(no subject)

[exceptionalthief]

Excerpt taken from Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp, which takes place in 1977 rather than the film's timeframe of 1988.

Leland: John McClane
Anton "Little Tony the Red" Gruber: Hans Gruber

(In the novel, Leland had encountered Gruber previously)

Leland had seen the sheet on Anton Gruber a half dozen times. "Little Tony the Red" was supposed to lend him a certain glamor. He was thirty years old, the son of a Stuttgart industrialist, raised by nurses, sent to private schools. On his eighteenth birthday he was given a Mercedes; on his nineteenth, another. Through the late sixties, he ran with a bunch of indolent rich kids who open their summers at Saint-Tropez, winters at Gstaad. Some of those people had been on the arty fringe of the Baader-Meinhof gang, and gradually Anton Gruber was drawn in, after initially becoming involved with the German student movement. He denounced his parents and accused his father of the "crimes" of hypocrisy, complacency, and arrogance.
There was more to it than that: Gruber pere had been an officer in the S.S. during the war, like so many presently successful German businessmen. Automobiles, electronics — the old Nazis were everywhere, silent about the past, smug about the present. A generation of the damned, whose children hated their parents' lies and self-justifications.

The Baader-Meinhof gang referred to in this passage was a West German far-left revolutionary group that came to be known as the Red Army Faction, upon which the West German Volksfrei Movement of the film was based.