On a recent afternoon in Berlin, where I went to write an article about an exhibit of Israeli art at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder maneuvered a vote of no confidence to try to dissolve the government. So I was curious to know what my taxi driver thought about the political situation, and we talked while riding from the Jewish Museum in Kreuzberg to the Bauhaus Museum. She pointed out to me the spot along the canal that marks where Rosa Luxemburg's murdered body was dumped, as the canal flows among fancy apartment buildings and new glassy high-rises.
I don't normally practice the fine journalistic art of asking taxi drivers their political opinions, but this time I hit pay dirt. My driver, Hannah Lehman, told me she'd worked as a teacher but then bought her own cab when she couldn't get a teaching job. As an activist in the 1970s and '80s, Lehman was in the “same circle of friends” as current German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. Back then, they were fighting for fair housing. Fischer, who once drove a taxicab himself, has been a major disappointment to Lehman and to others who feel that the Green Party has moved far from its anti-establishment roots.
“Now he's like the people he didn't like,” she complained, and she disapproves of Fischer's choice of partnership with Schröder's Social Democratic Party (SPD). Schröder, says Lehman, is a “chancellor for the bosses.” Even though she acknowledges that the German economy is affected by problems throughout Europe, by low-cost labor, and by globalization, she blames Schröder for the country's economic woes and won't support the Greens rejoining him in government. Like others who have fallen out of love, especially with the Greens, Lehman is thinking of voting for a new left-wing party, the Labor and Social Justice Party, which is led by the former SDP leader -- and now defector-- Oskar Lafontaine. This party was organized by Lafontaine and disillusioned Social Democrats (in coalition with Gregor Gysi, the former chief of the East German Party of Democratic Socialism, the party that emerged from the East German Communist Party and that was renamed The Left Party this past weekend).
From my informal poll of Germany's young people hanging out in the trendy Mitte district in former East Berlin, and at the Live 8 concert held near the Brandenburg Gate in July, many youth appear intrigued by this newest left formation. To them, the current Red-Green governing coalition does not represent the left but, rather, the establishment. (After all, many of the children of the Greens were raised by countercultural parents who have now become the establishment.) By posturing to the left, the Lafontaine-Gysi duo is picking up on a floating confusion and economic insecurity that these young people feel, along with some trade-union anger at Schröder's attempted economic reforms. Sixteen years after unification, most of the frustration comes from a lack of jobs in Germany and a surge in globalization. The irony is that the trappings of our global economy are what have partly transformed the former East Berlin into hipster central.
Oranienburger Strasse, a major thoroughfare through the Mitte and once home to a substantial Jewish community in pre-Nazi Germany, went into quiet disrepair during the communist years. It now outrivals New York's East Village for street and café life at all hours. (Well, not all hours -- at 9 on a recent weekday morning, I was one of the few souls up and out looking for coffee.) According to the bartender at my hotel, under East German reign, there was only one bar on this street; that one has since closed. This neighborhood, one of the first neighborhoods to gentrify after unification, has now become so commercial that many artists (among the first to transform these streets in the early 1990s) have moved farther east as gentrification continues throughout the former East German quarters.
Identity politics seems to hold sway in this onetime working-class district more than the economic issues that drive disgruntled left voters like Hannah Lehman. Workers themselves -- aside from taxi drivers and service workers -- are scarce. One young woman told me that while she voted Green last time -- and while her parents raised her, in good early-Green style, partly on a commune -- she was thinking of voting further to the left this time, perhaps for a new fringe party (and "fringe" was the word she used) with a familiar name (the Gray Panthers) or for the new lefty mixture.
But when I asked her if she considered that her protest vote would be a vote for the conservatives, she thought for a moment and then responded that at least the Christian Democrats are headed by a woman -- Angela Merkel, who comes from the former East Germany -- and that it would be nice to see a woman in power. Lehman, the taxi driver, appeared a bit more skeptical about Merkel, however, as we passed the gleaming Christian Democratic Union (CDU) headquarters, a large glass structure across the street from the Bauhaus Archives. She yearned instead for a man to lead again, but one from history: Willy Brandt, she tells me, recalling the legendary SPD leader who served as Germany's chancellor from 1969 to 1974, was what a left-wing leader should be.
Jo-Ann Mort, who writes frequently about Israel, is co-author of Our Hearts Invented a Place: Can Kibbutzim Survive in Today's Israel? (Cornell University Press).
