Authors: Bringing the War Home
They must not have this water.”8 But assistance to the terrorists could also be ideological, conveyed through support for their methods, affirmation of their broad goals, or even simple agreement with aspects of their worldview. In this capacity, the sympathizers were thought to confer legitimacy on the terrorists and serve as a receptive audience for their acts. A cartoon in
Der Spiegel,
used to head a series on the
Sympathisanten
in 1977, gave graphic expression to this image of terrorism’s supporters. In the cartoon, a black-clad, gun-toting figure with the word “Terror” on his chest traverses an abyss on a footbridge; over him hovers a white angel labeled “Sympathizers.”9
By the same token, fixation on the sympathizers all but confirmed that the literal threat to the nation’s security posed by the handful of practicing terrorists was in itself small. The true danger was that the cancer of antistate violence would spread, first to those within the RAF’s immediate orbit, and then more broadly throughout German society. The amorphous ranks of the sympathizers constituted the front line, where the battle against terrorism would ultimately be won or lost. There is a sense, finally, in which the sympathizers’ main offense lay simply in existing. Like the terrorists themselves, the sympathizers had, in the description of their accusers, neither fully assimilated democratic values nor been properly integrated into the norms of the postwar state. The sympathizer was thus an internal other, a shadowy expression of the failure 258
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of the West German state to command the basic allegiance of its citizens and complete the desired evolution toward democracy.
Preoccupation with, if not outright contempt for, the
Sympathisanten
spanned the political spectrum. Shortly after Schleyer’s kidnapping in 1977, Willy Brandt, the great SPD reform chancellor of the late 1960s, admonished the sympathizers:
You are, it seems to me, even more responsible for the atrocities than the fanatics who pull the trigger of their automatic weapons. Why is that so?
Without you, the assassins would be helpless. You furnish the stage set on which murderers appear as heroes. . . . You provide the suste-nance, equipment, and shelter without which the terrorists would have to abandon their absurd and bloody dreams of a civil war. . . . What kind of people are you? You, who claim to be politically aware, don’t realize that you are doing the bidding of the darkest forces of reaction—
yes, of the neo-Nazis—rather than creating more freedom, [and] pushing public opinion over the edge, beyond which there is only the abyss of chaos, a police state, or a dictatorship. Or is that what you really want?
After appealing to Germany’s youth to use its “critical intelligence” to reject, rather than promote, violence, he concluded: “To those directly aiding and abetting terrorism, I say again: Stop every form of assistance—
before it is too late. Otherwise our country will become a living hell, where father mistrusts son, where neighbor suspects neighbor, where the state spies on its citizens, and where assassination and deadly violence rule the streets. Help us avert this nightmare. . . . If you refuse, the nightmare may become reality.”10 In Brandt’s construction, the sympathizers were so pivotal precisely because they, unlike active terrorists, were not
fully
immune to appeals to reason; their capacity for choice enhanced both their current guilt and the importance of their future actions. In their hands lay not only the direction of the terrorist conflict but also, remarkably, the fate of West German society. Brandt’s status as a liberal Social Democrat with an antifascist background seemed less to limit than to shape his anger. For him, the sympathizers were so dangerous not because they were themselves reactionaries, as the foes of terrorism routinely charged, but because they threatened to unleash the forces of right-wing reaction.
As with so many things in postwar Germany, this image of a nightmar-ish future summoned memories of the catastrophic past. Brandt envisioned a disaster to rival Weimar’s tortured demise, and even the Nazis’
reign of terror, if left-wing violence escalated.
