by Tony Judt
The Provisional IRA was much like ETA in its methods, and in some of its proclaimed objectives. Just as ETA sought to make the Basque provinces ungovernable and thereby secure their exit from Spain, so the Irish Republican Army aimed at making Northern Ireland ungovernable, expelling the British, and uniting the six northern provinces with the rest of Ireland. But there were significant differences. Since an independent Ireland already existed, there was—at least in principle—a practicable national goal for the rebels to hold out to their supporters. On the other hand, there was more than one Northern Irish community, and the distinctions between them went back a very long way.
Like French Algeria, Northern Ireland—Ulster—was both a colonial remnant and an integral part of the metropolitan nation itself. When London finally relinquished Ireland to the Irish, in 1922, the UK retained the six northern counties of the island on the reasonable enough grounds that the overwhelmingly Protestant majority there was intensely loyal to Britain and had no desire to be governed from Dublin—and incorporated into a semi-theocratic republic dominated by the Catholic episcopate. Whatever they said in public, the political leaders of the new Republic were themselves not altogether unhappy to forgo the presence of a compact and sizeable community of angrily recalcitrant Protestants. But for a minority of Irish nationalists this abandonment constituted a betrayal, and under the banner of the IRA they continued to demand the unification—by force if need be—of the entire island.
This situation remained largely unchanged for four decades. By the 1960s the official stance in Dublin somewhat resembled that of Bonn: acknowledging the desirability of national re-unification but quietly content to see the matter postponed sine die. Successive British governments, meanwhile, had long chosen to ignore so far as possible the uneasy situation they had inherited in Ulster, where the Protestant majority dominated local Catholics through gerrymandered constituencies, political clientelism, sectarian pressure on employers, and a monopoly of jobs in crucial occupations: civil service, judiciary and above all the police.
If politicians on the British mainland preferred not to know about these matters, it was because the Conservative Party depended on its ‘Unionist’ wing (dating from the nineteenth-century campaign to maintain Ireland united with Britain) for a crucial block of parliamentary seats; it was thus committed to the status quo, with Ulster maintained as an integral part of the United Kingdom. The Labour Party was no less closely identified with the powerful labour unions in Belfast’s shipbuilding and allied industries, where Protestant workers had long received preferential treatment.
As this last observation suggests, the divisions in Northern Ireland were unusually complicated. The religious divide between Protestants and Catholics was real and corresponded to a communal divide replicated at every stage of life: from birth to death, through education, housing, marriage, employment and recreation. And it was ancient—references to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century quarrels and victories might appear to outsiders absurdly ritualistic, but the history behind them was real. But the Catholic/Protestant divide was never a class distinction in the conventional sense, despite the IRA’s efforts to import Marxist categories into its rhetoric. There were workers and priests—and to a lesser extent landowners, businessmen and professionals—on both sides.
Moreover, many Ulster Catholics felt no urgent desire to be ruled from Dublin. In the 1960s Ireland was still a poor and backward country and the standard of living in the North, while below that of most of the rest of the UK, was still considerably above the Irish average. Even for Catholics, Ulster was a better economic bet. Protestants, meanwhile, identified very strongly with the UK. This sentiment was by no means reciprocated by the rest of Britain, which thought little of Northern Ireland (when it thought of it at all). The old industries of Ulster, like those of the rest of the UK, were in decline by the end of the 1960s, and it was already clear to planners in London that the overwhelmingly Protestant blue-collar workforce there had an uncertain future. But beyond this, it is fair to say that the British authorities had not given Ulster serious thought for many decades.
The IRA had declined to a marginal political sect, denouncing the Irish Republic as illegitimate because incomplete while reiterating its ‘revolutionary’ aspiration to forge a different Ireland, radical and united. The IRA’s wooly, anachronistic rhetoric had little appeal to a younger generation of recruits (including the seventeen-year-old, Belfast-born Gerry Adams, who joined in 1965) more interested in action than doctrine and who formed their own organization, the clandestine, ‘Provisional’ IRA.199 The ‘Provos’, recruited mainly from Derry and Belfast, emerged just in time to benefit from a wave of civil rights demonstrations across the North, demanding long overdue political and civil rights for Catholics from the Ulster government in Stormont Castle and encountering little but political intransigence and police batons for their efforts.
