Rebel Rebel

Frankfurt, with its moderately exciting football team and financial district dubbed 'Mainhattan' by over-enthusiastic locals, is home town to some of the main players in recent German history. Böhse Onkelz for example, Germany's most successful hard rock band, with its full-blown Nazi/Skinhead past, or Sven Väth, famous Techno DJ whose base was the legendary Omen club. Now defunct, it had been located in the centre of town; a 20 minute walk from the university's Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research), birthplace of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, courtesy of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. The area in between is called Westend, and it was among its splendid late 19th-century townhouses that the mid-70s Häuserkampf raged in fierce streetfights. Squatting, militant, left-wing radicals tried to oppose the systematic destruction of housing space by speculators, and for a couple of short seasons the bourgeois quarter, with red and black flags flying from every third house, resembled a temporary anarcho-communist free zone. One of the prime movers under the flags was a man called Joschka Fischer.

One Saturday afternoon in the Summer of 1971, or maybe 72, on my way home from an open air concert by a local jazz-rock outfit called Dadazuzu (a name considered cool at the time), I took a wrong turn and ended up in Schumannstraße, where I heard The Flock's cover of the Kinks' 'Tired of Waiting' blaring from a huge speaker on a balcony. There was a fête going on in the street. Older people - but younger, prettier and freer than my parents - danced, ate, smoked and drank. Many of them were almost naked. Right in the middle of the street was a desk with a typewriter on it, so everyone could write whatever they wanted - a kind of collective Ecriture Automatique. I don't remember daring write something - I didn't even talk to anyone, I just watched. When I left a brief hour later, there was one thing I knew for sure: that's where I want to be, that's the scene my records and magazines are on about, that the pictures on my bedroom wall depict. On my way home to the suburbs, I imagined how it would be to belong. After this first brief encounter with Frankfurt's Left - the Sponti, as in 'spontaneous', a name I hadn't yet heard - I already had the barely describable yet very definite feeling of informal hierarchies that had to be ascended slowly, or circumvented only with great difficulty. But even that could not lower the promise and allure of an oppositional, subcultural milieu which I experienced for the first time one Saturday afternoon.

Without knowing it, I had stumbled across a party on the block: the squatted corner of Bockenheimer Landstraße/Schumannstraße, the pumping heart of Sponti Frankfurt, back to back with the Institut für Sozialforschung. The police clearing of this highly symbolic area in February 1974 was one of the narratives in director Alexander Kluges' In Gefahr und größter Not bringt der Mittelweg den Tod (In Peril and under Threat, on the Middle Course You're Dead), one of the few auteur films that were widely discussed on the Sponti scene - Spaghetti Westerns were generally preferred back then.

Joschka Fischer and Ignatz Bubis were the main opponents in the Westend showdown. Bubis, the well-known property speculator; Fischer, the notorious revolutionary (at least since his picture was on TV after his arrest in May 1976). The current Foreign Minister of Germany was suspected of having mortally injured a policeman with a Molotov cocktail during a demonstration on the occasion of Red Army Faction-co-founder Ulrike Meinhof's death in prison, the circumstances of which are still unclear. While Bubis was a hate figure among the left for being a speculator, nowadays he is one of the most hated public personas by the right. As spokesman for the Jewish Community in Germany he interprets his role actively, speaking out as a Jewish German citizen - and to the irritated discontent of many non-Jewish Germans - wherever there is a burning of a refugee shelter or a non-German is beaten up or killed by Skinheads. Last autumn he attacked elder statesman-cum-writer Martin Walser. The ex-fellow traveller of the German Communist Party had, in his acceptance speech on receipt of the 'Peace Prize of the German Booksellers', criticised the official rituals of Nazi-history awareness, suggesting that Germans could easily be forced to accept any political or social sacrifice when reminded of their past. A collective sigh was heard throughout the greater part of the reunified Republic, weary of continually having to face history. Finally an artist and thinker had said what everyone else thought but hadn't dared to utter. Shortly afterwards in Berlin, the tombstone of Bubis' predecessor Heinz Galinski was blown up, culprits unknown.

The old opposition of 'evil, dirty bloodsuckers', such as Bubis, and 'good, glamorous' Sponti streetfighters, such as Fischer, had been twisted around; and not just recently, with the former rebel turned pragmatic government politician, but right from the beginning. At the core this simplistic anti-capitalism was an unspoken belief structured around anti-Zionist conspiracy theories, as if unconsciously echoing the paranoid anti-Semitic violence of their parents' generation. It is, amongst other things, this Gordian knot of ideology that still breaks up discussions amongst the enlightened post-68 generation about how much of an advantage it is to have a former rebel like Fischer in government. Every conversation involving Fischer evokes the diffuse magic of the words Sponti, echoing with perished rebel-subcultures; Provos (as in 'provocationists'); Gammler (slackers) or Beats. The 'spontaneity' in Sponti paraphrases a vague post-68 theory, fuelled by sources as diverse as Summerhill and The Doors of Perception (1954), Mao Tse-Tung's Cultural Revolution and Wilhelm Reich's (later Larry Flynt's) Sexual Revolution, Anarcho-Syndicalism and the Frankfurt School, with a pinch of Machiavelli and Carl Schmitt. A non-committal mix of blueprints to live and revolt by, this theoretical soup is like an eclectic DJ-set: bordering on the incoherent but possibly harbouring an unintentional kick of brilliance. So is Joschka Fischer Fatboy Slim? Yes: from slim to fat to slim again, that's how bluntly history can be read into the body-metamorphoses of Sponti-rebel turned hedonist, late-Marlon Brando-Doppelgänger turned ascetic Mineral water-drinker.

He wanted to live his life like a novel, the Foreign Minister stated recently, back from an introductory world tour by German army plane. If Fischer was British, Julie Burchill would have written this novel, for she knows biographical metamorphoses all too well - from punk-propagandist to Thatcherite to Dianalogist. Fischer's cover blurb would read something like this: from Molotov Cocktail-thrower of the Frankfurt Häuserkampf to Cruise Missile-apologist of the Iraq airstrike. From 'freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose' - Janis Joplin was extremely popular amongst Spontis - to Kantian 'freedom is the insight into necessity'.

'One of us' is vice-chancellor now, and Fischer is the first to count AC/DC and Ice T. among his favourite musicians; the first vice-chancellor I have bought used books from (in the old days, he and Daniel Cohn-Bendit converted a patched up collection of stolen books into a more or less flourishing antiquarian bookshop, the Karl Marx-Buchhandlung - also one of the first places in late 70s Frankfurt where you could buy Punk and Reggae singles); the first vice-chancellor with whom I had direct and indirect bodily contact - football fouls, sex with the same women. Today, the death of the family through 'subversive' promiscuity, whatever that meant in the first place, is not an issue anymore: the tabloid Bildzeitung proudly presents 'Joschka's new one', a woman, always in her late 20s. (With around ten ex-wives between them, Schröder, Lafontaine and Fischer, the three leading figures of German government, represent the state of the art in high-level sexual politics.) Nowadays, it's a question of successive modernisation and the flexibility of the family through serial monogamy. An expert in redefinition, Fischer embodies the recent cultural history of Germany.