GERMANY: DEMOCRACY IN TROUBLE:COPING WITH TERRORISM
Eckstein, George
The recapture of the hijacked plane at Mogadishu, the death of three leading terrorists in Stammheim prison, and the murder of kidnapped industrialist Schleyer may, for a while, have put an end...
...These children of businessmen, ministers and other professionals became radicalized in their student years...
...Eventually, there was the hijacking of a Lufthansa plane in Spain with the help of Arab confederates, the murder of Schleyer and the deposition of his body on a street in Mulhouse, France...
...After a two-year lull, which had followed six years of intermittent terrorist activity, the recent months have seen a succession of spectacular actions: • in April, the assassination of the BaaderMeinhof trial's Chief Federal Prosecutor Buback and two of his assistants...
...Indeed, some of the latter, after serving their sentences, participated in the current RAF actions...
...Peymann's case is typical of the crosscurrents at work in Germany after Schleyer...
...But interestingly enough, all political parties have spoken out unanimously against the restoration of the death penalty...
...The official estimate was recently raised to 1,200, a figure that may be somewhat high...
...The memory of Hitlerian `justice" is still all too vivid...
...Fed by a sensationalist press and eager reactionaries, this wave also has engulfed people one would have presumed more immune to hysteria—such men as the historian Golo Mann, son of Thomas Mann, who, in the mass-circulation paper "Die Welt", demanded "in this new kind of civil war" countermeasures going beyond the limits of traditional law: "No longer is it sufficient to talk of 'keep a cool head,'use all means within the rule of law, 'intellectual debate with terrorism.' We are at war, we are up against enemies who are ready to kill...
...Insofar as they still sport a political line, it is oriented toward the Third World: they pattern themselves after Che and the Tupamaros and have developed close ties with Arab terrorists with whom some of them trained and cooperated (in the Munich Olympics, Entebbe, etc...
...But the larger questions remain: how could it develop in a country where dissent can be rather freely expressed, and what might be its effects on the society...
...To explore these questions, even to properly pose them, requires a look at some of the facts...
...All three sharply condemned terrorism...
...This attitude is not altogether untypical of certain West German radical students and some professors (their coalition with left-wing socialist students achieved a majority in the Goettingen student council...
...In the dilemma of what is compatible with the rule of law and what is considered necessary to overcome terrorism, opinions differ both within government and opposition parties...
...Conservative publications and politicians are using the prevailing public sentiment for an assault on the "intellectual breeding grounds" of radicalism at the universities...
...Among them are a number of young lawyers, a fact of some bearing on the present countermeasures...
...counterparts, such as the Weathermen and the Symbionese Liberation Army, these young people (in their late 20s and early 30s) come mainly from upper-middle-class families...
...This hard core can draw on occasional assistance (for shelter, money, maildrop, moral support) from a larger number of sympathizers, officially estimated at about 6,000...
...Over the years, the purpose of the terrorists has shifted from vaguely political dramatic shock to vengeance, intimidation of court officials, and fundraising and blackmail for the release of jailed members of the interconnected groups...
...Even if the Schmidt government succeeds in the task, this would not mean the end of conservative pressure for more "discipline...
...and against educational reforms that have put "questioning and controversy above the teaching of permanent values...
...The prominent liberal weekly "Die Zeit," for example, has published a thoughtful analysis of "the terrible fugitive Children of Affluence," the "dead-end street of terrorism...
...This internationalization of terror is facilitated by the ease with which today's European frontiers can be crossed...
...And political scientist Kurt Sondheimer proposes special "legislation for fighting terrorism" that might include limitations of freedom for people inclined in this direction—in other words, preventive custody...
...There now are already those who say: "This could not have happened under Hitler...
...in July, the killing of prominent banker Jiirgen Ponto in the course of a failed kidnap attempt that was guided by a girlfriend of his daughter (armed with a bouquet of red roses—a scenario straight out of Jean-Luc Godard...
...in addition, the pressure of an aroused public opinion is to be reckoned with...
...Their one highly prized "workingclass" member has long since retired and has written an impudent little book about his experiences...
...The law is clearly subject to abuse...
...Their total membership was 82 always considered to be very small and rather immune to penetration by the police...
...The more responsible press and the broadcasting stations (all public in Germany) clearly try to counteract the hysteria...
...This circle of sympathizers would certainly include such people as the member of a radical student group at Goettingen University who publicly confessed to "deep-down joy" over the daring murder of Prosecutor Buback, while considering the act as futile in the face of a still solid system "that cannot be brought down without a full-scale armed uprising...
...Dutschke rejects terrorism as contrary to democratic socialism...
...He was belatedly attacked by the Bildzeitung, a sensational sheet, for having months ago—for humanitarian reasons, as he says—assisted the mother of one of the convicted members of the Baader-Meinhof gang in raising funds for major dental work performed on them and not covered by prison regulations...
...The recapture of the hijacked plane at Mogadishu, the death of three leading terrorists in Stammheim prison, and the murder of kidnapped industrialist Schleyer may, for a while, have put an end to the wave of terrorism in West Germany...
...And it followed this by opening its pages to three prominent authors accused of belonging among the sympathizers—Heinrich Boell, Herbert Marcuse, Rudi Dutschke (himself once the victim of a right-wing murder attempt...
