A German Youth
Biography
•
1h 32m
Directed by Jean-Gabriel Périot • Documentary • With Ulrike Meinhof; Andreas Baader; Horst Mahler • 2019 • 93 minutes
In the 1960s, the young democracy of West Germany was embarrassed by its Nazi past, and ingrown in its role as imperialist and capitalist outpost faced by its communist double. The postwar generation, in direct conflict with their fathers, was trying to find its place. The student movement exploded in 1966. The pas de deux between students and the government deteriorated, and radicalized those involved in a gradual escalation of violence and reprisals. From this seething youth emerged the journalist Ulrike Meinhof, filmmaker Holger Meins, students Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, as well as the lawyer Horst Mahler. When the student movement collapsed at the end of ’68, they remained isolated in their radicalism, and desperately sought ways to continue the revolutionary struggle. A GERMAN YOUTH (Une Jeunesse Allemande) chronicles the political radicalization of some German youth in the late 1960s that gave birth to the Red Army Faction (RAF), a German revolutionary terrorist group founded notably by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, as well as the images generated by this story. The film is entirely produced by editing preexisting visual and sound archives and aims to question viewers on the significance of this revolutionary movement during its time, as well as its resonance for today’s society.
Up Next in Biography
-
The Cruise (Bennett Miller)
Directed by Bennett Miller • Documentary • With Timothy "Speed" Levitch • 1998 • 76 minutes
Sailing the streets of Manhattan atop a double-decker bus, Timothy "Speed" Levitch waxes philosophical as the city's most eccentric tour guide. Speed's bombastic and psychedelic poetry is captured in the ...
-
Marie Curie: The Courage of Knowledge
Directed by Marie Noëlle • Drama • With Charles Berling; Karolina Gruszka • 2017 • 100 minutes
The most turbulent five years in the life of a genius woman: Between 1905, where Marie Curie comes with Pierre Curie to Stockholm to be awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the radioactivity an...
-
Althusser, an Intellectual Adventure
Directed by Bruno Oliviero • Documentary • 2016 • 55 minutes
Documentary based partially on the only filmed interview given by Louis Althusser, a French philosopher who died in October 1990. The encounter took place in 1980 in Rome. Althusser had made a name for himself for his work on Marx. A f...