Red Army Faction  

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The Red Army Faction or RAF (German Rote Armee Fraktion) (also commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof Group [or Gang]), was one of postwar West Germany's most active and prominent militant left-wing groups. It described itself as a communist "urban guerrilla" group engaged in armed resistance, while it was described by the West German government as a terrorist group.

Logo

Logo of the 1970's German underground terrorist organization Red Army Faction (RAF) - a red star (similar to that of the Red Army of the Soviet Union) and a submachine gun Heckler & Koch MP5. Sometimes, people get confused because on most pictures available today, the MP5 has a curved magazine, whereas the weapon in the logo has a straight magazine. However, the MP5 had a straight magazine until it was changed to curved in 1976 due to technical reasons, so this is no contradiction. The MP5 was at the time (and is until today) one of the standard submachine guns of the German police. The logo designer, a young design student, apparently did not know this when choosing the weapon.

Films

Numerous West German film and TV productions have been made about the RAF. These include Klaus Lemke's telefeature Brandstifter (Arsonists) (1969); Volker Schloendorff and Margarethe von Trotta's co-directed The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (a 1978 adaptation of Heinrich Böll's novel Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum); Germany in Autumn (1978), co-directed by 11 directors, including Alexander Kluge, Volker Schloendorff, Rainer Werner Fassbinder , and Edgar Reitz; Fassbinder's Die dritte Generation (The Third Generation) (1979); Margarethe von Trotta's Die bleierne Zeit (The German Sisters/Marianne and Juliane) (1981); and Reinhard Hauff's Stammheim (1986). Post-reunification German films include Christian Petzold's Die innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In) (2000); Kristina Konrad's Grosse Freiheit, Kleine Freiheit (Greater Freedom, Lesser Freedom (2000); and Christopher Roth's Baader (2002).

The best known recent film was Uli Edel's 2008 The Baader Meinhof Complex (German: Der Baader Meinhof Komplex), based on the bestselling book by Stefan Aust. The film was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in both the 81st Academy Awards and 66th Golden Globe Awards.

Outside Germany, films include Swiss director Markus Imhoof's Die Reise (The Journey) (1986). On TV, there was Heinrich Breloer's Todesspiel (Death Game) (1997), a two-part docu-drama, and Volker Schloendorff's Die Stille nach dem Schuss (The Legend of Rita) (2000).

There have been several documentaries: Im Fadenkreuz – Deutschland & die RAF (1997, several directors); Gerd Conradt's Starbuck Holger Meins (2001); Andres Veiel's Black Box BRD (2001); Klaus Stern's Andreas Baader – Der Staatsfeind (Enemy of the State) (2003); Ben Lewis's In Love With Terror, for BBC Four (2003); and Ulrike Meinhof – Wege in den Terror (Ways into Terror) (2006).

The 2010 feature documentary Children of the Revolution tells Ulrike Meinhof's story from the perspective of her daughter, journalist and historian Bettina Röhl, while Andres Veiel's 2011 feature film If Not Us, Who? provides a context for the RAF's origins through the perspective of Gudrun Ensslin's partner Bernward Vesper. In 2015, Jean-Gabriel Périot released his feature-length, found-footage documentary A German Youth on the Red Army Faction.

The 2018 remake of Suspiria features a secondary character attempting to run away to join the Red Army Faction, serving as a catalyst for the later events of the film.

Fiction and art

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• Heinrich Böll's book The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1974) describes the political climate in West Germany during the active phase of the RAF in the seventies. Schlöndorff and Trotta (who knew the leading RAF cadre) filmed the book in 1975.
• The Professionals 1978 episode "Close Quarters" featured a German terrorist organization known as the "Meyer-Helmut Group", and was possibly inspired by Baader-Meinhof.
• Cabaret Voltaire, the industrial band from Sheffield, England, recorded a song called "Baader-Meinhof" that pondered the group's importance in history and their motivations.
• The Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum made a painting called The Murder of Andreas Baader in 1977–1978, that shows Nerdrum's personal commentary to the events in the Stammheim prison.
• In the mid-1980s, an Italian band called RAF Punk named themselves after this organization.
• Gerhard Richter, a German painter whose series of works entitled 18 October 1977 (1988) repainted photographs of the Faction members and their deaths.
• In 1990, the album Slap! by the influential British anarcho-punk band Chumbawamba featured a song titled "Ulrike", about Ulrike Meinhof and the RAF.
• Tom Clancy's 1991 novel The Sum of All Fears features the arrest of RAF members in former Eastern Bloc countries with the cooperation of the democratized Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War as a major plot point. In the book, embittered RAF terrorists ally with the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine to procure a lost Israeli atomic bomb to start a nuclear war.
• Christoph Hein's novel In seiner frühen Kindheit ein Garten (In His Early Childhood, a Garden) deals with a fictionalized aftermath of the Grams shooting in 1993.
• Josef Žáček, a Czech painter created a series of paintings entitled Searching in Lost Space 1993

that were inspired by events that had occurred in 1993 in Bad Kleinen.

• In 1996, British singer songwriter Luke Haines released a 9-track album under the Baader Meinhof moniker. In this concept album, all songs are a romanticized retelling of the RAF actions.
• Bruce LaBruce's 2004 film The Raspberry Reich is an erotic satire of the RAF and of terrorist chic.
• In 2003, The Long Winters released the song "Cinnamon," about the Baader-Meinhof gang.
• In 2004, Canadian singer songwriter Neil Leyton composed and released a song entitled "Ingrid Schubert."
• Australian-British playwright Van Badham's play Black Hands/Dead Section provides a fictionalized account of the actions and lives of key members of the RAF. It won the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards in 2005.
• The 2005 feature film See You at Regis Debray, written and directed by CS Leigh tells the story of the time Andreas Baader spent hiding in the apartment of Régis Debray in Paris in 1969.
• The 2011 album Amok by German band Weena Morloch features the song "Die Nacht der Stumpfen Messer" which deals with Andreas Baader's and Gudrun Ensslin's death in prison.

See also

• Red Army