The New Old World (41 page)

The direction of the government, of course, will not be set just by the SPD leadership. The rules of any German coalition give significant leverage to the lesser partner. The Greens did not do particularly well in the September election, losing about a hundred thousand votes after a lack-lustre campaign, distinguished mainly by sectarian attacks on the PDS. The party, always somewhat erratic, has lost direction in recent years, as some of its less attractive features have taken their toll—what might be called the bohemian version of the
Spiessbürger
smugness of the Bonn Republic, especially evident in attitudes to the East, where the party is virtually non-existent. On some fiscal and social issues, the exclusively middle-class base of the party, not insensible to neo-liberal themes, can put it to the right of the SPD. Nevertheless, on balance the weight of the Greens should tilt the government in less conventional directions than Social Democracy left to its own devices would take.

The figure of Joschka Fischer, the new foreign minister, indicates why. Son of another victim of the war, a labourer expelled from Bohemia in 1946, he is an expressive survivor of the student radicalism of the late sixties. In those years, he led one of the most daring ‘spontaneist' groups in Frankfurt, Revolutionary Struggle, fellow spirits of the better-known
Lotta Continua
in Italy. With his comrades, he took a job on the assembly line in an Opel factory to rouse the working class to revolt. When GM flushed them out, Fischer turned to the squatters' movement in Frankfurt, organizing a mobile strike-force—the
Putzgruppe
—to block police actions against housing occupations, matching
where need be violence with violence. Eventually a demonstration against the death of Ulrike Meinhof in 1976 got out of hand, and a policeman was nearly killed. Fischer was arrested on suspicion of responsibility, but released for lack of evidence.
³

Changing his mind about the legitimacy of civil violence after some years driving a cab and dabbling in philosophy, he joined the Greens and quickly rose to the top as their most flexible and articulate leader. Unencumbered with doctrine, he was soon minister for the environment in a Red–Green coalition in Hessen, winning the admiration of the press for hard-headed ambition and political realism, though the portfolio itself bored him. As a deputy in the Bundestag, he specialized in the tart put-down, cutting through official bombast. His new job as chief of German diplomacy has a certain piquancy—the diplomatic hypocrisies of ‘the international community' have not been his natural idiom. But he is a learner. Under Fischer's guidance, the Greens have welcomed the expansion of NATO to Russia's borders, impervious to criticism from the left of the SPD.

This career can be seen as a cameo of a wider parabola. Fischer is the first prominent politician in Western Europe who in origin is a chemically pure product of 1968. The revolt of that year left deeper and more durable traces in German society than anywhere else. The mass movements were more spectacular in France and Italy, but they did not have the same cultural staying-power. Three features set the German upheaval apart. Morally, here alone the awakening of '68 was also a first attempt to settle accounts with the national past, as a generation started to discover and confront the record of its parents in the Nazi years, in what became a watershed in the history of the country. Intellectually, the revolt drew on a much richer complex of indigenous ideas than its counterparts elsewhere. The students who triggered the movement not only read Marx with the ease and lack of distance we might Smith or Mill—studying any classic in one's own language is a very different experience from scrutinizing celebrated texts from another—but were surrounded by the legacy of Benjamin, the presence of Horkheimer and Adorno, the interventions of Marcuse, the debut of Habermas. Where in other lands there was a rediscovery of long-forgotten texts and traditions, here
there was a living continuity. The Frankfurt School occupied a unique position within the generally conservative culture of the Federal Republic—paradoxically, there was no collective body of social and philosophical work remotely rivalling it in power or influence. Naturally, its conceptual after-images persisted long past the street battles.

