Our Century: A Dialogue with Helmut Schmidt and Fritz Stern (II) by Scott Horton

[Jefferson23]

July 23, 2010

*Second installment.

With the kind permission of C.H. Beck Verlag, former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and Columbia University historian Fritz Stern, we present here the second in a series of excerpts from the bestselling book Unser Jahrhundert—Ein Gespräch, in an original English translation.


ii. remembering golda meir and yitzhak rabin

stern: Israel or Bismarck?

schmidt: We want to discuss one of them, but we have to come back to the other subject. An unedifying subject.

stern: One doesn’t make any friends with this subject–neither in America nor in Israel.

schmidt: And not in Germany either. And I have little desire in my days of advanced age to make new enemies. But once we were received with open arms in Israel. That was in the sixties. In 1966, Loki and I undertook our first trip to Israel — we had been invited by grandmother.

stern: Which grandmother?

schmidt: Golda Meir. She was roughly twenty years older than we were. That’s why Loki and I called her grandmother.

stern: 1966. So it was before the war, the famous Six Day War.


in full: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/07/hbc-90007406