Une jeunesse allemande

How did Meinhof, Baader, Meins, Hensslin and Mahler, all young German intellectuals born in the 1940s, end up planting bombs in the name of the Red Army Faction (RAF)? How does a democracy create “enemies of democracy,” a term used by Helmut Kohl in a speech to describe the RAF? The film—a French edit, so to speak—proffers an answer in images and sound. Keeping to visual and sound archives, Jean-Gabriel Périot retraces the history of a radicalisation and its reception by the media. Ulrike Meinhof, introduced as a “student of education and chief editor of the konkret magazine” at a TV debate in the late 1960s, sharply replies to the host of another programme: “Analyse your own problems inside television rather than appropriating ours.” Establishing a tension between the elliptic nature of a compilation film and the ideological precision, if not rigidity, of the discussions, the film suggests that the bloody repression of the far-left demonstrations stems from the refusal of the generation born before 1914 to look into the uncompromising mirror held up to them by the following generation. “Our parents lost their credibility by identifying themselves with Nazism,” said Meinhof in a debate before opting for violence. The form chosen here clearly shows how the escalation of violence between two increasingly uncompromising entities played out. (Charlotte Garson)