Watching The Baader Meinhof Complex last week and puzzling over the fanaticism of the Red Army Faction, I thought back to a hot day in 1972 in Italy, when I and my friend Nick Kotch, aged 19, stood beside a road trying to a hitch a ride to Lake Trasimeno where we planned to go swimming with some American girls.
A dusty black Mercedes 190D with German plates pulled up carrying three people. Nick and I squeezed into the back, which I seem to remember was upholstered in worn beige leather. The two men and one very attractive woman were in their mid to late twenties and were dressed in T-shirts and leather jackets. Cigarettes were handed round. Nick spoke a little cracked German and they spoke some English.
This was a time of great political tumult between left and right in Italy where the neo-fascist party, the MSI, was making strides. We had spent a lot of the spring travelling round the headquarters of the numerous leftish parties on our Vespa, begging election posters we eventually hoped to sell in Camden Town. The newspapers were full of stories about members of the Baader Meinhof gang hiding out in Italy and of the terror going on in Germany.
A few weeks before, the Vespa had died on us and now we were in a car travelling at high speed with some Germans who had suddenly grown a little menacing. A couple of miles along the way, they asked if we wanted their Mercedes. 'Come again?' we said. 'Do you want the car? You can have it for free.' We replied that we would certainly like their Mercedes. Nothing more was said.
It is at this point that our memories of the incident diverge. I recall Nick, who later became a distinguished correspondent for Reuters in Africa, deciding that there was something fishy about the Germans and getting out at a village near Lake Trasimeno.
This would fit since Nick was much more sensible than I was at 19. However, he says he came with me. At any rate, one or both of us accompanied the Germans up a long, rocky track to a place high up in the hills where there were stunted oaks and scrub.
Without turning off the ignition or providing any explanation, they piled out of the Merc and into the dappled light of the clearing. The woman took two or three big canvas holdalls from the boot while the men started pulling some loose boughs from the bushes, eventually revealing another car. They wiped down the interior of the Mercedes, unscrewed the registration plates, opened the bonnet and prised the engine number plate off with a screwdriver. Then, still without turning the engine off, they removed the battery and transferred it to the other car.
I suppose it was at that moment that it must have occurred to me that these weren't necessarily the most legitimate Germans I'd ever met.
A few minutes later, they departed in a cloud of dust without saying another word. The Mercedes engine was still going, but I knew if it stopped I'd never be able to start it again. So I (plus or minus Nick) tore down the track and, feeling innocently chuffed with the car, drove to find the girls at the lake. They were less than impressed. 'Cretins' was a word that I'm pretty sure was used.
We fooled around in the Mercedes for a bit, then ditched it, as I recollect, by running it into a tree at the bottom of a hill where the radiator exploded with a satisfying pop. Walking to hitch back to town, we passed an old garage and airily told a man in overalls that he could have anything he wanted from the car. This was a mistake. Two days later, we learnt the carabinieri - serious police in black uniforms with a flaming hat badge - were swarming over the area and that the car was suspected of being used in a number of Baader Meinhof incidents.
A bank robbery was mentioned by the garage hand, but no one knew and we weren't going to hang around to learn for certain.
As Nick said in an email to me last week: 'If we'd played our cards really badly and got arrested in that car, we'd probably still be in Regina Coeli, [the Queen of Heaven prison in Rome] planning our 183rd appeal.'
Our brush with what was certainly part of the delinquent Baader Mienhof cousinhood left me with an interest in the fanaticism of the Red Army Faction, which lasted long beyond the death by suicide of the main terrorists. Only in 1998 did the RAF abandon its campaign of violence, by which time it had been discredited for taking money and support from the Stasi in East Germany, a regime of such bewildering paranoia and direness that you wonder what on earth got into the heads of the young West Germans
The Baader Meinhof Complex, made from Stefan Aust's bestselling study, is said to be part of an attempt by Germans to demystify the trauma of their recent history, but in fact the film does almost nothing to show why they killed more than 30 people, nor does it help with any explanation of fanaticism in general. What it does is glamorise Meinhof, Baader and his girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin in the way of the film Natural Born Killers
But perhaps there is a clue in this. Fanaticism is generally held to be a state of mind where a person loses sight of their original grievance, yet believes that they are driven by that cause to the extent that they contemplate sacrificing themselves and others in its pursuit. Miguel de Garikoitz Aspiazu Rubina, the head of Basque separatist group ETA, who was captured last week in the French Pyrenees, probably fits the mould, but in a way he is easier to understand than the Baader Meinhof gang who killed so many innocent Germans because of their own objections to the Vietnam War and 'capitalist authoritarianism'.
Something else motivated these Germans, the same thing that inspires Osama bin Laden and the countless young Islamists who make suicide videos. The real Baader Meinhof complex (small c) is self-love, a vanity that finds its only expression and satisfaction in death.
Thinking back on it, Nick and I may have been rather lucky that day in 1972.
