• Auschwitz drew a record 1.38 million voluntary visitors in 2010. [Haaretz]

• Secretary of State Clinton forcefully accused those threatening to topple Lebanon’s government of trying to subvert the U.N. tribunal investigating the former prime minister’s assassination. [Laura Rozen]

• Israel is quietly but actively supporting Sudan’s Christian south in its efforts to secede, while essentially the entire Arab world backs the unionist regime in Khartoum. One reason for Israel’s support for independence? Trade opportunities. [World Tribune]

• Pro-Israel groups are finding it is most effective to be cruel only to be kind. [JTA]

• Newly released documents purport to show that West Germany knew of Adolph Eichmann’s whereabouts eight years before Israeli agents tracked him down and captured him in Argentina. [Der Spiegel]

I think I’ll try Alaska.

That is a phrase I first read in Anne Applebaum’s book Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, which was published five years after the Wall came down. She likened Central Europe during communism to a lake frozen over by ice, and wrote of peering through the ice to see the countries and cultures that existed beneath the Soviet empire.

The person who taught me to see through the ice—or at least to try—was my wife and guide, Amity Shlaes. We had met on the foreign desk of the Wall Street Journal, where Amity’s assignment was to read the transcripts of broadcasts from behind the Iron Curtain issued daily by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, and to pick out from them newsworthy items for a weekly column.

In 1983, she spotted an item from Yugoslavia. It reported that something of a riot had occurred at a soccer game in Kosovo. The disturbance erupted after rowdies in the crowd began shouting “E-Ho, E-Ho.” They were rooting for the Maoist madman Enver Hoxa, the dictator of Albania. Amity told me that some analysts saw portents. “Yugoslavia can’t survive,” she said.

I suggested she write it up for the next day’s paper. She thought it was an awfully long reach to make on the basis of some football fans in Kosovo. When I pressed, she remonstrated, “You right-wingers are all the same.” But it was newspaper work, and she wrote the column. The clipping that resulted became, once Yugoslavia disintegrated, a memorable item in her scrapbook.

By the late 1980s, we were married and living in Brussels, on assignment to cover the climactic years of the Cold War. One day Amity came into my office and closed the door, looked at me, and announced, “It’s over.” I thought, “What have I done?” Before I could actually say anything, she said, “The division of Europe, it’s over.” This was in July of 1988. The Russians and our side still had intermediate-range nuclear missiles pointed at each other all over the place. The ice looked frozen solid.

It turns out that she’d just read a piece in one of the provincial German newspapers saying that the Soviet party boss, Mikhail Gorbachev, was going to permit the Volga Germans, who had been living in Russia since the time of Catherine the Great, to leave. Not only was Gorbachev prepared to let them leave, Amity told me, but they were going to go not to Communist East Germany but to West Germany. A receiving center was being set up for them at Friedland. She told me it was an astounding development, one that meant that the Kremlin had concluded the division of Europe could not be sustained.

“It’s over,” she repeated several times. “It’s over.”

Amity left immediately for Friedland, from which she cabled a dispatch about the refugees and what she called the “provocative way their arrival posed the question of reunification.”

Then things entered a quiescent phase, and by November 1989, I was back in the United States, working on the agreement to bring out the Forward in English.

On November 9, I boarded a plane to visit Amity in Brussels. When I got there, I found my secretary had left on my desk a message Amity had dictated by phone. “Remaining Berlin, Hotel Kempinski.” I rushed back to the airport and caught a flight to Dusseldorf, thence another into Berlin’s Tegel Airport, reaching the Kempinski’s lobby just in time to find Amity dashing for a bus for Checkpoint Charlie, a transit point between the free and the Communist side.

The evening before, at a live press conference, an East Berlin party functionary, Günter Schabowski, had been trying to explain some changes in the rules for exit visas. One description of it is contained in a piece last month by the Wall Street Journal. It describes how questioning by a German tabloid reporter and an Italian foreign correspondent got the hapless Schabowski flustered. My own viewing of the press conference suggests the key moment came when Daniel Johnson, then of the London Daily Telegraph and now the editor of Standpoint, asked what I have called the most consequential question ever asked at a press conference.

It was ten words: “Herr Schabowski, was wird mit der Berliner Mauer jetzt geschehen?” [“Mr. Schabowski, what will happen to the Berlin Wall now?”] Johnson’s account of the “Seven Minutes That Shook the World” is here. Poor Schabowski waffled. And because his waffling was being broadcast live, East Germans by the thousands and thousands began pouring out of their homes and heading for freedom. By the end of the evening, the division of Europe had, in the practical sense, ended.

