12 Monday, August 17, 1970 1962-63 Except when he was traveling with Brigitte, Miki never slept well in sleeping cars, and this night was no exception. Intermittent snatches of sleep with confused dreams alternated with long waking spells during which thoughts crowded one another too quickly for him to grab a hold of any of them. Well before the night train’s arrival in Frankfurt he rose and freshened up as best he could. On boarding the Frankfurt-Stuttgart train he immediately went to the dining car for some breakfast. Fortunately the coffee was strong, and he needed two cups of it before he felt ready to face the day ahead. No one met him on the platform. He went out to the main hall, and, once there, to a newsstand to buy a copy of the Stuttgarter Nachrichten. When he turned around a young man in his twenties, in civilian clothes, stood in front of him and said, “Doctor Michael Wilner?” “Yes,” Miki said. “I am from the State Criminal Office,” the young man said, not introducing himself but showing Miki a badge. “I am here to take you to our office. Would you come with me, please.” His duffel bag in his hand, Miki followed the young police official out of the station to an unmarked car, in which he was invited to make himself comfortable. He tossed the bag into the backseat and sat down. The drive, in a westerly direction from the station – the sun was behind them – was quick. When they reached the Hölderlinplatz, the young official stopped the car in front of an unassuming office building, got out, opened Miki’s door and reached for the bag in the bag seat, which he carried into the building. He said to Miki, “We will keep this for you,” and led him to a waiting room with doors leading to several offices, all of them closed. After the young man left without a further word, Miki was the only person there. He sat down in a chair and began to read the paper without much interest. After about ten minutes, a young-looking secretary dressed in a fairly stylish pantsuit came out from one of doors, closing it behind her. “Herr Wilner?” she said in a questioning tone. “Yes,” he said as he stood up. “Would you come with me, please? Herr Kriminalkommissar Stracke will see you now.” She led him to the same door, opened it for him and closed without entering the office. Kriminalkommissar Stracke sat behind a desk. “Sit down, please,” he said, pointing to an empty chair facing the desk. After Miki sat down, the inspector asked, “Do you know why you are here?” “Not exactly,” Miki said. “Well, there are two matters, both having to do with the murder of a certain Axel Hemme.” “I understand that, but what are the two matters?” “Let me start with the first. We are still trying to determine who this Hemme was. As you may have read in the press, we found that he had undergone plastic surgery. Now we have located the surgeon who performed it. He says that the operation was needed after Hemme had been in a fire, in 1948. He has photos of Hemme’s burned face, but also one that Hemme had given him of himself before the fire, taken in 1946 or 1947, which means only a short time after you had encountered the Nazi Hemme during the war. On the other hand, the only photo that we have of the latter is from when he first joined the SS, in 1934, and when we compared the photos, the comparison was inconclusive. We therefore need your help.” “And what is the second matter?” Miki asked. “One thing at a time,” the inspector said with a smile. He opened a folder on his desk, took out two photos, and placed them in front of Miki. The one on his left was an upper-body shot of a smiling man in his thirties, in full SS uniform. There was absolutely no doubt in Miki’s mind that this was Axel Hemme, his Axel Hemme, a decade younger. The man in the photo on the right, a headshot, was definitely not. “Definitely not,” he said. “Definitely?” “Absolutely. This is not the man.” “We thank you for your help. Now, about the second matter, I have the unpleasant duty to inform you that you are, tentatively and in a very limited, technical sense, a suspect in the case.” “What?” “There are two pieces of evidence, which are not, and let me emphasize not, very reliable, that implicate you. One is a letter that we found in Hemme’s house, threatening to kill him, and signed with your name.” “Impossible! May I see the letter?” “Of course you will see it. The signature is being studied by our handwriting expert. Meanwhile, if we have your permission, a colleague of ours from the Hamburg police will go to your house and examine your typewriter to determine if the letter was typed on it. We believe that it’s a fake, but we Germans have to be thorough.” “Of course you have my permission.” “Thank you. Now, the other supposed piece of evidence is this. We have a suspect in custody, a Bulgarian named Petrov; we captured him through an anonymous tip, and he has admitted to committing the deed, but he says that Michael Wilner paid him to do the killing. He has a photo showing the two of you together, though it doesn’t appear that you are actually in conversation. The whole thing smacks of a frame-up, but, once again, we have to do our job.” “I understand. May I see this Petrov?” “Not at this stage of the investigation. We