Power And The Idealists Or The Passion Of Joschka Fischer And Its Aftermath

The author of the best-selling Terror and Liberalism on the rise to power of the generation of 1968. The student uprisings of 1968 erupted not only in America but also across Europe, expressing a distinct generational attitude about politics, the corrupt nature of democratic capitalism, and the evil of military interventions. Yet, thirty-five years later, many in that radical generation had come into conventional positions of power: among them Bill Clinton (who reportedly stayed up all night reading this book) and Joschka Fischer, foreign minister of Germany. During a 1970s street protest, Fischer was photographed beating a cop to the ground; during the 1990s, he was supporting Clinton in a NATO-led military intervention in the Balkans. Here Paul Berman, "one of America's best exponents of recent intellectual history" (The Economist), masterfully traces the intellectual and moral evolution of an impassioned generation—and gives an acute analysis of what it means to go to war in the name of democracy and human rights.

Described as 'One of America's best exponents of recent intellectual history' by The Economist, Berman uses the case of a famous - and notorious - German politician in a dazzling dissection of radical left politics then and now. In light of the international reactions to some photographs of Joschka in a fight published in 2001, noteably what the French newspaper Liberation called 'The Trial of the Generation of 68', he launches a crucial question for Western democracies today: was the violence-tinged radicalism in America and Europe in 1968 a force for social good or ill?

The way in which mainstream human rights discourse speaks of such evils as the Holocaust, slavery, or apartheid puts them solidly in the past. Its elaborate techniques of "transitional" justice encourage future generations to move forward by creating a false assumption of closure, enabling those who are guilty to elude responsibility. This approach to history, common to late-twentieth-century humanitarianism, doesn't presuppose that evil ends when justice begins. Rather, it assumes that a time before justice is the moment to put evil in the past. Merging examples from literature and history, Robert Meister confronts the problem of closure and the resolution of historical injustice. He boldly challenges the empty moral logic of "never again" or the theoretical reduction of evil to a cycle of violence and counterviolence, broken only once evil is remembered for what it was. Meister criticizes such methods for their deferral of justice and susceptibility to exploitation and elaborates the flawed moral logic of "never again" in relation to Auschwitz and its evolution into a twenty-first-century doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect.

Joschka Fischer evolved from a 1960s radical to become one of the first elected Greens in the 1980s, then later Germany's foreign minister. Beginning in the ruins of postwar Germany, this volume offers both a biography of Fischer and an alternative history of postwar Germany.

Introduction: The return of history? -- The German question -- Idealism and realism -- Continuity and change -- Perpetrators and victims -- Economics and politics -- Europe and the world -- Conclusion: Geo-economic semi-hegemony.

Explores the moral earnestness and confusions of the baby boom generation and offers commentary on ideological evolution

A major new study of the political and intellectual origins of modern humanitarianism from the 1950s to the 1980s.

This book examines antagonism to Israel by East and West Germany, from the Six-Day War through the Cold War.