When I found Amity at the Kempinski, it was 9 p.m. on November 10. We crossed over to the East side and spent the evening with dissident, pro-democracy East Germans. The enormity of what was happening hadn’t sunk in, and they were still pleading for photocopying machines and other tools of the democratic struggle. It was after midnight when we crossed back into Free Berlin, only to discover the crowds had swelled. Tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands were now in the streets, many holding tools and streaming toward the Wall. Someone gave us a rock-climbing hammer, and we spent the small hours of the morning chipping away at it like everyone else.

When we left Berlin that Sunday, we held hands in the taxi and talked of how it was the right moment to leave Europe to the Europeans and return to America. A piece that we’d chipped from the Berlin Wall is now embedded in the stone retaining wall of our garden in New York. Within a few years, the Soviet Union itself would be gone and Germany united—a reunification the prospect of which a resurgent Forward greeted with what it called “mixed emotions.”

Not that there was any lack of joy at the liberation of Eastern Europe and the breakup of the Soviet empire. But the Zheleznovodsk summit, where the German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, and the Soviet party boss, Gorbachev, cut the deal that would lead to formal unification, proved to be an uneasy moment. Kohl was too bland, and Gorbachev lacked a democratic mandate to speak for Russia. When we think of what happened to the Jews of Europe, the Forward concluded, “the labors of our leaders will always look small.”

When the final papers were drawn up, there was one eloquent cri de coeur reflecting what so many of us were thinking. It came from Heinz Galinski, who after the war rebuilt the Jewish center in Fasanenstrasse and embedded within its walls parts of the famed synagogue. He protested the wording of the unification treaty. He wanted the documentation to contain, as it was characterized in the Forward, a “clearer expression of historical responsibility for Nazi war crimes.” He got nowhere, and when he went public at a press conference, Reuters described him as “visibly angry,” saying the chancellor had not even given him the dignity of an answer. Galinski died in 1992.

A few years ago, Amity and I took our children to Berlin, and one afternoon, we visited the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. It includes—aside from the typewriter on which Charter 77 was written—several exhibits of the methods East Germans used to try to escape Communism by going over, under, or through the Wall. One is a flying contraption. Another is a car in which visitors are challenged to find a full-sized mannequin that has been secreted therein. A white booth that stood on our side of Checkpoint Charlie is now perched a few yards from the museum, in the middle of a street that bustles with commerce. I walked one of the boys over to show him the hut where GIs on duty kept warm as they guarded the entrance to the American sector and the plaza where, under the muzzles the guns of the Warsaw Pact, I had courted his mother. I tried to reassure him that in his time there would be new struggles in which he no doubt would throw himself. It happened to be an unforgettably cold day, and I pulled his collar up around his ears when I got to the part about the importance of not taking history for granted and remembering to look beneath the ice.

The Gang, which paralyzed West Germany in the 1970s, was a hallucinatory cult of would-be Maoist urban guerrillas who over the better part of a decade hurled Molotov cocktails, robbed banks, bombed American military bases, kidnapped and killed government officials, businessmen, and police, arranged to hijack a passenger plane, drove the police crazy, drove the media wild, immolated themselves and others, and succeeded in galvanizing the young of West Germany into vicarious roles in a self-conceived urban guerrilla war—against, as they said, imperialism, the Vietnam war, Israel, and consumer capitalism.

As they careened along their arc of moral giddiness toward the apocalypse, the Baader-Meinhof Gang had all the heart and brains of an action movie—no surprise, since in more ways than one they were inspired by action movies. The German journalist Stefan Aust, who worked with Ulrike Meinhof during her journalistic days and wrote the book on which the screenplay of director Uri Edel’s new film The Baader-Meinhof Complex is based, told Fred Kaplan, writing for The New York Times, that the charismatic young tough Andreas Baader liked to tell people that “his favorite movies were Bonnie and Clyde, which had recently come out, and The Battle of Algiers.” Baader, the star-leader, had an eye for branding, and paid “a designer to make a Red Army Faction logo, a drawing of a machine gun against a red star.”

What the Group wanted was nothing short of “total revolution,” in the words of one of its ideologues, Gudrun Ensslin, who once exclaimed: “in order to get no less than everything, in order to be liberated, means hate, means an effective killing machine.”

Language like that points to an ideological slipperiness resembling today’s jihadists’—a slipperiness that would have been wrestled with in a sophisticated film, which Edel’s effort is not. It was, after all, something of a sentimental convenience and something of a generational accident that Baader-Meinhof declared themselves to be on the Left at all. As the film doesn’t note, Ensslin as a teenager was partial to some views that would conventionally be called right-wing, along with others that would ordinarily be considered left-wing. Their lawyer and ideological counselor, Horst Mahler, now in his seventies, has spent his last dozen years as a professional anti-Semite and is currently serving a long sentence for Holocaust denial. But action movies are not strong on backstory, let alone exploring a history in which the modern party that most efficiently transformed itself into a “killing machine” called itself the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. It’s a pity that a two-and-an-hour-long movie is so busy with capers and shootouts that it fails to explore this—to say the least—interesting topic.

