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One interpretation, widespread in Germany, blames the isolation, extreme leftism and us-them mentality of the country's universities for at least the climate in which the terrorism developed. At the universities, says Stanley Rothman, a political scientist at Smith College, leftists took charge so effectively in the late '60s that they created "a tight little world, remote from the increasing disapproval of the society, where the students were able to act out their fantasies." Although radical leftists remain a minority (perhaps 20%) among student and faculty, they exercise disproportionate control because of their activism. A much larger segment of the university community seems willing to condone the terrorists if not their guns.
Rothman and S. Robert Lichter. a postdoctoral fellow in psychology and politics at Yale, think that West German terrorism results not only from the radicalization of the German university but from the continued authoritarianism of the German family. In parallel studies of 1,500 American and German students, Rothman and Lichter discovered that radicals in both countries had similar family backgrounds: fathers they saw as stern and punitive, mothers as distant and cold. Says Lichter: "The essence of the relationship was reduced to respect for the parent because of his power, rather than love." At the same time, a whole generation of West German youth grew up in the dark about their fathers' wartime activities. A child did not ask: "What did you do in the war, Daddy?" Thus, in one sense, Germany produced a "fatherless generation." Lichter speculates that "after generations of German fathers dominating the family it is possible that some thing of this got tied in with the kids' feelings that the fathers had lost their legitimacy." In addition, according to the Rothman-Lichter theory, America represented authority and goodness to the post war generation; but then, with racial troubles and the war in Viet Nam, the U.S., too, lost its legitimacy for Germans.
Psychological explanations are as satisfactory, or unsatisfactory, as any others. It is possible that at least some of the terrorists are simply psychotics. It may be true that, as I.F. Stone wrote about the Weatherman radicals in the U.S., "the ultimate menace they fear is their own secret selves in their own parents. This is what they are acting out on the stage of national politics." The parents, in West Germany's case, carry the whole burden of the moral ambiguity in the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) that rebuilt the country after 1945. Some thing in the very robustness of Germany's economy seemed to the terrorists and their sympathizers profoundly obscene.
West German films and novels today reflect that revulsion. To some, the sins of Auschwitz were never expiated; instead, a guilty society arose sleek and fat from defeat. Young men and women raised to take affluence for granted then violently recoiled from it and adopted the old anarchist's device of Propaganda by Deed.
Looking over their shoulders in frustration and bewilderment at a disapproving Western Europe, many Germans would probably agree with the weekly Die Zeit, which concluded that the terrorists, for all their savage qualities, "are idealists. And idealists can be terrible people."