Gregor Schneider, Catalogues (1985-2002)
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Since 1985 Gregor Schneider has been building a series of rooms or chambers within his outwardly ordinary house in Monchengladbach. The external construction conceals a series of ever changing growth of inner layers with all walls/doors/rooms not what they seem. Some rooms are empty; others contain elaborately constructed tableaux of found objects and Schneider's sculpture as in Kuche (kitchen), where a jumble of trashed clothes, rubbish and a blow up doll lie stinking on the floor. The sense of disorientation and discomfort is compounded by the imagining of the spaces as a site of some sinister trap or drama.
This torrent holds nine catalogues from 1985 to 2002.
Gregor Schneider.1985-1992,
Edited: Impulse Galerie Löhrl, Mönchengladbach 1992,
Text: Raimund Stecker and Ingrid Bacher
Gregor Schneider Haus ur 1985-1994,
Edited: Krefelder Kunstmuseen, Krefeld 1994
ISBN: 3-926530-69-3
Gregor Schneider,
Edited: Kunsthalle Bern, Bern 1996,
Interview with Ulrich Loock,
Text: Julian Heynen ISBN: 3-85780-107-7
Gregor Schneider -töten,
Peter-Mertens Stipendium,
Edited: Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn 1996
Text: Annelie Pohlen
Gregor Schneider. Tote Jungfrauen. 19.Dezember 1997,
Edited: Galerie Foksal, Warschau, 1997
Gregor Schneider,
Edited: Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris 1998, Interview mit Ulrich Loock, Text: Laurence Bosse
ISBN: 2-87900-410-1
Gregor Schneider. Keller. 30.03-21.05.2000,
Edited: the Secession, Wien 1999
Text. Noemi Smolik
Gregor Schneider. Karl-Schmidt-Rottluff Stipendium 2000,
Edited: Schmidt-Rotluff
Förderungsstiftung Berlin, Berlin 2000
Gregor Schneider. Haus ur Fotos und Videos.
Edited: Stiftung DKM, Duisburg 2002,
Text: Ulrich Loock
Download the catalogues via Gregor Schneider's personal page or help me share them via demonoid!
ps. I wanted to print a few of these catalogues, but for some fantastic reason, they are protected with a password. I've written whoever runs Gregor Schneider's page, for the password. If i get it, which i doubt, i will of course post it in here.
at 12:19 PM
Hubert Sauper - Darwin's Nightmare (2004)
IMDB writes: A documentary on the effect of fishing the Nile perch in Tanzania's Lake Victoria. The predatory fish, which has wiped out the native species, is sold in European supermarkets, while starving Tanzanian families have to make do with the leftovers.
NY Village Voice review by Dennis Lim:
The Descent of Man: Essential doc views globalization through prism of Tanzanian eco-disaster, sees colonialism.
August 2nd, 2005 4:16 PM
The Nile perch was introduced to Lake Victoria some 40 to 50 years ago, an apparent attempt to replenish the overfished waters that led to the extinction of hundreds of indigenous species. An oily-fleshed fish that reaches over six feet in length, the Lates niloticus rapidly emerged as the fittest specimen in its new habitat, depleting the food supply and preying on smaller fish (including its young). In a 2001 report, the World Conservation Union deemed the Nile perch one of the planet's 100 "worst invasive alien species." This ongoing ecological disaster happens to be the basis for a multimillion-dollar business: Tanzania, which owns 49 percent of Lake Victoria, is the main exporter of perc to the European Union. Bitter ironies come thick and fast in Hubert Sauper's essential documentary Darwin's Nightmare, and the most obvious one may be that this unnatural abundance of a profitable protein source—an economic godsend, if you ask the on-message factory managers and government officials—coexists with inhuman levels of famine and poverty.
Quietly outraged and actively upsetting, Darwin's Nightmare spirals out from a case study of one cannibalistic killer to a far bigger and more rapacious fish. The ruthless supremacy of the Nile perch and its devastating effect on the lake's ecosystem constitute a gruesomely resonant metaphor for the impact of global capitalism on local industry. From intimate camcorder interviews with fishermen, fishery workers, cargo pilots, and the prostitutes and street kids on the fringes of this lakeshore economic network, Sauper, an Austrian-born, Paris-based documentarian, constructs a detailed seismograph of predatory free trade's ripple effect.
