Spring Break
Rebel with a Cause - The Incredible Life of Joschka Fischer
Issue date: 4/23/07 Section: Opinion
Joschka Fischer, Germany's former foreign minister and now a visiting academic at Princeton, seems entirely respectable. When he lectured recently, he dressed like an executive on Wall Street, in a charcoal pin-striped suit jacket, a red tie, and a blue-and-white striped shirt, which bulged across his portly figure. He exuded an air of professorial dignity, and peered over rimless glasses at his rapt audience. I took a class with Fischer last semester, and found him warm, engaging and insightful: he jutted his chin out defiantly when disagreeing with a point, and thumped the table to add emphasis. He told jokes, and mesmerized with stories of princes, politicians and prime ministers. But he still seemed staunchly conservative.
Appearances can be deceptive. When I sat down to talk with Fischer, I found him decidedly tight-lipped about his radical past - or at least that part of his past, between 1968 and 1977, when he was a leader in Germany's New Left, a militant student movement with Marxist-Leninist tendencies, notorious for fighting running street battles with police. Fischer insisted that his politics were firmly middle-of-the-road these days. He declined to have his photograph taken for this article, protesting plaintively, "But I like not to be known."
Fischer now prefers to stay out of the limelight, and it's easy to understand why. His startling political career has been dogged by scandal, most of it splashed in excruciating detail across the front pages of European newspapers. In the 1960s, he counted Red Army terrorists among his friends, threw petrol bombs during demonstrations and vowed to destroy totalitarianism at all costs. Disillusioned by violence, in the 1980s he made an astonishing about-turn and entered mainstream politics as a mover-and-shaker in Germany's Green Party. When he ascended to the dizzy heights of Foreign Minister in 1998, his metamorphosis from student agitator to starchy politician seemed to be numbingly complete. Now he lives comfortably with his fifth wife in Princeton, every bit the elder statesman. But as I talked with Fischer, I began to suspect that his new-found conservatism was a front. Despite all his protestations to the contrary, the troubled heart of a revolutionary still beats beneath this prim exterior. Fischer is still fighting for what he believes is right.
Appearances can be deceptive. When I sat down to talk with Fischer, I found him decidedly tight-lipped about his radical past - or at least that part of his past, between 1968 and 1977, when he was a leader in Germany's New Left, a militant student movement with Marxist-Leninist tendencies, notorious for fighting running street battles with police. Fischer insisted that his politics were firmly middle-of-the-road these days. He declined to have his photograph taken for this article, protesting plaintively, "But I like not to be known."
Fischer now prefers to stay out of the limelight, and it's easy to understand why. His startling political career has been dogged by scandal, most of it splashed in excruciating detail across the front pages of European newspapers. In the 1960s, he counted Red Army terrorists among his friends, threw petrol bombs during demonstrations and vowed to destroy totalitarianism at all costs. Disillusioned by violence, in the 1980s he made an astonishing about-turn and entered mainstream politics as a mover-and-shaker in Germany's Green Party. When he ascended to the dizzy heights of Foreign Minister in 1998, his metamorphosis from student agitator to starchy politician seemed to be numbingly complete. Now he lives comfortably with his fifth wife in Princeton, every bit the elder statesman. But as I talked with Fischer, I began to suspect that his new-found conservatism was a front. Despite all his protestations to the contrary, the troubled heart of a revolutionary still beats beneath this prim exterior. Fischer is still fighting for what he believes is right.
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