The ‘Troubles’ that were to take over Northern Irish—and to some extent British—public life for the next three decades were sparked by street battles in Derry following the traditional Apprentice Boys’ March in July 1969, aggressively commemorating the defeat of the Jacobite and Catholic cause 281 years before. Faced with growing public violence and demands from Catholic leaders for London to intervene, the UK government sent in the British Army and took over control of policing functions in the six counties. The army, recruited largely in mainland Britain, was decidedly less partisan and on the whole less brutal than the local police. It is thus ironic that its presence provided the newly formed Provisional IRA with its core demand: that the British authorities and their troops should leave Ulster, as a first stage towards re-uniting the island under Irish rule.
The British did not leave. It is not clear how they could have left. Various efforts through the 1970s to build inter-community confidence and allow the province to run its own affairs fell foul of suspicion and intransigence on both sides. Catholics, even if they had no liking for their own armed extremists, had good precedent for mistrusting promises of power-sharing and civic equality emanating from the Ulster Protestant leadership. The latter, always reluctant to make real concessions to the Catholic minority, were now seriously fearful of the intransigent gunmen of the Provisionals. Without the British military presence the province would have descended still further into open civil war.
The British government was thus trapped. At first London was sympathetic to Catholic pressure for reforms; but following the killing of a British soldier in February 1971 the government introduced internment without trial and the situation deteriorated rapidly. In January 1972, on ‘Bloody Sunday’, British paratroopers killed thirteen civilians in the streets of Derry. In that same year 146 members of the security forces and 321 civilians were killed in Ulster, and nearly five thousand people injured. Buoyed up by a new generation of martyrs and the obstinacy of its opponents, the Provisional IRA mounted what was to become a thirty-year campaign, in the course of which it bombed, shot and maimed soldiers and civilians in Ulster and across mainland Britain. It made at least one attempt to assassinate the British Prime Minister. Even if the British authorities had wanted to walk away from Ulster (as many mainland voters might have wished), they could not. As a referendum of March 1973 showed and later polls confirmed, an overwhelming majority of the people of Ulster wished to maintain their ties to Britain.200
The IRA campaign did not unite Ireland. It did not remove the British from Ulster. Nor did it destabilize British politics, though the assassination of politicians and public figures (notably Lord Mountbatten, former Viceroy of India and god-father of the Prince of Wales) genuinely shocked public opinion on both sides of the Irish Sea. But the Irish ‘Troubles’ further darkened an already gloomy decade in British public life and contributed to the ‘ungovernability’ thesis being touted at the time, as well as to the end of the carefree optimism of the 1960s. By the time the Provisional IRA—and the Protestant paramilitary groups that had emerged in its wake—finally came to the negoti
ating table, to secure constitutional arrangements that the British government might have been pleased to concede almost from the outset, 1,800 people had been killed and one Ulster resident in five had a family member killed or wounded in the fighting.
Against this background, the other ‘pathologies’ of 1970s Europe were small indeed, though they contributed to the widespread atmosphere of unease. A self-styled ‘Angry Brigade’, purportedly acting on behalf of the unrepresented unemployed, planted bombs around London in 1971. Francophone separatists in the Swiss Jura, modeling their tactics on those of the Irish, rioted in 1974 at their enforced incorporation into the (German-speaking) canton of Bern. Crowds of rioters in Liverpool, Bristol and the Brixton district of London battled with police over control of ‘no-go’ inner-city slums.
In one key or another, all such protests and actions were, as I have suggested, pathologies of politics: however extreme their form, their goals were familiar and their tactics instrumental. They were trying to achieve something and would—by their own account—have desisted if their demands were met. ETA, the IRA and their imitators were terrorist organizations; but they were not irrational. In due course most of them ended up negotiating with their enemies, in the hope of securing their objectives if only in part. But such considerations were never of interest to protagonists of the second violent challenge of the times.
