Postwar

bombed the US Air Force HQ at Ramstein in West Germany, and the following month the ‘Gudrun Ensslin Kommando’ tried unsuccessfully to assassinate the US Supreme Commander in Europe.

Since the German terrorist underground had no defined goals, its achievements can only be measured by the extent of its success in disrupting German public life and undermining the institutions of the Republic. In this it clearly failed. The most distinctively repressive governmental action of the time was the passing of the Berufsverbot in 1972 by the Social Democratic government of Willy Brandt. This decree excluded from state employment any person who engaged in political acts considered detrimental to the Constitution, and was ostensibly aimed at keeping supporters of Left and Right political extremes out of sensitive posts. In a culture already preternaturally disposed to public conformity this certainly aroused fears of censorship and worse; but it was hardly the prelude to dictatorship that its critics feared and—at the outer extreme— hoped.

Neither the terrorist Left nor the apparently renascent neo-Nazi Right—notably responsible for killing 13 people and wounding 220 others in a bomb attack on Munich’s Oktoberfest in 1980— succeeded in destabilizing the Republic, although they did provoke careless talk in conservative political circles of the need to curb civil liberties and enforce ‘Order’. Much more worrying was the extent to which the Baader- Meinhof Group in particular was able to tap into a fund of generalized sympathy for its ideas among otherwise law-abiding intellectuals and academics.[205]

One source of local sympathy was a growing nostalgia in literary and artistic circles for Germany’s lost past. Germany, it was felt, had been doubly ‘disinherited’: by the Nazis, who had deprived Germans of a respectable, ‘usable’ past; and by the Federal Republic, whose American overseers had imposed upon Germany a false image of itself. In the words of Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, the film director, the nation had been ‘spiritually disinherited and dispossessed… we live in a country without homeland, without Heimat.’ The distinctly nationalist tinge to German extreme-Left terrorism—its targeting of American occupiers, multinational corporations and the ‘international’ capitalist order—rang a chord, as did the terrorists’ claim that it was Germans who were now the victims of the manipulations and interests of others.

These same years saw an outpouring of films, speeches, books, television programs and public commentary on the country’s problematic history and identity. Just as the Red Army Fraktion claimed to be fighting ‘Fascism’—by proxy, so to speak—so West Germany’s intellectuals, Left and Right, battled for control of Germany’s true heritage. Syberberg’s fellow film director Edgar Reitz directed a hugely popular, sixteen-hour television mini- series: ‘Heimat: A German Chronicle’. The story of a family from the Hunsruck countryside of the Rhineland Palatinate, it traced contemporary German history through a domestic narrative reaching from the end of World War One to the present.

In Reitz’s film the inter-war years especially are bathed in a sepia-like afterglow of fond memory; even the Nazi era is hardly permitted to intrude upon fond recollections of better times. The Americanized world of the post-war Federal Republic, on the other hand, is presented with angry, icy disdain: its materialist neglect of national values and its destruction of memory and continuity are depicted as violently corrosive of human values and community. As in Fassbinder’s Marriage of Maria Braun the main character—also ‘Maria’—does duty for a victimized Germany; but Heimat is quite explicitly nostalgic and even xenophobic in its contempt for foreign values and longing for the lost soul of ‘deep Germany’.

Reitz, like Syberberg and others, was publicly scornful of the American television series ‘Holocaust’, first shown on German television in 1979. If there were to be depictions of Germany’s past, however painful, then it was the business of Germans to produce them. ‘The most radical process of expropriation there is,’ wrote Reitz, ‘is the expropriation of one’s own history. The Americans have stolen our history through Holocaust.’ The application of a ‘commercial aesthetic’ to Germany’s past was America’s way of controlling it. The struggle of German directors and artists against American ‘kitsch’ was part of the struggle against American capitalism.

