In Europe (95 page)

That autumn, all of West Germany lived in a shifting state of fear, rage, bitterness and paranoia. The RAF, which had gradually come to represent only itself, demanded the release of Baader, Ensslin and nine other prisoners. Despite desperate pleas from Schleyer himself, the German government refused to budge. To further underscore the demands, three Palestinian RAF supporters then hijacked a Lufthansa Boeing; a lightning
raid by German commandos at Mogadishu airport on 18 October, however, put a speedy end to the hijack. Schleyer's body was recovered the same day, and that night Baader, Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe were found dead in their cells. For years any number of theories circulated concerning the cause of death, but nowadays most historians tend to agree with the official reading: suicide.

The films made later about the autumn months of 1977 bear titles like
Die bleierne Zeit
(The Days of Lead) and
Deutschland im Herbst
(Germany in Autumn). The young German democracy did, indeed, seem on the verge of backsliding to a situation very like that of the 1920s and 1930s; precisely what the left-wing radicals hoped to ‘prove’. Roadblocks were set up everywhere, police helicopters patrolled above the roads, ‘conspiratorial locations’ were permanently wiretapped and watched, emergency measures were tightened and all outspoken support for ‘terrorists’ was made punishable. On the basis of the Radicals Law, dissidents were faced with a vocational ban: they were excluded from all public functions, including teaching. RAF prisoners were put into isolation and submitted to a special regime. Their lawyers, including future minister of home affairs Otto Schily, received constant threats.

The Baader-Meinhof Gang's supporters remained active for another fifteen years. In total, the RAF carried out almost 250 attacks, robbed 69 banks, kidnapped a few dozen politicians, businessmen and journalists, and murdered 28 people.

The vast majority of the German student movement and the radical left had long since turned their back on these violent tactics. In Berlin alone, in 1980, an estimated 100,000 people were living within a subculture of alternative cafés, communes, action groups, political hippiedoms, squats,
Spontis
and
Wohngemeinschaften
, but almost none of them would have anything to do with the RAF.

In Italy, however, things were different. There the left actually granted a certain degree of support to extremists, and even to the RAF's Italian counterpart, the Red Brigades, which began its activities in 1969. In the late 1960s, the old civil conflict between Fascists and anti-Fascists had been reignited with an escalation of attacks by more or less covert neo-Fascist terror groups and the Red Brigades. These Italian ‘days of lead’
were far more violent than those in Germany, and ultimately claimed more than 400 victims.

The first bomb exploded on 12 December, 1969 in a bank on Piazza Fontana in Milan: sixteen people were killed, eighty-four were injured. The anarchist Giusseppe Pinelli was arrested and, during interrogations on 15 December, ‘accidentally’ fell to his death from a high window. The killers were never located, but most evidence pointed to neo-Fascists and right-wing elements within the Italian intelligence service. The funerals of the victims of the bombing turned into a demonstration in which 300,000 people took part. Attack after attack, demonstration after demonstration followed.

The Italian people were frightened, and rightly so. The Red Brigades, which its members claimed was a continuation of the resistance movement from 1944–5, went on terrorising the country for years. Meanwhile, speculating on the country's ongoing disintegration, neo-Fascist groups set to work on a right-wing coup by the Italian Army. It had worked in Greece, so why not in Italy? By the late 1970s, each year saw an average of more than 2,000 terrorist attacks. Even today it is not certain who was responsible for a number of them – including, for example, the infamous bombing which killed eighty-five people at Bologna's central railway station on 2 August, 1980. There are indications that foreign intelligence services were involved in other as yet unexplained attacks, and that during this same period a covert campaign was underway to halt the brand of Euro-communism so popular in Italy. There is, however, still no clear evidence for this. On 16 March, 1978, the prime minister, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped by the Red Brigades. His fellow party members and friends refused to enter into negotiations. Twenty-five days later, Moro's body was found in a Roman shopping street, crammed in the boot of a Renault 4.

