German history. "We tried in this film to show what the RAF really were," says Stefan Aust, former editor of Der Spiegel, on whose bestselling book the film is based. "They felt themselves being revolutionary [but] in the end it was a group of people killing others and in the end themselves."

Then why is it so controversial?

Many have condemned it for its exciting, Bonnie-and-Clyde depiction of the gang members. The widow of Jurgen Ponto, a banker killed by the group, has returned the Federal Cross of Merit, Germany's highest civilian honour, in protest. Bettina Rohl, the daughter of Ulrike Meinhof, has slated it for its "hero worship". This movie, says the film critic for Berliner Zeitung, has given Andreas Baader the cult status he always craved: "Posthumously he has become the hero of a real action film."

But what could be considered chic about these killers?

Baader was the handsome, dissolute son of a history professor; Ensslin the daughter of a respected vicar; and Meinhof a pacifist gone AWOL: a shy journalist who forsook her children for terrorism. The gang drove Mercedes and BMWs, dubbed 'Baader-Meinhof Wagons'. At their most fashionable, the group had a broad network of sympathisers: radical, usually bourgeois, Germans who saw them as leather-jacketed rebels enacting their own frustrations. One in four West Germans under thirty felt "a certain sympathy" with them. Later, the suicides of Baader and Ennslin made them martyrs to hard-core leftists, some of whom still insist they were murdered. Even now, their mystique endures: you can buy RAF T-shirts with the group's machine-gun logo; a few years ago a fashion designer adopted the slogan "Prada-Meinhof". In 2002, the ICA had a month of shows and talks called 'Red Army Friction'. They belong, albeit awkwardly, wrote the journalist and historian Neal Ascherson, to an historic German "tradition of doomed struggle, fighting to the end in order to leave a message for the future".

What effect did the RAF have on German politics?

Most historians agree that all it achieved was to make West Germany a more paranoid, repressive place than before. In the security clampdown, the BKA (the German equivalent of the FBI) became a hugely powerful institution and hasty laws banned all so-called 'radicals' from public service. Peaceful leftwing groups that had been inspired to join mainstream politics were weakened by the group's example. And if the Baader-Meinhof gang wanted to provoke a violent response from the state that would encourage more 'revolutionaries' to take up arms, that failed, too. Most Germans welcomed the strong response of the state and the end of the violence. "It was really a threat to the stability of this country," says Aust. "And actually it was the only threat after the War that this country ever had from the inside."

Where are they now?

Although the RAF did not formally disband until 1998, it was hugely discredited after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the group was shown to have been supported by the East German Stasi. Its last attack was the bombing of a prison in 1993, in which no one was seriously injured. Some of its members remain in jail; others have attempted to lead quiet, post-terrorist lives. Astrid Proll, for instance, who drove a getaway car for the gang and insists she left the RAF "before it got really cruel", worked in London as a park attendant and mechanic before being discovered in 1999 working as a picture editor at The Independent. Ulrich Scholze, who stole cars for the RAF, is reported to be working as a teacher of textile and design in north Germany, while Irmgard Moller, who killed three people at a US Army base and tried to stab herself to death, is living in anonymity in Hamburg. Horst Mahler, a radical lawyer who defended Baader and Ensslin in court and later joined the gang, organising training trips to the Middle East, is now an ideologue for the German neo-Nazi movement.