Goodbye To All That

Like an indecisive interior decorator, Germany has been mulling gaudy color schemes for its new coalition. Yet even if this week sees a final choice — pairing Christian Democrat black with Social Democratic red — the government will appear oddly colorless. Missing from any Cabinet will be the country's brightest politician, Joschka Fischer, 57, Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor since 1998. The street-fighting iconoclast who settled happily into a role at the peak of the German establishment, and whose international fame and personal popularity always seemed out of kilter with the modest size of his Green party, has retired from frontline politics. He left the Bundestag, the seat of parliament in central Berlin, with a wave at waiting reporters and a typically informal salutation: "Ciao, ragazzi."

That exit marked the end not only of Fischer's ministerial career but of the government in which his party served as junior partners to the Social Democrats. "The red-green chapter which my generation wrote is irretrievably at an end," he commented later. Politicians raised in the social turmoil of the 1960s — they are known as "'68ers" after a dramatic year of mass protests — were moving on. "Young people must write the new chapter."

For German voters of Fischer's age or older, these words may have come as a shock. For many, the pixie-faced politician embodies all the values they associate with youth: irreverence, passion, engagement with radical causes, an enduring whiff of rebellion. Fischer half-jokingly told Die Tageszeitung, a leftist newspaper: "I was one of the last live rock 'n' rollers of German politics. Now there's an up-and-coming generation in every party who mime to pre-recorded tracks." In any case, the elections on Sept. 18 showed Germans are ready for different mood music. The Social Democrats lost four percentage points, torpedoing any chance of a return to power for the incumbents. And although the Greens maintained their share of the vote at 8%, it was another small party, the Free Democratic Party (fdp), that attracted new and younger voters, many under 30, to edge ahead of Fischer's party with 10%.

Fischer and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder were the first German leaders born too late to feel implicated in Germany's Nazi past. One result was a bolder, more assertive German foreign policy and a willingness for the first time since 1945 to deploy German combat troops abroad. Schröder, 61, may yet find a way to hang onto some power — last week, he continued to discuss his prospects with his party and with the Christian Democrat leadership under Angela Merkel — but he looks unlikely to dominate German politics again. Other contemporaries within the government are considering their futures. "The torch is being passed," Michael Naumann, a former Cabinet Minister under Schröder and a '68er himself, told Time. "But to whom?"

Germany's younger leaders are distancing themselves in style and substance from the generation they plan to replace. The issues that animated those born during or soon after the war — from opposition to nuclear weapons to support for gay rights — fail to excite younger voters, preoccupied by a completely different set of challenges.

Anxiety about the economy, about work and pensions, has replaced a desire to change the world. "People don't have to go the barricades any more: they just need a job," says Walter Lindner, a Fischer aide.

It's three decades since Fischer, a former taxi driver who organized the Revolutionary Struggle protest group, last manned barricades and fought Germany's police force on the streets. Grainy photos showing a black-helmeted Fischer apparently punching and kicking a police officer in Frankfurt in April 1973 re-emerged in the German press four years ago. He and his contemporaries were not just throwing off the straitjacket of 1950s-style conservatism, they were asserting a separation from their elders who were compromised by their support for the Nazis. In time, the compulsive need to reject the past infused militant movements in Germany with the violence that blighted the 1970s.