Abstract

This essay analyzes the way East and West Germany fought left-wing terrorism in the Sixties and Seventies. In the first part, the author describes the most important events brought about by the clash between these states and the terrorists, while in the second he offers a comparative interpretation of this phenomenon. The conclusion is that both countries overestimated the threat posed by terrorism, particularly East Germany, given its ideological proximity to the terrorists. According to the author, the German Democratic Republic suffered from a sort of "security-related hypocondria": it supported terrorists in order to destabilize West Germany, while fighting them with exactly the same methods used by the German Federal Republic.