Goodbye To All That

Sunday, Oct. 09, 2005 By ANDREW PURVIS / BERLIN

OLD GUARD: Joschka Fischer, left, and Gerhard Schröder

ROBERTO PFEIL / AP

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And those grand, global dreams that motivated the '68ers? So uncool. "Environmental issues and all those big ideas just aren't as important anymore," says Birgit Gugath, 25, a political-science student in Berlin. "We have to take care of ourselves." For most young Germans the biggest worry is unemployment. "No matter how good your grades are," says Böttcher, "there is no guarantee that it will lead to a job. We've become a lot more flexible than our parents' generation. But we also live with a lot more insecurity." Last week, Gugath tuned into a favorite radio show aimed at helping young Germans find work. The jobs they were looking at were in Australia. In 2002, Gugath voted for the Greens and Schröder's Social Democrats; last month she ticked the Christian Democrat box. "I'm a little embarrassed to tell my friends about it," she admits. "But something has to happen. Germany needs this kind of a signal for change."

The biggest winner from the generational shift may be the fdp. A party that once relied on support from middle-aged voters increasingly appeals to the young. In the election, the fdp's youthful leadership stressed a simple campaign message that called for radical labor-market and tax reform. Even the Greens no longer stand in the way of market reforms, and can sound as fiscally responsible as Germany's postwar Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard. "Our concern was never the redistribution of wealth, but rather justice between the generations," says Renate Künast, outgoing Minister for Agriculture and Consumer Protection and Fischer's successor as co-leader of the Green parliamentary group. Matthias Berninger, 34, the co-leader of the Greens in the Hesse state parliament, says he fights with other leading party members "about how much debt the state should take on. We can't pass the burden to the next generation."

It still seems likely that the next German government will be headed by someone who came of age in the tumultuous 1960s. But Merkel, 51, though raised on the Beatles, grew up in East Germany. Her sense of the essence of the 1960s must be very different from that of Wessis of the same age — less flower power and protests against the Vietnam war, more Soviet tanks rolling into Wenceslas Square to crush the Prague Spring, and the numbing Soviet leadership of the Brezhnev era. Christian Wulff, 46, Governor of Lower Saxony and one of the most prominent young leaders in the Christian Democrat party, told reporters last month: "We need to look at the 1968 generation with a greater degree of sophistication. They did bring about change. But in many cases they threw the baby out with the bathwater." Althaus, the Thuringia Governor who is also Merkel's point man for East Germany, puts it more starkly. Social justice and equality were the big issues of the older generation, he says, "but we place more importance on freedom than equality."

Younger Germans seem to like the absence of ideological baggage that is typical of the new politicians. But the same lack of engagement means that some don't bother to vote or to become involved in politics at all. In the 2002 Shell Youth Study, which its authors say still holds true today, only 34% of respondents under 25 said they had any interest at all in political affairs. That is down from 57% of the same age group in the early 1990s. Says Hensel, the author from East Berlin: "With Fischer, for example, you knew what he stood for. With these new politicians, they don't stand for anything."

Standing for nothing may suit the mood of a Germany that wants to concentrate on pocketbook issues rather than big ideas. But ideas, passion, fervor have a habit of unexpectedly coming back to life. In 1968, the country was being governed by its first ever coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats. With the two big parties working together, there was no effective opposition in parliament to measures the government introduced, including the Emergency Acts, which gave the state new powers to snoop into the lives of ordinary Germans. And what happened? Fischer and his friends took to the streets. It would be an irony indeed if, just as the '68ers leave the stage, Germany were to adopt the very brand of opposition-free politics that first brought them into vogue.