This week's foiling of an alleged bomb plot comes 30 years after Germany last faced a major terrorist threat - and there are disturbing parallels, writes Derek Scallyin Berlin.
On September 5th, 1977, the left-wing extremist Red Army Faction (RAF) embarked on a spectacular campaign of kidnappings and killings that pushed West Germany to a near state of emergency.
Three decades later to the day, German special forces carried out their largest operation since the RAF era to swoop on a holiday home in a sleepy western German village. Their targets: three alleged Muslim extremists who had stockpiled barrels of chemicals and technical equipment for what Germany's chief prosecutor called a "massive bomb attack".
News that two of the three men, like the RAF members 30 years ago, came from outwardly respectable, middle-class German homes has thrown up the same questions that hung over the RAF anniversary: what made these people react so violently to their middle-class upbringing? And how, given its own history of extreme action, should the modern German state respond?
On September 5th, 2007, Germany was confronted with its first "home-grown" Muslim extremists, two men with unmistakably German names: Fritz Gelowicz and Daniel Schneider.
Munich-born Gelowicz (28) is believed to have converted to Islam sometime after he turned 15, when his parents, a doctor and an engineer, separated, and he took the name Abdullah. "I didn't think he was really Muslim," said his father, Manfred. "I though it was something he would grow out of."
Schneider, who turned 22 last weekend, was born in the western state of Saarland and converted to Islam three years ago.
The third man arrested, Adem Yilmaz (29), was born in Turkey but raised in Germany. It is alleged that after training in a camp in Pakistan, the three men spent most of this year working on plans to detonate home-made bombs at facilities in Germany frequented by US soldiers and their families.
Considering their supposed target, it's ironic that the two German-born men excelled at American sports: Gelowicz was a quarterback in the local American football team while Schneider was a talented basketball player.
Analysts of Islamic extremism suggest the two are classic cases, emotionally isolated young men who satisfied a need for structure and acceptance by converting to Islam.
"A very marginal number of these converts to Islam follow pied pipers and fall into the hands of criminals," said Gerhard Isa Moldenhauer of the Central Institute of the Islam Archive of Germany, himself a convert. "They reach [ the converts] through the internet and try to give them a new identity through violent action." There has been no suggestion so far that the men's motives were related in any way to 1970s terrorism. Still, there are biographical parallels with RAF members. Like Gelowicz, RAF member Brigitte Mohnhaupt - released earlier this year - was traumatised as a child by the collapse of her parents' marriage. Like Schneider, RAF terrorist Christian Klar - still in prison - was reportedly overwhelmed by the book-filled intellectual atmosphere of his teacher parents' home.
Some German experts have suggested that a new identity as a Muslim, or as a Muslim extremist, holds the same "radical chic" attraction as supporting the RAF in the 1970s.
"My parents could live with a punk," one convert from a rural German community told Die Zeit newspaper. "But converting to Islam - you can't top that."
What begins as an act of defiance can turn into a new calling, as it did for Gelowicz and Schneider in recent years, and for members of the Red Army Faction in the 1970s. The RAF grew from Germany's "1968 generation" of students who demanded that their parents face up fully to their Nazi-era complicity.
RAF leaders Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof went further, launching an all-out attack on a West German establishment they said was built on the poisonous foundations of post-war denial. At one time in the mid 1970s, surveys showed that between 20 and 30 per cent of Germans under 30 sympathised with the Baader-Meinhof gang.
"People warned us against attending their trials, others said we belonged in the gas chambers for supporting them," said film-maker Andres Veiel, a teenage supporter who went on to direct an award-winning RAF documentary, Black Box BRD.
Much of the RAF's support dwindled after the "German Autumn" of 1977 - its campaign of kidnappings and killings of high-profile victims to force German authorities to release Baader and others from prison.
In comparison, says Veiel, Islamic terror cells will never enjoy any significant support among German youth. "It's something even the most anti-American twentysomething cannot identify with in the slightest," he says. "When the RAF injured and killed civilians it caused huge internal rows and splits within the left scene whereas extreme Islamic violence targets as many civilian casualties as possible."
THERE IS ALSO a crucial difference in the response of the German authorities then and now. The RAF's violent campaign was deliberately provocative, to force the West German government into defensive action. Bonn's forceful response proved highly effective, but even Helmut Schmidt, chancellor at the time, admitted last week that the unrelenting pressure to act in some cases had consequences he now regrets.
The fact that Germany has until now been spared a major terrorist attack has allowed a more sober if abstract debate on the threat of international terrorism without an imperative for urgent, draconian measures.
Left-wing newspapers and the Social Democrats (SPD) say last week's foiled attacks show that Germany is adequately equipped to deal with terrorism. But the plan - for bombs more powerful than those that rocked London or Madrid - has put wind in the sails of Christian Democrat interior minister Wolfgang Schäuble.
Backed by Germany's powerful conservative press, he is making a renewed push for Berlin's grand coalition to approve counter-terrorism laws, including measures his SPD coalition partners have already rejected.
One controversial proposal would permit clandestine online searches of remote computers and has sparked a round of the familiar debate about how much privacy should be sacrificed for the promise of greater security.
Curiously, many of the conservative newspapers which 30 years ago called the RAF a threat to the social order are, in hindsight, playing down that same danger in order to demand tough action now.
"Unlike back then, terrorism now very much poses a threat to the state," argued Die Welt, published by the Springer group and a favourite target of left-wing attacks in the 1960s and 1970s. "Unlike the RAF, terrorists are now able to get their hands on weapons that make mass murder possible [ and] they are part of a worldwide network with almost endless resources to hit the West wherever it wants."
Despite left-right divides, most German commentators agree that, like RAF members 30 years ago, today's home-grown Muslim extremists are part of a self-proclaimed avant garde who justify violent plans and actions with an overpowering sense of self-righteousness.
Their means may differ and their politics may be poles - and decades - apart but the purpose of their campaigns is the same: to topple the social, economic and political pillars of society.
"Like the RAF, Islamic extremists believe they represent something, but in the end they stand only for themselves," says Veiel. "Just like the RAF, they are outsiders motivated by a desire to play the master of life and death over others."