He is in my mind the most important German politician of the 1980-2000 decades. For better or worse, he dominated politics. When he was finally defeated, it marked the end of the German politician who did not hold anything back and showed open disdain for enemies and media, as well as said what was on his mind. The tapes therefore are very fascinating. Helmut Kohl's strategy of ruling was accomplished with the telephone. If there was something amiss, he would simply dial a few numbers and try to fix it (or to crush somebody). He tried to do things according to his values. In that case, he is completely the opposite of Merkel as she is devoid of any values whatsoever.
The Reckoning: Kohl Tapes Reveal a Man Full of Anger
Helmut Kohl spent over 600 hours speaking with the journalist Heribert Schwan about his life's work. The secret tapes reveal a chancellor resentful of his public image and disdainful of many of those around him, including Angela Merkel.
Once, at the end of a long hike in the Bavarian Alps, former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had to carry his heavy hiking companion on his back. Franz Josef Strauss, the head of Bavaria's conservative Christian Social Union (CSU) at the time, wasn't in the best of shape. As Strauss and Kohl were preparing for the hike, his wife Marianne made sure he had a decent lunch and a package of tissues in his backpack. Strauss perspired a lot.
When the two men encountered a thunderstorm during their hike, the path became slippery and narrow. In the end, Strauss no longer felt secure on his feet.
"So I carried him on my back for the last 50 meters (165 feet). It wasn't until later that I thought about what would have happened if he had fallen off. No one would have believed me. Everyone would have written that I had thrown him down on purpose."
There are many stories about Kohl and Strauss, whose rivalry has been examined by historians of recent German history. An unforgettable moment is Strauss' speech at the Munich conference center owned by the Wienerwald roast chicken chain in November 1976, when he declared that the young Kohl, who was about to become his party's parliamentary leader, lacked all aptitude to become chancellor. "He is completely incapable. He lacks the character, and he lacks the intellectual and political qualifications. He lacks everything."
Later, in the 1980s, when Kohl was chancellor, he gloated over the CSU leader's waning influence in faraway Munich. "When the Bavarian lion roars, the only thing he spreads nowadays is bad breath," Kohl said. Neither man saw a need to back down.
But Kohl also told Heribert Schwan, a journalist with the West German Broadcasting Corporation (WDR), that there was a different and almost tender side to the political friendship between the two men. Strauss and Kohl shared a common bond, in that they both came from humble beginnings. Kohl was the son of a tax official and Strauss was from a family of butchers. Kohl admired the Bavarian politician for his eloquence and his courage in political combat. "He was an original thinker, and he wasn't a copycat. He stood on his own two feet and had his own stature," the former chancellor said during an interview with Schwan in the basement recreation room of his house in Oggersheim, near Frankfurt.
A Valuable Treasure
Schwan recorded more than 600 hours of interviews with Kohl in a total of 105 conversations between March 12, 2001 and October 27, 2002. Even during his tenure in office, Kohl had ruminated over his place in history. He sees himself on a level with former German Chancellors Otto von Bismarck, Konrad Adenauer and Willy Brandt. He is probably justified in doing so.
In the Schwan conversations, Kohl's objective was to document his own view of the Kohl era -- they are an extremely valuable treasure for historians. And the tapes served as the basis for Kohl's three-volume memoirs, which were ghost-written by Schwan. The relationship between the two, however, has soured of late, with Kohl having sued Schwan for possession of the tapes, a spat which is likely to worsen with the release this week of Schwan's book about the interviews.
The interviews contain, at least in part, Kohl's "historic legacy," according to the December 2013 ruling of a Cologne court on the ownership of the tapes. And they add new facets to Kohl's image. They reveal him to be a man who views both his rivals and the world at large through the lens of a calculating machtpolitiker (power politician).
German unity is the achievement for which Kohl wants to be remembered. In his public speeches, Kohl always spoke very warmly about the revolutionaries on the streets of Berlin and Leipzig. But in the Schwan interviews, the former chancellor takes a much more pragmatic view. He said that the Eastern Bloc owed its collapse to economic weakness and not the chants of the citizens' movements. "It's completely erroneous to act as if the Holy Ghost had suddenly descended onto the squares in Leipzig and changed the world," Kohl said. The notion that the revolutionaries in East Germany were the main impetus behind the collapse of the regime was the product of "Thierse's community college brain."