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259
This intense concern with terrorism’s alleged supporters had far-reaching consequences. First and foremost, it dictated that police cast their net of suspicion widely. The security forces paid closest attention to those groups considered most likely to produce new terrorists and their helpers: students, intellectuals, and disaffected youths. More generally, focus on the
Sympathisanten
created a climate of suspicion and accusation. Intellectuals were prime targets. In mid December 1974, a CDU official demanded that all Germans distance themselves both from terrorism and from “the writer Heinrich Böll, who a few months ago under the pseudonym Katharina Blüm wrote a book justifying violence.”11 The media and the public, fully much as representatives of the state, fed this climate. Later in December, the moderator of a popular current affairs program declared on German television that “[t]he sym-pathisers with this left-wing fascism, the Bölls and Brückners, and all the other intellectuals, are not one bit better than the intellectuals who led the way for the Nazis.”12 After visiting in 1974 with the prisoner Ulrike Meinhof to plead that she abandon her hunger strike, Berlin’s Bishop Kurt Scharf earned the label the “Baader-Meinhof-Bischof.” The pastor Helmut Gollwitzer who, like Böll, denounced the RAF but criticized the violence of the state, was also condemned by the media as a
“sympathizer.” The theorists of the Frankfurt School, so influential on the student movement, came under similar suspicion, even though they disclaimed the violence of left-wing radicals.13
At times, the entire discourse had a runaway, even absurd quality. Television’s “ZDF Magazine” denounced a Stuttgart theater director as a
“sympathizer” for collecting money to pay for Gudrun Ensslin’s dental work while she was in prison.14 (His actions prompted local police to call for a boycott of his productions.) Bernhard Vogel, the CDU
Ministerpräsident
of Nordrhein-Westfalen, commented that a sympathizer
“could be anyone who says Baader-Meinhof group [
Gruppe
], instead of Baader-Meinhof gang [
Bande
].”15 (Since the RAF’s inception, some felt that the use of the term “group” granted it political legitimacy, whereas
“gang” properly defined it as criminal.) Even mainstream voices asked just where the frenzy of accusation might stop. Responding at the height of the terrorist crisis in 1977 to a CDU statement that “[t]he sympathizer is an accomplice . . . no better than the murderer,”
Der Spiegel
asked,
“If that were so, then how many [sympathizers] are there: 1,000–1,500
active helpers, as the BKA sees it, or 5,000 potential supporters? Thousands of university students who privately cheer terrorist acts? Perhaps 260
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tens of thousands, who sympathize not with the acts but with the motivations for them? Or still more? . . . Are sympathizers all those who protest against putative isolation torture and fare card increases today, for freedom in Chile, and tomorrow against God knows what?”16 The magazine concluded that “the spongy idea” of the sympathizer had become little more than a “rhetorical weapon [
Sprachknüppel
]” in a primitive war of words.17 In the face of state and public hostility, some citizens worried that dissident views—be they affinity with the RAF’s grievances or goals, criticism of the antiterrorist response, or actual sympathy for the plight of RAF fugitives or prisoners—rendered them enemies of the state, subject to prosecution. Critics of sections 129 and 129a argued that the laws made punishable virtually any form of contact with members of organizations designated as “criminal” or “terrorist” and potentially criminalized all political speech deemed threatening or even merely offensive to the state.
Police conduct seemed at times to bear out the allegation that ostensible security measures sought in truth to harass, intimidate, and abuse dissidents. On March 5, 1975, shortly after the J2M released its kidnap victim Peter Lorenz, police raided more than fifty dwellings of Berlin leftists, notably the houses of the “youth collectives” so popular among young radicals. In some of the raids, the police entered violently in the early morning hours, failed to show warrants, pointed machine guns at the frightened residents (some of whom were made to lie naked on the floor), and destroyed windows, doors (even when unlocked), radios, and other property. They made nearly 180 arrests but failed to turn up any evidence that the houses’ inhabitants had any connection at all to the kidnapping. Members of the Thomas-Wießbecker-Haus, named after a Berlin anarchist killed by police, dismissed the police’s claim of reasonable suspicion that Lorenz had been held there by his kidnappers; the house, its members pointed out, had been under constant surveillance since the moment of his capture. Seeing similarities with the fascist past, they asserted that “whoever invoked his legally guaranteed rights would be forced against the wall by a machine gun. Who is not reminded by this of the methods of the GESTAPO during the Nazi period?”18 A young father, detained without explanation for sixteen hours following a raid on his house, drew a subtler comparison to Nazi tactics. Noting that police targeted “politically known” residents, he protested that “the arrests smack of the establishment of a camp for political undesirables.”19 Even a representative of the centrist Federal Democratic Party in the Bundestag warned of “fascist tendencies” as she assessed the raids.20
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The state also used the weapon of censorship against terrorism’s alleged sympathizers. On November 24, 1975, police raided offices and private homes in Munich connected to the publisher Trikont-Verlag to seize literature thought to promote terrorism. The chief object of the raids was “Bommi” Baumann’s newly published memoir
Wie alles anfing.
