An intellectual and moral turn, like the one István and he had ardently called for—as they assured each other—long before Chancellor Helmut Kohl used just those terms in proclaiming a new era for the Federal Republic of Germany, but which they had completely forgotten about as a result of watching so much Knight Rider. All summer long they had clutched their pain, hatred, heartache, and self-pity tight, sunk side by side in the cushions of the sofa, from which position they let Michael Knight massage their souls and soften their brains. Their completely uncritical passion for a talking car and its pompadoured driver battling evil together can confidently be attributed to the fact that this enthusiasm was the one thing they could share in those trying hours and weeks—indeed, months, we must sadly admit. Self-pity, as a rule, is a difficult thing to share and only István suffered the ocular pain, just as he was the only one to feel hatred for the devious, gerbera-wielding attacker, hatred that seethed in him whenever he felt those stabs of pain and his bleary eye watered, soaking the bandage. No, Kraft could not share this hatred, even though his friend regularly enjoined him to, but in the end István’s hatred and Kraft’s heartache were focused on the same object, the broad-hipped, exceptionally maternal, peace-loving art student and enucleator Ruth Lambsdorff. This, however, was something his Hungarian friend was on no account to find out and so Kraft suffered in silence while István mostly whimpered faintly but from time to time broke out in loud Magyar curses before collapsing into an exhausted stupor.
chapter six
Classical liberalism’s confidence that the objectives of a liberal society will be achieved through private enterprise is only partially supported by historical experience. There is no natural harmony between personal advantage and the common good. […] The tendency toward the accumulation of private capital, visible in earnings from interest returns and rising property values, is as much a part of an economic system governed by the pursuit of profit as the tendency toward the concentration of private ownership of the means of production. They are the reverse of the productivity ensured by the mechanisms of such an economic system.
The free exercise of these negative tendencies in unfettered productivity, will ultimately only destroy its human element by always privileging the owner over those who have nothing, the rich over the poor, the producer over the consumer, capital over labor.
—EXCERPT FROM THE FREE DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S FREIBURG THESES, 1971
Ironically enough, it was a distant uncle of the object of their love and hatred who would rouse from their lethargy the two radical free marketeers busy licking their wounds, the aforementioned Count Otto Lambsdorff, federal minister for economic affairs for the Social-Liberal coalition, who presented his plan, “Manifesto for Market Economy: Concept for a Policy to Overcome Weak Growth Performance and Reduce Unemployment,” on the 9th of September ’82. Despite its technocratic title, this proposal filled them with the warmest emotions and set their hearts aflutter.
Thanks to his contacts in the Free Democratic Party, Kraft was able to get ahold of a copy of the document that same day and to celebrate the occasion, the young men went together to their hair salon of choice, where the owner, a pencil-thin old soldier with trembling hands who had learned his craft in the Wehrmacht, cut the hair close on the sides of their heads and shaved the napes of their necks with the assistance of a Bakelite clipper that clacked loudly when the motor was turned on, a sound Kraft associated more closely with solidity and dependability than any other sound in the world. All the while, he and István excitedly discussed the blue-blood recommendations in the FDP document in favor of cutting social services, read the most incisive passages aloud to each other, their voices cracking with exhilaration, and exclaimed for all to hear that Thatcher and Reagan’s time had finally come in the Federal Republic as well, causing the clippers in the old barber’s hands to shake even more violently, since all he could gather from this more or less incomprehensible conversation was that an Anglo-Saxon invasion of his homeland was imminent.
* * *
The following morning, they could hardly wait to get to the university, after having seriously neglected their studies for months. Freshly shaved and neatly combed, they knotted their striped ties, picked lint off each other’s lapels, and polished their shoes; István wrapped his head in a clean bandage of a fresh yellow color that, Kraft assured him, differed only slightly from the official color of the Liberal Party. Thus accoutered, they made a triumphal entrance into the university and even the WOMEN ENRAGED that someone had graffitied with a thick brush on the rusted facade during their absence elicited nothing more than a scornful snort from István and a quick twitch of his bandage.
