In Europe

69 banks, kidnapped a few dozen politicians, businessmen and journalists, and murdered 28 people.
    The vast majority of the German student movement and the radical left had long since turned their back on these violent tactics. In Berlin alone, in 1980, an estimated 100,000 people were living within a subculture of alternative cafés, communes, action groups, political hippiedoms, squats,
Spontis
and
Wohngemeinschaften
, but almost none of them would have anything to do with the RAF.
    In Italy, however, things were different. There the left actually granted a certain degree of support to extremists, and even to the RAF's Italian counterpart, the Red Brigades, which began its activities in 1969. In the late 1960s, the old civil conflict between Fascists and anti-Fascists had been reignited with an escalation of attacks by more or less covert neo-Fascist terror groups and the Red Brigades. These Italian ‘days of lead’were far more violent than those in Germany, and ultimately claimed more than 400 victims.
    The first bomb exploded on 12 December, 1969 in a bank on Piazza Fontana in Milan: sixteen people were killed, eighty-four were injured. The anarchist Giusseppe Pinelli was arrested and, during interrogations on 15 December, ‘accidentally’ fell to his death from a high window. The killers were never located, but most evidence pointed to neo-Fascists and right-wing elements within the Italian intelligence service. The funerals of the victims of the bombing turned into a demonstration in which 300,000 people took part. Attack after attack, demonstration after demonstration followed.
    The Italian people were frightened, and rightly so. The Red Brigades, which its members claimed was a continuation of the resistance movement from 1944–5, went on terrorising the country for years. Meanwhile, speculating on the country's ongoing disintegration, neo-Fascist groups set to work on a right-wing coup by the Italian Army. It had worked in Greece, so why not in Italy? By the late 1970s, each year saw an average of more than 2,000 terrorist attacks. Even today it is not certain who was responsible for a number of them – including, for example, the infamous bombing which killed eighty-five people at Bologna's central railway station on 2 August, 1980. There are indications that foreign intelligence services were involved in other as yet unexplained attacks, and that during this same period a covert campaign was underway to halt the brand of Euro-communism so popular in Italy. There is, however, still no clear evidence for this. On 16 March, 1978, the prime minister, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped by the Red Brigades. His fellow party members and friends refused to enter into negotiations. Twenty-five days later, Moro's body was found in a Roman shopping street, crammed in the boot of a Renault 4.
    Is it merely a coincidence that the 1960s culminated in so much violence in Germany and Italy – the former Axis powers – while radical-left terrorist movements gained little or no foothold in, for example, France, Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands? Probably not. All over Europe, the 1960s constituted the delayed repercussion of the war experiences of generations past. Public officials and policemen were systematically referred toas ‘fascists’; the Provos of Amsterdam even shouted that epithet at their mayor, Gijs van Hall, who had been one of the country's most courageous resistance fighters during the war. Countless texts referred to the legacy of the Second World War, to ‘collaboration’ and ‘resistance’.
    But in Spain (ETA), in Italy, and in Germany above all, these sentiments were taken to much greater extremes, leading some to demonise the state as a whole. The sociologist Norbert Elias described the young people's rebellion as a ‘purification ritual for the sins of the fathers’. The great empires had crumbled, national ties had to be redefined and confirmed, and young people viewed the ideals and actions of older generations with a new, more critical eye. In Germany in particular, the younger generation had many questions to ask of the men and women who had been in power at that time, who had participated actively in public life throughout the war. Yet no answers were forthcoming.
    In 1969, the Bavarian Christian Democrat Franz Josef Strauss voiced openly what many older Germans had been thinking for a long time: ‘A people who have delivered such economic achievements have the right not to hear about