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relationship of the past to West Germany 's current policies reflects a
shallow understanding of the problem of democracy in Germany. As
scholars such as the late Freidrich Meinecke (the dean of this century's
German historians) and George Lichtheim have argued, the difficulty
experienced in grafting Anglo-American or French ideals of democracy
onto German soil derives initially from the shift in Germany during
the last century away from the liberal and universal ideals of the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment upon which American and French
democratic ideals, if not practices, are founded. This shift, which dates
from the early nineteenth century, constitutes the historic failure of
Western liberalism in nineteenth-century Germany. In the context of
this tradition. the history of "Blood and Iron" pre-World War I
Germany and the Nazi era place a burden upon contemporary demo–
cratic Germany, which is not understood by today's journalists and
their readers. When Justice Minister Vogel spoke of a nation of law
(Rechtstaat)
his words were not carelessly chosen. They point away
from the particularly German political theory and practice of the past
two hundred years toward Western European and American models.
They embody the Bonn government's view of the central problem of
German history, the failure of Germany before World War II to steer its
historical development away from a nation based on might
(Machtstaat)
or on nationalism
(Nationalstaat).
Bonn appears deter–
mined that terrorism will not undermine what it considers the Federal
Republic to be: a democratic nation of law in the Western tradition. As
one conservative deputy in the German parliament put it, German
terrorism has cast the spectre, in part, of the collapse of Weimar
Germany: "We have been reminded again how quickly and danger–
ously an apparently stable society can explode." A young German,
writing to
The New York Times
in January 1978, claimed, "After 1945,
the democratically governed part of Germany finally overcame that
old-age divergence from the West, which culminated in nazism. The
terrorists will not succeed in bombing Germany back into the political
Stone Age."
Interpretation of one past, if not an obsession with it, helps
explain the posture of the German government toward terrorism. The
absence of any overt recognition of a different past illuminates the
origin and meaning of German terrorism. The German terrorist of the
Baader-Meinhof gang is an extreme symptom of a society which, since
World War II, continues to inadequately absorb and deal with its
history. The German terrorists' marked disregard for mass support, for
any symbolic value in terrorist behavior, not to speak of the violence
