Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (95 page)

In Reitz’s film the inter-war years especially are bathed in a sepia-like afterglow of fond memory; even the Nazi era is hardly permitted to intrude upon fond recollections of better times. The Americanized world of the post-war Federal Republic, on the other hand, is presented with angry, icy disdain: its materialist neglect of national values and its destruction of memory and continuity are depicted as violently corrosive of human values and community. As in Fassbinder’s
Marriage of Maria Braun
the main character—also ‘Maria’—does duty for a victimized Germany; but
Heimat
is quite explicitly nostalgic and even xenophobic in its contempt for foreign values and longing for the lost soul of ‘deep Germany’.

Reitz, like Syberberg and others, was publicly scornful of the American television series ‘Holocaust’, first shown on German television in 1979. If there were to be depictions of Germany’s past, however painful, then it was the business of Germans to produce them. ‘The most radical process of expropriation there is,’ wrote Reitz, ‘is the expropriation of one’s own history. The Americans have stolen our history through
Holocaust
.’ The application of a ‘commercial aesthetic’ to Germany’s past was America’s way of controlling it. The struggle of German directors and artists against American ‘kitsch’ was part of the struggle against American capitalism.

Reitz and Fassbinder were among the directors of
Deutschland im Herbst
(‘Germany in Autumn’) a 1978 collage of documentary, movie clips and interviews covering the events of the autumn of 1977, notably the kidnapping and killing of Hans Martin Schleyer and the subsequent suicide of Ensslin and Baader. The film is notable not so much for its expressions of empathy for the terrorists as for the distinctive terms in which these are conveyed. By careful inter-cutting, the Third Reich and the Federal Republic are made to share a family resemblance. ‘Capitalism’, ‘the profit system’ and National Socialism are presented as equally reprehensible and indefensible, with the terrorists emerging as latter-day resisters: modern Antigones struggling with their consciences and against political repression.

Considerable cinematic talent was deployed in
Deutschland im Herbst
—as in other contemporary German films—to depict West Germany as a police state, akin to Nazism if only in its (as yet unrevealed) capacity for repression and violence. Horst Mahler, a semi-repentant terrorist then still in prison, explains to the camera that the emergence of an extra-parliamentary opposition in 1967 was the ‘antifascist revolution’ that did not happen in 1945. The true struggle against Germany’s Nazi demons was thus being carried through by the country’s young radical underground—albeit by the use of remarkably Nazi-like methods, a paradox Mahler does not address.

The implicit relativizing of Nazism in
Deutschland im Herbst
was already becoming quite explicit in intellectual apologias for anti-capitalist terror. As the philosopher Detlef Hartmann explained in 1985, ‘We can learn from the obvious linkage of money, technology and extermination in New Order Nazi imperialism . . . (how) to lift the veil covering the civilized extermination technology of the New Order of Bretton Woods.’ It was this easy slippage—the thought that what binds Nazism and capitalist democracy is more important than their differences, and that it was Germans who had fallen victim to both—that helped account for the German radical Left’s distinctive insensitivity on the subject of Jews.

On September 5th 1972, the Palestinian organization Black September attacked the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics and killed eleven athletes, as well as one German policeman. Almost certainly, the killers had local assistance from the radical Left (though it is a curiousity of German extremist politics of the time that the far Right would have been no less pleased to offer its services). The link between Palestinian organizations and European terrorist groups was already well-established—Ensslin, Baader and Meinhof all ‘trained’ at one time with Palestinian guerillas, along with Basques, Italians, Irish Republicans and others. But only Germans went the extra mile: when four gunmen (two Germans, two Arabs) hi-jacked an Air France plane in June 1976 and flew it to Entebbe, in Uganda, it was the Germans who undertook to identify and separate the Jewish passengers from the rest.

