Postwar

France’s brief, month-long protests of the previous year. The ‘hot autumn’ of that year, with its wildcat strikes and spontaneous occupations by small groups of workers demanding a say in the way factories were run, led a generation of Italian student theorists and their followers to conclude that their root and branch rejection of the ‘bourgeois state’ was the right tactic. Workers’ autonomy—as tactic and as objective—was the path of the future. Not only were reforms—in schools and factories alike—unattainable, they were undesirable. Compromise was defeat.

Just why ‘unofficial’ Italian Marxists should have taken this turn remains a matter of debate. The traditionally subtle and accommodating strategy of the Italian Communist Party left it exposed to the charge of working inside ‘the system’, of having a vested interest in stability and thus being, as its left-wing critics charged, ‘objectively reactionary’. And the Italian political system itself was both corrupt and seemingly impermeable to change: in the parliamentary elections of 1968 the Christian Democrats and Communists both increased their vote, and every other party came nowhere. But while this might account for the disaffection of the extra-parliamentary Left, it cannot fully explain their turn to violence.

‘Maoism’—or at any rate, an uncritical fascination with the Chinese Cultural Revolution then in full swing— was more extensive in Italy than anywhere else in Europe. Parties, groups and journals of a Maoist persuasion, recognizable by their insistence upon the adjective ‘Marxist-Leninist’ (to distinguish them from the despised official Communists), sprung up in quick succession in these years, inspired by China’s Red Guards and emphasizing the identity of interests binding workers and intellectuals. Student theorists in Rome and Bologna even mimicked the rhetoric of the Beijing doctrinaires, dividing academic subjects into ‘pre-bourgeois remnants’ (Greek and Latin), the ‘purely ideological’ (e.g. history) and the ‘indirectly ideological’ (physics, chemistry, mathematics).

The putatively Maoist combination of revolutionary romanticism and workerist dogma was incarnated in the journal (and movement) Lotta Continua (‘Continuous Struggle’)—whose name, as was often the case, encapsulates its project. Lotta Continua first appeared in the autumn of 1969, by which time the turn to violence was well under way. Among the slogans of the Turin student demonstrations of June 1968 were ‘No to social peace in the factories!’ and ‘Only violence helps where violence reigns.’ In the months that followed, university and factory demonstrations saw an accentuation of the taste for violence, both rhetorical (‘Smash the state, don’t change it!’) and real. The most popular song of the Italian student movement in these months was, appropriately enough, La Violenza.

The ironies of all this were not lost on contemporaries. As the film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini remarked in the wake of student confrontations with the police in Rome’s Villa Borghese gardens, the class roles were now reversed: the privileged children of the bourgeoisie were screaming revolutionary slogans and beating up the underpaid sons of southern sharecroppers charged with preserving civic order. For anyone with an adult memory of the recent Italian past, this turn to violence could only end badly. Whereas French students had played with the idea that public authority might prove vulnerable to disruption from below, a caprice that Gaullism’s firmly- grounded institutions allowed them to indulge with impunity, Italy’s radicals had good reason to believe that they might actually succeed in rending the fabric of the post-Fascist Republic—and they were keen to try. On April 24th 1969, bombs were planted at the Milan Trade Fair and the central railway station. Eight months later, after the Pirelli conflicts had been settled and the strike movement ended, the Agricultural Bank on the Piazza Fontana in Milan was blown up. The ‘strategy of tension’ that underlay the lead years of the Seventies had begun.

Italian radicals in the Sixties could be accused of having forgotten their country’s recent past. In West Germany, the opposite was true. Until 1961, a post-war generation had been raised to see Nazism as responsible for war and defeat; but its truly awful aspects were consistently downplayed. The trial that year in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, followed from 1963 to 1965 by the so-called ‘Auschwitz trials’ in Frankfurt, belatedly brought to German public attention the evils of the Nazi regime. In Frankfurt, 273 witnesses attested to the scale and depth of German crimes against humanity, reaching far beyond the 23 men (22 SS and 1 camp kapo) on charge. In 1967, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich published their hugely influential study of Die Unfahigkeit zu trauen (‘The Inability to Mourn’), arguing that the official West German recognition of Nazi evil had never been accompanied by genuine individual recognition of responsibility.