At one point, after viewing a cautionary video about Lake Victoria at an ecological conference, a Tanzanian minister blithely accuses the filmmakers of accentuating the negative: "What about the beautiful areas?" It's safe to assume he would take greater exception to Darwin's Nightmare, a crescendo of dismay that uncovers fresh horrors in almost every scene. Each appalling revelation is topped by a ghastlier one. Not only do the fishermen live in work colonies with no medical care and easy access to HIV-positive prostitutes (a pastor Sauper interviews gently discourages condom use), they're sent home to die before they get too ill, due to the prohibitive cost of corpse transport. Not only can most Tanzanians not afford the thick white perch fillets that are consumed by millions of Europeans daily, they're forced to literally pick on the rotting remains.
Darwin's Nightmare finds its most Brueghelian images at a sort of open-air factory, where ammonia-emitting, maggot-swarmed perch carcasses are dried and fried, repackaged as a local subsistence food. And in an even grimmer form of recycling, the factories' leftover packing materials are collected by children who melt down the plastic and inhale the fumes.
Sauper avoids voice-over and uses sparing titles, but there's no mistaking the film's point of view. In one unapologetic gut-punch sequence, he cuts from the fish dump, where an employee partially blinded by ammonia attests that her life has improved since she started working there, to a European trade delegation droning on about the perch industry's improving infrastructure and cleanliness standards, and in turn to footage of young boys fighting over a few mouthfuls of rice. The film returns repeatedly to the visual motif of Russian cargo planes taking off and landing over Lake Victoria—Sauper at first seems to be making the point that they leave heaving with crates of fish (the wrecks of overloaded planes still dot the airstrip) and fly in empty, a symbol of the take-and-take relationship that the West has long dictated with Africa. But the gradually divulged reality proves worse still: Many of the planes arrive loaded with the weapons that sustain the bloody conflicts raging nearby.
Praising Sauper's Kisangani Diary, an account of Rwandan refugees in the Congo, the ethnographer and filmmaker Jean Rouch used the phrase "a cinema of contact." Darwin's
Nightmare likewise benefits from Sauper's proximity with his subjects, some of whom possess a big-picture understanding of their plight that is of no practical use to them. Perhaps the film's most vivid figure, Raphael, a night watchman with bloodshot eyes, notes that war, besides profiting the powerful, is also an appealing financial option for those lucky enough to join the army. Darwin's Nightmare strings together cruel ironies into a work of harrowing lucidity. It illuminates the sinister logic of a new world order that depends on corrupt globalization to put an acceptable face on age-old colonialism.
NY Timez review by A.O. Scott:
Feeding Europe, Starving at Home
Published: August 3, 2005
"Darwin's Nightmare," Hubert Sauper's harrowing, indispensable documentary, is framed by the arrival and departure of an enormous Soviet-made cargo plane at an airstrip outside Mwanza, Tanzania. The plane, with its crew of burly Russians and Ukrainians, will leave Mwanza for Europe carrying 55 tons of processed fish caught by Lake Victoria fisherman and filleted at a local factory. Though Mr. Sauper's investigation of the economy and ecology around the lake ranges far and wide - he talks to preachers and prostitutes, to street children and former soldiers - he keeps coming back to a simple question. What do the planes bring to Africa?
The answers vary. The factory managers say the planes' cavernous holds are empty when they land. One of the Russians, made uncomfortable by the question, mutters something vague about "equipment." Some of his colleagues, and several ordinary Mwanzans, are more forthright: the planes, while they occasionally bring humanitarian food and medical aid, more often bring the weapons that fuel the continent's endless and destructive wars.
In any case, they leave behind a scene of misery and devastation that "Darwin's Nightmare" presents as the agonized human face of globalization. While the flesh of millions of Nile perch is stripped, cleaned and flash-frozen for export to wealthy countries, millions of people in the Tanzanian interior live on the brink of famine. Some of them will eat fried fish heads, which are processed in vast open-air pits infested with maggots and scavenging birds. Along the shores of the lake, homeless children fight over scraps of food and get high from the fumes of melting plastic-foam containers used to pack the fish. In the encampments where the fishermen live, AIDS is rampant and the afflicted walk back to their villages to die.
