Jeremy Varon (52 page)

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They are not only the enemies of democracy—they are

the enemies of every human order.

Bundespräsident Walter Scheel

As Bundespräsident, Walter Scheel was more a symbolic than a substantive leader. The federal chancellor, Helmut Schmidt of the SPD, held primary executive power and ultimate responsibility for shaping antiterrorist policy. Yet on the occasion of Schleyer’s funeral, Scheel was called upon to provide more than symbolic leadership. Speaking before an audience of mourners that included Schleyer’s family, leading politicians, and the heads of key industries, he rose to the challenge.

Scheel came to Schleyer’s funeral in Stuttgart on October 25, 1977, not only to praise his life, but to justify it; not only to condemn the terrorists, but to argue against them; not only to declare the legitimacy of

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the West German state, but to articulate its virtues. More than a eulogy, his speech was an important, highly public, and sharply polemical moment in the
geistige Auseinandersetzung
—the intellectual struggle—with terrorism. Security measures alone had proven inadequate. Twice the RAF, decimated by arrests, had managed to regenerate itself, and other guerrilla groups had formed, suggesting the existence of sustained support for violence among at least segments of the population. In the wake of Schleyer’s death, calls abounded for complementing the
militarische
Auseinandersetzung,
fought with police and military commandos, with a
geistige Auseinandersetzung,
whose goal was to induce, rather than coerce, loyalty to the state by convincing all Germans of the worth of their democracy and the need to defend it.77 Though participating himself in this “intellectual struggle,” Scheel also articulated its limits.

Like the RAF, Scheel presented Schleyer as a symbol. But he transformed Schleyer from the negative icon of capitalist oppression his captors had seen him as into a positive symbol of West Germany’s virtues.

Scheel stated that though Schleyer had represented employers’ interests, he had also cared about the conditions of workers. “The terrorists” had, therefore, “killed no ice-cold capitalist,” but rather a representative of

“capitalism with a human face.”78 Scheel also lauded Schleyer as the embodiment of the merits of democratic pluralism and, more deeply, of the political and moral legitimacy of the Federal Republic. In his dealings on behalf of German industry, Schleyer had been an “honorable adversary”

who had “never violated the rules of the game . . . a representative of an open society, committed to the reasonable balance of interests.” Generalizing Schleyer’s example, Scheel declared that “we all affirm democratic conflict, the conflict of opinions and arguments. But this conflict is based on respect for the convictions of one’s opponents.” Terrorism, according to Scheel, was inherently undemocratic, insofar as it used violence to compensate for the failure to gain power through legitimate means.

The resort to violence, moreover, necessarily demonstrated the poverty of the cause it intended to serve. Speculating that Schleyer and his captors must have engaged in political debates, Scheel said: “[T]he fact that the terrorists could end this debate only with naked violence shows on which side the better argument lay.”

Scheel also paid tribute to Schleyer by presenting him as a sacrificial object. Though Schleyer’s family had persistently pleaded that the government release the prisoners to save his life, Chancellor Schmidt stood by his decision, made immediately following the kidnapping, not to make any deal with the RAF. With this decision, Schmidt virtually ensured that 280

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Schleyer would be killed.79 In practical terms, Schleyer’s death prevented the freeing of convicted terrorists who might again have engaged in violence, as several of those released in the 1975 exchange for Lorenz had done. (By 1977, they stood accused of committing nine murders since their release.) Addressing the Bundestag the day after Schleyer was confirmed dead, Schmidt stressed this negative precedent in defending his refusal to make the exchange.80 Schleyer had died, in short, so that others might live.

