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“Once Upon a Time in Germany”

Hitchens’ take on the “Red Army Faction” of Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader by way of a review of The Baader Meinhof Complex, a film by Uli. Hitchens sums it all up by writing, “The Baader Meinhof Complex, like the excellent book by Stefan Aust on which it is based, is highly acute in its portrayal of the way in which mania feeds upon itself and becomes hysterical.” Hitchens does a good job of explaining why this movement was called a "complex." A very good essay…need to see the movie and read the book.

German Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11iuHVO4OKA

Baader & Meinhof:

New Learning: Of the leftist, terrorist protest groups of the ‘60s/’7s, Hitchens writes, “The first such group was the Japanese Red Army, the second (named partly in honor of the first) was West Germany’s Red Army Faction, led by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, and the third was the Red Brigades in Italy. You may notice that the three countries I have just mentioned were the very ones that made up the Axis during the Second World War….I am personally convinced that this is the main reason the phenomenon took the form it did: The propaganda of the terrorists, on the few occasions when they could be bothered to cobble together a manifesto, showed an almost neurotic need to ‘resist authority’ in a way that their parents’ generation had so terribly failed to do.” 

New Phrase: Götterdämmerung  = “twilight of the gods”, ot the downfall of the gods, the name of the last part of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.