LEON BOTSTEIN
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cern for a political relapse in Germany away from democracy is
directed at the government, perhaps the concern for the future of
German democracy might be better directed at the particular signifi–
cance and origin of the behavior of the German terrorists themselves.
Unlike fellow terrorists from nations where national liberation or
revolution against tyranny is at stake, recent German terrorists have
demonstrated little in the way of ideology. Their political slogans are
anti-imperialist, anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist, and pro-Third World,
but these slogans fail to explain the use of terror as a political tactic,
and as part of a coherent movement.
In
fact, despite radical left
rhetoric, the Baader-Meinhof gang and its tactics have been repudiated
by both the pro-Moscow German Communist party and the pro–
Peking Communist party of Germany. The latter, in the weekly
Rote
Fahne,
identified the terrorists as contemptuous of the working class
and distinct from the tradition of radical terrorism in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries.
Indeed, the terrorists themselves reject the classic identification
with a working class of a particular nation, particularly their own.
They concede their inability to arouse mass support within Germany.
Despite the fact that the rapid growth, the economic miracle of
Germany, is past, and "severe economic strain" is alleged
(to
quote
writer Andrew Kopkind), economic deprivation and the general eco–
nomic conditions in Germany cannot be compared to Italy's and
appear insufficient as an explanation for the terrorism. The German
terrorists' is an international struggle, one which rejects national
identification and seeks to somehow galvanize all the oppressed,
whether in the Middle East, Latin America, or Asia. Horst Mahler, a
lawyer for the Baader-Meinhof terrorists, was quoted as admitting that
the working classes could not liberate themselves and that the German
terrorists did not "feel German" any more and felt more like "a fifth
column of the Third World."
Along with the absence of a coherent political credo and the desire
for an international sphere of activity, the quality of intense loyalty
among the Baader-Meinhof German terrorists, one to another, must be
considered. The deaths of four terrorists in prison, which appear to
have been suicides, (immediately after the Mogadishu rescue) were
perhaps the most mystifying of the actions of the terrorists in the eyes
of the outside world. The continuing suspicion that these deaths were
not suicides but illegal murders by the Bonn Government or prison
authorities overlooks the plausibility of suicide as an act consistent
with the general behavior of the terrorists. The first suicides were in
