Is the long march through the institutions finally over for the German Green party? The death of the Greens has been forecast many times since the party's birth in 1980, not least when it failed to win enough votes in 1990 to get into the Bundestag. Judging by opinion polls, it may again fail to reach the 5 per cent mark in federal elections next September. In any case, Chancellor Schr?der has suggested that the Social Democrats, who have ruled Germany in coalition with the Greens since 1998, may seek a more congenial junior partner.
But behind the Greens' parochial political difficulties it is tempting to see bigger historical patterns: the final absorption of the 1968 radicals into the system; the definitive emergence of a "normalised" Germany, more relaxed and self-confident, partly thanks to the stamp of the 1968ers; and nothing less than the end of the post-postwar period in Germany.
If there was a single moment that marked the shift, it was November's vote of confidence over Schr?der's offer to send 3,900 troops to Afghanistan. Both the offer of combat troops and the fact that it was reluctantly backed by most Green Bundestag deputies would have been unthinkable even a few years ago.
The emblematic figure in this drama was 53-year-old Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister, and the Green who more than any other has forced his party and his generation to exchange the moral certainties of the sidelines for the compromises of power.
But on the issue of German military involvement abroad, in both Kosovo and Afghanistan, Fischer has shown no interest in compromise-in fact he has turned on its head the argument of the pacifist-inclined 1968ers: that war must never again go out "from German soil." Precisely because of German aggression in the first half of the 20th century, Fischer argued, the country is now obliged to join the disinterested coalition wars of the 21st century.
Only one week after the vote of confidence, Fischer rehearsed the arguments again at a Green party congress in a cavernous hall in the east German port city of Rostock. Many Green delegates insisted that the party should now abandon the coalition and banners were draped around the hall denouncing the Bundestag vote. Fischer made an emotional, rostrum-thumping speech-tieless in his ministerial three-piece suit, hand slashing with angry emphasis. There were a few boos; but the disapproval was drowned out by a prolonged standing ovation from many of the (previously sulky) delegates. The paradox was obvious: Fischer, representing a semi-pacifist party, had successfully argued for his country to take part in stronger military action than Germany had contemplated since 1945.
To understand how dizzyingly fast the change has been, one need only look back to the Gulf war, just after German reunification. There was still enormous suspicion of the newly united country. A British cabinet minister compared Helmut Kohl to Adolf Hitler and the EU launched the gamble of monetary union with the explicit aim of locking in the new Germany. At the same time, however, military action by Germany remained taboo. Public opinion opposed any involvement in the war against Saddam Hussein in 1991. Even when medical orderlies were sent to Cambodia, the action was seen by some Germans as a step too far. Hitler's actions had disqualified uniformed Germans from bandaging people's wounds in south-east Asia half a century later.
In 1994, when the Kohl government agreed to send planes to police a UN no-fly zone over Bosnia, the government's own foreign minister, Klaus Kinkel, took the government to court. (Only in Germany, you might say.) Meanwhile, the lacklustre Rudolf Scharping, then the SPD leader, worked himself into a fit when the Kohl government in 1995 sent planes to prevent attacks on Bosnian Muslims. This was inappropriate "because of our past." Today, Scharping is Schr?der's defence minister, an eager proponent of the new Germans-to-the-front proposals.
Public opinion has changed with equal speed. In 1991, more than eight out of ten Germans believed their country should not go to war abroad. Ten years later, a clear majority were ready for Germany to send its troops to fight the Taleban. Now they may go as peacekeepers. That is the thin end of the military wedge. Somalia has been mentioned and there will no doubt be other conflicts too.
Fischer has played a central role in this change. Some of his new admirers in the US describe him as a neo-conservative. But his support for German participation in military action is a reaction to German history. It is also an implicit endorsement of the country Germany has become-perhaps unsurprisingly, as Fischer's generation has done so much to shape it.
