The Ghosts of Autumn Past: History, Memory, and Identity in Christian Petzold’s Die innere Sicherheit

Just two weeks before the official release of Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (2008), Der Spiegel ran its cover story of Uli Edel’s much anticipated film. Although the headline asserted the necessity of this film in destroying the myths surrounding the Red Army Faction, the article nevertheless posed the question, “Schon wieder Baader-Meinhof, schon wieder RAF? Schon wieder die Geschichte von Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin und Ulrike Meinhof, die entsetzt sind von der Bundesrepublik und dem Krieg in Vietnam [...]? Tausendmal erzählt, tausendmal gedeutet” (Kurbjuweit 43). Although the number of narrations has not yet reached the thousands, to a certain degree the author was right. Within a year of the so-called German Autumn of 1977, Rainer Werner Fassbinder along with Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, and eight other directors released the film Deutschland im Herbst as their cinematic and personal reactions to the events. One year later, Fassbinder released his own film, Die dritte Generation, reflecting on the motivations, implications, and possible success of an anti-establishment movement in modern Germany, and in 1981 Margarethe von Trotta followed suit with her feature film Die bleierne Zeit. In 1985, Stefan Aust of Der Spiegel published the original book form of the 2008 film, and he wrote the script for Reinhard Hauff’s 1986 film Stammheim. By 1989, Gerhard Richter released his RAF-inspired series of paintings 18. Oktober 1977, and in 1998 the same year as the group’s official dissolution, former member Astrid Proll published her “photo album” as an eyewitness account of the RAF from within. Theatrical and literary confrontations with this subject matter have been numerous as well, including former RAF member Peter-Jürgens Boock’s 1990 novel, Der Abgang; Andreas Dresen’s 2002 series of monologues, Zeugenstand: Stadtguerilla – Monologe; and Elfriede Jelinek’s 2006 piece, Ulrike Maria Stuart. The number of cinematic, artistic, theatrical, literary, and scholarly works that address the members, actions, and repercussions of the Red Army Faction has continued to grow in the last ten years, thereby reinforcing the question in September’s Der Spiegel, “Schon wieder?”

Among this multitude of representations and works that address terrorist-related themes, however, Christian Petzold’s 2000 film Die innere Sicherheit stands out as an exception. While the majority of RAF-inspired texts, especially over the last ten years, focus on famous historical figures and events, Petzold’s film is unique in its displacement of the crisis into a relatively anonymous setting of a three-member family of unrevealed surname. The film spans approximately one month in the life of this family on the run, focussing on the fifteen-year-old daughter, Jeanne, whose parents, Hans and Clara, are presumed to be former left-wing terrorists. Though these characters never make explicit reference to past terrorist violence or ideologies, several allusions in the film’s structure and content highlight this implicit connection. In addition to eliminating direct naming, Petzold further distances this work from other RAF literature and films by framing the film not as a “Terroristendrama,” but rather as the first part of his Gespenster-trilogy, this 2000 film followed in 2005 by Gespenster and in 2007 by Yella (Hofer 175). With a relatively wide reception among German audiences, several reviews and interviews in the print media, and the 2001 Golden Film Award, the film uses the legacy of the Red Army Faction to expand a public discussion of the various forms of ghostly existence in modern society, as well as the traces of history’s ghosts.

This article pursues the ghost-like qualities of Die innere Sicherheit and its characters as they pertain to questions of knowledge and memory regarding the past. It argues that the hazy distinctions between presence and absence generate ambiguous understandings of the eponymous concepts of interiority and security and that this uncertainty has the ability to challenge not only conventional representations of the RAF, but also common understandings of memory and historical transmission in both the public and private spheres. While working predominantly with a close reading of Petzold’s film, the argument offered here...