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.

DAY OF THE JACKAL

Shortly before noon on December 21, 1975, six people entered the headquarters of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) on Vienna's Ringstrasse. Confirming that an OPEC summit was still in progress, they walked up the stairs to the first floor, took out automatic weapons, and advanced toward the room where the meeting was being held. When a pair of Austrian guards tried to stop them, the terrorists shot one, sending his body down to the lobby in an elevator, and locked the other in an empty office. After killing two bystanders who tried to intervene, they entered the conference room and took several dozen people hostage. A special police squad rushing to the scene was met with shots in the first-floor reception area and returned the fire. Soon one of the terrorists, bleeding from the stomach, tossed a grenade that exploded between the two sides and sent everyone diving for cover. The police retreated downstairs and a standoff began.

The terrorist leader, a Venezuelan who was born Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez but went by the nom de guerre "Carlos," stacked explosives near the hostages and announced that he was the head of a Palestinian commando unit targeting the conservative oil-rich states of Iran and Saudi Arabia. He dictated a communique in French promoting the Palestinian cause and Arab unification, along with a short message in English threatening to kill the hostages unless the Austrian authorities broadcasted the communique every two hours and provided a bus to the Vienna airport, a getaway plane, and a flight crew. He sent out to the police first the notes and later the terrorist who had been wounded during the firefight and needed immediate medical attention. By evening the Austrian government decided to broadcast the communique as directed, and during the night it acceded to the other demands as well, so long as the captive Austrians were released before the plane left.

The next morning a bus pulled up in front of the building and transported the terrorists and the more than 30 hostages to the airport, accompanied by an ambulance carrying the wounded gunman. With explosives packed under the seats of the Saudi and Iranian oil ministers, the plane flew first to Algiers, where most of the hostages were released; then to Tripoli, where several more were let go; and finally back to Algiers, where the last batch was turned over unharmed. The terrorists were allowed to disperse, and Carlos himself is believed to have collected millions of dollars in ransom money.

Two years later, the gunman who had been wounded during the incident, a young German named Hans-Joachim Klein, had a change of heart. He renounced terrorism and published a memoir entitled Return to Humanity. But he continued to live under a false identity because he was still wanted for murder and feared retaliation from former colleagues upset at his recantation. Nevertheless, in 1998 he was finally arrested in a small French village and extradited to Germany to face prosecution for his role in the OPEC headquarters attack.

Klein's trial, which began in Frankfurt this past January, was a media circus. But the reason for all the fuss was not so much the quarter-century-old crime or the defendants (Klein and one Rudolf Schindler) but the witnesses called to testify on both sides. To explain just what had happened at the OPEC headquarters on that fateful day, the prosecution featured Carlos himself, by then serving a life sentence in a Paris jail for another crime. The defense, trying to put Klein's youthful radicalism in context, brought in as character witnesses not only 1960s icon Daniel Cohn-Bendit (now a prominent European parliamentarian) but the most popular politician in Germany: Green Party leader and foreign minister Joschka Fischer. Fischer had been the lead defendant's friend and colleague during protests in Frankfurt nearly three decades earlier.

On February 15, the case officially ended as Judge Heinrich Gehrke sentenced Klein to nine years in prison for his role in the attack. But the broader questions that haunted the trial remain: How could individuals such as Fischer and Klein start from the same place yet end up so far apart? Which subsequent life -- that of the minister or that of the terrorist -- truly represented their common 1960s heritage? And what, in retrospect, did all the radical Sturm und Drang of those years actually achieve?

TALKING 'BOUT THEIR GENERATION

The social upheavals of the late 1960s affected virtually every aspect of public and private life across the industrial world. From Berkeley to Berlin, Paris to Prague, the youth of the educated middle classes discarded established conventions and challenged traditional values. Fueled by pot and acid, protesting to the chords of Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, experiencing a sexual revolution beneath posters of Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, they were swept up in an amorphous but palpable movement that would remain imprinted on their collective consciousness for decades to come.

Along the way, the young radicals spearheaded a complete redefinition of progressive politics. From the second half of the nineteenth century onward, the left in the industrialized world had highlighted the role of the working class as the subject of history; the workers' struggles against capitalism would eventually lead to the universal emancipation of humanity. Traditional leftists disagreed about whether this end would be achieved through violent revolution (the communist variant) or through evolution (the socialist and social democratic path). But they did agree on a project inspired by a modernist vision of politics, economics, and culture that was deeply anchored in the rationalism of the Enlightenment.