King Fischer.

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.

Paul Hockenos has had the good idea of fitting Fischer's mind-boggling career into the wider story of how Germany has dealt with its Hitler legacy and acquired its present character. An American commentator based in Berlin and specializing in German politics, he wrote a previous book on the neo-Nazi far Right, which was the opposing wing of the extra-parliamentary protest movement. His admiration of things German, and Fischer in particular, sometimes runs away with him, and loosens his prose and his judgment.

Fischer's parents were Hungarian Germans, modest people with a butcher shop in a village near Budapest. They seem not to have been Nazis, but after the war they were expelled from the country along with the other ethnic Germans. Born in Germany but an emigre, the young Fischer grew up rootless and restless, in a sort of social and spiritual vacuum into which trouble was likely to rush. Sure enough, he flunked out of school, ran away to marry the first of a series of five wives, and supported her and himself by shoplifting. In Frankfurt, he sat in on Marxist classes at the university, an autodidact with no formal education. Growing his hair and his beard, living in a "co-op" with squatters, he was the perfect stereotype of a rebel without a cause.

Violence and crime came naturally. He and his friends practiced street-fighting and throwing Molotov cocktails. When a woman in the squat was raped, they agreed that calling in the police wasn't the thing to do, but instead gave the rapist a beating he wouldn't forget. Photographs show that Fischer was present at a demonstration when a policeman was badly burned by a Molotov cocktail that exploded in his patrol car. The evidence was not enough for a conviction. Many years later, the daughter of Ulrike Meinhof created a scandal by providing a magazine with photographs of Fischer gratuitously beating up a policeman at another demonstration in 1973. He attended a PLO conference in Algiers to promote the usual anti-Israeli line, and can be seen in other photographs applauding Arafat's speech promising the "ultimate victory of the Palestinian people."

Quite why Fischer did not develop into a full-blown terrorist is unclear. With an edge of romancing or apology, Hockenos speculates that his "tryst with violence had gone way too far" and a voice within shrieked, "Stop!" Periods of living by stealing books and driving a taxi were dead ends. The discovery that he could be a persuasive orator fired ambition, allowing Hockenos to make the judgment that Fischer was really "a politics junkie second to none," and always "raring to climb back into the ring."

The United States alone guaranteed German freedom, but Fischer's big idea was that this had to stop. President Reagan's proposal in the early 1980s to station cruise missiles in West Germany gave Fischer his opening; he would advocate the scrapping of Adenauer's central policy of alliance with the United States at all costs, and replace it with pacifism. The Green party already had such a program, but it was a mere embryo, appealing only to the protest generation. With determination and skill, Fischer worked his way in a matter of years to the top of it.

Probably he could bring himself sincerely to support the issues that had brought the Greens to form a party--the abolition of nuclear energy, feminism, gay rights, multiculturalism, opposition to ecological abuse, and the whole kitbag of left-wing gripes and nostrums--but anti-American pacifism was the issue that made Fischer the leader of the Greens and a personality to be reckoned with. In the climate of public opinion compounded from guilt for the past and fear of the future, he acquired what Hockenos calls "pop-star status."

Implementation of Fischer's pacifism would have been as dangerous to the state as RAF and Baader-Meinhof terrorism. If Fischer had had his way, Germany would have opted out of the Cold War, and in due course the Soviet Union would have won at least Europe. Adenauer's idea was proved right when the United States brought the Cold War to a successful conclusion, supervising the peaceful reunification of the two Germanys.

Gerhard Schroder and the Social Democrats won the 1998 election but, in order to form a government, they were obliged to take the Greens into a coalition. So the unattractive, hirsute, and semi-criminal Sixties brawler and beater of policemen smoothly evolved into a member of the establishment--foreign minister for seven years, an ornament on national and international platforms, his hair cut short, well dressed in three-piece suits, and still able to extend his series of wives. The change in status, Hockenos observes, was visible in Fischer's narcissism and abusive behavior.

As minister, he was often contradictory to the point of incoherence. He got parliament to authorize the sending of troops on missions abroad, especially in the Balkans, where Hitler's armies had once been especially brutal. This unexpected rupture with pacifism almost destroyed the Green party, on which Fischer depended for office. But when the United States called a conference in Munich to put the case for overthrowing Saddam Hussein, Fischer jabbed a finger in the direction of Donald Rumsfeld and said, in English, "Sorry, you haven't convinced me!" Germany then joined France and Russia in opposing the Iraq campaign of 2003, and the alliance on which Adenauer had once staked Germany's future was effectively buried.

Meanwhile Fischer was carrying to an extreme Kohl's idea that Germany's future lay in a federal Europe. In a different manner than the overt terror of the RAF and the Baader-Meinhof gang, this too is a threat to the state. Hockenos gives the astonishing figure that, in the 1990s, for the $29 that every French taxpayer contributed to the European Union budget, his German counterpart paid in $264. At what point will German national interest assert itself, and how will it do so? This book aspires to be a cautionary tale about the way that Germany has been able to tame its monsters, even one with claws and teeth like Fischer, and so turn out as praiseworthy and provincial as everyone else in Europe. Fischer's career is over, but the tale may still have quite another ending.