In December 1971, the sculptor Dierk Hoff got an unexpected visit at his inner-city Frankfurt studio. Two young men were at the door: one of them was Holger Meins, a student at the Berlin Film Academy; the other called himself "Lester" - his real name was Jan-Carl Raspe. After smoking a few joints and talking about "hippies and subculture", the two men asked if Hoff could help them build props for a film they were working on. He agreed, in principle. What props? Meins showed him a picture of a hand grenade. Hoff asked what sort of film they were trying to make. "Eine Art Revolutionsfiktion," Meins replied. "A kind of revolutionary fiction." By the time that Meins and Raspe were arrested as part of the Baader-Meinhof gang in June 1972, Hoff's "props" had been used in five major bomb attacks in West Germany which left six people dead and at least 45 seriously injured. Fiction had turned into reality in the most violent way thinkable.
The most detailed account of this episode can be found in The Baader-Meinhof Complex, Stefan Aust's meticulously researched chronicle of German leftwing terrorism, originally published in 1985 and now reissued. The story doesn't make it into the film version, which is about to be released in British cinemas. This is a bit surprising: the movie's director/producer duo, Uli Edel and Bernd Eichinger, enrolled at film school (in Munich) a year before the meeting between Meins, Raspe and Hoff took place. It is not unlikely that they would have found themselves in a similar situation - faced with the choice between revolutionary films and revolutionary action. Yet their film obscures how closely intertwined the paths of terrorists and artists often were.
We now tend to think of the conflation of terror and art as a post-9/11 phenomenon. The phrase "terror chic" became popular in the summer of 2002, when T-shirts bearing the slogan "Prada Meinhof" popped up on Berlin catwalks. That followed Baader-Meinhof-themed concept albums and songs by Luke Haines, Brian Eno, Marianne Faithfull and Chumbawamba. Yet of course this symbiosis between fiction and politics was fully alive in the late 1960s. All of the main players of the Baader-Meinhof group were drenched in literary and popular culture - an idea of terrorists hard to reconcile with the one we have nowadays. By the time Gudrun Ensslin met her boyfriend, Andreas Baader, she had set up a small publishing house and had worked with such writers as Max Brod, Erich Fried and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Baader was a keen amateur actor at Munich's experimental "action-theatre"- a friend characterised him as "a Marlon Brando type". In the spring of the student riots, Baader felt that play-acting would no longer do: in April 1968, he and Ensslin organised an arson attack on a Frankfurt department store.
The group was arrested but managed to flee to Paris and Rome before being caught again in 1970. In pictures taken in Paris by the early gang member Astrid Proll, Baader and Ensslin resemble - consciously or not - the lead actors in A Bout de Souffle. On May 14 1970 Baader was granted a visit to the library of the Institute of Social Affairs, to discuss a book project with Ulrike Meinhof, a leading leftwing columnist. The literary aspirations were a cover: after a struggle in which a staff member was shot, Baader, Meinhof and three others escaped through an open window. The Red Army Faction was born.
Despite this title, the group became almost instantly known as the "Baader-Meinhof gang": there was a neatness to the phrase, even if it bracketed out Ensslin, whom many now consider the group's true leader. It pinpointed the internal division that the movement was never to resolve: between the designated "hands" of the revolution, represented by the trigger-happy but apolitical Baader, and the "brains" of Ulrike Meinhof, whom her foster-mother, Renate Riemeck, would later describe as "straight out of a Dostoevsky novel".
Meinhof had not only been a successful journalist, she had also written a screenplay about a reformation home for girls which was due to be shown on television a few days after she went underground. It was cancelled. The new film directly equates Meinhof's frustration as an artist with the beginning of her armed struggle: when Ensslin dismisses her endless theorising as "intellectual masturbation", she can't think of a response. Forced to realise the impotence of the pen, she picks up a Beretta. Perhaps a similar sense of self-doubt explains why Meinhof, the thinker turned doer, has long fascinated German writers. Günther Grass told one of the chapters of My Century from the perspective of the teacher whose tip-off led to Meinhof's arrest. Her life story inspired Elfriede Jelinek's play Ulrike Maria Stuart, and she rears her head as an Ophelia-like mythical vision in Heiner Müller's 1977 play Hamletmachine
None of these pieces was as controversial as an article published by the Nobel prize-winning novelist and poet Heinrich Böll on January 10 1972, a time when the majority of the group was still on the run. Böll, who was then president of International PEN, criticised the Red Army Faction's "war of six against sixty million", but he also blamed the Bild newspaper's populist coverage for escalating the situation and demonising a group whose "theories were considerably more violent than their actions". The counterpunch was quick and fierce. The conservative press branded Böll a "spiritual sympathiser of terrorism", there were several calls for his resignation from PEN and his home was searched by the police. Die Welt carried a cartoon of a gun-wielding Meinhof, in miniskirt and high-heels, using the writer as cover. The title of his best-known work served as a caption: Ansichten eines Clowns ("The Opinions of a Clown").