Wolfgang Thierse, a former president of Germany parliament, was a favorite target for Kohl's barbs. For one, Thierse is a Social Democrat, and thus fair game for a Christian Democrat like Kohl. For another, however, Thierse had been sharply critical of Kohl during the scandal over political donations that overshadowed Kohl's legacy after he left the chancellery.
Kohl attributed the collapse of the East German government to Moscow's weaknesses. "Gorbachev looked at the books and had to realize that he was in deep trouble, and that he couldn't sustain the regime," Kohl said. "And if he wanted to preserve communism, he had to reform it, which led him to the idea of perestroika."
Surprisingly Stark
Kohl has often praised Gorbachev's important contributions to German unity. If Gorbachev hadn't backed down at the famous Caucasus meeting in July 1990, German reunification would not have happened. In retrospect, however, Kohl's assessment of the man he had so often described as his friend was surprisingly stark.
"Gorbachev's legacy is that he did away with communism, somewhat against his will, but he did de facto eliminate it. Without violence. Without bloodshed. I can't think of much else to say about his legacy." One could contend that the liquidation of an entire empire isn't exactly a shabby lifetime achievement, and certainly not in the eyes of a Christian Democrat like Kohl, who had always struggled against communism. But Kohl's view allows for little interpretation: Gorbachev "failed," he said.
Kohl spoke with complete candor in the conversations with Schwan. He had never spoken as openly with a journalist before, nor has he done so since. Kohl has a reputation for being very vindictive at times. In the Schwan conversations, it becomes clear that he hasn't forgotten a single slight or derisive comment he encountered in the course of his long career. His speech is filled with wrath toward the political allies and protégés he feels betrayed him.
When the conversation turns to current Chancellor Angela Merkel, he can hardly contain his rage. "Ms. Merkel couldn't even eat properly with a knife and fork. She used to mope around at state dinners, and I often had to set her straight." In Kohl's opinion, Merkel is a woman he fished out of a sea of unknown, up-and-coming politicians -- who thanked him by turning on him in the dark hours of the campaign donation scandal. He was especially critical of her European policy, and his disapproval also extended to Friedrich Merz, the former CDU/CSU parliamentary leader. "Merkel doesn't have a clue, and the parliamentary leader is a political infant."
For Kohl, the conversations with Schwan are both therapy sessions and an opportunity to take stock of his life. He differs from former Chancellors Helmut Schmidt and Willy Brandt in that he was never a man of written words and the conversations with Schwan were his way of producing his memoirs. But the conversations also took place at precisely the time at which Kohl felt that his enemies were pushing him to the edge of an abyss. In March 2001, he was no longer the celebrated chancellor who had presided over German reunification. He was a man who had broken the law by accepting 2 million deutsche marks in anonymous donations and refusing to reveal where they had come from.
In Berlin, there were almost weekly meetings of an investigative committee dominated by the Social Democrats and the Greens, which Kohl saw as a tool to vilify his political legacy. And a few months after the interview sessions with Schwan began, his wife, Hannelore Kohl, committed suicide on July 5, 2001. The former chancellor always saw the suicide partly as a result of seeing Kohl's name being dragged through the mud in public.
Speaking with Contempt
In this sense, it is perhaps understandable that Kohl, in this gloomy phase of his life, spoke with such contempt for the people who had abandoned him. One of the targets of his invective was Peter Müller, the former head of the CDU in the southwestern state of Saarland, who had criticized Kohl for failing to send a "message of active remorse." "He behaved shabbily," Kohl ranted. "My God, he knows all too well how much of an advantage they had in the donations affair. Granted, he wasn't the chairman. It was Töpfer, who is now hanging out in African caves," Kohl said. It was only through Klaus Töpfer, the party's state chairman in Saarland from 1990 to 1995, who later went to work for the United Nations in Kenya, that he met Dieter Holzer, one of the key figures in the CDU donations scandal. Töpfer and Holzer were like a "head and an ass," Kohl said.
One reason the former chancellor spoke so candidly with Schwan is that he believed that the tapes would never be released during his lifetime. Schwan had signed an author's agreement in November 1999 with the Droemer publishing company, which was to publish the Kohl memoirs. Droemer granted Kohl the right to replace his ghostwriter at any time. Kohl also had the sole power to decide what the memoirs could ultimately contain.