The Nile perch itself haunts the film's infernal landscape like a monstrous metaphor. An alien species introduced into Lake Victoria sometime in the 1960's, it has devoured every other kind of fish in the lake, even feeding on its own young as it grows to almost grotesque dimensions, and destroying an ancient and diverse ecosystem. To some, its prevalence is a boon, since the perch provides an exportable resource that has brought development money from the World Bank and the European Union. The survival of nearly everyone in the film is connected to the fish: the prostitutes who keep company with the pilots in the hotel bars; the displaced farmers who handle the rotting carcasses; the night watchman, armed with a bow and a few poison-tipped arrows, who guards a fish-related research institute. He is paid $1 a day and found the job after his predecessor was murdered.
Filming with a skeleton crew - basically himself and another camera operator - Mr. Sauper has produced an extraordinary work of visual journalism, a richly illustrated report on a distant catastrophe that is also one of the central stories of our time. Rather than use voice-over or talking-head expert interviews, he allows the dimensions of the story to emerge through one-on-one conversation and acutely observed visual detail.
But "Darwin's Nightmare" is also a work of art. Given the gravity of Mr. Sauper's subject, and the rigorous pessimism of his inquiry, it may seem a bit silly to compliment him for his eye. There are images here that have the terrifying sublimity of a painting by El Greco or Hieronymus Bosch: rows of huge, rotting fish heads sticking out of the ground; children turning garbage into makeshift toys. At other moments, you are struck by the natural loveliness of the lake and its surrounding hills, or by the handsome, high-cheekboned faces of many of the Tanzanians.
The beauty, though, is not really beside the point; it is an integral part of the movie's ethical vision, which in its tenderness and its angry sense of apocalypse seems to owe less to modern ideologies than to the prophetic rage of William Blake, who glimpsed heaven and hell at an earlier phase of capitalist development. Mr. Sauper's movie is clearly aimed at the political conscience of Western audiences, and its implicit critique of some of our assumptions about the shape and direction of the global economy deserves to be taken seriously. But its reach extends far beyond questions of policy and political economy, and it turns the fugitive, mundane facts that are any documentary's raw materials into the stuff of tragedy and prophecy.
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at 11:40 AM
Adam Curtis - The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom (2007)
Sunday, April 8, 2007
What does freedom actually mean today? This series of films by BAFTA-winning producer Adam Curtis argues that our freedom is a limited kind of freedom. It shows how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today's idea of freedom. This model was apparently derived from techniques developed by nuclear strategists during the Cold War. Genetic biologists, anthropologists, radical psychiatrists and free market economists took it further until it became a new system of invisible control.
Part 1: F**k You Buddy
Part 2: The Lonely Robot
Part 3: We Will Force You To Be Free.
Share The Trap: What Happened To Our Dreams of Freedom via demonoid(i've got two invites): part 1, part 2 and part 3! Thanks to MVGroup for the rip and upload!
at 11:01 AM
William Basinski - Disintegration loop 1.1 (2001)
Sunday, April 1, 2007
The film recorded by William Basinski on the roof of his apartment as the twin towers burned in the distance. Accompanied by part 1.1 of his four album set of disintegrating tape loops which he played with friends on the rooftop as the drama unfolded.
"on september 11th i was on my roof in brooklyn, less than 1 nautical mile from the world trade center, our beacon, our compass: that which towered so far above every other skyscraper in nyc, my nightlight. my neighbors and i witnessed the end of the world as we knew it that day. we saw those towering structures collapse before our very eyes, on a crystal clear day we saw the incomprehensible change of landscape: like a volcano disappearing behind trees, we saw this magnificent minimalist human structure disappear before our very eyes. we were appalled. despite the catastrophic fires, we had no idea that these gigantic structures would collapse... cascade below the lower manhattan skyline. but it happened. we were in shock. we sat on the roof terrace in lawn chairs and watched the fires burning all day into night with the disintegration loops playing in the background. the human scale of the catastrophe we couldn't even comprehend at the time. that would come next, in tears and agony. this was the end of the world we all knew was coming sooner or later, but had forgotten about...put in the back of our minds. that evening i recorded on video the static image of the lower manhattan skyline billowing smoke as the last hour of daylight turned to darkness. the film is entitled disintegration loop 1.1 and is dedicated to the memory of those who perished in the atrocities of september 11th, 2001." -- william basinski
This DVD was recorded at composer William Basinski's place on 9/11. It's one full hour of a stationary camera watching the clouds billow over lower Manhattan on the evening of that day, accompanied by part 1.1 of Loops (the most elegiac of the pieces, in my opinion). The sun has already set, and the clouds of smoke (which cover half the screen) are slowly merging with the darkness. In the foreground, random people can be seen shuffling about, and a few buildings are visible. That's it. But those clouds and that sky! The colors shift and fluctuate with every passing moment. At one point, the remaining natural light gets sucked into the smoke, turning the edges red, like the fireballs that were, no doubt, still consuming the buildings. As the sky grows dark and the city lights begin to burn, the clouds take on an even more sinister form, like shadows ready to envelop the last embers of life.