In the eyes of the Bild-reading public, the links between politically minded artists and artistically minded terrorists were all too evident: every writer or film-maker was suddenly a potential sympathiser. Böll reacted by writing a novel, later turned into a film by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarete von Trotta. The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum tells the story of a normal young woman who, at a carnival party, falls in love with a terrorist who is on the run. The next morning her flat is raided by the police and she is taken in for interrogation. A sleazy reporter from "The Newspaper" reveals increasingly lurid (and entirely fictitious) details from her private life, until she promises to meet him for an exclusive kiss-and-tell. She shoots him in the stomach. At the end of the film, a statement from the makers flashes across the screen: "Should the portrayal of certain journalistic practices bear similarities with the practices of the Bild-Zeitung, then these similarities are neither intentional nor accidental, but inevitable."
The 1962 "Oberhausen Manifesto" which launched the New German Cinema of Fassbinder, Herzog and Wenders, didn't sound all that dissimilar to the mission statements of the Red Army Faction: the filmmakers called for a critical engagement with Germany's National Socialist past and its ongoing social ills, favoured realism over escapism and championed the direct action of the auteur over the laboured democratic process of the studio system. The title of the press conference at which the manifesto was launched had iconoclastic swagger: "Daddy's cinema is dead". Yet the idea that all German filmmakers of the 1970s were somehow "pro-terror" is a myth. If anything, the opposite is the case.
In June 1972 the core of the Baader-Meinhof group was arrested, but the bombings didn't stop: over the following five years the faction's "second generation" resorted to increasingly violent means in order to get their leaders out of prison. As German terrorism spiralled out of control, film directors began to resent their former peers. They were immune to the kind of jibes that had hit home with Meinhof: unlike writers, they felt that they were "doing things". The second season of Edgar Reitz's art-house soap opera Heimat (1992), for instance, looks back at the lives of a group of students at Munich University from 1960 to 1970. Several of them are wannabe film-makers: they even hand out flyers with the "Daddy's cinema is dead" slogan. One of them, Stefan, has an affair with a fierce and selfish poet, Helga. By the last episode in the series, Stefan is a successful director while Helga has joined the Baader-Meinhof gang. When Stefan grudgingly shelters her and other gang members for a night, the police raid his flat. He is shot, Helga escapes.
The films made in Germany in direct response to the terrorist atrocities of the 1970s are more reflective, more questioning of the situation as a whole than more recent movies. Edel's Baader-Meinhof Complex wants to give us "things as they really were". In the process it laps up the cinematic potential of Aust's book - the dramatic turning point of Meinhof's "leap into illegality" and the Butch Cassidy-esque shootout scene of Baader's arrest - but doesn't try to analyse (it's very much a "complex" in a military, not a psychoanalytical sense).
The most impressive cinematic document of the Red Army Faction remains the one that was an almost instant response to it. Work on this film started in the last months of 1977: in September, the faction had kidnapped Hanns-Martin Schleyer, the head of the Federation of German Industries, and was demanding the release of Baader, Ensslin and Raspe from Stammheim prison; Meinhof and Meins had already committed suicide. When the government refused to cooperate, a group of Palestinian terrorists kidnapped a Lufthansa plane and increased the pressure.
Germany in Autumn brought together the leading directors of the New German Cinema: eight camera teams and nine directors, including Fassbinder, Reitz, Schlöndorff and Böll, contributed a short segment each. A voiceover by Alexander Kluge held together the scraps of documentary and fiction. Watching it again now, it's the contribution by Fassbinder - who had been a director at the "action-theatre" and had known Baader and Meins - that leaves the most lasting impression. Set in a dark, bare apartment that looks more like an interrogation cell than a home, it starts with Fassbinder, played by himself, having a violent row with his boyfriend Armin, who says: "I would just blow up the whole plane."
The film cuts to Fassbinder lying next to his lover in the early hours. There is a news item on the radio: the police have stormed the plane and released the prisoners; Baader, Ensslin and Raspe have been found dead in their cells. Still undressed, Fassbinder calls his ex-wife Ingrid to discuss the situation: the camera shows him sitting on the floor chain-smoking, sweating, pale and bloated, legs wide apart, playing with his penis while he talks. It makes for uncomfortable viewing. But it also drives home that the Baader-Meinhof complex had a real place in the psyche of a nation: in Fassbinder's case, it's like a virus that has caught hold of his system.
In 1979, three years before Fassbinder's death of a drug overdose, he made another film about the Red Army Faction, The Third Generation, which mocks the terrorists as vain hipsters. The promotional posters carried the message: "I don't throw bombs, I make films."
