Baader Meinhof film stirs controversy in Germany
The controversial The Baader-Meinhof Complex is a warts-and-all depiction by the producer Bernd Eichinger, who won fame with his taboo-breaking 2004 hit Downfall, about Hitler's last days in his besieged Berlin bunker.
His new work on the Left-wing Baader-Meinhof gang – also known as the Red Army Faction – is reputed to be the most expensive German film ever made. Starring some of the country's top actors, it sets out to remind the German public that the gang members were vicious killers, rather than the glamorous but misguided revolutionaries that some now prefer to remember.
However, the film, which hopes to emulate the success of The Lives of Others, the 2007 Academy Award winner about the East German Stasi spy network, has been criticised for its violence. Children of Baader-Meinhof gang members, and the gang's victims, have described it as tasteless hero worship, while some of the former terrorists have complained that the production is a callous attempt to reap box office profits.
The gang killed at least 33 mainly prominent members of former West Germany's political and industrial establishment between 1970 and 1991. Founded by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, it emerged from the Leftist student and anti-Vietnam war movements of the 1960s.
But while its members were both violent and criminal, they were also considered to be expressing an anger that many Germans born after the war felt towards their parents' generation, whom they commonly viewed as accomplices to the Nazi era. As a result, previous German films have tended to portray the group with a degree of sympathy...
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
His new work on the Left-wing Baader-Meinhof gang – also known as the Red Army Faction – is reputed to be the most expensive German film ever made. Starring some of the country's top actors, it sets out to remind the German public that the gang members were vicious killers, rather than the glamorous but misguided revolutionaries that some now prefer to remember.
However, the film, which hopes to emulate the success of The Lives of Others, the 2007 Academy Award winner about the East German Stasi spy network, has been criticised for its violence. Children of Baader-Meinhof gang members, and the gang's victims, have described it as tasteless hero worship, while some of the former terrorists have complained that the production is a callous attempt to reap box office profits.
The gang killed at least 33 mainly prominent members of former West Germany's political and industrial establishment between 1970 and 1991. Founded by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, it emerged from the Leftist student and anti-Vietnam war movements of the 1960s.
But while its members were both violent and criminal, they were also considered to be expressing an anger that many Germans born after the war felt towards their parents' generation, whom they commonly viewed as accomplices to the Nazi era. As a result, previous German films have tended to portray the group with a degree of sympathy...