Finally, there was a peculiar strain in the national culture at large, that sustained and relayed the moment of the late sixties and the early seventies into the Green movement a decade later. This was, of course, the long and chatoyant tradition of German Romanticism—interpreted broadly, from
Werther
to Wenders, the most enduring single strand in the sensibility of the country's intelligentsia. The combination of sheer imaginative energy and theoretical ambition that stamped the
Frühromantik
—the ambience of the Schlegels, Novalis, Jean Paul, Tieck, Schleiermacher; Hölderlin and Kleist off-stage—made it an explosive force far beyond the sentimental reach of the Lake Poets or the vaticinations of Hugo: a star-burst that could never be repeated or forgotten, as its consequences worked their way through successive agitated generations. In a great variety of different registers, two motifs remained constant in that descent: an acute sense of the mystery of the natural world, and of the high calling of youth. Inevitably, the political issue of this tradition was dimorphous. Its contribution to movements of the Right—figures like Friedrich Schlegel or Adam Müller were, after all, ultras in their day—is well known. But its influence on the Left was critical too. Benjamin, whose
One-Way Street
emits the first flashes of ecological warning in the Marxist tradition, came out of the turnof-the-century
Jugendbewegung
. When Adorno later engaged in his famous dispute with him, it is no accident he should have appealed
inter alia
to two exquisite passages of Jean Paul.
⁴

The Greens are populist heirs to this tradition. The revolutionary ferment of '68, however utopian, was on such a scale that when it ebbed, it left behind a dense fenland of countercultural enclaves in West Germany—a sympathetic, if no longer especially strenuous, milieu whose characteristic bookshops and cafés can be found in even the most unlikely settings. Here the environmental concerns of the eighties found a natural habitat.
Ecology was from the start, and in principle remains, the leitmotif of Green politics.
⁵
But the Greens also appealed to a wider band of intellectual opinion, not necessarily enamoured of their positive programmes, but accepting them as at least negatively preferable to social democratic stuffiness. There is no way of knowing in advance what power will do to this movement. All that is clear is that Germany is the one country where the question of what has ultimately become of the experience of '68 is going to be put to a direct test.

The immediate agenda of the Red–Green government, although it has provoked outcries from business lobbies and establishment journalists, is inoffensive enough. The package is more radical than New Labour's, but not decisively so. Fiscal policy will be somewhat more redistributive; a reduction in social wage costs will be financed by a novel energy tax; more corporatist arrangements are envisaged for job-creation, in the shape of an ‘Alliance for Work' supposedly uniting all social partners. Changing Germany's laws of citizenship, notoriously based on the principle of
jus sanguinis
, to facilitate naturalization of the country's four million immigrants, is a much more significant reform. This is an unambiguous act of emancipation, of direct human consequence. Labour's tortuous constitutional manoeuvres are scarcely an equivalent. But if Schröder's programme seems less conservative than Blair's, this is also a function of its context. Kohl was no Thatcher: the centre of political gravity never shifted so far to the right in Germany.

The move of the capital to Berlin will be a much more dramatic change than any act of the coalition. No feature of the post-war Federal Republic defined it more sharply than the location of the government in Bonn. Over time the population became strongly attached to this arrangement. But it always had two sides to it. On the one hand, the absence of a major political capital prevented any territorial concentration of economic or political power, allowing the Federal Republic to revert to what had been the natural order of Germany for centuries—the coexistence of a large number of regional centres of roughly comparable size, the
pattern of the Enlightenment. The happy results of this dispersion of vitality and influence between Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Cologne and other cities are evident to any visitor from over-centralized societies like England or France, and keenly felt by the citizens themselves.

On the other hand, there had to be a capital somewhere, and here the choice of Bonn was peculiarly deadening. Adenauer was determined to prevent Frankfurt—the obvious choice, for reasons of both geography and history—from becoming provisional capital after the war, because he feared it would tend to have a Socialist majority, and anyway riff-raff might take to the streets. Bonn was picked as an urban zero, a small Catholic university town where no mob would ever gather, a stone's throw from Adenauer's base in Cologne.
⁶
The intention was to isolate politics in a bureaucratic capsule from the influence of any popular life. It succeeded all too well. The real virtues of the Federal Republic became identified with its artificial capital. This was always a confusion. Regional variety and autonomy did not require sterilization of public argument. Federalism was not dependent on this parliamentary parking-lot; it was diminished by it.

