Histories of the West German left-wing terrorist group Red Army Faction (RAF) have gone in three directions in the last decade. The first is biographical, focusing on the life stories of the RAF's founding members Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, and Holger Meins. The second concentrates on cultural and media representations of terror. The third direction, of which Karrin Hanshew's Terror and Democracy in West Germany is now the best example in English, examines terrorism as a problem of the state. Hanshew's book is not a history of the RAF as such. She states outright that she “leaves examination of the RAF itself to others” (p. 155). Rather, it is a history of the West German Left's confrontation with the RAF (and its affiliated groups), and the result of that confrontation. Through an impressive range of sources and a judicious writing style, Hanshew proves that seven years of theoretical and practical wrangling with the problem of the RAF transformed the West German Left from the radical fringes to the center.

Hanshew's main subjects are the leaders of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), and the majority of the book is devoted to them. After a prologue that recaps legal debates about the constitutional state of emergency in the Weimar period, written almost exclusively from secondary sources, she sets up the opposition between the SPD and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the early years of the Federal Republic. Hanshew provides the insight that even as the SPD opposed CDU calls for an emergency law and a strong executive, they advocated more power for the parliament and the centralization of the police force. This prefigures the direction that the SPD would take in the 1970s and replaces the simplistic but common framework of the “strong” versus “weak” state with one of varying forms of state power. Hanshew describes the SPD leadership's gradual reconciliation with a stronger executive in the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in support for Emergency Laws in 1968 against the opposition of much of its rank-and-file trade union membership.

While primarily a history of the SPD, the book is equally important as a history of the extra-parliamentary left and its engagement with the Gewaltfrage (question of violence). Though the account of the developments of the student movement is somewhat telegraphic, the chapter on “1968” introduces the observation that the SPD, the extra-parliamentary opposition, and left-wing terrorists such as the RAF were all acting according to a shared founding myth of antifascist resistance. Thus, the RAF considered their own actions to be examples of the very “resistance” and “civil courage” that the SPD felt was necessary for upright citizenship in post-Nazi Germany.

In the subsequent chapter, Hanshew develops the original point that the SPD saw “militant democracy” as a two-pronged concept, implying not only expanded police power and a new emphasis on “internal security,” but also new programs of “political education” designed to align popular ideas of democracy with their own post-Godesberg model of what Julia Angster has called “consensus capitalism.”

One of Hanshew's most valuable contributions is to put the “civil war” between the federal government and the RAF in relation to the contemporaneous emergence of the New Social Movements. She does so in a chapter that shows how the legislative weapons of search, surveillance, and censorship created to fight the RAF were also used against less obviously criminal groups, including antinuclear activists. She demonstrates deftly how, by the mid-1970s, many activists began to respond to acts of aggressive police action not with calls for counterviolence but the development of philosophies of politics that placed nonviolence at their core. The mobilizations that would become the women's, peace, and environmental movements, and Green Party came out of an act of double differentiation: against both the legal violence of the state and the guerrilla violence of the ultraleft.

In some of the best sections of the book, Hanshew shows that the fateful year of 1977 could perhaps be seen not as the climax of absolute dualism between the SPD-led state and the ostensible RAF “sympathizers” of the Left but as the first stage of escape from the dualism. As evidence, she cites critiques of political violence from members of the Socialist Bureau, publications such as Pflasterstrand, the recanting of violence by Revolutionary Cells member Hans-Joachim Klein (not “Red Cells member Hans-Jochen Klein” as she mistakenly writes), and the oft-misunderstood Buback Obituary itself. She makes clear that even as the denouement of the hijacking crisis in Mogadishu left Chancellor Helmut Schmidt basking in the international acceptance that “Germans can be strong and humane,” as the Wall Street Journal put it, much of the extra-parliamentary left was concluding that militarized strength was not the supreme political virtue (p. 231). The encounter with the would-be revolutionaries of the RAF had shifted the West German Left's center of gravity away from revolution and toward the middle.

Despite some attempts in the conclusion to protest otherwise, Hanshew's book remains very much in the genre of the coming-of-age tale of West German liberal democracy. Accounts of the SPD's conduct, though frequently damning in their details, are laudatory in their concluding assessments. Given the subtle (and not-so-subtle) sympathies for the RAF in much recent historiography, the light apologism for the SPD is refreshing, especially backed as it is by diligent research. More problematic is the fact that the arc following the SPD from the postwar moment to the German Autumn requires Hanshew to elide an inconvenient fact. Two of the men most closely identified with the war on the RAF, Interior Ministers Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Werner Maihofer, were not SPD but FDP, meaning their stories would presumably require an alternative narrative from the postwar period onward. This lingering question takes nothing away from the book, however. For its scope, complexity, and attention to granular detail, it is an extraordinary achievement that will be of interest and use to both initiates and newcomers to the field.