and latterly, anti-Semites too

In my review of The Baader-Meinhof Complex, I mentioned the difficult issue of the West German New Left’s anti-Semitism. A few people wrote back asking for more information. Meanwhile, one of the comments to the post from Terrence O’Keefe, said “the psychology operating behind the West German Left’s transition from the attractive but always vague “pro-peace” position to one of aggressive anti-Israelism is fairly simple.” I’m not sure its quite as simple as all that, and I wanted to say why.

This transition grew out of a legitimate anti-Zionism that began after the Six Day War in June 1967, which began three days after the killing by the West Berlin police of the student Benno Ohnesorg, the seminal event with which the Baader-Meinhof Complex begins. Until the Six Day War, the nascent West German student movement had generally seen itself as linkszionistisch, or “left-wing Zionist”. But in the summer of 1967, as the student movement radicalised, it also began to see Israel as a bridgehead of American imperialism in the middle east. Just as it had identified with the Vietcong (in the movie we see the famous Vietnam congress in West Berlin in February 1968 and hear the chants of “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!”), the West German student movement quickly began to identify with armed Palestinian groups. But, over the next couple of years, what had begun as anti-Zionism developed into what, I think, can only be described as anti-Semitism.

On November 9, 1969 –  the anniversary of Kristallnacht - a ticking home-made bomb was discovered the Jewish Community Centre in West Berlin. For years, no one knew for sure who had planted the bomb, which did not detonate because of a loose connection. In fact, as Wolfgang Kraushaar has proven, the perpetrator was Dieter Kunzelmann, a key figure in the West German New Left, making the bomb the first action in the “armed struggle” against the Federal Republic, capitalism and imperialism of which the Baader-Meinhof group would later become the face.

Over the next few decade there would be further expressions of left-wing anti-Semitism in West Germany. For example, after Black September kidnapped and killed the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Ulrike Meinhof celebrated the massacre as an anti-imperialist strike against what she called “Israel’s Nazi fascism”. The arc of anti-Semitic violence that grew out of the West German student movement culminated in 1976, when two young West Germans who had been active in various left-wing splinter groups in Frankfurt took part in the Entebbe hijacking and separated out the Jewish passengers from the non-Jewish passengers.

What was behind it? The origins of left-wing anti-Semitism is a difficult question, and one  I attempt to answer in my forthcoming book on the 1968 generation in Germany, which will be published next year. The idea that parts of the New Left might have anti-Semitic tendencies was such an astonishing one that for years many would simply refuse to consider the possibility (some, in fact, still do). It was not just that anti-Semitism had been associated with the right, though many on the left took it for granted that, as socialists, they could not be anti-Semitic (in fact, however, there had been a tinge of anti-Semitism in left-wing anti-capitalism in Germany going back to Marx’s own analysis of the particular role of Jews in the “circulation sphere”, in other words banking).

What made it even more astonishing was that the entire West German New Left had originated in the idea of “resistance” against the “Auschwitz generation”. In fact, though, that was part of the problem. The West German student movement had focused so much on the apparent continuities between Nazism and the Federal Republic, and was so convinced it had made a decisive break with the past, that it simply did not consider the possibility that continuities might also exist between the ideology of its parents’ generation and its own thinking.