Fischer is an embodiment of the journey taken by the radical 1968ers-something which caused him much discomfort in the first few months of 2001 when photographs were published which showed him beating a policeman at a demonstration in Frankfurt in 1973. "Yes, I was militant," the foreign minister commented laconically.
That was followed by a subpoena to appear in court, where Fischer was obliged to testify as a private citizen in the trial of a terrorist and former friend, Hans-Joachim Klein. Klein had been involved in an attack, masterminded by Carlos the Jackal, on an Opec summit in Vienna in 1975. Three people were killed; Klein escaped. Though Klein publicly denounced terrorism shortly after, he remained in hiding until his arrest in 1998. In court, Fischer, after describing how he tried to persuade Klein away from terrorism, walked across the courtroom to shake the defendant's hand.
By now, stories about Fischer's past were popping up everywhere. In the Klein trial, Fischer insisted it was ludicrous to suggest that members of the terrorist Baader-Meinhof gang had stayed at the squat where he lived in Frankfurt. Then, after his heated denials, it emerged that at least one member had spent a few days there. Whereupon the state prosecutor wanted to put Fischer on trial for perjury.
It was a messy business. In a country where Ordnung is still treasured, such evidence of Unordnung ought to have spelt political death for Fischer. But the scandals faded and he was soon once again the country's most popular politician. He is admired by millions who have never voted Green, not just for his wit and eloquence-although it is true that most German politicians seem dull beside him-but for the manner in which he has merged the values and aspirations of the 1960s with the reality of German and international politics at the turn of the century.
For 1968 marked Germany in a special way, more deeply than France or Italy, let alone Britain. It represented Germany's belated recognition of war guilt. And it was substantially due to those coming of age in the 1960s forcing this recognition upon their parents' generation. As Fischer puts it: "1968 in Germany cannot be understood without the conflict of the generations. We are the children of the war generation." Fischer's postwar generation could dare to be more outspoken than their parents-and they were. Honesty about Germany's past became something to be prized, not feared.
The pre-1968 Germany in which Fischer grew up was a democracy, anchored in the west. But it was still a traumatised place, unable to face reality. History books of the 1950s and 1960s bear witness to this. They make it clear that Germany was, above all, the victim. There is talk of how the second world war brought "terrible suffering such as the world no longer considered possible in the 20th century." But the phrase does not refer to Auschwitz, or to any other crimes committed by Germans. It refers to the brutal revenge-expulsions of millions of Germans from their homes in eastern Germany (now western Poland) after 1945. The same book has just one oblique reference to the Holocaust, with a passing mention of "the fate of the Polish Jews." Pupils were assured that ordinary Germans knew nothing of the horrors of the Third Reich.
Fischer's parents, conservative Catholics, arrived from Hungary after the war and settled near Stuttgart. His father, a butcher, died when Joschka was 18. Joschka made his own way early. At 19 he eloped with his girlfriend to Gretna Green, because his mother refused them permission to marry (his first of four wives). He left school without the final exams that would have allowed him to go to university; but he read voraciously and attended lectures in Frankfurt where he sat at the feet of J?rgen Habermas, philosophical leader of the German left. As Fischer said, "I enjoyed a profound theoretical education-a paperless degree. I still profit from it today."
He was aged 20 in 1968, on the fringe of the revolutionary scene in Frankfurt. Many radicals saw only continuity between the Nazi state and the democratic postwar state (the chancellor of the time had been a Nazi party member for 12 years). A few became terrorists. Other 1968ers-including many now in senior positions-romanticised the terrorism, even if they had no part in it. Otto Schily, the 69-year-old SPD interior minister (who has introduced tough anti-terrorist legislation recently) shocked judges when, as defence lawyer for the Baader-Meinhof in 1975, he argued that his clients' actions were morally justified, as violence against the Gestapo would have been.
Fischer's Damascene moment over violence came in 1976, when German terrorists working with Carlos the Jackal seized an Air France plane en route from Tel Aviv to Paris and then carried out a separation of Jewish and non-Jewish passengers. "Those who had begun as anti-fascists... ended with the same deeds and language as the Nazis," Fischer said later. In 1978, he made his final break with violence after a series of assassinations.
