German Foreign Minister, Mr Joschka Fischer, was a street fighter in the days when he was a radical political activist, Stern magazine recalls in its issue out today.
Mr Fischer is today the most prominent member of Germany's ecologist Greens party and, according to official protocol, the second-ranking figure in the government after Chancellor Gerhard Schroder.
But he was not so respectable in the 1970s, when he was part of a movement of leftist militants in Frankfurt given to forceful direct action.
"We occupied houses, and when they were evacuated, we defended ourselves. We threw stones. We were thrashed, but we also gave a good wallop back," Mr Fischer said.
The interview is accompanied by a photograph of the future foreign minister, today aged 52, wearing a motorcycle helmet and punching a policeman to the ground.
Mr Fischer explained that the incident occurred when the police had violently broken up a demonstration, at a time when confrontation between the federal German state and the leftist movement was at a high point.
He said it was a period of "openly preached hate against students, when for us German democracy showed the face of continuity with National Socialism".
This brought about a situation "where one wanted the complete overthrow of the constitutional order". At the time he was open to the "fascination of revolutionary violence", Mr Fischer admitted.
"At the moment when you strike, there is a mechanism which begins to takes effect, whereby you feel a sense of power, and which is seductive, above all for young men."
It was this which had led many activists into terrorism, Mr Fischer said, although he and like-minded friends had been strenuously against the resort to armed struggle.
The foreign minister said he had definitely never thrown a molotov cocktail.
The extensive interview comes as Mr Fischer is scheduled on January 16th to give evidence in the murder trial of repentant former terrorist Hans-Joachim Klein, who participated under "Carlos the Jackal" in the bloody 1975 attack on an oil ministers' conference in Vienna.
Mr Fischer told Stern it was a tragedy that Klein had taken the terrorist road chosen by some German ultra-leftists.
"The Red Army Fraction and the revolutionary cells were never my thing.
"On the contrary, if Hans-Joachim Klein had stayed in our milieu he would not be standing before a court today," the minister said.
Another former street revolutionary and comrade of Klein's, Mr Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who was a leader of the Paris student revolution of May 1968 and is now a prominent Green Party politician, has already given evidence at the trial.
Fischer said for him the use of violence was only acceptable as "a very last resort, when it is a question of life and freedom and other means no longer help".