Children of History; Children of Hitler

Kate Connolly,"Terrorist chic or debunking of a myth? Baader Meinhof film splits Germany," Guardian, 25 September, reviews Der Baader Meinhof Komplex, which will be Germany's entry in next year's Oscar competition for Best Foreign Language Film. Andreas Baader was the secondary-school-dropout son of a talented German historian who disappeared on the eastern front in 1945. Ulrike Meinhof was the daughter of an art historian father, who died early in her life, and was heavily influence by another historian, Renate Reimeck, who became her guardian when Meinhof's mother subsequently died. It's been thirty years since the most important studies in English of the Baader Meinhof Gang appeared: Jillian Becker's Hitler's Children (1978; republished 1998), Hans Josef Horchem's West Germany's Red Army Anarchists (1974), and Walter Laqueur's Terrorism: A Study of National and International Political Violence (1977) and his The Terrorism Reader: A Historical Anthology (1977). There are claims that Becker's book is unreliable. There's clearly an important story to be told here; and a first-rate young historian ought to revisit it.