Bruce Allen Scharlau PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText

148
possibilities
of
legal
extra-parliamentary opposition in West
Germany .159
Sternebeck felt the death of Meinhof was too much, and sought
contact with the underground, which did not pose any problems because it
seemed to be her only possibility to help the prisoners, and she did not
have many contacts holding her to the legal world. 16o
Most llnportantly, the person must see this path as the most viable
option available to him or her at the time. They must (a) see this as a
positive choice to become actively committed to the identity of a group
member, (b) where they will gain personal (and possibly political)
benefits from group membership! and (c) see this as the most viable
option available even though this means taking on the state. 161 The
person will also be aware, even if only in an abstract manner, that they
will be expected to commit murder if they come into particular
situations where weapons will be used 162 (see chapter five).
For example, as Sternebeck mentions above, the group offered her
more options thatn society, to which she only had severed most links.
The shift of contacts from society at large to the counter-culture and
the group also underscores the perception of the group as the person f s
most viable option at the time when other paths have been narrowed of
closed.
Later, as mentioned, the person will be able to incorporate his or
her earlier identities and experiences into a perspective placing this
new identity as the culminating point of their life. This provides
continui ty and explains their behaviour to them and provides a belief
system that makes their behaviour acceptable to them.
The conditions and ideas that prevailed in the fifties and sixties
were quite different from the rules and norms of the eighties which
determined the available alternatives with which individuals and groups
could assert their idependence from parents .16 3 The concerns of the
students of the sixties about peace and war served to widen political
consciousness in general and to increase awareness about the environment
as one effect. It also continued in the belief that peace and its
159 Krebs, 202-8, 210-2.
160 Sternebeck, Der Spiegel 33/1990, 62.
161 Knutson (1981), 143; Wilkinson (1986), 94.
162 Peter-Juergen Boock, Peter Schneider, Ratte-tot ... Ein
Briefwechsel (Darmstadt: Sammlung Luchterhand, 1985), 111-2.
163 Sibylle Huebner-Funk, ffGrowing up with Nazism and NATO: A
Comparative Generational Approach to the Formation of Political
Consciousness in the Federal Republic of Gennanyff International
Sociology 1 (4) 1986, 381-396, 392.