Niall Ferguson - Kissinger, Volume 1

Louis and Paula Kissinger married amid a revolution no less violent than the one that had driven his favorite poet Heine into exile ninety years before. Even before the formal armistice ended the First World War, the imperial regime had been toppled by the revolutionary wave that swept through Germany. On November 9, 1918, Fürth came briefly under the control of a Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council; the red flag flew high above the town hall. In April 1919 the revolutionaries sought to align themselves with the Munich “revolutionary central council,” set up in imitation of the Soviets in Russia. But as elsewhere in Germany, the Fürth Social Democrats repudiated the Bolshevik model and within just four days the city authorities (the Magistrat and the Kollegium der Gemeindebevollmächtigten) were restored to power. 61The revolution did not end there, however. In every year between 1919 and 1923, there was at least one attempt from either the left or the right to overthrow the new Weimar Republic (named after the Thuringian town where its constitution was drafted). Political violence was accompanied by economic insecurity. Intent on proving the unsustainability of the reparations debt imposed on Germany under the Versailles Treaty, Weimar’s ministers pursued a conscious policy of deficit finance and money printing. The short-term benefit was to boost investment, employment, and exports. The long-term cost was a disastrous hyperinflation that inflicted permanent damage on the financial system, the social order, and the political legitimacy of the republic. On the eve of the First World War, the exchange rate of the German mark had been fixed, under the gold standard, at 4.20 marks to the dollar. By Sunday, May 27, 1923—the day of Heinz Kissinger’s birth 62—a dollar bought nearly 59,000 paper marks. The annual inflation rate was approaching 10,000 percent. By the end of the year the rate was 182 billion percent. A paper mark was worth precisely one trillionth of a prewar mark.

Needless to say, the Kissingers’ newborn baby was oblivious to all this, but he was not unaffected by it. For no social group was harder hit by the inflation than higher civil servants like Louis Kissinger. Workers were able at least partly to protect themselves against spiraling prices by striking for higher wages. A respectable schoolmaster could do no such thing. In the postwar years, unskilled workers’ wages initially held up in real terms, finally falling by around 30 percent in the collapse of 1922–23. By contrast, when adjusted for inflation, a civil servant’s salary fell by between 60 and 70 percent. At the same time, the cash savings of middle-class families like the Kissingers were wiped out. In the great leveling produced by the Weimar hyperinflation, men like Louis Kissinger were among the biggest losers. It was not until January 1925 that he could afford to move his growing family from their cramped first-floor apartment at 23 Mathildenstrasse to nearby 5 Marienstrasse, where Heinz’s brother, Walter, was born.

V

Henry Kissinger once joked that if it hadn’t been for Hitler, he might have spent his life “quietly as a Studienrat in Nuremberg.” In fact, as a boy he did not seem very likely to follow in his studious father’s footsteps. When they were first sent to kindergarten, their mother later recalled, he and his brother “hated it and… were terribly naughty and hard to handle…. They would run away and I had to find them.” 63Later, the two attended the old Heckmann private school, where his father had first taught: a photograph from 1931 shows Heinz with his teacher, a man named Merz, and eight other students (five of whom are identified as Jewish). 64Contemporaries later differed about Heinz Kissinger’s academic ability as a boy. Menahem (formerly Heinz) Lion, who ended up living in Israel, later admitted to having been “envious of his essays…. They were remarkable for their form, their style, and their ideas, and they were often read out to the class.” 65But others remembered him as an “average” pupil at school. 66Shimon Eldad, who taught him English and French when he attended the Jewish High School, recalled a “good but not outstanding student…. He was a spirited and scintillating youth, but I didn’t notice anything special in him. His English didn’t exactly excite me, and it seems that way still today.” 67

It seems clear that the Kissinger brothers were brought up in a fairly strict Orthodox household. Menahem Lion remembered going “together to synagogue every morning before school. On Saturdays Lion’s father taught them both the Torah. They attended an Orthodox youth club, Ezra, together.” 68Tzipora Jochsberger had similar memories. 69A cousin, John Heiman, who came to live with the family when Kissinger was seven, later described

one Saturday when he and Henry took a stroll beyond the eruv, a sort of understood boundary encircling [the Jewish community]. Outside the eruv, under the teachings of their religion, Orthodox Jews were not permitted to carry anything in their hands or in their pockets…. [W]hen he and Kissinger crossed the boundary, Henry stopped and reminded him that “carrying” was forbidden. They took their handkerchiefs from their pockets and tied them to their wrists. 70

Yet as he grew into a teenager, Heinz Kissinger increasingly rebelled against his parents’ way of life. Their idea of entertainment was to hear Fidelio at the Fürth Theater. For pleasure, Louis Kissinger read the great works of Friedrich Schiller and Theodor Mommsen and even researched and wrote local history. Heinz’s passion, by contrast, was for soccer. 71

The Spielvereinigung in those days was a team worth following. They were German champions in 1926 and 1929—beating Hertha BSC Berlin in the final on both occasions — and got as far as the semifinals in 1923 and 1931. In the same period, they also won the South German Cup four times. The Fürth-Nuremberg rivalry had the intense quality of other neighborly feuds in European soccer, such as Rangers-Celtic in Glasgow. Heinz Kissinger was soon an ardent Fürth fan. As he later recollected,

Fürth was to soccer as Green Bay was to [American] football. It was a small town… that in a ten-year period won three German championships…. I started playing when I was about six. My grandfather had a farm [at Leutershausen] near Fürth, and they had a big courtyard and we played pickup games there. I played goalie for a brief period, then I broke my hand. After that, I played inside-right and then mid-field. I played until I was fifteen. I really wasn’t very good though I took the game very seriously.

Though no great athlete, Heinz Kissinger was already a shrewd tactician, devising for his team “a system that, as it turned out, is the way the Italians play soccer…. The system was to drive the other team nuts by not letting them score, by keeping so many people back as defenders…. It’s very hard to score when ten players are lined up in front of the goal.” 72So ardent did his soccer mania become that for a time his parents banned him from attending Fürth fixtures.

Soccer was not the only passion that brought Heinz Kissinger into conflict with his parents. As his boyhood friend remembered,

Heinz Kissinger spent many hours in my home. They lived near us and Heinz would ride over on his bike. He liked being with us. It seems to me he had a problem with his father. If I’m not mistaken, he was afraid of him because he was a very pedantic man…. His father was always checking Heinz’s homework, and kept a close watch on him. Heinz told me more than once he couldn’t discuss anything with his father, especially not girls.

As Lion later related, “the only time that Kissinger brought home a less than satisfactory report card was when he started paying attention to girls — or girls started paying attention to him. He was only twelve at the time and the girls were already chasing after him, but he didn’t pay any attention to them. His first love was a charming blonde.” According to Lion, the two boys used to take girlfriends for walks in the local park on Friday evenings. When Lion returned late from one of these walks, his parents blamed Kissinger’s influence and forbade their son to see “the Kissinger boy” for a whole week. Later they sent Lion off to a summer camp for six weeks “to get him away from Heinz Kissinger, who had earned a reputation as a skirt chaser.” 73Memory plays tricks, and this story had probably improved in the telling over thirty years. Still, even Kissinger’s mother noted her elder son’s penchant for “keeping everything locked up inside — never discussing your innermost thoughts!” 74Corporal punishment was not unknown in the Kissinger household, as in most households of the time. 75It paid to keep mischief quiet.