Uli Edel: The Hollywood Interview

Filmmaker Uli Edel.


Talkin’ Terrorism with Uli Edel
by Jon Zelazny

Director Uli Edel and writer-producer Bernd Eichinger met at the Munich Film School in the late sixties, and went on to collaborate on two gritty cult classics, the German Christiane F. (1981) and Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989).

In 2008, they reunited for The Baader Meinhof Complex, a chronicle of the domestic terrorism that plagued West Germany in the 1970’s. It was nominated for a Golden Globe, a BAFTA Award, and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. The Constantin/Vitagraph Films release opens this Friday, August 21st, in New York and on August 28th in Los Angeles.

Uli Edel and I met at his home in West Los Angeles.




The terrorist movement in Western Europe essentially began in 1968. What was that year like for you?

ULI EDEL: I was just starting my studies in Munich. And when I came there, that whole sixties uproar was already in its bloom. It was very exciting; every day was some teach-ins, or sit-ins, or some happening, and all the students—not only the left-wing minded—they just wanted to rebel against this authority. The structure of the university was still 19th century. And for me, coming from a Jesuit boarding school—also very 19th century, maybe even Middle Ages—for seven years, locked in that monastery, and then coming to Munich… you can just imagine.

You must understand, just to hear people say “Everything that is made by man can be changed by man” was a huge thing. Everything is changeable, and change was necessary. You heard that a lot now with Obama, but in those days… you know, we were the first generation after the Hitler generation; the generation of our parents, who were responsible for what had happened. Maybe not my father per se, but basically we saw them as… we knew we will do much better. That’s why it’s so important for me what Gudrun Ensslin says at the beginning of the movie: “We will not allow what our parents allowed. There will be resistance to the next wave of fascism.”

And there were a lot of reasons to think of fascism. Franco was still there in Spain. South America was basically dictatorships. Greece would become a dictatorship. Mexico was a dictatorship; the military there was shooting into a crowd of five hundred people before the Olympics. In Germany, a neo-Nazi kid shot the student leader Rudi Dutschke… the Berlin police went nuts and attacked a crowd… even our Chancellor in ’68 was a former Nazi. We saw fascist tendencies in American politics. We thought, what are they doing in Vietnam? It’s genocide.

And your generation resented all the American troops in Germany?

No, no; we accepted that. We were all born in a Germany that was like that; we never knew any other way. And what we loved about the American soldiers was that wherever they were… you know, there were cool clubs we were allowed to go in; there the music was better, the girls were better, there were cool radio stations—everybody listened to the American stations. There were a lot of stores where you could buy cool stuff. You always wanted to be where those soldiers were. You wanted to talk English with them.

But the German terrorists started targeting those bases.

That was ’72; that’s all later. And whatever we felt against America, it was just against the Vietnam war; it had nothing to do with American culture. We still watched only American movies, we read a lot of American writers, and listened just to American music. But the whole sixties movement—like what you had in the States, thousands of people in the streets protesting—in Germany, that all ended when Willy Brandt and the Social Democrats took power in 1970. So the whole country got quiet again... and then the Baader-Meinhof group started. You understand? They said, “No. It cannot be over.”

Ulrike Meinhof.

The film opens with left-wing journalist Ulrike Meinhof, her publisher husband, and their two young daughters relaxing at a nude beach in 1967. As a typically provincial American, I was shocked to see this family naked in front of each other…

(laughs) Yeah, that beach… it was on the island Sylt. You know, the whole nudity culture is very much a German thing. We have a great tradition in it; since the 1920’s, we have a lot of nude colonies. People start in it with their parents, and they stay with it until they are very old. And every summer they go whenever they can to these nudist beaches.

Anybody could go there. I went several times with my girlfriend. Everybody there acts very casual, but you are affected by it! They’d do all this volleyball, the naked girls’ boobs were going up and down, and I’m sitting there, twenty years old, the testosterone raging… and we all felt free!

(more laughter)

This was hippie times. But in Germany, it was not really connected to hippies, because we had it before. And we still have it.

So Ulrike and her husband are nudists. This is not mainstream German society.

