A German Youth

The award-winning short film director Jean-Gabriel Périot cuts between footage of the Third Reich and excerpts from 1960s German TV debates to contextualize the rise of the Red Army Faction, the revolutionary terrorist group founded by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. Both of these figures played a role in public life, especially Meinhof, who was a TV interviewer. In this sociogenesis of the RAF, Périot uses exclusively found footage to track how the rise of discontent with police violence and the balance of power radicalized Baader, Meinhof and many others. His sharply observed montage of news footage shows a young democracy held back by a centuries-old hierarchy and inevitably clashing with the Marxist rhetoric of a new generation, with kidnappings, hostage-takings and killings as the result. There are appearances from other directors including Godard, Antonioni and Fassbinder, because of what their films expressed about the radicalism of their era. We see how extremists to the far left and far right are much more closely embroiled with one another than what we might have imagined. The director leaves it up to us to decide to what extent the political context and social discontent resonates with our own times.