...to play for time in the hope of ferreting out the culprits—but not to shrink from a possible bitter end, in the knowledge that, on the one hand, only a living hostage is of value to the kidnappers...
...but it is the answer to recent experiences that point to collusion between imprisoned terrorists, their friends outside, and their "movement" lawyers with whom they were in constant touch...
...two, "to go to the limits of what is permitted to and demanded by a state under law...
...The present unusual, and limited, consensus, if it holds, may facilitate the difficult task of maintaining governmental authority while adhering to the rule of law, without succumbing to the danger of turning the Federal Republic into the repressive society that the terrorists falsely accuse it of being, or that they would like to see it become...
...This figure depends on how loosely one defines this larger circle...
...on the other, that a release of previously caught terrorists would render any future prosecution futile and thus only start another round of blackmail...
...The terrorism spread beyond the borders: just prior and after the Schleyer kidnapping, and obviously connected with it, there were incidents at car rental agencies in two Dutch cities where two young German women with forged driver's licenses had aroused suspicion, one Dutch policeman was killed and two were wounded, and one male accomplice was caught...
...Throughout the six weeks of the Schleyer case, there was a common determination shared by the...
...This law permits, in cases of acute threat of life or liberty and under certain.judicial safeguards, the complete isolation of imprisoned terrorists, whether convicted, indicted, or only suspected, from all outside contacts—including fellow-inmates, lawyers, families, news media—for a 30-day-period that can be extended under certain restrictions...
...Such facts have to be kept in mind when judging the deplorable "Radicals Decree" (inaccurately called BeruJsverbot by its opponents...
...Like their much weaker U.S...
...The local Christian Democrats (CDU) demanded Peymann's dismissal for this not very judicious act...
...but Stuttgart's Lord Mayor Manfred Rommel, son of the famous general and a man of integrity, successfully vetoed the demand, although he himself is a member of CDU...
...But it would not be a small achievement in a country where the libertarian tradition is still brief and fragile and where the memory of the weakness of Weimar in the face of its violent enemies stands as a warning example...
...This means, among other things, that any communication between accused persons and their attorneys has to be channeled via the investigating judge and that an ongoing trial has to be suspended during the period...
...Even the demagogue Franz Josef Strauss rudely cut off all discussion on this subject at the recent congress of his Bavarian CSU party...
...The law has been sharply criticized by civil libertarians and some jurists, but it was passed with only a handful of deputies voting against it...
...CHANCELLOR SCHMIDTS GOVERNMENT, already weakened by the country's sluggish economy and 83 the conservative trend in recent state elections, apparently has pursued two immediate objectives: one, a show of determination not to let the authority and the business of government be interfered with by terrorism...
...As the degree of violence escalated, whatever political purpose had been pursued by the "first generation" of `urban guerillas" (led by journalist Ulrike Meinhof, a recent suicide in jail), has in the "second generation" virtually evaporated behind the vague rhetoric of the current Red Army Faction (RAF), a linear descendant of the Baader-Meinhof group...
...There are familiar sounding demands (albeit perhaps a bit more justified) for reducing legal safeguards for the accused, harsher sentences including the death penalty (the current limit for life imprisonment is 15 years), and for harsher correctional treatment...
...At any rate, what happened now in Germany should be a sobering experience for those on "the left" whose explicit or implicit authoritarianism has not been altogether innocent in spawning a monstrous deformity...
...The result has been a new compromise piece of legislation, the swiftly passed"Isolation Law...
...At the moment, the Schmidt government has gained in stature at home and abroad through its determined handling of a difficult dilemma...
...against such leftwing authors as Heinrich Boell who, in one of his novels, had the heroine shelter a fugitive activist...
...Preparations can take place abroad, often with the help of local sympathizers: getaway cars and safe apartments were rented in Holland and France, weapons purchased or stolen in Italy and Switzerland, supportive parallel actions undertaken in Spain and Italy...
...in September, the kidnapping of industrialist Schleyer, head of the German equivalent of the NAM, during which his chauffeur and three bodyguards were gunned down while stopping the car for a baby carriage that had been put across a residential street (another touch of Godard...
...Ironically, the application of the Isolation Law to the Stammheim prisoners is now backfiring—it is bound to cast some doubt on the suicide of the three leaders...
...Boell combined his moral condemnation with an appeal to treat the terrorists judicially like all other lawbreakers,—in terms of the legal structure that is "the blessing and the burden of a government of laws...
...At the periphery of the circle of sympathizers is, for instance, a man such as Claus Peymann who is director of Stuttgart's Municipal Theater and has made it one of the country's leading stages...
...Marcuse, rather unsatisfactorily, merely as counterproductive, but permissible in "situations where the elimination of protagonists of repression really changes the systems" (note the use of the "value-free" word "elimination...
...Yet there remains the uneasiness about how such deep disaffection could develop in an economically successful democratic society, a phenomenon that should give pause to other democracies with greater social cleavages...
...ALTOGETHER, the recent terrorist acts have unleashed a wave of hysterical reactions, not unlike that which followed the blackout lootings in New York City...
...Schmidt government and the opposition to see it through without giving in to blackmail...
...84...
Vol. 25 • January 1978 • No. 1