Reitz and Fassbinder were among the directors of Deutschland im Herbst (‘Germany in Autumn’) a 1978 collage of documentary, movie clips and interviews covering the events of the autumn of 1977, notably the kidnapping and killing of Hans Martin Schleyer and the subsequent suicide of Ensslin and Baader. The film is notable not so much for its expressions of empathy for the terrorists as for the distinctive terms in which these are conveyed. By careful inter-cutting, the Third Reich and the Federal Republic are made to share a family resemblance. ‘Capitalism’, ‘the profit system’ and National Socialism are presented as equally reprehensible and indefensible, with the terrorists emerging as latter-day resisters: modern Antigones struggling with their consciences and against political repression.

Considerable cinematic talent was deployed in Deutschland im Herbst—as in other contemporary German films—to depict West Germany as a police state, akin to Nazism if only in its (as yet unrevealed) capacity for repression and violence. Horst Mahler, a semi-repentant terrorist then still in prison, explains to the camera that the emergence of an extra-parliamentary opposition in 1967 was the ‘antifascist revolution’ that did not happen in 1945. The true struggle against Germany’s Nazi demons was thus being carried through by the country’s young radical underground—albeit by the use of remarkably Nazi-like methods, a paradox Mahler does not address.

The implicit relativizing of Nazism in Deutschland im Herbst was already becoming quite explicit in intellectual apologias for anti-capitalist terror. As the philosopher Detlef Hartmann explained in 1985, ‘We can learn from the obvious linkage of money, technology and extermination in New Order Nazi imperialism… (how) to lift the veil covering the civilized extermination technology of the New Order of Bretton Woods.’ It was this easy slippage—the thought that what binds Nazism and capitalist democracy is more important than their differences, and that it was Germans who had fallen victim to both—that helped account for the German radical Left’s distinctive insensitivity on the subject of Jews.

On September 5th 1972, the Palestinian organization Black September attacked the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics and killed eleven athletes, as well as one German policeman. Almost certainly, the killers had local assistance from the radical Left (though it is a curiousity of German extremist politics of the time that the far Right would have been no less pleased to offer its services). The link between Palestinian organizations and European terrorist groups was already well-established—Ensslin, Baader and Meinhof all ‘trained’ at one time with Palestinian guerillas, along with Basques, Italians, Irish Republicans and others. But only Germans went the extra mile: when four gunmen (two Germans, two Arabs) hi-jacked an Air France plane in June 1976 and flew it to Entebbe, in Uganda, it was the Germans who undertook to identify and separate the Jewish passengers from the rest.

If this action, so unmistakably reminiscent of selections of Jews by Germans in another time and place, did not definitively discredit the Baader-Meinhof gang in the eyes of its sympathizers it was because its arguments, if not its methods, attracted quite broad consent: Germans, not Jews, were now the victims; and American capitalism, not German National Socialism, was the perpetrator. ‘War crimes’ were now things that Americans did to—e.g.—Vietnamese. There was a ‘new patriotism’ abroad in West Germany, and it is more than a little ironic that Baader, Meinhof and their friends, whose violent revolt was initially directed against the Germany-first self- satisfaction of their parents’ generation, should find themselves co-opted by the reverberations of that same nationalist heritage. It was altogether appropriate that Horst Mahler, one of the few surviving founders of Left terrorism in West Germany, should end up three decades later on the far Right of the political spectrum.

In external respects, contemporary Italian terrorism was not markedly different from the German kind. It too drew on para-Marxist rhetoric from the Sixties, and most of its leaders received their political education in the university protests of that time. The main underground organization of Left terror, the self-styled Brigate Rosse (‘Red Brigades’, BR) first came to public attention in October 1970, when it distributed leaflets describing goals that closely resembled those of the Red Army Fraktion. Like Baader, Meinhof and others, the leaders of the BR were young (the best known of them, Renato Curcio, was just 29 in 1970), mostly former students, and devoted to armed underground struggle for its own sake.

But there were also some important differences. From the outset, Italian Left terrorists placed far greater emphasis upon their purported relationship to the ‘workers’; and indeed in certain industrial towns of the north, Milan in particular, the more respectable fringes of the ultra-Left did have a small popular following. Unlike the German terrorists, grouped around a tiny hard core of criminals, the Italian far Left ranged from legitimate political parties through urban guerrilla networks to micro-sects of armed political bandits, with a fair degree of overlap in membership and objectives.