It was the elite. The so-called intellectual elite in Germany. I mean, at that beach, there were the publishers of the right wing papers and the publishers of the left wing papers! Hanging out in the evening in the bar together, and fucking each other’s wives! Ulrike and her husband went every year. They had a house there.

I wanted to start with something surprising. You don’t expect that a terrorist movie opens at a nude beach. And it’s a good way to introduce this family: this is not a normal family.

That was our first day of shooting. And we needed all these extras. That was no problem; I think we had about sixty or seventy people; older, younger, kids; everybody naked... and when I saw them, I realized I am a dinosaur! (laughs) Because in ’67, everybody had bushes—hair under their arms, and down here—and today they are all shaved! I thought, “This is not authentic! Our first day, and already we have a catastrophe!”

(laughter)

Even the men—young, old—all shaved! I was completely confused; I never saw a shaved man. How do you even do that in the first place without cutting yourself? But we had to shoot. We had one day. So what did we do? The make-up department went crazy: they had all these wigs, but they didn’t have pubic hair. So they cut those wigs up, they started to put it on all of them—it was nightmare!

(much laughter)

When we first see Andreas Baader, he walks into an apartment where his two friends are building bombs. Now you gave Ulrike those scenes to show where she came from, and that scene of Gudrun Ensslin with her parents explains something about her, but we don’t know what context this guy came from. How does he get to the point where he’s building bombs?

We talked about that a lot. At one time, there were some scenes in, explaining that he got arrested once because he stole a motorcycle, that he was never really a student… but when you know the German language, you can tell by the way he talks: this is street talk. He’s not educated. Ulrike and Gudrun talk this very intellectual—almost arrogant kind of elite, sophisticated language. While he is the complete contrary. He behaves almost like a pimp.

So why does a pimp want to throw bombs? What does he care?

He saw already in the student movement that they throw Molotov cocktails, and he always thought this was ridiculous; that they should do a bigger thing. Why should you burn just a car? Let’s burn down a whole department store!

But what was he after? What did he want out of it?

Be rebellious! In these days… you know, what did these people do on a Saturday night? Went to a disco, had a couple joints. Go out after, fill a bottle with some gasoline, put a handkerchief in it, light it, and throw it at the front wall of the America House! “In protest,” ha-ha-ha. It was just being… obnoxious.

Okay, he’s a goon, but it’s still hard to understand how a guy like that hooks up with these intellectual, left-wing political activists and starts planning hard-core terrorist operations. They want to change society; what does he want?

He’s with Gudrun. She says to Ulrike, “Your writing is just intellectual masturbation; you will never get anywhere. What we need is action. We have to do things. Stop discussing it, and do it!”

And Baader is a doer.

He’s a doer. She needs a guy like him. He knows how to build a bomb. And he always does a little bit more than everyone else. He dares to go farther.

Baader and Ensslin.

It’s fascinating how Baader carries himself. Like a rock star.

He looked like Marlon Brando. He’d already had his picture in the papers, with his shirt off; the girls were crazy about him. There was already a movie made about him and Gudrun in ’69—it played on TV. And Gudrun was in a student movie, completely naked; like this naked goddess.

I knew a little about the Baader-Meinhof group, but I didn’t know Gudrun Ensslin. She’s really their leader… so how did Ulrike’s name become the group’s name?

Gudrun was always furious about that. It was her group; Baader was more or less just a soldier. And Gudrun only brought Ulrike in so she could write those articles—that she could articulate for them. It was the press that started calling them “The Baader-Meinhof Group” because Ulrike was a well-known journalist when she helped them break Baader out of custody. From then on, it was Ulrike Meinhof who was on every poster, not Gudrun Ensslin.

The actress playing Gudrun—Johanna Wokalek—is amazing. I thought she looked too good, but then I saw pictures of the real Gudrun. She was very striking.

A real tough bitch.

She reminded me of Anita Pallenberg. Especially when you do that scene with her in the bathtub; she’s like Pallenberg in Performance (1970).

Exactly.

It’s a great scene. The way she treats that boy, Peter-Jurgen Boock, who’s been beaten, victimized; he’s a piece of trash. She treats him… like a friend, a lover, a mother?

You know why he would do anything later for them. They’re like his parents.

