How many more difficult pasts will Germany have to confront? Will this nend? First, there was the uniquely horrible business of facing up to the Nazi legacy. That took democratic West Germany the best part of 40 years. Then, after German unification, there was the Stasi legacy. All the poisonous dirt of communist East Germany was uncovered, debated and morally agonized over. Now Germany has plunged into yet another furious debate about yet another past. This time, it concerns the political protest generation of 1968, and specifically the embrace of political violence by some post-68ers in the 1970s.
The latest frenzy of German breast-beating, soul-searching and finger-pointing was sparked off at the beginning of this year by the publication of photographs showing the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, as a 25-year-old protester in Frankfurt in 1973. He wore a black helmet and he was beating a policeman. Predictably, opposition calls for his resignation followed.
How dare someone who had embraced political violence as a young hold a high office of state and represent Germany in the world? As the media were flooded with old black-and-white photographs from that time, I was transported back to the Germany where I went to live in 1978.
By Yu Sha
How neurotic and fragile German democracy seemed at that time. And how interesting. At every airport or frontier post there were posters with police photographs of terrorists from the so-called Red Army Fraction. University buildings in West Berlin and Frankfurt were covered with revolutionary graffiti. Young or not-so-young people wore PLO scarves, lived in communes, belonged to political splinter groups and decried the Federal Republic as a Scheissstaat (shit-state). They denounced what they called simply "The System."
For a time, I lived in a tiny commune myself. When I hogged the bathroom in the morning a communist fellow-resident angrily cried "herrschende Klasse! (ruling class). In a vaguely alternative restaurant called Terzo Mundo, the post-68ers sat eating "Partisan Salad" and, as I sourly noted in my diary, drinking -- in the course of a good evening's political discussion -- the annual income of a peasant in the third world. Grungy, self-indulgent and hysterical, this milieu nonetheless also contained people who were brave, intelligent and idealistic. And -- for this was Germany -- the best and the worst were very close together.
The previous year, West Germany's attorney-general, one of the country's leading bankers, and the head of its employers' organization had been assassinated by terrorists. A famous anonymous obituary article on the attorney-general, in a far-left magazine, confessed to feeling a certain "furtive joy" at his death. Now Germany's environment minister Jurgen Trittin, a Green Party leader like Joschka Fischer, is under attack for having supported the dissemination of that obituary. He claims the issue was the right to free speech, and points out that the article ended with a rejection of terrorism. In the 1970s, the state responded to terrorism with an overwhelming police presence, surveillance, and restrictive legislation keeping alleged "radicals" out of public service. An influential film called Germany in Autumn darkly implied that the leaves of German democracy were again turning brown (the Nazi color).
One must remember that Adolf Hitler had only been dead for 30 years. Erich Honecker was still very much alive, and running a very nasty little Stalinist state just across the Berlin Wall. These were the twin poles that structured the debate.
The Right, speaking most raucously through the newspapers owned by Axel Springer, suggested that the far-left were dangerous communists. Or, at best, anarchists who would sap West Germany's Cold War resolve. The Left, led by writers such as Heinrich Boll , summoned up the ghosts of Nazism. The Right cried "Communism!", the Left cried "fascism!"
Of course, West Germany in the 1970s was not seriously threatened by either communism or fascism. But there was a real and dramatic choice faced by thousands of individual men and women who, one way or other, were formed by 1968. I will never forget a conversation with the cultivated, liberal and sober correspondent of a leading German newspaper. He told me how, at the beginning of the 1970s, he had come very close to joining a terrorist group. I subsequently heard the same story from several people now holding senior and responsible positions in Germany.
The Fischer case is interesting because he came about as close to the frontier to revolutionary violence as was possible without actually crossing it, and has since come about as far away from it is as possible. Watching him in February in Davos, with his silver-grey hair and sober dark suit, smoothly hobnobbing with the rich and powerful at the World Economic Forum, one had to pinch oneself to believe that less than 30 years ago he was a long-haired radical member of the so-called Putzgruppe, or "cleaning group" in Frankfurt's alternative, squatter scene.
The Putzgruppe was renowned for leading the resistance to police actions. Fischer himself has admitted to the rush of excitement when they went out to "show the pigs" a thing or two. His biographer speculates that one motive for young Joschka was that such macho heroism was sure to pull the girls. (Fischer is not renowned for celibacy.) His friend Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the flame-haired Franco-German hero of "68," says Fischer was also a bookish type. An autodidact, who left school early, his head was always buried in a volume of Marx, Hegel or Lessing. By 1978, he was apparently reduced to helping out in a second-hand bookshop called "Karl Marx", part-time taxi-driving, and complaining in an alternative magazine that "the lack of perspective, the hanging about, the not-knowing-what-to-do is becoming ever more unbearable."
Then there emerged a new party called "the Greens." Within two years, he had joined; within five, he was sworn in as a regional environment minister; then there was no looking back. As a proclaimed realist, he steered his party towards a coalition with the Social Democrats, and himself towards the chair of foreign minister and vice-chancellor of Germany. He was supported along the way by the votes of millions of Germans who, one way or another, had made a similar choice, at some point in the 1970s, to work through that once hated "system" -- and perhaps to change it from within.
There is a sharp irony in the 68ers being confronted with their past. For what distinguished the German 68ers from the 68 protests in Paris, Prague or Berkeley, was its obsession with West Germany's failure to face up to the Nazi past. So when the 68ers are invited to face up to their own past, they cannot walk away. And they do not. Cohn-Bendit, himself now under attack for a long-forgotten article in which he confessed to physical dalliance with young children in his care, says "it's quite legitimate that public figures should be forced to confront their past."
Last week Joschka Fischer was cleared of involvement in an incident in 1976 when Molotov cocktails were thrown and a policeman seriously injured. New evidence or allegations may emerge. But his general attitude has been summed up in his words "I stand by my biography." Summoned to be a witness at the trial of a now repentant former terrorist, who was a long-time friend, Fischer demonstratively went over afterwards, shook the man's hand, and talked to him quietly.
Of course, there are party politics in play. Germany has an election next year, and here's a chance for the opposition to score some points off the ruling "red-green"coalition. Leading the attack have been, once again, the right-wing Springer papers, and especially the tabloid Bild-Zeitung. In the 1970s, Bild was a revolting, intrusive, sensationalist organ of a populist attack on anyone who associated with, sympathized with, or merely tried to explain the motives of the protesters. Now the tabloid hacks are at it again. But Bild will have to watch out, or people will start investigating its past.
It is amazing to recall just where the men and women who now rule Europe's most powerful country were 30 years ago. But the lesson is profoundly reassuring. It shows the extraordinary success of German democracy in integrating non- and anti-democrats. This democracy was built with former Nazis, and millions who had gone along with Nazism. It absorbed former Stasi, and 17 million East Germans who had no practical experience of democracy. The 68ers cannot be compared with either of these cases. Much of what they did was a great strengthening of German democracy. But that democracy went on to reintegrate almost all of those who, despairing of change in the "Scheissstaat" turned to or flirted with violence.
Progressively, each of Germany's three "debates about the past" has been less substantial, less difficult, less painful. This one is really a mouse compared with the Stasi bear and the Nazi elephant. It was a necessary debate, but I don't think it will last long.
Now I have a new worry. What will German intellectuals do in 20 years time? What will they write about in the review pages, or talk about in endless television discussions? They will look back to find a difficult past to confront, and they will find nothing! Probably they will have to invent one.
Timothy Garton Ash is the author, most recently, of History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Despatches from Europe in the 1990s.
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