Equally important, Schleyer’s fate gave rise to unprecedented unity in the Federal Republic, as groups spanning the ideological spectrum rallied in support of the chancellor, in condemnation of the RAF, and in affirmation of democracy. Setting aside partisan differences, the representatives on the “all-party crisis staff” advising Schmidt unequivocally backed the policy of no compromise with the RAF.81 The SPD, Schmidt’s party, explained that, “It is necessary, whatever ideological and political differences exist, to outlaw terrorists, to give demagogues the cold shoulder, and to show that the democratic community is stronger than cold-blooded murder. . . . [We] know what we are defending: our liberal and socially legitimate Rechtsstaat, which our citizens have built from the rubble of war and tyranny. . . . Not without reason are the terroristic murderers described as Hitler’s children. They would shoot their way to a new fascism if they could.”82 The Bundestag did its part by passing the contact ban law in just five days, by far the fastest a bill had ever been ratified in West Germany.83 The media lined up behind the chancellor as well, consenting to a news blackout about the kidnapping to hinder the ability of the kidnappers to communicate with the public or send coded messages to terrorist cells.

An outpouring of support also came from groups within civil society.

The Council of Evangelical Churches insisted in an official statement that

“murder and extortionary violence” can have no justification in a democracy, and urged that the terrorists seek “God’s love” to “free themselves from hatred.”84 A union of German bishops, asking “what have we done or let happen” as a society, answered that Germany had “devalu[ed] the dignity of life,” allowed its universities to become breeding grounds for violence, and permitted some in the media to “make a laughing stock of our state and its constitution.”85 In a public statement, over 100 university professors, as if answering those who had republished the Mescalaro letter, announced their unequivocal rejection of “violence as a means of political struggle.”86 An association of writers upbraided the terrorists: “They are no leftists. They haven’t read Marx. . . . When no

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revolutionary situation exists, what they are doing is merely kicking up a fuss. [The FRG] is a state that makes possible and protects freedom, justice, and peace.”87 Trade unions were equally critical of the RAF. Those of IG Metall warned that terrorism “throws citizens into fear and hysteria. Once before political adventurers have exploited such a climate.”88

The ÖTV Union charged, “Whoever supports the violent criminal or even sympathizes with him is an enemy of the democratic Rechtsstaat and, in that, an enemy of workers and unions.”89 It concluded by paying special thanks to the police. Scheel, taking stock of this extraordinary cho-rus, pronounced that the “unified embrace of the duty to uphold democracy has strengthened our democracy.”90 Within the logic of sacrifice, Schleyer’s death nourished the democratic collective by strengthening the
Wertgebundenheit
at its core. “In the name of all German citizens,” Scheel begged Schleyer’s wife and children for forgiveness.91 In this apology, received by Schleyer’s wife with stoic gratitude, lay the event’s deepest symbolism. The holy union of the Schleyer family had been shattered so that the bond of the nation might be renewed.

Scheel reserved his strongest language for the terrorists: There is truly nothing that these young people respect, that they honor, that they hold as holy. They laugh at such words. They are proud that they murder, rob, and blackmail. . . . They are free of every inhibition, every taboo. They have trashed the value of two thousand years of culture. . . . What kind of grimace of freedom stares at us? It is the freedom of malice, the freedom of destruction. . . . They are not only the enemies of democracy—they are the enemies of every human order. This enemy is naked barbarism. These lost young people not only threaten democratic freedom. They are the enemies of every civilization.92

The RAF’s actions were amoral, blasphemous, monstrous, and the freedom the RAF represented had nothing to do with liberation. It was, rather, the freedom of total license. Contemptuous of democracy and norms generally, the terrorists had excluded themselves from the nation as a community based on the affirmation of democratic values. The pluralist imperative that political opponents be fought through rational debate did not apply in their case. The paramount challenge was to arrest and convict them.

