Over the course of the 1970s, West Germans fought one another in an attempt to defend democracy. Frustrated with the seemingly ineffectual speeches and demonstrations of the 1960s protest movements, militant groups such as the Red Army Faction (RAF), June 2^nd Movement, and the Red Cells took up arms. They declared war on the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) for its failure to rid itself of the vestiges of fascism, for its hierarchical-authoritarian structure, and for the abuses of western consumer society. Inspired by national liberation movements in the formerly colonized world, the groups aimed both to raise revolutionary consciousness among the West German population and to demonstrate the state's vulnerability through illegal action. The RAF, in particular, stressed the importance of violence as a simultaneous act of emancipation and defense—the latter understood as counterviolence necessitated by state-initiated violence. The repeated violation of norms would, its members argued, undermine Germans' traditional “habit of obedience” and, at the same time, force the state to reveal openly its fascism.Footnote ¹ These tough-love tactics, in short, aimed to save West Germans from themselves and thereby save German democracy.

While the RAF never came close to toppling the FRG's political or economic structures, it did succeed in provoking loud and heated debate. From the very beginning, terrorism functioned as a litmus test for German democracy, where the responses of the state and populace were taken as evidence of the lessons West Germans had (or had not) learned from the past. To these already high stakes was added the question of the RAF's relationship to the student movement, and terrorism became a flashpoint in the burgeoning battle over the legacy of the 1960s. Rather than encourage consensus, then, each new attack furthered a debate over counterterrorism to which even convicted or suspected terrorists contributed. Conservatives, still smarting from the 1969 elections that placed the postwar Social Democratic Party (SPD) at the head of government for the first time, accused the new government of downplaying the threat posed by left-wing extremism and for failing to defend the “free democratic order” adequately. West Germany's highly diverse extra-parliamentary left, meanwhile, perceived the state's police tactics to exceed the bounds of acceptable force and to be part of a larger assault on left politics begun in the 1960s. Not surprisingly, those in government—Social Democrats and their junior coalition partners, the Free Democrats (FDP)—repudiated both assessments; they presented themselves as bastions of calm and reason in contrast to the reactionary and emotional responses coming from their right and left. No matter who was levying them, accusations carried barbed references to past violence, old failures, and the moral responsibility of each German to avoid their repetition.

Because the battle cries of the 1960s and the ghosts of the Third Reich loomed large in the minds and rhetoric of West Germans confronting 1970s terrorism, the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or “coming to terms with the past,” frames most scholarly discussions of the period.Footnote ² This article focuses on a different, equally important, interpretative context: the way West Germans' experience of terrorism contributed to a particular debate on democracy and its defense, a debate that started in the nineteenth century and continued to engage Germans after 1945. At the founding of Germany's second republic in 1949, democracy's protection dominated discussion. The SPD's early history at the head of the labor movement and under the heel of state repression had taught its members to expect abuses of power and to value popular resistance (Widerstand). At the same time, the downfall of the Weimar Republic and the experience of National Socialism inspired fears of violence in the streets and authoritarian tendencies in the people. Social Democrats' perception that the new Germany required protection from both the government and the population led them to conclude that security lay in the properly regulated and inviolable institutions of the democratic state. Thus, a kind of legal perfectionism defined their position from the constitutional debates of 1948–49 onward, as they sought not merely to contain abuses of power and reactionary tendencies within the constitutional order, but to eliminate both by using that same legal framework to reshape state and society.

Faced with terrorism in the early 1970s, the SPD continued to argue that uncontrolled violence and the emotional responses it evoked were best combated by using the resources already available to the state—the law, police, international cooperation, even the people themselves—rather than endangering democracy twice over by violating established norms. Crucial to their efforts was a new rubric of internal security (innere Sicherheit).Footnote ³ Though this notion had appeared in one or two isolated instances in the 1960s, it was not until the social-liberal coalition—and the rise of terrorism—that “internal security” was incorporated into official rhetoric. It provided Social Democrats with an important conceptual hook on which to hang their government's program of counterterrorism that circumvented language closely associated with conservative positions on security. This tactic provided Social Democrats with the room they needed to confront terrorism in a manner they, at least, considered within the bounds of established procedures and the rule of law.

Crucially, the internal security policies in which they invested the most resources, namely the modernization of West German police forces and a program of “political education” (what they referred to as a “positive” policy of constitutional protection) went beyond their immediate target—terrorism—to take aim at the democratization of state and society. I argue that the perceived success of this larger, democratizing program encouraged mainstream Social Democrats to revise long-standing notions regarding the viability of German democracy and the appropriate means for its protection during the height of the terrorist crisis in 1977. Despite criticism the government received from conservatives and the extra-parliamentary left as well as from within the SPD, they confronted terrorism on the basis of these new conclusions. The decision to equip the state with powers the SPD had previously considered illegitimate had ramifications for the party as well as for West German society more generally.

* * *

Much as the absence of a nation-state did little to staunch imaginings of a united Germany before 1871, the absence of democracy did not prevent Germans from debating its pros and cons before 1919. When Weimar politicians and legal scholars framed Germany's first republican constitution, therefore, they brought to the table long-held convictions regarding democracy. If there was one point upon which they agreed, it was that democracy was inherently weak—hampered by parliamentary procedure at critical moments such as war, occupation, or internal revolt.Footnote ⁴ To enable decisive action by the state, the constitution equipped the Weimar Republic with strong executive and emergency powers allowing for the suspension of norms such as civil liberties and parliamentary control. But political elites' obvious faith in the state did not preclude action on the part of German citizens. The republic owed its existence to popular revolt, and memories of earlier German resistance—against foreign occupation and the centralized state—lent further legitimacy and an air of romance to grassroots opposition.Footnote ⁵ This was particularly true within the labor movement, still deeply shaped by traditions formed under sharp state repression.Footnote ⁶ When right-wing forces attempted to overthrow the regime in 1920, therefore, Social Democratic President Friedrich Ebert called on workers across Germany to protect the republic. Their answer—a general strike—successfully foiled the Kapp Putsch and founded a tradition of democratic Widerstand.

The frequent use of emergency powers and such exceptional popular activism did not, however, protect the Weimar Republic from its enemies. The Reichstag's self-dissolution by way of the 1933 Enabling Act and the German people's complacency under the Third Reich confirmed fears regarding the weaknesses of democratic government and, worse, fed suspicions that neither the state nor the population was a reliable safeguard of democracy. This conundrum assured that democratic stability would remain a topic of postwar discussion, with Weimar and Nazism serving as both a lesson and a threat. Whereas previous imaginings of democracy's demise had, at most, envisioned the return of monarchical rule or defeat by outside forces, its collapse was now associated with Germany's total moral and physical devastation. With the stakes so high, the scope of what one could legitimately do to prevent such a fate was correspondingly expanded.

