Attempting to come to terms with its past is new for Germany. Only for a decade or so have real discussions started not only on Nazism but on more recent events in the country’s troubled history. Such would be the ascent of the Baader-Meinhof gang or Rote armee Fraktion (RAF) that, in the late 1960s and the 1970s, terrorized the establishment and went on a spree of bank robberies, kidnappings, assassinations. The terrorists at first attracted a certain degree of sympathy from the German public who, like most everyone at the time, was swept up in the mishmash of the sometimes generous ideas that floated about. But a decade of relentless violence finally turned public opinion against the terrorists.