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.

The two most prominent German radicals to undergo such a shift have been Horst Mahler and Bernd Rabehl. The former joined with fellow radical lawyer Otto Schily to defend left-wing terrorists in court during the late 1960s. But within a few years their paths began to diverge, as Schily became a Westerner and Mahler decided to join some of his former clients in the RAF. Today Schily -- a co-founder with Fischer of the Green Party who switched to the Social Democrats in 1989 -- is the German interior minister and quite conservative on law-and-order and immigration issues; Mahler is an attorney and publicist for the extreme-right Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands. Along with two other ex-leftists, Mahler recently declared that the 68er movement had been "neither for communism nor for capitalism, neither for a Third-Worldist nor for an Eastern or a Western community of values." Instead, it had been "about the right for every people [Volk] to assert its national-revolutionary and social-revolutionary liberation." In his view, the Germans were no exception. Mahler and his associates today vigorously oppose the liberalization of Germany's citizenship laws, inveighing against the "foreignization" of the country. The root of the trouble for them, however, lies in Germany's solid anchoring in the West -- controlled by that double-headed evil, the United States and world Jewry.

Rabehl, a long-time professor at the Free University of Berlin, has not espoused quite such extreme views as Mahler. Yet he too has drifted toward the volkisch milieu of Germany's far right. What renders his case particularly prominent is that he was once the comrade-in-arms of the legendary Rudi Dutschke. The two men led a prominent German student organization into aggressive activism in 1965 that helped precipitate the 1968 upheavals. Dutschke retains an almost saint-like status for virtually all 68ers, not least because he was nearly assassinated in the spring of 1968 and subsequently withdrew from public life into a self-imposed Danish exile, where he died of complications from his wounds in 1979. Ever since, activists from all sides of the movement have invoked Dutschke to legitimate their positions. Rabehl now insists that Dutschke wanted a national liberation movement not only for victims of colonialism in the developing world but for Germans themselves as well.

THE REMAINS OF THE DAY

Most 68ers, of course, became neither terrorists nor cabinet ministers. Just as in the United States (where their impact on politics has been much less palpable than in Germany), they began a slow march through the institutions of society that their generation now dominates. In public affairs, the 68ers are the current political class. In the universities, they are the tenured professors. In journalism and the media, they occupy the most coveted positions. Age has transformed them from hippies to yuppies, but ones whose culture is profoundly different from that of their parents. That this culture is deeply Western, in fact, is one of the 68ers' two lasting legacies.

Before 1968, the Federal Republic's ties to the West -- the much-touted Westbindung -- were little more than a political necessity and a military convenience. The country's integration into NATO and the European Economic Community (the precursor to today's European Union) was dictated by the exigencies of the Cold War and had little to do with any broad-based attachment to liberal values. But the 1968 upheavals initiated a cultural shift that fundamentally transformed the country. An opening of hitherto closed spaces occurred in virtually every aspect of German life. Although this happened elsewhere in the advanced industrialized world, nowhere else was it as profound or compelling -- largely because nowhere else had it been so bottled up.

Ironically, it was the 68ers -- who once reviled the postwar West German regime and regarded it as little better than a mere continuation of Nazi Germany -- who created what has been nostalgically referred to as the "Bonn Republic." Habermas' concept of a "constitutional patriotism" (Verfassungspatriotismus) based on allegiance to liberal values rather than blood or soil -- a basis that distinguishes many of today's Germans from practically all of their predecessors and from many of their European contemporaries as well -- would not have endured without the 68ers' activism. (Although Habermas perceptively rejected the 68ers' penchant for violence and forcefully decried some of their tactics as "leftist fascism," he nevertheless welcomed the movement's societal impact on Germany as a whole.) President Richard von Weizsacker's legendary speech of May 8, 1985, in which he argued that Western values were the sole legitimate basis on which a German democracy could continue to flourish, also would have been unthinkable without the 68er legacy.

The triumph of Western identity in most erstwhile 68ers came starkly to the fore with German unification and the establishment of what is now called the "Berlin Republic." It was they more than anyone else who feared a renewed German nationalism in which Western values would become less salient. It was because of their emotional attachment to the Bonn Republic, in fact, that the Social Democrats and the Greens -- the two parties in which the 68ers have had the most influence -- lost so abysmally in the December 1990 federal parliamentary election to a Christian Democratic Party more enthusiastic about unification.

In Germany today it is Joschka Fischer, above all others, who personifies this particular legacy. But contradictions remain. Although Westernization has been the 68ers' major contribution to German society, the Westerners in the German left have failed to carry the day. They remain a minority, just as they were decades ago. The victory of Fischer's Western wing of the Green Party at the turbulent party congress in May 1999 -- when Fischer was doused with red paint by protesters attacking his support of the NATO campaign against Serbia -- did not stem from any widespread agreement with his views or policies. Rather, it was due to his unique personal standing among Greens, his status as Germany's favorite politician, and the desire of a bare majority of those assembled to remain in power after being so long in the opposition. Fischer still needs to constantly justify his "Western" stances on Israel and globalization to colleagues who have begun to denounce him as a puppet of the United States and Western capitalism. Even his old friend Cohn-Bendit has criticized Fischer and called for a new movement to counter the United States.

Another example of these ideological divisions is the different responses among the Westerners and other leftists to the singular tragedy that befell the United States on September 11, 2001. The Westerners were horrified by this criminal act and rallied unequivocally in support of the United States, going so far as to claim that, in these difficult times, all Germans were Americans -- in clear reference to President John F. Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech. But other leftists immediately worried about the harshness of potential U.S. responses, next to which their perfunctory mention of the victims seemed less than secondary. This rift between the Westerners and the pacifist left has become so bitter that it may lead to either a split in the Green Party or to the party's abandonment of Fischer.

In one sense, therefore, Fischer has become such a unique figure that he seems to have transcended the old internal battles and concerns. But in another sense, it is possible to see him as continuing to fight the same battles today that he did then, albeit in a different setting. His strong support for a federal Europe grounded in liberal values, for example, is a logical extension of Habermas' constitutional patriotism from the national to the continental level.