Schwan initially accepted these conditions, and he began writing the memoirs after the interviews were finished. He wrote almost 3,000 pages, and in November 2007, the third -- and thus far, final -- volume of Kohl's memoirs was published. The book ended with Kohl's slim victory in the 1994 federal elections.
But the third volume also contains a subtle message for Kohl watchers. Unlike the two preceding volumes, it did not include a dedication to Kohl's wife of many years, Hannelore. The new woman at his side was Maike Richter, and she soon began to intervene in the work surrounding his memoirs. Schwan, who also had an irascible temper, put up with it at first, but only with great reluctance. But the peace was not destined to last.
The relationship quickly deteriorated when Schwan said that he wanted to publish a book to accompany a film about Kohl he had made for the WDR. When Richter tried to rewrite entire sections of the interviews Schwan had conducted, Schwan responded by writing directly to the former chancellor in Oggersheim. A short time later, he received a letter from Kohl's attorney informing him that the former chancellor would no longer require his services.
But Schwan kept the interview tapes. At first, no one in Oggersheim noticed they were missing. When Schwan announced in 2012 that he intended to use them for his own biography of Kohl, the former chancellor filed a lawsuit with a Cologne court to compel Schwan to hand over the tapes. The court ruled in Kohl's favor in mid-December 2013, and in March 2014 Schwan released the tapes to a court officer. But not before his sister had made transcriptions.
The legal dispute over the tapes is not yet over. It will probably end up before the Federal Court of Justice, now that Schwan has filed an appeal with that court. Nevertheless, the most important passages from his conversations with Kohl have now been published in his new book.
Does he have the right to do so? Schwan is undoubtedly committing a breach of trust. Kohl did give Schwan permission to use the tapes for purposes other than the memoirs, at least according to the journalist's recollection. But the fact that the content of the tapes is now being published in such an unvarnished form during Kohl's lifetime is certainly not in his best interests.
The relationship between Kohl and Schwan is fraught with jealousy. The man from the "red network," as Kohl described the WDR, alluding to a left-wing bias, gained the chancellor's confidence when he filmed a sympathetic portrayal of Hannelore Kohl for a 1987 TV production. After that, Schwan was repeatedly given access to the chancellor's office. When Kohl was voted out of office in 1998 and began to ponder how to present his life's work for posterity, the meticulous and hardworking journalist seemed the perfect fit for a man for whom writing was a chore.
It was always the same ritual: Schwan took the train from Cologne to Mannheim, where Ecki Seeber, Kohl's driver at the time, would pick him up at the train station and drive him to the former chancellor's house on Marbacher Strasse.
The two men would chat over a cup of coffee at first before withdrawing to the rec room downstairs, where Schwan asked Kohl questions about his political life's work. Kohl's housekeeper, Hilde Seeber, would serve up plates of hearty food for lunch, including rouladen, a German beef dish, and local bratwurst, of which Kohl would consume at least three.
Left to Pay the Bill
The interviews continued after lunch, and at 3:30 p.m. Kohl would add a touch of Riesling to his glass of water. Sometimes the workday ended with a meal at the Deidesheimer Hof, one of Kohl's favorite restaurants in the Palatinate region. Schwan was always left to pay the bill, he writes.
The hierarchy between the two men was clear. The former chancellor addressed Schwan with the informal "Du" and called him his "writer of the people," while Schwan addressed Kohl with the formal "Sie" and referred to him as the "Master." When Schwan celebrated his 60th birthday in 2004, Kohl invited himself to the party. Schwan was horrified at first, because the memoir project was still a secret known only to a few close associates and Fritz Pleitgen, the director of the WDR at the time. How was he to explain the presence of Kohl, a giant among conservatives, to his leftist friends? But when Kohl gave a short speech and described Schwan as a "true patriot," Schwan was close to tears.
The only explanation for Schwan's book is his resentment over Maike Kohl-Richter. It was Kohl's second wife who eventually showed Schwan the door, a fate suffered by many other of the former chancellor's longstanding associates. That, at least, is how Schwan felt. But for Schwan, the situation was complicated by his view of himself as the person with the former chancellor's intellectual legacy in his hands. Maike Kohl-Richter is now the gatekeeper in Oggertsheim. In an interview with the Sunday newspaper Welt am Sonntag, she said that she had the "sole decision-making power" over Kohl's political legacy.
