“Only now [WM season] do we have them,” he answers me. “Usually we don’t have any flags, not even one. Our history, you know. We are not America.”
Oh, my Germans: Why are you so extreme?! Can’t you take a middle ground for once?
I am given a little toy, a green bull. That’s nice. I walk out.
•••
I drive to Farah’s to bid her good-bye and thank her for being such a great host. She shows me an old Quran she has, a family heirloom. She says that Islam as practiced today is not mentioned in this book, that the Quran is a spiritual book, that she remembers the elders in Iran who studied the Quran and had shining faces. But those days are over. And now she’s in Germany.
“I feel like a Jew,” she tells me. “The Germans say that they respect me and my culture but they don’t get any of it, and don’t make any real effort. They just talk. They understand nothing about my culture, about the spirit of my culture. I understand theirs, but they never bothered to really understand mine. To them I am a foreigner, no matter what they say. I know. Farah knows. Farah knows people.”
I arrive at the main station in Frankfurt, ready to board a train going somewhere.
This is Germany. Flags abound, and people are buying. Three colors to the flag, all of them earthy, hot, serious, dooming, stubborn, and almost very clear.
Can anybody explain to me this country, and in plain English?
Kai Diekmann, the editor in chief of Bild, the biggest paper in Europe, as I’m told, is willing to give it a shot.
To Berlin I ride, Answers is my destination.
•••
Chapter 15
Twelve Million People Read His Paper Every Day: Interview with the Man with the Biggest Penis
After passing through X-ray screening, à la modern-day airports, I am led to his office. Two other gentlemen join the meeting. Are they lawyers? CIA? Mossad? No. They are just nice folks who speak good English and go by the names of Tobias and Ulrich. Nice to meet them both.
Time to talk. Kai enters. Gel-haired, white shirt without a wrinkle, black-framed glasses, clean-shaven, he approaches me and shakes my hand. He sits opposite me, behind him an artsy Bild painting, and he is all ready for the talk. In his hands he holds a big plate full of fruit salad, which is probably his lunch. He bites into the chunks of fruit with great craving, which makes me think that the man hasn’t eaten for quite some time. Yet his attention is not focused on the food but rather on the upcoming interview. He seems to be ready for some tough questions, big-time. That’s why, I assume, he has here with us The Two Gentlemen of Berlin.
Not wanting to disappoint him, I ask him the most personal, intimate question I can come up with: Is Germany one nation or a collection of tribes? The Two Gentlemen of Berlin look as if a rock had just hit their unprotected heads. What is this?! Their eyes roll in disbelief. But Kai, keeping focused, replies.
“Definitely a nation,” he says. Especially after unification, and after the government moved to Berlin. Now there’s a center. Everybody looks to Berlin.”
What makes a German German?
“Germans are great at rebuilding. You know what I mean? But we have a problem maintaining it.”
There’s going to be quite a lot of rebuilding to be done in Afghanistan, if peace is ever achieved there. Does he support having German forces in Afghanistan?
“I think it’s good that our forces are in Afghanistan. We are the strongest economic power in Europe.”
This is an explosive political issue in Germany. Not all see eye-to-eye on this, to say the least. I’d like to know Kai’s take on Germany’s various political parties. So I ask him:
What’s the difference between the conservatives and the liberals?
“It’s about how much freedom we have.”
What?
“Conservatives want different types of school, more choices, while the left wants the same school for all. People are not all equal, and I don’t want to make them all equal.”
It’s not exactly what I wanted to know, but it’s interesting to hear nonetheless.
Whatever the differences between the various political parties, Kai still believes in consensus. “Consensus-building is very important. And this may be the answer to your first question about the defining characteristic of this country. It is consensus. A consensus-building society. We spend a whole lot of money to maintain consensus.”
Not that consensus is easy. “This is the only country in the world where the majority wants to raise taxes. Why? Because taxpayers are the minority. And I am totally against raising taxes. More than 50 percent of the people get more from the government than they pay for it.”
Consensus is one thing, multiculturalism is another. “Multiculturalism here has gone wrong. The idea was to let them [workers from Turkey] live in the same way they’ve lived before, but many of those who came to Germany were poor people. Many of the Turkish people here still live in the Stone Age. We did not put enough pressure on the immigrants to learn and adopt to the culture here.”
This brings me to my favorite fashion item: hijab.
Are more Turkish women wearing hijab in Germany today?
“No. There are more of them wearing bikinis.”
I want to ask him where I can find them, but I decide to stay polite and stick to politics.
What’s the story with your paper regarding Israel? Is it true that you have here a Legacy to Protect Israel—
“Worse . . . Every journalist working for us has to sign on to four ‘principles’:
“To reject all forms of political totalitarianism.
“To uphold the principles of a free social market economy.
“To support the Transatlantic alliance.
“And very important: To promote the reconciliation of Jews and Germans and support the vital rights of the people of Israel.
“In my opinion, the state of Israel is where the survivors of the Holocaust found refuge, after the Germans murdered six million of them. And because of this special relationship I am deeply convinced that whenever Israel’s right to exist is in danger we cannot be neutral and our place is to be on the side of Israel. This is our responsibility: We have to take care of Israel.
