In Europe

by Geert Mak

  In Italy the focus was on corruption and public scandals, as well as education and police violence. Between 1960–8 the Italian student population had doubled, while the universities had seen little in the way of change since the nineteenth century. ‘Never have I met an Italian student who felt he had received a good education,’ George Armstrong wrote in the New Statesman in 1968. ‘The universities are the rigid feudal domain of the older professors. They are the haven of the sons and daughters of the middle classes, who usually have no intention of working in the field for which they have been trained.’ In Rome, 300 professors were charged with teaching more than 60,000 students.

  In the Netherlands, as in Britain, the revolution of the 1960s was a largely playful one. The student movement was a serious affair, but Provo and its adherents never stopped playing: with public opinion, with the medium of television, with the ‘public image’. It was an artistic form of protest linked to anti-monarchist and anti-German sentiments (made manifest during the wedding of Crown Princess Beatrix and Claus von Amsberg in March 1966), anti-bourgeois ideals (expressed in the happenings around the Lieverdje and elsewhere) and a kind of anti-fascism-in-hindsight (with the storming of the daily newspaper De Telegraaf in June 1966).

  In Germany, that playfulness was nowhere to be found. There things revolved, in essence, around the legacy of the Second World War.

  In 1968, the American philosopher Joseph Berke visited Commune 1 at Stephanstrasse 60 in Berlin. Arriving at 6 p.m., he found the entire community still fast asleep. The two televisions in the building were on all the time, albeit with the volume turned down. When the communards finally left their beds, they sat staring at the screens in silence. In his report, Berke said they were all high, despite their initial rejection of drugs as a ‘bourgeois distraction from the political revolution’.

  Commune I had been set up in March 1967 by Fritz Teufel. Teufel's notoriety began after he broke into the dean's office at the Freie Universität, took his cigars, toga and chain of office, then rode a bicycle through the corridors to the auditorium, where he allowed the cheering student body to appoint him the school's new dean. His first official act was to sack all of the unpopular professors. Teufel spent more time in jail than outside it. In imitation of the Dutch Provos, his Commune 1 used constant provocations to lure ‘the system’ into betraying its ‘true nature’ as aggressive, repressive and capitalistic.

  A former Amsterdam activist once told me how shocked he had been by the violent character of the Berlin demonstrations. Provo toted cap guns, carried banners with nothing written on them, but the members of Commune I had no such sense of humour. ‘In Holland, a nod was sufficient, as long as you observed a few rules. But in Berlin, that disciplined marching back and forth and then standing to attention … We thought it was scary, it wasn't our kind of thing.’

  When Rudi Dutschke, who lived in the commune for a time, refused to abandon the ‘bourgeois private relationship’ with ‘his’ Gretchen, the group took a vote and decided to go into collective psychoanalysis. Klaus Röhl, husband of the journalist Ulrike Meinhof and editor-in-chief of Konkret, said the commune seemed to him to be a group of neglected, over-privileged adolescents who had been given ‘too much pocket money and too little human affection’.

  ‘They lived,’ he said, ‘like Russian revolutionaries in the winter of 1917–18, wearing leather jackets and grubby trousers which they didn't bother to remove when they lay down to sleep somewhere. They ate and slept irregularly, sent their children to school irregularly, and only attended the university in order to hand out pamphlets and shout manifestos through their megaphones. When – despite this detailed replication of decor and lifestyle – the revolution failed to materialise, when it turned out (as Dutschke had predicted long before) that there was no way to avoid the long, grinding and rather unromantic march through the halls of the established order, they became disillusioned.’

  In spring 1967, 300 people were killed in a fire in a Brussels department store. Soon afterwards, Fritz Teufel and his fellow communards Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin began handing out pamphlets in which responsibility for the fire was attributed to Belgian ‘cells’ who actively opposed the war in Vietnam, and suggesting that their example might very well be followed in Germany. ‘300 fattened citizens and their exciting lives were snuffed out, and Brussels became Hanoi.’