In front of the buildings they met groups of outraged students in a flurry of excitement, arguing and blowing the smoke from their hand-rolled cigarettes into the autumn air as if they were spitting in disgust. The word betrayal was being bandied about and there was talk of capitalist clear-cutting, of a declaration of war on the social state, but Kraft and Pánczél had a surprisingly hard time getting a foothold in the discussions. They had imagined they’d be attacked since they were known throughout the university as fiery advocates of an ultra–free market economic and libertarian social political system modeled on the Anglo-Saxon variety, as proponents of the very worldview that emanated from every line of the count’s proposal, and they would have welcomed such attacks because they had so far simply not been taken seriously, their arguments striking their fellow students as too remote and eccentric. But now they would finally be in a position to stuff these simpletons’ unwashed ears with evidence of their intellectual brilliance and worldly superiority, they assumed.
In this regard, however, Kraft and Pánczél were doubly deluded: on the one hand, there is no measurable or statistically verifiable connection between the cleanliness of one’s ears and one’s place on the political spectrum—István, of all people, should have refrained from such judgments at the time given that he had been limited to sponge baths since the 11th of June due to his eye injury, leaving his left ear hardly above corresponding suspicion—and on the other hand, none of the students had any desire to lend an ear to their intellectual brilliance, since they were all still too profoundly shocked at this betrayal by the Liberal Party to entertain the thought of a debate on the subject. To be sure, there were few supporters of Helmut Schmidt’s government among the students, and hundreds of thousands of emphatic demonstrators were taking to the streets to protest the NATO Double-Track Decision that made provisions both for stationing new American nuclear missiles in Europe and for bilateral arms controls. But after fourteen years of the Social-Liberal coalition, most of the students had concluded that, under the circumstances, this coalition was the lesser evil and they had somehow ended up accepting the idea that the Liberals were a more or less trustworthy partner for the Social Democrats of the SPD. It was well-known that certain members of the FDP were flirting with radical economic liberalism, but the widespread hope had remained that the spirit that had guided German Liberals since the end of the 1960s, when they had adopted the Freiburg theses, which set the party in a direction supportive not only of the social state, but even of a reform of capitalism in order to achieve a government-controlled mechanism for greater distributive justice, would prevail. Now the Lambsdorff paper: betrayal! For the majority of the student body, solidarity with the Social Democrats was suddenly a kind of obligation and indignation was given free rein. It can come as no surprise, then, that no one wanted to deal with these two smirking fops, much less engage in an extended discussion of the subtle economic advantages of a supply-side versus a demand-driven economic policy. This may, however, also have had something to do with the fact that Kraft and Pánczél had well-formulated arguments at hand, supported by a frightening number of figures, statistics, and models they launched like a volley of arrow-headed footnotes. Their theoretical arsenal was terrifying and the frigid disregard for the less fortunate that emanated from the weapons they deployed inspired in their
fellow students a premonition that a new time had come in which such brilliant but sadly socially inept misfits would have to be taken seriously. Still, for the moment the other students preferred to turn their backs on them and get worked up in like-minded company. Kraft and István were somewhat disappointed that their entry was not nearly as triumphal or controversial as they had hoped, but they sensed their time would soon come.
* * *
The situation escalated a few days later when Helmut Schmidt declared that the plan presented by his minister for economic affairs was tantamount to being served divorce papers. In response, the FDP foreign minister Genscher and three other Liberal cabinet members, including Count Lambsdorff, resigned. The coalition was thereby dissolved and the Liberals marched upon the enemy with flags waving and cries of joy from Grunewaldstraße. Kohl saw that the ideal opening for his intellectual and moral turn—which naturally could only be realized under his chancellorship—had come and he proposed a constructive vote of no confidence against the sitting chancellor.
