Director: Jean-Gabriel Périot, colour and b/w, 93 min., 2014/15
Film screening as part of Festival Film Dokumenter (FFD) Yogyakarta 2017
A look back at the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1960s and the development of the terrorist group RAF (Red Army Faction).
The French director exclusively uses archival material without any additional commentary. His position can be found in the way the material is edited together; he confronts “underground” documents with media representations. This results in a kaleidoscope of contradictions, and the audience is left with the task of coming up with answers and explanations.
The questions initially posed off-screen are rhetorical and purely provocative: “Is it possible to make films in Germany these days? Is it possible from a philosophical point of view? Is a German able to take a picture? We will know by the end of this film!” Then two contrary positions are referenced. We hear “The Internationale”: “Stand up, damned of the Earth...” A man aims a gun at the camera. Then the message: “20 years ago, German youth stood to attention.” Among the memories shown is archival footage of the infamous book burnings of 1933.
What has become of Germany since the Nazi dictatorship? How did the protest movement of the 1960s come about? People argue on the street. One man tries to put the six million victims of the Holocaust into perspective – 10 million Germans had also been killed. The old racism is still present in the minds of people, for German Jews still are not considered German. Another elderly man scolds the critical youth on the street. It is clear that these young people would eventually put their energy into opposing this malign political atmosphere, one that seems to have survived the 1950s intact.
Berlin, 1965: The student protests have become militant. Extremely confident, the later RAF terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, then editor-in-chief of the magazine “Konkret”, defends the growing readiness to use violence – especially given a church and a generation of parents that have lost all credibility due to their role in the National Socialist state. She also complains about the still very authoritarian education that is prevalent in society. At the time, she was a popular guest on talk shows and political shows, as excerpts from “Panorama” show. Unfortunately, Jean-Gabriel Périot only references the source of his film clips in the end credits, unless it was already included in the archival material itself. The filmmaker also foregoes identifying the people shown in images. This does not make his film, which also renounces pure chronological structures, any easier.
The film focuses on protests that emanated from the German Film and Television Academy (DFFB), founded in 1966. The cameraman and filmmaker Holger Meins, who would later die of a hunger strike in prison, studied there, as did Hartmut Bitomsky, Christian Petzold, Christian Ziewer and Thomas Mitscherlich. They, in turn, maintained contact with Ulrike Meinhof, who was also active as a filmmaker for a while, and with Gudrun Ensslin, who acted in a DFFB film. The student protests targeted the powerful Springer publishing house, which, to put it mildly, held very conservative political views with DIE WELT and BILD, and was against all that was “left-oriented”.
The visit of the Shah of Iran in 1967 caused further escalation. During the visit, the police allowed suspected members of the Iranian Intelligence to beat up protesting students. During the demonstration, the student Benno Ohnesorg was shot – by a West Berlin policeman who, years later, was revealed to be an Informal Collaborator of the Ministry for State Security (Stasi). A GERMAN YOUTH becomes a document of an unstoppable escalation, which the courts also contributed to, as they didn’t want to admit that none of the accused took their verdicts seriously. The Vietnam War and protests against the United States also intensified this development. The growing militancy was first expressed in attacks on properties, such as the Springer publishing house in Berlin. Ultimately, it would also be directed against people. The student leader Rudi Dutschke advised his fellow students to renounce passive forms of protest. In the Federal Republic of Germany, numerous department stores would go up in flames, then the terrorist Andreas Baader was freed from prison by force. The opposition used infamous smear campaigns, e.g. against the writer Heinrich Böll, to besmirch the reputations of authors, theologians and intellectuals. In 1972, most of the RAF members were arrested. In 1976, these inmates were found dead in their cells in Stuttgart’s Stammheim Prison. In 1977, terrorists hijacked a Lufthansa plane, which was then liberated by German special forces in Mogadishu. The people demanded that the terrorists all be shot.
According to his own statements, Périot viewed thousands of hours of material. “By exclusively using material that the ‘protagonists’ created themselves or that depicts them, I avoid psychologising, or trying to explain, their actions (...) My intention is to open the door to a more complete discussion of the nature of the acts and of our own humanity.” What at first appears easy to comprehend, namely the anger and escalating violence of the young generation directed at the heirs of the National Socialist state, imperceptibly and increasingly overwhelms the senses right up to the limits of comprehensibility. Ulrike Meinhof had declared that police officers were not human beings, but pigs who could be shot. The RAF victims prove that this was not simply a verbal provocation. And if one were to replace “police officers” with “Jews” in her statement, it becomes clear that we had now come full circle. In its final stages, the RAF resembled a system that was once the starting point of the protests – namely that of fascism.
A GERMAN YOUTH contains documents from numerous television programmes and excerpts from films by Hellmuth Costard, Ulrike Meinhof, Holger Meins, Helke Sander, Thomas Giefer, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and many others.
Biography
Jean-Gabriel Périot was born in 1974 in Bellac (France). He studied visual communication and completed an internship at the Centre Pompidou. He works as a video artist, cameraman, film editor and director. After numerous short films, A GERMAN YOUTH is Périot’s first full-length film.
Filmography (selection)
2002 BEFORE I WAS SAD (AVANT J'ETAIS TRISTE)
2004 WE ARE WINNING DON’T FORGET
2005 UNDO
2006 NIJUMAN NO BOREI
2007 ENTRE CHIENS ET LOUPS
2009 LES BARBARES
2012 THE DEVIL
2014/15 A GERMAN YOUTH (UNE JEUNESSE ALLEMANDE)
Hans Günther Pflaum, 04.02.2016
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