don’t think his story will hold up under questioning, anyway. He doesn’t seem very intelligent.” “So, what does this mean as far as I am concerned?” “It means that you will have to remain in Stuttgart and be available to us. The investigation is being carried out with great urgency, so that the time should not be very long, though I can’t give a specific length of time.” “And what can I tell my wife?” “Only that you have been delayed. Would you like us to book a hotel room for you?” The police as a travel agency? Billung would have good laugh about that. “I usually stay at the Unger when I am here,” Miki said, omitting to mention that his previous trips to Stuttgart had been in connection with visiting the Nazi crime archives in Ludwigsburg. “Can you get me a room there?” “We can try,” Stracke said, “but I can’t promise. There is a convention taking place here. But I’m sure we will be able to find you a room of a similar category. If you don’t mind waiting for a little while, we will make the arrangements right away.” He pushed a button on his desk telephone. “Fräulein Bothe? Would you come here to escort Dr. Wilner to the waiting room, please?” Miki didn’t quite understand why he needed to be escorted. He thought that perhaps it was in order to give the pretty Fräulein Bothe something to do. This time there were other people in the waiting room, but the chair where he had sat before was still free. He resumed his perusal of the paper. After ten minutes Fräulein Bothe came out of Kriminalkommissar Stracke’s office and said, “You’re in luck, Herr Wilner. We found you a room at the Unger.” She led him out of the waiting room into the hallway, where the young man who had brought him there came with the duffel bag, and they retraced their steps to the car and back to the station area, where Miki was dropped off in front of the Hotel Unger, two hundred meters from the station. The doorman took his bag, and the woman behind the desk said, seemingly remembering him from his previous stays, “You may go up to your room, Doctor. Wilner.” Apparently the police had already registered him. He took the bag from the doorman, tipped him half a mark, entered his room, and plopped the bag on a chair and himself on the bed. Exhaustion, physical and mental, quickly overtook him. *      *     * Miki began typing his articles immediately upon returning to Hamburg, his plan being to have them published in a series following the time sequence of his journey. The title he and Margot had originally envisaged for the series was An Anglo-Saxon Journey, but the excursion into Quebec made that title inappropriate. Since Miki also had an article in mind about his encounters with Spanish-speaking Americans – Mexicans in California, Puerto Ricans and Cubans in New York – with whom he spoke in Spanish, the title became An Anglo-Saxon Journey (With a Little Spanish and French). Another complication was presented by Margot’s wish to have the drafts of the articles on the United States reviewed by the Countess, since they touched on some aspects of the American scene that were of interest to her, specifically John F. Kennedy and his administration. But Marion Dönhoff was, as usual in September, on her Ischia vacation, and, to her, as she liked to proclaim, vacations were vacations. Miki consequently typed his three planned articles on Quebec (about Lesage, about Quebec nationalism in general and about its effect on the Jews of Montreal) immediately after the ones about England (about Mosley and about the East End riot of which Miki was a virtual eyewitness), and left the articles dealing with the United States (which he thought would number eight) in summary form, awaiting the Countess’s return. In the meantime, since Brigitte was still free and since the weather was still warm, they decided to spend a week on Norderney. The renovation of their favorite hotel was complete, and Miki managed to reserve a room with a balcony overlooking the beach. They had a lovely four days on the North Sea, but a sudden storm made them return early. Since the Countess was due back shortly, Miki went back to typing his articles on the United States, but his memory of the trip could by that time no longer be neatly divided into chapters, taking instead the form of a continuous narrative. He therefore typed it as a single extended reportage, almost as if it were a book, and decided to leave its division into articles to the editorial board. He was careful, however, to write the personality sketches – of John F. Kennedy, of Marilyn Monroe, of Martin Luther King – as self-contained units. In late September he had ready the part of the report that corresponded, more or less, to the first half of the journey, and the articles began running soon thereafter. *      *     * He woke up hungry, and his watch told him that it was past his usual lunch time. He showered quickly and put on a clean shirt, underpants and socks before getting into his pants and shoes. The knowledge that he would be in Stuttgart overnight gave him leeway to do a bit more revising of the essay. He would then make two photocopies – one for himself, one for Max – and deliver the original to Merkur the next day. Before going out for lunch he telephoned