There’s a very famous horror movie called Cannibal Holocaust that caused a huge amount of controversy on it’s release in the director’s native homeland of Italy. Ruggero Deodato had set out to make an exploitation movie about exploitation itself – inspired by the Italian media’s coverage of the Red Brigade murders of the 1970s, where garish footage of victims would be broadcast nightly. The film deliberately blurred the line between reality and fiction – to the point Deodato was put on trial and had to display his actors to prove the film didn’t depict real murder. The film itself is naturally horrific to watch but has some sharp and salient points to make on modern media’s obsession with the macabre.
The same kind of horrific content was on display in the concluding episode of Gladbeck. There wasn’t any gore of course, but the attitudes and behavior of the people in the show were sickening enough. Whilst the initial episode had focused on the growing incompetence of the police leading up to the bank robbers being able to hijack a bus full of passengers with impunity, this episode’s lens was firmly set on the press themselves and their abhorrent behaviour. Whatever the gathered journalists were thinking at the time, whether they felt these criminals wouldn’t cross an unseen line and harm anyone or simply they were doing their jobs to report the news is to all extents largely unknowable, but the ensuing collective madness they perpetrate – with the knowledge this was reality, with human beings at stake – is hard to watch.
The episode draws in on two journalists as our guides through this mass insanity – press photographer Peter Meyer (played by NSU German History X’s Albrecht Schuch) and Udo Röbel (Dark’s Arnd Klawitter). Meyer is presented initially as a bit of carefree spirit – literally driving up to the bus in his sportscar, blasting some 1980s rock music – before Rösner adopts him as the conduit between himself and the press and police. The initial chaos that follows the hijacking is mind-boggling in itself to watch unfold, as a handful of senior detectives stand around the square utterly powerless to act and none of the apparatus required to deal with the crisis anywhere near being available.
Eventually Peter Möller, the rather reluctant head of operations in Bremen, has enough marksmen in place around the bus to execute a kill shot simultaneously on all the fugitives. A large debate breaks out at headquarters about the veracity of the order. Germany’s post-war history overshadows the dialogue wholly as they argue the order cannot legally be carried out without threat to life being apparent. Even at this stage, nobody considers the hijackers to be murderous. This is evident in Meyer’s behaviour as he switches from boarding the bus and taking photographs of the victims to rallying the police to find a better car for the hijackers. It seems like a game, albeit a surreal game – and the volume of people around the scene seems to lower the level of threat, as Rösner makes grandiose statements to the press with the faint hope of romanticizing his criminal actions as he talks of committing suicide and a life spent in hardship.
However. This atmosphere is practically sucked out of the story instantaneously in the next scenes, when a clumsy and ultimately thwarted attempt to arrest Rösner’s girlfriend Marion at a petrol station leads Degowski to flip out and shoot teenager Emanuele de Giorgi in the head. It’s a singular moment portrayed without any flair or embellishment and as a result is an absolute punch to the gut, designed to recreate the murder without any sensationalism to the credit of the director. What follows next is hard to watch. Emanuele’s body is dumped on the pavement, barely alive and covered in blood. Rather than help him, the pack of journalists move in to take their footage. One asks the other “can you tilt his head so” to get a better shot of the body. At this stage, Emanuele is still alive but bleeding out. Nobody thinks to call an ambulance. I feel physically ill.
Meyer’s gradual repulsion in this scene, as he pulls away from the crowd and finally gravitates back toward reality from the mass hysteria gripping his colleagues, is mirrored in Möller‘s dawning realization back at police headquarters that he never even thought an ambulance would be necessary in this situation, uniting both in the clear fact nobody was prepared for something like this to happen. And yet when the criminals briefly pass through the Netherlands on their way to Cologne, the Dutch police are the very model of cold professionalism. They prevent any journalists passing their border. When they negotiate with the trio, they barter successfully for the exchange of some of the women and children on the bus for an escape car. When Rösner accidentally shoots Marion in the leg, the Dutch police deal with the issue calmly. A German police officer warns his Dutch counterpart about the situation back in Bremen. The cop says “That was your disaster” acidly. It’s a pointed juxtaposition to show how things might have worked out differently all the way back at the bank, if somebody had took real authority of the situation rather than trying to pass the buck. And yet strangely, the German officials are desperate to end the situation on German soil to avoid national embarrassment, despite that ship having set sail long ago.
Udo Röbel enters the scene when the trio dump the bus in favour of a car carrying hostages Silke Bischoff and Ines Voitle back into Germany through Cologne. The scenes showing the car swamped by journalists, police and public is hard to compute through a modern lens and this sense of surrealism follows through in the detached and dreamlike dialogue Silke has with the surrounding press (“how does it feel to have a gun on you?”,”do you think you’re going to die?”) as they repeatedly ask Degowski to hold his gun up to her throat so they can get a better photo. With the criminals running high on amphetamines and low on patience, Röbel senses imminent danger in this worrisome theatre and befriends Rösner with coffee and kind words. When Rösner decides to escape onto the motorway out of Germany once and for all, Röbel offers to tag along and provide directions. Throughout the crisis, Silke is portrayed as somewhat detached from proceedings, but the truth is shown in a key scene when she breaks down in a petrol station rest room under the impassive gaze of Rösner.
The final scene where the German police take an opportunity to ram Rösner’s car and spray it with bullets is filmed in as perfunctory way as possible to avoid becoming a thrilling or entertaining chase, not least because everybody survives bar Silke, shot through the chest in the ensuing chaos by Rösner. Once again her corpse is fodder for television as journalists descend on the scene, cameras ready. There is barley any epitaph or explanation to follow this closing scene, which presumes anybody watching this would be German or have a fair knowledge of the incident, and that’s a shame. One thing it was certainly not is entertainment – or ‘sensational’ as the BBC continuity advisor crassly called it ahead of airing (oops).
One thing the show did do respectfully well was it’s handling of the victims stories – Emanuele’s father Aldo de Giorgi (played by Romanzo Criminale’s Vinicio Marchioni) has perhaps the most fully realised journey through bewilderment to grief, compounded by the incompetence of the police. The scene where he realises he needs to clean his son’s brains off his daughter’s skirt is absolutely heart-breaking in it’s smallness and intimacy. Likewise the unraveling of Silke’s grandparents as they live out their grief through graphic television reports, impotent and powerless, is similarly tough to watch, with Heinrich’s choked tears involuntarily watering my own eyes. What’s remarkable perhaps in comparison to the industry of grief counseling these days is the lack of state apparatus to pick these people up in the aftermath of such a situation – nobody greets Aldo at the hospital, nobody is there to support him in his hour of need. It’s another silent piece of commentary that runs through this dramatization without feeling preachy or judgemental.
Due to it’s length there wasn’t a lot of time to dig into the minutiae of the incident, and I would have liked to have learnt more about the fate of some of the key players involved. Meyer and Röbel for example, might not have benefited directly from the tragedy but it certainly didn’t harm their future careers either. We barely got any time with Silke’s boyfriend, nor either of the bank clerks post-release. The German release of the film included a documentary after it’s airing and it feels absolutely missing here, especially by presenting this dramatization in an entertainment slot. Maybe that’s indicative of its resonance in Germany but not elsewhere – like every country they all have their national shames to live with, but we can all learn a lesson from them.
Andy D
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