Early September 1977, just days after left-wing terrorists of the infamous Red Army Faction (RAF) pushed the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) into its worst internal crisis by kidnapping its most important businessman, Hanns Martin Schleyer, a diverse group of left-liberal intellectuals, among them the writer and Noble laureate Heinrich Böll, spoke out in defence of the beleaguered republic. After years of pessimism about the viability of West Germany's democracy and heavy criticism of its postwar political institutions, these prominent writers and thinkers were suddenly openly calling upon their fellow citizens to side with the existing political order.

With Terror and Democracy in West Germany, the American historian Karrin Hanshew of Michigan State University has published an outstanding book in which she explains how this new, optimistic perspective on the FRG, which reflected a profound change in West German political culture, came about. In her eyes, the 1977 terrorism crisis – the “German Autumn” – was a “transformative event” that stabilized and normalized German democracy. The culmination of the state's confrontation with left-wing terrorism in 1977 brought to a conclusion a prolonged debate about democracy and its ability to survive a state of emergency that reached as far back as the late nineteenth century. In this sense, she argues, this fateful year is more of a watershed in German political history than 1945 or 1968.

To prepare the ground for her argument, Hanshew starts this book with a detailed prologue, in which she discusses some early entries in the debate. She thereby introduces a long-term perspective to RAF-centred research that is both refreshing and clarifying. More than many others, Germans in the nineteenth century thought that sheer geopolitics dictated that their country needed a powerful and alert executive, as democracy could never be an effective guarantor of its security. The Weimar Republic, with its feeble governments unable to overcome either the grave social and economic crises they were faced with or the fatal assault by the political extremes, added to this criticism. Several years after its demise, around 1940, two German exiles, jurist and political scientist Karl Loewenstein and sociologist Karl Mannheim, formulated separate visions of a “militant” (Wehrhafte) democracy that would be able to deal with totalitarian challenges. While Loewenstein suggested giving the state extraordinary powers to repress fundamental opposition to democracy, Mannheim proposed a programme aimed at preventing an attack on democracy by disseminating democratic values among the people through education.

After this prologue, Hanshew presents six well-written chapters in which she depicts postwar German politics until the 1980s as an uneasy ballet involving three rather than two dancers: not only the conservatives (i.e. the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian counterpart the CSU), and Social Democrats (i.e. the SPD), competed over the question of how to organize, and moreover defend, democracy in Germany, but, especially from the mid-1960s, an outspoken and extremely heterogeneous extra-parliamentary left, made up of all varieties of communists, socialists, and anarchists, too tried to make its mark. In most of these chapters, Hanshew places the Social Democrats at the centre of the dance floor: their moves were the most daring and drew most criticism from the other dancers and from bystanders within Germany and abroad. But, ultimately, when the music stopped, they took home the prize. Democracy was saved because, in Hanshew's eyes, the Social Democrats in government never lost sight of their ultimate goal: democratization of the German population.

In the founding years of the FRG, Social Democrats and CDU/CSU representatives introduced the arguments of Loewenstein and Mannheim into the constitutional debate. The SPD claimed the legacy of German resistance, reasoning that, in the end, the best defence of democracy is provided by people willing to resist anti-democratic forces. Although they failed to win the argument in the late 1940s, Social Democrats succeeded in incorporating the right and the obligation to resist attacks on democracy and human values into Germany's Basic Law in 1968. In the meantime, however, the party had given up its initial opposition to the FRG and joined a Grand Coalition with the CDU. The resistance creed was subsequently adopted by the extra-parliamentary left, which took the Mannheim ideal of raising “disobedient Germans”, as Hanshew titles her second chapter, to unexpected heights.