the Merkur office and learned that Paeschke was out of town, but his secretary was expecting Dr. Wilner’s essay. She was surprised to hear that Miki was in Stuttgart, but made nothing of it. Paeschke, Miki was sure, would want to know why he was in town and would probably invite him for drinks. It’s just as well that he’s away, Miki thought. He told the secretary that he would bring the typescript the next day. “I’ll be expecting you,” the woman said. For some reason he visualized her as looking like Fräulein Bothe, though their voices were not the least bit alike; Paeschke’s secretary sounded far more mature than the other. Was it wishful thinking on his part? He could think of no reason to deny that he enjoyed looking at pretty women, even when they did not match Brigitte’s beauty. As always, he reminded himself that his mother had been a pretty woman, and that he had been deprived of looking at her since Axel Hemme took her away from him. *      *     * The second part of Miki’s reportage, which included some additional considerations of the vicissitudes of the civil-rights movement and of the evolving Cuban missile crisis (in which he predicted that Kennedy and Khrushchev would work it out peacefully), was ready precisely on the day when the American President showed the world the U-2 photographs of the missiles. On the following Saturday Margot had it in her briefcase to deliver to the Countess. That afternoon Miki received a call from Margot. “You won’t believe what happened, Miki,” she gushed. “When I arrived at the Press House it was surrounded by police! In order to get into the building I had to show my identification card as a staff member of Die Zeit.” She paused for breath. Miki took advantage of the pause to ask, “What’s going on?” “Last night special police came from Bonn and took over the offices of Der Spiegel. The editors were arrested on charges of treason. Their files and even their typewriters were confiscated. Their homes were searched, and their children were pulled out of bed so that the police could look under the mattresses! And this morning Augstein was arrested too.” “Treason? What did they do?” Miki asked. “They supposedly published state secrets, which according to the federal prosecutor’s office they got from Bundeswehr officials by bribing them.” “You mean, because of Ahlers’ articles about the bad strategy of the Bundeswehr, where he criticized the overreliance on atomic weapons? They call that treason?” “Yes. And all of that information has already been published!” “I think this is Franz Josef Strauss’s personal revenge against Augstein,” Miki said, “after all the scandals about Strauss that Der Spiegel has published. I mean, we all know that Strauss wants to be Chancellor after Adenauer, and we’re all equally afraid of the prospect. But how did he manage to get the justice system to get involved?” “I don’t know yet,” Margot said, “but he seems to have the Old Man’s backing. Oh, just in case you’re wondering, I did manage to give your typescript to the Countess.” “Thank you,” Miki said. “To change the subject,” she said, “Do you remember that English band called The Beatles that played at the Star-Club last spring?” “Yes, of course. We went to hear them with you and Helmut.” “They’re coming back, and they have a new drummer who I hear is much better than the old one. His name is Ringo Starr.” “Ringo! I remember a character named Ringo in some Western that I’ve seen. But, to come back to the changed subject, yes, let’s go hear the Beatles.” *      *     * Back in his room at the Unger, Miki began to scan the essay carefully for the first time. He began by going to the last page and its concluding paragraph. The train change in Frankfurt that morning had brought his year at the Institute for Social Research back into his memory, and between has and spilled he penciled in a caret and above it , as predicted by Adorno and Horkheimer,. He then started at the beginning. In the first paragraph, he decided to replace announced their specter by announced the sighting of their specter. He inserted a caret in the appropriate place and the missing words in the space above it. As he went on, he marked typographical and punctuation errors with the usual proofreader’s marks in the margin, but when he came to page 7, he decided to flesh in his references to Savonarola and Qutb. He accordingly placed carets after both names, and above the carets penciled in (who 472 years ago was executed on the orders of Rodrigo Borgia, alias Pope Alexander VI) and (who four years ago was executed on the orders of Gamal Abdel Nasser), respectively. On page 8 he inserted and theirs is a modern party after and they are modern men. On page 14, he decided to insert a caret before a Jewish state. Above it he penciled in (and as defined in Resolution 181 of the United Nations). Going down the page, he inserted another caret after the word Austria, and above it wrote (even if some present-day Austrians might dispute it). As he came back to the last page, it struck him that ‘bourgeois democracy’ (which he meant in contrast to the ‘people’s democracy’ that was practiced next door) might be taken by some as pejorative, so that he changed bourgeois to liberal. Then