“Years of Lead”? Political Violence in Perspective

Abstract

On 7 May 2012 the chief executive of a leading Italian firm specializing in the manufacture of thermoelectric power plants was kneecapped by two men as he left his home in Genoa to go to work. This attack immediately prompted the mainstream media to resurrect memories of left-wing — or ‘red’ — terrorism in Italy (Hajek, 2012c).1 Such a dramatic re-evocation of traumatic memories of political violence is symptomatic of Italy’s failure — or reluctance — to come to terms with its past, and hence of a wound that refuses to heal. At the same time, however, those who were involved in the various social movements of the late 1960s and 1970s tend to promote an overly celebrative narrative which equally hinders a more objective and inclusive elaboration of this past. In the first two chapters of this book I will outline the contrasting yet co-existing public memories of the 1970s in Italy as, on the one hand, the violent anni di piombo (‘years of lead’), and, on the other, anni formidabili (‘wonderful years’).2 The first chapter challenges dominant narratives — characteristic of the Italian and German context in particular — of the 1970s as a decade marked by political violence and terrorism. In Germany these master narratives mostly revolve around the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion, RAF), the left-wing terrorist group which regained notoriety in 2008, when Stefan Aust’s best-selling history of the RAF — The Baader–Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon (1986) — was adapted for the cinema (The Baader Meinhof Complex).3