  Teufel and an accomplice were arrested for inciting arson. That summer, during a violent demonstration against a visit to Germany by the Shah of Persia – ‘The new Hitler!’ – a student, Benno Ohnesorg, was killed by a police bullet. A few months later Dutschke was gunned down by a neo-Nazi. Students all over the country took to the streets by the hundreds of thousands.

  In April 1968, Baader and Ensslin made their first real attempt at burning down the Schneider department store in Munich. During their trial that October, rioting broke out. About 400 sympathisers were arrested. The demonstrators chanted: ‘What is civilisation? Is it a Mercedes? A nice house? Is it a soothed conscience? I ask you again, comrades, what is civilisation?’

  In late 1968, Ralph Blumenthal of the New York Times visited Commune 1 and found only one female member and a couple of men still living there. Ulrich Enzensberger, brother of the writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger, sat there ‘stoned, examining his painted fingernails’. The last communards lived largely from giving interviews on the subject of revolution and capitalism, and they demanded hefty sums for doing so.

  From the early 1970s, Baader, Ensslin, Horst Mahler and others banded together to form the Baader-Meinhof Gang, also known as the Red Army Faction (RAF). The allusion to the Royal Air Force (RAF) was no accident: just as the British had bombed Germany from above, they now planned to raze the ‘new fascism’ from within. In 1970, Baader and Ensslin were helped to escape from prison by a group of friends led by Ulrike Meinhof. According to those involved, it was a purely impulsive action: there was no well-organised network of safe houses or hiding places, no longer-term ‘urban guerrilla’ action had been prepared, the group was almost completely unarmed. Very soon, however, they began receiving support from the Middle East and the DDR – even though the intensely conventional East German communists had little use for the RAF's tactics. After Baader and Ensslin's escape, the group robbed a number of banks. Bombings of the American army headquarters in Frankfurt, the head offices of the Springer publishing concern (whose newspapers included Bild-Zeitung and Die Welt) and government buildings in Munich and Karlsruhe followed. Then began a chaotic game of cat and mouse with the authorities. When the presence of Ulrike Meinhof's twin seven-year-old daughters began forming a hindrance to this ‘people's war’, the group decided they should be sent to a camp for Palestinian orphans. ‘Ulrike clung to her children, more than a mother, more like a mother hen,’ her ex-husband wrote. That, in fact, was precisely why Baader and Ensslin demanded that she free herself of this ‘remnant of her bourgeois past’. But El Fatah refused to cooperate: even their Palestinian contact person felt that this was taking things too far. In the end, probably at the insistence of Meinhof herself, the children were handed over to their father.

  In early June 1972, Baader and Ensslin were reapprehended. This time, Meinhof was arrested as well. Their followers fought on, increasingly obsessed with the idea of freeing the three ringleaders. On one occasion they met with limited success: in 1975, Peter Lorenz, chairman of the Berlin branch of the CDU, was abducted and exchanged for three RAF prisoners.

  In 1976 Meinhof died in her cell, probably – although opinions differ on this score – having committed suicide. Violent demonstrations broke out again; in Frankfurt, Joschka Fischer – at the time a fervent street-fighter – was arrested for ‘attempting to take the life’ of a policeman. Within the next year the group's sympathisers singled out and attacked more than 150 targets, killed German Attorney General Siegfried Buback and bank director Jürgen Ponto, and, in September, kidnapped the foreman of the German employers’ collective, Hanns Martin Schleyer.

/>   That autumn, all of West Germany lived in a shifting state of fear, rage, bitterness and paranoia. The RAF, which had gradually come to represent only itself, demanded the release of Baader, Ensslin and nine other prisoners. Despite desperate pleas from Schleyer himself, the German government refused to budge. To further underscore the demands, three Palestinian RAF supporters then hijacked a Lufthansa Boeing; a lightning raid by German commandos at Mogadishu airport on 18 October, however, put a speedy end to the hijack. Schleyer's body was recovered the same day, and that night Baader, Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe were found dead in their cells. For years any number of theories circulated concerning the cause of death, but nowadays most historians tend to agree with the official reading: suicide.