Influenced by the Frankfurt School's analysis of the authoritarian personality and the authoritarian, capitalist state, and informed of the possibilities of armed resistance by anti-imperialist thinking, activists in the extra-parliamentary movement were convinced that it was their duty to criticize and attack the FRG, with its “ongoing fascist potential”. Hanshew acknowledges the diversity among the extra-parliamentarians by referring to them as a “negative alliance”: they were “outsiders” split on many issues but joined by “a shared set of understandings that saw the state as the initiator of an ongoing dynamic of state and civil violence”. Its role as “the agency of oppression upholding the capitalist system” fostered a dichotomous perception of politics as a fight between perpetrators and victims, which laid the basis for a justification of “counter-violence” that was automatically framed as “purely defensive in character” (p. 82). Ultimately, the RAF and similar groups concluded that violent resistance to the state was the only viable political strategy.

The confrontation between the SPD-led governments of the 1970s and this terrorism of the left has been studied many times before, but Hanshew's focus on the SPD and her clever use of party files and other German archives permits a novel perspective. More than others, she points to the context of the state planning and reform policies of the 1960s and 1970s and the earlier Mannheim-style ideas of fighting extremism. Both led the SPD to develop a comprehensive policy on “internal security” consisting both of police modernization and enhanced political education of the general public through the most German of all institutions, the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Federal Office for Political Education).

Although she sometimes seems a bit too understanding of the measures taken by the Brandt and Schmidt governments, Hanshew is in fact willing to criticize their bleak aspects. She notes, for instance, that when the SPD came under more and more pressure from the CDU opposition, which accused it of weakness in the face of terrorism, it allowed the public education programme to gradually slip into the array of government propaganda and it cemented rather than broke the “negative alliance” on the left. And Hanshew frowns upon the 1972 Decree on Radicals, banning extremists from government careers (hence its unofficial name Berufsverbote), and the anti-terrorism legislation of 1974 and 1976, which arguably widened the definition of support for a terrorist organization to questionable degrees.

Two tracks ultimately led Germany away from violent politics. On the one hand, many on the extra-parliamentary left slowly developed doubts about the viability of revolutionary violence, and, more importantly, about the necessity to maintain the wall of solidarity that was supposedly shielding the left from infringements by the state. Hanshew suggests that successful experiences with non-violent demonstrations in the broad “no-nukes” movement of the mid-1970s and the emergence of feminist voices critical of the masculinity of violent politics laid the first foundations for a more principled rejection of armed resistance. In her analysis of the left-wing debate on terrorism, Hanshew betrays a slight deprecation of left-wing counter-culture, especially in her handling of the infamous Buback obituary, and there are sometimes minor mistakes in her summary of statements made by radical leftists. Despite what Hanshew writes (p. 191), Joschka Fischer called upon left-wing terrorists to put aside only their guns; “pick up the stones again”, he urged them, assuming this was already a positive step away from the abyss of terror. Still, in sum, Hanshew's portrayal of these discussions on the left is almost as commanding as her analysis of the SPD.

On the other hand, it was the government's handling of the Schleyer abduction and the ensuing hijacking of a German passenger plane in September and October 1977, and the SPD's new and more liberal approach to “internal security” after this crisis, that paved the way to an end to left-wing violence and a reintegration of the left into parliamentary politics. Again, Hanshew states that, overall, the SPD remained loyal to its guiding principle of democratization, which she illustrates by mentioning the civilian uniforms – jeans and leather jackets – the GSG-9 special forces wore upon returning from the successful liberation of the abducted plane in Mogadishu, Somalia. Despite being experts in state violence, Social Democrat-led governments assured the GSG-9 “rocker-cops” upheld an image of being the most “nonmilitaristic of military”, as Hanshew writes (p. 233).

To conclude, as Hanshew does, that 1977 ultimately meant “The End of the Postwar” seems a bit stark, although it is true that fascism's hold on German political imaginations has lessened much since the late 1970s, which means that Germans are better capable of distinguishing real from imagined conditions in the FRG – and not, for instance, bluntly equalling the flaws of capitalism with fascism. All in all, Hanshew delivers a handsome argument, which is original, well-researched, carefully embedded in relevant historiography, and convincing to a large degree. It is daring in its comprehensive approach and long-term perspective, and it is a must read for students of German terrorism and counterterrorism in the 1970s, of the dynamics of terrorism in democratic societies in past and present, and of postwar German history in general.