One source of local sympathy was a growing nostalgia in literary and artistic circles for Germany’s lost past. Germany, it was felt, had been doubly ‘disinherited’: by the Nazis, who had deprived Germans of a respectable, ‘usable’ past; and by the Federal Republic, whose American overseers had imposed upon Germany a false image of itself. In the words of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, the film director, the nation had been ‘spiritually disinherited and dispossessed . . . we live in a country without homeland, without Heimat.’ The distinctly nationalist tinge to German extreme-Left terrorism—its
...more
