Symbol of postwar Germany has settled in at Princeton

There is no advance staff whispering urgently into cell phones, no security or receptionist, as Joschka Fischer, clad in a tweed jacket, slips from his Princeton University office to greet visitors.

Time was when Fischer, a former 1960s radical who battled riot police in the streets of Frankfurt, strode the world stage as German foreign minister and, briefly, U.N. Security Council president.

But that was then; this is now.

Fischer abruptly resigned his seat in the German parliament in 2005 after his governing coalition was voted out of power. He has come to quiet, leafy Princeton to write his memoirs and teach, and to drink deeply of American culture, far from the grand boulevards of Europe he once frequented.

He remains a tough critic of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and is deeply worried that unless a solution is found quickly, sectarian strife will boil over.

Still, he says, there is no going back to his former life mediating world and domestic crises.

"I don't miss public life, and definitely not (politics)," said Fischer, 58, sitting in his office. "It's over, so that means a complete break. I am a free and private man again. When I entered the parliament for the first time in 1983, I exchanged freedom for power. And now I want my freedom back."

More than any other modern German politician, Joschka Fischer embodies his nation's sharp break with the past.

As a former street-fighting radical and cabdriver who dropped out of high school at 17 but still rose to be head of the German foreign ministry and the nation's vice chancellor, he came to represent Germany's lurching progress toward a more egalitarian society.

In the late 1990s, Fischer forged a close friendship with then-U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as the two pushed for NATO intervention in Kosovo to halt genocide in the Balkans.

Days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, Fischer huddled in Washington with President Bush, then with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and other top officials on a coordinated response. Those talks led Germany to contribute thousands of troops to the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.

He was an enormously popular politician in Germany, in part because many identified with his radical past. The mass-circulation tabloid Bild, remarking on one of Fischer's romantic liaisons, once published the banner headline "What makes Joschka so sexy?"

"He is an extraordinary, charismatic and intelligent figure," said Jeremy Shapiro, a foreign-policy expert at the center-left Brookings Institution. "He is a very broad and original thinker and very difficult to pin down. He did not approach the job of foreign minister as a 1960s radical or a Hugo Chavez but rather as a pragmatic person who took stands occasionally, as in the Iraq war, but they were stands that people could understand and respect."

Fischer strenuously opposed the Iraq war, concluding after visiting Washington that the Bush administration wanted to topple Saddam Hussein and that an invasion might unleash chaos.

"I was definitely convinced that this ... would end up in a mess, I'm sorry," Fischer said.

He argues that the Middle East will remain a powder keg until the United States takes the lead in fashioning a lasting settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

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He is critical of the proposal by Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Del., to create three semiautonomous regions in Iraq for Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis, the country's main competing groups, as a way to reduce sectarian strife.

"When will it end?" he said, practically rising from his chair. "The Balkanization of the Middle East. Good luck. It is very, very risky."

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Fischer's life story is a uniquely German tale but one that resonates with Americans who came of age in the '60s, dabbled in radical politics, then went on to conventional lives as teachers, lawyers and even government officials. After dropping out of high school, Fischer, who says he was radicalized by the music of Bob Dylan, hitchhiked around Europe, ending up in Frankfurt, where he led sometimes violent demonstrations promoting squatters' rights, opposition to the Vietnam War, and other causes.

His communal apartment block was a magnet for such New Left grandees as American Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman, who spent his final years in Pennsylvania supporting local environmental causes.

Fischer says he felt his first sense of political awakening when Soviet tanks and soldiers crushed the Hungarian revolt in 1956, an uprising that cost the lives of as many as 50,000 Hungarians. His parents, working-class ethnic Germans whose families had lived in Hungary for generations, were forced to leave after a new, Soviet-installed government came to power. They settled in the southwest German state of Baden-Wurttemberg, where Fischer was born.

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He can remember adults weeping as they heard reports of tanks rumbling through Budapest.

"I remember it well because my mother was crying all the time, and my father looked terrible," said Fischer, whose first name, Joschka, is derived from Hungarian.

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In Frankfurt, he drove a cab for a while and evolved into a local leader of the Greens, a new party dedicated to reducing reliance on nuclear energy and opposing genetically engineered crops and medicines.

Fischer was a fluent and entertaining speaker, and his political career blossomed. In 1998, when the much larger Social Democratic Party needed the Greens to form a governing majority, he was catapulted into the national leadership, and memories of his radical past had faded.

That changed abruptly in 2000, when the newsmagazine Stern published photos of him in 1973 with a band of street demonstrators beating a police officer. But the photos never dented his popularity; opinion polls found that 80 percent of voters thought he should keep his post.

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Many Germans thought Germany's student revolt of the '60s marked a needed break with the nation's authoritarian past. Fischer's radical background may also have given him additional credibility to argue for German military intervention in Kosovo and Afghanistan.

"The movement that he was involved in, this far-left, deeply antifascist movement, which strayed into violence at times, which was at its heart antiestablishment, is a movement that Germans of all types respect because it was ultimately a repudiation of the type of attitude toward power that at times got them into trouble," says the Brookings Institution's Shapiro.

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Today, Fischer says his past as a street radical did not preclude endorsing military force.

"First of all, I was never a pacifist, as it was demonstrated then, but secondly, I don't see a contradiction," he said. "I believe in peace, and war was always an instrument of last resort ... but even then it is very questionable. I grew up in postwar Germany with two basic principles: No more war and no more Auschwitz, no more genocide. And when this came in conflict in the Balkans, I had to fight a bitter struggle within myself."

"But in the end, when all these negotiations ended up in more killing of innocent people, it was a turning point for me. Enough is enough."