he thought about his omission of other modern ideologies such as fascism and Stalinism, which were still alive, if not necessarily well, in Europe and elsewhere. He omitted them because the regimes that espoused them were too repressive to allow a postmodern reaction at home, but he thought that once the essay was expanded into a book he might include a chapter on them, and touch on the fact that the relentlessly impersonal modernity of their architecture might have been one of the factors that inspired postmodernism. Lastly, it occurred to him that saying simply that “the line between culture and politics has been blurred” lacked punch, and he thought of adding, “as Marxism-Leninism dances to The Beatles,” but then it struck him that in English Lenin and Lennon sound the same, so that he wrote in, as Marxism doesn’t march but dances to rock-and-roll, and as Leninism becomes Lennonism. He reassembled the essay and put it back in the briefcase. He decided to go for a walk before giving it a final review. *      *     * Miki’s series of articles on the Anglo-American scene ran on a semi-regular basis, about three times a month, well into the new year. He was kept somewhat busy with rewrites on each article as it was prepared for publication, but had time for some additional writing, and when Rudolf Augstein was released from prison, he wrote a brief article in the news section, titled From Z to A, praising him as a champion of press freedom in the mold of the German-American journalist and publisher John Peter Zenger. As was Die Zeit’s custom with such articles, he signed it with his initials. A few days after its publication, Margot told him that she had received a call from Augstein in which he thanked her for the article, thinking that M. W. stood for Margot Wallmann, since it was her name that he found in the masthead. After she explained his mistake he kept her on the telephone, asking her if she was married (he had recently been divorced for the second time), if she would have lunch with him, and if she would like to work for Der Spiegel. She declined the first offer, explaining her relationship with Helmut, and with respect to the second offer she said that she was, for the time being, happy at Die Zeit but would consider changing in, let’s say, five years. She pulled that length of time out of thin air. A few days later Miki received a note from Augstein, joking about the mistake he had made, thanking him for the article and inviting him to call Augstein if he ever considered changing publications. Miki took the ‘if’ to mean ‘if and only if’ and decided not to call the publisher, only to write him a note in return. He was sitting on the sofa, rereading Augstein’s note and thinking about his reply when Brigitte came home from the studio in an excited state. “Guess what!” she exclaimed as she flung her purse on the sofa next to him. “I’m going to be Lois Lane!” “And who’s going to be Superman?” he asked as he looked up at her. She looked radiantly beautiful. “You are,” she said as she sat on his lap, “at least when you’re in bed with me. But on stage,” she went on, standing up again, “I’m going to be a different Lois Lane.” “Explanation, please,” he said. She pulled up a chair and sat facing him. “Do you remember the song that I sang for you in New York, ‘True to you in my fashion’?” “How could I forget it?” “Too bad you didn’t hear Kitty Kallen sing it.” “I was quite happy with the way Brigitte Wilner sang it.” She took his hands in hers and kissed them, one after the other. “It’s from a musical, Kiss Me, Kate, by Cole Porter,” she said, “and the character who sings it is named Lois Lane.” “Oh yes, I remember. It was shown on German television last year, but we didn’t see it…” “It was the year before last, and we didn’t see it because it was the night of the Songbird House premiere. I heard that it wasn’t a very good production. And, anyway, it hasn’t been done on stage in Germany yet, but it has been done in Vienna.” “And?” “Do you also remember when I told you that some of the people that I worked with on Songbird House, and particularly the ones who sing, are now working at NDR? Well, the other day we had a sort of reunion, and someone suggested that we could all be in an American musical together. Someone else proposed Brigadoon, because she had just seen it in New York and she read in the program that it’s based on a German story…” “I know,” Miki interjected, “Germelshausen by Gerstäcker.” “But I proposed Kiss Me, Kate,” Brigitte went on breathlessly, “and everyone thought it was a great idea, even the girl who had proposed Brigadoon, because there already is a German version. Two of them, in fact.” “Of course,” Miki said. “When I told Hetty about it, she also thought it was a great idea. She knows Marcel Prawy, who produced it in Vienna, and she will get one of his assistants to produce and direct it. She will also get us the rights, the set design, everything!” “When do you think it will happen?” “It depends on whether we do it as a fixed production or as a touring company. I like the idea of a touring company, because that’s the theme of the play, and in that case we can do it this summer, since a lot of theaters will be free.” When Brigitte