ulrike's weinglas, gudrun's violin is the account of a fictitious member of West Germany's 1970s terrorist/revolutionary Baader-Meinhof Gang/Roten Armee Fraktion (RAF). George W Bush says that people become terrorists because they are "jealous," and that's a load of utter bullshit. If there's a simplistic explanation it's more along the lines that they become terrorists because they're "appalled and desperate."
A number of factors make the RAF immediately relevant, in addition to the bonus sex, drugs, bombs & rock ‘n' roll context: (1) their main political concerns were (a) American imperialism/Vietnam, (b) corporate hegemony, (c) environmental degradation, and (d) apartheid in Palestine. The RAF positions on these internationally fundamental issues have become the position of the masses, if not their nominally representative governments. (2) The government they were attacking was composed, literally, of (ex-) Nazis, whose moral defects are even easier to detail than the Enron generation, (3) the RAF leaders are extraordinary character studies (Gudrun Ensslin was a direct descendant of Hegel, the dedicated daughter of a pastor who actively opposed Hitler, and an occasional porn star; Ulrike Meinhof was the most successful radical journalist in West Germany at the time; Andreas Baader was a badass whom no one seems able to describe without referencing Brando, mea culpa ; Holger Meins was a young filmmaker who made a film for the Berliner students demonstrating how to make a molotov cocktail), and (4) the hypocritical and immoral nature of the system they opposed could not possibly be better illuminated than in the generally accepted "suicide" cover story for the murder of the principals in Stammheim prison. As an apostate lawyer who has successfully argued on two continents-including in the Royal Courts of Justice in London-I can only assure you that any competent prosecutor acting in good faith would have had no choice but to issue murder indictments against the state. Helmut Schmidt has all but admitted the murders in his more recent interviews.
It's also true that, if anything, RAF actions set their political agenda back a decade or two, but passion is the heart of the story. These were bright, educated, successful people who threw it all away for a roll of the dice that couldn't possibly win. They considered their actions not so much "right," I believe, as "necessary."
it's all too scary, I want to go home