Stammheim – Zeit des Terrors (2025)

The docudrama opens on May 21, 1975, with the spectacular arrival of Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin in the high-security wing of Stuttgart-Stammheim Prison. The film then focuses on the tightly monitored daily lives of the four principal prisoners: Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof, and Jan-Carl Raspe. Their shared “communal living” moments in their cells are followed by heated debates over strategy papers, secret notes, the smuggling of records and radios, and hunger strikes that lead to force-feeding. Baader and Ensslin constantly harass Meinhof; Raspe is her only genuine conversation partner. In parallel, the film reconstructs key stages of the Stammheim trial in the specially built courtroom next to the prison. Original audio recordings and transcripts accompany the re-enacted scenes, from the reading of the indictment to the verdict on April 28, 1977, when Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe are sentenced to life imprisonment. A second timeline takes viewers to the parliamentary inquiry committee of 1977–1978, where Horst Bubeck, a key figure, testifies about prison conditions, hunger strikes, and the bugging affair. These events are traced through to the Stammheim night of death. To place the prison story in its historical context, the docudrama regularly cuts to acts of violence by the RAF’s second generation: the Stockholm hostage crisis (1975), the murders of Federal Prosecutor General Siegfried Buback and banker Jürgen Ponto, and the kidnappings of Hanns Martin Schleyer and the “Landshut” (1977). On May 8, 1976, prison guards find Meinhof hanged in her cell; the state calls it suicide, while the RAF calls it murder. The film portrays Meinhof as a psychologically worn-down outsider who breaks under the internal psychological terror inflicted by her comrades. After the hijacking of the “Landshut” fails on October 18, 1977, the film shows the Stammheim night of death: Baader shoots himself, Ensslin hangs herself, and Raspe kills himself with a pistol. An on-screen caption notes that it remains disputed to this day whether the cells were bugged that night.