went to the bathroom to freshen up, Miki went back to thinking about Augstein’s note. He realized that he had declined Augstein’s offer without thinking it over, simply because Margot had done so. But, as he thought about it, he became convinced that it was the right decision. The two Hamburg-based weeklies, housed in the same building, were like two states that were friendly neighbors with very different constitutions. Augstein, though a passionate champion of democracy, ran Der Spiegel – of which he was the founder, owner, publisher and editor-in-chief – like a benevolent despot in the mold of Frederick the Great, whom he admired and about whom, it was reported, he was planning to write a book. The magazine, a newsweekly modeled on the American Time, was a smoothly running machine like Frederick’s Prussia, and the imbroglios in which it got involved, such as the recent one with Strauss, were like Frederick’s wars, in which he always emerged victorious. Die Zeit, by contrast, once it emerged from the internecine conflicts of the previous decade, came to be like a parliamentary monarchy, with the publisher Gerd Bucerius as king, the editor-in-chief Müller-Marein as prime minister and the chief political editor Marion Countess Dönhoff as foreign minister. Personally, the Countess and M-M were not only friends – they called each other Jupp and Marion – but also related by marriage, since M-M’s wife was the Countess’s niece Alexandra. But in the operation of the weekly they represented different factions with different concerns. The large issues of the day – international politics, east-west relations, the underdeveloped world – were the Countess’s domain, and Theo Sommer was the leader of her faction, which consisted mostly of tall blond young men. Culture in all its manifestations – one of which was the internal politics of France – was under the aegis of M-M, and since Margot had been hired by him and belonged to his faction, so, by default, did Miki. But in reality, once his probationary period had passed, Michael Wilner was given – perhaps because of his past (which the spelling of his family name kept present) and the German sense of guilt associated with it – a latitude that transcended the factions, subject only to the idiosyncratic predilections of the principals. He had, by this time, learned to navigate around these obstacles, and so at Die Zeit he felt like a citizen. At Der Spiegel he would have been more like a subject. He preferred citizenship. *      *     * After he came back from his walk, he reread the essay for the last time, erased the changes that he had earlier made in pencil and reentered them in careful lettering with a ballpoint pen. It was five o’clock. Too early for dinner. Brigitte must be home from the studio by now, he thought. And her period must be over, he calculated. He decided to call her. There was no answer. Of course, he thought: since there’s no Miki to come home to, she’s probably hanging out with her show-biz pals, as Hetty liked to say. She’ll probably go out for dinner with them. And then to a club… No, it’s Monday night. Over the years Brigitte had tried intermittently to introduce some of her friends from her acting world to Miki, but her attempts were halfhearted, for she knew that their shallow conversation, largely limited to shoptalk, would not interest him; Helmut was the exception that proved the rule. Playwrights and screenwriters proved, disappointingly in view of their literary pursuits, to be no more interesting than actors. The converse was also true, but in a different way. To his journalistic and literary colleagues, as to his other acquaintances, Brigitte was only secondarily Miki’s wife and hence a potential friend. Above all she was Brigitte Wilner, the sexy, beautiful film star. They were too dazzled by her allure to see that she was a woman of remarkable intelligence, insight and wit. Here, too, the exception was Margot, and not only because she was a woman, but because she knew herself to be attractive enough – she had, after all, snagged a handsome actor away from a glamorous starlet – not to feel threatened by Brigitte, as so many other women were, including her sister. And so it was that Helmut and Margot became, and remained, the only couple that Miki and Brigitte had as friends. The friendship reached across their professional connections. While they often did things together as a foursome – nightclubs, concerts, the Rothenbaum tennis tournament – sometimes Miki and Helmut would go to football matches while Brigitte and Margot went to fashion shows. Every so often Miki asked himself, as he did that evening in Stuttgart while he was strolling to find a congenial restaurant in which to have dinner, why it was that he and Brigitte had not formed a broad circle of friends. He remembered being struck, when he was in Montreal, by the numbers of visitors who came to call on Leon and Fela. Many of those visits were no doubt motivated by curiosity about Leon’s German nephew and his gorgeous shiksa wife, but the sheer number of people whom his uncle treated as close friends was impressive. Miki also remembered already noticing Leon’s gregarious nature in Germany, and thinking that it was something