the crossing line to violence

interesting question up in The Rumpus, as ending note of Ryan Boudinot's essay about the BaaderMeinhof film:

“The questions I’m left with after watching this fine film are, where’s the line that gets crossed that leads to domestic guerilla warfare? How close are we to that line?”

i mailed about the film with a friend in December, and now added a comment with a take on the film in germany, and some latest revelations about the start of the RAF: the years of bloodshed were probably induced by an agent provocateur from East Germany, here a copy&paste of the comment:

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"The problem with machines guns is that they tend to not be too articulate.”

you hit a point with that line. the Baader Meinhof film actually received very mixed reviews here in germany. the main critic point was that the film tries to cover a long and eventful period of time, with the focus more on the happenings (‘the action’) – which leaves not enough space for the politic backgrouds / discussions of that time, and resulted in overly simplifying things to make all fit into the film length and keep the “cinematic arc”.

i just looked at the german and then the english wiki page, i think the english one doesn’t include that aspect, while the german page is running rather long with all viewpoints: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Baader_Meinhof_Komplex

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“where’s the line that gets crossed that leads to domestic guerilla warfare?”

good question.

there’s a fact about the german student’s movement that isn’t included in the film, as it only was discovered recently – and it is directly connected to the crossing-line to violence:

one key scene/date for the student movement was the death of a student in a non-violent demonstration in Berlin in 1967: Benno Ohnesorg, who was shot by the police in the back of his head. this event changed the mood in germany, and let students and liberaly sympathize with the radical left-wing / RAF. it also was the crossing line to violence on the student’s side (‘if they kill us, we have a right to fight back’).

now, all those years later, files were found in the archives of former East Germany that document that the policeman who shot Ohnesorg was a spy, and might have had the order to act as agent provocateur, to try and destabilize West Germany.

i just looked, here’s an NY Times article: “Spy Fired Shot That Changed West Germany“ –

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additional note:

i was a kid at the time the RAF-members were caught and imprisoned. as it turned out, one of the judges lived in one of the towns of this region, and one of our teachers knew this judge, and later told us about this time, how there was a wall built around the judge's house, with hourly police patrols to check on his and his wife's and children's security. that's one of the memories i still have: this dark realization that there are people out there who walked so far off from the rules of society that they would go and kill a judge. people who claim to fight for a better world. their symbol: a machine gun.

(and no. so far none of the RAF-members commented on the fact that they might have been instrumentalized by the secret service of a communist regime that followed its own agenda of guerrilla warfare. )
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