The day before the big event, Kraft and István dressed to the nines and, giddy with anticipation, boarded the train to Cologne at Bahnhof Zoo. Yet when the train stopped at Griebnitzsee and the Transport Police, accompanied by a commando of German Democratic Republic ticket collectors, boarded the train, the shirt-washer Pánczél became noticeably quieter. Taciturn, he stared with his right eye at the actually existing socialism passing by the window. In his breast pocket burned a dark green passport with the Federal Republic’s golden eagle, issued to a certain Gustl Knüttel, born in Neugablonz and now a pastry chef at the Kranzler. Thanks to his family’s Bohemian roots, Knüttel was endowed with Eastern European features, which made his fiancée clap her hands in delight whenever István Pánczél pushed his tray up to her register in the student cafeteria of the Free University and exclaim that he, István, was the spitting image of Gustl. It was Kraft who came up with the idea that István should take advantage of his resemblance to said Gustl Knüttel and travel with his passport once it had become clear to them that flying was not an option due to budgetary constraints and they would therefore have to cross the territory of the workers’ and farmers’ state by train, exposing István to arrest by the German People’s Police and the subsequent threat of extradition to the fellow socialist state of the Hungarian People’s Republic. The pastry chef was persuaded to lend his pass by his fiancée, who in return for her support of this conspiratorial undertaking was loaned all the Knight Rider videos, which made her so happy she offered on the spot to blow out István’s hair the way she styled Gustl’s Bohemian locks so that the curly-haired István would be almost completely indistinguishable from the pastry chef, except for his cloudy eye, of course, but since it was so obviously a recent injury, it hardly had to be evident in the passport photo. It was, in fact, István’s eye that got him through the passport control without a problem, because the officer, uncomfortable at the sight of the injury, had no wish to stare at the young man’s sad face for any length of time, and so, happy to accept the rough resemblance between pastry chef Knüttel’s passport photo and the shirt-washer Pánczél, he handed the false passport back without a word.
Thus the biggest danger was behind them, but the fear remained, and whenever the train slowed, István’s complexion changed from ivory to ash gray and, his head pressed against the seat back, he kept repeating, “It’s not going to stop, it’s not going to stop…” At the border checkpoint in Marienborn, the train did come to a stop and tear after tear fell from Pánczél’s eye and hung from his trembling chin …
Only once they reached Helmstedt did he relax, and for the entire stretch to Cologne, Pánczél tormented his fellow traveler with a detailed lecture on the foundations of game theory applied to the balance of fear, pausing only to offer asides praising the architectural qualities of the passing towns and the fashion sense of people on the train platforms at which their train stopped.
* * *
Early on the morning of October 1, they left the youth hostel in Bonn and walked to the Parliament Building on the bank of the Rhine and found seats in the visitors’ gallery of the assembly hall where they waited patiently for the members of parliament to arrive. Their sense that they were witnessing a significant historical event grew stronger when Hannelore Kohl and her two sons sat down near them.
Kraft’s doubts that he was on the right side in the coming debate surfaced the moment Chancellor Schmidt stepped up to the podium wearing a dark three-piece suit and a thin silver-blue tie, his thick gray hair combed to one side, with exceptional statesmanlike aplomb—yes, Kraft even found his rasping chain-smoker’s cough befitting a statesman—and opened the debate with admirable nonchalance, speaking of himself in the third person and making the planned unseating of the chancellor look like a revolution of dwarves incited by a corpulent giant. This man, Kraft was well aware, had the stature of a great head of state, and what fascinated Kraft even more was the sense of ease he emitted, the like of which, it seemed to Kraft, had never been seen in this country before. Schmidt addressed all the great men of this world as equals; he sat beside Carter with a broad smile, dynamic and decisive; next to Giscard d’Estaing he seemed a levelheaded intellectual, radiating esprit and charm; and his mere presence reduced Honecker to a little man in an oversize fur hat. In short, Kraft greatly regretted that they weren’t on the same team.