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at 11:31 PM
Trashing the Neoliberal City: Autonomous Cultural Practices in Chicago from 2000-2005
Trashing the Neoliberal City: Autonomous Cultural Practices in Chicago from 2000-2005
Edited by Daniel Tucker and Emily Forman, Learning Site, 2006
With contributions by Ava Bromberg, Rachel Caidor, Emily Forman, Dara Greenwald, Nicolas Lampert, Pauline Lipman, Josh MacPhee, Micah Maidenberg, Laurie Palmer, the Pink Bloque, Laurie Jo Reynolds, and Daniel Tucker. Design by Dakota Brown and Daniel Tucker
"We need an exciting new energy that challenges who will live in the city, who will benefit from its growth and development, and who will get to participate in fundamental decisions affecting economic, cultural, and social life. What we need is a space to contest whose city Chicago will be." - Pauline Lipman's essay from the publication entitled "Whose City Is It Anyways?"
Chicago is a post-industrial success story. At least that is what the spring 2006 special feature article on the 3rd largest city in the United States had to say about the matter. Increasingly cities, especially those that qualify as "Global Cities" of significant importance to the world economic stage, compete for success in terms of quality of life for white collar service workers and the so-called Creative Class and to facilitate the proper business climate to satisfy the needs of globalized capital. Other characteristics include the privatization of services previously managed by the state and the deregulation of labor and markets. Aspects of this contemporary phase of neoliberal capitalism are new, while some are as old as the free market itself. When we look at the implications of such a moment in time on a single city, many questions about the social impact on precarious residents arise. This publication catalogues a diverse range of cultural projects that responded to and questioned the state of social and political life in Chicago at the turn of the century.
The projects in this publication raise fundamental questions about our right to the city and the possible uses of culture in the struggle for community self-determination: How do we want to interact with our neighbors? What kinds of reforms do we want from the state and what kinds of collective infrastructures should we be building ourselves instead? What kinds of spaces encourage resistance, free movement and the well being of the whole population?
Most of the work featured in this publication has never been published or seen in print. For the first time, seventeen of the most compelling self-organized projects, events and initiatives from Chicago's recent past have been catalogued together to present a document of a unique period of cultural activism. Only the surface is scratched with 1-3 pages dedicated to each individual project, yet we get a sense of the projects essence and motivation through the inclusion of original press releases and reproductions of promotional materials as well as documentation. The work is divided up into three sections which attempt to organize the work according to it's most significant themes. The sections are "The Right to the City" featuring work that deals with housing and gentrification, "Protest Experiments" that address the policing of public space and dissent, and "Social Reorganization" which offers alternative contexts for gathering and relating to strangers, friends and collaborators in times of intense alienation and social isolation.
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at 10:19 PM
Adam Curtis - The Century of the Self (2002)
Friday, March 30, 2007
The Century of The Self
Adam Curtis' acclaimed series examines the rise of the all-consuming self against the backdrop of the Freud dynasty.
To many in both politics and business, the triumph of the self is the ultimate expression of democracy, where power has finally moved to the people. Certainly the people may feel they are in charge, but are they really? The Century of the Self tells the untold and sometimes controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society in Britain and the United States. How was the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interests?
The Freud dynasty is at the heart of this compelling social history. Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis; Edward Bernays, who invented public relations; Anna Freud, Sigmund's devoted daughter; and present-day PR guru and Sigmund's great grandson, Matthew Freud.
Sigmund Freud's work into the bubbling and murky world of the subconscious changed the world. By introducing a technique to probe the unconscious mind, Freud provided useful tools for understanding the secret desires of the masses. Unwittingly, his work served as the precursor to a world full of political spin doctors, marketing moguls, and society's belief that the pursuit of satisfaction and happiness is man's ultimate goal.
