Narrating Terrorism: Kristina Konrad’s Große Freiheit, kleine Freiheit (2000)

Around 1968 self-liberation and self-determination struggles rose up the globe over, seeking to challenge hegemonic structures in society, at the workplace, at universities, and at home. While these movements sought to address conditions domestically, they also expressed solidarity internationally. For example, as many of the speeches, writings, leaflets, banners at demonstrations, and films of the era testify, people around the world protested the U. S. war on Vietnam. Often citing and encapsulated by Che Guevara’s call (at the Tricontinental Conference of April 1967) for “Two, Three, Many Vietnams,” the movements expressed solidarity with the anticolonial, anti-imperialist, and self-determination struggles of the Vietcong, but they also drew inspiration from Che Guevara’s role in the 1959 Cuban Revolution, which overthrew CIA-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Additionally, these social movements drew on a broad spectrum of political influences – communist, socialist, Marxist, anarchist – and, within each of these currents of political thought, included splinter groups or factions, such as Leninist, Trotskyist, and Maoist factions within the communist strand. Again, these influences provided the basis for international solidarity. Importantly, many of these movements were also extraparliamentary. That is, they agitated outside of political institutions and parliamentary structures, seeking not votes but change on particular issues, again an opportunity to underscore transnational alliances.

To be sure, the student and social movements of 1968 as well as the armed-struggle groups were a global phenomenon, acknowledged as such by everyone from participants to critics. As historian Martin Klimke puts it, “Whether we describe sixties’ protest as a revolution in the world-system, a global revolutionary movement or a conglomerate of national movements with local variants but common characteristics, its transnational dimension was one of its crucial motors” (8). While historical studies exist that compare student and social movements either within Europe or between Europe and the U. S., ones that compare the so-called “First World” of western capitalism with the “Third World” in Latin America, Africa, and Asia were – until recently – less common.

Likewise, while a range of films and literary texts focus on the era – its student and social movements, as well as its armed-struggle groups – they seldom compare leftist movements transnationally. Early films of the New German Cinema with terrorism as a theme include Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta’s Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (1975), Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Mutter Küsters’ Fahrt zum Himmel (1975), von Trotta’s Das zweite Erwachen der Christa Klages (1977), the codirected Deutschland im Herbst (1978), Richard Hauff’s Messer im Kopf (1978), Fassbinder’s Die dritte Generation (1979), and von Trotta’s Die bleierne Zeit (1981). Yet none of them bring global solidarity into the discussion or compare terrorism in Germany and in another country.

The spate of recent films produced about the left-wing terrorist group the Red Army Faction (RAF) also focus mostly on West Germany. These films include the documentaries Todesspiel (1997) by Heinrich Breloer, Andres Veiel’s Black Box BRD (2001), and Gerd Conradt’s Starbuck Holger Meins (2002), as well as the fictional feature films Die innere Sicherheit (2000) by Christian Petzold, Christoph Roth’s Baader (2002), Connie Walther’s Schattenwelt (2008), and Susanne Schneider’s Es kommt der Tag (2009).

Two recent docudramas form notable exceptions to this trend. Uli Edel’s Oscar-nominated Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (2008) briefly mentions the RAF’s early training in Jordan at a Palestinian Liberation Organization camp; the hijacking of the Lufthansa airplane Landshut to Mogadishu, Somalia; and members of the RAF’s second generation waiting in Yemen, where they hoped to greet their comrades from the first generation. In exchange for the hostages of the hijacked plane, the plane’s hijackers, who were members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, demanded the release of ten members of the RAF imprisoned at the Stammheim maximum security prison in Stuttgart, West Germany and two Palestinians imprisoned in Turkey. Yet Der Baader Meinhof Komplex engages the international relations among armed-struggle groups only in passing, at the film’s beginning and end. The failed...