The first German Netflix docuseries, Rohwedder: Unity and Murder and Freedom, has wisely been marketed in the United States as A Perfect Crime, thus hopefully averting the risk of being the last German Netflix docuseries. The subject of the series, Detlev Rohwedder, was the head of the Treuhandanstalt, or the Trust Agency, known more commonly as the Treuhund, responsible for the privatization of East Germany’s state-owned industries after German reunification in 1990, and he met a grim end in the form of three bullets through his window in a Dusseldorf suburb in 1991. Scattered evidence suggested Rohwedder had been assassinated by the Red Army Faction, a far-Left terrorist group, but the crime was never quite solved.
The story itself is engrossing, and A Perfect Crime also benefits from ideal timing, far enough away from events that various official types are willing to speak frankly but not so far away that they’re all dead. Among the commentators featured in the series are the former finance ministers from both Germanys, all sorts of police and officials, and even a few hoary RAF militants. It’s part of a recent miniboom in German productions feeding the country’s half-ironic nostalgia for the 1980s, including the Sundance TV-German RTL Group co-production Deutschland 83, the 2017 series The Same Sky by Downfall director Oliver Hirschbiegel, and even Dark, which is fairly often set in the ‘80s and is a sort of Teutonic Stranger Things.
Rohwedder was handed an impossible task: The liquidation of East German industry, which proved even more rotten than ever imagined. It was initially thought that the process might generate a profit, but it, in fact, incurred 230 million deutsche marks in debt. And the mass shuttering of unprofitable enterprises led to skyrocketing unemployment in the former East Germany, where Rohwedder became a widely despised figure.
The rifle shots that killed Rohwedder were fired from about 200 feet away and into an upper story window of his house. The window wasn’t bulletproof, and Rohwedder had no bodyguards. A note was found claiming RAF responsibility, but that explanation didn’t satisfy everyone. Some blamed the Stasi or shadowy elements within the West German government who wanted to speed up privatization. One of the cardinal sins of contemporary true crime is making a whole cast of suspects seem plausible in order to heighten the drama, even when the evidence isn’t particularly ambiguous, and A Perfect Crime is exceptionally guilty on this count. It isn’t that the two alternate theories of the murder aren’t worth mentioning, but the documentary is altogether too credulous about the possibility that some entity other than the RAF was responsible for the murder.
The bigger problem is that this credulity isn’t an isolated caprice but fits seamlessly into a long history of left-wing mythology about West Germany’s decades of terror, which holds that the government was just as responsible for the violence as the young radicals who actually carried it out. Amid repeated left-wing bombings, kidnappings, and murders in the 1970s, Volker Schlondorff’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum focused on the problem of right-wing media sensationalism, Reinhard Hauff’s Knife in the Head blamed the police, Margarethe Von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane presented a woman radicalized by her terrorist sister’s death in prison, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation posited that the terrorists were actually in the pay of shadowy industrialists. 2013’s The Baader Meinhof Complex, which portrayed the early RAF leaders Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof as megalomaniacal zealots, was a welcome break from this tendency, as was Olivier Assayas’s Carlos, about the Venezuelan terrorist who carried out a string of attacks in Europe in the 1970s under the banner of Palestinian liberation.
West Germans, of course, had better reasons than most to be skeptical of their government, which had been only partially de-Nazified in the postwar Allied occupation. But the West German intelligentsia’s indulgence of student terrorism went well beyond the bounds of reason. In its public manifestos, for instance, the RAF seemed less concerned with rooting out Nazism than with blurring the distinctions between Nazism, capitalism, and Western society more generally. Although a few of its victims had Nazi pasts, the group also targeted Americans, businessmen, and, at times, random civilians.
Still, much of West Germany’s artistic establishment was careful not to criticize the terrorists too harshly, and the same tendency is unfortunately on display here, with the documentarians using selective omission to sow doubt about the RAF’s culpability. For instance, the Guardian’s Berlin bureau chief, Philip Oltermann, noted in his review that the series neglects to mention that Birgit Hogefeld, an RAF member arrested in a shootout with police in 1993, said in an interview that the RAF targeted Rohwedder and considered the “conspiracy theories around the case as a ‘failure’ on its own behalf.”
The appearance of RAF militants in the film makes sense, given the subject matter, but the function of their commentary is at times extraordinarily suspect. Brigitte Mohnhaupt, who was sentenced to five life sentences for her involvement in the plotting of multiple actual and attempted assassinations, offers her opinion that RAF culpability “doesn’t make any sense,” setting up the series’s speculations about shadowy conspiracies. The show takes her testimony seriously, but it’s about as believable as Assata Shakur telling us that Angela Davis was framed or Osama bin Laden saying that Mohamed Atta must have had help from the pilots.
The show also presents us with an undercooked narrative about West German rapacity following reunification. Rammstein’s keyboardist Christian “Flake” Lorenz, who grew up in East Berlin, is quoted as saying, “Suddenly, a country was thrust upon us that was not who we were and did not want to be.” “Thrust upon” is one way of putting it. In East Germany’s sole free election, in March 1990, the reconfigured Communist Party was trounced by a coalition campaigning on reunification. The East German Parliament then approved of reunification by a vote of 299 to 80.
A closing fact notes that 94% of East German assets came to be owned by West German businesses. East Germans obviously weren’t in a position to buy, and it’s understandable that wholesale ownership of former eastern companies by western companies is a sore spot. At the same time, there’s no mention of the west’s 30 years of subsidies for the former east, paid for by westerners’ taxes. It’s an especially sour note to end on, a final insinuation that the real villain of the story is someone, anyone, but the terrorist who carried out the murder.
Anthony Paletta is a writer living in Brooklyn.
