In Heinrich Böll’s 1974 novel The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, adapted as a film a year later by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, a young woman’s life is destroyed by the tabloid press, which invades her privacy and torments her on account of her fleeting romantic association with an alleged anarchist bank robber. Quite justifiably, readers and viewers at the time interpreted the work as an allegory for the prevailing political climate in the Federal Republic.

Originating from the country’s student movement in the late 1960s, armed conspirational groups such as the Red Army Faction (RAF) and the Revolutionary Cells (RZ), had wreaked havoc by assassinating key political and business figures and bombing US military installations. Influenced by Latin American and Chinese guerrilla struggle theory, these groups believed that their actions would cause the state to shed its liberal facade, in turn enabling a social revolution.

They were quite right about the first part of their assumption, but fatally wrong about the second. In the course of trying to track down and neutralize these groups, West Germany was indeed transformed into an authoritarian police state, where the borders of the Rechtsstaat — the rule of law — were frequently transgressed. However, rather than provoking a social revolution, these measures were largely accepted by the broad populace, further isolating the entire radical left, even those who fundamentally disagreed with the tactics of the terrorists.