September 11, 2001 marked an historical turning point which posed a daunting challenge to the German government and the German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. The first response to the New York attacks was the war in Afghanistan which has continued to cast its shadow over German politics until the present day. Opposed by the coalition of Social Democrats and the environmental Green Party, the US war against Iraq generated a deep rift between the Bush Administration and the German government. Joschka Fischer reveals the dramatic background to this bitter conflict and the difficult balancing act he negotiated between his rejection of the war and honouring Germany’s role as the USA’s most important ally in Europe.
Yet many other key political issues today also trace back to the years of the red-green government, among them the debate on the operational life of the nuclear power plants, the series of economic, labour-market and public welfare reforms, and not lastly the controversy surrounding the Nazi history of Germany’s Foreign Ministry, which, on the initiative of Joschka Fischer himself, was intensively researched and unearthed shocking findings.