01 Happiness Machines: Edward Bernays and the invention of public relations and modern advertising
02 The Engineering of Consent: How the US Government turned to psychoanalytic principles after WWII as a reaction against the Nazi state. Focusing on the rise and fall of Anna Freud.
03 There Is A Policeman Inside All Our Heads. He Must Be Destroyed: How the reaction against Freudian ideas in the 1950s and 60s ended up making it even easier to control the public
04 Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering: How the left turned to psychoanalytic principles to regain power in the US and Britain in the 1990s.
Screenshots
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at 6:36 PM
Dusan Makavejev - W.R. - Misterije organizma [W.R. - Mysteries of the Organism] (1971)
Summary: Makavejev's most famous film is WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1968-1971), and while some critics, notably Robin Wood, have argued that here the director's collage approach has finally gone out of control, the match of subject and director is ideal. The "WR" of the title refers to Wilhelm Reich, the controversial psychologist and philosopher whose "orgone box" alleged to cure cancer and other diseases landed him in a Pennsylvania prison, where he died in 1958.
Reich was, like Makavejev, an unapologetic liberationist, disgusted by both communism's hatred of creativity and capitalism's idolatry of consumerism. For both men, to quote Reich as quoted in the film, "Fascism is the frenzy of sexual cripples." Makavejev's paean to Reich is a kaleidoscope of constructs and effects, a wild m?lange that's variously a heartfelt tribute to a martyred pioneer, a screed against war and more personal brutalities, a satire of communism, and a plea for liberation on all levels. Shot in both Yugoslavia and the United States, WR includes a rich sampling of Reich quotes, a bit of footage of Reich and his wife, interviews with family members, devotees, and Maine locals who knew him as an okay guy who was slightly eccentric. His influence is indicated in voiceover quotes from both Reich and Makavejev ("Comrade-lovers, for your health's sake, fuck freely!"), scenes of a bioenergetic workshop in New York, a penis plaster cast being made, and a rare sighting of one of the (then) "ten or fifteen orgone boxes left in the country."
The film is a crazy quilt of visual quotes, ranging from the ironic hagiography of an old Russian melodrama about Stalin to the grisly horror of Nazi medical footage of electroshock therapy. WR?s weapons against these atrocities are whimsy, satire, and sex. He skewers war in the person of poet Tuli Kupferberg, seen prancing through the streets of New York in a comic costume holding a fake gun and quietly rattling passersby. Most impressive in this regard is a recurring story of Party faithful Radmilovic (Zoran Radmilovic), Reich enthusiast Milena (Mileana Dravic), and her roommate Jagoda (Jagoda Kaloper). Hilarious indeed are Milena's arguments with a canny old lady, who dishes the Reichian ideal as practiced by a couple nearby: "To me it's just a fuckfest!" When her boyfriend Radmilovic upbraids her thus, "Now that you've passed a Party course, you snub intimate proletarian friends!" she replies in perfect communist-speak: "That's a slanderous lie, you irresponsible element!"
In a brilliant stroke, when a perfect orgasm leads to Milena's beheading, she continues to dispense Reichian homilies from the little white pan in which her head sits. Not surprisingly, WR had its share of censorship problems; in fact, Makavejev left the former Yugoslavia in 1971 when the film was banned there.(from Bright Lights Film Journal)
Screenshots:
File info:
File ==> Size : 700 MB (or 717,304 KB or 734,519,296 bytes)
Source : VHS
Ripper : Unknown
Language: Serbo-Croatian
Subtitle : Hardcoded English Subs
Video ==> Frame Size : 640x480
Bitrate : 1028 kb/s
FPS : 23.976
QF : 0.140 bits/pixel
FourCC Code : [DX50] DivX 5.x Codec
Audio ==> Sampling Rate : 48000 Hz
Bitrate : 131 kb/s (65/ch, stereo) VBR LAME3.90
Channels : 2 (Stereo)
Audio Tag : 0x0055(MP3) ID'd as MPEG-1 Layer 3
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at 1:56 PM
Matt McCormick - The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal (2002)
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Graffiti removal: the act of removing tags and graffiti by painting over them.
Subconscious art: a product of artistic merit that was created without conscious artistic intentions.
