Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic An Alternative History of Postwar Germany by Paul Hockenos
Oxford, 400 pp., $35
Josef "Joschka" Fischer is an enigma. Few people evoke such strikingly different reactions. For some Germans, Fischer will always be the militant radical identified with the violent protests of the 1960s and '70s, clad in black leather and beating up a police officer. For others he is, first and foremost, the internationally respected and dapper former foreign minister, his countercultural past belied by three-piece suits and bifocals.
For Paul Hockenos, Fischer is Germany's prodigal son, the youth who went astray, but learned from the experience and returned a better and wiser man. By 2005, when one survey asked what living figure best "represents" Germany, Joschka Fischer came in second, behind only former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.
Fischer's remarkable personal transformation offers an instructive metaphor for Germany's own postwar metamorphosis. As Hockenos makes clear in this readable and engaging volume, Fischer's story is both a product of Germany's complicated and painful postwar history--starting with his family's expulsion from Hungary at the end of World War II because they were ethnic Germans, resulting in Fischer's birth in West Germany in 1948--and a contributor to that history. (Most dramatically, his service as a united Germany's first and, thus far only, Green foreign minister.)
A rags-to-riches story more compelling than any Horatio Alger ever wrote, Fischer's life is indeed a quintessentially American story. For Germans, Fischer's experience is an exceptional one, and his ability to transcend social standing, class, ethnicity, and education is a testament to his own drive and to how much West Germany itself changed in the postwar period.
Fischer's life proves to be an ideal prism through which to explore the trajectory of West Germany's postwar evolution and transformation into a united Germany as the ultimate symbol of the Cold War's end. Fischer's protests against the system were emblematic of those of a disenchanted postwar generation that had internalized the lessons of Germany's Nazi past and sought to ensure a democratic future for their country.
Hockenos succeeds here in writing the story not only of Fischer, but also of the diverse protest movements and grassroots campaigns, born of Fischer's generation, that shaped post-1945 Germany. He writes compellingly about these civic initiatives and political movements:
In different ways, these initially unwelcome forces pushed the postwar republic to deepen, widen, and entrench democracy; they insisted that modern Germany become an active, pluralist civil society the likes of which Germany had never known before.
One irony of Fischer's fascinating evolution is that he sets out wanting to undermine the postwar governing institutions in West Germany and ends up coming to terms with that system and, ultimately, reforming it from within.
Fischer's relationship to the use of force proves to be an enduring theme of his political life. His early commitment to nonviolent protest gave way to the belief that a strategic use of violence was necessary for the success of the protest movement. In the late 1960s and early '70s Fischer became a leading figure in "Revolutionary Struggle," a radical left group known to use violent tactics; and while Hockenos argues that Fischer didn't distance himself soon enough from the terrorism of the Baader-Meinhof gang, his experiences in the militant left protest movement led him to renounce violence.
In May 1976 Fischer addressed a crowd of 10,000 that had gathered in Frankfurt for a conference on political repression. This "Römerberg address" would become one of his most important and passionate. For the first time, he publicly criticized the terrorists and urged them "to put down bombs and pick up stones again." Thereafter, Fischer largely withdrew from political activism and, in Hockenos's words, embarked upon a process of "soul-searching" that "would last six long years."
Fischer would have seemed a natural recruit for the Greens when they emerged as a new political party in 1977-78, but he was uninterested. He viewed a party focused on ecology, nonviolence, grassroots democracy, and social justice as a passing trend. It would take the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in March 1979, the Soviet army's invasion of Afghanistan and NATO's decision to deploy new midrange U.S. missiles in Europe in December 1979, and finally the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, to lead Fischer to join the party in the summer of 1981.
From the start, he identified with the realpolitik faction of the Greens, agreeing that forming ruling coalitions with the center-left Social Democrats would be the best way to bring about concrete policy changes. In contrast, the fundamentalists, or "Fundis," saw the Greens as an "anti-party party" that needed to be committed wholly to "fundamental opposition."
Fischer's early success as a Green took place in Hesse. Then, in 1983, the Greens made it into the Bundestag. When parliament convened in late March, the new Green members, together with myriad supporters, paraded to the Bundestag carrying plants, colorful signs, and planet-earth beach balls. The German political establishment would never be the same.
As a newly minted parliamentarian, Fischer quickly distinguished himself as one of the party's best speakers. He gained a national profile and became a favorite of the media thanks to his quick wit and persistent heckling of conservative opponents. As a party, the Greens were an acrimonious lot, and their bid for transparency--including televising all of their internal meetings--meant that the divisions were on full public display. As Hockenos points out, it took the Greens a full decade to overcome the most debilitating of their contradictions.
The Greens' shaky debut on the national political stage received a boost from the peace movement, which peaked during the fall of 1983 as millions of West Germans protested the planned deployment of intermediate nuclear forces. The Bundestag voted in favor of the deployment, with 286 members of the governing coalition parties (Christian Democrats and Free Democrats) voting in favor and 226 Social Democrats and Greens voting against it. The peace movement marked the first time that the West German public opposed its leadership in order to speak out against an American policy that directly affected the security of Germany.