Kraft’s doubts were not assuaged by the performance of Rainer Barzel, who had to justify the vote of no-confidence for the opposition and displayed every bit as much self-confidence as the speaker before him, but none of the latter’s elegance and natural nobility. He came off instead as an arrogant schoolyard bully who had been tasked by the teachers with overseeing recess. The chancellor meanwhile sat sprawled in an armchair behind the government bench, calmly snorting one pinch of snuff after another, managing to look as if he were slurping oysters. To be sure, the two men were well matched in arrogance, but while there was something coarse about Barzel’s hubris, Schmidt seemed entitled to his.
Kraft gave his friend a sidelong glance to see if he was plagued by similar doubts, but István appeared intoxicated by the high mass of parliamentarian democracy and lapped up Barzel’s every word as if it were sacramental wine transubstantiated to liberty.
It wasn’t until the next speaker that Kraft was delivered from his doubts. It was easy for him to dismiss Wehner, the SPD parliamentary leader, as an old man, a dinosaur, an embodiment of that syndicalist clique prone to romantic ideas about society who were responsible, in Kraft’s view, for the country’s two million unemployed, and as someone who still acted as if most of the working class came home at night with machine oil on their hands or coal dust on their faces. The worst of it was that he seemed to believe it would always be so, whereas—and Kraft was sure of this—Germany had long ago set out on the irreversible path toward a service society; no, now there he had to correct himself, since he had learned from Thatcher that “there’s no such thing as society,” so Germany was rather on the path to a service … what exactly?… a loose collection of service individuals voluntarily aligned in family groups? It still wasn’t entirely clear to Kraft what one could call the thing they lived in without using the term society. But Wehner’s remarks tore Kraft from his reflections on the difficulties of conforming to correct Thatcherist vocabulary when the geezer, spraying old-man spittle over his papers, accused Count Lambsdorff of sinning against the younger generation. Kraft heard István gasping for breath beside him and before Kraft realized what he himself was doing, he shouted, “And what do you know of the younger generation?” into the rising wave of the Social Democrats’ applause, loud enough for the president of the Bundestag, eyebrow raised, to give the visitors’ gallery a stern look with a precautionary reach for the bell. Kraft ducked his head and muttered, “But it’s true.” Really, that old man couldn’t read the signs of the times, and besides he had a tie the size of a rag around his neck that hung down his chest like a baby’s bib.
&
nbsp; In this respect, at least, the next speaker scored some points: Mischnick’s tie won Kraft’s approval even if the Liberal parliamentary leader himself didn’t have a shred of Helmut Schmidt’s elegance and ease. And it didn’t help that he began his speech by emphasizing what a difficult period Germany had entered, what a difficult time it was for this parliament too, and finally what a difficult time it was for him personally. Stuff and nonsense, Kraft muttered, in what way is this such a difficult time? It was an opportunity for a nation standing on the brink of disaster, that’s what it was. It was time to air out the social-democratic fug, cut taxes, shrink the state, deregulate the banks, privatize the railroads, the post office, the telephone, electricity; out with Keynes, in with Friedman and Hayek; free the individual from the state’s stranglehold; consolidate the national budget; relax labor laws; reduce maternity benefits, federal training assistance, and housing subsidies, or better yet, eliminate them altogether. Liberty, liberty, the word buzzed in Kraft’s head.
This Mischnick, however, was much too hesitant, too soft, too prudent, even if, as Kraft had to admit, his well-formulated phrases, his refusal to sweep away all doubt, the way he measured his words, had a certain charm and, from an intellectual point of view, were certainly preferable to the ranting of a Barzel. Still, Kraft had traveled to Bonn to witness a final showdown and a crushing victory, so he applauded wildly when Mischnick overcame his restraint and raised his voice in a call to abandon the entitlement mentality, jabbing his index finger at the podium to underscore each and every word as if he were squashing an entire tribe of beetles.
Kraft Page 7