Student Protest by Gerard J.De Groot

Author:Gerard J.De Groot [Groot, Gerard J.De]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, World
ISBN: 9781317880493
Google: LEygBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-09-25T16:07:35+00:00

Conclusion

The ‘German Autumn’ of 1977 is remembered in the Federal Republic as a time of dangerous ideological division. Leftists contended that the state undermined its commitment to the Rechtsstaat in hastily passed laws, which dramatically extended police powers and restricted civil liberties: the paradox of a virtual police state (‘creeping fascism’, some called it) to protect democracy.31 Conservatives and many social democrats, like the political scientist Kurt Sontheimer, retorted that without terrorism and Utopian criticism of the Federal Republic, such a reaction would never have occurred.32 Fortunately for West Germany, the crisis management of the social democratic chancellor Helmut Schmidt (1974–82) averted the civil war measures for which conservatives had called, and which would have played into the terrorists’ hands. Social democratic provinces de-escalated the situation by a less strict application of the Radikalenerlass.

It had become apparent that ‘belligerent democracy’ was insufficient when not balanced by tolerance for a loyal non-parliamentary opposition. Citizens wanted to be more than obedient objects of government policy. But then the left needed to commit itself to the Federal Republic’s liberal institutions. The founding of the Green Party in 1977 marked a positive beginning, even if it regarded itself as an ‘anti-party party’. Although the left still clashed violently with police during the early 1980s over nuclear weapons and squatting issues, the disturbing polarization of 1977 was not repeated. Conservatives, for their part, had to temper their rhetoric when Filbinger was forced to resign in disgrace on 7 August 1978, after the writer Rolf Hochhuth revealed that he had served as a judge under the Nazis and had sentenced servicemen to death in the last days of the war. He had not shown the generosity to leftists in the 1970s that had been granted him after the war.33 But it was precisely such generosity that the country needed to break out of the vicious circle of escalating violence.

1. Fritz R. Allemann, Bonn ist nicht Weimar (Munich, 1956); Karl Dietrich Bracher, ‘Wird Bonn doch Weimar?’, Der Spiegel (13 March 1967), pp. 60f.; Hans Schuster, ‘Wird Bonn doch Weimar?’, Merkur (June 1969), pp. 501–14.

2. Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, Mass., 1997).

3. Richard Löwenthal, ‘Widerstand im totalitären Staat’, in Richard Löwenthal and Patrik von zur Mühlen, Widerstand und Verweigerung in Deutschland, 1933 bis 1945 (Bonn, 1984), pp. 11–24. A recent intellectual history of totalitarianism is Abbot Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (Oxford and New York, 1995).

4. It should be noted, though, that the SPD did not support entry into NATO until 1960. See Stephen J. Artner, A Change of Course: The West Geiman Social Democrats and NATO (Westport, Conn., 1985).

5. Eckhard Jesse, Streitbare Demokratie: Theorie, Praxis, und Herausforderung in der Bundesrepublik (Berlin, 1980); Erhard Denninger et al., Freiheitliche democratische Grundordnung: Materialien zum Staatsverständnis und zur Verfassungsivirklichkeii in der Bundesrepublik, 2 vols. (Frankfurt a.M., 1977). The term ‘free democratic basic order’ is mentioned in those articles of the Basic Law (18, 21:2, and 91) that deal with ‘enemies of the state’.

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