"I was one of the last rock’n’rollers of German politics," he told the left-wing Tageszeitung in an interview after the September general election.
"After me it will be the lip-synch generation."
His exit leaves the Greens, now a small opposition party, in flux with no obvious successor to their ideological leader of more than two decades.
Fischer’s successor in parliament will be Omid Nouripour, a 31-year-old member of the Greens leadership who has dual Iranian and German citizenship.