As a number of historians have recently underscored, Germans in the immediate postwar period were not powerless in the face of the occupying powers but rather did their utmost to shape Germany's future.Footnote ⁷ In the west, those responsible for framing a new constitution based on the liberal model of Britain and the U.S. reached across 1945 to retrieve previous conclusions regarding the necessary conditions for democratic government. Determined to avoid the pitfalls of the past and provide for security, they rejected a politically passive conception of the state in favor of a militant democracy (wehrhafte Demokratie) empowered to protect the constitutional order from those who would use “democracy and democratic tolerance … for their own destruction.”Footnote ⁸ What forms this kind of non-neutral state intervention might take, however, was left vague due to Germans' own disagreements on the matter. Conservatives drew heavily on earlier arguments that national crisis necessitated decisive action and thus emergency legislation allowing for the concentration of power in the hands of one strong man and the suspension of civil liberties. Such proposals, however, met strong opposition from Social Democrats who rejected solutions that started at the moment of crisis. Instead, they sought to prevent a state of emergency altogether through the perfection of the state and inviolability of its legal norms. Should crisis prove unavoidable, the SPD argued that no acts of government could save a democracy abandoned by its citizens. While the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) called for emergency laws, the SPD emphasized the need for active democrats.Footnote ⁹

Widerstand thus also found its place in the postwar order. Left-leaning intellectuals and publicists interpreted the lack of resistance to the Nazi state as only the latest, if most egregious, example of Germans' submissive relationship to power; fashioning resistance-capable citizens thus became critical to democracy's post-fascist survival.Footnote ¹⁰ The single-minded focus on overcoming past failures had significant consequences for the ways resistance was imagined in the postwar period. Whereas SPD leaders such as Carlo Schmid conjured up the Kapp Putsch as an ideal for popular resistance in the sense of the state's defense, such moments were absent in extra-parliamentary discussions.Footnote ¹¹ Ironically, the latter operated within a liberal framework that pitted the interests of the individual (and thus society) against the state. The result was that Widerstand and the civil defense of democracy were judged the moral responsibility of each citizen and conceived exclusively in opposition to the state.

Widerstand functioned as the extra-governmental equivalent of militant democracy in framing the parameters of legitimate state and civil action in the FRG. Though both principles operated as symbolic placeholders for a whole spectrum of positions, by the late 1960s militant democracy had become firmly associated with the policies of the CDU/CSU under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer: remilitarization, NATO membership, atomic armament, and emergency legislation. Similarly, popular resistance had become closely tied to an extra-parliamentary left that emerged in opposition to those very policies. Social Democrats stood awkwardly in the middle. In early debates, the SPD stringently fought anything that allowed for legal gray zones—what to their minds translated as opportunities for the abuse of executive or state authority. And when party leaders' efforts shifted from criticizing to entering government in the late 1950s, the SPD sought to address the perceived dangers of civil action by (re)defining Widerstand within the safe confines of parliamentary politics. In both periods, the SPD remained consistent in arguing that popular and government excesses were best avoided—and confronted—through well-formed legal institutions. The internal dissent that erupted over the party's distancing from extra-parliamentary politics, which it formalized in the 1959 Godesberg Program, demonstrated that this “safe” course had its consequences.Footnote ¹² The new direction stood in direct tension with the party's trade union and Marxist roots, and it caused a fundamental rift within the party that would only widen over the next two decades.

The Social Democratic Fight for Internal Security

When the Social Democrats formed a government in 1969, they immediately proclaimed their intent to pursue a distinctly different course toward cultivating democracy in the FRG. Chancellor Willy Brandt's famous appeal to West Germans to “dare more democracy,” followed quickly with amnesty for previously convicted protesters and new legislation protecting citizens' right to demonstrate, did more than attest to the left-liberal government's sympathies for a younger generation's activism. These first acts of government reflected the Social Democrats' conviction that democracy was still a work in progress, insecure until actually realized. Moreover, by establishing clear legal parameters for demonstrations, they both regulated civil action and corrected conservative overreaction, bringing the FRG one step closer to their vision of a decidedly civil (democratic) society.

The Social Democrats' path to militant democracy was based on the simultaneous modernization and democratization of state and society. Despite, or perhaps because of, their long history on the receiving end of state power, Social Democrats viewed the state as an essentially neutral instrument of power whose use or abuse depended on its wielder.Footnote ¹³ To their minds, it was not necessary to reject the state as an inherent threat to democracy, but only to regulate the sites and applications of its power properly. Rather than fearing centralized power, therefore, Social Democrats considered the biggest potential for abuse of authority to be at the local level. From the constitutional debates onward, the SPD repeatedly favored standardization—of legal codes, police administration, taxation, and other areas where the state directly intervened in the lives of its citizens—as a way of striking at the “little Führers” among local politicians and police as well as at the unequal distribution of money and resources.Footnote ¹⁴ The rational state and the cool, impersonal technologies it deployed were to be the antidotes for historical privation and repression.

This conviction encouraged optimistic social engineering projects to keep the specter of authoritarianism at bay. Though none of the parliamentary parties (in any industrialized nation) were immune to the planning euphoria of the late 1950s and 1960s, the Social Democrats were its greatest cheerleaders, unsurprisingly given socialism's embrace of planning as the path to a well-formed society.Footnote ¹⁵ Nothing captured this better than the party's frequent association of technocratic state planning with democracy—often assuming the latter to be a byproduct of the former. In Willy Brandt's first speech as the nation's chancellor, he announced the government's program of “inner reform,” explicitly linking “modernization” to the “democratization” of society and describing them as coterminous goals.Footnote ¹⁶ Heavily weighted toward “modernization,” this program aimed, among other things, to restructure and streamline state and public administrations with the introduction of new management techniques and new technologies such as computer databases.Footnote ¹⁷ This emphasis was consistent with the SPD's drive to overcome the inefficient and irregular application of state power at the local and Land levels and symptomatic of the optimism with which the SPD viewed technology itself. Though Social Democrats' relationship with technology would begin to change over the course of the 1970s, at the beginning of the decade it was understood in uniformly positive terms—as an instrument of social progress and social security.