“This does not mean that we do not criticize Israel. We do.
“What I ask our journalists to do is to always take a closer look, not just follow the mainstream. This is what I tell my people.”
What so you think of Obama?
“I think he is going to be a big disappointment. He’s a one-term president. He is very charismatic, politically very naïve, and very left. But first of all, I don’t like his attitude toward Israel. He gave dangerous speeches, not understanding at all the Arab world.”
One of Kai’s office workers tells me that Kai hardly grants interviews anymore, that in fact he gave only one other this year. I’m intrigued why he granted this interview to me of all people, but I’m more intrigued about his leadership of this paper and how he sees his job here. This man, after all, is one of the most influential people in Germany today.
I ask him the same question I asked Sheikh Jens of Die Zeit: Is the Bild the best paper in Germany?
“Bild is the most successful paper in Germany, the most successful in the whole of Europe. Twelve million read it every day. In its category, it’s the best. We manage to explain politics, and other things, to people who probably would not understand it otherwise. We have got a totally different readership from that of Die Zeit.”
Who are your readers?
“Mostly the typical German citizen. Our reader structure is very similar to our [country’s] demographics. It’s a little younger and it’s a little bit more male. As for influence, we reach more academic, educated readers than does FAZ [popular name for the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung]. If somebody told me I’m allowed to read only two newspapers, that’s it! I’d decide for FAZ and Bild.”
And if you are allowed to rea
d only one paper?
“Of course, Bild . . . You know why? FAZ is a newspaper governed by logical criteria, it simply reports what is going on. Bild has an emotional approach, we are not only reporting what’s happening, we are also reporting what people think is going on, what they feel about it and how they speak about it, and very often this is more important than what actually happened. To give you an example: In New York, when you check the weather you don’t get just the temperature, “minus two degrees,” but you also get the wind-chill factor. With the winds, it feels like minus twenty. So if you go out, you don’t take the coat for the minus two but for the minus twenty. This is what Bild is doing, and this is what makes Bild so important. There’s nothing like Bild in the whole world.”
What’s your contribution to Bild?
“I always had one strategy, and I think this is the most important thing: I always said, Bild has to be so ‘boulevard’ so that there’s no other newspaper that could attack us from down under. We always have to be so boulevard—so simple, so funny, so surprising—that no other newspaper can be better than we are from down there, can get to the masses better than we can. But, to get new readers, to change the image of the newspaper, to be attractive as a platform for politicians, it is important to open the newspaper up at the top. To attract more readers who’d usually not read Bild, thinking it’s just for the man in the street. And this is what we have done for nine and a half years now, trying to open up Bild. And we managed to do it.”
What does this “opening up” mean?
“Very simple: To fill the newspaper with subjects, with content that would be different from what’s in FAZ.”
He tells me of an exhibition that Bild has put on at a museum: the sixty most important pieces of art in the last sixty years. An editor from FAZ even called to tell him he’s ashamed it was not his paper doing it. “This would not have happened in Bild fifteen years ago,” he says. “Fifteen years ago culture in Bild was, you know, on a stage if a light fell down and somebody was killed. That was then Bild reporting about culture. Today we are serious players. I lifted the standards. The only interview President George W. Bush gave to any German newspaper, a one-on-one interview, was to Bild. Every important book, if we want it, we get first serial rights to at Bild. This was unimaginable years ago. And we don’t even pay for it. This was my idea. If we want to see the pope, we go to Rome for a one-on-one meeting. Another thing that I brought to the paper is politics. Page two of the paper today is dedicated to politics. The whole page.”
Talking about his paper, his baby, Kai gets close, and quite friendly. We have eight hundred journalists working in Bild, he says. “If you want to be the best newspaper in Germany, you need eight hundred journalists.” Personally, he says, he knows three hundred of them. He is the one with the authority to make final decisions. And he does. Every day. And as many times a day as he thinks it’s important to be in touch and on top. In short: Everything that’s published in Bild, whatever edition, must get his approval.
But the most important thing for him, strangely enough, is Israel. When he talks about Israel, he gets passionate. “A journalist who is against Israel has no place on our team,” he declares. “If he’s an anti-Semitic asshole he’ll be fired.”
All during the interview, and we are talking for more than an hour already, Kai shows much more passion when he talks about Israel than when he talks about Germany. He had just come back from London, where he attended a party with Elton John, and he is a little tired. But when the name Israel is mentioned, he jumps like a lion to defend it.
I try to push the envelope and I make a comment against some Israeli settlers, particularly the extreme among them. I compare their philosophy to that of the Nazis. Kai lets me have my say, but he definitely doesn’t accept one word of it. If I ever entertained the idea of writing for Bild Zeitung, forget it. I stand no chance. This man is committed to the Israeli cause. This man is definitely not a Jew. I don’t think I ever met a Jew that committed.
Being that he’s not Jewish, and likely not circumcised, it’s time to talk about the really important stuff: His penis. I ask Kai if he has a small penis.
