There’s nothing like being a revolutionary to ruin one’s family life. That’s one of the lessons to be learned in " The RAF’s Germany, " a series of films screening at the Harvard Film Archive in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut. Another might be that anti-establishment violence and government repression can inspire a nation’s most profound and poignant filmmaking.

From the ’70s to ’90s (elements machine-gunned the US embassy in Bonn during the last Gulf War), German terrorists killed some 50 people through bombings and assassinations, and though the Red Army Faktion might have failed in its project to overthrow the government, it did light a fire under German directors like Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, Reinhard Hauff, and Rainer Werner Faßbinder. They saw the upheaval as a manifestation of that smallest unit of political violence: the family. That theme recurs throughout Andres Veiel’s brilliant documentary Black Box BRD/Black Box Germany (2001; April 12 at 7 p.m. with an introduction by the director and April 14 at 9 p.m.), an account of two of the last-known RAF incidents, the murder of Deutsche Bank CEO Alfred Herrhausen in 1989 and the death of his alleged assassin, Wolfgang Grams, four years later in a police shootout.

With assaultive cutting and compelling interviews, the film parallels the biographies of the two men, uncovering an almost Oedipal dynamic. Grams’s father joined the SS during World War II; Herrhausen was a charismatic leader in the Hitler youth. Grams rebelled against his father’s authoritarianism by becoming a radical — and what more suitable target for his wrath than Herrhausen, whose bank embodied capitalist exploitation and whose past reflected the fascism of his father? Yet before his death Herrhausen had a change of heart and was trying to get his bank to void Third World debts. And before his death, Grams was trying to start a normal, middle-class family life.

That family unit is the origin and destiny of the revolutionary violence in Die bleierne Zeit/Marianne & Juliane (1981; April 15 at 9:30 p.m.), perhaps the underrated Margarethe von Trotta’s finest film. Juliane (Jutta Lampe) writes for a woman’s magazine, campaigns for abortion rights, and lives with a placid architect; Marianne (Barbara Sukowa) robs banks and blows up people. Marianne (the character is based on Gudrun Ensslin, girlfriend of Andreas Baader of the notorious RAF Baader-Meinhof gang) is caught and jailed, and the two sisters’ lacerating efforts to reconcile in the stark prison visiting area are intercut with flashbacks to their childhood and their forbidding minister father, their sibling rivalry, their youthful rebellion and idealism. More plaintive than the past is the future as Jan, Marianne’s young son, bears the consequences of his elders’ illusions and folly.

Jan is not unlike Jeanne (Julia Hummer) in Christian Petzold’s touching Die innere Sicherheit/The State I Am In (2000; April 13 at 7 p.m.). Her parents are revolutionaries, wanted by the police and on the run, but she craves CDs, clothes, and boyfriends. Not that her parents wouldn’t love her to have all that, but hanging around the mall and dating would alert the authorities. Jeanne does fall in love, of course — so does she conform to her parents’ rebellion or rebel and accept conformity? Reminiscent of Sidney Lumet’s Running on Empty, Die innere Sicherheit is more convincing and melancholy.

In Philip Gröning’s pseudo-Godardian Die Terroristen!/The Terrorists! (1992; April 14 at 7 p.m.), three slackers in Hamburg decide to assassinate a politician with an exploding toy car (maybe they got the idea after seeing Clint Eastwood’s The Dead Pool). Why? " Cynical violence has no reason. But is perfectly justified. Just like fun. " So claims one of their slogans. Some might find that hard to accept after September 11, especially since al-Qaeda were getting started in the same city and at the same time that the film was shot.

Then there’s the poster boy of European angst, Bruno Ganz. He plays a professor who gets caught in the crossfire during a violent demonstration in Reinhard Hauff’s Messer im Kopf/Knife in the Head (1978; April 11 at 9:30 p.m., with the director present). A bullet lodges in his brain, turning him into a basket case. As he struggles to regain control of his body and mind, the right and left (the latter led by his wife’s lover!) battle over him as a symbol of their cause (sounds like a cross between Citizen Ruth and Regarding Henry). Although the film is at times over-metaphorical, Ganz’s performance roots it in a pain that is primal and familiar, a reminder that revolutionary violence begins at home.