At this point the Greens' rotation policy in the Bundestag forced Fischer off the national political stage and allowed him to reenter politics in Hesse. The Hessian elections in 1985 resulted in the first SPD-Green coalition and produced one ministerial position for the smaller coalition partner. Fischer became environment minister, "the first Green minister on the planet," according to Hockenos. Heads turned when Fischer arrived to take his oath in bright white Nike high tops and jeans. Despite the best efforts of the Social Democrats to keep the new environment ministry weak, the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 turned Fischer into the man of the hour. The West German public wanted to hear from the first Green environment minister.
On the one hand, the Greens posed the first serious challenge to the Social Democrats from the left since the founding of West Germany. On the other, the SPD and its center-right counterpart, the Christian Democrats (CDU), expected the Greens to find their way back under the wing of the SPD and disappear within a couple of years. In fact, the Greens would prove themselves to be an enduring phenomenon.
While much of the success of the Greens resulted from their ability to divine the Zeitgeist, the party failed completely to grasp the implications of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the inevitability of unification. In Hockenos's telling, "the Greens opposed unification long after it was a fait accompli." Fisher, for his part, argued in print one week after the wall fell that Germany's division was the price that Germany had to pay for Auschwitz, and continued to be a precondition for a Europe-wide peace, even with the Cold War over. In the immediate run-up to Germany's official reunification in October 1990, Fischer would write: "I accept Germany's unification because I have to accept it. I can't shake my distrust of this 'we are one nation' thing."
While Fischer may have come to terms with Germany's unification late and poorly, he led the metamorphosis of Green foreign policy during the 1990s. He wrote The German Risk in 1994, outlining a foreign policy agenda for a united Germany. Strikingly, he suggested that united Germany, like the old Federal Republic, needed to preserve its proper place among the Western allies, including its key relationship to the United States, and not occupy some middle zone between East and West. He underscored the need for Germany to retain "continuity" in its foreign policy. Many interpreted Fischer's words as proof that he coveted the foreign ministry if the 1998 elections resulted in the ouster of the CDU/FDP government.
An ongoing debate in the Green party had been whether Germany should use military force to stop the Serb onslaught against the Muslim civilian population in Bosnia. Fischer's initial position had been that there should be no German military presence in places that the Wehrmacht had occupied during World War II (which would include the Balkans). But his position would change fundamentally in 1995 following the massacre of 7,000 Bosnians in Srebrenica. In a 13-page open letter to his party, Fischer reversed his position and called on the Greens to wake up to the reality that international policy in Bosnia had failed. Nonetheless, in late 1995, 60 percent of Green party delegates voted against any participation of German soldiers in a NATO-led stabilization force in Bosnia. While pacifism remained a bedrock principle for most Greens, change was underway and Fischer was driving it.
The election results in 1998 were exactly what the SPD and Greens had hoped for. The Social Democrats garnered 41 percent of the vote and the Greens, 6.7 percent, enough to form a governing coalition. That coalition was the first red-green government at the national level and marked the first time in postwar Germany that a change of government led to a complete break with all of the parties in the incumbent coalition. History was being made. Gerhard Schröder would become the Social Democratic chancellor and the Greens would claim three ministries: Jürgen Trittin became environment minister; Andrea Fischer, health minister, and--most eye-catching to all and alarming to some--Joschka Fischer became foreign minister and vice chancellor.
In an episode that would prove to be stranger than fiction, 12 days after the election, even before coalition negotiations had begun, Schröder and Fischer were asked to make a whirlwind trip to Washington to meet with Bill Clinton to discuss the Kosovo crisis. All agreed that, if necessary, Germany and its incoming red-green government would condone airstrikes against Yugoslavia (even without a United Nations mandate) but would not contribute any aircraft or military personnel until the new Bundestag could vote on it.
Schröder and Fischer left Washington relieved that Clinton had not pushed them to contribute directly to the military effort. But three days later Chancellor Helmut Kohl informed the two that Washington had changed its mind: President Clinton wanted Germany fully committed to the military operation. Schröder and Fischer consented and agreed to have Kohl reconvene the old Bundestag for a special session--a historically unprecedented, even legally dubious move--and 500 of 580 members approved Clinton's request, including the majority of the Greens.
As it turned out, no military action was needed at that point, as the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic backed down and agreed to a cease-fire and the deployment of monitors in Kosovo. But the incident, and the reaction of Schröder and Fischer, was telling and critically important in U.S.-German relations, and assured Germany's allies of continuity in foreign policy.
These events gave Fischer's words, when he assumed the mantle of foreign minister, particular resonance: "I'm not a Greens foreign minister," he said, "but the foreign minister of all Germans. There won't be a Green foreign policy."
