No Island: The Palmers Kidnapping of 1977

Gast: Alexander Binder

The year 1968 was made tragically famous by the student unrest in France and Germany, unlike in Austria, where the cultural revolution took place in an orderly manner. Only a small handful of people there pushed for a political revolution and for the most part this was limited to verbal jousting.

On 9 November 1977, Austria lost its reputation as an “island state” unaffected by international terrorism. The wave of violence that had rolled through Germany also made its presence felt in Austria. The industrialist Walter Michael Palmers was kidnapped by the “Movement 2 June” organisation and only released after a ransom of 30.5 million Austrian schillings had been paid. Most of this money went to the Red Army Faction and this helped them finance their ideological struggle until 1998, when the group was finally disbanded. Thomas Gratt, Othmar Keplinger and Reinhard Pitsch were the main people responsible for the kidnapping.

No Island: The Palmers Kidnapping of 1977 tries to uncover the background to this event and it gives prominence to the worldview of the main perpetrators. In the film, the kidnappers speak for the first time about what they did.