This gets him really animated. “That’s not true,” he says. “You can see on the wall, over there!” He gets up, asks me to come to the window of his office, and then points to a location outside. “You see that red flag there? That’s the building of the TAZ [the paper Die Tageszeitung paper]. You see that yellow sign on the wall? To the left of the yellow sign, that’s the top of my penis. Four stories high. My penis. That’s true. You don’t believe it? It’s true.”
Yes, he’s right. Projected all over the building, from the bottom to the top, is an image of a huge penis, supposedly Kai’s penis. And Kai Diekmann, this guy next to me, is seen at the bottom. With sizable balls, by the way, as he proudly presents his junk to whoever wants to see. That’s culture, I guess. German-style. Some artist, hired by TAZ, created it. I try to imagine this image in New York: the penis of a newspaper editor on the Empire State Building. Will never happen. Even if God himself orders it, no God-fearing New Yorker will ever dare to do it. But this is Berlin. This is Germany. Sophisticated. Cultured.
It turns out that TAZ, for whatever reason, published a fictitious news item about Kai Diekmann, their chief ideological enemy. Kai, they said, was having an operation to enlarge his tiny penis. Very complex operation, mind you, where parts of dead corpses were used to create his new, enhanced organ.
Kai, taking a step that could only backfire, sued TAZ for 30,000 euros. He lost in court. And the folks at TAZ hired an artist to create this image.
What does this have to do with news? As much as the penis of Barack Obama would have.
Kai leaves me to my thoughts and leaves the room, but only to come back with a black folder. Here are quite a few documents. Some TAZ stuff, plus a fake TAZ that Bild published at the time. Yes, they did that.
“They did it to provoke me,” he says. “They hoped that I’d tell them to take it off, but I said, ‘It’s great.’ If you go out of this building, and go there, you’ll see me. It’s me. My face and everything. But I will always say, ‘It’s a great piece of art but it’s not me, it’s their lawyer.’ And then they got crazy. They said, ‘It’s not our lawyer.’ So I said, ‘It’s a left-wing columnist from the Berliner Zeitung.’ And then they had a big discussion, because they are feminists. The chief editor then was a new girl, and she publicly stated in the newspaper that she didn’t want to park her bicycle for the next two years under the penis of Kai Diekmann. Then we secretly published a newspaper—it looks like TAZ, the same layout—with the title We Are Penis, where we argued that the mural had to stay. And everybody thought it was the real TAZ. We had great fun!”
But Kai is not a man to step down and accept defeat.
“When the TAZ turned twenty-five, four years ago, they asked their most beloved enemies to publish their jubilee edition. They asked me to be chief editor for a day. I did it. And even today, that one issue is the highest-circulated ever in the history of TAZ. When they turned thirty, they made the mistake of sending me a letter, which they sent to many others, offering me the opportunity to join their corporation.”
Kai accepted. And he loves it! He goes to their annual meeting, asks stupid questions, and “I have great fun.”
I have fun, too. He and I get along.
He gets up, brings in his iPad and his iPhone, sits next to me and shows me tomorrow’s edition. His iPad, by the way, is the shiniest and cleanest machine I have ever seen. You won’t get it from Apple in a minter condition.
We start with the front page. His Apple brings up tomorrow’s front page as it now stands. He doesn’t like the way it looks and feels. He doesn’t even like the fonts used. Why not?
“This is like old-fashioned,” he says. There’s nothing new to it. We need something different. This will not go to print; it must be changed. “There are only three people allowed to do the newspaper, my
two deputies and me. I am here from nine o’clock and I preside at all the conferences. I pick the pictures.”
I get up, thank the Jew-lover gentile Kai Diekmann for his time, and tell him it was a pleasure meeting him. He takes one look at me and says, “But you are not a Jew, ah?” He doesn’t mean it in a bad way, he’s simply still shocked by the comments I made earlier. Before I leave, I take one look at this Jew Lover and “box” him: I register him in my brain under “Jewish Bride.” Kind of a “Jew Lover.” Yes, “Jewish Groom” would better but it is already taken, supposedly, by God.
Kai surprised me, I must admit. I expected to meet a bully, based on what some told me, but what I saw was a believer. A man driven to do what he believes is right. We might not see eye-to-eye on this or that issue—where Kai sees a great Jew, I see a potential little Nazi; where he sees bikinis, I see hijab—but he’s driven by ideals and he says what he thinks. I respect this.
Did I achieve what I set out to achieve, did I decipher the German character? No. Kai might influence twelve million men and women in his country, but he’s only one man. A man with a big penis on a Berlin wall, and a much bigger love for the Jews in his heart. This is not the Normal German, at least not the one I’ve seen so far.
Perhaps I should cross the political divide and get me somebody from the left—from, let’s say, Die Linke (the Left [Party]). They impress me as educated people, maybe they know that which mere mortals don’t.
Where should I start?
The man who answers to the name Gregor Gysi would be a good start, I think. But how do I get to him?
Through his sister.
•••
Chapter 16
Artists, Leftists, North Korea and a Poem
I Sleep in Hitler's Room Page 19