Green chameleon

Date: 05/11/1998

GERMANY'S new foreign minister has a rubbery face, not unlike Mr Bean's, and an elastic personality to match.

Joschka Fischer can at times be extremely witty, or severe, or analytical, but never all three at the same time. He switches from one to another without any explanation, but always with genuine conviction. He is currently in his melancholic phase, although he would probably describe it as 'statesmanlike'.

There have been so many metamorphoses - physical as well as spiritual - that at times even Fischer himself appears to have difficulty keeping track. In the curriculum vitae he penned for the handbook of the members of the outgoing Bundestag, he struggled to fill three lines with the barest details: date and place of birth and the years of his parliamentary tenure.

Either he is very modest, or he has something to hide. Since no one has ever accused the leader of the Greens of undue modesty, it is hard to escape the conclusion that there are aspects of his life which he does not want to advertise.

Although some of the blank spaces have been filled in by diligent researchers, Fischer remains an enigma.

His origins are ordinary enough. Born 50 years ago in a village in southern Germany, he was raised in a God-fearing home. His parents were ethnic Germans driven out of Hungary after the war. 'Joschka' is the Hungarian diminutive, spelt the German way, for Josef, his given name.

Josef Fischer senior was a master butcher. His domineering wife Elisabeth wanted their son to become a civil servant and brooked no opposition. Young Joschka was enrolled in a grammar school, but soon began to display the first signs of rebellion. “He was always a difficult child,” his mother complained later.

So difficult was her impulsive son that one day he dropped out and took up an apprenticeship in a photography shop. He left that, too, before long, and at the age of 19 ran off to Gretna Green in Scotland to marry his first wife Edeltraud, then a minor.

Moving as far away as he could from his Catholic roots, Fischer wound up in Frankfurt. There, in the milieu of squatters' revolts and anti-Vietnam War protests, he discovered Marx, Mao and their German apostles. Frankfurt was the centre of revolutionary fervour in the 1960s, effervescing with young people in a hurry to change the world. Fischer mugged up on Marxist classics, attended university lectures by celebrated philosophers of the Frankfurt School and joined the leftist group Revolutionary Struggle.

To make ends meet, he begged in the streets, did casual jobs, worked for a period on Opel's assembly lines, ran a Marxist second-hand bookshop, and drove a taxi around Germany's financial capital. He hung out with friends who took the revolutionary cause very seriously indeed, and went demonstrating with them against NATO and US 'imperialism', exhorting the use of violence against the capitalist state. The police had files on him, his telephone was tapped and he was once arrested on suspicion of consorting with terrorists.

Fischer himself became implicated in the assassination in 1981 of the economics minister of Hesse. The murder weapon had been stolen from a US base and transported in Fischer's car by his acquaintance Hans-Joachim Klein, a terrorist who once belonged to Carlos the Jackal's group and was found in hiding in France in August this year. However, the police were satisfied that Fischer did not know what his car had been used for.

He had, in any case, become disillusioned by the violent tactics of the Baader-Meinhof gang and lined up with those on the left who sought a peaceful way to power. In 1977, at the time of the bloody 'German autumn', Fischer became a convert to democracy.

In contrast to most of his colleagues in the anarchic Green Party, he was single-minded too. Not for him the endless discussions about fundamentalist principles and impractical organisation. Fischer was a Realo from day one, uninterested in debates about whether sending letters by air mail was politically correct, and determined to chart a course to the institutions where decisions were really made.

In 1983 he was among the first group to enter the Bundestag as a Green 'co-MP'. Two years later, he became the first Green anywhere in Germany to take office, as environment minister in Hesse, wearing an oversized jacket and white training shoes as he swore an oath of loyalty to the constitution.

That first experiment with Green government in Hesse was a disaster, wracked by constant bickering with Social Democrat coalition partners over nuclear power and other environmental issues. Fischer held the office for a mere 14 months, but learned a great deal during that time about the art of compromise and the burden of unrealistic goals.

All over Germany, the shambolic Greens dropped out of regional parliaments and the Bundestag, forcing them to reappraise their strategy. Embittered by their defeat, many Fundis left the party and returned to their communes. Fischer regrouped the Realos, purged the remaining Fundis, and plotted the party's comeback.

By the time the Greens were re-elected to the Bundestag in 1994, Fischer was their undisputed leader.

He was, again, a different man. He had become deeply interested in foreign affairs and had written a book entitled Risk Germany, arguing that his country's stability depended on its role in NATO and in the process of European integration. The thesis was not very original, but in those days amounted to Green heresy.

A year later, as Serb troops were slaughtering Bosnian civilians in Srebrenica, Fischer experienced another conversion, from anti-war protestor to passionate advocate of armed intervention against murderous regimes.

Then came the physical transformations. After separating from his third wife in 1995, Fischer embarked on a radical diet, shedding 30 kilos within a few months. He took up running, and now jogs up to 12 kilometres a day and has even run a marathon in under four hours. He sticks to his bananas and mineral water diet religiously, and never touches alcohol.

Fischer did not become mean in his leaner body, only more serene. The rapier wit is still there, but these days he prefers to advertise his cerebral qualities.

His attire has also changed. The slimmed-down politician now wears Boss jackets, black T-shirts and black shoes on normal days, and even a tie for special occasions. Germany no longer shivers in horror at the thought of Joschka Fischer addressing the United Nations. The former revolutionary clown has been domesticated. Middle-aged voters, especially women, love him.

Nor do his followers provoke much angst. As he demonstrated at the Greens' conference late last month, Fischer has moulded the party members in his own image. As long as they are in power, they are content.

Few dissenting voices could be heard during the debate on the joint government programme, most of which had been written in red rather than green ink, and few opposing votes were cast. As the Greens themselves admit, Fischer has them all in his pocket.

He lorded it over the conference proceedings, nonchalantly eating bananas, and making one speech to gently remind the grass roots that their excessive zeal had very nearly cost the party its seats in the Bundestag. In an election where the outgoing government was decimated, the Greens managed to lose some votes while the Social Democrats prospered.

It was a salutary lesson. Fischer had argued for pragmatism, but was ignored. His party will not make the same mistake again, so long as the going is good. They will back him even if he sends German troops to war, as he has agreed to do in Kosovo.

Fischer has yet to spell out precisely what he will do with his mandate, circumscribed as it is by his Social Democrat bosses.

But he has already pledged that there will be no Green foreign policy, only a German one. NATO is safe, as is Germany's commitment to the transatlantic link. He has promised new 'accents', particularly in the European arena: greater concern for human rights, more openness and transparency in European institutions, and a stronger emphasis on sustainable development; in other words, something of a new beginning in international relations.

Perhaps he is being naïve. But who is better qualified to engineer that than Joschka Fischer? He is, after all, quite an expert at new beginnings.

BIO