  The films made later about the autumn months of 1977 bear titles like Die bleierne Zeit (The Days of Lead) and Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn). The young German democracy did, indeed, seem on the verge of backsliding to a situation very like that of the 1920s and 1930s; precisely what the left-wing radicals hoped to ‘prove’. Roadblocks were set up everywhere, police helicopters patrolled above the roads, ‘conspiratorial locations’ were permanently wiretapped and watched, emergency measures were tightened and all outspoken support for ‘terrorists’ was made punishable. On the basis of the Radicals Law, dissidents were faced with a vocational ban: they were excluded from all public functions, including teaching. RAF prisoners were put into isolation and submitted to a special regime. Their lawyers, including future minister of home affairs Otto Schily, received constant threats.

  The Baader-Meinhof Gang's supporters remained active for another fifteen years. In total, the RAF carried out almost 250 attacks, robbed 69 banks, kidnapped a few dozen politicians, businessmen and journalists, and murdered 28 people.

  The vast majority of the German student movement and the radical left had long since turned their back on these violent tactics. In Berlin alone, in 1980, an estimated 100,000 people were living within a subculture of alternative cafés, communes, action groups, political hippiedoms, squats, Spontis and Wohngemeinschaften, but almost none of them would have anything to do with the RAF.

  In Italy, however, things were different. There the left actually granted a certain degree of support to extremists, and even to the RAF's Italian counterpart, the Red Brigades, which began its activities in 1969. In the late 1960s, the old civil conflict between Fascists and anti-Fascists had been reignited with an escalation of attacks by more or less covert neo-Fascist terror groups and the Red Brigades. These Italian ‘days of lead’ were far more violent than those in Germany, and ultimately claimed more than 400 victims.

  The first bomb exploded on 12 December, 1969 in a bank on Piazza Fontana in Milan: sixteen people were killed, eighty-four were injured. The anarchist Giusseppe Pinelli was arrested and, during interrogations on 15 December, ‘accidentally’ fell to his death from a high window. The killers were never located, but most evidence pointed to neo-Fascists and right-wing elements within the Italian intelligence service. The funerals of the victims of the bombing turned into a demonstration in which 300,000 people took part. Attack after attack, demonstration after demonstration followed.

  The Italian people were frightened, and rightly so. The Red Brigades, which its members claimed was a continuation of the resistance movement from 1944–5, went on terrorising the country for years. Meanwhile, speculating on the country's ongoing disintegration, neo-Fascist groups set to work on a right-wing coup by the Italian Army. It had worked in Greece, so why not in Italy? By the late 1970s, each year saw an average of more than 2,000 terrorist attacks. Even today it is not certain who was responsible for a number of them – including, for example, the infamous bombing which killed eighty-five people at Bologna's central railway station on 2 August, 1980. There are indications that foreign intelligence services were involved in other as yet unexplained attacks, and that during this same period a covert campaign was underway to halt the brand of Euro-communism so popular in Italy. There is, however, still no clear evidence for this. On 16 March, 1978, the prime minister, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped by the Red Brigades. His fellow party members and friends refused to enter into negotiations. Twenty-five days later, Moro's body was found in a Roman shopping street, crammed in the boot of a Renault 4.

  Is it merely a coincidence that the 1960s culminated in so much violence in Germany and Italy – the former Axis powers – while radical-left terrorist movements gained little or no foothold in, for example, France, Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands? Probably not. All over Europe, the 1960s constituted the delayed repercussion of the war experiences of generations past. Public officials and policemen were systematically referred to as ‘fascists’; the Provos of Amsterdam even shouted that epithet at their mayor, Gijs van Hall, who had been one of the country's most courageous resistance fighters during the war. Countless texts referred to the legacy of the Second World War, to ‘collaboration’ and ‘resistance’.