As the film does make plain, Baader-Meinhof’s “issues” (to pirate a line from the 60s) , were not the issue, nor was their analysis lucid. They were not a political party dickering over a platform, nor a vast movement piecing together a plausible strategy out of some inchoate but slowly clarifying sentiment. The Baader-Meinhof Gang longed for the absolute, the utter purgation, the ultimate purification, the overthrowing of everything less. Their intoxication was not original to them. The bringing down of the pillars (let them fall where they may) is a grand theme running throughout German romanticism—and, the lust for the final apocalypse was not only German. It was an American radical who said in 1969, as a faction called the Weathermen were readying themselves to go underground to plant bombs, “I feel like turning myself into a brick and hurling myself.”

The gang’s trajectory was full of bang-bang and blow-up and stick-your hands-up, and their flamboyant car thefts, fire fights and ambushes, combined with ham-handed police responses, galvanized millions of young Germans who were at least half-consciously looking for a way to hold their parental generation accountable for Nazism, at a time when the upper ranks of German society (including the prime minister between 1966 and 1969) was, in fact, riddled with former Nazis. Ensslin (played by the spunky Johanna Wokalek), who turned her fierce, ignorant boyfriend Andreas Baader into a Leninist-talking household name, once told a group of less ferocious radicals: “You can’t argue with people who made Auschwitz. They have weapons and we haven’t. We must arm ourselves!”

This was in 1967, after a West Berlin policeman killed a protesting student for demonstrating against the Shah of Iran. From Ensslin’s lips to the ears of the young thief Baader, whom she introduced to the joy of anti-imperialism, and soon, together, they were planting two firebombs in department stores in Frankfurt am Main, for, in Ensslin’s frame of mind, West Germans were lost in a stupor of consumerism, and only firebombs would blow them out of their apathetic collusion with the forces of imperialism.

Of this conviction, Ensslin’s father, a rigorous Lutheran minister in the grip of noble angst, said during her trial that she reached “a state of almost ecstatic self-realization, of holy self-realization.” It was perceptive of him, if chilling, to speak of his daughter’s transfiguration in Gnostic rather than intellectual terms, for the faction’s ideas were the barest of bones. Baader himself had all the ideas of a Molotov cocktail, and the sensuous-lipped Moritz Bleibtreu plays him that way. The closest the movie Baader gets to a thought is this remark he throws at Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine guerrillas in a 1970 Jordanian training camp when they object to the bare-breasted female Germans: “Sexual revolution and anti-imperialism go together. Fucking and shooting are the same.” Ejected by the Palestinians, Baader & Co. headed back to Germany to resume their lethal adventures.

If the movie passes lightly over the ideas that were presumably the point of the crusade, then, it is in this respect accurate, as when the movie’s Ensslin confronts the journalist Ulrike Meinhof (the splendid Martina Gedeck), not yet having burned her bridges and thrown in with the Gang, with the challenge: “Do you think your theoretical masturbation will change anything?” When Ensslin proclaims, “We need a new morality,” what she means is more like no morality at all.

But the relative verisimilitude of Complex conceals its deficiency, which is the deficiency shared by its entire genre of action-history film. It suffers from the reductive quality that Arthur Miller once described to me as the “simple recognition of reality,” which is characteristic of naturalism. The student movement is brutally set on by the police. (True.) Some of the movement’s outliers resolve on “action.” By “action,” they mean violence. No alternative is proposed. The student movement is the gateway drug. What gives the movie its momentum is its sense of inevitability, for once they are launched on their course, Baader, Meinhof, and the rest are stick-figures of the Zeitgeist, not choosing human beings. They purport to be doing politics but they are doing Triumph of the Will, the absence of politics. Nobody on screen seems ever to have thought that anything could be accomplished by civil disobedience, or by any other means of changing the world besides shooting it up.

But this is only to say that the reality of Baader-Meinhof, hallucinatory as it was, was built on a delusion shared by many—that the vast crimes of the recent German past could be purged with effusions of terror and could not be purged in any other manner. The film can’t be faulted for depicting them in all their crudity. At one point, as the smart police official (played by an underutilized Bruno Ganz) says, according to a respectable poll, a quarter of West Germans under 40 said they felt “a certain sympathy” with the Gang; one in ten said they would be willing to hide one of the gang from the cops. “We must change conditions,” he says, in a sort of self-parody of liberal hand-wringing. In truth, the Gang was destroyed without global reforms—though it took years after the Vietnam War ended. At another point the Ganz character declares that what motivates Baader-Meinhof is “a myth.” The contradiction doesn’t strike him—or anyone else in the film. The movie, almost as tedious as it is breathless, moves on to the next kinetic moment.

Todd Gitlin, a onetime president of Students for a Democratic Society who teaches at Columbia University, is the author of 12 books, including The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.