Baader Meinhof: Pictures on the Run 67-77

A photo album from the living rooms of quasi-communist German terrorists should be of exquisitely narrow appeal, but Astrid Proll, a former Red Army Faction activist turned documentarian, does more than offer old snapshots here. The attempt of her academic-turned-revolutionary comrades to ignite a civil war in Germany, she writes, was both "ruthless and useless," the product of too many drugs and too many rarefied ideas about mass movements and the class struggle. "We overestimated ourselves ridiculously," she writes, "indulging in the illusion that a revolution was thinkable in the prosperous Federal Republic." The Baader-Meinhof gang's misadventures resulted not in revolution but murder, and in the violent deaths of many of the protagonists. Proll's pictures tell the story. --Gregory MacNamee