Documenting ´A German Youth´

 

A German Youth, a French-Swiss documentary film co-production, that I watched yesterday on MUBI, diplomatically documents fragments from the rise of The Red Army Faction, a German organisation with terrorist minset created 20 years after the end of the Nazi rule. 

In the late 60s, the whole world was on fire: the Vietnam War was widely contested on the streets, the Cold War was close to his peak, the flower power movement anti-war and holistic in its world was preaching inner meditation and reaching peace - world and interior - including by using a complex drugs cocktail. Germany, too was affected, and offered its own version of coping with the new realities: The Red Army Faction (RAF).

20 years after the end of WWII, it was a new generation, born during after the terrible events, that was taking over. They were angry with their parents, they were angry with the establishment, they were angry with the world punishing them, the Germans. A German Youth, compared to artistic movies made on a similar topic, The Baader Meinhof Complex, documents those times, through archive films featuring the mentalities realm of the time. One can see the brave journalist Meinhof, smoking live while explaining to a row of old men about social justice, or the creative anti-establishment movies played, among others, by another founder of the movement, Gudrun Ensslin.

What the 1h30 documentary helps to understand is the intellectual background of the movement, with its philosophy of intellectual engagement - in the very military sense of the term. A fact that, didn´t occurred in the case of other similar movements in other countries. In France, the 1968 student protests did not lead to airplane hijacking or training by Palestinian military camps. Not too many made the lap to practice what they were writing. German youth did it again, and through the documented intervention one can easily see the roots, although there are a couple of missing chains.

For instance, there is not too much to be seen about the deep wounds of a generation trying to cope with the faults of the previous generation. The voices that Germans paid already too much for the Shoah were high and keep being loud since then. 

Another missing chain is the very complex Cold War background that cannot be ignored because it was very much part of the puzzle. At what extent was Soviet Union - through its usual Stasi-KGB strong chains (for instance, Axel Springer the verbal and physical target of RAF ideologues, the owner of Bild, on the forefront of the yellow press, was also very much involved against the Soviet Union and the division of Berlin, therefore an inconvenient ideological opponent - involved in maneuvring those ´german youth´? What about hijacking airplanes and killing people? Is it worth the cause? Obviously, RAF was by far more than an intellectual book club where people were fighting verbally, socratically, for their right to reach the truth. By not offering the entire contextual information, the risk is that again and again, the terrorism is glorified in the name of freedom and youth´s fight against the rigid academic bureaucracy. 

There is so much to be told about this ´german youth´ and any documentary testimony is important, with the condition of being critically weighted.