Helmut Schmidt: free-spirited, intellectual, iron-willed

His obituaries will say that he was a Hamburg native but Helmut Schmidt was, in his essence, a Hanseat. A Hanseat is as much a state of mind of the natives of Germany's three Hanseatic cities: Hamburg, Lübeck and Bremen. A Hanseat's view of life is inseparable from the free-spirited, outward-looking and tolerant attitudes that come from being a trading city.

The most famous Hanseats were Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. The family spent several hundred pages declining in Lübeck, but Helmut Schmidt spent 96 years in the ascendent.

That wasn't a given in 1982 when, after eight years, he was ousted from power by that other Helmut – Kohl – and Schmidt's public life could have been over. But the end of his political career marked a new beginning. He entered Hamburg's red-brick galleon – Die Zeit – and never left, first as co-publisher and later as managing editor.

Week for week, in the newspaper columns and in regular books, he became one of Germany's most influential public intellectuals with an interest as vast as his output, from the European project to renewable energy in China.

Following Kohl’s departure from politics and later health problems, Schmidt was privately delighted that, in later years, he eventually stole back the public respect and gravitas snatched from him in 1982.

Weekly meeting

Last July I met him in person when a journalist friend invited me along to the weekly meeting with “Schmidt”. He was older and wider than I remembered from public events, with a hearing aid and dressed in a cardigan rather than a suit.

But his gaze was as sharp as the collar of his shirt, his hair-parting as precise as his speech, with the clear, consonants of the Hanseatic German given an extra edge with the distinctive and distinguished habit of replacing “sch” sounds with “s”.

Before him on the table lay pages torn from that week’s issue, paragraphs highlighted and notes in the margins. He was nearing his 100th birthday, but as far from his dotage as ever.

As we gathered – nine of us in total – Schmidt opened proceedings by lighting up one of his trademark Reyno White menthol cigarettes. A smoker since an uncle gave him cigarettes for his confirmation, he switched to menthol in the 1960s and bought up a stockpile in his cellar when the EU threatened to ban them.

Smoking three or even four packs a day, his refusal to accept Germany's smoking ban in public became, in later life, as much of a Schmidt trademark as his glowing cigarette. He was like a latter-day Martin Luther: "Here I stand, smoking, I can do nothing else."

It was an attitude honed in difficult times of high-stakes hostage takings with home-grown terrorists and high-stakes cold war rearmament politics.

That iron resolve was like a shadow from another age and earned him huge respect as an antidote to the Gutmensch attitude, a slightly hysterical brand of political correctness particular to modern Germany.

Wise Buddha

At our morning meeting everything, including his cigarette smoke, revolved around Schmidt, sitting silently and contentedly in his wheelchair like an old, wise Buddha.

He let his seven senior staff members discuss the coming issue and issues of the day. After the recent Brussels all-nighter for a third Greek bailout, they wondered whether Angela Merkel, with her long list of demands, had finally poisoned Europe opinion against Germany?

The table was divided until Schmidt rowed in. Though Merkel is from the rival, Christian Democrat (CDU) camp, it was clear – reading between the lines – that Schmidt felt she had pushed a very hard bargain with Greece but done it well.

The negative media reaction, he said, was irrelevant. Freedom of the press is important but often overrated by the press itself, he declared. That left an impression on his staff.

As the meeting wound up, I asked him whether he thought people worried about Germany’s growing influence in Europe were right to be worried. He studied me for a few moments with an imperious gaze, then gave an answer that morphed into a mini lecture, stretching from the previous week in Brussels back to the court of Charlemagne in Aachen, the first man to unite Europe.

“We’ve had many attempts to unite Europe from the centre – starting with Karl the Great, Napoleon and even Adolf Nazi,” he said. With humour dry enough to preserve fish, he added: “They all went badly in the end and I don’t see any interest from anyone here in trying that again.”