Is it merely a coincidence that the 1960s culminated in so much violence in Germany and Italy – the former Axis powers – while radical-left terrorist movements gained little or no foothold in, for example, France, Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands? Probably not. All over Europe, the 1960s constituted the delayed repercussion of the war experiences of generations past. Public officials and policemen were systematically referred to
as ‘fascists’; the Provos of Amsterdam even shouted that epithet at their mayor, Gijs van Hall, who had been one of the country's most courageous resistance fighters during the war. Countless texts referred to the legacy of the Second World War, to ‘collaboration’ and ‘resistance’.

But in Spain (ETA), in Italy, and in Germany above all, these sentiments were taken to much greater extremes, leading some to demonise the state as a whole. The sociologist Norbert Elias described the young people's rebellion as a ‘purification ritual for the sins of the fathers’. The great empires had crumbled, national ties had to be redefined and confirmed, and young people viewed the ideals and actions of older generations with a new, more critical eye. In Germany in particular, the younger generation had many questions to ask of the men and women who had been in power at that time, who had participated actively in public life throughout the war. Yet no answers were forthcoming.

In 1969, the Bavarian Christian Democrat Franz Josef Strauss voiced openly what many older Germans had been thinking for a long time: ‘A people who have delivered such economic achievements have the right not to hear about Auschwitz any longer.’

For this war generation, Elias writes, the reconciliation with the Nazi past was completed with the Nuremberg trials and the rehabilitation of real or alleged party members. ‘Officially, they had nothing to fear and nothing to regret. Their consciences may have bothered them now and then, but in the public life of Germans in positions of leadership, it seemed, the nightmare of the Hitler years could be buried.’ However, their own sons and daughters, in voices which grew louder and louder, were demanding a retrial.

At home, I found an interview I had once made with Christiane Ensslin, Gudrun's sister. Christiane was the real protagonist of Margarethe von Trotta's film
Die bleierne Zeit
(1981), the woman who had taken in Gudrun's son after the child had been badly wounded by a right-wing fanatic, and who sympathised with her sister but refused to choose the path of violence. When I visited her at her Cologne apartment in 1984, she was unemployed, precisely because her surname was Ensslin. Her boyfriend was not allowed to hold a job in his own professional field, simply because he was her boyfriend. Her father had encountered great difficulty finding
a graveyard where her sister could be buried: even in death, Gudrun Ensslin was not to be allowed to repose amid ‘normal’ people.

Together we looked back briefly at the ‘days of lead’ in the 1970s, but ultimately the discussion focused on her generation and that of her parents. ‘Most older Germans see the war as, well, tough luck,’ she felt. Her own generation refused to see things that way, and was therefore, in her eyes, more frustrated than its contemporaries in other countries. ‘We were the country that applied fascism to the highest degree of perfection. Our most recent history, that of our parents, is so unimaginable for us, their children … And that means something. The greater the wrong you have behind you, the more you must watch out for what you do in the future. To that extent, the historical debt we have to pay is much heavier than that of other European countries.’

She talked about a scene in
Die bleierne Zeit
which was true to life. When her father, a brave and critical pastor, showed his congregation a film about the concentration camps, she and her sister Gudrun left the room, sick to their stomachs. ‘As a child of course, when you see something like that, you think: What? Did my father know about that? And he just sat at home and ate his dinner? That can't be true, can it? And then you promise yourself: I'm going to pay very close attention, if people start disappearing again or being mistreated or murdered, I'll take up the fight!’

Christiane Ensslin talked about feelings and frustrations: ‘Our German perfectionism, the concept of power that's behind it, the frustrations it has created and still creates among young people … If you ignore feelings like that you can never understand history. No action ever takes place without a feeling!’ Old Norbert Elias saw it, above all, as a drama: ‘The tragedy was that some members of this young generation, in their attempts to create a better, warmer, more meaningful kind of human life as counterpoint to the National Socialist regime, arrived in turn at increasingly inhumane actions. And perhaps it was not their tragedy alone, but also that of the state, of the society they were trying to transform, and even of the older generation that had all the power firmly in hand.’