that one grew into while becoming an adult. But, as he reflected on that phase of his life, he realized that the friendships that he had formed then, and specifically during his first two years in Göttingen, were not of lasting importance, and were not renewed when he returned there after another two years, except for the fortuitous reconnection with Margot, who was no longer there. There was no doubt that during their ten years in Hamburg, if either one of them had made a serious effort to add people to the comfortable foursome, they would have succeeded, though the odds were quite high against finding another couple as compatible with them as Helmut and Margot. But it seemed that neither of them felt the urge to do so. They were both busy individuals whose professional lives took up much of the time that to many other people would be private, and they valued their time with each other above all else. He heard accordion music emanating from a half-lit rustic-looking tavern in a restored half-timbered building, and saw that the blackboard outside the door advertised fresh whitefish from Lake Constance. As he entered he saw that in a small open space beyond the tables there was indeed a live band playing Swabian folk music, and he received a friendly welcome from a very pretty blond waitress. The sensation of missing Brigitte suddenly became foremost in his mind and heart, until, as he followed the waitress to a table near the band, the sensation of hunger in his stomach moved in, but did not displace the other. He missed her more than normally because he was not in a normal situation. He was not on journalistic assignment, nor was he at home while Brigitte was away on location or performing in an out-of-town theater. He did not know when he would be returning home. He felt frustrated by his failure to reach her by telephone. He ordered a half-liter of white Neckar wine to wash down his fish, which was fried in butter and accompanied by spätzle and the special local sauerkraut known as Filderkraut. He wished Brigitte were there to share the delicious food, but the wine and the music gradually dissipated his loneliness. By the time he was back in his hotel room he felt not a care in the world. He tried calling Brigitte one last time. There was still no answer. She must be having a good time, he thought cheerfully. Good for her. *      *     * All through the spring of 1963, Miki continued to write about events in the United States as they were evolving. In April, in the wake of Martin Luther King’s arrest in Birmingham, he flew to Washington for a week, in time to hear King’s letter from the Birmingham Jail read on the radio and to attend the press conference at which Kennedy announced King’s release. While in America he became aware of the growing complexity of the situation in Vietnam, and of the disagreements within the American government over the continued support for Ngo Dinh Diem in view of his repressive regime. He also had a long telephone conversation with Leon, taking advantage of being in the same time zone. Everything in Montreal seemed to be going well, according to Leon. Back in Germany, he heard of the announcement by Fritz Bauer, the state prosecutor of Hesse, that a trial would be held against twenty-two SS officials and kapos who had been active at Auschwitz. When Miki told the editors that he wanted to be among those covering the trial, they were surprised, in view of his refusal to cover the Eichmann trial. He explained the difference: he had no feelings, not even hatred, for a bureaucrat like Eichmann, but he could relate to the men to be tried in Frankfurt; they were like Axel Hemme. Brigitte’s television work, meanwhile, was winding down, and before long she was fully engaged in rehearsals for Kiss Me, Kate, work that, to judge by her mood, was the most enjoyable she had ever done. She would sing Why can’t you behave? every time Miki did something that displeased her, however trivial, or, rather, especially when trivial. Everyone involved in the production went along with the idea of a tour. It would start with a two-week run in Hamburg in late June and early July, when the season of the Deutsches Schauspielhaus would be over and its stage available, and continue in various cities – to be determined once the tour’s manager, an HKA employee, completed his negotiations – across Northwest Germany until early September. On Brigitte’s insistence, Bad Harzburg was to be one of the tour’s stops. There was to be no Norderney vacation that summer. In the middle of June, as Miki was struggling to keep abreast of developments in America in relation to civil rights and Vietnam – the Buddhist monk Thich Quan Duc had just immolated himself in protest against Diem, and the photograph of the act spread around the globe – Washington announced that Kennedy would visit Berlin. But for Miki to cover the visit in person would have meant to miss the premiere of Kiss Me, Kate, and since Die Zeit already had a correspondent in West Berlin, there was no real need for him to go there. The premiere took place on the evening after Kennedy’s Berlin speech. That morning, while Brigitte was at the theater for last-minute rehearsals, he typed an article in response