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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
A Race To The End of A Movement, 7 Mar 2001
By A Customer
This book represents a pictorial documentary of the history of the Red Army Faction or Baader Meinhof group that leaves you with a strong sense of the urgency and speed at which was executed and ended.The pictures begin with the sporadic and often harmless demonstrations of the many factional student activist groups of the late 1960's that could so easily be geographically unspecific. Within a few pages these culminate in a tragic shot of the death of activist Benno Ohnesorg with the bullet of an over zealous German policeman. Then the race begins with pictures displaying urgent faces and fashions of the time that show that not only were these people serious about what they did, but they also had fun. They were young and good looking and showed the often hedonistic attitude to life that most of the followers practised, only to be galvanised by the serious rhetoric of the journalist Ulrike Meinhof and the criminal Andreas Baader. They fought the civil war that Germany both least expected and yet needed in some way so that the generation after the second-world war could have their say. This book shows their struggle, containing all the elements of other more successful well-known terrorist campaigns such as the picture of Holger Meins on his death-bed after 2 months of a hunger strike and the heavy handedness of the police best displayed by the tank being used to arrest him and Andreas Baader. The author Atrid Proll is also pictured entering the courts for her trial in 1973, tongue in cheek with the cocky swagger of a young lady sure of her convictions. All these give some idea of the times and serious politics of people hell-bent on changing the world. And then the victims. The pictures of a scared and desperate Peter Lorenz (Christian Democrat MP) abducted in exchange for 5 prisoners, propped up in bed with a board under his chin to identify him. The loneliness the hijacked Lufthansa plane during it's stopover in Aden, and the tank rolling in which would end the campaign. And then finally the empty cells of Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin with the last photo of Andreas Baader with his head blown open by a gunshot wound. Because without many words this book not only unwaveringly shows that the group made a rapid start, they also made a quick exit, and with it the death of the mainstay of what it achieved. Nowadays protest is rapidly quenched, yet one somehow feels that this could and will be repeated on a much larger scale many times over.
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(1 customer review)
