Contribution to the H-German Forum, "Revisiting the "_Deutscher Herbst_"

Karrin M. Hanshew, Michigan State University

The "German Autumn" of 1977 has never wanted for commentary. Even before the
final curtain fell on the events of that year, journalists joined filmmakers,
legal experts, and intellectuals in a common attempt to capture--and make sense
of--the terrorism and counter-terrorism besetting 1970s West Germany. In stark
contrast to the Weather Underground, who were all but lost to public memory
before a 2001 documentary (re)introduced them to Americans, the terror
unleashed by the Red Army Fraktion (RAF) and the West German state trying to
combat it achieved long-lasting notoriety. For more than 30 years, the RAF has
sustained wide-ranging public debate scholarly investigations; it has also
inspired bestselling novels, movies, and, in the late 1990s, a fashion glibly
referred to as "Prada-Meinhof" after one of the group's leading ideologues.
Despite some scholars' dismissal of the RAF as little more than a
sensationalist sideshow in the evolving historiography of the postwar era,
evidence would suggest that the terrorism of the 1970s is widely accepted as an
important event in West German history. What is not generally understood, it
seems to me, is _why_.

Even before the events of September 11th, the subject of violence and terrorism
had become a major battleground in the fight over popular memories of the 1960s
and 1970s. As sixty-eighters entered high politics, the history of violent
radicalism became a cudgel with which conservatives attempted to bloody the
left and its democratic credentials (one only has to think back on the 2001
Fischer affair). Important for our discussion is how this newest "culture war"
has in many ways confined the historicization of West German terrorism to the
decade preceding the German Autumn, as scholars seek either to refute or
confirm terrorism's relationship to the protest movements of the 1960s. Though
this debate has inspired--and will no doubt continue to inspire--excellent
work, its emphasis is on the politics and actors of '68 and not on
understanding terrorism, much less on understanding the German Autumn's
particular claim to significance. To better grasp these events and their place
in German history, we must widen the analytic lens and approach the subject of
West German terrorism from an altogether different angle.

The German Autumn has historical contexts, of course, that are no less of a
conundrum for present-day politics than is the legacy of the 1960s. The
question preoccupying many in the post-9/11 era of how a democratic society
successfully confronts a state of emergency is, in fact, an especially useful
framing for the study of West German terrorism. Long before self-proclaimed
"urban guerillas" declared war on the West Germany (the Federal Republic of
Germany or FRG), German parliamentarians and constitutional experts debated the
nature of democracy and, more specifically, its ability to defend itself with
the powers accorded it in times of peace. Following Carl Schmitt, some of
Germany's first republicans argued that, without emergency powers to facilitate
its swift and effective defense, the democratic state was doomed to perish
before its enemies. This pessimistic prediction met with equally gloomy
prophecies from the other side, which argued that any powers that allowed for
the suspension of civil liberties and the rule of law would not save democracy
but rather destroy it from the inside out. And a third position, carrying the
torch of popular participation, asserted that in times of national emergency,
it was up to the people and not the state to save democracy. The disastrous
results of Article 48 and the clear failure of Germans to resist
anti-democratic forces during the Weimar Republic guaranteed that the question
of how to safeguard democracy--in times of peace as well as crisis--took center
stage in the post-World War II period.

The immediate answers hit upon by West Germans--and codified in the Basic
Law--were the Federal Republic's designation as a defensive (_wehrhafte_)
democracy and each citizen's duty to resistance (_Widerstand_). Intended to
protect democracy from internal enemies on the one hand and an overly obedient
population on the other, these two principles formed the cornerstones of West
German political culture; they offered a solution to preventing fascism's
repetition and established the boundaries of legitimate state and civil action
in the FRG . The protest movements of the 1960s bore witness to the continuing
salience of these answers as a new generation of leftists demonstrated their
commitment to resistance and, in so doing, clashed with state representatives
intent on defending the "free and democratic order." While the events of the
late 1960s tore West Germans from complacency and contributed to a longer-term
and thoroughgoing rethinking of social and cultural norms, West Germans'
particular relationships to coercive state power remained intact.

In striking contrast, the terrorism of the 1970s or, more accurately, the
experience of that terrorism, prompted West Germans to revise such postwar
positions on democracy, as both resistance and defensive democracy threatened
to undo the very republic they were designed to uphold. Forced to weigh the
specters of the past against the realities of the present, the political actors
drew new conclusions regarding what constituted legitimate state and civil
force within a democratic society and acted to contain terrorism accordingly.
In other words, while the RAF both literally and figuratively self-destructed
at the end of the 1970s, the challenge of the terror they perpetrated became
the impetus for the working-through of past terror by others. Social Democrats
rejected limits they had originally placed on coercive state force out of
concern for its misuse in favor of swift and repressive action; this majority
decision caused many members of the party's left wing to retract their support
and transfer their political energies elsewhere. Members of the
extra-parliamentary left renounced the possibility of revolutionary (counter-)
violence entailed by their vigilance against fascism for a politics of dialogue
and nonviolence. And even conservatives' earlier support for wide-sweeping
emergency powers was tempered by their unease over the new state technologies
introduced by Social Democrats in the government's struggle against terrorism.
All told, these shifts in political sensibility did more than allow West
Germans to cope with terrorism. They fostered a new consensus on the polity's
democratic legitimacy, a consensus that goes part of the way to explaining how
West Germans got from a population at war with itself--out of a desire,
ultimately, to protect German democracy--to the relatively civil society of the
1980s.

It is not infrequently said that history is doomed to repeat itself, and
certainly this was the underlying fear that shaped West German society and
political culture in the postwar period. Although I have little room to
substantiate my claims here, I want at least to suggest the novel possibility
that, even in a state of emergency and plagued by the specters of the past,
Germans managed not only to learn from the past, but also to use those lessons
in order to deescalate the civil war-like atmosphere of the late 1970s. In the
midst of the terrorist crisis, the West German government utilized the full
extent of its powers, most starkly evidenced by the deployment of German armed
forces (in the form of a militarized police unit, the GSG9) for the first time
since 1945. Despite the genuine concern evinced by members of the
extra-parliamentary left that the state's actions crossed constitutional and
democratic boundaries, their choice not to support the RAF's open and violent
resistance undermined enduring if tacit sympathies for that style of politics.
While an important part of the population experienced the "German Autumn" as
anything but a triumph of democracy, the events of that autumn demonstrated
with unparalleled clarity that West Germany was a distinctly _new_ Germany.
Those who had stood skeptically awaiting the FRG to prove itself--as either
fascist or too weak--finally stopped watching their backs and agreed to move
forward on the assumption that West Germany was neither Weimar nor
totalitarian, but rather a legitimate, if flawed, democracy. One of the most
immediate--and significant--consequences of this development was the successful
integration of a large, disaffected youth population that had, since the end of
the 1960s, been a source of instability and ongoing civil conflict. In this
way, one could legitimately argue that postwar political culture shattered, not
on the popular protests of the 1960s or even the heady events of 1989 and
German reunification, but rather here, at the end of the 1970s, when lessons
drawn from Germans' experience of Nazi terror were usurped by the lessons of a
much more recent past.

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