Less than two years later came the creation of the Greens (the "anti-party party"), which held its founding congress in 1980 in Karlsruhe. Fischer, part of the still-powerful Frankfurt Sponti movement, was initially sceptical. But, like his friend Daniel Cohn-Bendit-Danny the Red of the 1968 riots-he joined the Greens, a year later. The Greens were the non-violent offshoot of the 1968 rebellion. Violence-including violence against the state, not just by the state-was no longer seen as providing answers.
Fischer, who was working as a taxi driver, quickly became a leading figure in the Greens, leader of the Realos in the constant battles with the fundamentalists, or Fundis. He was among the first Greens to be elected to the Bonn parliament in 1983, where his quick wit made him a star. In 1985, he made history by becoming the first Green minister in a regional government in Hesse, the state that includes Frankfurt. He turned up for his swearing-in ceremony wearing jeans and white trainers, specially purchased the previous day; the trainers are now in a museum-a small Joschka-shaped chunk of German history.
Today's fastidious remembrance of Germany's past did not come without a struggle; but the generation which led that struggle-which now rules Germany-has helped Germany to move on from its bloody history without leaving it behind. It is no coincidence that Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum and the planned new Holocaust memorial are being realised now, and not 20 (let alone 50) years ago.
A glance at the latest schoolbooks gives a sense of the scale of the change. The evasive platitudes have gone and it is the lack of resistance to Hitler which is emphasised. Some schoolbooks examine an extraordinary event which, until recently, was scarcely discussed. In central Berlin in 1943, 1,000 German women gathered for a protest-"give us our men back!"-when their Jewish husbands were arrested and deported. The SS ordered the women home; they refused. The women forced a climbdown by the Nazi regime. Unbelievably, some men were fetched back from inside Auschwitz. The story is not told as a happy ending. Rather, schoolchildren are encouraged to consider what would have happened if the entire country had acted as those women did.
Most changes to German life demanded by the 1968ers-like those to history books-have been to everyday life; there is no significant legislative legacy. One big exception is the new citizenship law introduced by the SPD/Green coalition and drawn up by Otto Schily, the former Realo ally of Fischer who defected to the SPD. The law makes it easier for immigrants born in Germany to become German citizens (although still not as easily as in Britain or France). The new citizenship law means that the old ius sanguinis, the blood law, is partly replaced by the ius soli or law of the soil, where place of birth and residence are the determining factor. A new immigration law is planned to make it easier for foreigners to settle in Germany and to become Germans.
As in most European countries, there is plenty of fear and division over race and immigration. There is also a significant far right, especially in east Germany, which grabbed attention in the early 1990s with attacks on asylum seekers. Coming just after reunification this caused a flurry of anxiety around the world. But Germany is not unique among other developed countries in either its fringe racists or its agonised debate about assimilation, multiculturalism and the economic need for immigration. (The Greens have made their mark in this field too, fielding the first Bundestag member of Turkish origin, Cem ?zdemir, who has forced many to question their unbending notions of what "German" means.)
So have the Greens served their purpose? They have channelled Germany's patricidal generation into legitimate politics and at the same time helped to create a new country. Their specific views on the environment or economics or gender relations have, by and large, been absorbed by other parties-especially their friends and rivals on the left, the SPD. (The Greens are less statist on economics than the SPD and have flirted with a Green "high-tech" market liberalism, but with limited success.) November's vote on troops to Afghanistan removes one of the last distinctive marks of the semi-pacifist party which rose to prominence in the early and mid-1980s, partly through its leadership of the campaign to reject the siting of a new generation of nuclear weapons on west German soil.
Like all successful parties, the Greens are also a movement. In that form they will limp on, especially in the states and towns with large concentrations of the ageing 1968 generation. But they are unlikely to regain the 8.7 per cent share of the national vote they achieved in 1987 and they may gradually wither away.
