But the ’68 generation, and Berman does not shrink from admitting this, has its own history of collaboration. Collaboration with state violence and oppression in Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, and elsewhere. Collaboration with foreign and domestic terrorism, with Baader-Meinhof and the PLO. Even the creed itself, the insistence on opposition to Nazism and crypto-Nazism, had its own illusions and delusions—most perniciously, as Berman relates, when Israel, and its invocation of the Jewish Question, entered the picture:

What are we to make of the bizarre association of the Jewish state—a liberal democracy and a homeland for the oppressed—with Nazism in the minds of those who saw themselves as anti-Nazis par excellence? Berman deals with the question head on, in the classic buldingsroman fashion, as a piece of his chronicle of young men in the process of becoming. Fischer, as Berman relates, may well have sat in silence in Cairo as Yasser Arafat called for Israel’s annihilation, but he also looked with horror at the Entebbe incident, and the separation of Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners at the hands of the Palestinian terrorists and their German leftist collaborators. Fischer, Berman tells us, reached a realization, and since then has been outspoken in his condemnation of anti-Semitism and of hatred of Israel—a path, we are told, that others of his generation, even active collaborators in anti-Jewish violence, have followed ever since.

 

The Bosnian crisis gave way, of course, to a more cataclysmic disaster. 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror presented Berman’s ’68ers with a new set of dilemmas, and a new challenge to their anti-Nazism. The tale of their reaction makes up the lion’s share of Berman’s book.

Through the Bosnian crisis into the war on terror, Berman finds the most active, and in some ways the most sympathetic of his ’68ers in the person of Bernard Kouchner—radical, sometime sympathizer with Castroism, acquaintance of Che Guevara, medical doctor, founder of Doctors Without Borders, and globe-trotting humanitarian who eventually found himself a place in François Mitterrand’s government and a leadership role in the reconstruction of Kosovo following the intervention of the Western powers.

Kouchner appears to have gone farther than Berman’s other icons, in both action and theory. Kouchner asserts an obligation beyond simple anti-Nazism. His is a view both more universal and, in some ways, more radical. It favors resistance not merely to oppression but to human suffering in general. For Kouchner, the use of organized and even official political power to relieve the wretched of the earth is a charge beyond politics and yet completely of politics. It is a Hippocratic sort of obligation, one in which the questions of ideology or even morality are largely irrelevant. According to Kouchner, whatever one’s opinion of the conflict between communism and anti-communism in Indochina, Jimmy Carter’s dispatch of the Sixth Fleet to relieve the suffering of the boat people is beyond condemnation.

Berman joins Kouchner with Andre Glucksmann, among the first of the French New Philosophers who stepped beyond the prejudices of Right and Left to propose a “humanism of bad news,” an Arendtian collapse of ideological boundaries to recognize the universality of suffering and the necessity of being a resistant to it. Oppression and suffering, whether inflicted by Right or Left, are of equal terror in the eyes of Glucksmann, and Kouchner’s borderless wanderings in the name of human decency seem to him the epitome of the ’68 spirit: The refusal to submit, to collaborate, with the inhuman. Berman, it seems, agrees. This, he argues, is the spirit of ’68 as it is meant to be, without corruption, compromise, or collaboration.

It is here that the closing of the circle, the cycle of purification, turns to tragedy, as it must, with the War on Terror. The 9/11 attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan, and especially the war in Iraq, drove a slow but inevitable wedge between Europe and America, between supporters and dissenters, and, ultimately, between the ’68ers themselves. Their reactions represent the most telling, and most painful, epoch of Berman’s chronicle, an epoch whose denouement remains unfinished and unknown.

 

But before Berman’s characters are forced to resolve the tension between the desire to resist and the desire to collaborate, between the ecstasy of ideals and the temptations of power, he takes us elsewhere: Into the Islamic world itself, and into the thoughts of a pair of resistants named Azar Nafisi and Kenan Makiya.

Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Teheran, is the model of the disillusioned true believer. An ex-communist and biographer of Mike Gold, an American communist novelist of the 1930s, who returned to Iran to take part in the revolution that overthrew the Shah, Nafisi tells a tale of slow and creeping horror. It is an old tale, as old as the French Revolution itself, the tale of ecstatic rebellion and overthrow slowly descending into fanaticism, paranoia, and, ultimately, Terror. From the revolutionary fervor of her youth, Nafisi is reduced to teaching English literature to classrooms full of jihadist foot soldiers, one of whom proclaims The Great Gatsby to be representative of the rape of Islamic culture.

It is in Nafisi and Makiya that Berman seems to find his kindred spirits. Both children of the spirit of ’68, Nafisi and Makiya have been at the heart of real revolutions, not what Martin Amis called “the revolution as play” which was the work of Fischer, Cohn-Bendit, & Co.; and both have endured the long and difficult descent into disillusionment and despairing clarity.

Both of these ex-’68ers join Berman in ultimately turning to Hannah Arendt. They too see the kinship between the Islamic form of totalitarianism and its earlier, European manifestations: The same culture of illusion, the ubiquity of oppression, the permeation of the very inner selves of the subjects by the ideology of the regime, and, most of all, the urge towards death and thus towards destruction, which cannot strike us as anything but chillingly absolute in this era of the suicide bomber. Equally, they join Berman in tracing the historical sources: The influence of the Vichy regime on the Baath Party, which merely rendered the essentials of Fascism into Arab translation; the mythos of a glorious past, of the Wagnerian Teutons or the fourteenth-century caliphate. These regimes, their methods, their makeup, their horrors, are all of a piece. What we are faced with in radical Islam, claim Berman and his fellows, is nothing new. It is as old as the twentieth century, and as dangerous to the liberal state, and to human freedom itself, as its previous iterations.

 

The question of this kinship of totalitarianisms leads us to the War on Terror and, ultimately, to the passions that surrounded, and continue to surround, the debate over the war in Iraq. What we find is division, uncertainty, and fear. The nature of Saddam’s regime is not challenged, nor is the nature of Islamic radicalism in Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. There is no naïveté of the fellow-traveling variety at work among the ’68ers, but the debate among Berman’s various principals, among Fischer, Cohn-Bendit, and Kouchner, with various interjections by the likes of Andre Glucksmann and the Polish ’68er and longtime dissident Adam Michnik, does point to a torpor, a resignation, and an atrophy of ideas in the face of power, a willingness to condemn matched with a refusal of action, and a desire on the part of at least some of these icons not to abandon their essential creed, but to circumvent it, to find some method of being neither resistant nor collabo. In other words, it points to tragedy.