GO TO THE CAFÉ IN COLOMBEY-LES -DEUX-ÉGLISES AND ASK ABOUT
the general, and they all launch into stories right away. About how he sat in church, straight as a ramrod, the seats beside him always empty, ‘it was as if there were a glass cage around him’. How he lowered all his defences for his handicapped daughter Anne, how he danced around and slapped his thighs. How his wife Yvonne, during his period as an unemployed civilian between 1946–58, did her shopping in the village and counted every centime. How he left in summer 1958 to save France once again: this time from the Algerian ultras and the threat of civil war. How he, even as president, always came back to the village, ‘my home and my mistress’.

Colombey is a simple rural hamlet with one huge eighteenth-century house, La Boisserie. De Gaulle bought it in 1937, especially for Anne. With the many elections and referenda, the term of his presidency was a perpetual propaganda campaign, and gradually de Gaulle came to believe all those stories himself. Over time his already considerable ego took on absolutely mythic proportions. He was, in his own eyes, the body and soul of France, he thought what
la France
thought, and eventually he began referring to himself in the third person, as though he had entered history during his own lifetime. But in the village he was simply himself.

Now he lies amid the families of Colombey, his grave marked by a simple marble cross, beside Anne and his wife Yvonne. During his funeral on 12 November, 1970, the myth became fused with the village, once and for all. The men in the café show me a photograph: it shows them with rusty wheelbarrows, preparing the big grave. The places at the funeral were reserved for the family, the old companions in arms and the town
council of Colombey. ‘But still, 40,000 people came to our village that day. And the boys here turned a pretty penny! They sold little bags of earth, supposedly from the cemetery, for five francs apiece! What a day!’

Pilgrims are allowed to leave their own tribute against the wall of the graveyard. It is full of crosses of Lorraine and marble plaques reading ‘Regrets’. And there is always a sentry standing guard. ‘Always?’ I ask the gendarme on duty. ‘Yes, day and night.’ ‘Even after almost thirty years?’ ‘Yes, but of course, it's the general!’

If de Gaulle had not been de Gaulle, if he had not been that theatrical, brilliant, stubborn spirit, would France be a different place? The trust placed in him by the French of which he spoke so proudly in 1940 was only so much hot air; he imagined it, and only received it once the war was almost won. But as a role model, as father of the fatherland, he restored the self-respect of the French as no one else. That process repeated itself when the French Empire fell apart, when the nation's pride was deeply hurt by the humiliations in Indochina – where 20,000 French soldiers were killed – the Suez conflict, and when the Algerian question cut the nation to the quick.

In Algiers in October 1954, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) began a national uprising that led to countless attacks on French targets; gradually the French – its army under the command of General Jacques Massu – became entangled in a violent, urban guerrilla war.

In 1958, under the title
La Question
, the European-Jewish Algerian Henri Alleq, editor of the
Alger Républicain
, published a detailed report of his arrest and interrogation by French police: the continuous hitting and kicking, the electrodes attached to ears and mouth, the partial drownings, the barbed wire in the mattress, the salt water to quench his thirst, the drugs to make him talk.

This dealt yet another blow to the national self-image: many French people felt deeply ashamed. Their own soldiers were applying methods associated with the Gestapo.

In spring 1958 the already divided Fourth Republic was shaken to its foundations; under Massu's leadership, an ultra-right-wing coup was in the offing. French paratroopers based in Algeria were made ready to be dropped in Paris, de Gaulle was called in to restore order, and what finally
happened was reminiscent of the Second World War: the French rebels in Algeria called on de Gaulle to save their cause, de Gaulle used them to consolidate his own power, and in the end there was little or no heed paid to their demands.

On 1 June, 1958, de Gaulle was appointed prime minister. Within three months the country had a new constitution which placed the most important executive powers in the hands of the president. De Gaulle's Fifth Republic was born. Four years later, Algeria gained independence.

In essence, de Gaulle's utopia was a nineteenth-century one: a regal France within a Europe of self-aware ‘fatherlands’ from the Atlantic to the Urals, led by the French-German axis and excluding Britain and America, and with a gradual thawing of relationships with the East. But when Warsaw Pact troops put a brutal end to the Prague Spring in August 1968, the general was forced to abandon his dream.