Black Box RFA

This documentary has some interesting contents but it doesn't quite know what it wants to be. The end credits show that there was a dramaturgical consultant who obviously told the filmmakers to include pop music at some points of the movie, but who didn't succeed in helping them to make a point on the material they had shot.

The film investigates the lives of two men who were both killed: Alfred Herrhausen was assassinated by the Red Army Faction in 1989, and Wolfgang Grams, an RAF member himself, died at a police operation in 1993. Grams might or might not have been involved in Herrhausen's death; that's the only interface between them. In the movie, which consists exclusively of archive footage and interviews and which does not use an off-voice commentator at all, it never becomes clear why the filmmakers didn't make two separate films, or why they chose precisely these two people for their documentary.

The two lives did not have much in common, but each taken on its own, they were interesting. The movie is most amazing whenever people tell about certain crucial events in Grams's or Herrhausen's lives. In between, I felt its length to too large an extent.

There was a good story in here waiting to get out but the director failed to find it. There was a huge amount of back-story to the two main people but none of it turned out to be at all relevant.

There was no known connection between Wolfgang Grams [the terrorist] and Alfred Herrhausen of the Deutsche Bank [the terrorism victim]. The film-makers would have been better served if instead of following the story of Grams they had followed the alleged killers of Herrhasusen - while no one has been arrested in connection with his murder, some group must have claimed responsibility [RAF?].

The revelation late in the film that Herrhausen wanted to erase debts from the third world, and was possibly in a position to enable that, made him a sympathetic character. He also seemed to be causing problems with his peers at Deutsche Bank through what was seen as an insane, liberal concept. His murder seemed to be a very stupid choice for an anti-capitalist terrorist act.

It was two seperate stories and made for unsatisfying viewing.

This movie attempts to turn something into history. By treating both sides of the intense conflict between the leftist terrorists and the political elite of postwar West Germany in the 70s and 80s with equal respect, its main message is, perhaps, this: it's all over. The movie shrugs off the ideologies involved and turns its focus on the two biographies of Grams and Herrhausen instead.

Some of the previous comments have remarked that those two really didn't have much in common. Even their involvement with terrorism wasn't particularly similar - Herrhausen, the banker, was simply a victim. He had known, of course, that he was a likely target, but only his death, not his life was molded by the RAF terrorist movement. Grams, on the other hand, was a terrorist for roughly two decades, and died, most probably by suicide, during a shootout with the police. I believe that the only way in which these two biographies could be linked (without a tremondous, and strained, analytic effort) was by representing them both as parts of an historical phenomenon. The movie doesn't really need a clear connection between its two protagonists other than this: they're part of the same historical constellation. It doesn't aim at explaining this constellation. It aims at telling us that it IS historical.

How could this be of interest to German audiences? While I don't want to reduce the movie's appeal to this - there's a lot of intriguing material in it - I think the explanation lies in the German present, not in the past. Mostly unnoticed, overshadowed by the more severe transformations in the Eastern part of the country, the old West has changed quite thoroughly as well. And the changes are accompanied by certain tendencies of framing recent history in collective memory, as it were. We now like to regard all the political conflicts of the years before 1989 as finished and done with. Germany, we want to believe, is totally different from what it was back then. This urge for discontinuity is rather questionable, actually... Anyway, that's where both the fascination and the problems and perhaps the ultimate failure of the film lie. Or so I think.

if you want to learn something about german post-war history, maybe this documentary movie is the best way to achieve that. the director succeeds in connecting the events that happened in the years succeeding to "1968" - especially the so-called terrorism - to the pre-history of nazism in the time before 1945, a history that had a major impact on germany till at least 89 and maybe even beyond. note thet the father of wolfgang grams was a member of the "WAFFEN-SS", one of the most notorious institutions of the "third reich". and herrhausen as a child was trained at first in the "hitler-jugend". with all the differences among the two men, there's one thing they have in common : in the end both of them were loosers or at least felt that way.

A documentary movie about the live of two men, which played a role in Germany's latest history: The mighty banker and economist Alfred Herrhausen, who was killed by a car-bomb,laid by Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorists. And Wolfgang Grams, a RAF-terrorist, who died in a shooting with German elite policists, the GSG 9 of the german Bundesgrenzschutz, under mysterious circumstances.

The movie is well-worked and features interesting friends, relatives and other witnesses (even Ex-Chancellor Helmut Kohl) of the two man. There are also these small clues, which make a documentary great: One businessman remembers resignative, when he and Herrhausen went to the whorehouses. Or theres one former friend of Grams, who was also a leftist, and now owns a small house and a big car, and considers that he also could have been a terrorist.

The problem is, that the director Veiel was just a bit over-ambitious. He wanted to put a plot to the two biographies. And so he compares the characters and tries to show how similar the lifes of the two man were. But Veiel fails: Despite his attempts, theres no invisible band between the banker and the terrorist. They are totally different, except great ambitions burning in their hearts.

This is a good movie though, but I recommend to watch the film "Starbuck", the best of the latest german movies about the RAF.