In most of Western Europe, the airy radical theorems of the 1960s dissipated harmlessly enough. But in two countries in particular they metamorphosed into a psychosis of self-justifying aggression. A small minority of erstwhile student radicals, intoxicated by their own adaptation of Marxist dialectics, set about ‘revealing’ the ‘true face’ of repressive tolerance in Western democracies. If the parliamentary regime of capitalist interests were pushed hard enough, they reasoned, it would shed the cloak of legality and show its true face. Confronted with the truth about its oppressors, the proletariat—hitherto ‘alienated’ from its own interestand victim of ‘false consciousness’ about its situation—would take up its proper place on the barricades of class warfare.
Such a summary gives too much credit to the terrorist underground of the 1970s—and too little. Most of the young men and women swept up in it, however familiar they were with the justificatory vocabulary of violence, played little part in its formulation. They were the foot soldiers of terrorism. On the other hand, especially in West Germany, the emotional energy invested in their hatred of the Federal Republic drew on sources deeper and darker than the mal-adapted rhetorical gymnastics of nineteenth-century radicalism. The urge to bring the architecture of security and stability crashing down on the heads of their parents’ generation was the extreme expression of a more widespread skepticism, in the light of the recent past, about the local credibility of pluralist democracy. It was not by chance, therefore, that ‘revolutionary terror’ took its most menacing form in Germany and Italy.
The link between extra-parliamentary politics and outright violence first emerged in Germany as early as April 1968, when four young radicals—among them Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin—were arrested on suspicion of burning two department stores in Frankfurt. Two years later Baader escaped from prison in the course of an armed raid planned and led by Ulrike Meinhof. She and Baader then issued their ‘Concept City Guerrilla Manifesto’, announcing the formation of a ‘Rote Armee Fraktion’ (Red Army Fraction—RAF) whose goal was to dismantle the Federal Republic by force. The acronym RAF was chosen deliberately: just as Britain’s Royal Air Force had attacked Nazi Germany from the air, so the Baader-Meinhof Group, as they were colloquially known, would bomb and shoot its successor into submission from below.
Between 1970 and 1978, the RAF and its ancillary offshoots pursued a strategy of deliberately random terror, assassinating soldiers, policemen and businessmen, holding up banks and kidnapping mainstream politicians. In addition to killing 28 people and wounding a further 93 in the course of bombings and shootings in these years, they took 162 hostages and carried out over 30 bank robberies—partly to finance their organization, partly to advertise their presence. In the early years they also targeted American Army bases in West Germany, killing and injuring a number of soldiers, notably in the late spring of 1972.
In their peak year of 1977, the RAF kidnapped and subsequently executed Hans Martin Schleyer, the chairman of Daimler Benz and President of the West German Federation of Industries, and assassinated both Siegfried Buback, the West German Attorney General, and Jürgen Ponto, the head of Dresdner Bank. But this was to be their swansong. Already, in May 1976, Meinhof (captured in 1972) had been found dead in her Stuttgart prison cell. She had apparently hung herself, though rumors persisted that she had been executed by the state. Baader, seized in a shoot-out in Frankfurt in 1972, was in prison serving a life sentence for murder when he, too, was found dead in his cell on October 18th 1977, on the same day as Gudrun Ensslin and another imprisoned terrorist. Their underground organization persisted into the eighties, albeit much reduced: in August 1981 it bombed the US Air Force HQ at Ramstein in West Germany, and the following month the ‘Gudrun Ensslin Kommando’ tried unsuccessfully to assassinate the US Supreme Commander in Europe.