  But in Spain (ETA), in Italy, and in Germany above all, these sentiments were taken to much greater extremes, leading some to demonise the state as a whole. The sociologist Norbert Elias described the young people's rebellion as a ‘purification ritual for the sins of the fathers’. The great empires had crumbled, national ties had to be redefined and confirmed, and young people viewed the ideals and actions of older generations with a new, more critical eye. In Germany in particular, the younger generation had many questions to ask of the men and women who had been in power at that time, who had participated actively in public life throughout the war. Yet no answers were forthcoming.

  In 1969, the Bavarian Christian Democrat Franz Josef Strauss voiced openly what many older Germans had been thinking for a long time: ‘A people who have delivered such economic achievements have the right not to hear about Auschwitz any longer.’

  For this war generation, Elias writes, the reconciliation with the Nazi past was completed with the Nuremberg trials and the rehabilitation of real or alleged party members. ‘Officially, they had nothing to fear and nothing to regret. Their consciences may have bothered them now and then, but in the public life of Germans in positions of leadership, it seemed, the nightmare of the Hitler years could be buried.’ However, their own sons and daughters, in voices which grew louder and louder, were demanding a retrial.

  At home, I found an interview I had once made with Christiane Ensslin, Gudrun's sister. Christiane was the real protagonist of Margarethe von Trotta's film Die bleierne Zeit (1981), the woman who had taken in Gudrun's son after the child had been badly wounded by a right-wing fanatic, and who sympathised with her sister but refused to choose the path of violence. When I visited her at her Cologne apartment in 1984, she was unemployed, precisely because her surname was Ensslin. Her boyfriend was not allowed to hold a job in his own professional field, simply because he was her boyfriend. Her father had encountered great difficulty finding a graveyard where her sister could be buried: even in death, Gudrun Ensslin was not to be allowed to repose amid ‘normal’ people.

  Together we looked back briefly at the ‘days of lead’ in the 1970s, but ultimately the discussion focused on her generation and that of her parents. ‘Most older Germans see the war as, well, tough luck,’ she felt. Her own generation refused to see things that way, and was therefore, in her eyes, more frustrated than its contemporaries in other countries. ‘We were the country that applied fascism to the highest degree of perfection. Our most recent history, that of our parents, is so unimaginable for us, their children … And that means something. The greater the wrong you have behind you, the more you must watch out for what you do in the future. To that extent, the historical debt we have to pay is much heavier than that of other European countries.’

  She talked about a scene in Die bleierne Zeit which was true to life. When her father, a brave and critical pastor, showed his congregation a film about the concentration camps, she and her sister Gudrun left the room, sick to their stomachs. ‘As a child of course, when you see something
like that, you think: What? Did my father know about that? And he just sat at home and ate his dinner? That can't be true, can it? And then you promise yourself: I'm going to pay very close attention, if people start disappearing again or being mistreated or murdered, I'll take up the fight!’

  Christiane Ensslin talked about feelings and frustrations: ‘Our German perfectionism, the concept of power that's behind it, the frustrations it has created and still creates among young people … If you ignore feelings like that you can never understand history. No action ever takes place without a feeling!’ Old Norbert Elias saw it, above all, as a drama: ‘The tragedy was that some members of this young generation, in their attempts to create a better, warmer, more meaningful kind of human life as counterpoint to the National Socialist regime, arrived in turn at increasingly inhumane actions. And perhaps it was not their tragedy alone, but also that of the state, of the society they were trying to transform, and even of the older generation that had all the power firmly in hand.’

  Chapter FIFTY-FOUR

  Paris

  GO TO THE CAFÉ IN COLOMBEY-LES -DEUX-ÉGLISES AND ASK ABOUT the general, and they all launch into stories right away. About how he sat in church, straight as a ramrod, the seats beside him always empty, ‘it was as if there were a glass cage around him’. How he lowered all his defences for his handicapped daughter Anne, how he danced around and slapped his thighs. How his wife Yvonne, during his period as an unemployed civilian between 1946–58, did her shopping in the village and counted every centime. How he left in summer 1958 to save France once again: this time from the Algerian ultras and the threat of civil war. How he, even as president, always came back to the village, ‘my home and my mistress’.