Of the Armed Struggle in Western Europe. Italian and German 1970s Left-Wing Terrorism in a Transnational Perspective
Abstract
The study is concerned with the issue of the left-wing terrorism in Italy and Federal Republic of Germany in the 1970s. The chosen topic is approached using the methods of transnational studies, which have been thus far applied only exceptionally in the relation to this phenomenon, despite the numerous parallels in different countries.
The focus of the research lies in the analysis of the German-Italian terrorist network as a whole, the contacts between the organizations and mutual influence. The cooperating terrorist organizations are also subjected to both direct and indirect comparison.
The protest movement, which spread at the end of the 1960s and from which the future terrorist groups emerged as its most radical branches, was an important transnational phenomenon itself. The first chapter concerns with the analysis of this movement, emphasizing the reasons of its inception and its stances on political violence.
The student and worker aspects of the movement are introduced, as well as older roots in the anti-fascist resistance or in the work of the Marxist authors. A special inspiration for the radicalizing Left is found in the events in the Third World.
The study further examines the individual terrorist groups, chosen according to their importance and relevance of their contacts with foreign countries, emphasizing especially the two well-known organizations, that is, the Red Army Faction and the Red Brigades, which were the most active and whose actions had biggest impact. The second chapter focuses on the causes of their radicalization, ties to the rest of the extra-parliamentary movement, and also their organizational structure and ways of functioning.
The most important terrorist attacks and their exponents are also introduced. The contacts between the Italian and German terrorist groups were arranged by the mediators; the two most significant examples are explored in detail, that is, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli and the Swiss anarchist circle around Petra Krause.
Feltrinelli played a special role at the European radical left-wing scene - he supported both financially and materially the emerging terrorist groups and eased their difficult beginnings, mediated know-how that he gained in the Third World, interconnected the radicals from different countries, published their written production, and last but not least founded his own terrorist organization. Petra Krause used the distribution network of the stolen weapons, built by the young anarchists from Zurich, and supplied a number of left wing extremist groups in Western Europe with their help.
The study further explores the contacts between Italian and German groups, which were established without any intermediaries, only out of the initiative of the terrorist organizations themselves. The most successful among them was the Workers' Power, cooperating with many other European entities, and especially important German organizations like the RAF or the Revolutionary Cells.
These followed their internationalist ideology and gained allies in the Palestinian national liberation movement and illegal structures tied to it (such as the terrorist organization of the Venezuelan revolutionary Carlos), with which they exercised their most important attacks. The Italian left wing extremist milieu was to a great extent defined by its anti-capitalist stances.
In the beginning, the core of the protest and of the political violence lay in the big North Italian factories and the extra-parliamentary movement itself was much more numerous and long-lasting than in Germany. Tens of subversive groups emerged in Italy and the sympathizers' movement, from which the new terrorist were recruited, counted tens of thousands of people.
Since the mid-1970s, most of the Italian groups were connected by a half-organized platform called the Worker's Autonomy, which consulted the operations even with the Red Brigades or the Front Line. In the second half of the 1970s, the German and Italian terrorism reached its peak in the kidnappings and murders of Hanns Martin Schleyer and Aldo Moro.
Both these operations are analysed from the view of their transnational importance; while this dimensions is rather obvious with the RAF due to the parallel plane abduction by the Palestinian comrades, in the Moro case the speculations of the international involvement come often from the conspiracy theories realm. A space is also dedicated to the legal supportive organizations (especially the International Defendant Committee) and their role in the terrorist network.
The final chapter compares chosen aspects of the examined terrorist organizations, such as the methods, used during the terrorist attacks and during the propaganda campaigns, or the optics, through which they categorized their allies and enemies, and through which they perceived the martyrdom of their fallen or imprisoned comrades. The last subject of comparison is the names of the organizations and their individual cells and their used graphic symbolism.
The examples from other European and non-European countries are used in the comparison, helping with the typology of the Italian and German terrorist groups.