Goodbye To All That

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STRUMPF / AP PHOTO THAT WAS THEN: Schröder, who led the Young Socialists in the late 1970s may make way for younger politicians

Fischer split from the more extreme factions in his own movement and later brought his pragmatic style and trenchant wit to the Greens, which he joined in 1982, just two years after the party was founded. He was the first Green to take a government post, wearing sneakers to his swearing-in ceremony in 1985 as Environment Minister in the state of Hesse. His appointment as German Foreign Minister, the highest post held by a Green politician, lent Germany a distinctive presence on the international stage, one enhanced when the former anti-militarist turned humanitarian interventionist backed German troop participation in Kosovo and later questioned Donald Rumsfeld on the eve of the Iraq war. ("Excuse me, I am not convinced," he told the U.S. Defense Secretary about claims that weapons of mass destruction were hidden in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.)

Schröder was not an active '68er. But he too absorbed the values of the protesters and their hunger for social justice. His ready grin and populist touch were for many young Germans a welcome relief from Helmut Kohl, his predecessor as Chancellor, whose fondness for woollen sweaters and oompah brass bands reminded many of a past their parents and grandparents preferred not to discuss. Schröder's ease in front of the camera and on the stump helped his party recoup a seven-point deficit in opinion polls prior to last month's election. There's a sense in Berlin that the fun people are clearing their desks. The German Defense Minister, Peter Struck, sang in a rock band; Schröder and Fischer were renowned for their fondness for Cuban cigars and a comfortable lifestyle.

"Governing is fun!" Schröder quipped at the end of his first term, sending shock waves though Germany's conservative establishment. "They all wore suits and ties to the office," Lindner said of his colleagues in the Bundestag. But "in their heads they saw themselves as from another culture." "There was a feeling that they were on the same wavelength as you, that we had something in common," Stefan Hermes, 25, a Berlin student wrote recently in a tribute in Der Tagesspiegel. "The '68ers changed politics."

They certainly accomplished some — though by no means all — of their goals. The Red-Green coalition introduced reforms in gay rights and environmental protection, and helped encourage more tolerant views of minorities. The coalition, says Jana Hensel, 29, author of After the Wall, an account of growing up in East Berlin, "has effected a monumental change in the past seven years. Germany has a new self-confidence. We are going to miss these guys."

Not enough, apparently, to vote for them. Whereas 20 years ago the Greens relied on people under 30 for most of their support, today their base is aging and the bulk of their vote comes from Germans in their 40s and 50s. Jan Böttcher, a 27-year-old law student at the Free University of Berlin, voted for the fdp, with their emphasis on free-market policies. "The big difference between us and the '68 generation is that we don't feel any real revolutionary drive," says Böttcher. "We feel an affinity with the economic system more than a need to demonstrate against it." First-time voters in last month's elections ranked "labor-market policy" as the key factor that would determine their support. Social justice trailed well behind, and environmental policy was ranked next to last, registering with just 8%.

"Young Germans tend to let their belly decide who they vote for," says Stefanie Wahl of the Bonn-based think tank the Institute for Economic and Social Research. They have also embraced the traditional family values that their firebrand elders rejected. Not for them the lifestyle of Fischer — married four times and now divorced with a girlfriend half his age — or Schröder, who has a similar record. In a recent poll by the Forsa agency in Berlin, 87% of young people aged 18 to 30 said they were in favor of marriage n favor of marriage, 90% said they wanted (or would probably want) children and 80% believed in one true love. All of that is "a reaction," according to Ulrich Schneekloth, a researcher at TNS Infratest Social Research in Munich, against "the excessive individualization" of the 1968 generation. Conservative politicians have already tuned in to that social change. "The values of the 1950s are very important to us," Dieter Althaus, 47, the cdu Governor of Thuringia and a confidante of Merkel, told Time last month. "The home and the family are our focal point."