If this action, so unmistakably reminiscent of selections of Jews by Germans in another time and place, did not definitively discredit the Baader-Meinhof gang in the eyes of its sympathizers it was because its arguments, if not its methods, attracted quite broad consent: Germans, not Jews, were now the victims; and American capitalism, not German National Socialism, was the perpetrator. ‘War crimes’ were now things that Americans did to—e.g.—Vietnamese. There was a ‘new patriotism’ abroad in West Germany, and it is more than a little ironic that Baader, Meinhof and their friends, whose violent revolt was initially directed against the Germany-first self-satisfaction of their parents’ generation, should find themselves co-opted by the reverberations of that same nationalist heritage. It was altogether appropriate that Horst Mahler, one of the few surviving founders of Left terrorism in West Germany, should end up three decades later on the far Right of the political spectrum.

In external respects, contemporary Italian terrorism was not markedly different from the German kind. It too drew on para-Marxist rhetoric from the Sixties, and most of its leaders received their political education in the university protests of that time. The main underground organization of Left terror, the self-styled
Brigate Rosse
(‘Red Brigades’, BR) first came to public attention in October 1970, when it distributed leaflets describing goals that closely resembled those of the Red Army Fraktion. Like Baader, Meinhof and others, the leaders of the BR were young (the best known of them, Renato Curcio, was just 29 in 1970), mostly former students, and devoted to armed underground struggle for its own sake.

But there were also some important differences. From the outset, Italian Left terrorists placed far greater emphasis upon their purported relationship to the ‘workers’; and indeed in certain industrial towns of the north, Milan in particular, the more respectable fringes of the ultra-Left
did
have a small popular following. Unlike the German terrorists, grouped around a tiny hard core of criminals, the Italian far Left ranged from legitimate political parties through urban guerrilla networks to micro-sects of armed political bandits, with a fair degree of overlap in membership and objectives.

These groups and sects replicated in miniature the fissiparous history of the mainstream European Left. In the course of the 1970s each violent act would be followed by assertions of responsibility by hitherto unknown organizations, frequently by sub-sections and breakaways from the original unit. Beyond the terrorists themselves orbited a loose constellation of semi-clandestine movements and journals whose sententious ‘theoretical’ pronouncements offered ideological cover for terrorist tactics. The names of these various groups, cells, networks, journals and movements are beyond parody: in addition to the Red Brigades there were
Lotta Continua
(‘Ongoing Struggle’),
Potere Operaio
(‘Workers’ Power’),
Prima Linea
(‘Front Line’) and
Autonomia Operaia
(‘Workers’ Autonomy’);
Avanguardia Operaia
(‘Workers’ Avant-garde’),
Nuclei Armati Proletari
(‘Armed Proletarian Nuclei’) and
Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari
(‘Revolutionary Armed Nuclei);
Formazione Comuniste Combattenti
(‘Fighting Communist Formations’),
Unione Comunisti Combattenti
(‘Fighting Communist Unions’),
Potere Proletario Armato
(‘Armed Proletarian Power’), and others besides.

If this list suggests in retrospect a desperate desire to inflate the social and revolutionary significance of a few thousand ex-students and their followers at the disaffected edges of the labour movement, the impact of their efforts to bring themselves to public attention should not be underestimated. Curcio, his companion Mara Cagol and their friends may have been living out in fantasy a romanticized fairy tale of revolutionary bandits (derived in large measure from the popularized image of revolutionary guerrillas in Latin America), but the damage they wrought was real enough. Between 1970 and 1981 not a year passed in Italy without murders, mutilations, kidnapping, assaults and sundry acts of public violence. In the course of the decade three politicians, nine magistrates, sixty-five policemen and some three hundred others fell victim to assassination.

In their first years, the Red Brigades and others confined their actions largely to the kidnapping and occasional shooting of factory managers and lesser businessmen: ‘capitalist lackeys’, ‘
servi del padrone’
(‘the bosses’ hacks’), reflecting their initial interest in direct democracy on the shop floor. But by the mid-seventies they had progressed to political assassination—at first of right-wing politicians, then policemen, journalists and public prosecutors—in a strategy designed to ‘strip away the mask’ of bourgeois legality, force the state into violent repression and thus polarize public opinion.

