Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (84 page)

As a consequence, the disruptions of first-generation industrialization overlapped and collided with the discontents of modernity. Unskilled and semi-skilled workers—typically from the south, many of them women—were never absorbed into the established unions of skilled male workers in the industrialized north. Traditional worker/employer tensions were now multiplied by disputes between skilled and unskilled, unionized and unorganized workers. The better-paid, better-protected, skilled employees in the factories of FIAT, or the Pirelli Rubber Company, demanded a greater say in management decisions—over shift hours, wage differentials and disciplinary measures. Unskilled workers sought some of these goals and opposed others.
Their
main objection was to exhausting piece rates, the unrelenting pace of mechanized mass production lines, and unsafe working conditions.

Italy’s post-war economy was transformed by hundreds of small engineering, textile and chemical firms, most of whose employees had no legal or institutional recourse against their bosses’ demands. The Italian welfare state in the 1960s was still a rather rough-and-ready edifice that would not reach maturity until the following decade (in large part thanks to the social upheavals of the Sixties), and many unskilled workers and their families were still without workplace rights or access to family benefits (in March 1968 there was a nationwide strike to demand a comprehensive national pension scheme). These were not issues that the traditional parties and unions of the Left were equipped to address. On the contrary, their main concern at the time was the dilution of the old labor institutions by this new and undisciplined workforce. When semi-skilled women workers sought backing from the Communist trade union in their complaints about accelerated work-rates they were encouraged instead to demand higher compensation.

In these circumstances, the chief beneficiaries of Italy’s social tensions were not the established organizations of the Left, but a handful of informal networks of the ‘extra-parliamentary’ Left. Their leaders—dissident Communists, academic theoreticians of worker autonomy, and spokesmen for student organizations—were quicker to identify the new sources of discontent at the industrial workplace and absorb them into their projects. Moreover, the universities themselves offered an irresistible analogy. There, too, a new and unorganized workforce (the massive influx of first-generation students) faced conditions of life and work that were deeply unsatisfactory. There, too, an old élite exercised untrammeled decision-making power over the student masses, imposing workload, tests, grades and penalties at will.

From this perspective, administrators and established unions and other professional organizations in schools and universities—no less than in factories and workshops—shared a vested, ‘objective’ interest in the
status quo
. The fact that Italy’s student population was drawn overwhelmingly from the urban middle class was no impediment to such reasoning—as producers and consumers of knowledge, they represented (in their own eyes) an even greater threat to power and authority than the traditional forces of the proletariat. In the thinking of the New Left it was not the social origin of a group that counted, but rather its capacity to disrupt the institutions and structures of authority. A lecture hall was as good a place to begin as a machine shop.

The protean adaptability of Italian radical politics in these years is well captured in the following set of demands circulated in a
liceo
(secondary school) in Milan: the goals of the student movement, it declared, were ‘the control and eventual elimination of marks and failures, and therefore the abolition of selection in school; the right of everyone to an education and to a guaranteed student grant; freedom to hold meetings; a general meeting in the morning; accountability of teachers to students; removal of all reactionary and authoritarian teachers; setting of the curriculum from below’.
¹⁷⁰

The late-Sixties cycle of protests and disruptions in Italy began in Turin in 1968 with student objections to plans to move part of the university (the science faculty) to the suburbs—an echo of the protests taking place in suburban Nanterre at exactly the same time. There was a parallel, too, in the subsequent closure, in March 1968, of the University of Rome following student riots there in protest of a parliamentary bill to reform the universities. But unlike the French student movements, the Italian student organizers’ interest in the reform of academic institutions was always secondary to their identification with the workers’ movement, as the names of their organizations—
Avanguardia Operaia
or
Potere Operaio
(‘Workers’ Vanguard’, ‘Workers’ Power’)—suggest.

