Subject: Viridian Note 00040: German Politics Key concepts: German politics, Joschka Fischer, German Green Party, Gerhard Schroeder Attention Conservation Notice: it's political biographies of German politicians written by a British Marxist postmodernist. Life may be too short to try to understand these people. Links: none Entries in the Viridian "Fungal Typography" Contest: http://members.aol.com/stjude/ http://www.saunalahti.fi/~jtlin/viridian/ http://www.wenet.net/~scoville/Viridian/viridiantext.html http://www.erols.com/ljaurbach/ http://www.empathy.com/viridian/ http://www.spaceways.de/Viridian/Viridiantype.html http://www.stewarts.org/users/stewarts/viridian.html http://way.nu/greens/typography.html http://abe.burmeister.com/viridian1.html http://rampages.onramp.net/~jzero/viridian/ Note: The Pope-Emperor returned from the California book tour with a raging case of L.A. pneumonia. Thanks to the modern miracle of antibiotics, I retained my place in our aging population. However, I find it necessary to extend the Fungal Typography Contest until January 31, 1999, so that the many new entries can be gloated over properly. The winner will be announced shortly after that date. Source: London Review of Books, 7 January 1999, pages 10- 16, "The German Question" by Perry Anderson. Bruce S remarks: Perry Anderson just spent a year as a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. His most recent book is THE ORIGINS OF POSTMODERNITY. He edited the NEW LEFT REVIEW in Britain, and is about as Marxist a guy as you are likely to find whose first language is English. He's one of these *new* Marxists however, as his class analysis of contemporary German society is broken up with much eloquent complaining about how bad the new architecture is in Berlin. Perry Anderson obviously pays a lot of sustained attention to the electoral minutiae of left-wing German politics. His profiles of Germany's new Prime Minister and Foreign Minister may help explain why these guys are provoking some head-scratching. "(((Prime Minister Gerhard))) Schroeder, whose father was killed on the Russian Front, comes from the debris of postwar German society. His mother was a charwoman; his first job was behind the counter in an ironmonger's shop; his degree was eventually obtained at night school. He became a leader of the Jusos, the SPD's (((Social Democratic Party))) youth organization in the early 70s, when it was a rebellious outfit well to the left of the Party, and took active part in mass demonstrations. (...) The aura of moderate pragmatism is quite recent. But there is no lack of charm: sturdy good looks, attractive thick voice, mischievous smile. (...) "The Greens did not do particularly well in the September election, losing about 100,000 votes after a lacklustre campaign, distinguished mainly by sectarian attacks on the PDS (((the post-Communist "Democratic Socialist Party."))) The Party, always somewhat erratic, has been losing direction in recent years, as some of its less attractive features have taken their toll == what might be called the bohemian versions of the Spiessburger 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, its exclusively middle-class base, not insensible to the attraction of neo-liberal notions, can put it to the right of the SPD. Even so, the Greens are likely to pull the Government in less conventional directions than Social Democracy, left to its own devices, would follow. "The figure of Joschka Fischer, the new Foreign Minister, indicates why this should be so. 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 strikeforce, the 'Putztruppe,' to block police action against housing occupations, matching violence with violence where need be. 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 attempted murder, but released for lack of evidence. "Changing his mind about the legitimacy of civil violence, he spent some years driving a cab and dabbling in philosophy; then joined the Greens and quickly rose to the top as their most flexible and articulate leader. Witty, trenchant, 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 specialised in the tart put-down, cutting through official bombast. (...) "Fischer's career can be seen as in many ways emblematic. He is the first chemically pure product of 1968 to become a front-rank politician in Western Europe. (...) Germany is the one country where the question of what has ultimately become of the experience of '68 will be put to a direct test." Bruce Sterling (bruces@well.com)