Germany in Autumn

Germany in Autumn

by Carl Bennett

ermany in Autumn is a documentary by members of the New German Cinema (which includes Böll, Fassbinder, and Kluge) as a fictionalized record of public reaction to the terrorist events of September and October of 1977. The film begins with footage of the funeral of industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer, who was head of the Federation of German Industries until kidnapped and killed by members of the Red Army Faction. The RAF was associated with the Baader-Meinhof group of terrorists and had demanded that 11 political prisoners be released and flown to political asylum in another country or Schleyer was to be killed. Three of those prisoners, Andreas Baader, Gundrun Ensslin, and Carl Raspe, committed suicide hours after news was released of the capture of the terrorists who hijacked a Frankfurt-bound Lufthansa jet in Mogadishu, Somalia. It is with the Baader, Ensslin and Raspe funeral that the film ends.

The bulk of Germany in Autumn is a fictionalized account of the effect the above events had in both emotional and political terms on the people of such a highly industrialized country as Germany. A series of loosely connected dramas and documentary footage explores the emotional and psychological effects of the news of the extremely well-executed kidnapping of Schleyer and of the suicides by the terrorists inside their maximum-security cells of Stammheim prison in Stuttgart.

A particularly effective segment tells of the extreme trouble friends has in finding a proper burial site for the three dead terrorists, and equates their trouble to the story of Antigone in a scene where a television editorial board is putting brakes on a production of the play because they read a call for political subversion into Sophocles's account of Antigone's defiance of decreed law to bury her dead outcast brother. The editorial board decides that the production is too timely and insists they are not exercising censorship by agreeing to finish the production, only to air it at a later, more politically stable, time.

Germany in Autumn was not put together to be aesthetically pleasing; it was necessary for the filmmakers to finish the production while the content was still pertinent. Unfortunately, due to their haste, much of the first part of the film, a section dealing with two roommates mulling over the significance of the events, is so underlit that one suffers eyestrain attempting to distinguish a character's dark clothing from the dark background. At times the editing is unclear due to taking a jumble of material and piecing it together. This makes more than one dramatized section hard to follow. Germany in Autumn requires more than passive interest in either the filmmakers, the subject matter or contemporary German politics to be of interest.

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