensslin, Baader and their two accomplices were arrested just two days later it seemed their insurgency was over even before it had begun. It took the dramatic conversion of journalist-and-haüsfrau Ulrike Meinhof into terrorist outlaw to give the fledgling outfit fresh purpose. 

Meinhof had been on the fringes of the radical left and was well known for her passionate columns for underground mag-azine konkret. She was to play a central role in what became the group’s first nationally newsworthy action – breaking Baader out of prison on May 14th 1970. Meinhof arranged with the authorities to have Baader brought to the library of a nearby institute under the pretext of collaborating with him on a book. Once he arrived, armed youths burst in, saw off the guards and helped Baader escape through a window. Meinhof then went on the run with the group, abandoning her previously settled life. Like Ensslin, who had left behind a young son, she cut her ties with her twin daughters. The girls were later rescued dramatically in Sicily when it emerged Meinhof was planning to send them to an orphanage. She would never see them again. 

Meinhof’s involvement caused a sensation. Following Baader’s escape she sent a statement to the press which began by asking “Did the pigs really believe that we would let Comrade Baader sit in jail for two or three years?” and concluded: “Whoever does not defend himself will die. Start the armed resistance! Build up the Red Army!” Posters went up offering a 10,000DM reward for her capture and German newspapers began talking up the ‘Baader-Meinhof Gang’, a name which made the Red Army Faction sound more dangerous than they really were. The RAF never had more than around thirty members and, at first, none could be described as hardened killers. Holger Meins was a former cinematography student, while Petra Schelm – shot dead by police in July 1971 after running a roadblock – was a newly qualified hairdresser. 

It was this lack of experience which led the group’s leaders, including Horst Mahler – a former lawyer who had defended Baader during his first arson trial – to accept an invitation from the PLO to train at one of their camps in Jordan in the summer of 1970. On their return, having learned how to shoot machine guns and throw a grenade, Baader and Ensslin initiated an 18-month campaign of bank raids – interrupted by regular arrests and shoot-outs with police – intended to finance the full-scale “anti-imperialist” bombing campaign of May 1972. 

Baader-Meinhof have been referred to as the first celebrity terrorists. But for all the media coverage there is little evidence that they were fomenting anything resembling a popular revolution. What support the group did have came mostly from their contemporaries – a 1971 poll found one in five Germans  under thirty to have a “certain sympathy” with their aims. But nearly all that goodwill was exhausted during the chaotic and bloody events of May 1972. Just a week after a horrific car bomb attack on a US army base in Heidelberg which left the remains of a soldier decorating a nearby tree, Baader was arrested in Frankfurt. Ensslin and Meinhof were captured soon after. By the end of the year virtually the entire first generation of the RAF were in prison. 

The authorities celebrated, parading their new arrests before the public. Margrit Schiller, a former member of the bizarre Socialist Patients Collective who believed mental illness to be a direct result of capitalism, was dragged into a room full of cameras in October 1972. They also attempted to limit the group’s contact with each other and the outside world, holding them in solitary confinement across Germany in preparation for a plan to move all Baader-Meinhof prisoners to the rebuilt high security wing of Stammheim prison near Stuttgart. 

Astrid Proll, a founder member of the group who later published a book of photographs of the era called Pictures On The Run 67-77, has said she felt “buried alive”. But RAF prisoners were granted access to radios and newspapers, as well as regular visits from lawyers and relatives. Baader had as many as 58 visits in a single month and later met Jean-Paul Sartre in Stammheim. Sartre, while drawing attention to the “torture” the prisoners had to endure, referred to Baader privately as “an arsehole”. 

Ever the innovator, Ensslin developed a system of codenames (based on the names of characters in Moby Dick) which enabled the group’s leaders to exchange letters through their lawyers. They also maintained contact with a second generation of RAF sympathisers who attempted to secure their release via a series of high-profile actions, such as the botched April 1975 occupation of the West German embassy in Stockholm. 

Finally the trial went ahead. Baader used the early hearings to denounce the proceedings as “a tactical manoeuvre in the prosecution of psychological warfare”. Numerous delaying techniques and absurd requests followed, such as calling Richard Nixon as a witness. But there were already signs of internal division. During the trial, Meinhof appeared alongside Baader and Ensslin only once. Ostracised by her former comrades (Baader wrote to her calling her “a burden”), Meinhof was found hanged in her cell from a rope made of jail towels on May 9th 1976. 

Almost 12 months later, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe were found guilty of four murders and 54 attempted murders and sentenced to life imprisonment. Another wave of deadly RAF attacks followed, beginning with the fatal kidnapping of German businessman Hanns-Martin Schleyer on September 5th (his body was found two days later in a green Audi left on a street in Mulhouse, near the French-Swiss border) and ending on October 17th with the storming of a hijacked Lufthansa Boeing 737 in Somalia by German commando troops.  

Baader had written to those on the outside: “Either you manage to free us, or we will decide our own fate.” Raspe heard the news of the failed hijacking on a tiny radio secreted in his cell. The prisoners were in touch via an ingenious telegraph system wired to the block’s heating thermostats. Baader devised a pact in which all three (plus fellow inmate Irmgard Möller) would simultaneously commit suicide on the night of October 18th. Their deaths – Baader and Raspe shot themselves, Ensslin hung herself and Möller stabbed herself in the chest – made headlines around the world, but remain shrouded in mystery. Baader appeared to have staged his suicide to look like an execution, first firing shots into the wall of his cell and mattress, then putting the gun – which had been smuggled in inside legal box files – to the back of his head. “It was like he was saying: ‘Here’s a riddle you’ll never be able to solve’,” says former friend Thorwald Proll. “Always the paradox – he played with truth and lies to unsettle other people.” 

Despite being virtually spent as a political force following the deaths of its founders, the Red Army Faction staged terror attacks well into the 80s, killing at least ninety people before officially disbanding in April 1998. Their legacy has also become the subject of a wider cultural debate, thanks to a series of books, documentaries and artist Gerhard Richter’s series of 15 black-and-white paintings titled October 18, 1977 (which depicted various scenes from the prison suicides, including an image of the record player in which it was claimed Baader hid his gun). Although Richter has since called the group “childish, naïve terrorists”, his work – completed in 1988 and later bought by the Museum Of Modern Art in New York – captures the air of futility and ambiguity which still surrounds the group. Feelings voiced directly in Don DeLillo’s 2002 short story Baader-Meinhof, in which a woman looking at Richter’s images comments blankly: “These paintings make me feel how helpless a person can be.” 

In Germany, the ghosts of the gang have never been exorcised. Earlier this year a court turned down a request to extend the sentences of RAF members imprisoned for the 1977 murder of state prosecutor Siegfried Buback. But The Baader-Meinhof Complex has reopened the debate and once more put the spotlight on controversial figures like ex-RAF leader Horst Mahler, now an advocate for extreme right-wing groups, and those who still believe Western society to be sick. “In hindsight the revolution was impossible back then,” former gang-member Monika Berberich admitted recently. “But I think one day it’ll happen – otherwise the outlook is pretty bleak.” 

The Baader Meinhof Complex is released on November 14