Schmidt and scholl-latour: a meeting of old men
Helmut Scvhmidt 2014. Image: Kleinschmidt/CC-BY-SA-3.0
Uninvited double call to one "wise statesman" and one "wise observer"
Now that Helmut Schmidt, after having helped to shape my life for more than forty years, is in the ground and the last strains of the state ceremony have faded away, I may dare, as perhaps the first historian, to say something less good about the dead man. I’ll say it frankly: I never liked him, the chancellor of the concrete era – the wiser and holier he became in old age, the less. Why not? This can be found here. The dogma I want to contradict is: Helmut Schmidt was wise, "the last statesman" (according to Der Spiegel), the last politician you could trust. Peter Scholl-Latour has been dead for a year already. Die beiden waren politisch uneins, aber in der Haltung ahnlich. The dogma about the latter is: Peter Scholl-Latour was an expert on Islam and a wise, because completely independent observer of world events.