BOOKS
287
Hitler's Children,
the book that novelist Jillian Becker has devoted
to the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group in West Germany, is a serious
attempt to present a synopsis of the facts and to describe the milieu in
which the
Rate Armee Fraktion
arose. The author draws a lively
picture of the student movement of the
1
960s, which first consisted of a
reformist effort to democratize and modernize the German university.
Later, the movement became radicalized in its campaigns against the
Vietnam war. Finally, through its solidarity with the Third World (the
protest against the Shah of Iran's visit to Berlin was one of the root
causes of student agitation), it ended in its most desperate groups with
a total questioning of the system in Germany and it opted for the Great
Refusal (following the formula of Marcuse, who was one of the
movement's prophets at its beginning but who was later rejected by the
most belligerent groups for being timid and bourgeois). The Baader–
Meinhof group was briefly but intensely active: attacks on department
stores, assaults on banks, sabotage of military centers, kidnapping, and
murders. The principal members of the group, whose social origin and
formation are well outlined in this book, were born into families of the
middle and upper bourgeoisie, some of them within religious and
intellectual circles. The most interesting personality is that of Ulrike
Meinhof, who was imbued with theological concerns in her student
days. She later became a successful journalist for a magazine (edited by
her husband, the writer Klaus Rainer Rohl) that combined pacificism
with pornography, and she then gave up a position of certain impor–
tance within the intellectual Left in order to devote herself to direct
action. She ended by committing suicide in prison on May 9,1976. The
story of Ulrike Meinhof has much of the archetypal about it since the
stages of her radicalization-that path leading from moral rebellion to
the election of terror as a political strategy-are still being travelled by
countless young people in the Third World.
Hitler's Children
is an informative book, not an analytic one, and
occasionally the reader is disturbed by the commentaries-ironies and
sarcasms of sometimes doubtful taste-that accompany the facts. But
her book contains valuable material for situating one of the most
dramatic examples of contemporary terrorism in its proper context.
Scattered throughout its pages, just as in the sensational chapters of
Colin Smith's book, are more than sufficient facts for a conclusion
that, nevertheless, neither of the authors formulates.
The acts of Carlos and the Baader-Meinhof group are strident
expressions of a widespread phenomenon in contemporary political
life: the corruption of the ends by the means used to achieve them. This