I also like that the story takes place in the 1960’s and 70’s, but you don’t go out of your way to call attention to it. The look is very understated, which allows us to focus more on all the characters.

I thought if I start to get nostalgic about the hippie era, people might say, “Well, that was all a long time ago.” I wanted to bring that time as close as possible, so when you look at it, you almost think it was yesterday. Or today.

I had two movies I used as examples for the crew: The Doors (1991), by Oliver Stone, and Spielberg’s Munich (2005). When you look at Munich… there is nothing special at all about it being the seventies. And The Doors is the other extreme—

Right. He’s bending over backwards to get in every little detail.

It becomes almost like a fantasy. What I said I wanted to avoid.

Another early scene depicts that 1968 police riot in Berlin, where a public protest against the visiting Shah of Iran was brutally suppressed. You show the protesters as essentially peaceful. Why did the police attack them?

It’s hard to understand. Nobody who was protesting that day did anything that would legitimize what the police did. That scene… everybody knows it, because that documentary material was shown in Germany again and again and again. So I knew I had to stage it absolutely truthful; that people feel they are almost watching a documentary.

How did the authorities justify that attack?

Somebody told the Chief of the Berlin Police, “When the Shah comes out of the opera, this street must be clean.” So a hundred police charged out there, started beating everyone, and a panic started.

There’s one cop in the movie—an older guy with a beard in the front line—he had been a young cop there the day it happened. He said their orders were very simple: go out there, push the crowd to the left and to the right, and whoever is resisting, just force them. They called it The Leberwurst Strategy: hit it in the middle and it explodes at either end.

He also said there was a rumor going around that some students had stabbed a cop to death. Which was not true. But all the cops in Berlin had heard that, and that made them… you know.

I’m surprised you didn’t put that in.

That rumor only started after the first beatings… when they were chasing people all over the city. What we compress into ten minutes actually went all day and night.

The scene is a real gut punch. There’s a nice nude beach, a nice cocktail party, and suddenly we’re in the midst of this chaos. And like all the action scenes in this movie, the editing is just phenomenal.

We had so much to tell, I said we’re gonna do the fastest German movie ever shot. As fast as possible. Because my kids will say—

Your movies are too slow?

Yeah! (laughing) They say, “Why do we know sometimes in the middle of your scenes how they will end?”

But action cutting in Hollywood has come to mean you put it together so fast people can’t even tell what’s going on.

Yeah, that’s what I hated in the new Bond movie. How could they say that was a good movie? I could hardly see a thing in those action scenes!

That’s how I felt about The Dark Knight. But this movie isn’t like that. As fast as it goes, you can always follow every little beat.Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin began their terror campaign by destroying an upscale Frankfurt department store with an after-hours firebomb. You cut from the store burning to the cops busting in and arresting them… like maybe it’s even the next morning. How did the police figure out who was responsible?

After the bomb went off, they went that night to The Cabaret Voltaire, this sort of intellectual hangout, and Baader was already bragging. Saying he and Gudren were getting engaged that night, “an engagement forged by fire” or something. So some people knew it already… and then somebody called the police.

I had that club scene in once; then I thought, who cares? They get them. And they wanted to be caught; they wanted to be the big stars. You see how they carry themselves in the trial: “We did it… to protest against the Vietnam war… dadda dadda da…”

Ulrike Meinhof met Baader and Ensslin while covering their trial. The fledgling terrorists were already calling themselves The Red Army Faction, or RAF.

It’s interesting when Ulrike overhears Gudrun’s parents talking to the media, and they’re kind of defending her actions. Her mother says something like, “She’s really finding herself in this experience.”

Everything the parents say there is exactly what they said. We changed nothing. What happened was… at first they were very concerned, when they heard their daughter planted a bomb. But then they saw how the press—the left-wing press, the liberal press—treated it: “Well, it’s interesting what our young people have to say… let’s not be so quick to pass a verdict on them,” they realized the public had some sympathy to these young rebels. “Nobody got hurt… it was just part of that store… they were insured… the Capitalists got what they deserved.” So the parents, who were very conservative, they changed very suddenly.

As things got steadily worse, did they come to regret those statements?

