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PARTISAN REVIEW
American historical myth that time, evolution, and some form of
democracy (consider, for example, the name S.D.S., Students for a
Democratic Society) would narrow the distance between promise and
reality in the ideals of justice, equality, freedom and prosperity. Only
the rapidity of that process was ultimately at stake.
The German student radical in 1967 did not, and the German
middle-class terrorist today does not possess such a secure historical
tradition and backdrop. While Habermas is correct in the narrow sense
that the German radical of the late 1960s never possessed direct memory
of nazism, the failure of serious remembrance to take the place of
memory in the minds of young Germans helps explain the phe–
nomenon of terrorism. The striking patricidal cha racter of the killing
of Jurgen Ponto by Susanne Albrecht, a German terrorist, is symbolic
of the impact of the difference in the historical memory and tradition
behind radical violence in America and Germany. Susanne Albrecht
was the goddaughter of industrialist Jurgen Ponto, from a socially
equal family; she gained access
to
hi s house with flowers on the
premise of a friendly dropping-by; he was shot at pointblank range. He
was of an age comparable to her father and like him had had political
conversations with her in the past. Ponto's killing is a typi cal indi ca tor
of the qualitative difference in young German terrorist response, in
their "outrage" at the older generation's suspect standards and values.
Curiously, Habermas himself predicted in 1969 that the kind of violent
behavior demonstrated by the Baader-Meinhof terrorists, neo–
anarchism, which seeks to demoralize people, to generate discontent by
"psychicall y induced conflicts," such as kidnapping and hijacking,
might grow out of the radical political movement in Germany.
What the German terrorist sees is an older generation now in
power in West Germany attempting to provide the stabi lity, the
prosperity from which American-style democracy and its attendant
rhetoric of evolution, reason and compromise can eas ily emerge. Those
in power in finance and government act and speak li ke their American
counterparts, urging gradual change, conceding the imperfections of
the world, urging tolerance and moderation , preaching th e virtues of
law, of a brokered, perhaps less than always hones t process of govern–
ment in the name of a democrati c tradition. Yet, the German older
generation, unlike its American counterpart, is, like the young in
Germany, on ly at the starting line of democracy. For the young
German, the years behind that starting line, before 1945, are a dark
abyss. They realize, in some vague fashion , that precisely those now
preaching the virtues of democracy were participant somehow with a