It was from within this established context of planning and reform that the SPD confronted the advent of left-wing terrorism. Often mistaken for the impetus behind the expansive police reforms of the 1970s, terrorism in fact propelled forward already existing plans for the modernization of police and intelligence services and, if less successfully, the reform of criminal law and the penal system.Footnote ¹⁸ Dismissing conservatives' demands that they focus on deterrence and retribution, Social Democratic authorities at all levels pursued a course of action directed at prevention and early detection in the fight against terrorism—a form of active, rather than reactive, policing that, in keeping with international trends, required a thorough overhaul of the West German police. As part of the “internal reform” program, the modernization of police power had the full support of the party base even when it became the government's leading counterterrorism strategy. Thus, while the 1970s began with police power almost exclusively in the hands of the individual Länder, it closed with the federal government having obtained significant police jurisdiction, an expanding personnel, and clear primacy in criminal investigations. In addition, police work had fundamentally changed in its outlook and orientation, becoming professionalized and far more technological and comprehensive in its execution.Footnote ¹⁹

The new government's association of technology with not only efficiency but also social justice is essential to understanding the overhaul of police power in the FRG and, specifically, the major expansion of the Federal Criminal Office (BKA). Indeed, to fail to attend to the radical promise of technology for men such as Horst Herold, the newly appointed BKA president, is to fail to understand the modernization project. In striking contrast to his predecessor, who had publicly dismissed the use of computers in police work, Herold demonstrated an explicit faith in technology. For Herold and his supporters, the new computer technology promised speed, efficiency, and the possibility that unlimited information could be electronically saved, processed, and then rationally applied in areas where human imperfections and emotions were known to interfere with justice. In this way, Herold argued, computer technology held the key to a more democratic policing.Footnote ²⁰ Cybernetics, a cousin of systems and control theory that stressed the importance of feedback, gained wide international currency by the 1960s and strongly influenced the BKA president's plans for data processing.Footnote ²¹ Seeking to improve the way information was processed as well as the effects it generated, Herold developed computerized catalogs searchable by person or object (a stolen car, for example) and pulled data from a variety of different collection sites—“similar to a clinical examination conducted on a patient.”Footnote ²² Like doctors, the BKA's agents gathered information not only on the specific pathology but also on the environments conducive to it and the responses triggered by, in this case, police intervention.

Most famous of Herold's innovations was his development of the dragnet (Rasterfahndung), whereby a computerized search system scanned enormous data sets in the hopes of identifying overlapping clusters of suspicious traits. In hunting terrorists, for example, police accessed utilities records and specifically targeted those customers who paid their bills in cash or through a third party. This group of potential suspects was then checked against residence and automobile registrations as well as data on social security, welfare, or child-care recipients in order to refine further the list of suspects matching the “criminal” pattern or profile. Only after such data crunching, in which both human and environmental factors were considered, did those names at the top of the list become the focus of traditional investigative techniques such as surveillance and house searches.Footnote ²³

Though it would eventually provoke sharp criticism, the very impersonal nature of this process was fundamental to the democratic project that pioneers such as Herold saw themselves pursuing. In developing and adopting new technologies, Social Democrats joined police experts in an effort to eliminate more than technical errors. Through consistently and uniformly applied laws and procedures, they sought to remove human bias from the picture as well. When electronic data-processing was first advocated at the beginning of the 1970s, data protection was not yet on the agenda, and most Social Democrats shared Herold's perception that the cool, impersonal efficiency of computers would help to undermine abuses of police power. The modernization and centralization of police power routinely earned Social Democratic leaders the full backing of their party and made it the government's counterterrorism strategy of choice.

Despite Social Democrats' evident comfort with centralized power and innovative police technologies, it is worth noting that when the internal security program ran up against the boundaries they had erected against traditional (and thus potentially authoritarian) abuses of government, these misgivings proved stronger. This ambivalence toward state power was nowhere more evident than in the government's relationship with the GSG-9, the elite, antiterrorist squad that in many ways captured Social Democratic ideals of a modern, democratic police force.Footnote ²⁴ The immediate impetus behind its creation was the hostage crisis at the 1972 Munich Olympics, which demonstrated to the world how ill-equipped the FRG was to confront the specific problem of terrorism. In a matter of days, the interior ministry drew up plans to create a highly specialized unit at the federal level, educated in the latest crime-fighting technologies and tactics as well as in law and so-called “contemporary ideologies.” While consensus never wavered over the need for a police force specifically trained in counterterrorism, the quasi-military accoutrements of the GSG-9 raised specters of unwelcome state force, and Social Democrats both in government and the party base proved unwilling to accept its use. Thus despite the creation of the GSG-9 at its own behest, the government continually backed down from using the unit in any function beyond that of glorified bodyguards. This remained true even when the FRG experienced a string of hostage situations—the very scenario for which the GSG-9 had been created—beginning in 1975.

The FRG was certainly not the only country modernizing its police forces and experimenting with new technologies to control its population more efficiently. Indeed, West German developments mirrored those in other industrialized nations—in both their police modernization and their conviction that a new criminality had come to plague affluent societies since the 1960s.Footnote ²⁵ By the end of the 1970s, every western European nation had its version of the GSG-9 and a computerized intelligence system.Footnote ²⁶ The SPD government did more than merely keep up with the Joneses, however. It very deliberately cultivated a spirit of international cooperation in the area of domestic security. Within the first year of being appointed head of the BKA, for example, Horst Herold launched an impressive research agenda for innovative and collaborative work across national borders. For this purpose, experts and heads of security from West Germany, France, Britain, Sweden, Italy, and the United States met annually in Wiesbaden to discuss organized crime (of which terrorism was considered the most extreme form) and the genuinely uncharted territories of intelligence technology that each was pursuing.Footnote ²⁷

Such ventures not only aided information exchange, but they also brokered trust between the nations' security experts and confirmed the FRG's place among “civilized” nations. Even historical grudges were cast aside in the common effort to combat terrorism. Israel offered its own antiterrorist task force as a model for the GSG-9, while the French and Germans worked together in the hope of providing a model for European-wide cooperation on counterterrorism.Footnote ²⁸ International collaboration, however, also confirmed Social Democrats' conviction—not shared by many conservatives—that what was acceptable for some was not necessarily acceptable for the ex-Nazi state. U.S. and British counterterrorism practices in particular were cavalier about civil liberties and police power to an extent that West German security experts and government officials frequently judged impermissible.Footnote ²⁹ Even the French displayed an activism and use of force that West German police eschewed.Footnote ³⁰ Despite their differences, international cooperation offered a kind of unofficial standard by which the SPD government could establish—both for itself and the West German population—the democratic legitimacy of its actions.

