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A colourful chronicle of Germany's past
By Bertrand Benoit

Published: November 19 2007 02:00 | Last updated: November 19 2007 02:00

Two years ago, as Germany's coalition of Social Democrats and Greens was reaching its twilight, a book by Joschka Fischer, its foreign minister, hit the bookshops with The Return of History .

The Financial Time's verdict on the tome - a heavy-going piece of international relations theory - was, to put it politely, mixed. It concluded with the hope that the most colourful politician of the country's post-war era would soon publish his memoirs and let us in on the kitchen secrets of the red-green coalition. Last month, fresh from a year spent teaching in the US, the former Green leader obliged. His chronicle, The Red-Green years , is a tasty treat that was well worth the wait.

First a warning: covering the period from Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's election in 1998 to the September 11 terrorist attacks, the book ends before the mighty German-US fallout over Iraq. Some readers will feel short-changed, but Fischer's insight and talent as a story-teller make having to wait two years for the sequel almost bearable. Yet the period was not uneventful. The first half of the book covers the Nato-led military intervention in Kosovo, the Federal Republic's first war since the Nazi defeat in 1945.

Reading Fischer, one feels almost compassion for the inexperienced team catapulted into office after 16 years of conservative rule. In its first year, it was confronted with the challenge of Kosovo and a recession, and had to chair both the European Union and the Group of Eight industrial nations. "History was not being easy on us," laments Fischer.

There was no shortage of domestic drama either, starting with the resignation of Oskar Lafontaine, SPD chairman and finance minister, from both offices within months of the coalition taking power. Indeed, although The Red-Green Years is billed as a foreign policy account, its juiciest bits relate to Fischer's battles with his own party.

The Greens of the 1990s were a half-reconstructed alliance of pacifist utopians, amateur politicians and ambitious, hard-nosed realists. In the long list of unruly party conferences Fischer presided over - essentially street fights between his "Realos" (realists) and the "Fundis" (fundamentalists) - the May 13 1999 congress in Bielefeld, at the height of Nato's bombing campaign, stands out. Doused in red paint by an outraged militant, Fischer went on to deliver a rousing speech, defeating an anti-war motion from the left that would have forced him to resign as foreign minister. "I was thinking about . . . the long path my party had travelled up to Bielefeld, about the high personal price this travel had cost me, wondering if I could find the strength to carry on. And whether I wanted to," Fischer writes.

As the face of the Greens to the outside world, Fischer felt a lonely, misunderstood figure in a party whose national leadership "was emotionally always alien to me and remains so to this day". One lesson that resonates is the fact that the Greens' grudging acceptance of foreign military interventions - just like the SPD's painful conversion to economic reforms in Mr Schröder's second term - could only be won through decisive leadership. Its absence may explain both parties' descent into populism today.

In foreign policy terms, Kosovo's implications reached far beyond the Balkans. It set the precedent that allowed Germany to join the US-led war in Afghanistan after 9/11. But it also established tough criteria as to the legitimacy of military operations. These and the scars left by the debate go a long to way towards explaining Fischer and Schröder's categorical opposition to the war in Iraq.

After so much drama, the pace inevitably slackens as Fischer moves to the travails of the EU. In his "Humboldt" speech of May 12 2000 calling for a united federal Europe, Fischer set out the ideas that would eventually lead to the drafting of an EU constitution, an ambitious project that ended in failure after its rejection by French and Dutch voters in 2005.

It is tempting to see this defeat, which Fischer took as a personal blow, as a metaphor for the man's waning influence later in his term. Schröder's gradual hijacking of EU policy left him with little else to do but contemplate the deadly downward spiral of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This hardly works to the detriment of the book. Fischer's enlightening portrayal of Schröder, a man endowed with unique leadership qualities, boundless cynicism and flashes of extraordinary political lucidity, is only one of the facets that make The Red Green Years a worthwhile read. So are the countless anecdotes and the uniqueness of the voice . Berlin has turned a little greyer since Fischer's retirement as an active politician but it has gained a precious chronicler of its recent past.

The writer is the FT's Berlin bureau chief

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007