Since the German terrorist underground had no defined goals, its achievements can only be measured by the extent of its success in disrupting German public life and undermining the institutions of the Republic. In this it clearly failed. The most distinctively repressive governmental action of the time was the passing of the Berufsverbot in 1972 by the Social Democratic government of Willy Brandt. This decree excluded from state employment any person who engaged in political acts considered detrimental to the Constitution, and was ostensibly aimed at keeping supporters of Left and Right political extremes out of sensitive posts. In a culture already preternaturally disposed to public conformity this certainly aroused fears of censorship and worse; but it was hardly the prelude to dictatorship that its critics feared and—at the outer extreme—hoped.
Neither the terrorist Left nor the apparently renascent neo-Nazi Right—notably responsible for killing 13 people and wounding 220 others in a bomb attack on Munich’s Oktoberfest in 1980—succeeded in destabilizing the Republic, although they did provoke careless talk in conservative political circles of the need to curb civil liberties and enforce ‘Order’. Much more worrying was the extent to which the Baader-Meinhof Group in particular was able to tap into a fund of generalized sympathy for its ideas among otherwise law-abiding intellectuals and academics.201
One source of local sympathy was a growing nostalgia in literary and artistic circles for Germany’s lost past. Germany, it was felt, had been doubly ‘disinherited’: by the Nazis, who had deprived Germans of a respectable, ‘usable’ past; and by the Federal Republic, whose American overseers had imposed upon Germany a false image of itself. In the words of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, the film director, the nation had been ‘spiritually disinherited and dispossessed . . . we live in a country without homeland, without Heimat.’ The distinctly nationalist tinge to German extreme-Left terrorism—its targeting of American occupiers, multinational corporations and the ‘international’ capitalist order—rang a chord, as did the terrorists’ claim that it was Germans who were now the victims of the manipulations and interests of others.
These same years saw an outpouring of films, speeches, books, television programs and public commentary on the country’s problematic history and identity. Just as the Red Army Fraktion claimed to be fighting ‘Fascism’—by proxy, so to speak—so West Germany’s intellectuals, Left and Right, battled for control of Germany’s true heritage. Syberberg’s fellow film director Edgar Reitz directed a hugely popular, sixteen-hour television mini-series: ‘Heimat: A German Chronicle’. The story of a family from the Hunsrück countryside of the Rhineland Palatinate, it traced contemporary German history through a domestic narrative reaching from the end of World War One to the present.
In Reitz’s film the inter-war years especially are bathed in a sepia-like afterg
low of fond memory; even the Nazi era is hardly permitted to intrude upon fond recollections of better times. The Americanized world of the post-war Federal Republic, on the other hand, is presented with angry, icy disdain: its materialist neglect of national values and its destruction of memory and continuity are depicted as violently corrosive of human values and community. As in Fassbinder’s Marriage of Maria Braun the main character—also ‘Maria’—does duty for a victimized Germany; but Heimat is quite explicitly nostalgic and even xenophobic in its contempt for foreign values and longing for the lost soul of ‘deep Germany’.
Reitz, like Syberberg and others, was publicly scornful of the American television series ‘Holocaust’, first shown on German television in 1979. If there were to be depictions of Germany’s past, however painful, then it was the business of Germans to produce them. ‘The most radical process of expropriation there is,’ wrote Reitz, ‘is the expropriation of one’s own history. The Americans have stolen our history through Holocaust.’ The application of a ‘commercial aesthetic’ to Germany’s past was America’s way of controlling it. The struggle of German directors and artists against American ‘kitsch’ was part of the struggle against American capitalism.
Reitz and Fassbinder were among the directors of Deutschland im Herbst (‘Germany in Autumn’) a 1978 collage of documentary, movie clips and interviews covering the events of the autumn of 1977, notably the kidnapping and killing of Hans Martin Schleyer and the subsequent suicide of Ensslin and Baader. The film is notable not so much for its expressions of empathy for the terrorists as for the distinctive terms in which these are conveyed. By careful inter-cutting, the Third Reich and the Federal Republic are made to share a family resemblance. ‘Capitalism’, ‘the profit system’ and National Socialism are presented as equally reprehensible and indefensible, with the terrorists emerging as latter-day resisters: modern Antigones struggling with their consciences and against political repression.