Hollywood Reporter ran
an interesting interview with IF NOT US, WHO director, Andres Veiel, last year when this latest film on Germany's notorious terrorist gang of the 1970s and '80s premiered at the Berlinale.
"In his award-winning documentary Black Box BRD, Veiel looked at the so-called "second generation" of Germany's notorious left wing terrorist group the Red Army Faction, or R.A.F," wrote the Reporter's Scott Roxborough.
"In IF NOT US, WHO Veiel goes back to the origins of the R.A.F. in the 1960s, looking at the lives of R.A.F. founding members Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader and that of Ensslin's husband, the author Bernward Vesper, who sympathized with the R.A.F. but did not become a terrorist...
"HR: There are already a number of German films on the R.A.F. Why make another?
"Veiel: There's a long tradition of German R.A.F. films from (Margarethe von Trotta's) Marianne and Juliane to my documentary film Black Box BRD to The Baader-Meinhof Complex. Every film has its own perspective. Marianne and Juliane looks at the relationship between the two sisters – between Gudrun Ensslin and one of her sisters.
"In Black Box BRD I look at the second generation of R.A.F. terrorists. And in Baader-Meinhof the focus is on what the terrorists did and less the why. My focus in this film is very much on the why. And to get at that you have to tell their back stories..."
A little further on Veiel adds:
"How does it come to this point (ie. terrorism - LB)? That's what interests me. I think we have to engage ourselves with these people's biographies and not just say: a killer is a killer. What are their motives, what compels them to see violence as their own alternative? It's not about justifying their actions. I walk a thin line but wanting to understand something is not the same as justifying it."
Having seen the film in the festival I'd add that Veiel's approach has the advantage of giving a clear picture of the burden of the immediate Nazi past for the more radicalised members of this immediate post-WW2 generation, who were forced to struggle with the implications of their parents’ behaviour during the Third Reich.
This is particularly true of Vesper, who is seen in the arresting opening scene as a child trying to save his cat from his father, the disgraced Nazi writer, Will Vesper. Pater decides to kill the pet because it has killed a nightingale and this shows that “cats are the Jews of the animal kingdom.”
IF NOT US, WHO rewards those prepared to sit through its a relatively uneventful first half, which features many discussions on the economics of the independent political publishing venture in which Vesper (August Diehl) and Ensslin (Lena Lauzemis) were initially engaged.
One flaw is to leave unexplored the paradox via which the young Vesper was on one hand drawn to radical leftism, and on the other committed to publishing the literary writing of his notoriously Nazi father.
Another is that Veiel assumes a great deal of background knowledge on the audience’s part. This might not be an issue for older Germans who can decode some of the more obscure references, but foreign viewers and younger Germans may be baffled as to why the film initially takes so much interest in a largely unlikable, self-obsessed young couple whose lives don’t appear particularly eventful - at least at this stage.
But with the late entrance of Alexander Fehling's Andreas Baader, the energy levels lift and the film at last fulfills its promise. Baader is depicted as a fiery activist whose leftier-than-thou grandstanding and air of megalomania proves sexually as well as intellectually seductive for the humourless Ensslin.
The pair's rampant coupling has a raw intensity that goes a long way towards explaining Baader's influence, his driving her towards violent extremism.
