The rebel realist: how Joschka Fischer reinvented Germany.

• Author: Hammer, Joshua
• Position: Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic: An Alternative History of Postwar Germany - Book review

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Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic: An Alternative History of Postwar Germany by Paul Hockenos Oxford University Press, 384 pp.

In January 2001, toward the end of my stint in Germany as Newsweek's Berlin bureau chief, a decades-old series of photographs surfaced in the German magazine Stern and instantly became the talk of the country. The pictures showed the country's charismatic, popular foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, clad in a motorcycle helmet and leather jacket--punching and kicking a prostrate German policeman in the middle of a 1973 street protest. Fischer's evolution from streetfighting radical to pillar of the establishment had always been a subject of controversy at home and of bewilderment abroad (imagine, say, David Dellinger or any other member of the Chicago Seven becoming secretary of state). But these photos seemed beyond the pale, spurring angry demands for his resignation from the right-wing opposition. "Someone who acts in this manner is no representative of a nonviolent civic society," said Wolfgang Bosbach, a parliamentary leader of the Christian Democrats, who led the charge for his ouster. Within a few weeks, however, Fischer had weathered the storm--and been inoculated against further revelations of his checkered past.

The foreign minister's survival was a testament not only to his own political skills but to Germany's own recent history. No other nation has undergone the kind of reinvention experienced by Germany since 1945: from defeated perpetrator of the Holocaust to stable democracy, economic superpower, and leader of a united Europe. As the American journalist and longtime Berlin resident Paul Hockenos argues in his absorbing new book, Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic, Germany's metamorphosis was in some ways made possible by the leftist rabble-rousers who operated on the fringes of society in the 1960s and '70s but became a vital part of the political process. To be sure, Fischer's rise to power was partly due to the quirks of Germany's parliamentary system: in the elections of 1998, Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats formed a coalition government with Fischer's Greens--who had received a serviceable 6.7 percent of the seats in the Bundestag--and Fischer, as party leader, reaped the Foreign Ministry as a prize. But it also reflects how the concerns of Fischer and his comrades--unflinching acknowledgment of the country's Nazi past...