Still today—still today—they are saying the government killed their daughter. Can you believe that? Her sister wrote a book, what Margarethe von Trotta made into a movie, Die Blierne Zeit (1981).

So her parents were always in denial.

Yeah.

That’s sad. When Gudrun asks to see a priest later, I thought it would lead to something with her father. Was he— ?

No, at that point she did not talk to him. I would have liked to bring him back, but we tried very hard not to put characters together in scenes that didn’t happen.

Edel & Eichinger’s "Christiane F." was based on the true stories of the teenage heroin addicts who congregated around Berlin’s central train station in the early seventies.

You met the real Peter-Jurgen Boock, a member of the RAF’s third generation. I read he was also a teenage drug addict in Berlin. Did he know Christiane?

He did not know her personally, but he was very much around that whole scene. He started out as a drug dealer, then became an addict.

Did he like your movie of Christiane F.?

I never asked him. We are… not speaking now.

I was curious if there were any links between the two movies.

There are some. Christiane’s roommate Stella went to prison and became a close friend of Brigitte Mohnhaupt, who Gudrun trained to be the leader of the third generation.


Brigitte Mohnhaupt.

And Christiane’s boyfriend has a photo of Ulrike on his wall. So Baader, Gudrun, and Ulrike became icons—like Che Guevara—to the disaffected youth of Germany?
Yeah. I put Ulrike’s picture in because Christiane always talked a lot about her. The terrorism had only ended about four years before we did that movie.

What happened between you and Boock?

He got upset about the riot scene in the orphanage, that I show him starting that fire. First he tried to tell me the police did it. I said, “The police started a fire? Give me a break!” Then he said, “Well, I didn’t do it—my friend did!” And all this shit. I said, “What does it matter if you do it or someone else? It was one of you guys!” He didn’t protest at all that I later show him shooting all those innocent people… when they kidnapped Schleyer, he shot those guys twenty-five times! No, he just complains, “I never lit that match!”

Selective morality… It’s amazing so many of these people are not in jail anymore.

They are all free.

I mean, the only thing we had in the U.S. that was even close to this was Manson. Those people are all still in jail, and they’ll probably die in jail. How many years did these terrorists get? The most was 25 years, right?

You must understand one thing: why they are all free—why some have been free fifteen years, even having killed eight people or so—is because in Germany, a life sentence does not exist. If you get lifetime, it means maximum 25 years. And if you behave well, it’s only 15. In Germany, Charlie Manson would most likely be out now.

Christian Klar got several life sentences, and he did 25 years. Brigitte Mohnhaupt did 25 years; she just got out two years ago. They did the most time; the others did 12-15 years.

I know a lot of Nazis convicted after the war didn’t serve a lot of time, either.

All the Nazis we convicted, under German law—even guys who had gassed hundreds of thousands of people—none of them served more than twelve years… and some of them got out after only five! That was an argument the RAF’s lawyers brought up: “How can we treat these poor misguided kids worse than the most brutal killers under Hitler?”

The word “Nazi” is never mentioned in the movie, but wasn’t that a big part of the RAF’s motivation? That ex-Nazis were still in positions of power? The guy they kidnap, Schleyer, had not only been a Nazi, he was SS.

If you do a whole movie on Schleyer, you would mention that. But when he is in for just short moments…

The real Schleyer in his ransom photo.

But why don’t the RAF members talk about it? “These Nazis in our society…”

It was a motivation… but you have to differentiate: after 1970, when Brandt came to power, you could not say anymore there were so many Nazis in charge. It was still in the sixties so—a lot of judges, for instance; sure, they worked under Hitler. But there were no others there; we needed people in those positions. So they had to swear something, take some oath, and they were reestablished. A lot of things were… just put away. Teachers. There were no new teachers, so all those old teachers—even if they were members of the Party—they went back to work. A lot of ministers. Our Chancellor, Kiesinger; come to find he was a Nazi. Then our President, Heinrich Luebke—a man we respected as a figure of great integrity—it turned out the motherfucker built concentration camps! He was the architect; he signed the construction plans. A lot of people made the Third Reich happen; it was not Hitler alone... so our generation didn’t trust anybody. Once Ulrike joined the RAF, a contingent traveled to Jordan to train with the PLO.

