Film in Germany: Red Army Reactions
A spate of recent films suggest that the scars of Germany’s history show little sign of healing. Markus Bauer reports.
While Hollywood brings the story of the plot to kill Hitler to a wider world, German cinema continues to examine the nation's troubled past with the release of two controversial movies. Der Baader-Meinhof-Komplex tells the story of the Red Army Faction, the terrorist gang born of the 1968 student revolt, while Anonyma: Eine Frau in Berlin confronts the issue of mass rape, committed by another Red Army after the fall of Berlin in 1945.
Hitler’s Children by Jillian Becker, published in 1977, was one of the first books to tackle the subject of West German terrorism, its very title evoking the idea that the left-wing Baader-Meinhof group, or Red Army Faction (RAF), was a product of a past its members were so brutally keen to be rid of.
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