Germany in Autumn, a collaborative effort of 11 of the leading filmmakers of the New German Cinema, was designed as a protest against the new tendencies toward Fascism in West Germany. The film takes the specific form of a series of reflections on the tragic events of Autumn 1977, when public official Hanns Martin Schleyer was kidnapped and executed by members of the Baader-Meinhof group, whose core members died rather mysteriously in a Stuttgart-Stammheim prison. Most viewers were disappointed in the film, politically and artistically, but Germany in Autumn remains an important and unique film in contemporary German Cinema, and also contains a revealing autobiographical sequence by Fassbinder. The following excerpt from a critique by Sight and Sound critic John Pym is a fair response to the film's ambition and ultimate failure:
“The film's contents range from newsreel clips of Rommel's cortege, through scenes of the massed dignitaries at Schleyer's funeral and a fictitious argument among TV executives about a controversial production of ‘Antigone' (scripted by Heinrich Boell), to a long elegiac sequence recording the burial of the Stammheim prisoners. The most abruptly startling and subjective episode has Fassbinder at one point interviewing his mother, who concludes with an endorsement of benevolent dictatorship, and at the next physically abusing his boyfriend in a display of domestic tyranny--the corollary, one presumes, of public injustice and private impotence. The filmmakers, however, never really come to grips with the implications of the fact that, for example, an apparently repressive state can also allow the filming of a long interview with an imprisoned radical lawyer. Judgments are eschewed: the dead--the murderers and their victims--simply become aspects of German history....”