The "Deutscher Herbst," Seen More Prosaically

Jonathan Sperber, University of Missouri

Artistic representations, journalistic accounts and individual memoirs of the
"Deutscher Herbst" often seem to have something of the apocalyptic about them.
This is not entirely surprising, in view of the astonishing series of events of
the fall of 1977--the kidnapping of the director of the Federal Employers'
Association, Hans Martin Schleyer, the subsequent enormous manhunt for him and
his kidnappers, across the entire Federal Republic, its failure and the
discovery of Schleyer's corpse, the mysterious deaths of the RAF prisoners in
their cells in the high-security Stammheim prison, the PLO's highjacking of a
Lufthansa jetliner to Mogadishu, and the liberation of its passengers by West
German commandos. After three decades, in the course of which we have become
more familiar with apocalyptic instances of terrorism, it might be possible to
stand back from these events and examine their intellectual and political
context in more prosaic fashion, and this essay will offer a few suggestions
about ways to do so. Since the point is to offer suggestions rather than to put
forth a formal argument, there will be no extensive bibliographical references.
Woven into the essay will be a few personal observations, as I was a DAAD
Stipendiat in the Federal Republic from the summer of 1976 to the spring of
1978, on the scene as the events and some of their ramifications were
unfolding.

There has been much written about the RAF, but it does seem that the rhetorical
articulation and representation of its self-understanding needs to be examined
more critically. This was a group, according to its own lights, engaged in
anti-imperialist struggle. One has to ask, though, against just what empire?
The West German governments the RAF was attacking were those of Willy Brandt
and Helmut Schmidt, which had moved to reduce tensions in a divided Europe, to
renounce claims on the former eastern territories of the German Reich. In doing
so, they broke with the Nazi past to promote a more peaceful attitude toward
international relations in Europe and throughout the world, and even to counsel
the United States against excessive use of military force in its foreign
policy. Describing such governments as imperialist suggests the extent to which
the members of the RAF moved within a closed, self-referential discursive
structure, not immediately related to their empirically observable environment.
An analysis of these discursive structures, of their tropes, or of their
symbolic resonances, might provide an important insight into the intellectual
universe of the terrorists, and of many others in the society of the Federal
Republic, who shared some of their views, without taking them to the extremes
they did. One successful example of the analysis of political rhetoric is
Hans-Peter Goldberg, _Bismarck und seine Gegner: die politische Rhetorik im
kaiserlichen Reichstag_ (Düsseldorf, 1998), but I could also imagine a
full-bore treatment of the RAF along the lines of Klaus Theleweit's
_Männerphantasien_ (Reinbek, 1980).

Turning from the terrorists themselves to the responses to their actions, I
will note five different areas (naturally, there are many more possible) in
which these responses could be considered: (1) the nation, (2) heritage of the
Nazi era, (3) the political instrumentalization of the events, (4) the sense of
insecurity and (5) a cross-national comparison.

As an American living in the Federal Republic at the time, I was struck by the
comparative lack of public appearance of the national, and by the reluctance
many West Germans felt to see themselves in national terms. During the events
of the fall of 1977, though, and following previous terrorist actions, such as
the murder of Chief Federal States Attorney, Siegfried Buback in April of that
year, the entire country seemed to be covered in black-red-gold flags.
Remembering Benedict Anderson's celebrated description of the nation as an
imagined community, held together by ties of the mass media, one has to wonder
about this experience of nationhood--like many post-1945 public experiences,
amplified by electronic mass media--as compared with previous ones, such as the
1954 soccer world cup, the building of the Berlin Wall, the visits of Willy
Brandt to Erfurt and Warsaw in the course of _Ostpolitik_, or the future one of
1989.

In the fall of 1977, I met in a train compartment an ideal-typical Social
Democrat, a middle-aged _Facharbeiter_ (he installed industrial machinery) and
long-term SPD member. We struck up a conversation. It turned, as conversations
invariably did then, to the terrorists, and he remarked about them, "Es
sind...Es sind," paused for thought, and then exclaimed with anger and
conviction, "Es sind Faschisten!" This remark points to the extent to which the
terrorists, their victims (the fact of Hans-Martin Schleyer's one-time SS
membership only added to this tendency) and the government response to
terrorism were viewed through the prism of the Nazi era. Historians and
cultural commentators have dealt, at some length, with the extent to which the
Nazi past was evaded or distorted in the decade of the 1950s, but by the late
1970s this past had become a more acceptable subject of public conversation,
making it possible to see current events in its terms. Of course, one has to
wonder whether this form of understanding of 1970s events in terms of the Nazi
era was just as distorted and politically misleading as had been the refusal to
consider the Nazi past during the 1950s.

