{"id":33571,"date":"2015-11-13T04:00:21","date_gmt":"2015-11-13T09:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33571"},"modified":"2018-01-15T20:30:53","modified_gmt":"2018-01-16T01:30:53","slug":"helmut-schmidt-rip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/11\/13\/helmut-schmidt-rip\/","title":{"rendered":"Helmut Schmidt, RIP"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.davidwarrenonline.com\/2015\/11\/12\/death-of-a-smoker\/\" target=\"_blank\">David Warren<\/a> remembers the former German chancellor:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Helmut Schmidt was a highly unusual politician: \u201cintelligent, honest, candid, decent,\u201d 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\u2019s opinion. It was not the occasional cigarette; witnesses, including television audiences, calculated that he lit another every seven minutes.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>His manner was commendable. People would come to him with some policy matter they thought he must urgently address, and he would say, \u201cThat doesn\u2019t interest me.\u201d Then change the subject to something more amenable.<\/p>\n<p>From what I gather, he was miscast as the equivalent of a prime minister. He would have been entirely acceptable as a kind of \u201cconstitutional\u201d Holy Roman Emperor; powerless, but constantly telling the merely departmental figures what\u2019s what. It is unfortunate that the office has lapsed; I think Schmidt would have enjoyed it.<\/p>\n<p>The next best thing was writing for <em>Die Zeit<\/em>. 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\u2019s: Social Democrat, technically, but against almost everything the Left stands for. And a shameless bastion of pro-Americanism.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>A \u201cprogressive,\u201d I suppose, but according to the tenets of another generation; the German equivalent of my father, in some ways, who was a \u201cliberal\u201d in the 1950s sense, which is to say, free markets and total opposition to Communism. Who wanted a \u201csocial safety net\u201d for the hard cases, but hardly a Kafkaesque welfare state for all. Too, a form of \u201copen-minded\u201d tolerance for what the kids get up to; but nothing like what we tolerate today.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>David Warren remembers the former German chancellor: Helmut Schmidt was a highly unusual politician: \u201cintelligent, honest, candid, decent,\u201d 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,1118,7],"tags":[108,293],"class_list":["post-33571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-germany","category-history","tag-coldwar","tag-obituary"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8Jt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33571"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33572,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33571\/revisions\/33572"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}