Real History and modernGerman Politicians

Posted Wednesday, February 21, 2001

London, Wednesday, February 21, 2001

INSIDE GERMANY

The forgotten house guest who came back to haunt Fischer

BY ROGER BOYES

IT WAS Thomas Mann, the novelist, who made the simple discovery that houses can have careers. Buddenbrooks chronicled three generations of Germans and the rise and decline of the house they inhabited.

The pleasant four-storey building at No 64 Bornheimer Landstrasse in Frankfurt is not quite in the Thomas Mann league, but it has seen a century of ups and downs. Nowadays it is on the up: freshly painted, finely wrought cast-iron balconies, a high rent, a fashionable restaurant on the street.

Twenty-seven years ago Joschka Fischer [picture below, in black helmet, with thuggish friends beating a police officer] lived here. The Frankfurt prosecutor is now trying to establish whether a terrorist stayed with him and whether the Foreign Minister lied in court about her presence.

As a result German readers are as familiar with the ground plan of No 64 as British viewers are with the neighbourhood structure of Coronation Street. It was, in Herr Fischer's day, a cross between a political commune and an ordinary house-sharing arrangement.

Officer down On the left side of the first floor, Herr Fischer lived in a book-lined room. He shared a bathroom and kitchen with flatmates, including Daniel "the Red" Cohn-Bendit (expelled from France because of his work on the 1968 barricades), a sociology student and an earnest young man who later became a conservative leader writer. All were members of the Revolutionary Struggle, a militant group.

On the right side of the same floor there was an apartment occupied by radical feminists, including Barbara Köster, M Cohn-Bendit's girlfriend. On the third floor there were other street fighters. One day Margrit Schiller, a terrorist recently released from jail, came to stay, sleeping, it seems, on the feminist side of the house, but (as she remembers it) breakfasting with Herr Fischer.

In court, Herr Fischer could not remember the visit. Now he does -- hence the perjury investigation -- but argues that he did not lie: each apartment was self-contained and so there was no suggestion that he had in some way sheltered a member of the Red Army Faction.

Among other things, the prosecutor will be quizzing Frau Schiller (who now lives in Uruguay) about the nature of her breakfast in 1974. The career of Germany's Foreign Minister hangs on this and similar questions.

It seems improbable that the prosecutor will ever nail Herr Fischer, but the mere fact of the investigation fuels suspicion: that Frau Schiller was perhaps not the only terrorist to pass through the house and that Herr Fischer, who claims to have renounced revolutionary violence, actually flirted with it. Allegations surfaced yesterday that he was involved in a discussion about a petrol-bomb attack on the Spanish Consulate in the 1970s.

The conventional wisdom is that all politicians lie. Most journalists would not agree -- many of us have known honest practitioners -- but it is a profession prone to reinvention. Herr Fischer may not be guilty of the small lies truffled out by the conservative press, but there is a growing concern that he is an exponent of the Big Lie. The core of his political philosophy has been the need to prevent another Auschwitz. When Frankfurt acquaintances hijacked an aircraft during the terrorist era and divided passengers into Jews and non-Jews, he realised (belatedly) that a turning-point had been reached: the men of violence, his contemporaries, were behaving like the despised Nazi generation.

Yet now Herr Fischer has been forced to concede that he attended a rabidly anti-Israeli conference staged by the Palestine Liberation Organisation. When this story emerged recently, Herr Fischer knew that he was in trouble and engaged a lawyer.

A month ago it seemed as if Herr Fischer was indispensable to Gerhard Schröder. In fact, no one is indispensable to the Chancellor. A new Green politician is doing well as Agriculture Minister, demonstrating the competence of the Greens as a governing party. That used to be Herr Fischer's function. The wind is turning against him.