At the same time that the government modernized its security forces, officials in the Federal Ministry of Interior (BMI) advocated balancing repressive measures with what they called a “positive” program for the constitution's protection in the new arena of internal security.Footnote ³¹ The job of conceptualizing and carrying out such a program quickly fell to the Federal Center for Political Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, or BPB), an agency that had grappled with the threat of political extremism in relative obscurity since 1952.Footnote ³² Directed to focus its energies on the “confrontation with the extremism and terror of minority groups” as of March 1969, the BPB's responsibilities were explicitly linked to the field of internal security two years later. The Center for Political Education soon led a coordinated effort involving the whole Interior Ministry to confront political radicalism through political education. Far less visible than the police reforms, mass expansion of security offices, and new legislation widely associated with government efforts to combat terrorism, the role of political education in state defense has received no notice from scholars of West German counterterrorism and has been inadequately grasped as psychological warfare in the more general studies of the period.Footnote ³³ But if anything competed with the modernization of police power in terms of the commitment of resources, it was the attempt to preclude violence and extremism by cultivating a political climate in line with SPD notions of democratic civil society through the agency of the BPB. In this process, political education was understood as both a means and an end.

In response to parliamentary inquires initiated by the FDP and the CDU/CSU concerning the problem of “political radicalism,” Social Democratic leaders touted political education as the primary solution.Footnote ³⁴ The two overarching goals established for and by the BPB were the prevention of violent radicalism and the enlistment of the population in government efforts to contain it. The former complemented but did not replicate police efforts, since the BPB took a decidedly policy-oriented approach—organizing conferences and engaging the energies of respected scholars in a range of fields with the primary goal of determining the origins of political unrest.Footnote ³⁵ If criminal behavior was a product of specific social and economic conditions, as experts believed, then—in keeping with their enthusiasm for planning—state action was necessary to eliminate those conditions.Footnote ³⁶ This task was analogous to the one alluded to by Herold when he compared data processing with a clinical examination. The point was not merely to identify the symptoms ailing the FRG but rather to locate their cause and then direct state resources toward the cure.

Contemporary studies of the RAF and other violent groups have typically described them as ideologically confused and, ultimately, lacking any rationale other than the pursuit of violence. By referring to them as “anarchists,” officials underscored that the attacks were ends in themselves.Footnote ³⁷ By denying the political nature of terrorism, they—in line with international convention—defined it as purely criminal and sought its roots in the values of the postwar generation. A common perception among older members of the SPD was that the material affluence and political uniformity of the Adenauer years, as well as younger Germans' lack of historical identity, had left much of the youth politically stunted and with little, if any, sense of allegiance to the FRG. The rise in ideological dogmatism, political apathy, and apparent tolerance of violence prompted direct comparisons with the climate of the 1920s and encouraged Social Democrats to conclude that the sources of political extremism lay in social-political malaise.Footnote ³⁸ To prevent further deterioration and potentially a repetition of Weimar, members of government called for a “political-spiritual confrontation” with terrorism that would not only wean sympathizers off the RAF but also mobilize the population to defend democracy actively. The BPB, with an explicit mandate to educate West Germans in the art of democratic politics, directed this offensive.

It is not altogether surprising that political education formed a core part of the social-liberal government's policy of internal security, as twenty years earlier SPD leaders such as Carlo Schmid had argued that the cultivation of active democrats was democracy's best defense.Footnote ³⁹ Now, as then, Social Democrats proposed to strike at the root of political radicalism by cultivating the people's skills of “objective criticism, openness, even of resistance.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The operative logic in both 1949 and 1969 was that, so educated, West Germans would have essentially no choice but to defend the principles of democracy and to engage the status quo critically, for both the courage and willingness to do so would have become second nature.

On the whole, officials believed the biggest obstacle to overcome was the public's lack of information. It was this, their reports observed time and again, that encouraged West Germans to react emotionally; fear or gut instinct led them to doubt either the regime's legitimacy (and thus to sympathize with the terrorists) or its ability to govern (and thus to favor undemocratic solutions and, by implication, the CDU/CSU). According to its self-description, the program for “political education and positive constitutional protection” therefore aimed to help to orient the citizen politically by facilitating his or her “rational- rather than emotional-critical consciousness.”Footnote ⁴¹ If the Center for Political Education was to encourage the population's critical understanding of terrorism and the government's efforts to contain it, it had to enlighten them first on existing conditions within the FRG.

Part of this program resembled a classic civics lesson on the “free democratic state” in which West Germans lived. The BPB published everything from books to bus billboards, but the Center's pedagogical commitments were captured best in its use of television, which not only extended the BPB's reach but also allowed for an active, even interactive learning format. In particular, they promoted news programs similar to the ARD network's Pro+Contra and the development of “who's who” quiz shows and “what if” discussion forums.Footnote ⁴² In the first case, the two-sided presentation of a current controversy did more than promote political awareness. It taught by example the critical thinking, civil exchange of ideas, and willingness to compromise that Social Democrats perceived as essential to democratic civil society (and sorely lacking on the extra-parliamentary left). In comparison, the quiz shows and discussion forums were intended to familiarize their audience in an engaging fashion with the FRG's history and achievements. A particular favorite of BPB officials were programs that sought to underscore the well-reasoned construction of the existing political system by asking viewers to contemplate scenarios such as “what if” there were no constitutional rights or “what if” federalism were abolished?Footnote ⁴³ Such exercises aimed to combat disillusionment and disaffection—the perceived sources of radicalism—by teaching West Germans civic pride at the same time that they underscored the need for critical engagement.

When not pursuing explicitly didactic programs, the BPB's efforts to undermine political radicalism focused on providing the public with the government's narrative on terrorism and the attempts to contain it. Through numerous books, films, and media conferences, political education drew attention to the social and economic cost of violent crime, the government's extensive police reforms, and lingering obstacles to terrorism's successful confrontation. The assumption guiding these efforts was that the public could not help but support the government's fight against radicalism if given “the facts.” It was this type of work that the BPB, and the BMI more generally, referred to as a program for the “positive” or “enlightened” protection of the constitution.