West German intellectuals vigorously took up this idea. Established writers, playwrights and film-makers— Gunter Grass, Martin Walser, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, Jurgen Habermas, Rolf Hochhuth, Edgar Reitz, all born between 1927 and 1932—now focused their work increasingly upon Nazism and the failure to come to terms with it. But a younger cohort of intellectuals, born during or just after World War Two, took a harsher stance. Lacking direct knowledge of what had gone before, they saw all Germany’s faults through the prism of the failings not so much of Nazism as of the Bonn Republic. Thus for Rudi Dutschke (born in 1940), Peter Schneider (1940), Gudrun Ensslin (1940) or the slightly younger Andreas Baader (born in 1943) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945), West Germany’s post-war democracy was not the solution; it was the problem. The apolitical, consumerist, American- protected cocoon of the Bundesrepublik was not just imperfect and amnesiac; it had actively conspired with its Western masters to deny the German past, to bury it in material goods and anti- Communist propaganda. Even its constitutional attributes were inauthentic: as Fassbinder put it, ‘Our democracy was decreed for the Western occupation zone, we didn’t fight for it ourselves.’

The youthful radical intelligentsia of the German Sixties accused the Bonn Republic of covering up the crimes of its founding generation. Many of the men and women born in Germany during the war and immediate post-war years never knew their fathers: who they were, what they had done. In school they were taught nothing about German history post-1933 (and not much more about the Weimar era either). As Peter Schneider and others would later explain, they lived in a vacuum constructed over a void: even at home—indeed, especially at home—no-one would talk about ‘it’.

Their parents, the cohort of Germans born between 1910 and 1930, did not just refuse to discuss the past. Skeptical of political promises and grand ideas, their attention was relentlessly and a trifle uneasily focused on material well-being, stability and respectability. As Adenauer had understood, their identification with America and ‘the West’ derived in no small measure from a wish to avoid association with all the baggage of ‘Germanness’. As a result, in the eyes of their sons and daughters they stood for nothing. Their material achievements were tainted by their moral inheritance. If ever there was a generation whose rebellion really was grounded in the rejection of everything their parents represented—everything: national pride, Nazism, money, the West, peace, stability, law and democracy—it was ‘Hitler’s children’, the West German radicals of the Sixties.

In their eyes the Federal Republic exuded self-satisfaction and hypocrisy. First there was the Spiegel Affair. In 1962 Germany’s leading weekly news magazine had published a series of articles investigating West German defense policy that hinted at shady dealings by Adenauer’s Bavarian defense minister, Franz-Josef Strauss. With Adenauer’s authorization and at Strauss’s behest, the government harassed the paper, arrested its publisher and ransacked its offices. This shameless abuse of police powers to suppress unwelcome reporting attracted universal condemnation—even the impeccably conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung observed that ‘this is an embarrassment to our democracy, which cannot live without a free press, without indivisible freedom of the press.’

Then, four years later in December 1966, the ruling Christian Democrats selected as Chancellor in succession to Ludwig Erhard the former Nazi Kurt-Georg Kiesinger. The new Chancellor had been a paid-up Party member for twelve years, and his appointment was taken by many as conclusive evidence of the Bonn Republic’s unrepentant cynicism. If the head of the government was not embarrassed to have supported Hitler for twelve years, who could take seriously West German professions of repentance or commitment to liberal values at a time when neo-Nazi organizations were once again surfacing at the political fringe? As Grass expressed it in an open letter to Kiesinger at a moment of neo-Nazi resurgence:

‘How are young people in our country to find arguments against the Party that died two decades ago but is being resurrected as the NPD if you burden the Chancellorship with the still very considerable weight of your own past?’

Kiesinger headed the government for three years, from 1966-1969. In those years the German Extra- Parliamentary Left (as it had taken to describing itself) moved into the universities with dramatic success. Some of the causes taken up by the SDS, the Socialist Students Union, were by now commonplace across continental Western Europe: overcrowded dormitories and classes; remote and inaccessible professors; dull and