[italic]After what Luca Guadagnino calls “20 years of obliviousness,” the Nazi years were introduced into German school curricula in the early ’60s, just in time to enter the minds of the youths who would be on the front lines of the decade’s subsequent cultural shifts. In Germany, the late-’60s generation gap was even starker than in other Western countries, as young people born during or after the war woke up to the fact that their parents’ generation had perpetrated one of history’s greatest monstrosities. As Gudrun Ensslin, a founder of the Red Army Faction, put it after West Berlin police killed a young protester in 1967: “This is the generation of Auschwitz we’ve got against us. You can’t argue with people who made Auschwitz. They have weapons and we don’t. We must arm ourselves.”
The Red Army Faction If you’ve seen Suspiria, this was the group that Chloë Grace Moretz’s character supposedly fell in with. If you haven’t: The RAF was a Marxist terror group that emerged out of the more militant fringes of West German counterculture. (Though the RAF received assistance from the East German government, the regime generally considered them unruly dilettantes.) You might have also heard them called the Baader-Meinhof group, after two of their leaders: Andreas Baader, Ensslin’s boyfriend, who as David Clay Large drily notes in Berlin, “seems to have drifted into the radical protest movement less out of conviction than out of a desire for adventure and self-dramatization”; and Ulrike Meinhof, a former journalist who joined the gang after helping Baader escape from prison.
When we see the RAF in Suspiria, most of their original leaders are in jail. After a string of robberies and bombings, Baader, Ensslin, and Meinhof were all arrested in 1972, but a “second generation” carried on in their absence. With the exception of Meinhof, who had been found dead in her cell in 1976, the leaders were convicted on several murder and terrorism charges and sentenced to life in prison in 1977, kicking off a string of events now known as the “German Autumn.”
The ‘German Autumn’ The term refers to a series of kidnappings and other violence the second generation of the RAF undertook in order to force the release of Baader, Ensslin, and their compatriots. (You could argue that really began in the spring during the trial, when the group killed West German attorney general Siegfried Buback, a former Nazi, in a drive-by shooting.) The first kidnapping, of banker Jürgen Ponto, went wrong, as RAF members shot Ponto to death after an apparent struggle. Then, in September, the group abducted Hanns Martin Schleyer, president of the West German employers’ association and a former second-lieutenant in the SS. When the government refused to negotiate, the RAF raised the stakes.
On October 13, an allied Palestinian organization hijacked a Lufthansa flight and threatened to blow up the plane unless the prisoners were released. The plane ended up in Mogadishu, where the West German government pretended the accede to the demands, but instead sent a commando squad who stormed the plane, killed the hijackers, and freed the hostages. (News coverage of this pops up in Suspiria.) After the failure of the hijacking, Baader, Ensslin, and others were found dead in their cells, though, as with Meinhof’s death, the official ruling of suicide was challenged by RAF supporters. Schleyer was murdered the next day, his body left in a car trunk in France. We’re getting outside the purview of the movie, but the RAF would hang around until 1998. In all they were responsible for the deaths of more than 30 people, many of them innocent bystanders.[/italic]
