Since leaving office in November 2005, the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder has made a point of not commenting on his successor Angela Merkel's government. In particular, he has avoided criticising her foreign policy—not least because his former chief of staff Frank-Walter Steinmeier is now foreign minister in Merkel's coalition. However, since the outbreak of the Caucasus conflict in August, Schröder has broken his silence to criticise Georgia, the US, Nato—everyone, in fact, except Russia. In an interview with Der Spiegel, he made it clear that he regarded Georgia as the aggressor, dismissed fears about a new cold war, and rejected the idea that the EU should freeze talks on a strategic partnership with Russia. Astonishingly, he even declined to call for Russia to pull out of Georgia.
At the end of August 2008, on the day after Russia recognised the independence of the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, I met Schröder in his office on the fourth floor of the Bundestag building directly opposite the Russian embassy on Unter den Linden in Berlin. With his back to the window and the Russian flag flying above his head, he reiterated his anger at the west's actions, but had not a bad word to say about Russia. "Germany is doing what it can to save what can be saved, but I am concerned at how carelessly Nato is gambling away its strategic partnership with Russia," he said as he puffed away on a Cohiba. The way Schröder sees it, he made great progress as chancellor in building a close relationship with Russia—an equivalent, almost, of the historic reconciliation between West Germany and France under Konrad Adenauer. This is now being undermined by Merkel, who has been more critical of Russia in public than Steinmeier.
Even in office, Schröder, whose father was killed fighting the Red army in the second world war, was conspicuously pro-Russian. He developed a close personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, whom he famously described as a "flawless democrat" while glossing over the war in Chechnya and the suppression of political rights in Russia. Just two weeks before the German election in September 2005, Schröder and Putin signed a deal to build a Baltic sea gas pipeline that would run from Russia to Germany, bypassing Poland. Then, in December 2005—shortly after leaving office—he became the chairman of the board of Nord Stream, the consortium set up to build the pipeline, which is controlled by the Russian energy group Gazprom.
This underlines the deep differences between these two men. While they worked remarkably well together as the key figures in the "red-green" coalition (1998-2005), in fact they stand on opposite sides of the debates about German history that have divided German intellectuals since the 1960s. Although they were basically in agreement on the three main foreign policy crises that they faced in office—Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq—they had very different justifications for their positions and used strikingly different rhetoric. In other words, they embody two very different visions of Germany's world role in the 21st century.
From his days in the West German student movement in the 1960s onwards, Fischer has tried to learn and apply the lessons of the Nazi past, in particular the Holocaust. The constant theme of his political thinking has been an attempt to live out Theodor Adorno's exhortation "to arrange one's thoughts and actions so that it will not be repeated, so that nothing similar will happen." The key tenets of his foreign policy thinking—for example, his passionate belief in the "completion" of European integration—are deduced, in effect, from this one basic premise. He also controversially used the Holocaust to justify sending German troops to Kosovo in 1999, which led some in Germany to accuse him of playing politics with Auschwitz.
Schröder, on the other hand, never spoke about the Holocaust over Kosovo and now says it was a mistake for Fischer to have done so. "I never publicly contradicted him at the time, but I thought it was wrong," he said. Both men talked about German "responsibility," but whereas Fischer meant German responsibility for Auschwitz, Schröder simply meant a greater role for Germany in international affairs. On the rare occasions when Schröder does talk about 20th-century history, it is about war rather than genocide, and in so far as he seeks to apply history to German foreign policy, it is to affirm the importance of a close relationship between Germany and Russia.
Above all, Fischer and Schröder differ on their attitude to the west. Fischer is an Atlanticist, who during the Iraq crisis spoke out against anti-Americanism and afterwards did all he could to repair German-American relations. Schröder, on the other hand, famously spoke of a Deutscher Weg—a deliberate contrast to the "American way"—and seemed to see the break with the US as a historic opportunity. In his memoirs, published the year after he left office, he wrote that it would be a mistake for Germany to "give up its newly won foreign policy freedom and independence" from the US. When I put it to him that he did not seem to regret the estrangement between the countries, he agreed. "There is nothing to regret," he said flatly.
As for the future of what the Germans call the Westbindung, Schröder says it is a given—even after Iraq—and therefore no longer needs to be affirmed. "If you see something as completely natural, you don't feel the need to constantly emphasise that you are in favour of it," he says. "No one asks the French or the British if they are part of the west. Why do they ask us?" The reason, of course, as I point out to him, is that Germany has a different history from France or Britain. "Yes, of course," he replies. "But we have overcome that part of our history."
Fischer has little time for this. "Now you see what I had to deal with," he says with a grin. "I kept him on the tracks." At the same time, he rejects the idea that Schröder's views reflect a wider German drift. According to opinion polls, Germans are split over Russian policy in the Caucasus. "Don't confuse Schröder with Germany," Fischer says. In practice, he says, Germany is no more pro-Russian than Britain. "Where are all the oligarchs and their money anyway?" But that does not answer the question of what might happen if in future a Schröderesque pro-Russian chancellor—someone like Steinmeier, perhaps, who will be the Social Democrats' candidate in next year's general election—does not have a pro-western figure like Fischer to keep him or her "on the tracks."