The labor disputes that began in the Pirelli company’s Milan factories in September 1968 and lasted through November 1969 (when the government pressured Pirelli into conceding the strikers’ main demands) furnished an industrial counterpoint and encouragement to the student protesters. The strike movement of 1969 was the largest in Italian history, and had a mobilizing and politicizing impact upon young Italian radicals out of all proportion to France’s brief, month-long protests of the previous year. The ‘hot autumn’ of that year, with its wildcat strikes and spontaneous occupations by small groups of workers demanding a say in the way factories were run, led a generation of Italian student theorists and their followers to conclude that their root and branch rejection of the ‘bourgeois state’ was the right tactic. Workers’ autonomy—as tactic and as objective—was the path of the future. Not only were reforms—in schools and factories alike—unattainable, they were undesirable. Compromise was defeat.

Just why ‘unofficial’ Italian Marxists should have taken this turn remains a matter of debate. The traditionally subtle and accommodating strategy of the Italian Communist Party left it exposed to the charge of working inside ‘the system’, of having a vested interest in stability and thus being, as its left-wing critics charged, ‘objectively reactionary’. And the Italian political system itself was both corrupt and seemingly impermeable to change: in the parliamentary elections of 1968 the Christian Democrats and Communists
both
increased their vote, and every other party came nowhere. But while this might account for the disaffection of the extra-parliamentary Left, it cannot fully explain their turn to violence.

‘Maoism’—or at any rate, an uncritical fascination with the Chinese Cultural Revolution then in full swing—was more extensive in Italy than anywhere else in Europe. Parties, groups and journals of a Maoist persuasion, recognizable by their insistence upon the adjective ‘Marxist-Leninist’ (to distinguish them from the despised official Communists), sprung up in quick succession in these years, inspired by China’s Red Guards and emphasizing the identity of interests binding workers and intellectuals. Student theorists in Rome and Bologna even mimicked the rhetoric of the Beijing doctrinaires, dividing academic subjects into ‘pre-bourgeois remnants’ (Greek and Latin), the ‘purely ideological’ (e.g. history) and the ‘indirectly ideological’ (physics, chemistry, mathematics).

The putatively Maoist combination of revolutionary romanticism and workerist dogma was incarnated in the journal (and movement)
Lotta Continua
(‘Continuous Struggle’)—whose name, as was often the case, encapsulates its project.
Lotta Continua
first appeared in the autumn of 1969, by which time the turn to violence was well under way. Among the slogans of the Turin student demonstrations of June 1968 were ‘No to social peace in the factories!’ and ‘Only violence helps where violence reigns.’ In the months that followed, university and factory demonstrations saw an accentuation of the taste for violence, both rhetorical (‘Smash the state, don’t change it!’) and real. The most popular song of the Italian student movement in these months was, appropriately enough,
La Violenza
.

The ironies of all this were not lost on contemporaries. As the film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini remarked in the wake of student confrontations with the police in Rome’s Villa Borghese gardens, the class roles were now reversed: the privileged children of the bourgeoisie were screaming revolutionary slogans and beating up the underpaid sons of southern sharecroppers charged with preserving civic order. For anyone with an adult memory of the recent Italian past, this turn to violence could only end badly. Whereas French students had played with the idea that public authority might prove vulnerable to disruption from below, a caprice that Gaullism’s firmly-grounded institutions allowed them to indulge with impunity, Italy’s radicals had good reason to believe that they might actually succeed in rending the fabric of the post-Fascist Republic—and they were keen to try. On April 24th 1969, bombs were planted at the Milan Trade Fair and the central railway station. Eight months later,
after
the Pirelli conflicts had been settled and the strike movement ended, the Agricultural Bank on the Piazza Fontana in Milan was blown up. The ‘strategy of tension’ that underlay the lead years of the Seventies had begun.

