The Kidnapping of Hanns-Martin Schleyer and the (Unlearned) Lessons of History

I’ve just finished reading Tom Bowers’ fascinating — and disturbing — book on the failures of denazification after WWII, Blind Eye to Murder. In the final chapter, Bowers discusses the 1977 kidnapping and eventual murder of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, the wealthy president of the Federation of German Employers and a former SS officer, by the Red Army Faction (RAF). It was deja vu all over again as I read Bowers’ account of the German government’s reaction to the kidnapping:

In Bonn an all-party crisis committee was formed by the Chancellor’s office to organize the government’s response to the crisis. Its members quickly and unanimously agreed on two fundamentals: firstly, there would be no surrender to the terrorists’ demands; and, secondly, this was an unprecedented situation calling for extreme measures. It followed that they felt justified in invoking a state of emergency. The laws placed before the Bundestag gave the police and other government agencies virtually unlimited powers. Arrests and searches could be carried out without warrants; those arrested could be detained for what amounted to an indefinite period without access to anyone.

[snip]

Those who felt the full force of the state’s authority in the six weeks between the kidnapping and the discovery of Schleyer’s mutilated body… were not the criminals, but all those elements in German society which the Establishment, and the police, suspected of liberal or left-wing tendencies…. One of the reasons that the Social Democratic government had found it necessary to involve the other parties in the management of the crisis was that they were all too well aware that it offered a fine opportunity for the their right-wing opponents to argue that this was the inevitable outcome of left-wing softness and tolerance….

But the conservatives felt no constraints when they addressed the public. Only four members of the ruling Social Democratic party had opposed the emergency legislation on the floor of the Bundestag, and they were instantly labeled as terrorist sympathizers. Worse was reserved for those outside the legislature who questioned the government’s motives or the need for such drastic steps. They were stigmatized as “poisoners,” “gangsters,” the “carrier of moral epidemics,” “viruses who are blackmailing the state and must be exterminated.” Even respected figures, like the writers Heinrich Boll and Gunther Grass, whose political stance was critical and unorthodox, were “enemies of the state” and “spiritual bombers.” This was not the language of leaders eager to unite the country in the face of crisis; it was rhetoric in a German political tradition that went back at least to the night of the Reichstag fire.

The Schleyer kidnapping highlighted two sinister trends in German political life. The social democratic Left did not have the authority to stand up for its principles when it found itself in danger of being outflanked by the Right; because it, too, understood the public appeal of the Right’s simplistic solutions. And the Right did not hesitate to take advantage of a crisis to smear its opponents wholesale.

There was, of course, nothing even remotely “unprecedented” about Schleyer’s kidnapping. As Bowers notes, the kidnapping was not qualitatively different than “an IRA bomb attack or assassination in Britain or the murder of a Fiat executive in Italy.” And therein lies the fundamental irony at the heart of the dialectic between terrorism and emergency powers: the overreaction to each “unprecedented” terrorist situation itself becomes precedent for the overreaction to the next “unprecedented” terrorist situation. And so on, in an endless Santayanian spiral of decreasing freedom…

FULL DISCLOSURE: Felix Ensslin, the son of Gundrun Ensslin, one of the founders of the RAF, was one of my best friends at the New School.