I was curious about the man who was Ulrike’s lover. He seemed too sensitive, too reasonable to be going along with all this crazy stuff. Was that because of the actor playing the part, or was the actual person like that?

I know the real guy. Peter Homann. I interviewed him. He was a friend of Stefan Aust, who wrote the book. He was a journalist, but also kind of a pothead. I also spoke to Ulrike’s former husband, who didn’t really like Homann, but had to admit he was a good father to those kids. He was never really a terrorist. For a long time people thought he was, because he was in those camps with them. Why he went there… it’s hard to understand. He wanted to be with Ulrike, and he knew Baader for quite awhile. All what happened at that camp, he told me in great detail. And it was confirmed by two other people I talked to.

What it was… you didn’t go to those camps to become “a revolutionary.” The RAF had this invitation, because another group had gone the year before. It was arranged through East Germany; Ulrike had connections over there… but I didn’t want to go into the whole East-West thing… I think a young audience would never understand how that all worked.

It didn’t really occur to me there might be larger forces operating behind the scenes until that moment when you show the third generation meeting, and they’ve got all this military weaponry. I thought, how could these young kids have all this stuff?

They robbed banks.

But they look like seasoned urban guerrillas, not a heist crew. That’s when I knew somebody had trained them, and somebody was supplying them. I researched it after the movie, and found out all this stuff about East Germany and the Stasi.

That started later. It was four years later when the third generation started. The second generation had almost no support from East Germany.

You just said Ulrike had connections there. Wasn’t she even on their payroll?

It’s true. For years, that paper she wrote for was secretly financed by the Communists. But that was mostly until ‘66. When our story starts, the paper was already successful. I just didn’t want to go into all that… the story’s getting too complicated.

And most of the RAF income was indeed from robbing banks. They cost the German government fifteen to twenty million Deutschmarks. Each member needed about 10,000 DM a month to survive, so where do you get it? From banks. Then they went into Switzerland and bought the weapons. Almost like they do here; the Mexican gangsters cross the border and buy their guns here.

Switzerland sold military hardware to teenagers?

No, there was that lawyer. He bought the weapons. And you see it was becoming this international thing; they’re going to Baghdad, they’re meeting with the PLO.

I love those scenes at the training camp; the difference between the German and the Arab terrorists. Baader is just hilarious.

For the RAF, it was like Club Med. Or an adventure camp: “We can go to Jordan? Okay, let’s go! Maybe we get a tan. We can work on weapons, we can shoot, we can hang out… and we will have time to talk what we gonna do with all this.” They had no fucking idea! So when Baader arrived, and the PLO guy says do this, do that—you know, they were at war with Israel then—and Baader just wants to shoot their guns. They said, “You’re wasting our fucking bullets! From now on, you’re only getting ten per day.” So Baader said, “Let’s go on strike. We’ll take a few days off.” And all the girls ended up naked, and all the guys too, up on that roof. They just didn’t give a shit.

It takes a lot to make you feel sorry for the PLO. But it’s really funny... I love that one shot of the two Arab kids with the binoculars, checking out the naked girls.

Yeah.

There are so many great little human moments like that in this movie. It’s these kinds of things you didn’t have that much of in your sword movies. You seem much more comfortable with people and things in the recent past.

Yeah, I felt much closer to these people. Because I feel that I know them. They’re all my age, more or less; we were in the same schools, listening to the same seminars… Brigitte Mohnhaupt was living around the corner from me in Munich!

Did you meet with her?

No, she was still in prison. Now she is out. And she’s still a hardliner.

Holger Meins was a film student. Did you know anyone in common?

He was in Berlin. And he was older than me. But Wolfgang Petersen knew him; worked with him. Michael Ballhaus knew him. Meins made a student film called How to Build a Molotov Cocktail. He showed you how to do it.

What did Wolfgang think of the movie?

I think he was very impressed. He said, “You could not do it any better.”

Another great little moment is during Baader’s capture. You cut to that little girl in the next building, who starts taking pictures. I’m guessing that really happened?

