Along with Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, perhaps the Fassbinder film most concerned with contemporary West German issues. A razor-sharp and politically astute take on terrorism as bourgeois diversion, and on how the Third Generation of radicals (following the idealists of ’68 and the Baader-Meinhof Group) has no particular ideology, making them easy prey for exploitation by the state. Eddie Constantine (who played himself in Beware of a Holy Whore) stars as an industrialist kidnapped by the Schopenhauer-spouting upper-middle-class terrorist cell, whose members don’t realize they are being set up by the authorities. Fassbinder may have been outlining the thesis of this film when he stated: “In the last analysis, terrorism is an idea generated by capitalism to justify better defense measures to safeguard capitalism.”