Cashing In on an Inglorious Past

Whoever has left nothing lasting behind can still market his name. Joschka Fischer has been marketing his for twenty years.

I. The text

On 28 October 2026 a text by Joschka Fischer appeared in German newspapers under the headline “Europe’s greatest enemy sits in its own house”. It comes from Project Syndicate, which sells Fischer’s column “The Rebel Realist” to newspapers around the world every month. In it Fischer warns against Marine Le Pen and the AfD, against “egocentric nationalism”, which he calls Europe’s “most self-destructive hereditary disease”. On Ukraine, he writes, Europe has formed a “united front” and is showing “its determination to become an independent world power”. If the nationalists win, a dictated peace looms.

Why the nationalists are winning, Fischer does not ask. France’s debt crisis and the weak federal government appear in his text only as accelerants. In “Small Protection” we showed that the role of guardian of order falls to Le Pen because the centre no longer delivers, and in “Are Democracy and Competence Incompatible?” how voters, after a chain of incompetent governments, follow whoever promises to put an end to it. Fischer’s text is addressed to the voters, who are not to vote the wrong way. It is not addressed to those who govern and would have to deliver. That is convenient for a man who himself governed for seven years.

The text is confetti. The question is who fires it and why anyone listens.

II. The street fighter

Fischer came to Frankfurt in the mid-sixties, without a school-leaving certificate and with an abandoned photography apprenticeship. He became a figure of the “Sponti” scene and a member of the group “Revolutionärer Kampf”, worked for half a year at Opel until he was dismissed, and then drove a taxi. In March 1973 photos show him in a street battle of the so-called “Putzgruppe”, beating the police officer Rainer Marx. When the pictures became public in January 2001, Fischer was foreign minister. He apologised publicly.

In May 1976, after a demonstration at which a police officer suffered severe burns from a Molotov cocktail, he was arrested as a suspect and released after two days. He denied having thrown firebombs himself, and he was never charged. In January 2001 he testified as a witness at the trial of his former companion Hans-Joachim Klein, who had taken part in the attack on the OPEC conference in Vienna. Prosecutors then examined whether Fischer had told an untruth about his acquaintance with the Red Army Faction member Margrit Schiller, and dropped the investigation because other witnesses supported his account.

Fairness requires saying all this. Many of his generation went through similar things, and nobody has to atone for his youth for ever. But Fischer did not draw a lesson from that youth that he passed on to others. He made a legend of it: from stone-thrower to foreign minister. The legend is the first capital he cashes in on.

III. Never again Auschwitz

On 13 May 1999 Fischer stood before the special party congress of the Greens in Bielefeld. For seven weeks NATO had been bombing Yugoslavia, and Germany was flying with it, in combat for the first time since the Second World War. There was no mandate from the UN Security Council. A demonstrator hit Fischer with a paint bomb, rupturing his eardrum. Then he spoke: “Auschwitz is incomparable. But I stand on two principles: never again war, never again Auschwitz; never again genocide, never again fascism.” The congress followed him by 444 votes to 318.

With this sentence Fischer took from the German peace movement its strongest argument and turned it against it. That was his real historical achievement. Whether the war in Kosovo prevented worse is disputed to this day. His second legacy is not disputed: when Vladimir Putin justified the annexation of Crimea on 18 March 2014, he expressly invoked the Kosovo precedent. When Fischer today calls the Russian attack “a flagrant breach of international law”, he is right. But he was also the foreign minister who shared responsibility for the first major breach of that order in Europe, without a mandate and with Auschwitz as justification.

IV. Where he was right

Fischer also had moments that last. On 12 May 2000 he gave a speech at Humboldt University sketching a European federation with a parliament and a government. It was courageous, and it was never realised. On 5 February 2003, as president of the UN Security Council, he chaired the session at which Colin Powell presented the alleged evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and demanded that the UN weapons inspectors examine it. Three days later at the Munich Security Conference he told Donald Rumsfeld, who was making the case for war: “Excuse me, I am not convinced.” He was right; the evidence was false.

Both moments belong in any honest balance sheet. But they also show how little he could achieve. The federation did not come, and he did not prevent the Iraq war. What remained was the sentence.

V. The visa affair

At the beginning of 2000 his minister of state Ludger Volmer issued an instruction to the embassies to decide in favour of the applicant when in doubt. The embassy in Kyiv, which had already issued more than 150,000 visas in 1999, became a gateway, as it later emerged, also for people smugglers, forced prostitutes and criminals. On 25 April 2005 Fischer testified before the Bundestag committee of inquiry for an entire day, live on television. He admitted mistakes and accepted “political responsibility”. He did not resign. In June the Social Democratic and Green majority ended the taking of evidence after thirty minutes; the Federal Constitutional Court provisionally stopped that. Shortly afterwards the government was voted out.

Accepting political responsibility without bearing any consequences is a skill. Fischer has mastered it.

VI. The name as a commodity

In November 2005 Fischer left office. He said at the time that he was exchanging “power for freedom”. The freedom at first consisted of a visiting professorship at Princeton. In 2008 he became Senior Strategic Counsel at the Albright Stonebridge Group, the consultancy of former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, advising Siemens, BMW and Deutsche Börse among others. In 2009 he founded his own firm, Joschka Fischer & Company, with a former spokesman of the Green parliamentary group. In the same year BMW hired him to sharpen its employees’ environmental awareness. Guido Westerwelle remarked that it was a pity Greens always arrived in the social market economy once their term of office was over.

In September 2009 Fischer appeared before journalists in a Brussels hotel, invited by the energy company RWE. He promoted the Nabucco gas pipeline that RWE and the Austrian company OMV wanted to build. “Europe needs Nabucco,” he said. The work was essentially the same as before, only for a company. Asked whether it paid better than a ministerial post, he replied: “Could be.” In June 2013 Nabucco was finished; the gas from Azerbaijan went to another pipeline.

Since then Fischer has been what speaker bureaus call a “thought leader in international politics”. He can be booked for foreign and security policy, the future of Europe, globalisation, crisis management and environmental policy. The price is available on request.

VII. From paint bomb to atom bomb

The man whose party grew out of the peace movement now demands whatever the moment requires. In March 2025 he told Stern that Europe was “alone from now on” and that two per cent for defence was not enough. He called for conscription for men and women and a European nuclear umbrella. In April 2026 in Vienna he advised the Austrians to reconsider their neutrality, a concept of the Cold War. In October 2026 he writes of Europe’s determination to become an independent world power.

The pattern is always the same. Fischer stands on the side where the majority of his milieu currently stands, and he supplies it with the credibility of someone who once stood on the other side. In 1999 it was the pacifist who justified the war. Today it is the old street fighter who demands rearmament. The conversion itself is the product. It sells in any direction, as long as it comes from the right name.

VIII. The thesis

This past is inglorious not because Fischer did nothing. It is inglorious because little of what he did has remained that one could be proud of. The war without a mandate became a precedent for others. The federation remained a speech. The visa affair ended without consequences for him. The pipeline he promoted was never built. What remains is a sentence in Munich and a name.

Fischer has been cashing in on that name for twenty years, as adviser, speaker and columnist. That is his right. But whoever markets his name should not expect his texts to be read as the warnings of a statesman. They are products. And when someone who helped bring about the situation he laments goes looking for Europe’s greatest enemy in its own house, he should start with the mirror.

Further reading: Small Protection · Are Democracy and Competence Incompatible? · The Genesis of the Confetti Cannons · The Titanisation of the Confetti Cannon