Before reading this Times article, I’d never heard of the protest and shooting in 1970s Germany that toppled a conservative government and ushered in a generation of populist leadership. The event has much in common with our own Kent State shootings, but more dramatic in its political fallout: a peaceful protest, a reactionary government, an armed soldier fires on the crowd, and a few die. The number of deaths is not so important as their evocative power, a symbol of government gone wrong. Having read a bit about it, I suspect the NYT exaggerates the effects—that the shooting was more rallying point for those who wanted to overturn conservative leadership than the cause of the party shift—but a “want of a nail” case can be made for it. The shooting is a big moment in German history, and has a strong influence on the country’s current self-identity.
Learning that the shooter was a communist agent provocateur, as just happened upon the release of East German documents of the period, must create a weird tremor of self-identity in the politically aware among Germans, as if we were to learn that Aaron Burr had been employed as agent of the crown when he killed Hamilton in a duel, calculatedly destroying an American asset, and not merely acting as an arrogant prick.
The temptation to take the shooting as part of some grand scheme is strong. The plan, if plan there was, worked; the German government moved abruptly left, including some reduction in hostility toward communist bloc countries. We can imagine the security officer, or his spymasters, turning the protest into a massacre in the hopes of causing just such a reaction. But I don’t really believe he was thinking so clearly in the heat of the moment, any more than the National Guardsmen at Kent State were calculating the political fallout when they fired on the crowd. He was in a scary, chaotic situation, and, rightly or wrongly, pulled the trigger. I doubt, too, that his handlers could predict with superhuman prescience the outcome of the shooting and calculate it being worth the sacrifice of a useful “asset” in hand, so as to give the order to turn the protest into a massacre.
But however much more likely the prosaic interpretation of events seems, there’s no way entirely to expunge the suspicion that perhaps it was a deliberate act. Just as there must be suspicion that, say, Pearl Harbor was more invitation to war than mistake, or that Reagan sympathizers deliberately delayed the release of American hostages in Iran. Planning such specific cause-and-effect sequences is devilishly difficult, and believing events are orchestrated in this fashion is the stuff of conspiracy theory. At most, we might blame various powers that be for creating a climate in which such chains of events are possible.
Still, that’s enough for reprehension. The Bush regime is not responsible for 9/11, not even for overlooking the evidence that predicted it, or something like it—such evidence as existed only comes into prominence from amid a sea of competing crises to avert in hindsight. But it is responsible for magnifying and perpetuating Arab hostility, and for magnifying the climate of fear in American politics, for its own benefit: hostility and fear that cannot but have horrific consequences, even if we can’t draw a straight line between cause and consequence.