Police also seized copies of a manifesto of the Socialist Patients Collective and of a booklet published by the French group Gauche Prolétarienne, each of which had been available in Germany for several years. More than 1,600 books were confiscated, as were Trikont-Verlag’s business records and the printing plates for Baumann’s text.21
Prosecutors justified the action under section 140 of the Criminal Code, which banned expressions of approval of criminal offenses, and section 131, which punished those who produced, disseminated, or possessed texts that “glorified”
(verherrlichen)
violence of a “gruesome” or “inhuman form.” The raids set the stage for the passage of amendments to the Criminal Code designed specifically to ban literature supporting left-wing violence. Section 188a, which went into effect in April 1976, created penalties of up to three years’ imprisonment for “anyone who disseminates, publicly issues . . . produces, owns, offers, stocks, announces, praises, or attempts to import or export” a text supporting or encouraging others to commit specified crimes or acts threatening “the existence or safety of the Federal Republic.” Section 130a did the same for texts “instructing in the commission of criminal offenses.”22
The raids on publishers and the new censorship legislation met with widespread and vehement objections. Prominent West German writers, artists, and publishers denounced these measures as assaults on freedom of expression. “What happened yesterday to Trikont-Verlag can happen tomorrow in any theater,” warned Volker Schlöndorf, the director of the acclaimed film adaptation of Böll’s novel
The Lost Honor of Katharina
Blum.
23 The defenders of the besieged publisher were particularly indignant that the state would think that Baumann’s book glorified violence. A textured and deeply honest work,
Wie alles anfing
chronicles Baumann’s transformation from a rebellious working-class youth into a leading member of West Berlin’s anarchist scene and then its violent underground. Baumann also, however, describes his exit from a life of violence and his eventual renunciation of the “armed struggle.” Even before the Lorenz kidnapping and the von Drenkmann murder, Baumann had pleaded in
Der Spiegel,
“Comrades, throw away the gun.”24 As evidence of Baumann’s enduring support for violence, prosecutors cited such passages from
Wie alles anfing
as: “I still stand behind all the things 262
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I have done . . . . Even the worst experiences were right in their time, because otherwise, it wouldn’t have come to this point. That was your road, and you had to walk it.”25 Seemingly oblivious both to existential sub-tleties and Baumann’s ultimate message, they saw the book as only a threat.
Böll commented that “the worst thing one can do is to ban” Baumann’s book.26 On the contrary, he felt that it should be
recommended
to youths, parents, clergy, and police to help them understand not only the social origins and appeal of violence but also its tremendous hazards. In repressing the work, the state seemed to assert that merely to discuss political violence was to promote it, and that to promote it was a crime.
Who was doing the discussing was crucial in determining the tactics of prosecutors. On the day of the raid on Trikont-Verlag, excerpts from Baumann’s “criminal” book appeared in
Der Spiegel,
which naturally went unpunished.
The new censorship laws intensified the charge that the state sought to criminalize the left by outlawing the ideas it devoured, debated, and even rejected. In August 1976, in the very first application of section 88a, police raided eight bookstores, seizing copies of the Revolutionary Cells’
newspaper and other “terrorist” texts. The head of the Union of Political Bookstores in Bochum and Essen was arrested for violation of both the new law and section 129a. Colleagues rallying in his defense warned that “virtually all left-wing groups and projects can be criminalized under section 88a, because it can punish discussions of everything from defensive violence, to building-site occupations, to guerrilla actions.”27 In 1977–79, four members of the Agit-Druck press, a radical print collective that produced an array of left-wing literature, were successfully prosecuted under sections 88a and 129a for printing the newspaper
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