Ideology and Terror in Germany
An Age of Murder: Ideology and Terror in Germany Jeffrey Herf It is best to begin with the obvious. This is a series of lectures about murder, indeed about an age of murder. Murders to be sure inspired by politi- cal ideas, but murders nevertheless. In all, the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction, hereafter the RAF) murdered thirty-four people and would have killed more had police and intelligence agencies not arrested them or prevented them from carrying out additional “actions.” Yesterday, the papers reported that thirty-two people were killed in suicide-bomb attacks in Iraq, and thirty-four the day before, and neither of those war crimes were front-page news in the New York Times or the Washington Post. So there is an element of injustice in the amount of time and attention devoted to the thirty-four murders committed by the RAF over a period of twenty- two years and that devoted to the far more numerous victims of radical Islamist terror. Yet the fact that the murders of large numbers of people today has become horribly routine is no reason to dismiss the significance of the murders of a much smaller number for German history. Along with the murders came attempted murders, bank robberies, and explosions at a variety of West German and American institutions. The number of dead could have been much higher. If the RAF had not used pistols, machine guns, bazookas, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), remote-controlled . This article was originally delivered as the opening lecture of the lecture series “The ‘German Autumn’ of 977: Terror, State, and Society in West Germany,” held at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, on Thursday, September 7, 007.
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