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To West Germany's liberal community, the restrictive laws, including a regulation that allows government officials to deny civil service jobs to people on suspicion of radical activities, smack of McCarthyism. "It's simplistic to say there is an underlying trend toward fascism," says Gerald Grünwald, professor of criminal procedure at the Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Bonn, "but there is a tendency toward an authoritarian state and a limitation of freedom." Notes Margret Möller, legal adviser to the Christian Democratic Union, whose conservative members push for even more stringent restrictions: "Nonsense, these people, the terrorists and their lawyers, don't believe in our system of justice. That's the deeper issue. If the defense counsel keep to the rules, no one will touch them."
The deepest issue, of course, is the dilemma that terrorism poses for any open society, and particularly one with Germany's painful history. How much can civil liberties be curbed, in the name of securing a people against terrorism, in a country that once lost its civil liberties altogether?