to it in one fell swoop. Kennedyesque Charisma President John F. Kennedy’s speech in Berlin was something that I watched on television. I was not among the million or more Germans who gathered around the Schöneberg City Hall to hear him say Ich bin ein Berliner. I am glad that I saw it as I did, for I believe that the future of politics is on television, not in mass rallies, and President Kennedy represents that future as much as anyone else in present-day politics. He possesses the quality that American journalists call telegenic, and he demonstrated it in the televised debate with Richard M. Nixon. His performance in that debate is probably the reason that he is now the President of the United States. But there is another term with which American journalists describe John F. Kennedy, and his speech justified the description. The term is charismatic. We are used to thinking of charisma in Max Weber’s terms: as “an individual’s quality regarded as beyond the everyday (originally… as magically induced), by virtue of which he or she is treated as someone with powers or qualities that are supernatural or superhuman, or at least beyond the everyday and not accessible to just anyone, or as God-sent or as exemplary, and therefore as a ‘leader.’” In politics, this is the form of charisma that we have seen in dictators. But we see a reflex of it in certain democratically elected leaders as well, leaders whom the people treat with a trust and a deference bordering on awe: Churchill, Eisenhower, De Gaulle, Adenauer. Note that these leaders were all in their sixties when their first attained their positions of power. Their charisma is that of what Freud called a “father figure.” Note also that all these figures are all, politically, on the right. John F. Kennedy’s charisma is different; Freud might have called it that of a “brother figure.” It power resides in making the people believe that he is one of them, not above them à la Weber. And Kennedy’s German phrase, with the emphasis – perhaps unintentional – on ein, embodies that power. I posit that it is this kind of charisma, which is already coming to be known as Kennedyesque (the President is said to share it with his younger brother, the Justice Minister Robert F. Kennedy), that is necessary for political victory by a leader on the left. I may be taken to task for placing the Democratic Party of the United States, with its long history of protecting racial segregation in the South, on the left, considering that in many respects (such as social welfare) it is to the right of European conservative parties such as our CDU. I will explain what I mean. In a democratic state, a vote is an act that is directed toward the future, and the way one votes expresses the way one feels about the future. And what are our feelings about the future? Typically, a mixture of fear and hope. If the predominant feeling is fear, then one’s vote represents a desire for the fear to be quelled, and it will go to the party that promises security and stability. That, normally, is a party of the right, whether it calls itself conservative, Christian, or a people’s party. But if the predominant feeling is hope, then the vote will go to whoever can kindle hope with a promise of progress, and such a vote will typically go to the left. In the United States, this is the role of the Democratic Party, as typified by the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The difference is this: for the promise of stability, charisma is not necessary, except perhaps at times of crisis; an appearance of competence is normally sufficient. But to kindle hope one needs that special something that I call charisma on the left. It was possessed by Roosevelt and by Louis St. Laurent (whom the press called ‘Uncle Louis’), and it is what we find in John F. Kennedy, the embodiment of hope in present-day politics. An appearance of competence is what such non-charismatic present-day leaders as Jorge Alessandri in Chile and Harold Macmillan in Great Britain provide. In our midst, it is the strongest asset of Ludwig Erhard, and it is what will probably propel him into the chancellorship if stability, not progress, is what the people continue to desire. And who among us has, on the left, the ability to kindle hope? The man with the greatest potential, despite his loss two years ago (though with greatly improved results for his party), is still Willy Brandt, Kennedy’s friend, who stood with him in front of the Schöneberg City Hall during the speech. Those who wish the SPD well can only hope that it stays with Brandt until such time as hope wins out over fear in the hearts of West Germans. But as a Hamburger – a relatively new one, but one baptized by last year’s storm tide – I would like to add that our own Helmut Schmidt is another man with the potential of inspiring hope, as he demonstrated by the way he led us out of that disaster. Helmut Schmidt was among those who attended the Kiss Me, Kate premiere. His appearance in the Senate box evoked enthusiastic applause from the audience, but this was soon matched by the ovation that greeted Another Opening, Another Show, and dwarfed by the cheers that resounded in response to Brigitte’s singing of Why Can't You Behave?