Kosovo never left the agenda and, despite energetic efforts (including by Fischer himself), the cease-fire broke down and peace talks failed. In 1999 NATO aircraft began bombing Serbia. In the first sortie, German pilots flew four Tornado jets, and as Hockenos explains: "Germany was in a shooting war for the first time in 54 years--without a U.N. mandate, against a sovereign state that hadn't attacked it or a NATO ally, in a region that the Nazis had once wreaked terror upon, and under the leadership of a red-green government." Who would have imagined that this milestone would become one of the most significant components of Fischer's legacy?
When NATO began its bombing campaign, the conventional wisdom was that NATO would quickly prevail. No one imagined that the campaign would drag on for 78 days. There was no official within the alliance who was more exposed than Fischer: He faced the all-too-real prospect that his pacifist party base would desert him, and the Greens called an extraordinary party conference for mid-May to vote on German participation in the Kosovo mission. On May 13, 800 delegates gathered in Bielefeld and, as Fischer sat on the stage with the rest of the party's national leadership, demonstrators burst into the hall and one protester hurled a balloon filled with red paint at him, exploding on his head. (The right side of Fischer's face and torso were covered in red, but he refused medical help at the time and it would turn out that he had suffered a broken eardrum.)
Hockenos tells this tale beautifully, capturing the drama of Fischer delivering the most critical speech of his life since 1976 when he had pleaded with the West German left to renounce violence. Twenty-three years later, in one of the more arresting ironies of Fischer's life, he was trying to convince the left why they had to support violence:
I understand all too well your arguments and reservations. They're mine, too. I wage this debate with myself every day. But I nevertheless ask you to have the strength to accept responsibility, as difficult as that may be. What I ask as foreign minister is that you help steer this course. Please support me, strengthen me, don't weaken me.
The party reversed its former positions, with 444 voting in support of the leadership's resolution and 318 against. Fischer had been vindicated.
Joschka Fischer likely never imagined that the two axioms that had guided his political activism and convictions--"never again war," "never again Auschwitz"--would ever conflict. But in the case of Kosovo these two postwar imperatives could no longer coexist. For Fischer, the legacy of Auschwitz meant that the international community had to use the instruments of war to stop another genocide in Europe, and Germany's own history compelled it to engage militarily.
The red-green government's bid for reelection in 2002 was inextricably connected with the run-up to the Iraq war. The attacks of 9/11 had led Schröder to declare that "now is the time for solidarity with the United States. Germany has to stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States and show unlimited solidarity." That solidarity held in the case of the war in Afghanistan, but shattered as the Bush administration moved steadily forward with its plans to attack Iraq. Schröder, whose SPD was doing dismally in state elections (with the Greens faring no better), chose to make Germany's opposition to the war a major campaign issue. In Hanover he argued that "playing around with war and military intervention--this I warn against. With me, that's not going to happen." He would use this formulation across Germany for the duration of the campaign, and the SPD-Green coalition was returned to power. But it was a surge in Green votes that allowed the coalition to survive. Fischer had become the most popular politician in Germany.
Of course, no champagne corks were popping at the White House over this victory, and President Bush would not even place the perfunctory call to congratulate the reelected chancellor on his victory. Bush could never forgive Schröder for what he saw as a betrayal, even though the two overlapped in office until the fall of 2005.
A particularly striking public episode, illustrating the depth of the U.S.-German split over Iraq, involved Fischer. In February 2003, in the immediate run-up to the war, at the annual security conference in Munich, Fischer responded to Donald Rumsfeld's case for invasion by following his pointed rebuttal in German with English: "Sorry, I am not convinced," he said, slapping the podium for emphasis and continuing, his voice rising: "You have to make your case. Sorry, you haven't convinced me!"
As he explained in a press interview that same month, "I don't have any patience for anti-Americanism, but despite all differences in size and weight, alliances can't be reduced to follow-the-leader. Allies aren't satellites."
Joschka Fischer is a remarkable personality. The prejudice he felt growing up in a refugee family in class-conscious West Germany left him with a deep desire to be "number one," a drive that propelled him to repeatedly prove himself. He never finished high school, but sat in on classes at Stuttgart's technical university and later at Frankfurt's Goethe University. Fischer can quote Das Kapital and has the proletarian credentials to back up the ideology; but he always seems self-conscious about his lack of formal education. It is somehow fitting that, when he resigned his seat in the Bundestag in 2006, he accepted an adjunct lectureship at Princeton. His complicated relationship with the United States, and to institutions of higher learning, had come full circle.
Paul Hockenos captures the essence of Fischer's story in one sentence: Fischer made his way "not only from the outer fringes of the republic into its center, but also from the very bottom of the social ladder to the very top--a feat unthinkable in the highly stratified Germany of old." Fischer, he writes, was "the nation's prodigal son." Certainly his remarkable ability to reinvent himself--from high school dropout to '60s radical, from leading figure in the anti-party party to Germany's foreign minister--leaves you wondering what the next act will be.
Karen Donfried, executive vice president of the German Marshall Fund, handled the Europe portfolio on the State Department's Policy Planning Staff during 2003-05.