The Baader-Meinhof-Report: Documents, Analyses, Contexts is exemplary of efforts to raise public awareness of terrorism and gain support for the government's cause.Footnote ⁴⁴ Published in memory of those killed by the RAF in May 1972, the volume underscored the very real victims of terrorism at the same time it presented information on the roots, networks, and ideology of the “Baader-Mahler-Meinhof-Gang.” With a fold-out table and appendices of expert commentary on the group's manifestos as well as their connections to Arab terrorists and other criminal associations, the report aimed to instill in the reader an appreciation for the RAF's dangerous nature as well as the government's command of the situation. Two years later, in the midst of the debate over the state's efforts to limit contact between imprisoned RAF members and their attorneys, the BMI produced a similar publication. This was a collection of “cell circulars,” defense attorneys' letters, as well as documents written in prison and recovered by police in apartments of “sympathizers.”Footnote ⁴⁵ By divulging the extent of prisoners' communication with the outside world, the publication aimed to raise readers' awareness of the genuine threat this posed to West German security and thereby rally support for a proposal to curtail attorney-client privilege.

As the government came increasingly under attack from all sides, “enlightenment” efforts became progressively more focused on countering criticism. During the Stammheim trial of major RAF figures and amid growing accusations of torture and state repression, for example, the BPB started plans for a feature film about police that would underscore how state authority, when backed by the rule of law, was not restrictive but rather protective of civil rights. They also set up an “info booth” to counter misinformation about the state of prisons and the justice system in the FRG.Footnote ⁴⁶ Though the intent of “enlightened constitutional protection” had always been to undermine public sympathy for the RAF and win support for the social-liberal government (indeed, as an arm of militant democracy, it never claimed to be a neutral force), this more defensive tact notably blurred the line between political education and propaganda. Indeed, it meshed with new public relations work being carried out by the BMI to the point that even the ministry itself did not always take pains to differentiate between the two.Footnote ⁴⁷

It may be tempting to dismiss the program of political education as glorified government propaganda. But it is precisely that reaction, I suspect, that has caused its importance for Social Democrats' pursuit of militant democracy and their program of internal security to escape scholarly attention. Those involved insisted on a significant difference, and they rejected proposals deemed too ideological, too media- or profit-oriented, or too naively “American” (when dismissing the FBI's more heavy-handed strategies).Footnote ⁴⁸ The active role allotted the citizen entailed that political education be fundamentally different from the passive consumption of propaganda. Political education was, at least in its intent, about enabling citizens to form their own opinions by making it possible for them to acquire and critically assess new information. The goal was not simply that citizens side with the state but that they willingly participate in its defense, not mindlessly or patriotically in times of crisis but as part of a habit of political engagement. Here, the SPD demonstrated its ongoing commitment to a civilian defense of democracy and its desire to anchor that popular participation securely within the bounds of parliamentary politics. Party leaders did not reject Widerstand but rather the “revolutionary ethos” of the extra-parliamentary left in exchange for a model of pro-state grassroots engagement. In this and its more general pedagogical goals, political education's aims extended considerably beyond the particular threat of the moment. It sought to ensure the state's internal security permanently by achieving actually existing democracy in the FRG's institutions and in its citizens' mentalities.

Too Little or Too Much State Power? Criticisms of Internal Security

It is often said that the sign of a successful compromise is that no one leaves the table happy. If this is true, then the response to government efforts to balance state power with popular participation suggests that its internal security program was a success. Members of both the right and the far left voiced sharp displeasure over the social-liberal answer to counterterrorism. While the former criticized the government as soft on crime, the latter condemned it as reactionary and antidemocratic. Even within the SPD, a minority voiced its concern over the government's direction. Played out in parliament as well as the mainstream media, clashes over counterterrorism underscored Germans' diverging assumptions regarding democracy and its defense. They also underscored the importance of the democratization project to the SPD's orientation. Despite the onslaught of criticism, party leaders maintained their course and the bounds on state and civil action they had previously established.

In a critique they would wage well into the next decade, conservatives and CDU/CSU leaders argued that the Social Democrats had routinely failed to take seriously the threat posed by left-wing extremism. As an explanation for this inaction, they offered the SPD's socialist sympathies and its incapacity to lead. The minutes of the CDU Presidium and party meetings reveal such accusations as part of a calculated strategy to regain power—with each new terrorist attack taken as an opportunity to assert their identity as the country's proven governors and experts on national security.Footnote ⁴⁹ Here, the opposition not only canvassed for votes but also expressed their distinct positions on democracy and its defense. Conservative complaints that the SPD refused to mobilize anything but police force against terrorism reflected their perception that national crises required the kind of strong, decisive action many thought incommensurate with ordinary politics. They noted the government's expansion of existing powers but they considered it ultimately incapable of resolving the situation. For members of the CDU/CSU, a loss of state authority—such as they perceived to accompany each successive terrorist attack—undermined democracy in Germany and was something to be actively defended against. In order simultaneously to combat terrorism and underscore the unassailability of the free democratic order, the Union parties proposed, among other things, curtailing suspected terrorists' rights, harsher punishments for convicted terrorists and accomplices, and allowing police officers to use unprecedented force in their pursuit of suspected terrorists—all of which, predictably, raised Social Democrats' hackles.Footnote ⁵⁰

Nowhere was the difference in the parties' approaches more apparent than in the debates over counterterrorism legislation. In the year following the 1974 murder of Berlin judge Günter von Drenkmann, the CDU/CSU had four proposed laws rejected out-of-hand by the SPD, which argued that legislation made in the heat of the moment tended toward overreaction and endangered democracy as much as or more than the terrorists did.Footnote ⁵¹ Parliamentary debates in which the SPD's characterization of the RAF as a “criminal association” was consistently corrected by the opposition's shouts of “gang!” continued to play out this disagreement.Footnote ⁵² Social Democrats' rhetoric did more than echo contemporary legal understandings of terrorism. It placed the RAF firmly within an existing legal framework—specifically, Article 129 of the Basic Law stating that any group deemed a “criminal association” could be banned and otherwise prosecuted—thereby countering conservative arguments for new anti-terrorist laws.

The SPD agreed with the CDU/CSU that modifications were necessary to deal effectively with terrorism, and Social Democrats had long proven themselves keen legislators. But they viewed such attempts as foolhardy endeavors that opened the door to government abuse of power.Footnote ⁵³ As Federal Minister of Justice Hans-Jochen Vogel described the situation, the fair trial guaranteed even those suspected of terrorism in a democracy was “more likely to be achieved if legislative amendments must fit into” the basic principles of “an established constitutional code” than by a special law that had nothing more than its own alleged effectiveness to guide and constrain it.Footnote ⁵⁴ The best protection against fallible egos and emotions, in other words, was the existing justice system. With this in mind, the SPD and its coalition partner sought to restrict counterterrorism legislation to the reform of criminal law and procedure. By refusing to acknowledge the exceptional, of course, they guaranteed continued conflict with the CDU/CSU.

