Seventy years ago, in The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad described an act of anarchist terrorism as "a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought." Today West Germans, in ordeals of introspection and defensive truculence, are trying to understand the almost autistic fury of their own terrorists. Why should their country—its political system stable and democratic, its wealth distributed reasonably well, its society open and obsessively moderate —have produced the murderous young of the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Army Faction?
Other European countries are afflicted by violent radicals, notably Italy. But somehow national stereotyping makes a certain amount of disorder seem less remarkable in Italy than in Germany. The dictum is that Germans, with their Ordnungsliebe, could not make a revolution because they refuse to walk on the grass. Today, West German police estimate that there are no more than 50 committed terrorists—abetted by perhaps 2,000 active sympathizers—in a population of more than 61 million. Despite the massive, nationwide man hunt for the killers of kidnaped Industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer, the terrorists have not yet given up or gone underground. Last week Austrian police disclosed that members of the Red Army Faction were responsible for the kidnaping in November of Viennese Millionaire Walter Palmers. He was released unharmed after his family paid a $2 million ransom, but the German Red Army members who engineered Palmers' abduction once again made good their escape. One Austrian official speculated that they were "probably somewhere between Libya and South Yemen" by now.
The terrorist problem especially torments Germans because of the history that haunts them, and because of their sensitivity about their image in the rest of the world. German history—always the dark backdrop when terrorism is discussed—has periodically involved a volatile mixture of romanticism and brutality. Jillian Becker, author of a flamboyant history of the radical Baader-Meinhof gang, calls the terrorists "Hitler's children." Others fear that their violence will coax fascism up from the rubble where it was buried 30 years ago. After the dramatic German rescue of hijacked Lufthansa passengers at Mogadishu two months ago, a Dutch diplomat's mind wandered back uneasily to the abyss: "You can't help getting the shivers at the precision with which the rescue operation was carried out. It was German military skill at work again."
Germans are caught in a painful damned-if-they-do, damned-if-they-don't dilemma with their terrorists. If they enact tough laws against radical violence, they are "Nazis again." If they do not, social order might fray to the point that real and dangerous repression would become inevitable. As John Donne wrote. "It takes so little poison to crack the crystal."