At the beginning, not even Adenauer dared suggest that Bonn was anything but an interim location. The Constitution of 1949 laid it down that as soon as Germany was reunified, Berlin would become the nation's capital once again. But since unity appeared a remote horizon, gradually more and more vested interests became encrusted in the status quo. When the Wall finally came down, Bonn became the theatre of an astonishing spectacle. Far from the Constitution being automatically respected, a massive campaign was mounted in the West to keep Bonn as capital of the unified country. As the assembled parliamentarians prepared to vote on the issue, the town for the first time became a caricature of what it was set up to avoid: a cauldron of self-interested passions as shop-keepers, waiters, cab-drivers, not to speak of burly local MPs, refused service to, abused or threatened any deputy who had declared in favour of Berlin. When the vote came, it spoke volumes for the egoism of the Western political class. Kohl and Schäuble, the architects of absorption of the East, spoke for
Berlin. Brandt, in the most courageous speech of his career, rightly compared the prospect of remaining in Bonn to the notion of a French government clinging to Vichy in 1945.
⁷
But the majority on both their benches was shamelessly ready to break the promise of the Constitution. The SPD actually voted to stay in Bonn by the wider margin (126 to 110; CDU/CSU 164 to 154). The hostility of the Catholic south to a transfer of the capital to the Protestant north was predictable enough. But, strikingly, more rapacious even than Bavaria in its resistance to a move was the over-weight province of North-Rhine Westphalia, clinging to Bonn as a honeypot of local prebends. Honour was saved only by the Liberals and PDS, whose decisive majority in favour (70 to 27) created the final narrow margin (338 to 320) for Berlin.

This was a moment of truth, casting a sharp retrospective light on the Bonn Republic. Left to their own devices, the Western deputies would never have moved back to Berlin—they voted by a thumping majority to stay in Bonn (291 to 214). The implied prospect for the East would have been a modern equivalent of Victorian rule of Ireland from London. But if such colonial administration from afar was averted, what will take its place in the new capital remains to be seen. No European city has accreted so many misleading legends as Berlin. To resist them is easier, however, than to capture the elusive realities now taking shape behind them. Most people—not just foreigners, but Germans themselves—associate Berlin with Prussian military tradition, Bismarck's autocracy, Nazi violence and megalomania. In fact, Frederick II preferred his complex in Potsdam. Bismarck disliked Berlin so much that, after unification, he wanted to make Kassel—a Protestant version of Bonn—the capital of the country. Not a single Nazi leader of any prominence came from Berlin. Hitler loved Munich and relaxed at the other end of the country in Berchtesgaden. Berlin was not a natural setting for reaction. In 1848 it saw the sharpest fighting at the barricades of any city in Germany. By the turn of the century, it was the most industrialized capital in Europe, with a working-class population to match. In 1918 it led the November Revolution, and in 1919 was the scene
of the Spartakusaufstand. In the Weimar period, it was a Social Democratic and Communist stronghold.

The Third Reich and the Cold War cut off these traditions. After the fall of Hitler, the occupation and division of Berlin masked the question of what, if any, underlying continuities might have survived. The 1998 elections offer a startling answer. The Left won every single district. The map of the city is just one colour, in two shades: bright Social Democratic red in the west and southeast, deep post-Communist red in the centre and north-east. Compare Paris, long a permanent fief of the Right; Rome, where Fini's ex-fascists are the largest party; or even London, where Ken Livingstone will never sweep Finchley or Kensington. Bismarck's nightmare has come true. Berlin is going to be the most left-wing capital in Europe.

The electoral profile of a city is, of course, only one index of its character. What kind of a metropolis is the future Berlin otherwise likely to become? A true
Hauptstadt
is a synthesis of three functions—the focus of a country's political life, as seat of government; a nexus of wider economic activities; and a magnet of emergent cultural forms. The fundamental question is whether these will, in fact, intersect in Berlin.
⁸
The city remains the largest city in Germany, with a population over twice that of its nearest rival: 3.4 million inhabitants dispersed across some 550 square miles, a quarter of it woods and lakes. During the Cold War, both parts received preferential treatment as showcases of their respective regimes. Subsidies were, of course, far higher in the West, where everything from factories to art-shows was lavishly funded in the battle against Communism; but the East got more investment than the rest of the DDR too.