When, on 9 May 1976, news broke that Ulrike Meinhof, a left-wing terrorist in her early forties facing life in prison, had hung herself in a Stuttgart prison cell, a wave of grief and anger swept through radical circles not only in West Germany itself but all over Europe. Demonstrations and furious press commentaries protested against the way German prison authorities and judges had handled this Cassandra of the left. Some radical commentators reprinted the accusation made by Meinhof's lawyers that she had not committed suicide but had actually been murdered by those in power to intimidate other revolutionaries in Germany and beyond. Others shrewdly stated that she had been suicided by state authorities: it had been a case of “zelfmoord op Ulrike Meinof”, as Dutch left-liberal journalist Martin van Amerongen put it
Ulrike Meinhof was of course one of the most prominent members of the “Rote Armee Fraktion” (Red Army Faction, RAF), aka Baader-Meinhof Group, a militant urban guerrilla group she helped organize in 1970 together with Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and a few other radicals living in West Berlin. In writing about the RAF, historians have for a long time largely ignored the fact that so much attention has been paid to this group outside Germany. They focused very much on Meinhof and the other founding members and, to a lesser degree, on later generations of left-wing terrorists, and on the personal and collective backgrounds that might explain their steps on the road to political violence. In addition, the counter-terrorist policies of West Germany's establishment and its counter-productive response to the challenge of violence and extremism attracted a lot of academic attention.
Of course, spectacular events involving foreign support for the RAF, such as French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre paying a visit to Baader in a Stuttgart-Stammheim prison cell late in 1974, were never fully ignored, but basically these were just filed away as historical curiosities. There was hardly any attempt to integrate the story of Germany's left-wing terrorism into postwar European history, and a whole range of elements to this story were thus neglected, such as the RAF's importance as a cultural and political signifier in countries and cultures outside Germany, its cross-border activities and contacts, and its exchanges within the broad transnational European and even transatlantic radical post-1968 milieu of the 1970s.
Recently, we have seen some change, beginning with studies of the reception of the RAF and the German confrontation with left-wing terrorism in countries bordering the Federal Republic (my own work on the RAF in the Netherlands, published in 2007, took this angle too). In her door-stopping monograph, Deutscher Herbst in Europa. Der Linksterrorismus der siebziger Jahre als transnationales Phänomen, Petra Terhoeven, professor of European cultural history and contemporary history at Göttingen University, has now taken the transnational approach further. In her view the 1970s brought about an “Europeanization of the ‘stage’ of the ‘theatre of terror’” (p. 25, my translation), a result of a conscious communication strategy by the RAF, and her book is intended as a first attempt to really appreciate the significance of this.
In light of these claims, it is unfortunate that the title of Terhoeven's book is slightly misleading. It does not deal as much with European reactions to the “German Autumn”, the climax of West Germany's confrontation with the Red Army Faction in 1977, as its title suggests. Rather, Terhoeven presents a comparative study of left-wing terrorism as a transnational phenomenon throughout the 1970s, as the subtitle indicates. In a sense, even this subtitle is too broad, as large parts of the book are basically devoted only to a comparison of Germany and Italy or to a histoire croisée of left-wing terrorisms in both countries. One can easily understand her choice of these two countries, the Italian left and the Red Brigades offering the best comparison to Germany in the 1970s, but it would have been better to have been upfront about it.
Nevertheless, it is hard not to be impressed by Terhoeven's monograph. Its sheer volume is almost intimidating, and the footnotes reflect a commanding understanding of the literature. It is obvious, too, that Terhoeven has done extensive research in all sorts of archives and has read practically every relevant publication of the period and of the countries she deals with. Intellectually, her book is a fountain of ideas and perspectives, though she is somewhat uncritical of the counter-terrorist policies of the era. The introduction offers a clear five-point explanation of her special, transnational approach, followed by a good overview of the book's programme. She touches on many relevant theories and debates, which gives the book its broad intellectual base.
Five long and dense chapters then carry the argument further. In Chapter 2, Terhoeven relates the encounters between German and Italian radicals from 1967 to 1971, such as those between student leader Rudi Dutschke and independent communist publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, and their “dream of the revolution”, as she slightly condescendingly phrases it. Thereafter, in Chapter 3, she turns to those among the Italian radical left who, after 1970, considered taking up armed struggle against the state and who sought contact with German comrades who had already chosen violent means.
In Chapters 4 and 5 Terhoeven steps out of the strictly German–Italian story to reconstruct and analyse the “transnationalization strategy” of the founding generation of the RAF, the help they received from their lawyers, and the transnational solidarity network maintained by these lawyers. Terhoeven tends to stress the agency of the imprisoned RAF members more than most others have, and she does this rather convincingly. They created an image of themselves as victims organizing a campaign that, in fact, helped them regain a measure of political significance in spite of their being behind bars. I found these two chapters very rewarding, but I also think it would have been better for the book if this subtopic had been dealt with more concisely. In effect, Terhoeven offers a book about the RAF's communication strategy within a book that deals with the Italian–German case.
The sixth chapter offers a return to the main case study: the author analyses the reception of the “German autumn” in Italy in an exemplary and profound manner. Although she is not the first to write about it, it is fascinating to see how throughout Europe Germany obtained the unwanted status of a police state projecting a “German model” and disciplining its neighbours – in this case in Italy. After this, a rather short conclusion with a surprisingly strong focus on what the problem of left-wing terrorism actually meant for Germany concludes the book.
All in all, Terhoeven has written a book of great significance for the study of the RAF and its constituency in Germany and beyond. It also gives rich insights into the Italian radical left and its armed organizations. Its main flaw is that the author presents us with slightly too much for one book. But this should not discourage anyone from studying it as an important contribution to our understanding of terrorism as a transnational phenomenon.
