The Minister and the Terrorist

Andrei S. Markovits

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2001

Summary:  Germans always knew that their foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, had been a leftist activist in the 1960s and 1970s. More controversial were recent disclosures that he had once assaulted a police officer and may have had links to terrorists. Fischer's evolution is the tale of a generation that changed Germany -- and then itself.

Andrei S. Markovits is Professor of Politics in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His most recent book, with Steven L. Hellerman, is Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism.

Meanwhile, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and its liberal coalition partner, the Free Democrats, presided over political reforms in the 1970s that contributed to a greater democratization of German society -- even though social democracy was more the beneficiary of these massive transformations than their cause. Most notably, the SPD's policy of Ostpolitik initiated an opening toward Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, which helped break down the Cold War paradigm that had solidly gripped West German life in the 1950s and 1960s.

Fischer's views of the West in general and of the United States in particular also evolved during this period. He came to see them not as the obstacle to universal human liberation but rather as a means to it. For Fischer and those like him, influenced by their spiritual and philosophical mentor Habermas, the West represented liberalism, humanism, and democracy. Given Germany's troubled history, they felt that the country's creeping Westernization was the best thing that had happened to it during the twentieth century. Hence German politics had no more important task than making sure this trend continued. Although Fischer had opposed the war in Vietnam, he did not, unlike many others, take from the issue a deep hatred of all things American. Instead, he saw the United States as a crucial player on the world scene that could do much harm but also much good. If American engagement in Vietnam represented the former, American involvement in Germany represented the latter -- and it deserved to be recognized as such.

As is so often the case in European politics whenever America enters the equation, the Jews and Israel were not far behind. Here too the views of Fischer's "Westerner" camp were distinctive. Even though the 1960s radicals were among the first in West Germany to actively address the country's Nazi past, many of them were entirely uninterested in the Holocaust. They did not deny that it had happened but saw it as a secondary manifestation of "fascism." Tellingly, they often preferred that term over the more precise "National Socialism," which would have forced them to acknowledge the unique and defining characteristic of the German variety of fascism -- the nearly successful destruction of European Jewry.

It is known that Fischer participated in a 1969 conference in Algiers that passed a resolution calling for the destruction of Israel; it is unclear whether he was still there when the resolution was actually voted on. But such open support for the Palestinian cause was almost de rigueur in German radical circles at the time; what is more interesting is Fischer's relatively early break with this viewpoint. During the 1970s, he began to care and learn about the Holocaust, the fate of European Jewry, and Israel's role in the world; a similar shift would eventually occur among all the Westerners in his circle. Fischer even ended up a close friend of the late Ignatz Bubis, the German Jewish leader who typified the hated real-estate developers the Frankfurt squatters had protested against -- and who later served as the model for the central character in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's vilely antisemitic play about the era, Garbage, the City, and Death.

GREEN, RED, AND BROWN

Fischer's Westerners constituted an important strand of the German New Left. But they were overshadowed by a larger and more vocal cohort of anti-Westerners, who themselves comprised three groups: the Third Worldists, the orthodox Marxists, and the neonationalists.

The Third Worldists considered imperialism the most important political issue of the day and rejected everything that the developed world stood for, including Western values and industrial modernization. They would later constitute the bulk of the "Fundamentalist" (or "Fundi") wing of the German Green Party and fight a determined rear-guard action against what they felt were unnecessary compromises being made by Fischer and his "Realists" (or "Realos"). During the 1970s, they believed that the Federal Republic was second only to the United States in its objectionable character. They detested its parliamentary institutions, disdained its market-based economy, hated its role as a driving force in modernization's inevitable destruction of the environment, and feared any manifestations of German nationalism, which they saw as a harbinger of the ever-looming "fascistization" of German politics and society. They were vehemently anti-Zionist (although not necessarily antisemitic) and found in the Palestinians an emblem of noble suffering and anticolonial resistance.

Although the world of German left-wing terrorism will always remain complex and murky, most of its ideas and participants were drawn from this sector of the radical movement. By the time of the OPEC attack, for example, Hans-Joachim Klein had become a member of the Revolutionary Cells (Revolutionare Zellen, or RZ), a terrorist organization that emerged from Frankfurt's Sponti scene. The RZ prided itself on being more loosely organized, autonomous, and spontaneous than the Berlin-based Red Army Faction (RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang). An early publication divided its operations into three types: anti-imperialist actions, anti-Zionist actions, and actions in solidarity with the struggles of workers, youths, and women. Some RZ members maintained a close relationship with George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which is how Carlos came to recruit Klein for his commando unit in 1975.

The second group of anti-Westerners gravitated toward an orthodox interpretation of Marxism, locating the source of the Federal Republic's ills not in industrial modernization but in capitalism. In contrast to other radicals, they considered the industrial working class not only a worthy ally in the struggle but an "objectively necessary" part of any major social and political transformation. The members of this group reached deep into the SPD and major German trade unions such as ig Metall. They also developed cozy relations with East Germany, whose Marxist-Leninist system they regarded with tolerant admiration if not outright enthusiasm. This group's strength explains why serious criticism of "actually existing socialism" in the Soviet bloc was often unpopular in many parts of the German left until well into the 1980s -- so much so that the Polish Solidarity movement was often denounced by German unionists and social democrats as retrograde and reactionary.

The third group of anti-Westerners was the neonationalists. The New Left focused mainly on opposing the war in Vietnam, demonstrating solidarity with developing-world liberation movements, and transforming bourgeois society. But in Germany it also had, willy-nilly, a nationalist component provoked by the country's division and continued limited sovereignty. Left-wing nationalism has a long history in Germany, and it is hardly surprising that such feelings were represented among the 68ers as well. Nationalist sentiment grew over the controversy surrounding the 1982 deployment of American intermediate-range nuclear missiles on German soil -- something that allowed the Germans to perceive themselves as victims yet again -- and was later intensified by German unification. By the mid-1990s, in fact, some 68ers had completed a journey from extreme left to extreme right, with the constant factor being their hatred of the West and what it represented. Today, this antimodernist, anti-Western sentiment is alive and well in Europe among those on the extreme right and left who invoke nationalism in their opposition to globalization.