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 trains 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 Mikis 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 Hemmes 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 Mikis 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 Hemmes 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 its 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 doesnt
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 dont think his story will hold up under questioning, anyway.
He doesnt 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 cant 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 cant promise. There is a convention taking place here. But Im sure we
will be able to find you a room of a similar category. If you dont 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 didnt 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 Strackes office and said, Youre 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 Margots 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 Countesss 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. Wilners 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.
Its just as well that hes away, Miki thought. He told the secretary that he
would bring the typescript the next day. Ill 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; Paeschkes 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 Brigittes 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 Mikis 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 wont 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, Whats 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 prosecutors 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
Strausss 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 were all equally
afraid of the prospect. But how did he manage to get the justice system to get
involved?
I dont know yet, Margot
said, but he seems to have the Old Mans backing. Oh, just in case youre
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.
Theyre 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 Ive seen. But, to come back to the
changed subject, yes, lets 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 proofreaders 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 peoples 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 doesnt 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.
* * *
Mikis 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 Zeits
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, lets 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 Augsteins 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. Im going to be Lois Lane!
And whos 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 youre in bed with me. But on stage, she went
on, standing up again, Im 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 didnt 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. Its 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 didnt see it
It was the year before last,
and we didnt see it because it was the night of the Songbird House
premiere. I heard that it wasnt a very good production. And, anyway, it hasnt
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 its 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 thats 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 Augsteins note. He
realized that he had declined Augsteins 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 Fredericks Prussia, and the imbroglios in
which it got involved, such as the recent one with Strauss, were like
Fredericks 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-Ms wife was the Countesss 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 Countesss 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 oclock. 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 theres no Miki to come home to, shes probably
hanging out with her show-biz pals, as Hetty liked to say. Shell
probably go out for dinner with them. And then to a club
No, its 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 Mikis 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 Leons 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
Leons 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 Kings arrest in Birmingham, he flew to Washington for a week, in
time to hear Kings letter from the Birmingham Jail read on the radio and to
attend the press conference at which Kennedy announced Kings 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.
Brigittes 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 cant 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 tours manager, an HKA employee, completed
his negotiations across Northwest Germany until early September. On
Brigittes insistence, Bad Harzburg was to be one of the tours 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 Kennedys 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.
Kennedys 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 Webers terms: as an individuals 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. Kennedys 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 Kennedys 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 ones 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 peoples 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, Kennedys 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 years 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 Brigittes singing of Why
Can't You Behave?
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