Horst Mahler and Hermann Hesse

The good, the bad and the misguided
BySacha Molitorisz
May 2, 2009


In 1973 - an era of sideburns, body shirts and Franz Beckenbauer - my parents and I migrated from Germany to Australia with no more than several bags of clothes, the vague dream of a new life and a lingering difficulty with "th" and "w". Ah, zose vere ze days. I was four years old.

Ever since, I've wondered what prompted my parents to shift the goalposts by moving to the other side of the world, into an unknown future far removed from the love and support of their nearest and dearest.

Was it larceny? Not long before boarding our migrant ship, my family had stepped into the regimented order of a German supermarket. Sneaking off to the confectionary aisle, I snatched the largest block of chocolate I could find and made a run for it.

Details remain sketchy. Was I wearing Lederhosen? Possibly. Was I yodelling? Probably. What is clear is that panic sideswiped my parents as soon as they twigged to my disappearance, summoning the police to scour Munich for a toddler with a guilty grin. Finally, after kind-hearted strangers found me seated atop a mound of snow, the cops reunited me with my folks. I still remember the relief hanging in the air, almost as thick as the cigarette smoke.

Just recently, however, I had the sudden realisation that perhaps it was more than my tentative steps into a life of crime that prompted our migration. After watching the new film The Baader Meinhof Complex, I realised that perhaps we moved to escape terrorism.

In Germany in the late '60s and '70s, a bunch of young radicals led by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof detonated bombs, kidnapped industrialists and hijacked a plane. In all, they killed dozens. Meanwhile, in the year before we left Munich, the 1972 Olympics descended into horror as Palestinian gunmen killed Israeli athletes. The Baader Meinhof group weren't responsible; but they did have links to Palestinian terrorists.

"No," says my dad. "It wasn't terrorism that made us leave. Most of the Baader Meinhof stuff happened after we left. For me, I came here more because I was frustrated by the bureaucracy. Back then, you'd have to take a day off work to register your car."

To stay would have meant death by a thousand paper cuts. (I must remember to ask Dad whether he's thinking of emigrating again now that Australia now has a mandarin for PM.)

Released locally next week, the film touches on the motives of the Baader Meinhof group. The book on which the film is based delves even deeper. In a new edition published yesterday, journalist Stefan Aust - who says he has 60 metres of shelf space devoted to the group in his apartment - takes a long, hard look at a bloody period that is little-known outside Germany.

The key players are Andreas Baader, a petty crook and uncompromising hothead, and his volatile, photogenic girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin, the daughter of a pastor. Committed to violent revolution, they were eventually joined by Ulrike Meinhof, an impassioned, intellectual journalist. Until their capture, imprisonment and suicides in 1976 and 1977, these three led their young co-conspirators on an explosive killing spree.



For what? The answer, as the book's title suggests, is complex. In the late '60s, Germany was divided into communist east and a capitalist west struggling desperately to come to grips with its Nazi past. In the democratic west, Baader, Ensslin and Meinhof were leftists concerned that their government might be sliding back into totalitarianism. In 1968, prompted by the shooting of a German student during a rally against the Shah of Iran, Baader and Ensslin bombed a department store.

At the ensuing trial, with no shortage of support or sympathy for their anti-authoritarian cause, the defendants were represented by nine lawyers. Initially, though, the bombers said little. As Ensslin said, "It's not worthwhile defending ourselves against a class-based legal system when the script has already been written."

In his defence notes for a speech he never delivered, lawyer Horst Mahler wrote that he was planning to read a long passage from Hermann Hesse's novel Steppenwolf as "a coded presentation of the social significance of the defendants' actions". Summarising the book's plot, Mahler noted of its doomed characters: "They know that their actions cannot succeed in real terms … But they also know they have no choice … Above all, one must take action … And in the end, yes, there is guilt, but it is the world that is guilty. They have killed human beings for the sake of humanity."

As Aust notes, this undelivered speech neatly encapsulates the psychopathology of the group, who realised from the outset they were destined to fail, but felt no choice but to act. Until the end, the Baader Meinhof members were relentlessly idealistic. They were also painfully misguided. Ensslin and Meinhof were both young mums who abandoned their children so that they could fight their cause.

The book and the film (reputedly the most expensive feature ever shot in Germany) remind us that terrorism wasn't born on September 11, 2001. They also remind us that terrorism can be homegrown. In 1995, US war veteran Timothy McVeigh made the same awful point by felling an office block in Oklahoma City, killing 168.

Last month a US Government report warned of the likelihood of more McVeigh-style incidents, as right-wing extremists look to recruit disgruntled veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 1973, with Baader, Meinhof and Ensslin locked up in purpose-built prison cells in Germany, my parents and I passed through the heads and into Sydney Harbour, to be greeted by the newly unveiled Opera House. uring our six weeks at sea, I had marked each sunset by releasing a balloon from the ship's deck. It was hard to believe we'd arrived.

Stepping ashore at Circular Quay, hoping to be understood as we sought directions to the migrant hostel in South Coogee, we were just three more boat people eager to start a new life in a strange land. In our hopes, we probably weren't all that different from the 450 or so boat people plucked from Australian waters so far this year. Or from the 1400 or so boat people who arrived in 1788 aboard the First Fleet. In different ways, each of us would have had trouble with the local language.

Sometimes the bad stuff comes from within; sometimes the good stuff comes from without.

Annabel Crabb is on leave.


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Warum wird Hermann Hesse so gehasst?

Die Dunkle Akademie