The memories came flooding back when I heard last weekend that Oskar Lafontaine, the leftwing German political leader, was withdrawing from national politics.  Lafontaine is the sort of public figure that lazy journalists often call “firebrand” (Ukraine’s Yulia Tymoshenko, though from the opposite end of the political spectrum, is another).

I first came across Lafontaine in November 1990, just after capitalist West Germany had taken over communist East Germany – a more accurate way of putting it, in Lafontaine’s opinion, than the weaselly term “reunification”.  He was the Social Democratic party’s candidate for chancellor in the first parliamentary elections in the newly united Germany, and he was holding a campaign rally in a sports hall in east Berlin.

Suddenly, there was a loud bang in the hall.  Lafontaine looked startled – with good reason.  A deranged woman had stabbed him in the throat on stage six months previously.  This time, however, it was just a child bursting a SPD campaign balloon.  “Amazing, all these Western toys you come across in the East these days,” Lafontaine murmured.

He went on to speak of the immense financial cost of reunification.  It wouldn’t be easy, he warned his east German audience, many of whom had known no political leaders in their lives except the awful Erich Honecker, the appalling Walter Ulbricht and the unspeakable Adolf Hitler.  People would have to work hard and not despair, Lafontaine continued.

As I looked around, I saw the east Germans stare at Lafontaine glumly.  This wasn’t the message they wanted to hear.  They preferred the promise of “blooming landscapes” made by Helmut Kohl, the Christian Democrat chancellor and mastermind of reunification, against whom Lafontaine was running.

Instead, here was Lafontaine, a self-confident stranger in a flashy suit, breezing in from the West, lecturing them on how to lead their lives and offering them no hope.  Although he correctly diagnosed the financial reality of reunification, he really was out of touch with the common people.  I saw this even more clearly when he was campaigning in his native Saarland and other parts of west Germany.  There he dined on oysters and Champagne, sitting next to his punk-haired girlfriend in a restaurant adorned with a modernist nude painting.  Guess who once tagged along for the ride on his campaign train?  Donovan, the flower-power minstrel of the Sixties.

Later in his career, Lafontaine was appointed finance minister in a SPD-led government in 1998, tried unsuccessfully to wrench German fiscal and economic policy in a radical left direction, and then resigned in a huff after a mere five months in office.  In 2005 he abandoned the SPD, and it wasn’t long before he hooked up with east Germany’s ex-communists in the newly formed Left party.

Some commentators are saying that Lafontaine’s departure is good news for the German left, because it increases the chances that the SPD and the Left party will be able to co-operate at national level and present a credible challenge to Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, and her centre-right government.

Well, that might not be a bad thing.  In a democracy you need political competition.  But I notice that one such commentary, on the excellent Deutsche Welle website, persists in calling Lafontaine a “firebrand socialist”.  Will we never learn?  In most respects, he was a political failure.