'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

political events that took place in 1977. McCormick has asserted that the “history-film”
trend in New German Cinema can be explained in part as:
a response to the trauma of the “German Autumn” of 1977, when the hysteria and
polarization around the activities of the terrorist “Red Army Faction” reached its
peak, and memories of earlier periods of turbulence in twentieth-century German
history were awakened. (“Gender” 250)
On September 5, 1977 prominent West German industrial and former Nazi Hanns
Martin Schleyer was kidnapped by members of a terrorist group known as the Red Army
Faction (RAF). The following month the RAF hijacked a Lufthansa airliner, compelling
it to land in to Mogadishu, Somalia. These terrorist actions were meant to force the West
German state to release RAF members Andreas Baader, Gundrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl
Raspe from their confinement in the maximum security prison at Stammheim, near
Stuttgart. Instead, an antiterrorist team of the West German border police liberated the
hostages and killed the hijackers. Moreover, in Stammheim the next morning Baader,
Ensslin, and Raspe were found dead, apparent suicide victims under circumstances so
suspicious that an international commission was required to investigate the matter. In an
atmosphere of suspicion, fear, and hysteria, the West German government reacted with
increased security measures and the persecution of anyone it suspected of being a RAF
sympathizer. A fear of surveillance and censure spread across the country and many left-
leaning Germans felt that their civil liberties, especially their freedom of expression, were
threatened. This situation caused many older West Germans to recall how the Nazi
regime had suppressed the civil rights of many segments of the population during the
“Third Reich.” Norbert Elias, who was eighty years old in 1977, writes in his essay on
the “German Autumn” of 1977:
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