Terrorism was as much a part of my time in Germany as warm beer. There was the Red Army Faction (RAF), otherwise known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Revolutionary Cells (Revolutionäre Zellen, or RZ), and other splinter groups, copycat wannabes, until it became hard to keep track of who was blowing up whom. My German friend Bernhard always told me these (himself included) were the first children born beneath the Nazi legacy, and they were having a hard time dealing with that, and were pissed off they even had to deal with it to begin with, so they just decided to start blowing things up, until they could figure it out.
“It’s all one great big collective temper tantrum,” Bernhard would say, laughing and shaking out his shoulder-length black wavy hair, and puffing on one of his foul little filter-less cigarettes.
Maybe so, but as one of the “imperialists” invading their country, I knew the bombs they were exploding around anything American they could find were real enough, and beyond any tantrum I’d ever witnessed. And after they blew Captain Bonner and others to pieces at the Campbell Barracks in Heidelberg, the entire U.S. military command in Germany went lockdown, and pretty much stayed that way, in varying degrees of intensity, for the remainder of my tour there. The terrorists announced the bombings were in response to the war we were engaged in Southeast Asia, and I believed them. But I was sorry to see the easy, relaxed relationship between the Americans and the Germans go away, or at least uncomfortably dampen beneath the wet blanket of geopolitics. For the most part of what I witnessed, Germans and Germany loved all or at least a great many things American, including our bluejeans and cigarettes and our whiskey. Some of this may have had to do with their white-hot hatred for the Russians and what they did at the closings of World War II, but I recall a genuine affection, jokingly calling themselves America’s 51st state, and always asking me about Al Capone and John Dillinger, as well as cowboys and Indians, as if they had all ingested a bit too much Karl May.
At the time the bombings began, I was renting an upstairs apartment from a lovely old German couple, who invited me down to their apartment every Sunday afternoon for brunch. The old woman’s thick soups and steaming red cabbages and succulent pork roasts were amazing, and most likely went a long way toward keeping me alive, those days. They had both been through two world wars—the old man had been a young soldier in the first one—and were not easily impressed by the rants and ravings of a few young people with chips on their shoulders and ragged copies of Karl Marx on their bedside reading tables.
“Ach—diese Kinder!” she would say, shaking her head, while her husband chuckled, reading his newspaper, and shook his head. Then she would look over at me while cutting off slices of that thick dark German bread I would kill for and say, “They are like so many angry children without discipline!” And she would shake her head again, her comments reminding me of what Bernhard had said about them. The terrorists. I wasn’t so sure. Of course, this was years before 9/11, but even then it was apparent some sort of shift was taking place—social, political, cultural—that would change things then and forever. I remember feeling different literally overnight, as New Yorkers and all Americans felt different on September 12th. For my old German landlords, even though they had been engaged in world wars, there was some semblance of here and there. Then, there were fronts, even though they might change in a heartbeat, and borders, and rules of engagement. There was a before and an after. A start and a finish. A we win and you lose. But that was all gone now. There were no fronts anymore. Now, it was all about the local. Rules of engagement? Any semblance of moral propriety? The very sacredness of civilization? Fuck it, those angry, post-Nazi children would tell you, if you had asked them. Fuck it all. Everything was on the table now. Everything was in the game. No quarter given or expected, unless you were absolutely naïve about the whole thing.
At a German party once, I found myself being whisked away into the night by two of my friends.
“Say nothing,” Dieter told me, clenching my arm. “Just come.”
Only later, when we were safely ensconced back at his apartment, sharing a hash-bowl, did I find out the reason.
“Gundred saw two RAF there, watching you,” he said. “She told us to get you out of there.”
Gundred already knew what my old German landlords (as well as all parties at that moment struggling for supremacy in Southeast Asia) slowly came to realize. Once you gave up the territory of your hearts and minds and your physical geography to whomever decided to have a temper tantrum because of their beliefs—political, religious or otherwise—it was hard as hell to get it back, if ever. And by the time their German Autumn arrived, everyone there realized it as well.