Terrorism: Why West Germany?

By LANCE MORROW

Seventy years ago, in The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad described an act of anarchist terrorism as "a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought." Today West Germans, in ordeals of introspection and defensive truculence, are trying to understand the almost autistic fury of their own terrorists. Why should their country--its political system stable and democratic, its wealth distributed reasonably well, its society open and obsessively moderate --have produced the murderous young of the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Army Faction?

Other European countries are afflicted by violent radicals, notably Italy. But somehow national stereotyping makes a certain amount of disorder seem less remarkable in Italy than in Germany. The dictum is that Germans, with their Ordnungsliebe, could not make a revolution because they refuse to walk on the grass. Today, West German police estimate that there are no more than 50 committed terrorists--abetted by perhaps 2,000 active sympathizers--in a population of more than 61 million. Despite the massive, nationwide man hunt for the killers of kidnaped Industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer, the terrorists have not yet given up or gone underground. Last week Austrian police disclosed that members of the Red Army Faction were responsible for the kidnaping in November of Viennese Millionaire Walter Palmers. He was released unharmed after his family paid a $2 million ransom, but the German Red Army members who engineered Palmers' abduction once again made good their escape. One Austrian official speculated that they were "probably somewhere between Libya and South Yemen" by now.

The terrorist problem especially torments Germans because of the history that haunts them, and because of their sensitivity about their image in the rest of the world. German history--always the dark backdrop when terrorism is discussed--has periodically involved a volatile mixture of romanticism and brutality. Jillian Becker, author of a flamboyant history of the radical Baader-Meinhof gang, calls the terrorists "Hitler's children." Others fear that their violence will coax fascism up from the rubble where it was buried 30 years ago. After the dramatic German rescue of hijacked Lufthansa passengers at Mogadishu two months ago, a Dutch diplomat's mind wandered back uneasily to the abyss: "You can't help getting the shivers at the precision with which the rescue operation was carried out. It was German military skill at work again."

Germans are caught in a painful damned-if-they-do, damned-if-they-don't dilemma with their terrorists. If they enact tough laws against radical violence, they are "Nazis again." If they do not, social order might fray to the point that real and dangerous repression would become inevitable. As John Donne wrote. "It takes so little poison to crack the crystal."

Various theories have been proposed to explain the German terrorist poison. Some ascribe it to the furor teutonicus that nourished the Nazis, but anyone discussing the country that attempted genocide should have a care about racial generalizations. Germans are methodical and tend to become unhinged by attacks on the social order. Even the terrorists are orderly and thorough in their efforts to create disorder; grimly literal minded, they zealously translate extreme theories into practice. But it is hard to argue that Germans have a greater genetic predisposition to violence than other peoples. These days most Germans are careful to avoid any aggressive display. Says a foreign ministry official: "We know we're the most powerful country in Western Europe. But we must bend over backward not to use that power." In fact, the terrorist activity is a lefthanded tribute to democratic institutions. A repressive society would not have tolerated the intellectual dissent that led to terrorism.

Nearly all the Red Army gangsters are products of middle-and upper-middle-class families. Many Germans share the bafflement that George Bernard Shaw is said to have expressed years ago about the English young: "They've got enough food, sexual freedom and indoor toilets. Why the deuce aren't they happy?" West German terrorists are especially difficult to fathom because ideologically they travel light, somewhat like the turn-of-the-century Russian anarchists called bezmo-tivniki (motiveless ones). Says Martin Greiffenhagen, a political scientist at the University of Stuttgart: "Behind the acts of terror stands neither revolutionary theory nor strategy." The American radicals who blew up the Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin seven years ago had Viet Nam for a rationale. The West German terrorists, who command no support in the working class, have only a vague feeling of solidarity with the Third World and a homicidal hatred of their own country.

The terrorists do not connect with the political reality of West Germany, which may partly explain their bitterness. The West German system--capitalism infused with touches of social democracy--has been so successful in gaining its citizens' support that extremists of either left or right have found little social unrest to exploit. Says Irving Fetscher, a political scientist at the University of Frankfurt: "Those students who did try to win over the workers generally failed, and then they turned violent. Either you reshape your view of reality, or you try to punish reality for not conforming to your theories."

One interpretation, widespread in Germany, blames the isolation, extreme leftism and us-them mentality of the country's universities for at least the climate in which the terrorism developed. At the universities, says Stanley Rothman, a political scientist at Smith College, leftists took charge so effectively in the late '60s that they created "a tight little world, remote from the increasing disapproval of the society, where the students were able to act out their fantasies." Although radical leftists remain a minority (perhaps 20%) among student and faculty, they exercise disproportionate control because of their activism. A much larger segment of the university community seems willing to condone the terrorists if not their guns.

Rothman and S. Robert Lichter. a postdoctoral fellow in psychology and politics at Yale, think that West German terrorism results not only from the radicalization of the German university but from the continued authoritarianism of the German family. In parallel studies of 1,500 American and German students, Rothman and Lichter discovered that radicals in both countries had similar family backgrounds: fathers they saw as stern and punitive, mothers as distant and cold. Says Lichter: "The essence of the relationship was reduced to respect for the parent because of his power, rather than love." At the same time, a whole generation of West German youth grew up in the dark about their fathers' wartime activities. A child did not ask: "What did you do in the war, Daddy?" Thus, in one sense, Germany produced a "fatherless generation." Lichter speculates that "after generations of German fathers dominating the family it is possible that some thing of this got tied in with the kids' feelings that the fathers had lost their legitimacy." In addition, according to the Rothman-Lichter theory, America represented authority and goodness to the post war generation; but then, with racial troubles and the war in Viet Nam, the U.S., too, lost its legitimacy for Germans.

Psychological explanations are as satisfactory, or unsatisfactory, as any others. It is possible that at least some of the terrorists are simply psychotics. It may be true that, as I.F. Stone wrote about the Weatherman radicals in the U.S., "the ultimate menace they fear is their own secret selves in their own parents. This is what they are acting out on the stage of national politics." The parents, in West Germany's case, carry the whole burden of the moral ambiguity in the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) that rebuilt the country after 1945. Some thing in the very robustness of Germany's economy seemed to the terrorists and their sympathizers profoundly obscene.

West German films and novels today reflect that revulsion. To some, the sins of Auschwitz were never expiated; instead, a guilty society arose sleek and fat from defeat. Young men and women raised to take affluence for granted then violently recoiled from it and adopted the old anarchist's device of Propaganda by Deed.

Looking over their shoulders in frustration and bewilderment at a disapproving Western Europe, many Germans would probably agree with the weekly Die Zeit, which concluded that the terrorists, for all their savage qualities, "are idealists. And idealists can be terrible people."

But West Germany is not a special case in its pursuit of materialism; it has simply pursued the goal of affluence for a majority of its populace more successfully than its near neighbors. Moreover, acknowledging the zeal (however misplaced) of idealists is one thing; quite another is accepting, at face value, the radical claims of a violent adventurist movement with no moral vision beyond Goetterdaemmerung. West Germans somehow ought to be assured that the world will not think badly of them for interfering with the work of those who wish to destroy them. -- Lance Morrow

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.