Joschka Fischer’s path to party leadership is intriguingly portrayed in a documentary, writes DEREK SCALLY in Berlin
THE MOST remarkable thing about Joschka Fischer is less that he joined the Green Party but that he stayed there for over two decades.
A fascinating new documentary, Joschka and Herr Fischer, traces his path from student revolutionary to statesman, finding clues to his complicated character in the turbulent backdrop of post-war West Germany.
Making a double bio-documentary about a politician and a country might seem an ambitious endeavour. To give such a film a cinema release rather than a late-night television screening seems even more daft.
Yet the film works, thanks to director Pepe Danquart’s snappy editing and gripping, innovative exposition.
Like Ebenezer Scrooge or James Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life, the film presents Fischer with footage from his life played out on big screens in the concrete cavern of Berlin's Tresor techno club.
An entranced Fischer soon recalls going through life feeling like an outsider, in permanent conflict with the world around him.
Born in 1948 to a family recently expelled from Hungary, Fischer had a “poor yet glorious” childhood in the village of Gerabronn, near Stuttgart.
With his family’s different dialect and traditions, Fischer’s outsider feeling was amplified by the “insular narrowness” of their new home town. Surrounded by Protestant villages, Gerabronn’s enclave status bred a pious, closed Catholic atmosphere that Fischer says was “like a little bit of Northern Ireland”.
While the scars of war were still visible in the streetscape, Fischer never saw the invisible scars of denial on his neighbours. When as a teenager he heard the full story about Hitler, the Nazis and the Holocaust, it compounded his shock over German guilt.
He left home for Stuttgart and later Frankfurt, his lack of a secondary education certificate not hindering him crashing lectures with philosophers like Horkheimer and Habermas. In Frankfurt, Fischer found himself drawn into the left-wing revolutionary scene, populated by others equally shocked by German wartime guilt and their parents’ determination to leave the past in the past.
By 1967, this intergenerational resentment exploded into pitched street battles across western Germany, shot through with an atmosphere of angst.
Fischer, like many of his peers, feared that the violent reaction of the state to their protests – over the Vietnam war and city redevelopment – was proof that West Germany was another Weimar Republic, slipping into fascism.
“It was of course absurd,” admits Fischer, “but it was the feeling at the time.” Therein lay the initial attraction of “revolutionary violence”, Fischer says: turning back on illegitimate state authorities their own violent tendencies.
As the student scene radicalised further, however, Fischer got out, disgusted by the “self-deception” of the extreme-left Red Army Faction (RAF).
“It was the opposite of what we wanted to achieve,” he says, describing their campaign of kidnappings and killings – justified in bureaucratic language – as no different to the behaviour of fascists they abhorred.
Exhausted, Fischer began driving a taxi, allowing his brain make some crucial realisations about life.
“In a taxi you get such a colourful mix of people, it soon made me a realist,” he says. “Left-wingers, put simply, want to liberate the good in man. In a taxi you soon realise that there are great things and awful things often in one person.” With this new-found realism he joined the burgeoning Green Party in 1982 during the West German rearmament debate.
From the beginning, the new party was in permanent conflict and hated by the Bonn establishment – “for them we were the political wing of the RAF or the fifth column of Moscow”.
The film has ample proof of another conflict, too: footage of an exhausted Fischer, head cupped in his hands in frustration, amid endless, emotional debates between the Green Party’s pragmatist realo and idealistic fundi camps.
“For me politics wasn’t just about protest but about aiming for a majority to change things once in power,” says the realist Fischer.
“The fundis were always for protest but when it came to doing anything they hesitated and thought, ‘the others can do that’.”
Eventually Fischer brought the Greens success beyond their wildest dreams – leading them into government in 1998. The fundi grassroots loved and hated Fischer for the prestige – and difficult choices – power brought.
The film’s dramatic high point is his 1999 party conference speech when, after being pelted with paint, he goes on to make an angry and emotional appeal for his pacifist party to support Germany’s first post-war military deployment against Serbia.
“After Srebrenica it had reached the point where I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror in the morning,” says Fischer.
“We were at the point where we had accused our parents of . This was about attempted mass murder and we were supposed to say we don’t want to have anything to do with that, it’s not our problem?”
Joschka and Herr Fischer is as ambitious and flawed as its subject. Despite running over two hours, the film deals only fleetingly with East Germany and suffers from a lack of critical voices. Yet it is a worthy self-reflection – a German speciality – on the achievements of an angry generation and one angry young man who fought the law and won.
“It’s the German success story that it could come out of the twilight,” says a pensive Fischer. “It just needed some forceful experiences to make it stronger.”