and a commitment to reform more than romanticising terrorism. Celebrating the new liberalism Haffner did not agree with the stringency of some of the security measures endorsed by the Brandt government. He objected to the 1972 Radikalenerlass (Anti-Radical Decree) that instituted a Berufsverbot barring certain public-sector occupations to persons with "extreme" political views. Marxists, he argued, must be able to be teachers and university professors "not because they are liberals, but because we are liberals" (Stern, 12 March 1972). However, Haffner no longer referred to police "pogroms" or to regime neo-fascism. In the 1960s the police may have beaten demonstrators on the streets, but no one, he countered, ever "heard of them having tortured them". West Germany had changed. It may not have done enough to come to terms with the history of the Reich, but it had, in Haffner's view, "distanced itself from it with a light-footedness that no one had expected". The old authoritarianism, the sense of being a "subject" of the state, was "passé". The atmosphere had become "more liberal, more tolerant". Out of a nationalist, militaristic Volk there had emerged a comparatively modest, cosmopolitan ("weltbürgerlich") public. Yet for some of Haffner's readers, there was to be a further, and "absurd", volte face. "Hands off" Franco's Spain In October 1975, the editorial board of Stern refused a submission from Haffner on the grounds that it violated the magazine's commitment to a "democratic constitutional order and to progressive-liberal principles". In what was to prove its last use of capital punishment, on 27 September 1975 (just two months before Franco's death) Spain executed two members of the armed Basque separatist group ETA and three members of the Revolutionary Antifascist Patriotic Front (FRAP) for the murder of policemen and civil guards. Not only did Haffner refuse to join the general international condemnation, he appeared positively to defend the Spanish dictatorship. In a piece provocatively titled "Hands off Spain", he argued that Spain had not done badly in its thirty-six years under Franco. There may not have been political freedom, but there had been economic modernisation and progress. To many it appeared that Haffner had overplayed his reputation as a provocateur, an enfant terrible. His readership was reportedly falling: he had already dropped from the Allensbach Institute's list of leading West-German journalists. Haffner allowed that he may have been moving right while Stern was moving left. In his last piece in