The Baader-Meinhof Complex
The rise and fall of the Baader-Meinhof group represents one of the most significant phenomena of post-war Europe. A group of young people, mostly from solid middle-class backgrounds, took the law into their own hands.
Rooted in the student protest movement of the late 1960s, the story of the group begins in May 1970 with the release of Andreas Baader - imprisoned for setting off firebombs to protest the Vietnam War - Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and others. They spent the years that followed acquiring apartments from left-wing sympathizers, stealing cars and robbing banks in preparation for attacks on US military bases.
After an intense manhunt, the ringleaders of the group, now called the Red Army Faction (RAF), were finally captured in 1972. Their prolonged trial began in 1975 and lasted almost 2 years, during which Ulrike Meinhof hanged herself in her cell. Other members of the group were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.
The 'war of six against sixty million' (Heinrich Böll) reached its climax in the autumn of 1977 when supporters tried to secure their release by kidnapping the president of the German Employers' Association, Hanns Martin Schleyer, and later by hijacking a Lufthansa plane, which was eventually captured by German special forces in Mogadishu airport. The morning the rescue was announced, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe were found dead in their cells. The 'German Autumn' marked the violent climax of a journey that had begun with peaceful protests against the US war in Vietnam: moral indignation had turned into blatant immorality.
Stefan Aust's completely absorbing account of these events reads like a first-rate thriller. The Baader-Meinhof Complex is the definitive chronicle of the seven years that changed Germany.
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