Yeah. That girl was ten years old. They start shooting down there, and she goes and gets a camera! One picture she took of Baader was bought for 1,000 DM by the famous artist Gerhard Richter. He used it as basis for a painting, which is now hanging in New York, at MOMA I think. It’s worth now $600,000.

When we get to the prison, I was struck right away by those huge cells. They’ve got books. They’ve got tables. They look like offices.

Because their lawyers always told the press they get isolated, they get tortured, all this stuff. Which was not all a lie in the beginning. Ulrike was in isolation five months; what I show. But even in isolation, they were allowed to have TV, they were allowed to write, she had twice visiting her daughters—I wanted to have that in, but we had big trouble with the daughters.

They didn’t like that nude beach scene, huh?

No! In Germany, that’s nothing. Not one person referred to that. The first word I got about it was from an American guy who saw it in London: “Uh… those two naked girls… don’t you think you’ll have problems with that?”

You said, “Only in America!”

No, I thought, “Why didn’t I just film them from the back?”

But those cells… I was in those cells. Today, those rooms hold four prisoners each. Baader had one all to himself. Gudrun had one all to herself. These cells with two windows; it was like a fucking penthouse at this prison! Men and women together on the same floor; only prison in the world where that’s happened. And still, for years, they said they were tortured, isolated, dadda da… and everybody believed them! That the government was fascistic.

So the government was doing everything to prove they were not?

Exactly. They were so afraid of them, they gave them everything. “Look! We’re not fascists anymore! Please believe us!” All over Germany, a prisoner is only allowed to have ten books. By 1977, Baader had 950 books in his cell. That’s when he got his political education; he never knew too much before he had time to read in prison.

Altogether, they had 2,400 books… a whole library, what they got for free, because their sympathizers sent them everything in. Every day, they got sixteen newspapers! Jan-Carl Raspe was in charge of the scrapbook. He went through them all, collecting every article about them. So they knew exactly what status they had with the public. They had a fitness cell, with all gym equipment. They had a cell just filled with food… whatever they wanted. They had everyday a shower; what no other prisoner is ever allowed. And they were alone up there on that seventh floor; no other prisoners. They had sex. Not officially, but they had it. People told me.

So the government made a lot of mistakes. They even finally allowed Brigitte Mohnhaupt to join them there. She was originally in a different prison. And Gudrun and Baader trained her, that when she got out, she would start the bloodiest terror wave ever. What she did.

So why were they all put together? Just because of the trial?

They were put together after Holger Meins died. The government did not want the public suspicion that came with suicides, so they put them all together. That’s also why Mohnhaupt was brought in. The authorities whole idea was, “Let’s just get through this trial.” That trial was going on for 192 days, just going on forever. It cost the government millions. They built that whole courtroom for them right at the prison, for 22 million DM, so they would not have to drive them anywhere.

You didn’t ask me why they read Moby Dick in there.

Okay. Why do they read Moby Dick in there?

It was a very important work to Gudrun. For her, Melville’s novel was the metaphor for what they were all doing. She’d told them all very early on that they were like Captain Ahab and his crew… who are obsessed with killing the white whale.



Who was the whale?

The German government. That’s what they wanted to kill. And she talked of the others as if they represented characters in the book. She called Jan-Carl Raspe “The Carpenter,” the man who is clever with his hands; who can design and build anything they need. Raspe was the one who designed their communications system in prison. Holger Meins was Starbuck, and Gudrun’s code name was Smutje, the ship’s cook.

And what happens at the end of Moby Dick? The whale—the leviathan—it completely crushes them. Everybody dies. So Gudrun saw very clearly how it was all going to end for them.

So the whole thing was a death trip.

What’s the first line in Moby Dick? “Call me Ishmael.” Who is Ishmael? A minor character, but he’s the only one who survives. Why? So he can tell the story. And Gudrun had her Ishmael: Irmgard Moller. They find Moller with four stab wounds in her chest, but she survives. She was meant to survive! Why? Because now for thirty years, she continues to say it was the authorities that came in and killed them.

That was the myth Gudrun wanted to leave behind: the authorities are fascist murderers, so we were right to do what we did… and that new fighters must continue the struggle.

(This article originally appeared at EightMillionStories.com on March 27, 2009)