Niall Ferguson - Kissinger, Volume 1

In his memoirs of his career in government, Kissinger alludes only once to his German boyhood. 6His birthplace, he remarked in 2004, meant little to him. 7Those who seek the key to his career in his German-Jewish origins are therefore wasting their time.

I experienced the impact of Nazism and it was very unpleasant, but it did not interfere in my friendship with Jewish people of my age so that I did not find it traumatic…. I have resisted the psychiatric explanations [which] argue that I developed a passion for order over justice and that I translated it into profound interpretations of the international system. I wasn’t concerned with the international system. I was concerned with the standing of the football team of the town in which I lived. 8

Kissinger’s readiness in later life to revisit Fürth has served to reinforce the impression that his youth was not a time of trauma. He paid a visit during a trip to Germany in December 1958, when his return — as the associate director of the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University — rated two paragraphs in the local paper. 9The media attention was far greater seventeen years later when, as U.S. secretary of state, he traveled to Fürth to receive a “citizen’s gold medal,” accompanied by his parents and younger brother, as well as his wife. 10The event was a carefully choreographed celebration of (in Kissinger’s words) “the extraordinary renewal of the friendship between the American and German peoples.” Before an audience of Bavarian worthies, he and the German foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, exchanged what today might seem like diplomatic platitudes.

In the shadow of a nuclear catastrophe [declared Kissinger]… we must not bow to the supposed inevitability of historical tragedy…. Our shared task is to collaborate in building a system of international relations which ensures the stability of continents and the security of peoples, which binds the peoples of the world together through their common interests, and which demands restraint and moderation in international affairs. Our goal is a peace for which all of us work — small as well as big states — a peace that is enduring because all wish to uphold it — strong as well as weak states. 11

Yet the more memorable speech was the unscheduled one given by Kissinger’s father, Louis, making his first visit to Germany since 1938. Though noting that he had been “forced to leave” Germany in that year, he generously referred to Fürth’s earlier tradition of religious tolerance. (“While, in past centuries, intolerance and prejudice were predominant in many German cities, in Fürth the various faiths lived together in harmony.”) His son was being honored in his birthplace not just because of his worldly success but because, like Trygaeus, the hero in Aristophanes’s comedy Peace, he

has seen it as his life’s work to dedicate his time and energy to furthering and maintaining peace in the world. Working together with the President of the United States, he has the great idea of ushering in an era of understanding and peaceful collaboration between nations…. It is a gratifying feeling for us parents that today the name Kissinger is seen around the world as interchangeable with the term “peace”; that the name Kissinger has become a synonym for peace. 12

It was December 1975. Angola was sliding into civil war, less than a month after the end of Portuguese colonial rule. A matter of days before the Kissingers’ trip to Fürth, the Pathet Lao, supported by Vietnam and the Soviet Union, had overthrown the king of Laos, and the Indonesian military had invaded the briefly independent state of East Timor. Just eight days after the medal ceremony, the CIA’s head of station in Athens was shot dead. The newspapers that month were full of terrorist outrages: by the Irish Republican Army in London, by the Palestine Liberation Organization in Vienna, by South Moluccan separatists in the Netherlands. There was even a fatal bomb explosion at New York’s La Guardia airport. To some young German Social Democrats, it seemed incongruous to honor the American secretary of state at such a time. 13Perhaps only the older Germans present understood the significance of Kissinger’s call for “a world, in which it is reconciliation and not power that fills peoples with pride; an era, in which convictions are a source of moral strength and not of intolerance and of hate.” 14These were no empty phrases. For the Kissinger family, what was “especially moving” about this “homecoming” was the fact that the country they had once fled now feted them. 15

May 1923 was the month Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born in Fürth. That, too, was a year of turmoil in the world. In January the town of Rosewood, Florida, had been razed to the ground in a race riot that left six people dead. In June the Bulgarian prime minister, Aleksandar Stamboliyski, was overthrown (and subsequently killed) in a coup. In September General Miguel Ángel Primo de Rivera seized power in Spain, while Japan was devastated by the Great Kanto Earthquake. In October another military strongman, Mustafa Kemal, proclaimed the Republic of Turkey amid the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. The world was still reeling from the political aftershocks of the First World War. In many countries, from Ireland to Russia, bloody civil wars were only now coming to an end. The revolution in the latter had been a human catastrophe, claiming the lives of millions — including its leader, Lenin, who that same month was forced to retire to his estate at Gorki, his health never having recovered from an assassination attempt in 1918.

Nowhere, however, was the upheaval of 1923 greater than in Germany. In January French and Belgian troops had occupied the coal-rich Ruhr area in retaliation for Germany’s failure to fulfill its obligations under the Treaty of Versailles. The German government called for a general strike. The crisis was the coup de grâce for the German currency, which nose-dived into worthlessness. The country threatened to fall apart, with separatist movements in the Rhineland, Bavaria, Saxony, and even Hamburg, where the Communists attempted to seize power. In Munich on November 8 Adolf Hitler launched a putsch from the huge beer hall known as the Bürgerbräukeller. He would not have been the first uniformed demagogue to seize power with such a stunt; Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome had succeeded just over a year before. It took a concerted effort by the head of the Reichswehr, Hans von Seeckt; the leader of the German People’s Party, Gustav von Stresemann; and the banker Hjalmar Schacht to restore the authority of the central government and begin the process of currency reform and stabilization.

It was into this chaos, in the Middle Franconian town of Fürth, that Heinz Kissinger was born.

II

Stifling in its narrow dreariness, our ungardened city, city of soot, of a thousand chimneys, of clanging machinery and hammers, of beer-shops, of sullen, sordid greed in business or craft, of petty and mean people crowded together, with poverty and lovelessness…. In the environs, a barren, sandy plain, dirty factory streams, the slow, murky river, the uniformly straight canal, gaunt woods, melancholy villages, hideous quarries, dust, clay, broom. 16

Fürth lacked charm. The author Jakob Wassermann, who was born there in 1873, recalled its “peculiar formlessness, a certain aridity and meagreness.” 17The contrast with its ancient neighbor, Nuremberg, was especially striking. One of the three most important cities of the Holy Roman Empire, Nuremberg was all “ancient houses, courtyards, streets, cathedrals, bridges, fountains and walls.” 18Separated by just five miles — a short train ride away — the two cities were, in Wassermann’s words, an incongruous “union of antiquity and recentness, art and industry, romance and manufacturing, design and dissolution, form and deformity.” 19Even more sharp was the contrast between grimy industrial Fürth and the pretty, hilly countryside around Ansbach to the south, a landscape of “flower gardens, orchards, fish ponds, deserted castles, ruins full of legends, village fairs, simple people.” 20