Germany in Autumn, a collaborative effort of eleven of the leading filmmakers of the New German Cinema, reflects on the tragic events of autumn 1977, when a public official was kidnapped and executed by members of the Baader-Meinhof Group. It contains a startling and revealing autobiographical sequence by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who turns the camera mercilessly on himself in his exploration of private and public fascism. Shot in his apartment, this thirty-minute sequence near the beginning of the film provides a setting for the whole enterprise. It is an unblinking portrait of the artist as a powerless intellectual, and of the powerless intellectual as a personal tyrant.