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terrorist, the sense that these same men perhaps served quite different
ideals only some years earlier might legitimate their violent elimina–
tion. Face-to-face shooting and patricidal murder become elevated
to
acts of essential purgation, acts forcing off the mask of democratic
reasonableness from incorrigible authoritarian monsters. Conse–
quently, German terrorists are given to assassination and profound
violent doubt about the integrity and value of human life. They
mistrust the authenticity of their own human environment. The
American radical questions the superiority of the father in a manner
and to a degree quite significantly apart from his German counterpart
(despite Erik Erikson's effort in 1970
to
consider radicalism in an
internationally valid psychological manner). The American concedes
that his parents, and their parents before them, perhaps the entire
American political tradition (although deliberately compromised in
the name of democracy), have been neither radically good nor radically
evil. The German faces parents making comparable claims, without
either children or parents dealing effectively with far more devastating
events of history, especially of the recent past. Consequently, the young
German is not so sure that the parents are
not
radically evil, without
knowing why.
It
is perhaps significant that Japan, a nation which
began democracy at the same time as Germany, after a comparable
authoritarian history, has its international Baader-Meinhof-style ter–
rorists who have pursued similar patterns of violent terror, kidnap–
ping, hijacking, and assassination.
Perhaps the most substantial support for this thesis comes from
Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich's masterful psycho-analytic
study of postwar Germany,
The Inability to Mourn,
published in
German in 1967 and in English in 1975. Using their own "spontaneous
observation" and case histories of Germans who lived through the war,
the Mitscherlichs noted a continuing effort by Germans to deny the
Nazi past. They view Germans as not having dealt with the roots of "an
ossifying German national egotism." Germans after 1945 have avoided
the key issues of basic political rights. Instead, their concern has been
economic, for the swift postwar recovery in which affluence cast an
illusion of normalcy over a nation that established a democracy not by
a political process but as a result of military defeat and edict by the
victors. Germany, neither through legal nor educational means, has
ever dealt with its terrifying past. The Mitscherlichs provide supportive
psychoanalytic insights-the obsessive blaming of Hitler, the de–
realization of the past, a continuing defense against mourning,and
mass melancholia. They identify a political indifference, isolation, and
