Essays in Idleness

Helmut Schmidt was a highly unusual politician: “intelligent, honest, candid, decent,” as described by old colleagues in Germany; and a smoker, as everyone noticed. This last was important. He smoked everywhere, paying no attention to Nicht Rauchen signs, right up to the day before yesterday. (Literally.) It was part of his charm, a way to signal that he did not care for anyone’s opinion. It was not the occasional cigarette; witnesses, including television audiences, calculated that he lit another every seven minutes.

When the EU threatened to ban his brand, two years ago, he went out and bought two hundred cartons. (At the rate indicated, he must have smoked them all by now.)

If I have one criticism of the man (former Bundeskanzler, who died Tuesday, age ninety-six), it is that he smoked menthol cigarettes. I do not like them. But he was a generous man, who kept non-menthol packs, too, which he distributed to visitors in his office, from a giant candy bowl loaded with all brands. He would force them on people, and make them feel self-conscious if they were not smoking with him.

The Germans are notoriously a disciplined, rule-bound people. But they hate themselves for it, and they loved Helmut Schmidt. There were polls to show, right up to his death, that he remained the country’s most popular politician, even if few wanted him back in office again. They always wanted to hear, however, what he had to say. And to watch the way he said it: like a captain. He could enchant foreign audiences, too, but especially German ones, by being so un-German. But of course he was from Hamburg, the ancient Free and Hanseatic City, which is full of un-German types.

His manner was commendable. People would come to him with some policy matter they thought he must urgently address, and he would say, “That doesn’t interest me.” Then change the subject to something more amenable.

From what I gather, he was miscast as the equivalent of a prime minister. He would have been entirely acceptable as a kind of “constitutional” Holy Roman Emperor; powerless, but constantly telling the merely departmental figures what’s what. It is unfortunate that the office has lapsed; I think Schmidt would have enjoyed it.

The next best thing was writing for Die Zeit. This wonderful post-war German institution is a fat, weekly broadsheet. When displaced from federal office he bought a stake in it, and held court from there as one of the co-editors. Since adolescence, when I could almost read German, I have been trying to follow it. The articles are long, both serious and light, and the attitude is like Schmidt’s: Social Democrat, technically, but against almost everything the Left stands for. And a shameless bastion of pro-Americanism.

Schmidt, older readers may recall, was the Bundeskanzler (I almost wrote Reichskanzler, OMG), who, in defiance of millions of Leftist hooligans in the streets, invited the Americans to put fresh nuclear missiles in silos all across West Germany — at a time when the Soviets were getting too pushy. Ah, the old Cold War: how we miss it. He was the man who refused to negotiate with the Baader-Meinhof gang, and when they hijacked a Lufthansa plane to Mogadishu, sent commandos to rescue all the passengers, and bring the terrorists home in body bags. This is how it should be done.

He was also a persistent architect of Ostpolitik (in continuity with Willy Brandt); and a proponent of “Europe.” His reasons, in every case, were the common ones: e.g. a statesman should try to avoid war. And yes, he had served in the Wehrmacht (having joined the Hitler-Jugend at age fourteen, like all the other kids). Indeed he had served on the bloody Eastern Front; he had some inkling what war is like, along with his Iron Cross. Too, on the Western Front, where he was captured and interned in a British POW camp; and wherein he became something of an Anglophile, and a thoughtful politician.

Showing strength is one aspect of maintaining the peace; arranging alternatives to war is another. We could argue the fine points; not today.

A “progressive,” I suppose, but according to the tenets of another generation; the German equivalent of my father, in some ways, who was a “liberal” in the 1950s sense, which is to say, free markets and total opposition to Communism. Who wanted a “social safety net” for the hard cases, but hardly a Kafkaesque welfare state for all. Too, a form of “open-minded” tolerance for what the kids get up to; but nothing like what we tolerate today.

His wife Hannelore, or “Loki,” to whom he was very happily married for sixty-eight years, was another of those: an “environmentalist” but of an earlier generation that stressed conservancy, and public education. Her (and their) notion was that, the more people know about nature, the safer it will be from depredation. It was not, vegans in jackboots. The two were inseparable as a political team. She was a chain-smoker, too. Sad to say, she died young, at age ninety-one.

After which, in his own nineties, Helmut scandalously took a mistress. (He was lovable, what can one say?)