edible derangements

In September, I saw the sexy German thriller advertised on every Litfaßsäule in town, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex. It’s one of those movies meant to encompass and (somewhat self-consciously) idealize a fat stretch of national history, a Forrest Gump or a The Curious Case of a Movie for Simpletons, but with more pistol-whipping and less Southern charm. But it took the rise and disorderliness and fall of the Red Army Faction as its box of chocolates. The RAF is post-war West Germany’s most violent militant left-wing terrorist group. In the 70s and 80s they were a big, bloody deal, holding bell-bottomed Germans at gunpoint and sporting sunglasses and garnering oodles of media attention and generally causing a big mess. Who knew! I recommend an RAF Wiki Tangent Spree. You’ll discover historical ties between Chancellors and RAF terrorists-turned-holocasut-deniers, modern-day politicians who were one-time Stasi informants or simply plucked straight from the Nazi ranks. Good gossip.

The movie begins on June 2, 1967. A procession in the streets, men hoisting pro-Shah signs; young, chiseled-jaw students by the sidelines, screaming protests of one throaty sort or another.  Suddely, unprovoked, fighting: confusion in the streets, and confusion among us Americans in the audience. Why? What caused them to do that? Huh? Did that guy just shoot a teenager in the head?  The director is not doing a good job of showing character motivation here. Little did we know that this single incident, laughable in cinematic representation for its unwarrented violence, is crucial to German history, this photograph one of its best recognized:

And little did we know that the shooting’s motiviation was so unsettlingly obscure because everyone got the story wrong. A reactionary West German police officer didn’t fire the gun; an East German spy did.

An article in the Spiegel reports that the incident’s textbook story  — that the youth (student, father and husband Benno Ohnesorg — whose last name, by the way, means “without worry”) was shot by a reactionary, zealous West German police officer — is, indeed,  more complicated.

“New documents discovered in the Stasi archive — the vast collection of files left behind by the East German secret police — reveal that the policeman who shot Ohnesorg, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was in fact a spy for East Germany’s communist regime.”

This is huge. This is huge because this event, the murder of a student, was and still is huge. As in: the incident triggered the RAF’s formation and subsequent decades of violence. The event also convinced the German people that its current regime was far more violent police state than peaceful democracy. The nation has pushed for more progressive politics ever since. And if this information was publicized 40 years ago? Germany today wouldn’t be Germany today.

So, yes, there is a sense that 21st Germany has whitewashed over its history. I’m currently ripping through Tod Wodicka’s spry and fun All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well; as a book about, among other things, history, the narrator puts it well: “despite the castles and churches, and all those townships still adhering to thousand-year-old plans, modern Germany seems a most non-historical kingdom. Safe, well-ordered, tame, all mystery  long since burned away in the conflagrations of this last century.” It’s like they just have an overabundance of history and it has all accrued and canceled itself out and now the country is forever pulling out their orderly, efficient clean slate.

But, once again, history reminds us that it can’t be deftly boxed up and buried. Wow.