It is no coincidence that funding for “anti-graffiti” campaigns often outweighs funding for the arts. Graffiti removal has subverted the common obstacles blocking creative expression and become one of the more intriguing and important art movements of our time. Emerging from the human psyche and showing characteristics of abstract expressionism, minimalism and Russian constructivism, graffiti removal has secured its place in the history of modern art while being created by artists who are unconscious of their artistic achievements.
Production of The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal took approximately six months and was completed in January 2001. Shooting was done primarily in Portland, Oregon and other pacific northwest locations. The piece was shot in both 16mm film and digital video, and post-production was completed with desktop editing and animation software.
Awards and screening summary:
* The Seattle Art Museum- 03 The Sundance Flm Festival- 02
* The San Francisco Int Film Festival- 02 *grand prize for best short film
* The Ann Arbor Film Festival- 02 *best short film/life work award
* The New York Underground Film Festival- 02
* South X Southwest Film Festival- 02
* The New York Film Society at the Lincoln Center- 02
* ResFest- 02
* The Portland Art Museum/Northwest Film Center- ‘02
* Black Maria Film Festival- 01 *first place
* Viper Festival (Basil Switzerland)-01
* Media City Film Festival (Windsor Canada)- 01 *grand prize/best of fest
* Cinematexas Film Festival (Austin Texas)- 01 *audience choice award
* Taos Talking Picture Festival- 01
* Microcine Festival (Baltimore)- 01 *best documentary award
* The Chicago Underground Film Festival- 01
Additional honors:
* ‘Top 10 of 2002’ - Art Forum magazine
* ‘Top 10 Avant Garde Films of the Year’ - The Village Voice
* Regularly aired on The Sundance Channel.
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at 11:31 PM
Ben Lewis - Baader-Meinhof: In Love with Terror (2002)
BAADER-MEINHOF: IN LOVE WITH TERROR
How do you start a revolution in one of the world's richest, modern democracies? The Baader-Meinhof group, aka the Red Army Faction attempted to in 1970s West Germany with bombings, kidnaps and murders.
Ben Lewis' stylish film provides a unique insight into the notorious terrorist group and includes interviews with former RAF members and leaders of the West German government.
DIRECTOR INTERVIEW
BBC Four: What was the attraction of the Baader-Meinhof Gang at the time?
Ben Lewis: Guilt. I think young Germans were very guilty about the past and Baader-Meinhof offered them an attractive and very simple way to absolve themselves of that guilt. When we say attractive, we don't mean they had a lot of supporters, we mean there were a lot of people who were quite attracted by them.
There were only a very small number of people doing these attacks and sheltering them. But a lot of school children thought they were cool. They wore leather jackets and were full of sexy girls and were run by a sexy guy. This was the German answer to the Rolling Stones. Typically, Germans couldn't come up with the Rolling Stones because they have to be very serious about things; so they came up with a terrorist group rather than a rock group.
BBC Four: Where did the Baader-Meinhof Gang get their influences from?
Ben Lewis: Mao and a few South American guerrilla leaders. In a way the most important thing about the Baader-Meinhof Gang is that they read the guerrilla theories of Che Guevara and Carlos Marighella and decided to translate it to Western Germany. Let's translate a manual for warfare in one of the world's poorest countries to a manual warfare in one of the world's richest. And a lot got lost in the translation.
BBC Four: Did you detect any remorse or regret in any of the surviving members you interviewed?
Ben Lewis: Not really. One guy, Horst Mahler, is now a lawyer for the German NPD, which is a far-right, latter-day Nazi Party. So he obviously thinks it was a bit of a cock-up. But the rest of them, they're against violence now. Not because they think it isn't justified against the imperial-capitalist conspiracy of America against the rest of the world, but that the forces of imperialism are too strong to be overcome. They have recanted. The trouble is, once you ask them about their political beliefs it's quite clear that logically most would support violence. The theoretical framework is still there for most of the people I talked to.
BBC Four: Do you think they've had lasting impact on Germany?
Ben Lewis: I don't. I think it was a total dead end. The German Left in the 1960s was a big, heterogeneous and colourful force. Out of that you got the Greens and the anti-nuclear movement. These things had a tremendous impact on German society. The Baader-Meinhof Gang was a sideshow really. I think they did an enormous amount of damage to the Left.
Horst Mahler - contemporary fascist and ex RAF founder.
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at 11:15 PM