One can discern in Scheel’s language coded references to the past. His talk of the RAF’s “naked barbarism” and nihilistic transgressions implicitly equated the RAF’s terrorism with Nazism, which had indeed violated every humane value. This negative construction of the RAF suggests a positive view of West Germany as part of the age-old project of 282

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civilized culture. Scheel betrayed no recognition that a German state just thirty years earlier had, much more plausibly than RAF, “trashed the value of two thousand years of culture”; that Schleyer, whom he lauded as a noble democrat, had been an SS
Hauptsturmführer
in the service of the monstrous Reinhard Heydrich, the Third Reich’s genocidal proconsul in Czechoslovakia; or that anyone or anything associated with Nazism might have survived in the personnel, institutions, or ideology of the postwar state. In Scheel’s discourse, the conversion from totalitarianism to democracy had been total. The battle against the RAF, presented this way, affirmed West Germany’s desired identity, not only as thoroughly democratic, but also as resolutely antifascist.

Scheel then addressed issues of guilt and how best to combat terrorism. The RAF’s ends, he felt, could no longer be separated from its gruesome means, making any form of support for the group indefensible.

Those who provided tactical assistance he judged as guilty
(schuldig)
as the terrorists themselves. The ranks of those who were complicit
(mit-schuldig)
included those who offered gestures of support—even as small as painting pro-RAF graffiti—and those who “in word and writing openly support the terrorists while personally rejecting the use of terroristic violence.” Ideally, such people could be persuaded of the illegitimacy of violence; failing that, the state must “resist [them] with the full severity of the law.” Scheel targeted the alleged sympathizers within the profes-sorate, charging that they were “not qualified to instruct our children”

and should therefore be subject to the
Berufsverbot.
He concluded by restating his understanding of the essence of democracy. Those who recognized “the human dignity” even of the terrorists had grasped the meaning of democracy, whose “life-elixir” was “critique.” “Illegitimate critique,” however, “had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with democracy.” The courage of intolerance must therefore be summoned to vanquish the deadly intolerance of the terrorists.

Scheel’s speech, however impassioned, is full of tensions and contradictions that go to the heart of the controversies surrounding the state’s campaign against the RAF. Scheel asserts the importance of pluralism but says that those who fail to recognize its value should be denied the right of political participation. The democratic community thus defines itself through exclusion and undermines its claim to universality. He identifies the “dignity of man” as the foundational principle of democracy, only to denounce the RAF as virtually inhuman. Though rational debate is the favored means for winning back its “sympathizers,” the law is poised, should they prove incorrigible, to rid the public sphere of

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their poisonous ideas. And since sympathizers reveal themselves largely through words and not deeds, the glare of surveillance must carefully inspect the speech of Germans for signs of disloyalty, with the state alone empowered to separate legitimate from illegitimate critique.

Suspicion, surveillance, censorship, confinement, condemnation, exclusion—such were the core elements of the state’s battle against the RAF. From the state’s standpoint, these tactics represented only the re-grettable necessity of sometimes having to use unsavory means to preserve democracy.
Any
state, the Federal Republic’s defenders argued, has the obligation to provide for its citizens’ safety; and any
democratic
state, faced with terrorism, would necessarily have to balance the imperative of security against the protection of civil liberties. Why, the state’s defenders protested, should West Germany be held to a different and higher standard as it tries to strike a fair balance? Other western European democracies at least had on the books laws similar to those in West Germany that drew so much criticism; the discomfort of seeing such laws in action, to extend the argument, was ultimately a result of the extraordinary threat terrorism posed, and not a sign of the laws’ illegitimacy.93

The German past, to the state’s backers, only enhanced the need to err on the side of security; to
fail
to do so would be to ignore the grim lesson of the Nazi experience. Finally, certain arguments of the radical left appeared to echo the state’s own premises. Most dramatically, Marcuse had advocated his own version of the “courage of intolerance” in arguing that tolerance should be
actively withdrawn from the enemies
of true democracy.
“This intolerance,” to be effective, had to “extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion . . . even [to] thought and opinion.”94 Though Marcuse meant for the
political right
to be the object of repression, the means he promoted were strikingly close to those the West German state applied against the radical left. Furthermore, Marcuse called for intolerance against “regressive movements
before
they become active,” lamenting that “if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn when the future [Nazi] leaders started their campaign, mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.”95 Even the historical examples summoned in defense of intolerance were the same.