View / To understand today’s political violence, look to the 1970s

Germany recently spent $4.2 million building a high-security courtroom for a suspected terrorist. The defendant is Daniela Klette, 66, with long grey hair and a penchant for oversized knitwear. Police officers found a machine gun, an anti-tank weapon, and other firearms in her flat last year. And Germany’s fear of the type of terrorism she stands accused of runs deep.

Klette is on trial for her association with the Red Army Faction (RAF), or Rote Armee Fraktion, a far-left militant group active in West Germany between 1970 and 1998 and held responsible for dozens of murders. In its most radical phase in the late 1970s, it conducted murders, bombings, abductions and other serious crimes in order to bring down a system it considered “fascist.” While now defunct, with only a couple more aging ex-members on the run, the shadow of the RAF looms large.

The right-wing extremism of the Nazis remains the main reference point for expressions of concern or outrage about threats to Western democracies and freedoms. But in many ways, the left-wing terror of the seventies is as instructive for our times. It doesn’t feature as prominently in collective memory because it never had mainstream backing, and it ultimately failed and fizzled out. At the time, the threat was real and terrifying.

In the 1970s, many Western democracies faced their first substantial challenges to the postwar order. This was particularly evident in West Germany, where the so-called economic miracle, or Wirtschaftswunder, had lifted the country into a new age of affluence in the 1950s and 1960s, initially leading to a broad political consensus that seemed rock-solid. In the 1957 elections, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s conservative party achieved an absolute majority, a unique and spectacular victory in Germany’s multi-party electoral system. The government appeared to guarantee prosperity for all (or at least most), and the class struggle was deemed a thing of the past.

Just a decade later, a visceral new anger drove broad discontent among parts of the younger generation. In Germany, the RAF sprang from the ideological residue of the global student movements of 1968-69. Following Marxist doctrine, members believed in violence as the only path to change. Ulrike Meinhof, co-founder of the RAF, wrote in 1968: “Throwing one stone is a criminal offense. Throwing a thousand stones is political action.”

But it isn’t their stone-throwing that sends shivers down many German spines to this day. In all, 34 murders are commonly ascribed to the RAF. Among them were high-profile figures like industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer. Other victims were merely in the line of fire. The terrorist group coldly accepted casualties as sacrifices that had to be made for the greater good. Drivers, bodyguards and bystanders were fair game.

Klette’s alleged association with the RAF falls into the time of one such callous killing. The victim was a 20-year-old American soldier stationed in West Germany, Edward Pimental, for whom the group set a murderous honeytrap. A German woman flirted with him at a nightclub in Wiesbaden in August 1985, and he left the bar with her. He was shot in the head in a nearby forest, and the RAF used his ID to enter his airbase the next day. There, they planted a car bomb that killed two more Americans and injured 20 people. One suspect’s lawyer argued the attack was a “legitimate means of resistance against American imperialism.”

Something about the zeitgeist of the seventies sparked such outbursts of political violence in a younger generation, which, unlike Germans in the 1920s and 30s, had not experienced the devastation of total war and its civilian aftermath. Economic crises, such as those caused by the 1973 oil shock, were devastating, but they never reached the scale of the Great Depression in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street crash. Yet the period produced many radical far-left groups across the West.

There was the Weather Underground Organization in the US, which issued a “Declaration of a State of War” against the government in 1970. It conducted riots and bombing raids to bring down a system it considered “imperialist.” The Irish Republican Army wanted to end British rule in Northern Ireland using guerrilla tactics that killed an estimated 1,700, including more than 500 civilians. The far-left Basque Homeland and Liberty, or ETA, in Spain conducted bombings, assassinations, and kidnappings, killing over 800 people between 1968 and 2010.

They all had different motives, from the RAF’s rage against the refusal of their morally complacent parents’ generation to confront their Nazi past to the IRA’s and ETA’s nationalism. But the common strand in their brutal methodology was the Marxist conviction that violence is a necessary and justified catalyst of change.

Unlike the rise of the Nazis in the 1920s and 30s, the extremists of the seventies never achieved majority backing because they couldn’t tap into widespread destitution. RAF members primarily came from middle-class backgrounds, and the WUO originated from American university campuses.

These dynamics perhaps resonate even more strongly in our times than those of the trauma-torn interwar era. We appear to live in an age where political violence and illegal action are once again condoned by a significant minority. This year, the Glastonbury Festival made headlines when a performer led a chant of “Death to the IDF,” and the BBC continued to livestream the performance. In Germany, the leader of the Green Party’s youth wing posted pictures of herself wearing an anti-police “ACAB” sweater associated with anarchism. Environmental activists vandalize paintings, property, and infrastructure to force change by non-lawful means, property crimes that echo the wave of property-damaging bombs set by US radicals like Weather.

None of this compares to the murderous terror of the 1970s, but that too didn’t start as violence. There were protest movements in the mid- and late 1960s, often on university campuses, which became smaller and more radical over time. As they did, the silent majority condemned them, but a significant minority argued that they had a point. To this day, the RAF has retained a romanticized Robin Hood image among people who argue that the West German state brought terror upon itself with its excessive violence against legitimate protest in the 1960s — for instance, when student Benno Ohnesorg was shot dead by police in 1967 at a protest against the visit of the Shah of Iran.

This line of thinking, that political ends can justify violent means, appears to see a resurgence. Demonstrations in our cities freely express allegiance with Hamas. In Germany, the so-called Hammer Gang, or Hammerbande, garners sympathy on the moderate left. A network of far-left extremists, it targets people it deems neo-Nazis with extreme violence, including with the eponymous hammers. A 24-year-old German who is currently on trial in Hungary for alleged participation in violent assaults there has now been visited in prison by mainstream politicians like Bundestag Vice President Katrin Göring-Eckardt from the Green Party.

These dynamics apply to right-wing violence, too. When anti-immigration riots broke out in Northern Ireland last month after two Romanian-speaking teenagers were charged with attempted rape of a teenage girl, segments of the British media argued that “if politicians dealt with uncontrolled mass immigration, they wouldn’t have to deal with riots.” In the US, the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol in 2021 was directly incited by President Donald Trump in order to overturn what he called a “stolen election.”

The belief that violence is a legitimate way of doing politics by other means is back among a sizable minority across Western societies, whether on the left or the right. These societies are not traumatized by world wars or poverty on the scale of the Great Depression; they are deeply polarized political landscapes in which significant minorities radicalize themselves with the tacit backing of others.

As a German historian, I get asked a lot whether we’re experiencing a re-run of the 1930s. I’m inclined to think the 1970s deserve just as much attention.