Until 1978 the Red Brigades had failed to provoke the desired backlash, despite a rising crescendo of attacks in the course of the previous year. Then, on March 16th 1978, they kidnapped their most prominent victim: Aldo Moro, a leader of the Christian Democrat Party and former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister. Moro was held hostage for two months; backed by the Communists and most of his own party, the Christian Democrat Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti refused even to consider the kidnappers’ demand for the release of ‘political prisoners’ in exchange for Moro’s life. In spite of unanimous condemnation across the Italian political spectrum and appeals from the Pope and the Secretary General of the UN, the terrorists refused to relent. On May 10th Aldo Moro’s body was found in a car brazenly parked on a street in the centre of Rome.

The Moro Affair certainly illustrated the incompetence of the Italian state—the Interior Minister resigned the day after the body was found. After eight years of frantic anti-terrorist legislation and nationwide manhunts, the police had manifestly failed to break the terrorist underground.
²⁰²
And the reverberations of the Red Brigades’ success in committing political murder at the very heart of the state and its capital city were significant. It was now clear to everyone that Italy faced a real challenge to its political order: less than two weeks after Moro’s corpse was found, the BR killed the head of the anti-terrorist squad in Genoa; in October 1978 they assassinated the Director General of Penal Affairs in Rome’s Justice Ministry. Two weeks later the
Formazione Comuniste Combattenti
assassinated a senior public prosecutor.

But the very scale of the terrorists’ challenge to the state now began to extract a price. The Italian Communist Party threw its weight firmly and unambiguously behind the institutions of the Republic, making explicit what was by now clear to almost everyone: namely, that whatever their roots in popular movements of the Sixties, the terrorists of the Seventies had now placed themselves beyond the spectrum of radical politics. They were simple criminals and should be hunted down as such. And so should those who provided them with ideological cover, and perhaps more: in April 1979 the University of Padua lecturer Toni Negri, together with other leaders of
Autonomia Operaia
, was arrested and charged with plotting armed insurrection against the state.

Negri and his supporters insisted (and continue to insist) that the radical ‘autonomists’, neither clandestine nor armed, should not be confused with illegal secret societies, and that the political decision to go after them represented precisely the retreat from ‘bourgeois order’ that the Red Brigades had prophesied and sought to bring about. But Negri himself had condoned at the University of Padua violent attacks on teachers and administrators falling only just short of terrorist tactics. The slogans of ‘mass illegality’, ‘permanent civil war’ and the need to organize ‘militarily’ against the bourgeois state were widely declaimed in respectable academic circles—including Negri’s own paper
Rosso
. A year after the kidnapping and murder of Moro, Negri himself wrote in celebration of ‘the annihilation of the adversary’: ‘The pain of my adversary does not affect me: proletarian justice has the productive force of self-affirmation and the faculty of logical conviction’.
²⁰³

The idea that political violence might have the ‘productive force of self-affirmation’ was not unfamiliar in modern Italian history, of course. What Negri was affirming, and what the Red Brigades and their friends were practicing, was no different from the ‘cleansing power of force’ as exalted by Fascists. As in Germany, so in Italy: the far Left’s hatred of the ‘bourgeois state’ had led it back to the ‘proletarian’ violence of the anti-democratic Right. By 1980 both the targets and the methods of terrorist Left and terrorist Right in Italy had become indistinguishable. Indeed, the Red Brigades and their offspring were by no means responsible for all the violence of Italy’s
anni di piombo
(‘Lead Years’). The conspiratorial, anti-republican Right resurfaced in these years (and perpetrated the single worst crime of the age, the bombing of Bologna’s railway station in August 1980, killing 85 and wounding 200 more); and in the
Mezzogiorno
the Mafia, too, adopted a more aggressive strategy of terror in its war with magistrates, police and local politicians.

But to the extent that the re-emergence of neo-Fascist terror and the resurgence of Mafia violence illustrated and exacerbated the vulnerability of democratic institutions, their undertakings were—perhaps correctly—interpreted by Left terrorists as a sign of their own success. Both extremes sought to destabilize the state by rendering normal public life intolerably dangerous—with the difference that the far Right could count on some protection and collaboration from the very forces of order they sought to subvert. Shadowy right-wing conspiratorial networks, reaching up into the higher ranks of the police, the banking community and the ruling Christian Democrat Party, authorized the murder of judges, prosecutors and journalists.
²⁰⁴