This movie attempts to turn something into history. By treating both sides of the intense conflict between the leftist terrorists and the political elite of postwar West Germany in the 70s and 80s with equal respect, its main message is, perhaps, this: it's all over. The movie shrugs off the ideologies involved and turns its focus on the two biographies of Grams and Herrhausen instead.
Some of the previous comments have remarked that those two really didn't have much in common. Even their involvement with terrorism wasn't particularly similar - Herrhausen, the banker, was simply a victim. He had known, of course, that he was a likely target, but only his death, not his life was molded by the RAF terrorist movement. Grams, on the other hand, was a terrorist for roughly two decades, and died, most probably by suicide, during a shootout with the police. I believe that the only way in which these two biographies could be linked (without a tremondous, and strained, analytic effort) was by representing them both as parts of an historical phenomenon. The movie doesn't really need a clear connection between its two protagonists other than this: they're part of the same historical constellation. It doesn't aim at explaining this constellation. It aims at telling us that it IS historical.
How could this be of interest to German audiences? While I don't want to reduce the movie's appeal to this - there's a lot of intriguing material in it - I think the explanation lies in the German present, not in the past. Mostly unnoticed, overshadowed by the more severe transformations in the Eastern part of the country, the old West has changed quite thoroughly as well. And the changes are accompanied by certain tendencies of framing recent history in collective memory, as it were. We now like to regard all the political conflicts of the years before 1989 as finished and done with. Germany, we want to believe, is totally different from what it was back then. This urge for discontinuity is rather questionable, actually... Anyway, that's where both the fascination and the problems and perhaps the ultimate failure of the film lie. Or so I think.
Some of the previous comments have remarked that those two really didn't have much in common. Even their involvement with terrorism wasn't particularly similar - Herrhausen, the banker, was simply a victim. He had known, of course, that he was a likely target, but only his death, not his life was molded by the RAF terrorist movement. Grams, on the other hand, was a terrorist for roughly two decades, and died, most probably by suicide, during a shootout with the police. I believe that the only way in which these two biographies could be linked (without a tremondous, and strained, analytic effort) was by representing them both as parts of an historical phenomenon. The movie doesn't really need a clear connection between its two protagonists other than this: they're part of the same historical constellation. It doesn't aim at explaining this constellation. It aims at telling us that it IS historical.
How could this be of interest to German audiences? While I don't want to reduce the movie's appeal to this - there's a lot of intriguing material in it - I think the explanation lies in the German present, not in the past. Mostly unnoticed, overshadowed by the more severe transformations in the Eastern part of the country, the old West has changed quite thoroughly as well. And the changes are accompanied by certain tendencies of framing recent history in collective memory, as it were. We now like to regard all the political conflicts of the years before 1989 as finished and done with. Germany, we want to believe, is totally different from what it was back then. This urge for discontinuity is rather questionable, actually... Anyway, that's where both the fascination and the problems and perhaps the ultimate failure of the film lie. Or so I think.