German foreign minister Joschka Fischer has the kind of wild past that most German politicians can only dream of. While most embellish their youthful indiscretions, however minor, in an embarrassing attempt to attract the elusive youth vote, Fischer is the real deal, a rebel with a cause.
The Green Party politician and vice-Chancellor is already far and away Germany's most popular politician, and has remained so, even after his past life as a revolutionary street fighter caught up with him last week.
Fischer was forced to apologise after photos emerged of him beating up a policeman in a 1970s street demonstration.
"It was a big mistake," he said of the photos published in the news magazine Stern. He has apologised to the policeman in question and, on the whole, got an easy ride from the German media.
But the incident shed light on Fischer's life as an active member of Germany's militant, leftwing movement in the 1970s. Next week will see more light thrown on Fischer's metamorphosis from stone thrower to statesman.
On Tuesday, a federal court in Frankfurt will witness the unprecedented sight of Germany's foreign minister being called as a character witness in a terrorist murder trial.
Hans Joachim Klein, "a good acquaintance" of Fischer's from his left-wing radical days, is accused of murdering a security guard and two others during the kidnapping of 11 Opec oil ministers in Vienna in December 1975.
Klein denies the murder charges, but his accomplice in the kidnapping, the international terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal, has testified that Klein pulled the trigger.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a fellow left-wing radical and leading figure in the 1968 Paris revolt, was called to give character testimony last year and described Klein as a "poor bastard who got washed away by the tide of history".
At the start of his trial, Klein said that "Joschka Fischer was my role model". Fischer could not only fight, but could quote Marx, Hegel and Adorno, he added. The two men met after Fischer, the third son of a Hungarian-German butcher, moved to Frankfurt in 1968.
Today the staid financial capital of Germany, Frankfurt was at that time a hotbed of 1960s nonconformity. Fischer and Klein were both members of the militant left-wing group "the Revolutionary Struggle" and were regularly in the thick of anti-Vietnam demonstrations and running street battles with the police.
Since the publication of photographs by Stern, Germany's other magazines have been scrambling to find evidence that Fischer did more than punch and kick policemen.
The Stern photographs, now the subject of a copyright dispute, were given to the magazine by journalist Bettina Rohl, the daughter of left-wing terrorist Ulrike Meinhof. This week, Stern's rival Der Spiegel revived allegations that Fischer played a central role in the violent riots in Frankfurt after Meinhof died in prison in 1976.
During the riots, masked demonstrators threw three Molotov cocktails at police, seriously injuring two officers. However, Fischer denies any involvement in the violence during the riot and says that shortly afterwards he left the Revolutionary Struggle, denouncing the riot as "the darkest chapter in our and my history".
Klein, meanwhile, moved deeper into the extreme-left underground, joining the "Revolutionary Cells" terrorist group. While on the witness stand next week, it is likely that Fischer will have to clarify another awkward episode from his past.
In 1973 Fischer loaned his car to Klein, ostensibly to have the engine replaced. Klein, however, used the car to transport a gun later used to murder the minister of economics of the state of Hesse, Heinz Herbert Karry.
Fischer acknowledges lending Klein his Volkswagen, but says he did not know what it was being used for.
Despite his marginal involvement, the Supreme Court still allowed investigators to place a tap on Fischer's telephone after they said there was reason to assume that he was passing messages to the Revolutionary Cells.
The tap produced nothing of interest to investigators and was removed the same day in 1983 that Fischer was elected to the Bundestag, the German parliament, for the first time.
Fischer has had to retread the old story many times, and next week is unlikely to be any different. But it is unlikely to faze him.
The Stern photos have proved to be a one-week wonder, despite the huffing and puffing of the opposition conservatives. They called for Fischer's resignation, calling him a "disgrace to the country", but the Chancellor Gerhard Schroder has defended Fischer and his "brilliant" work as foreign minister.
The four-times married street fighter turned taxi-driver turned politican has emerged unscathed. Barring any surprise revelations in court next week, Fischer will carry on as before as an oddity in German public life: a popular politician.