There was no question that politicians made use--in part, cynically, in part in
good faith (although in retrospect the good faith of their actions is hard to
follow)--of the terrorist events. The nascent environmentalist movement was a
particular target. I remember that at the end of September 1977, three weeks
after Schleyer had been kidnapped but the crisis over the kidnapping was in
full swing, there was a large demonstration at the town of Kalkar, near the
Dutch border, site of the experimental--now long-terminated--fast-breeder
nuclear reactor. It was met with an enormous police reaction: helicopters
swooped down on trains leading to Kalkar and a small--rather, a large--army of
police guarded the site and turned tens of thousands of potential demonstrators
away. The basis for these actions was the ostensible threat of a terrorist
attack on the reactor. The perpetrator of this particular reaction was the
Social Democratic _Landesregierung_ of North-Rhine Westphalia.

Conservative reactions to terrorism, particularly the campaign against
ostensibly pro-terrorist intellectuals, the so-called "Sympathisantenszene,"
was much stronger.  Here, political instrumentalization emerged particularly
clearly, and could be seen in the context of Helmut Kohl's almost-successful
effort in the 1976 elections to overturn the social-liberal coalition. Casting
the elections as a struggle between freedom and socialism, the CDU/CSU received
an impressive 48 percent of the vote, the party's second-best result in its
history (only 1957 was better). We might consider the outcry about the
Sympathisantenszene as part of an ongoing conservative opposition to the
social-liberal coalition, an attempt to create a climate of opinion hostile to
and ultimately destructive of the political prospects of a center-left
government. There were similar sorts of campaigns in the United States in the
1970s and 1990s, and, after 1998, against Gerhard Schröder's red-green
government in Germany. A comparison of these sorts of campaigns--their themes,
their forms of discourse, their public resonance--might be revealing about
late-twentieth and early twenty-first century politics.

For all the political instrumentalization of the terrorists and their actions,
the events of the Deutscher Herbst revealed a very real sense of insecurity,
both at the highest levels of government and in the public at large. In this
context, one would have to wonder about the extent to which the entire period
of the late 1970s and early 1980s can be seen under the sign of insecurity.
Such insecurity was most evident in the economic realm. The end of the
effortless prosperity of the post-war period, the oil price shocks and supply
problems, the onset of inflation, the mid-1970s recession, with its (then still
temporary) rise in unemployment, all created a persistent climate of
insecurity. The increasing public visibility of environmentalism, which in its
earlier forms was given to apocalyptic predictions about the traumatic end of
industrial society--a prime example being the Club of Rome's widely publicized
"limits to growth" report--that portrayed the economic disruptions of the
period as the beginning of a global environmental debacle. One could argue that
the growth of feminism and the women's movement, and their visions of a
disruption of accustomed family and gender roles, were another element in the
creation of social uncertainty, but I am not sure that such an observation
would be particularly salient for the Federal Republic of the time.

Of course, uncertainty and insecurity were common throughout the advanced
industrial world in the decade of the 1970s, and this raises the last point I
would mention, namely the need for a comparative perspective. The 1970s were a
highpoint of pre-Islamicist terrorism, and the Federal Republic was not the
only country that was confronted with terrorist campaigns. Just considering
Europe, Italy, with its Red Brigades and its extreme right-wing terrorists,
Spain with the ETA, and the United Kingdom, with the IRA, all come to mind. It
would be helpful to compare public and media responses to terrorism in these
countries, the political ramifications of terrorist campaigns and
law-enforcement and legal responses to terrorism, and particularly the extent
to which anti-terrorist measures involved setting aside normal legal procedures
and basic civil rights. (I could also imagine conducting a similar comparison
between reactions to the terrorism of the 1970s and the terrorism of the
2000s.)

It might be argued that all these approaches divert attention from the events
themselves, and from the eerie public mood in the Federal Republic in that fall
three decades ago--a feature emphasized in many of the artistic portrayals of
that time and place. Analytical categories and comparative investigations may
not directly address the immediacy of the events and of the feelings at the
time, or possibly even detract from an empathic understanding of them, but they
do provide a useful context for considering them.

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