Italian radicals in the Sixties could be accused of having forgotten their country’s recent past. In West Germany, the opposite was true. Until 1961, a post-war generation had been raised to see Nazism as responsible for war and defeat; but its truly awful aspects were consistently downplayed. The trial that year in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, followed from 1963 to 1965 by the so-called ‘Auschwitz trials’ in Frankfurt, belatedly brought to German public attention the evils of the Nazi regime. In Frankfurt, 273 witnesses attested to the scale and depth of German crimes against humanity, reaching far beyond the 23 men (22 SS and 1 camp
kapo
) on charge. In 1967, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich published their hugely influential study of
Die Unfähigkeit zu trauen
(‘The Inability to Mourn’), arguing that the official West German recognition of Nazi evil had never been accompanied by genuine individual recognition of responsibility.

West German intellectuals vigorously took up this idea. Established writers, playwrights and film-makers—Günter Grass, Martin Walser, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, Jürgen Habermas, Rolf Hochhuth, Edgar Reitz, all born between 1927 and 1932—now focused their work increasingly upon Nazism and the failure to come to terms with it. But a younger cohort of intellectuals, born during or just after World War Two, took a harsher stance. Lacking direct knowledge of what had gone before, they saw all Germany’s faults through the prism of the failings not so much of Nazism as of the Bonn Republic. Thus for Rudi Dutschke (born in 1940), Peter Schneider (1940), Gudrun Ensslin (1940) or the slightly younger Andreas Baader (born in 1943) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945), West Germany’s post-war democracy was not the solution; it was the problem. The apolitical, consumerist, American-protected cocoon of the
Bundesrepublik
was not just imperfect and amnesiac; it had actively conspired with its Western masters to deny the German past, to bury it in material goods and anti-Communist propaganda. Even its constitutional attributes were inauthentic: as Fassbinder put it, ‘Our democracy was decreed for the Western occupation zone, we didn’t fight for it ourselves.’

The youthful radical intelligentsia of the German Sixties accused the Bonn Republic of covering up the crimes of its founding generation. Many of the men and women born in Germany during the war and immediate post-war years never knew their fathers: who they were, what they had done. In school they were taught nothing about German history post-1933 (and not much more about the Weimar era either). As Peter Schneider and others would later explain, they lived in a vacuum constructed over a void: even at home—indeed, especially at home—no-one would talk about ‘it’.

Their parents, the cohort of Germans born between 1910 and 1930, did not just refuse to discuss the past. Skeptical of political promises and grand ideas, their attention was relentlessly and a trifle uneasily focused on material well-being, stability and respectability. As Adenauer had understood, their identification with America and ‘the West’ derived in no small measure from a wish to avoid association with all the baggage of ‘Germanness’. As a result, in the eyes of their sons and daughters they stood for
nothing
. Their material achievements were tainted by their moral inheritance. If ever there was a generation whose rebellion really was grounded in the rejection of everything their parents represented—
everything
: national pride, Nazism, money, the West, peace, stability, law and democracy—it was ‘Hitler’s children’, the West German radicals of the Sixties.

In their eyes the Federal Republic exuded self-satisfaction and hypocrisy. First there was the
Spiegel
Affair. In 1962 Germany’s leading weekly news magazine had published a series of articles investigating West German defense policy that hinted at shady dealings by Adenauer’s Bavarian defense minister, Franz-Josef Strauss. With Adenauer’s authorization and at Strauss’s behest, the government harassed the paper, arrested its publisher and ransacked its offices. This shameless abuse of police powers to suppress unwelcome reporting attracted universal condemnation—even the impeccably conservative
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
observed that ‘this is an embarrassment to our democracy, which cannot live without a free press, without indivisible freedom of the press.’

Then, four years later in December 1966, the ruling Christian Democrats selected as Chancellor in succession to Ludwig Erhard the former Nazi Kurt-Georg Kiesinger. The new Chancellor had been a paid-up Party member for twelve years, and his appointment was taken by many as conclusive evidence of the Bonn Republic’s unrepentant cynicism. If the head of the government was not embarrassed to have supported Hitler for twelve years, who could take seriously West German professions of repentance or commitment to liberal values at a time when neo-Nazi organizations were once again surfacing at the political fringe? As Grass expressed it in an open letter to Kiesinger at a moment of neo-Nazi resurgence: