Vicar’s Daughter Trades Books for Bombs in Baader-Meinhof Film
by Catherine Hickley, bloomberg.com
March 10th 2011
A pretty, bookish vicar’s daughter fell in love with a hot-headed, left-wing
drifter in 1967. If that explosive coupling had never happened, Germany might
have been a lot more peaceful in the latter part of the 20th century.
The terrorist group they founded became known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, yet
it could just as well be named Baader- Ensslin. A German film opening in
cinemas tomorrow chronicles Gudrun Ensslin’s marriage and fateful decision to
leave her publisher husband, Bernward Vesper, for Andreas Baader and a career
of bank holdups, bombings, murder and prison.
“Wer Wenn Nicht Wir” (“If Not Us, Who”) is the first feature film by
documentary director Andres Veiel. Unsurprisingly, his treatment is based on
thorough research. For a feature, it’s too didactic. Newsreel clips of the era
break the flow of the narrative and at times seem patronizing.
Yet his focus on the family backgrounds and private lives of the protagonists
offers insight into the birth of the fanaticism. Where Uli Edel’s action-packed
2008 movie, “The Baader-Meinhof Complex,” tried to cover the gang’s whole
blood- soaked history, Veiel’s story ends where the killing starts.
He spotlights the contradictions of the still-peaceful, war-traumatized German
society of the early 1960s. While Vesper, played by August Diehl, championed
left-wing writers, he also published the poetry of his father, an enthusiastic
Nazi.
“If it weren’t for the Fuehrer, you wouldn’t exist,” Vesper’s mother tells him.
It was only Adolf Hitler’s exhortations to Germans to reproduce that persuaded
his reluctant father to have a child, she explains.
Self-Mutilation
Vesper and Ensslin meet at Tuebingen University, where they together found a
publishing company. Vesper’s infidelity drives her to self-mutilation in a
disturbing scene in an Alpine cabin involving a broken glass. They move to
Berlin to make a new start in 1964.
Without much ceremony, Ensslin abandons Vesper with their son to go underground
with Baader and fight what she perceives as the dark forces of fascism in
German society. “We have different missions,” she tells Vesper.
The movie ends with the bombing of a Frankfurt department store: The Red Army
Faction, or Baader-Meinhof gang, went on to claim more than 60 lives from 1970
to 1993, including those of Ensslin and Baader, who committed suicide in jail.
Diehl, one of Germany’s best young actors, plays the unfaithful Vesper as an
idealist who lacks the guts for violence and prefers to stick with his books.
He descends into drug abuse and madness after Ensslin leaves. He committed
suicide at the age of 32.
Lena Lauzemis’s performance as the willowy Ensslin has the right blend of
passion and idealism, sharp wit and fanaticism. Alexander Fehling is too
effeminate to possess Baader’s dangerous magnetism. Moritz Bleibtreu was much
more charismatic and unpredictable in “The Baader-Meinhof Complex.”
Rating: **½.
What the Stars Mean: **** Excellent *** Good ** Average * Poor (No stars)
Worthless
(Catherine Hickley is a writer for Muse, the arts and leisure section of
Bloomberg News. Opinions expressed are her own.)
To contact the writer on the story: Catherine Hickley in Berlin at
[email protected].
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Beech at
[email protected].
Original Page:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-09/vicar-s-daughter-trades-books-for-bombs-in-baader-meinhof-film.html
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