Germany’s predicament

Press, 29 April 1978, Page 14

Germany’s predicament

By

DAVID LEIGH

I in the “Guardian”

The disorderly rolls of barbed wire round the Bonn Ministry of Justice strike a jarring note. The makeshift gate and the armoured car that surveys the checkpoint shed seem a graceless intrusion on the sleek West German urban scene, with its shining p iestrian precincts, elegant shops and spotless transport systems. “It is all a bluff to make us feel secure.” one university student said. "Actually, it makes me feel threatened.” This is a typical reaction among liberals and young people. As West Germany tries to mop up political terrorism with new laws, bigger specialist police forces and widespread political screening, it is wading deeper into civil liberties problems. The Russell Tribunal’s denunciation in the middle of April of public sector employee loyalty tests was one symptom. The present stalled anti-terrorist legislation in Parliament is another. Another big terrorist trial opened in Berlin this month. Mr Fritz Teufel, a longnotorious student radical, and five others are charged with kidnapping Mr Peter Lorenz, a West German politician, and killing a judge. Mr Guenter von Drenkmann. The Berlin authorities point out proudly that they take ' a more sophisticated attitude than their colleagues in Stuttgart. who built a whole new high-security courtroom at Stammheim for the BaaderMeinhof trials, currently being used for the trial of Mr Klaus Croissant, the BaaderMeinhof defence lawyer, extradited from France. Berlin’s centra! court has merely been terrorist-proofed to the tune of SI.BM. About 100 urban guerrillas have so far been jailed in Germany: perhaps another 20 are still at large. “Anti-terrorism” is a political growth industry. In conservative Bavaria, Mr Hermann Haring, a senior official of the Interior Ministrv. enumerates a chilling list of further measures the Rightwing would like to see. Among them, that lawyers suspected of agreeing with the views of guerrillas should have all conversations with their clients monitored. At present, the montoring of f letters has been authorised, and the new bill legalises the placing of screens between the inspected lawyer and his client.

The Right also wants judges to discipline lawyers who try to delay trials. It is a common complaint among German officials that trials go on far too long, partly because of “sabotage” tactics by lawyers which the courts have little power to prevent, and partly because of the laborious nature of German prosecution. One Hamburg prosecutor pointed out wistfully that a terrorist trial for killing a policeman was dealt with in the Netherlands in two days: similar trials in Germany took a year, because the prosecution is obliged to delve into every aspect of a crime and cannot simply aim for a conviction on one, easily-provable event. The conservatives also want to extend preventive detention, a little-used German sentence which enables persistent offenders to be kept in prison for an extra year or two if they have not, apparently, reformed. The Right also wants identity checks in hotels; registration with the authorities every time someone rents a flat; computerised identity cards, compulsorily carried, and every citizen numbered: police powers to search whole districts and more policemen. “There are thousands of 'people you have to observe.” says Mr Haring. Left-wingers point out that plans to prohibit the wearing of masks at demonstrations, or to permit the authorities to study library borrowing-lists, aim at people’s political opinions, not at their criminal behaviour. Political screening is a very sore point. In Bavaria, for example, in addition to the 100-strong terrorist police squad, the state has. like all 11 members of the federation, its own political police, the Verfassungschutz. Its numbers in Bavaria alone have risen 30 per cent to 300 men in the last four years and will rise again sharply this year. One of the tasks of the Verfassungschutz is to collect information about political radicals: this is passed to public sector emplovers who refuse to hire people “hostile to the constitution” not onlv as civil servants in “the British sense, but as postmen, train drivers, or lifeguards at the municipal swimming pool. Communists, members of other legal poli-

tical groups, pacifists, and even, in one case, an electricity authority worker who lived with the sister of a convicted guerrilla are refused jobs. To publish a pamphlet accusing the police of brutality (“slander of the State”) would be considered hostility to the constitution. Against this background, the present anti-terrorist bill, allowing police to search apartment blocks, and making it easier to exclude suspected lawyers, looks a relatively mild compromise by the ruling Social-Democrat and Liberal coalition. Even so, some 40 SocialDemocratic M.P.s think it goes too far. However, only four actually voted against it.

The guerrillas wanted to provoke West Germany into revealing its underlying “fascism”—an ambition which throws much more uncomfortable historical shadows in Germany, where Nazism is not discussed in schools, than elsewhere in the West. “It’s a question of how far we jump over the outstretched stick,” says Mr Heinrich Albertz, the former Mayor of West Berlin and a priest, whose politics have become much more radical since the Berlin student riots of the 19605.

“My position is clear: I think it’s extremely dangerous. Success against the terrorists depends not on new laws, but on the selfconfidence of our democracy and the efficiency of the police.

“The young grew’ up in a society which was exclusively concerned with consumption. efficiency and industriousness, and was without values . . . they experienced democracy as a smooth-running mechanical system in a country that did not really have any democrats: it was imposed from outside.”

The danger in the present situation seems not to be that Germany has become a dictatorship: but that radicals fear they are being increasingly treated as grit in the machinery, rather than equal members of German society. As one young member of the Social-Democratic Party put it: “Let’s face it —if you’re a Left-wing engine driver, you’re not really likely to drive your train to Moscow. But you’ll be excluded.”