The Passion of Joschka Fischer:From the radicalism of the '60s to the interventionism of the '90s.

The New Republic Online ^ | 08/27/01 | Paul Berman

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From the radicalism of the '60s to the interventionism of the '90s.

The Passion of Joschka Fischer

by Paul Berman

Issue Date: 08.27.01

Post Date: 08.22.01

I.

Last January, Stern magazine in Germany published a set of five grainy photographs of Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister and vice chancellor, as a young bully in a street battle in Frankfurt. It was April 1973. The photos showed: a figure in a black motorcycle helmet, labeled as Fischer, facing off against another figure in a white policeman's helmet, with a dented Volkswagen squatting in the background; the black-helmeted Fischer drawing near, and a skinny girl or maybe a long-haired boy (this was an androgynous era) running to join him; Fischer and other people on the attack, the white-helmeted cop going into a crouch; Fischer's black-gloved fist raised as if to punch the crouching cop on the back, Fischer's comrades crowding around; the cop huddled on the ground, Fischer and his comrades appearing to kick him, with two additional people watching. And no more dented Volkswagen. The photographer has evidently been circling around the skirmish, snapping his camera in what must have been a frenzy of adrenaline, each picture taken from a different angle.

Those were brutal photographs. One glance at them and you were back in the days of left-wing street fighting from the late 1960s and 1970s, when young militants in West Germany were always pouring into the streets, and Volkswagens were getting dented right and left. And the photographs, having conjured the past, provoked an outcry. The Joschka Fischer of 2001 was a member of the party called, in expressively anti-bureaucratic fashion, "the Greens"--a man of the left on its hipper, friskier side. He happened to be the very first Green to hold a ministry in Germany's federal government, let alone the foreign ministry. A powerful man, therefore a man with enemies. The photographs gazed blearily at the world from the semi-glossy pages of Stern, and flames of Christian Democratic wrath erupted at once from those many partisan enemies. Germany's foreign minister had disgraced himself in those photographs; had embarrassed his nation; had lost the ability to represent Germany to the world; ought to be investigated, to be indicted, to resign.

The street battles of 1973 took place long ago, and it could have been supposed that Fischer's enemies, having given vent to a thousand pent-up furies and Christian Democratic resentments, would eventually calm down, and the scandal of those ancient photographs would fade. The editors of Stern seem to have anticipated that sort of development. The magazine advertised its photographs on the cover with a quotation from Fischer ("Ja, ich war militant"), but the big story in that week's issue was Europe's meat crisis, illustrated by a giant sausage skewered on the tines of an oversized barbecue fork. Mad cow disease, now that was a lasting story.

The weeks went by, though, and the Fischer affair, instead of fading, grew in intensity and scale. Like the broken tape on the door at the Watergate, or the girlish confessions on Linda Tripp's treacherous recording, the photographs in Stern seemed to pull slowly at a curtain that, as it opened, revealed ever more distant peaks of unsuspected scandals (or non-scandals, depending on your interpretation). The controversy spread to France. In London, The Observer, playing the part of the yellow press, gave the polemic a slightly demented sexual twist. The Italians weighed in. The Fischer affair achieved at last a large enough dimension and a sufficiently accusatory tone to be described rather grandly but not inaccurately as "the trial of the generation of 1968" by the editors of the Paris daily Liberation (who know something about the generation of 1968)--an unforeseeably rich and vivid scandal, fecund with implications for Europe and modern life and thirty or forty years of history.

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The comprehensive essay on the European New Left. Good portrayal of what ticks them. It will definitely improve your understanding of the European New Left.

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Mark for later read

[coloradan]

The photos showed: a figure in a black motorcycle helmet, labeled as Fischer, facing off against another figure in a white policeman's helmet, with a dented Volkswagen squatting in the background;

Fischer's black-gloved fist raised as if to punch the crouching cop on the back, Fischer's comrades crowding around

[Valin]

Bump