The Legend of Rita (1999) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski) and Tuna

The Legend of Rita, or "Die Stille nach dem Schuß", was based upon an interesting theoretical question. There were 11 West German terrorists who were sheltered for years by the GDR (East Germany). When the wall came down, the West was in charge, and demanded to know where the terrorists were. East Germany, no longer in existence and suddenly simply part of the German apparatus, had no choice but to turn over one day the eleven whose identity it had been scrupulously protecting the previous day. Schlöndorff and his scriptwriter simply asked themselves what the lives of those people must have been like. They were not important communist officials or influential thinkers. They were simply eleven average people whose identities had been changed, and who were living mundane lives in the working class. Some had families. Their closest relatives and friends had no idea that they used to be terrorists.

To answer this question, they chose to focus on one fictitious woman, Rita Vogt, whose radical days apparently began with the Baader-Meinhof Gang, a group of German terrorists who envisioned themselves as a 20th century James Gang, robbing banks to strike a blow against exploitative institutions and in favor of the common man. At one point, they all fled to East Germany, which sheltered them. After a brief stay, the East Germans offered them a choice of plane tickets to the radical venue of their choice, or a new identity in the working class of the East German worker's paradise. 

The new identity turned out to be rather unconvincing. East Germans were not as isolated as some Communist states, and were quite aware of what life was like in the west, so when Rita claimed she left her life in Western Europe for a chance to join the worker's paradise and rip her hands apart in a textile mill, her co-workers laughed in her face, although she was such a true believer that it all seemed perfectly plausible to her. Pretty much nobody believed that story. "We can only assume you are insane", was the mainstream response, and the complete illogic of her cover story eventually led her secret to be compromised.

Despite various setbacks and the negative attitudes surrounding her, she often seemed to be bathed in bliss because of her role in socialist heaven.

Unfortunately, the Berlin Wall fell, Germany reunited, and she was no longer a "legend" sheltered by an outlaw state, but an outlaw herself. When Germany united, many of the people with police and administrative functions in the East had to continue to provide the same functions, although under a new rule of law. So it came to pass that the man who had been in charge of sheltering her identity was the same man who was assigned the task of bringing her in. 

The film could easily have passed a severe judgment on the 1970's radicals. With the exception of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, those terrorists probably turned out to be about as wrong as anyone has ever been in the history of humanity:

1. The state they sought to "destroy" is now many times more powerful.

2. The cause they sought to champion was destroyed, and they were ultimately to blame. All political struggles are a battle for the minds of the people in the center. Crazed leftists like the Baader-Meinhof gang convinced many centrists that the Left was morally bereft, and ultimately turned people in the center further Rightward.

3. Their own leaders disavowed their former actions.

4. The architects of their crumbling ideology disavowed it as a viable economic system. NOTE: to be fair, the die-hard socialists now fundamentally hold the position that it all would have worked out if not for Stalin. They still have not been able to grasp that a complete economic system requires the generation of wealth as well as its allocation. Even in an ideal world with no Stalin and no corruption, socialism provides no sensible theoretical mechanism to create wealth, so there is less and less to distribute as time goes on. I've often thought that socialists had some good and compassionate points about the distribution of wealth, but I'll be damned if I ever met one who understood how it was created in the first place.

5. With both their ideals and their methods renounced by both mainstream culture and their own leaders, it turned out that all of their terrorist acts were not in pursuit of a worthy cause. They simply killed people for nothing. 

In a very touching scene, the great French film, Grand Illusion, makes the point that the only thing war is good for is making people's tables too large. In that scene, a German woman helps a Frenchman and a Jew to escape German soldiers because she has a kitchen table that was built for eight people, and a bed meant for two, and there is nobody left in her family but her and her young daughter. The company of the strangers is more precious to her than her patriotism, which cost her a husband and several brothers. Similarly, the European socialist radicals of my generation ultimately served no purpose in our existence other than to make several tables too large for their households.

Complex movie, intelligent without losing our interest in the storyline.