Starbuck Holger Meins (2002) dir. Gerd Conradt

A documentary portrait of Holger Meins, the Red Army Faction member who died in Stammheim prison, following a hunger strike in 1974. His painful death was the culmination of a journey from art school, via film-making, to increasingly militant actions against the Vietnam War, media monopolies and corporate control. Friends contribute numerous memories, there are clips from his short work and valuable archive footage of both the times and his creatively oppositional community. If, finally, we do not come away with a clear sense of the man’s interior motivation, this is partly because so much of his identity was bound up in the larger social frame, one well-communicated in this intelligent work. Meins’ codename ’Starbuck’, incidentally, was drawn from Moby-Dick A whole range of companions give information about this tragic chapter of German history with the help from the widest variety of documents of the times. Meins the boy scout, artist, film maker and guerrilla is remembered by Gretchen Dutschke, Harun Farocki, Wolfgang Petersen, Peter Lilienthal, Michael Ballhaus, Margrit Schiller, “the family screw” Detective Superintendent Alfred Klaus, and many others.