King Fischer.(Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic: An Alternative History of Postwar Germany)(Book review)

Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic: An Alternative History of Postwar Germany, by Paul Hockenos (Oxford, 400 pp., $35)

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A PRIORITY in the post-1945 world order was to make Germany a normal nation. The effort might easily have failed; whether justly or unjustly, Germans as a whole were perceived as perpetrators of mass murder and moral outcasts who had brought reprisal and suffering on themselves. The Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe expelled ethnic Germans to the West by the million. A good part of the country was also lost as a Soviet satellite, and a police state apparently too controlled ever to break free. The Iron Curtain dividing the two Germanys was an inflammable frontline throughout the Cold War. Righting the wrongs of Nazism was not a clear-cut matter.

In these conditions of national and psychological distress, the Germans might have rallied to someone promising vengeance, as Hitler had once done. In the absence of such a figure, two conservative chancellors, Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl, were responsible for the country's reconstruction during their long periods in office. Adenauer's overriding idea was that Germany should link its fate to that of the United States, and so help keep the peace. Kohl did not disagree, but he had his overriding idea as well: that Germany should link its fate to the European Union, and that this would keep the peace even more securely. A country duly emerged that was hard-working, conventionally respectable in manners and thinking, more or less apolitical--a ghostly version of an idealized past that Germans actually had never known.

On the left, the Social Democrats became so desperate for power that they dropped their brand of Marxist socialism and became hard to distinguish from the conservatives. To many of those born after 1945, this consensus seemed to impose a code of conduct that stifled choice and imagination, and even freedom. From the Sixties onward, assorted anarchists, Marxists and Trotskyites, hippies and drop-outs occupied houses and squatted in them, attended the same radical courses at universities, and marched together in demonstrations in search of peace, love, and brotherhood. They had no real program but hoped to find one by taking to the streets.

This protest movement was motivated by guilt over the Nazism of its participants' parents, but it was also caught up in a worldwide illusion of the moment, that "doing your thing" was some sort of ideal--universal, cost-free, and entirely realistic. Like other countries, Germany was already rich and secure enough to ride it out. What it could not afford was the Red Army Faction, or RAF, and the Baader-Meinhof gang. These were mostly lumpen-intellectuals whose limitless resentments drove them to take up arms and resort to terror. Abducting and murdering prominent personalities, they were also in secret contact with the KGB on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Evidently Hitler's storm-troopers remodeled, and even anti-Jewish to cap it all, they were a sinister threat to the state's fledgling democracy.

Most of the RAF and the Baader-Meinhof gang have been captured and condemned to prison, and their notorious leaders were found dead in their cells, killed by their own hand or--according to conspiracy theorists--by the police. Joschka Fischer swam in those murky waters, and his trajectory seemed destined to lead to disaster. Instead, he became Germany's foreign minister, shaping the country to a marked degree in his own image.