At the same time that conservatives criticized the SPD for its failure to mobilize sufficient state powers, members of West Germany's extra-parliamentary left accused the government of slowly dismantling—rather than protecting—democracy through its efforts. Although the political education program intended to reduce the field of so-called terrorist sympathizers and woo disaffected intellectuals, it instead further alienated this part of the population and affirmed a kind of “negative alliance” whereby widely divergent groups on the left were united in opposition by a common sense of persecution.Footnote ⁵⁵ By the early 1970s, this extra-parliamentary left belied generational and old-versus-new left designations, comprising a patchwork of traditional leftists—from Marxist-Leninist sectarians and Communist Party members to members of the SPD youth organization—as well as antiauthoritarians who were decentralized, determinedly “undogmatic,” and largely from the university milieu. In this way, critical old leftists such as Heinrich Böll joined former student radicals in feeling themselves to bear the brunt of counterterrorism measures.Footnote ⁵⁶ Indeed, for those within the extra-parliamentary left, police checkpoints, raids on apartments of suspected sympathizers, and armed guards in Bonn's diplomatic quarters symbolized the state's war against its own population and severely damaged its already questionable democratic legitimacy.

While it would be difficult to find an aspect of internal security of which the extra-parliamentary left approved, two areas in particular met with widespread protest. The first was the perceived maltreatment of suspected or convicted terrorists at the hands of the state. In statements issued by the RAF, prisoners accused authorities of resurrecting the “methods of the recent past” in order to “openly terrorize a section of the proletariat” with the prospect of “Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor” and thereby break “the resistance of the great majority of the people against exploitation.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The evocation of Nazi crimes spoke directly to their convictions regarding the state's fascist potential and the need to guard against it. Picking up where the RAF left off, the informal mouthpiece of the extra-parliamentary left, Informationsdienst (or ID), provided detailed reports on the prisoners' conditions in an attempt to document torture and the state's fascist tendencies.Footnote ⁵⁸ More powerful than words were images of the emaciated body of Holger Meins, whose death while on hunger strike in late 1974 launched nationwide protests. Suspicions of willful neglect and even murder in West German prisons raised the question of just how far the state would go to suppress political opposition—and just how different it was from its Nazi predecessor.

As the decade wore on, however, Nazi terror increasingly competed with an Orwellian surveillance state in the imagery of the extra-parliamentary left. Student newspapers, underground literature, and social scientific scholarship registered mounting fears of a society in which the pursuit of technological (rather than racial) perfection enslaved humanity.Footnote ⁵⁹ The state-of-the-art Stammheim prison built to hold the suspected terrorists symbolized the state's modern disciplining technologies. Intended to instill a sense of security among West Germans, it instead aroused the extra-parliamentary left's sympathies for its inmates. In addition to the mail censorship, prisoners were subjected to solitary confinement, sensory deprivation, closed-circuit television surveillance, and, during hunger strikes, forced feedings. Thus, while the majority of the extra-parliamentary left may have denounced the actions of the RAF, they saw its members as victims of gross human rights violations taking place in West German prisons.Footnote ⁶⁰

Fears of futuristic dystopia and latent fascism resonated widely within the FRG and, crucially, with an international community. Indeed, the anti-torture campaign's ability to mobilize sympathy outside West Germany on both these scores made it a tremendous success—as well as the source of extreme aggravation for the political establishment. On the one hand, lingering international and domestic concerns over the German past proved mutually reinforcing. Doubts over Germany's ability to break free of authoritarianism or fascism were voiced shrilly by the French media as well as by self-declared “friends” in the U.S. and Britain concerned about the overreaction and fear that appeared to be sweeping the FRG.Footnote ⁶¹ On the other hand, the attention of watchdog groups such as Amnesty International and the International Russell Tribunal crystallized how events in the FRG fit into a larger, transnational movement to hold governments accountable in an era of increasing state intervention and Cold War tensions. The Russell Tribunal first convened in 1967 to examine the genocidal intentions of American military actions in Vietnam; a decade later, a Tribunal was called to investigate accusations of torture and inhumane conditions in West German prisons. Despite Willy Brandt's objections that the planned Tribunal was “transparently propagandistic and slanderous” in its intent, a public investigation proceeded. The international community's intervention lent legitimacy to claims of political persecution and undemocratic action on the part of the West German state.Footnote ⁶²

In addition to the treatment of prisoners, a second policy that drew the ire of the extra-parliamentary left was the 1972 Decree against Radicals (Radikalenerlass), by far the most controversial of all the government's strategies to secure the political loyalties of its population. Referred to by its critics as the “occupational ban” (Berufsverbot), the decree excluded so-called radicals from careers in the civil service. Accusations that the ban was incompatible with the constitution's guarantee of civil liberties seemed borne out as numerous leftists came under investigation by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which received a notable influx of funds and personnel in order to meet the new demands placed on it by the decree. The intrusions on privacy and the demand for unquestioning loyalty elicited sharp resistance from the extra-parliamentary left, who recognized in the ban an attempt to bring leftist teachers and professors (as civil servants) to heel and thereby stamp out dissent. More than any other state measure, the “occupational ban” contributed to a sense of political repression on the left—a climate of fear and self-censorship—that many argued had more in common with totalitarian rule than democracy.Footnote ⁶³

A favorite case study in scholarship on militant democracy, the Decree against Radicals is conventionally explained as following a particularly German practice of binding civil servants to the crown.Footnote ⁶⁴ But rather than a reactionary throwback or a desperate attempt on the part of the SPD to appease conservatives, the ban is better understood as part of the postwar struggle to defend democracy—inspired less by authoritarian continuities than by the antiauthoritarian discussions and democratic militancy of the immediate postwar period. In 1948/49, memories of Nazi Schreibtischtäter motivated SPD delegates to argue that the state could not afford even passive or apolitical representatives but required an actively loyal bureaucracy, responsible to the free democratic order.Footnote ⁶⁵ And, in 1972, Social Democrats' convictions that the universities and schools were sites of radicalism and that educators were crucial to West German democracy drove them to a similar conclusion. If the positive side of the SPD's program of political education was the creation of active democrats, then the negative side was the deliberate exclusion of those who would not conform to their definition of that role.

