Life in a State of Siege

Fear and division triggered by a "mad operation "

"When the enemy is mad, keep still. When his fury has subsided, attack again." --Terrorist Siegfried Haag

Bonn looked like a city at war--as, in a way, it was. The fortress-like Cologne-Bonn airport north of the West German capital was filled with machine-gun-bearing border police, supplemented by plainclothes agents in unmarked cars. Barbed wire surrounded almost every government building, as well as the houses of all high-level officials. Makeshift machine-gun bunkers, constructed of stacked sandbags, appeared on the rooftops of buildings throughout the city's government section along the Rhine. Night and day, armed police stopped virtually every car in the city and suburbs.

The extraordinary security precautions were in response to the kidnaping of Industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer by terrorists of the notorious Red Army Faction (TIME, Sept. 19). In a daring ambush of his automobile, Schleyer's three bodyguards and chauffeur were killed; it was the third terrorist attack on a prominent West German this year. Speaking before a packed session of the Bundestag last week, West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt made an emotional televised appeal to Schleyer's kidnapers to "stop this mad operation," which strikes "against our liberal order as a whole, against any human order whatsoever and therefore against all of us." He assured West Germans--who according to recent polls support a tougher government response to terrorism--that he would do all that the "state of law allows us."

Despite secret contacts between the government and the terrorists through an intermediary, Swiss Lawyer Denis Payot, fear grew that Schleyer's chance of survival was slim. The terrorists had demanded that eleven jailed terrorists, including the leaders of the notorious Baader-Meinhof gang who are serving life sentences for the 1972 bombing murders of four U.S. servicemen, be given safe passage to a country of their choice, either Libya or South Yemen. In letters to West German newspapers, TV and radio stations, Schleyer's kidnapers threatened that unless their demands were met he would be shot and a major government figure would be seized as a new hostage.

For many prominent Germans, life resembled a state of siege. Parties, theater events and public appearances were canceled. President Walter Scheel dropped all appointments outside the capital, and Chancellor Schmidt's wife Loki returned her tickets to a premiere performance of Aida. Henry Ford II moved a scheduled business meeting of the Ford Motor Co. from Cologne to England; British Prime Minister James Callaghan postponed a state visit to Bonn in deference to Schmidt's domestic problems.

The impunity with which the terrorists have struck over the past five months has hit West Germany's business community hard. Several businessmen last week recalled an odd incident. After the head of Germany's Dresdener Bank, Jurgen Ponto, was murdered in July, some of his friends gathered for a memorial service in Sensbachtal, where Ponto had kept a hunting lodge. Looking around the room, which contained some of the biggest names in German industry and politics, one man remarked, "The next victim of terrorism is almost certainly standing in this room now." The speaker was Hanns-Martin Schleyer.

Since Ponto's death, virtually every company has strengthened its security, hired additional guards and installed monitoring cameras. Agencies providing bodyguards for hire, and other private security services, are doing brisk business. Complained one official: "I can't drink a beer without security men. I can't go to the toilet without security men. My family life is ruined. And I can't have a relationship with another woman without security men." A Bavarian tycoon grumbled that the elaborate alarm system hastily installed in his house is forever going off, "sending the two resident guards running into nowhere with their pistols." After the Schleyer kidnaping, Daimler-Benz received 138 orders for bulletproof Mercedes-Benz limousines.

The issue of terrorism, and the government's response to it, has revealed deep divisions in German society. Conservatives rail against the country's university system as a hotbed of radicalism and a spawning ground for terrorist sympathizers. In defense, some professors last week publicly condemned the use of violence as a means of realizing political aims.

But while most students and faculty are quick to disavow terrorism, they also charge that the government is overreacting--particularly against students--in an atmosphere of hysteria. "Oh God!" cried one Berlin student after learning of the Schleyer kidnaping. "One step closer to a fascist state." When a lampoon appeared at Gottingen University with a "non-obit" for Schleyer, tastelessly referring to his limited options of a "shabby life" or a "shabby death," police staged a three-hour search of the student-government building, its printing offices and two apartments. They seized 33 copies of the pamphlet, and the university rector was ordered by the state education officials to suspend the student-body officers.

Many academics complain that in its enthusiasm for order, the government has been steadily eroding civil liberties. Now, in the face of a real threat from a small band of terrorists, they fear it will seize the opportunity to clamp down on the liberal movement. Says a leftist member of Schmidt's Social Democratic Party: "The country is in political trouble, it is in economic trouble, and it needs some elements to blame."

Students also complain that the government has been insensitive to grievances about the quality of life and rigidly resistant to any form of political dissent. Bonn, they argue, has been slow to counter potential causes of discontent, like unemployment; 30% of those currently out of work are in the under-25 age group. Another source of friction is the so-called Radicals' Edict, pushed through by conservative legislators in 1972 as a counter to the legalization of the Communist Party. The law requires close checks on the personal political histories of all those seeking public employment, whether it be for street cleaning or teaching school. Although only 273 have been turned down for jobs, it is an outrage to the left that 500,000 people seeking public employment have had to submit to investigations of their political beliefs.

The isolation of the country's intellectual community from the rest of society worries thoughtful observers like West Berlin Senator Peter Glotz. "It's as if there are two cultures," says Glotz, "a culture for the universities, in which most of the students read only left-wing magazines and the Frankfurter Rundschau [a large left-oriented daily], and a second culture in which people rely on the [ conservative] Springer newspapers and German television. The two cultures are cut off from one another, and nobody tries to build a bridge between them."

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