Fast guitar riffs, a motorbike chasing a fighter jet taking off. The driver (without a helmet!) wears aviator goggles, his blond hair blows in the wind, “Highway to the Danger Zone”. Heavy machines, speed and of course a military cliché. Just like top gun, but this is not Tom Cruise, this is his German colleague Henning Baum in a documentary for the private broadcaster RTL. He sends the former “Last Bull” and “King of Palma” at prime time for a kind of reality check: Henning Baum, the former community service, should get to know the real everyday life of a Bundeswehr soldier.
For top gun producer Jerry Bruckheimer received considerable support from the US military in the 1980s. The Bundeswehr is also closing the hangars of the Eurofighter on.
But before he gets on the plane, the actor has to complete basic training under camera accompaniment in Germersheim in the Palatinate, only then does special training for pilots begin. In the swimming pool, for example, he practices how to release an ejection seat and land in the water. He is also allowed to rub camouflage paint on himself in the forest, and at the shooting range the experienced marksman hits better than expected, to the delight of the trainers. But even the trained tree sometimes reaches its limits: for example in the centrifuge, which, like a large slingshot, simulates the forces that act on the pilot’s body at more than 2000 kilometers per hour. Action-packed sequences to warm you up, after all we are here at RTL.
Henning Baum also pursues serious questions: what does it mean to (now) be a soldier in the Bundeswehr?
The actor is fearless and testosterone-heavy, that’s his image. From the off, he leads through the documentary with a deep narrator’s voice. But it gets emotional when Baum takes a back seat as an interviewer and lets the Bundeswehr veterans do the talking. Some former soldiers tell him about their fears on deployment and the lasting trauma, for example after their return from Afghanistan. They wanted to serve their country, they say, but the hard everyday life away from their families was torturous.
A lot has changed for the Bundeswehr since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Suddenly there is hope for security again in the troupe that has been saved and not particularly valued. She is actively recruiting and this documentary also gets attention during prime time. Whether that helps in the long term to improve their image and really attract people remains to be seen. At the campfire, the career changer recruit Baum also asks the veterans and gets clear answers: Society and politics should do more. To this day, for example, there is no veteran concept that would make it easier for those who return from a foreign assignment, who are often traumatized, to return to everyday life. They demand more recognition for their work and a different view of the Bundeswehr in society.
What sticks with you after this documentary is above all one thing: great respect for those people who devote their lives to the great ideal of security and peace. Henning Baum also expresses this respect, through whose eyes the viewer understands better. And then there would be Baum’s first Eurofighter-Flight. Because, unlike Tom Cruise, it ends early. With a pale face and a full “emergency bag”.
“Deployment for Henning Baum – what it means to be a Bundeswehr soldier” on RTL +.