Criticism of the ban came not only from the extra-parliamentary left but also from Social Democrats themselves, in displays that ranged from deep ambivalence to outright resistance. Before the ban even went into effect, SPD deputy chairman Herbert Wehner expressed unease over its potential threat to civil liberties. In reference to the Decree—and conservatives' enthusiasm for it—he warned that the fight against extremism “could not be misused … for the abuse and mistrust of all that is not conservative.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Many party members, particularly those whose formative political years were after 1945, openly rejected the ban. Most emphatic in their rejection was the party's youth organization, which led a public campaign to pressure the government into its revocation.Footnote ⁶⁷ Though such breaches of party discipline infuriated party leaders, the wide discrepancies in the ban's implementation between SPD- and CDU/CSU-governed Länder undermined support for the Decree. A growing frustration among Social Democrats that the ban was doing democracy more harm than good was already apparent at the 1973 party congress.Footnote ⁶⁸ By the 1975 congress, they appeared unanimous in the wish that the Decree would simply fade away. Still, the vast majority proved unwilling to revoke it and give up what they continued to consider an important weapon of the state.Footnote ⁶⁹ Though awake to the coercive and potentially undemocratic effects of the ban, the SPD remained committed to its previous assessments of democracy and its defense and thus could do little more than pursue a course of damage control.

Conservatives did not make life easy on the coalition government, but they were easier for the party and its leaders to contend with than attackers on the left. Among other things, the Decree against Radicals proved that members of the SPD were not immune to the concerns typical of the extra-parliamentary left. For a party whose leadership was intent on overcoming not only terrorism but also long-standing doubts over its political loyalties and ability to govern, this proved a significant problem. To SPD embarrassment and CDU/CSU delight, for example, resistance broke out within the SPD over the 1976 government-sponsored bill to amend the existing penal code so as to criminalize the “support of violence” (§88a) and the “instruction to violence” (§130a).Footnote ⁷⁰ Rather than closing a legal loophole as the bill's supporters claimed it would, critics such as Freimuth Duve saw it as opening the door to censorship and the repression of artistic and intellectual freedom.Footnote ⁷¹ Before the Bundestag, Dieter Lattmann aimed his critique directly at the SPD's central strategy—at the “dangers and delusions” of searching for security in the perfection of laws. However noble the intent, he warned, “what might be achieved is a climate of intimidation, opportunism, and that particular brand of self-censorship that has suppressed moral courage in Germany far too often.”Footnote ⁷² Supporters of the bill saw the opposition as tiresome in its state aversion and dangerous blindness to Weimar's lessons. Facing down internal dissent, Brandt and Vogel vowed that Social Democrats would never again shirk their responsibility (as they had in 1930) or lack the self-confidence to defend the state (as in 1933).Footnote ⁷³ In short, they demanded members give the bill their full, undivided support and govern. This response, even more than the initial dissent, made clear the SPD's schizophrenic relationship to state power and its increasing relevance to internal party harmony.

Reassessing the Playing Field: The “German Autumn” of 1977

On May 7, 1977, Federal Attorney General Siegfried Buback was “executed” by the RAF for his role as an “agent of the system” in convicting the group's leaders.Footnote ⁷⁴ Widely compared by politicians and the press to the 1922 murder of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, the murder was also a symbolic attack on justice. As such, it elicited comparisons with Italy, where escalating violence against politicians, lawyers, and judges had brought legal proceedings against suspected terrorists to a halt and the system as a whole to its knees.Footnote ⁷⁵ For the West German left, that spring's events were experienced as a watershed of political intolerance that ushered in a repressive climate that would reach its apex during that autumn's terrorist crisis. From the government's perspective, however, little changed over the course of that spring and summer. Despite the repression of the left “scene” and indications that SPD leaders were increasingly open to measures they had previously ruled out, postwar boundaries regarding democracy's defense remained tenuously in place. Not until the kidnapping of Hanns-Martin Schleyer and what is popularly referred to as the “German Autumn” did party leaders begin to redefine legitimate state action. And as they did so, the legitimacy conferred by the party's original democratization project proved essential in convincing the SPD majority to revise its long-standing position on the character of West German democracy and to act to contain terrorism accordingly.

By 1977, the extra-parliamentary left's success at mobilizing international opinion against the FRG seemed to confirm authorities' concerns over the danger posed by the disaffected left. Frustration and growing resentment were palpable in the BMI's January assessment of their counterstrategy, the political education program.Footnote ⁷⁶ First and foremost, it argued that terrorism was an extreme manifestation of the so-called “sympathizer scene” rather than the other way around, concluding that in fact, it was these “anti-groups” that posed the greatest threat to democracy. According to the report's authors:

The report critiqued but did not undermine political education; on the contrary, it lent a new urgency to the government's attempts to gain control of a population it increasingly portrayed as the “enemy within.”

The heightened importance placed on the extra-parliamentary left helps to explain events that occurred that spring. Although the murder of Siegfried Buback certainly fanned West German fears, it was the anonymously written “Buback Obituary” that provoked the full fury of mainstream political commentary and open government repression.Footnote ⁷⁸ Printed in the student-run Göttinger Nachrichten and immediately thereafter in university papers across the FRG, the obituary caused a stir for admitting to a “clandestine joy” upon first hearing of Buback's death. Though it went on to develop an explicit statement against the terrorists' use of political murder, it was read by members of the establishment as proof of the antidemocratic culture flourishing in universities and on the left scene more generally. With the help of the recently amended penal codes, the government mobilized to defend democracy just as many had feared it would: it banned the obituary for aiding terrorism; police raided student newspapers and alternative presses throughout the country to suppress its further publication; and the editor of the Göttinger Nachrichten was brought up on criminal charges for refusing to divulge the author's identity.Footnote ⁷⁹

The government's move to censor and prosecute all those connected to the “Buback Obituary” demonstrated the new urgency to control “sympathizers” and did not abate in the months ahead. For, as though acting out the BMI's script, the prominent leftist poet Erich Fried immediately defended the “Buback Obituary”—though he did so by calling it “one of the most significant documents of the present-day German left against political murder.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Not long after, forty-three professors and teachers joined forces to publish the illegal text seeking to challenge the repressive actions taken in the name of counterterrorism and to open up a public discussion on violence.Footnote ⁸¹ By late summer, the obituary had become a symbol of everything that divided the extra-parliamentary left and the government in the fight to protect German democracy. While old policies had dictated new responses, the government still followed the general course laid down in 1969. Indeed, minutes from security meetings indicate that SPD leaders refused to implement significant changes to existing counterterrorism policy for fear of “alienating the main constituency of the SPD and FDP, as new laws and other ‘strong-arm tactics’ would.”Footnote ⁸² Not until the events of the German Autumn did they—and the party rank-and-file—reevaluate the boundaries they had previously set.

