A baby-boomer generation of middle-class West Germans, raised in the shadow of their nation's 1930s-40s authoritarian horrors, were deeply ashamed of their country's Nazi past. As young Germans came of age in the 1960s, another phenomenon was at play: people were learning to make movies, in film schools, cinema societies, ideologically-driven groups. The art form was seen as inherently political in its subtexts and vision of the world, and useful for challenging entrenched power and raising the stature of the working class.
A dynamic documentary, A German Youth, ingeniously shows us how film and politics came together in a fraught run-up to the domestic terrorism of a notorious, West German radical terrorist organization called the Red Army Faction, better known as the Baader Meinhof Gang. Named after its two most famous members, agitator Andreas Baader and (more famously) newspaper columnist Ulrike Meinhof, the small organization felt dismissed by the public and political establishment, the latter made up of older people with previous Nazi ties.
At its worst, in 1972, Baader Meinhof set off a wave of bombs, killing five and wounding 65. German security forces eventually captured or killed all members of the gang, with the treatment of several in prison causing controversy. A German Youth tells a complex narrative about how the group came together, and how the role of the film (some of it of their own making, some from contemporaneous television documentaries, and more) contributed to Baader Meinhof's sense of bloody mission. Strongly recommended. Aud: J, H, C, P.