The Raspberry Pi is a versatile device with many project possibilities:
On its surface, the plot of The Raspberry Reich is deceptively simple. The film follows a group of young, attractive, and emotionally volatile German urban guerrillas led by a radical lesbian revolutionary known only as "The Commandant" (played with chilling deadpan by Susanne Sachße). The Commandant’s mission? To overthrow the "hetero-fascist capitalist patriarchy" by dismantling the most bourgeois of institutions: monogamy and the nuclear family.
After a botched bank robbery (where the revolutionaries steal a money-transport vehicle only to find it filled with advertising jingles on cassette tapes), the group kidnaps the son of a wealthy industrialist, named Holger (Andreas Rupp). The Commandant orders Holger to be "radicalized" through group sex and ideological re-education. The film then descends into a delirious fever dream of black balaclavas, leather harnesses, and repeated recitations of Theodor Adorno, Wilhelm Reich, and the Red Army Faction (RAF) manifestos.
The "raspberry" of the title is a triple entendre: the raspberry as a rude sound of derision (blowing a raspberry at authority); the fruit’s red color (communism); and a slang term for a woman’s genitalia—a nod to the film’s radical feminist, matriarchal revolutionary cell.
The Raspberry Reich premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) in 2004, where it predictably caused a firestorm. Conservative German critics accused LaBruce of defiling the memory of the RAF’s real-life victims. Leftist critics accused him of aestheticizing terrorism. Feminist critics were divided: some hailed the film’s matriarchal, queer-positive power structure; others decried the male-male sex scenes as a betrayal of the lesbian commandant’s vision.
LaBruce, ever the trickster, relished the chaos. In contemporary interviews, he stated: “The far left and the far right both hate my movies because I refuse to be pious. The left wants revolution to be chaste and noble. The right wants sex to be private and shameful. I want revolution to be sloppy, public, and extremely horny.”
The film also arrived at a moment when the "terrorist chic" aesthetic was being commodified by fashion houses (think: Balenciaga’s later hoodies, or the fetishization of Che Guevara t-shirts). The Raspberry Reich recognized that the iconography of revolution—the ski mask, the AK-47, the guerrilla uniform—had already been absorbed into the capitalist spectacle. LaBruce’s response was to push that absorption to its logical, absurd extreme: a porn film where the actors literally fuck the revolution to death.
The Raspberry Reich is a 2004 German film directed by Ulrike Ottinger that imagines a radical left-wing revolutionary group called the Raspberry Reich. The film follows members of this group as they attempt to create a new revolutionary culture by blending political militancy, sexual experimentation, and aesthetic provocation. Their methods include agitprop, guerrilla theater, and a fixation on appropriating the language and symbols of historical revolutionary movements—especially the Red Army Faction and other 20th-century militant leftist groups—while adding surreal, fetishized rituals.
For the curious reader, a word of caution: This is not a movie for everyone. It is explicit, politically incorrect (even by radical standards), and deliberately frustrating. It is currently available on physical media through Cult Epics (the Blu-ray includes a commentary track where LaBruce and his cast try to out-argue each other) and streams on several subscription services dedicated to queer arthouse and avant-garde cinema. Be advised: The uncut version runs 92 minutes. The edited "soft-core" version, which LaBruce disowned, runs 75 minutes and is nonsensical.
