Time Essay: Terrorism: Why West Germany?
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 n
