(Kipenheuer & Witsch, é22.90)
Loveable Joschka Fischer was not. Even those who liked his politics were not too fond of Germany's first Green foreign minister, who ruled in tandem with the Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder from 1998 to 2005. Perhaps it is the curse of the super-smart autodidact. Fischer, a butcher's son, never finished high school, but became a voracious reader and prolific writer—and often seemed impelled to prove his credentials, if not his intellectual superiority, to all those Herr Doktors who moved in the same circles.
That penchant made him a bit of a besserwisser (know-it-all) who prized pontificating—a trait that did not endear him to his foreign office minions, who would sit through his learned digressions in deferential silence, rolling their eyes. Journalists, the greatest besserwissers of them all, were also fair game. "You know, Joffe…," he once addressed me over lunch, and I responded with a feeble attempt at irony: "Mr Foreign Minister, for you it is either 'Joe' or 'Herr Doktor Joffe.'" I don't recall whether he grinned or scowled.
Yet it is hard to deny this former rabble-rouser, street fighter and militant pacifist his place in German history. For it was on his watch that a united Germany took a giant step towards transcending its past when, in 1999, it went to war again, participating in the Nato air campaign against Serbia. And what did Fischer invoke to drag his seething Green comrades into accepting their country's new role? History—and the worst parts of it. At a Green party convention in 1999, at which one of the more aggressive pacifists launched a plastic bag full of paint in his face, Fischer cried out: "Never again war, never again Auschwitz, never again genocide, never again fascism!"
This statement was logical fratricide: if you want to fight genocide and fascism, you can't quite propound "never again war." But "Auschwitz" proved the more potent appeal. And so the older past trumped the younger one of those cosy decades after 1945 when Germans could huddle in the shelter of contrition. Again and again, this generation pointed to their horrifying past as the explanation-cum-excuse for rejecting all military action (save in self or alliance defence). It was good moralpolitik, but also good realpolitik—letting the Yanks, Brits and French take care of the world's nasty business. As Helmut Kohl, chancellor from 1982 to 1998, put it during an earlier phase of the Balkan wars: we mustn't go where the Wehrmacht once trod in Europe. This left only Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland, didn't it?
Fischer has called himself a "merciless realist," yet it was with the language of idealism—"never again!"—that he used to coax his country into a new reality in which war was suddenly raging on Germany's doorsteps. At the core of this book—only the first part of Fischer's memoirs—are two chapters on the Kosovo war. Soon after he became foreign minister, Fischer recalls telling a journalist that "there was no foreign policy for the Greens, only one for Germany." This, he adds, "would haunt me for years"—and rightly so, because his comrades had expected a Green strategy from him: pacifism, environmentalism and all. They soon realised this was not to be. In an open letter, his rivals for the Green leadership denounced him as "Crown's witness for a conservative foreign policy." It was quite a new persona for a man who had won early fame in the street battles against the Frankfurt police.
All of this recalls the old American quip: where you stand depends on where you sit. Fischer, sitting in the foreign office, learned quickly how to take a new stand. Right away, he writes, he was informed by US special envoy Richard Holbrooke that Slobodan Milosevic was "counting on Germany's non-participation" to avoid war. Fischer recounts his anguish: "maybe Germany's decision would determine the fate of Nato. What then?"
But what about the UN security council, where the certain veto of the Russians would block any war resolution? This meant ditching the hallowed German dogma that only the security council could turn might into right. Fischer puts it delicately—given a stalemate among the big five, "we had to strike out on a new path to transcend this dilemma." Then he launches into a discourse that would make the most hard-nosed legal spinmeister proud. No UN go-ahead? "We had complete consensus in the most important regional organisations," meaning the EU and Nato. Russia was digging in its heels? Then it was Moscow's fault that the west had to circumvent the veto in such an "emergency." But this was to be a "singular event," the "exception to the rule." Thus international law was affirmed while it was broken.
Fischer's chapters on Kosovo offer a fascinating insight into the making of recent international history—and into the do-as-you-go diplomacy of the west. After the bombardment of Serbia had begun, Fischer relates, Nato was counting on a quick surrender by Milosevic. "But what if not? What was Plan B? There was none," he notes in wide-eyed amazement.
An implacable taskmaster as far as his Green party was concerned, Fischer stuck to his guns over Kosovo and, in the end, Milosevic caved in. But if Kosovo was Fischer's crucible, the middle east was his passion. Again, this put him out of sympathy with most of his comrades, who were no friends of Israel. Fischer had parted ways with the anti-Israeli left as early as 1976, when two German terrorists collaborated with a Palestinian gang in the hijacking of an Air France plane to Entebbe. His epiphany came, Fischer relates, when the two Germans started separating Jewish from non-Jewish passengers. "This," he writes, "was a de facto selektion"—the term the Nazis used to mark people for the gas chamber—and it "triggered sheer horror in me."
Fischer's unbroken sympathy for the Jewish state suffuses this book—as does his distaste for Yasser Arafat. The PLO leader, he notes in the aftermath of Camp David 2000, "never understood the catastrophic effects of his 'no' in Camp David and his return to violence." Fischer would forever criss-cross the middle east in search of a deal; he even came up with his own peace plan—to no avail, as we know. Then again, bigger players with a lot more chips have also failed there, from Bill Clinton to George W Bush.
Events in the middle east took a far nastier turn after 11th September. Yet this is where Fischer's book ends. Afghanistan, Iraq and the resurgence of Russia will have to await the second instalment. This much we know already, however: German soldiers are in Afghanistan while the German navy patrols the waters of the Levant, thousands of miles away from Berlin—and light years away from the comfortable "let George do it" tradition broken on Joschka Fischer's watch.
That feat alone has reserved him a place in history—and the honorific "professor," although not in Germany, but at Princeton. Not bad for a former taxi driver who left school without an abitur (the German A-level equivalent).