The German Autumn began in Cologne on September 5, 1977, when RAF members kidnapped the president of the Employers' Federation, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, from his car and left his three bodyguards and chauffer dead at the scene. In a matter of days, the SPD's distrust of state power retreated to the background amid fears that political extremism such as that which ushered in the Third Reich was raging out of control.Footnote ⁸³ To deal with the escalating crisis, government leaders—with the strong support of their party—mobilized powers they had previously rejected as illegitimate or too problematic given Germany's freighted history. After repeatedly denying CDU/CSU calls for counterterrorism legislation, the SPD was now overwhelmingly in support of a new Contact Ban Law (Kontaktsperregesetz), which gave federal and state justice ministers the right to suppress prisoners' contact with one another and the outside world if there was a strong possibility they posed a “present danger to life, limb, or liberty.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Not only was the passage of the law in a mere three days driven by the heat of the moment, but the ban's explicit extension to defense attorneys' visitation rights and all written communications also demonstrated the SPD's unprecedented willingness to restrict civil liberties.

At the same time that they violated the sanctity of existing legal frameworks, the SPD strengthened executive power in two steps: first, by freeing it to act without the approval of the legislature and, second, at the height of the crisis, without making its actions public. The first was achieved by the Krisenstab, a crisis management team first deployed in 1975, when members of the RAF occupied the German embassy in Stockholm. The team consisted of Helmut Schmidt (who replaced Brandt as chancellor in 1974), his ministerial cabinet, and the speaker of each party in parliament. Unlike 1975, when the Krisenstab served mainly to open up communication between the parties and provide the chancellor with cross-party backing, during the “German Autumn” it effectively became the ruling body of the nation. The second shift was achieved with the institution of a news blackout (Nachrichtensperre) following Schleyer's kidnapping, a structure to which the press and the SPD conceded upon the government's promise to divulge all suppressed information and minutes of committee meetings once the crisis had ended.Footnote ⁸⁵ So empowered, the coalition government made the decision not to negotiate for the life of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, rejecting arguments that this violated constitutional Articles 102 (outlawing the death penalty) and 1 (mandating the protection of life).Footnote ⁸⁶ And, when members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked the German airliner “Landshut” in a demonstration of solidarity with the RAF, the government broke the taboo on militarized force by deploying the GSG-9 to rescue the plane as it refueled in Mogadishu on October 18.Footnote ⁸⁷

The success of this mission to widespread domestic and international acclaim assured Social Democrats' support for their government's decision to use what was, by that point, the last of the state powers they had traditionally eschewed. Though many have argued otherwise, neither the success of the GSG-9 nor the heightened fears of that autumn are sufficient to explain this dramatic break with the party's long-standing position on state power, much less its maintenance in subsequent decades.Footnote ⁸⁸ In a country besieged as much by its own past as by terrorism, the shift in Social Democratic conceptions of legitimate state action also expressed a corresponding shift in their assumptions regarding West German democracy. Crucial for the SPD's ability to empower the state was its ability to convince its members of the distance they and their actions had achieved from authoritarian and militarist traditions. Their internal security program, with its two-pronged course of enhancement and democratization of state power, went far toward achieving this, not only by reshaping the police and attendant institutions but also by rhetorically connecting the (social) state with the people. Even at the height of the terrorist crisis, Social Democrats very consciously fashioned an image of democracy around the state they were empowering.

For, as problematic as it may have been, the Krisenstab represented a deliberate rejection of the CDU/CSU's early proposals to centralize power in the hands of “one strong man” in times of national crisis. Never doubting the organizational necessity of the crisis staff, security experts and cabinet members who gathered in the Chancellor's bungalow also underscored its symbolic importance. The latter was stated most succinctly by a legal expert in the room: “proof must be given that our free basic order is stronger than a strong man. All decisions must be subordinated to this postulate.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Furthermore, with each party represented by its parliamentary speaker, the presence and authority of the Bundestag acting as a check on executive power was, at the very least, implied. In this way, the crisis staff was understood by many Social Democrats to avoid the worst abuses of power by combining efficient state action with democratic representation.Footnote ⁹⁰ Similarly, party leaders' argument that the Contact Ban protected the average citizen from both untimely death (by preventing further terrorist attacks) and unwarranted state intervention (by creating clear and fixed procedures for suspending civil rights) was not simply one of political expedience.Footnote ⁹¹ It also furthered and expressed their reconceptualization of state power as democratic. To Social Democrats, their government's attention to the preservation of individual life and the control of arbitrary state power demonstrated the sharp distinction between present actions and those taken by the authoritarian regimes of the past.

The SPD's democratization of state power in this sense was, of necessity, particularly on display where coercive force was physically manifest. The government's decision to deploy paramilitary power required countering Social Democrats' engrained distrust by distancing such a move from past abuses, and the GSG-9 did just that. Returning from Mogadishu, the GSG-9—truly in the public eye for the first time—realized the image of the non-militaristic military Social Democrats had set out to create in 1972. Dressed in blue jeans and black leather jackets, the men of the GSG-9 did not evoke comparisons with Prussian or, worse, Nazi soldiers. Instead, accounts of modest heroism and technical efficiency abounded in descriptions of these “rocker-cops” with “honed 007 skills that made the use of weapons redundant.”Footnote ⁹² Clothing GSG-9 members both literally and figuratively in the trappings of Hollywood heroes allowed many Social Democrats and other West Germans to conceive of this newest, formidable deployment of state power as not only distinct from the excesses of the past but also democratically legitimate. Regardless of its accuracy, this perception that state power had become significantly more democratic—and not simply the fear provoked by terrorism—was essential to convincing many Social Democrats that a German state could indeed manifest strength without fear of being authoritarian.

Writing in the party organ, one member attempted to explain the emotional significance of Mogadishu for the SPD. For him, the successful hostage rescue was not only about “the chancellor, the federal government—a democratically legitimated executive—fulfilling their sworn duties with calm and luck.” It concerned more, even, than “the democratic state having proved itself capable of action.” The experience that the author most underscored for his readers was the collapse of the “stereotypical conservative-reactionary slander” that claimed “Social Democrats have no relationship to the state and power.”Footnote ⁹³ For many in the SPD, the lasting importance of the autumn's events was not only the belief that their government had demonstrated before an international audience the decisive yet democratic use of German state power but that its actions had once and for all established Social Democrats as effective statesmen. That they celebrated this despite the fact that the government had overstepped the bounds that the party long maintained on state power spoke directly to a change in their perception of German democracy itself.