If the latter is their fate over the next few years it will be for two reasons. First, the Green failure to pass on their values and messages to the generations following them. The average age of the 50,000 Green party members is well over 40, the same with the average Green voter. This is partly a mark of success; the younger generations are so "greened" that they do not need a Green party. But it also reflects the generational parochialism of the party. They really are the party of the baby-boom generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. Their brand of cultural war with their parents' generation seems sanctimonious and dated to many younger Germans, as well as to those many former 1968ers themselves who have moved on as they have grown older.
The second Green failure has been east Germany. The psychological and political gulf that remains between the two parts of Germany is perhaps the 1968 generation's most negative legacy. This is not just a Green party failure (although the east German Greens are a negligible political force). It is also a failure of the many 1968ers in the SPD, most notably Oskar Lafontaine. Lafontaine, as the SPD chancellor candidate in 1990, was poised to usher in the first SPD/Green coalition in liberal, ecologically-minded, post-national west Germany. The arrival of 16.5m patriotic, conservative, east German voters upset that electoral equation. Lafontaine has evidently found it hard to forgive the east Germans for their "backwardness" and for handing the prize of a red-green chancellorship to Schr?der eight years later.
(East Germans return the compliment, attributing all their problems to "Wessi" arrogance. I was with a television crew in Hamburg recently when a group of east German tourists stood in front of our camera. After waiting for a while, the polite cameraman asked them to move. One man, in his mid-fifties, was indignant at this perceived slight and spat out the phrase: "West TV!" As it happens, the cameraman was east German-born and his soundman was also from east Berlin. The young soundman in his twenties pointed out, though, that such attitudes were far rarer among easterners under 40 such as himself.
Where does this leave Fischer? He will find it hard to abandon the Greens, even if the party sinks out of political contention. If that does happen he may have to abandon domestic politics and reinvent himself again as a kind of ambassador-in-chief for the new Germany in an international institution. (He has already reinvented himself physically. After growing podgy in his thirties and forties he jogged and dieted relentlessly and then wrote a bestseller, My long run to find myself.)
If he does leave Germany, he will leave behind a Berlin republic self-confident in a way that the Bonn republic never dared to be. A country sufficiently at ease with itself to loosen its ties with France and push its weight around more in the EU. And in quick succession German troops have been sent into Kosovo (1999); became leaders of the military force in Macedonia (2001); and been put on standby to be sent to Afghanistan (2001). This is only the beginning. A Fischer aide said about the Rostock vote: "the important thing is that the Greens were not told, 'just this little bit more, and we won't do it again.' On the contrary. The message was: 'You'll have to face it. We'll have to do this again.'"
A democratic Germany; a powerful Germany; a Germany that is willing to use its military might. We have seen each of those Germanies before-but never at the same time. But Fischer's Germany-for this is Fischer's Germany as much as it is Schr?der's-is also marked by deep continuities with the recent past, and not only in its support for US-led western coalitions. Fischer's idea of a more federal EU-spelt out in his famous speech at Humboldt university in 2000-is almost identical to that of Helmut Kohl. He remains, like all postwar German politicians, acutely aware of the residual anxieties about Germany's size and might within Europe. The only plausible contemporary anxiety is that Germany may at some point in the future form a special relationship with a newly powerful Russia. Fischer repeats, with admirable conviction, the postwar mantra that any such Alleingang (unilateral action) has always ended in disaster for Germany.
As a result of the Green yes-vote in November-first, hesitantly, in the parliament, then, more confidently, with a two-thirds majority at Rostock-Germany has moved into a different era. Almost six decades after Hitler's death, Fischer's battles have helped to bring closure of a kind. From policeman-beating revolutionary, to pacifist politician, to foreign minister demanding that German troops be dispatched to far-flung wars, it is an extraordinary progression for one man-and the generation that he leads. A man, and a generation, whose long march through the institutions is, indeed, now over.
