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a mechanical allegiance to democracy in the context of an unresolved
national past. This forms the context for the young Germans of the age
of the terrorists.
The Mitscherlichs' perceptions from the 1960s are validated for the
terrorist by Frederick Weibgen's eloquent "Op-Ed" piece in
The New
York Times
(January 1978), "Compensating for a Childhood in
Germany." He claims that his youth and schooling bred a peculiar
mistrust, hatred and fear of the older generation as a result of the
unresolved Nazi past. This experience is in contrast to the intergenera–
tional dynamics experienced by American activists and radicals. As
Weibgen put it, the postwar symbols of affluence "struck us as an
obsc;:ene reward for ob cene practices and added to the shame we felt ...
how could I trust my parents ... trust my teachers?" Terrorists were
fighting against parents who, as in Weibgen's own case "so recently
exchanged the black of the S.S. uniform for the business executive's
suit"; against "evil" itself, "and you don't fight fire other than with
fire."
German terrorism, then, is an extreme symptom of the difficulties
encountered in transplanting American and Western democratic ideals
onto a nation with not only a radically different tradition but, more
important, an unresolved, misunderstood and concealed past. The
young middle-class, Baader-Meinhof-style terrorist reflects three cru–
cial problems for German democracy: I) that prosperity alone is
insufficient as the basis for a stable democracy; 2) that an open, cold,
and full exploration of the past (to an extent and an interpretative
subtlety not undertaken since World War II) should be a continuing
part of a new German generation's process of education and personal
development; and 3) that the alienation of the young from democracy,
an alienation which, in the case of the terrorists, is comparable to the
alienation of the early Nazis from the Weimar Republic in style and
substance, cannot be prevented by strict laws. enforcement, and the
mere assertion of democratic principles. What appears lacking is an
open confrontation with the historical differences that today's Ger–
many inherited, a confrontation which might lead to an integration of
the rhetoric and ideas of democracy into the fact of German history and
the Nazi past.
In 1947, when Karl Jaspers presented his lectures entitled
The
Question of German Guilt,
he identified the mistrust of the young
stemming from the past as a key problem for the future of Germany.
He provided a perceptive analysis of how Germans could deal with
their past without falling into deceptive traps-facile repentance, easy
