>From Commie Bomb-Thrower to Media Darling
By Gabriele Metzler
FRANKFURT. The Foreign Minister has been outed as a former revolutionary thug, while an ex-terrorist from the Red Army Faction will soon be seen playing a police officer in a television series. Each life offers many roles and, so it seems, a German life offers them in abundance.
Members of the generation of Joseph (Joschka) Fischer and Christof Wackernagel, however, were offered chances their fathers and grandfathers could hardly have imagined. They grew up in peace and rising prosperity, presented with opportunities and careers that they, however, rejected. At least that is the conclusion suggested by Gerd Koenen's study of the "Red Decade" extending from the start of the Apo, the extra-parliamentary opposition, in 1967, and the "German Autumn" of 1977. Koenen, born in 1944, knows of which he speaks. In 1967 he was a member of the German Socialist Students' Alliance, one of the driving forces behind the student protests, and later joined various left-wing groups.
The revolt symbolized by the year 1968 took most contemporaries by surprise, especially in its quickly growing radicalism. Its clashes soon escalated into a "double-bind of narcissistic self-representation and media presentation." The core conflict was generational. The young -- according to Koenen's (self-)interpretation -- were obsessed by the idea of having to give weight to their biographies, whereas their parents were able to point to their achievements during the war and postwar periods. Rebellious youth thus plunged into war fantasies, based on gloomy suppositions of an imminent World War III or the liberation struggles of the Third World.
Despite their growing radicalism, the Apo activists believed they carried a halo of "militant innocence." They were convinced they stood on the right side of history, a history totally centered on National Socialism though without any interest in objective discussion of the Nazi era. The rebels acknowledged the Germans' historic guilt in order to assert their own moral superiority.
In Koenen's view, the boundaries between the Apo and terrorism were fluid. He dates the beginnings of organized terrorism to the "prison camp" demonstration at Ebrach in July 1969, drawing a direct line to the German Autumn. Indeed, Koenen sees the detour into terrorism as the "paradigmatic form for a highly diverse spectrum of new political groups and secession movements" established after 1969.
The protest movement did in fact diversify and differentiate in the early 1970s. While many joined the Social Democratic Party under Willy Brandt, others saw the new government, more than ever, as an enemy that had to be fought. For many the time for revolution had arrived, supposedly confirmed by the strike action of September 1969.
During his research Koenen worked his way through a large portion of leftist writings -- an achievement that few have managed, let alone attempted. The new left was a "textual religion" that produced mountains of treatises and pamphlets. Classics and previously neglected works were devoured, buried German left-wing traditions brought back to light. This activity was increasingly divorced from the real world and soon, as in a sect, related only to the group itself.
The Red Decade culminated in the autumn of 1977. Here the narrative contains nothing truly new, although the theory that the terrorists acted in "blind compulsive repetition, right down to their collective suicide in the bunker" is certainly worth considering. Perhaps those months really were a "distant echo of the murky collapse of April 1945," as Koenen writes, and perhaps, one might add, 1977 was an attempt to make good the absent catharsis of 1945.
What is left of the Red Decade? Koenen draws a modest balance. The protest movements were catalysts in a process of change that had long begun; in that sense, Koenen concludes, West German history is characterized by a high degree of continuity that was not interrupted until the events leading to reunification. That it was possible to blunt the militancy and radicalism of these very diverse movements and integrate them into a social consensus demonstrates a high degree of self-civilization. At the same time, the country itself was transformed during the Red Decade. By taking the new progressive middle classes as their main social base, the Greens represented the attempt to form a synthesis between democratic society and protest movements.
Gerd Koenen, ]Das rote Jahrzehnt. Unsere kleine deutsche Kulturrevolution 1967 bis 1977. (The Red Decade. Our Little German Cultural Revolution 1967 to 1977). Cologne: Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2001. 553 pp, DM49.90 ($22).