Germany in Autumn

Hans Peter Cloos
Maximiliane Mainka
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Alexander Kluge
Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
Alf Brustellin
Katja Rupé
Volker Schlöndorff
Edgar Reitz
Bernhard Sinkel
Peter Schubert

1978•123 min.•

Germany

★6.2(28)

The film does not have a plot per se; it mixes documentary footage, along with standard movie scenes, to give the audience the mood of Germany during the late 1970s. The movie covers the two-month time period during 1977 when a businessman was kidnapped and later murdered by the left-wing terrorists known as the RAF-Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction). The businessman had been kidnapped in an effort to secure the release of the original leaders of the RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. When the kidnapping effort and a plane hijacking effort failed, the three most prominent leaders of the RAF, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe, all committed suicide in prison. It has become an article of faith within the left-wing community that these three were actually murdered by the state.