Terrorism as Third Front: The Radicalization of the New Left in Italy and West Germany

Which factors were responsible for the radicalization of the 1968 protest movement? Why did Germans and Italians develop such a fascination with the notion of guerilla warfare? And why were the terrorist organizations that developed there so long-lived? The reasons are partly to be found in unresolved problems of postfascist societies. New Left activists criticized the lack of domestic democracy and idealized the “anti-imperialist” fighters in the global south. But as this chapter shows, radicalization also developed through transnational interaction in the European public spheres, specifically through a mixture of solidarity and rivalry between the Red Army Faction and the Red Brigades. The history of German and Italian left-wing terrorisms was, therefore, closely connected by multiple symbolic ties from the first shootings to the final showdown of the kidnapping and murder of Hanns-Martin Schleyer during the German Autumn of 1977 and of Aldo Moro just a few months later.