Victory of the liberal Left
Richard West
Bonn The Lufthansa hijacking and the murder of the industrialist, Schleyer, have had an effect on West Germany which is immediately obvious to the Gastarbeiter like me, the foreign workers from poor countries like Greece, England and Turkey, who come here to earn more money than is possible at home. The West German Border Guards, from the same regiment that brought off the Mogadishu raid, subjected me to a quite unprecedented interrogation. Why was my passport smudged? (A fault of the passport clerk in the British Embassy in Vientiane.) Why did I write for a German magazine? How long would I stay? Did I know that I had to report after a certain time to the local police? And so on. The police and intelligence services tracking down the Baader-Meinhof gang have been told that the fugitives may have friends in the Gastarbeiter communities, so that the leaflets showing the photographs of the sixteen terrorists have been printed with appeals for information in some of the Gastarbeiter languages.
The leaflets (in German) are stuck in the entrance of every public building, restaurant, and hotel; moreover most offices now make you fill in a slip when you enter and hand it back when you leave. Police vans With loud hailers go around warning the Populace 'Achtung! Achtung!' to report anyone who resembles one of the sixteen, or anything else that seems suspicious, so that You do after a time find yourself staring at strangers.
Especially at young women, for these account for all but five of the most wanted sixteen, and two of the four Lufthansa hijackers. It was a mere coincidence but nevertheless telling that Frankfurt, the city for which the plane was bound, was even then holding its international book fair of which the most talked about title this year was The Hite Report, the latest modish twaddle from New York, encouraging women to do without men and find sexual pleasure either from other women or masturbation. The only Baader-Meinhof gangster that I have met was almost a caricature Of a butch, lesbian concentration camp . guard. Yet most of the wanted women, one learns from the press, have men for lovers and even bear children, although they tend to desert the latter.
The present condition of Germany lends itself to comparison with that of England three years ago, and one thinks at first that the Germans have over-reacted. After all, the Baader-Meinhof people have tended so far to choose specific targets for murder or kidnap and have not, as yet, please God, used indiscriminate terror bombing. There is not now in Germany the same actual fear that England knew after the Birmingham, Guildford and London bomb outrages. Yet anger against the terrorists is higher here than it was in England and for one good reason: while the IRA terrorists came from a small minority group, identifiable by their accents, the Baader-Meinhof people could be your neighbours, especially if you are well-to-do. In fact one tends to look with fear and mistrust at that class of people, attractive young women, that, in other countries one stares at with other emotions. For obvious reasons, plainer, older German women tend to look on young women terrorists with hatred amounting to frenzy. For similar reasons of envy, working-class Germans hate the Baader-Meinhof gang becauk they come from rich, middle class families and have enjoyed 'advantages'.
Another terrorist outrage could drive the Germans into hysteria but, for the moment, feeling does not run quite so high as one might expect from a people always slightly inclined to hysteria. For one thing, the events of last week ,represented a triumph for those Germans like Chancellor Schmidt who counsel calm and reason, as well a corresponding defeat for those Germans, like Franz-Josef Strauss, who want heavy measures to bring back law and order. The rescue of all but one of the Lufthansa hostages represented a triumph for Schmidt's leftcentre government, while the embarassing deaths in prison of three of the BaaderMeinhof gang could fairly be blamed on the right-wing government of the province responsible for the prison. What sort of 'law and order', the Germans ask, would be established by a political party whose prison officials allowed the gangsters to furnish their cell, with guns, high explosive, knives and even a stomach probe? (That stomach probe is to my mind the strangest fact in the mystery of the gangsters' death. Why should a prisoner want a stomach probe?) The debate in Germany over law and order has always been fought out more in the Press than in Parliament, and here too, the liberal left established a win last week. The Axel Springer newspapers, which for weeks have been trying to show that left wing terrorist sympathisers associated with Konkret (Ulrike Meinhofs old newspaper) were subversives and spies of the East German government, were disconcerted when East Germany not only denounced the Baader-Meinhog gang but helped diplomatically in freeing the hi-jackers.
The two liberal-left, mass-circulation magazines Spiegel and Stern gave a cover age of the hi-jack and murder stories that was both comprehensive and calm. (Here I should declare an interest, as they say. I write for a magazine in the Stern group.) It was, of course, a marvellous story, as we journalists say in our callous fashion, and Stern remade its cover twice, first dropping a story about the Queen ('Mrs Windsor's Profession') and then one showing the hijacked plane at Bahrein. Its final cover showed the Frontier Guard heroes.
The Stern Foreign Editor, Klaus Liedtke, told me the paper feared a kind of German McCarthyism, but had not changed its polit ical tune: 'In the early days of BaaderMeinhof we used to call them a "group" and the Springer Press said we therefore guilty of promoting unrest. But in those days the Baader-Meinhof gang, although they had anarchist ideas, didn't kill people.
Now of course we call them a "gang": Similarly Stern has supported détente with the East. 'We are the first German magazine to interview Brezhnev,' Herr Liedtke told me, 'but we also published photographs of how Russians keep dissidents in what is almost a concentration camp'. Like most of the German Press. Stern is acutely sensitive to how the outside world reacted, first to the Mogadishu attack and then to the death of the Baader-Meinhof prisoners. 'We Germans are like the Americans,' Herr Liedtke went on, 'we want to be loved. And we all thought that anti German feeling was aiding the right.
Everybody abroad acclaimed the Mogadishu operation. The Daily Mail wrote about "Desert Foxes". There was an almost military admiration of the Germans. Then came the suicides, and the "Ugly Germans" are back. Oh my God'.
He asked how the English public had greeted the news of the deaths of the Baader-Meinhof prisoners, and I said that from what I had heard people a) believed that the authorities had murdered them, b) applauded this. When I said this, Herr Liedtke sighed. It is hard to be a liberal in this illiberal world.
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