Postwar
Page 73
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
That democracy and the rule of law in Italy survived these years is a matter of no small note. From 1977 to 1982 especially, the country was under siege from random acts of extreme violence by far Left, far Right and professional criminals alike—it was in these same years that the Mafia and other criminal networks assassinated police chiefs, politicians, prosecutors, judges and journalists, sometimes with apparent near-impunity. While the more serious threat came from the extreme Right—better organized and much closer to the heart of the state—the ‘Red’ terrorists made the greater impact upon the public imagination. This was in part because, like the Red Army Fraktion in Germany, they traded upon widespread local sympathy for radical ideas. Official Communists correctly saw this appropriation of the revolutionary heritage as the terrorists’ chief asset, as well as a symptom of the risk that they posed for the credibility of the mainstream Left.
Ironically, and unbeknown to local Communists themselves, the Red Brigades and the Red Army Fraktion—like the similarly motivated but ineffectual Cellules communistes combattantes in Belgium, Action Directe in France and other, even smaller operations elsewhere—were financed in part with money supplied by the Soviet secret services. This cash was not part of any coherent strategy: it was paid out, rather, on general principles—the enemies of our enemies, however absurd and insignificant, are still our friends. But in this case the undertaking backfired: the one incontrovertible achievement of left-wing terrorism in Western Europe in these years was the thoroughness with which it expunged any remaining revolutionary illusions from the local body politic.
All the mainstream political organizations of the Left, Communists especially, were constrained to take and maintain their distance from violence of any kind. Partly this was a spontaneous response to the threat terror posed to them as well as others—trade unionists and other representatives of the traditional labor movement were among the most vilified targets of the underground networks. But partly it was because the ‘lead years’ of the 1970s served to remind everyone of just how fragile liberal democracies might actually be—a lesson occasionally neglected in the heady atmosphere of the sixties. The net effect of years of would-be revolutionary subversion at the heart of Western Europe was not to polarize society, as the terrorists had planned and expected, but rather to drive politicians of all sides to cluster together in the safety of the middle ground.
In the life of the mind, the nineteen seventies were the most dispiriting decade of the twentieth century. In some measure this can be attributed to the circumstances described in this chapter: the sharp and sustained economic downturn, together with widespread political violence, encouraged the sentiment that Europe’s ‘good times’ had gone, perhaps for many years to come. Most young people were now less concerned with changing the world than with finding a job: the fascination with collective ambitions gave way to an obsession with personal needs. In a more threatening world, securing one’s self-interest took precedence over advancing common causes.
There is no doubt that this change in mood was also a response to the heady indulgence of the previous decade. Europeans who only recently had enjoyed an unprecedented explosion of energy and originality in music, fashion, cinema and the arts could now contemplate at leisure the cost of their recent revelries. It was not so much the idealism of the Sixties that seemed to have dated so very fast as the innocence of those days: the feeling that whatever could be imagined could be done; that whatever could be made could be possessed; and that transgression—moral, political, legal, aesthetic—was inherently attractive and productive. Whereas the Sixties were marked by the naive, self-congratulatory impulse to believe that everything happening was new—and everything new was significant—the Seventies were an age of cynicism, of lost illusions and reduced expectations.
Mediocre times, wrote Albert Camus in The Fall, beget empty prophets. The 1970s offered a rich harvest of them. It was an age depressingly aware of having come after the big hopes and ambitious ideas of the recent past, and having nothing to offer but breathless and implausible re-runs and extensions of old thoughts. It was, quite self-consciously, a ‘post-everything’ era, whose future prospects appeared cloudy. As the American sociologist Daniel Bell observed at the time, ‘The use of the hyphenated prefix post- indicates [a] sense of living in interstitial time.’ As a description of the real world—‘post-war’, ‘post-imperial’, and most recently ‘post-industrial’—the term had its uses, even if it left uncertain what might follow. But when applied to categories o
f thought—as in ‘post-Marxist’, ‘post-structuralist’ and, most elusively of all, ‘post-modern’—it merely added to the obscurities of an already confused time.
The culture of the Sixties had been rationalistic. Mild drugs and utopian revelries notwithstanding, the social thought of the age, like its music, operated in a familiar and coherent register, merely ‘expanded’. It was also strikingly communitarian: students, like ‘workers’, ‘peasants’, ‘negroes’ and other collectives, were presumed to share interests and affinities that bound them in a special relationship with one another and—albeit antagonistically—to the rest of society. The projects of the Sixties, however fantastic, presumed a relationship between individual and class, class and society, society and state, that would have been familiar in its form if not its content to theorists and activists at any point in the previous century.
The culture of the Seventies turned not on the collective but the individual. Just as anthropology had displaced philosophy as the Ur-discipline of the Sixties, so psychology now took its place. In the course of the Sixties the notion of ‘false consciousness’ had been widely taken up by young Marxists to explain the failure of workers and others to liberate themselves from identification with the capitalist interest. In a perverted variant this idea formed, as we have seen, the core premise of Left terrorism. But it also took on a curious afterlife in less politicized circles: adapting Marxist background language to Freudian subjects, self-styled ‘post-Freudians’ now emphasized the need to liberate not social classes but aggregated individual subjects.