If Germany's World War II wounds are still festering today (which they are), imagine how much fresher they were in 1967 -- especially in the minds of its first post-Nazi generation, determined to thwart what many of them perceived as "the new face of fascism" in their divided country.

No need to imagine. Director Uli Edel reimagines it for us in bloodcurdling -- and bloodletting -- fashion with "The Baader Meinhof Complex," a tough docudrama depicting the rise and fall of RAF (Red Army Faction), the home-grown radical group whose bombings, kidnappings and hijackings rocked West Germany for a decade.

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'The Baader Meinhof Complex'

3 1/2 stars = Very good
Ratings explained

• Starring: Martina Gedeck, Moritz Bleibtreu, Bruno Ganz.
• Rating: R for strong bloody violence, disturbing images, sexual content, graphic nudity and language.

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As genres go, it has pretty much everything: action, thrills, crime, cops, romance, history -- and a plethora of biography. Central figure Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu) and his girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) are free-lover radicals, provoked by the Vietnam War and the attempted murder of a prominent left-winger into leading a violent fight against American imperialism and the German capitalist establishment.

"This time, we won't sit by idly and watch fascism develop," declares Baader, whose revolutionary fervor calls for a new morality to go with a new politics. "Sexual revolution and anti-imperialism go together!"

So does a certain misogyny on his part, complicated when prominent journalist Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck) enters their tight-knit cell. In the film's opening nude beach scene, Meinhof establishes her "ultra-liberal" credentials. She and the others are further radicalized by the Shah of Iran's 1967 visit to Germany, the brutal police suppression of protests and the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War. Ulrike, increasingly coming to share the belief that "talk without action is wrong," is the film's most enigmatic figure. At first just a spokesperson for the extremists, she soon leaves her husband and children to join the movement as an active participant.

On the other side of the law stands Horst Herold (Bruno Ganz), West Germany's top law enforcement official -- the one man who "understands" them. As the film's unifying character of sorts, he argues that brutal police tactics are counterproductive and that -- like Sherlock Holmes -- you have to penetrate the criminals' thought processes.

Director Uli Edel is objective even with his biases, if that's oxymoronically possible. His clear sympathy for Meinhof and certain of her colleagues (excluding Baader) is influenced -- like she is -- by her motivational meetings with people willing to take action instead of just jawboning for a better world. In one of the picture's best scenes, when she helps Baader escape incarceration, her last-second jump from a window sill is a powerful metaphor for her jump to extremism.

But Edel's apparent initial sympathy with the extremists' goals slowly evaporates with their murderous tactics. At first split over how violent to be, killing soon becomes acceptable to the radicals, whom Edel portrays as increasingly more criminal than political. Meanwhile, Ganz's Herold character suggests the government was a model of moderation -- not exactly true. In fact, Herold did nothing to challenge the German people's postwar complacency and American complicity, succeeding in his relentless pursuit of the young terrorists while acknowledging they were just the tip of an iceberg.

Nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar (which it lost to Japan's "Departures"), "Baader-Meinhof" is as impressive in its period recreation as Edel's "Last Exit to Brooklyn" (1989). The screenplay, based on Stefan Aust's book, is by Edel and Bernd Eichinger, who wrote the terrific "Downfall" (2004), about Hitler's last bunker days. Ganz is as superb here as he was playing the paranoid Fuhrer coming unglued.

"Downfall" was heightened by its concentrated time and space. "Baader-Meinhof" is historically accurate to a fault: too many names, dates and events over too much historical time (and reel time -- 149 minutes). It regains its focus toward the end, after the gang's original members are rounded up, jailed, put on trial and go on a hunger strike. But it would have benefited by zeroing in on fewer characters from the start. Otherwise, only Germans who lived through the period can fully grasp the details.

Many such Germans were RAF sympathizers, transfixed by them, their agenda, and by the circus trials that resulted -- until the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, Germany's rough equivalent of America's 9-11. If there's a moral or a parallel today, it's that we're still faced with similar dilemmas that inspired the uptick in terrorism then: Palestinian statelessness, dubious wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, financial crises and a growing divide between rich and poor caused by unfettered rogue capitalism. Why today's youth doth protest too little? Perhaps because the RAF experience taught them it's better to be docile and look out for No. 1 if you want security. There was worldwide disillusionment with the counterproductive evil of terrorism.

The Baader-Meinhof group resembled the American Weathermen but were longer-lived and much more destructive in their belief that random acts of violence could bring down an oppressive government. They aimed to create a more human society by inhuman means. Edel's film is a compelling chronicle of how they lost not only the battle and the war but their own humanity in the process.

Opens Friday at Regent Square Theater.

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