Customer Reviews

Baader Meinhof: Pictures on the Run 67-77

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This book is exactly what it purports to be: a collection of photos documenting the RAF. Astrid Proll's short 1998 narrative and musings on her experiences makes somewhat interesting reading, but this is not a history or work of analysis, and readers who are seeking such will be disappointed. _Pictures on the Run_ serves as a unique and invaluable accompaniment to Stefan Aust's volume, and should be seen as such. If the reader isn't already familiar with the photo subjects, s/he will only be perplexed by the single line captions. If like me, however, you are intrigued by the RAF and the Deutsche Herbst, you will keep this book beside you as you read Aust, Becker, Vague, and Baumann. You will return to the pictures again and again, and some of the faces will haunt you.

VERY INTERESTING! - A must for anyone interested in BAADER MEINHOF! The pictures tell quite a story. The whole book can be used as a suppliment to the other BAADER MEINHOF reading!

The core founders of the Baader Meinhoff group Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin {an equal number were women} were murdered in their prison cells by authorities of the wealthy Federal Republic of Germany and then framed as suicides. Astrid Proll was a minor activist who served a jail sentence and then fled to England, she is not representative of this movement and some of her comments are wrong, but the photographs of these fallen young revolutionary's are intriguing.

While some of the accounts are informative, this book is simply a blatant project to make money. The crimes committed by the group were hideous and, how better to squeeze a little more out of the publicity by justifying them?

The photographs in this book are bad, taken by an amateur and tell no story. They're of minimal interest and do nothing to help explain anything of what really went on behind these scenes. I do not understand how the reviewer from the New York times can describe the pictures as "daunting" ad "carefully selected". They're a haphazardly thrown together group of nothing. If these were the best of the bunch, the bad ones must have been terrible.

I think I might be a little less hostile if this book were a lot cheaper, but I was expecting a lot more substance and pictures of more than marginal interest. My advice would be to try and check this book in the local library first to make sure it is what you thought it was.