As much as the drama revolves around hurt feelings, it also has a political dimension. Maike Kohl-Richter is trying to ensure that Kohl's legacy remains intact and that he is presented to the public as a statesman who thought along historic lines and was above the uglier aspects of everyday political life.
Schwan also has great admiration for Kohl and he makes no secret of it in the book. But he is also a journalist, and he doesn't want readers to be presented with a Kohl who is perfectly clean. After all, such a portrayal would be at odds with the man who, in the conversations in his home, delivered such magnificently candid opinions about his contemporaries and on world events.
A Country Bumpkin
One of Kohl's great contradictions is that he could be coarse and sensitive at the same time. In public, he was a political steamroller that flattened every obstacle in its path. But the interviews with Schwan revealed a different Kohl, a person who remained sensitive about portrayals of him as nothing but a country bumpkin from the largely rural Palatinate region.
"All that prejudice -- 'He's a cultural barbarian!' -- was systematically constructed. Schmidt, the citizen of the world. The cosmopolitan Brandt. And now we have this man from Palatinate who can't even speak German properly," he said. Ironically, at the beginning of his career Kohl was seen as a young reformer bringing a breath of fresh air into the stuffy CDU in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate. In the conversations, Kohl recounted how he had advocated public condom vending machines at a Rhineland-Palatinate state CDU convention in the mid-1960s. Kohl was a southern German Catholic with a perception for the human dimension, which is why he was critical of the Vatican's objections to birth control. "You don't seriously believe that my grandmother would have had 13 children if she had had the pill," he said.
The image of the unsophisticated provincial politician only gained credence when Kohl moved from Mainz, the capital of Rhineland-Palatinate, to Bonn in 1976. Suddenly he was no longer a fresh-faced governor from Palatinate, but a simpleton who had dared to challenge a world-class economist like Helmut Schmidt for the job of chancellor. Kohl blamed much of this shift in his image on SPIEGEL, which is why the magazine soon fell out of favor with him. "I won't give them an interview," Kohl told Schwan in their conversations. "I don't read it, but I'm also not against SPIEGEL, nor am I opposed to garbage collection in Bonn. But I'm still not about to spend a night in a sewage treatment plant."
Kohl mentioned SPIEGEL more than 250 times, according to Schwan's co-author Tilman Jens, who analyzed the transcripts of the interview tapes. Kohl made no secret of how much satisfaction he derived from speaking disparagingly about SPIEGEL, which had written such disparaging things about him. "It was also part of my enjoyment of life, the ability to insult those individuals," he said, before turning his attention to SPIEGEL publisher Rudolf Augstein. According to Kohl, Augstein "became a larger-than-life figure in Germany overnight, with enough power to destroy careers and people, because he had access early on to all the imponderables of the modern exercise of power, like super-archives, and so on."
It's true that SPIEGEL did not mean well by the young chancellor candidate. A caricature that has since become legendary first appeared on the cover of the Aug. 23, 1976 issue of the magazine: Kohl's head in the shape of a pear. But it was Die Zeit that had sent author Walter Kempowski a few days previous to test the young CDU chancellor candidate's education.
'Naked on a Bench'
"What are you reading, Mr. Kohl?" Kempowski asked, and Kohl did him the favor of stumbling awkwardly through the canon of German literature. The interview culminated in a gem of a sentence: "I was good in Hölderlin." It was a witticism that he was never able to shake. "That article did me an enormous amount of harm," said Kohl. "Shortly before the election, I was being portrayed as a village idiot. Die Zeit did it as part of its extermination program, which began then and hasn't changed to this day."
Kohl later made a virtue out of necessity and purposely portrayed himself as a man from provincial Germany. It wasn't a bad approach. Germans felt reassured by Kohl's brand of cardigan congeniality. The chancellor turned himself into an emotional ground zero for a country that had despised political extremes since the war and felt comfortable in its geopolitical niche. When the Berlin Wall came down, Kohl benefited from his image as an honest man. Who could feel threatened by a politician who invited world leaders to a meal of pork belly at the Deidesheimer Hof, and who had no qualms about having political discussions in the sauna? "When you're lying naked on a bench and talking about some issue, it's completely different from being all dressed up and sitting in a conference room with a large entourage."
But his many successes have not diminished his resentment over the public humiliations. Kohl never understood why people like former Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and former President Richard von Weizsäcker enjoyed such great respect among the public. "Peace will only come when I'm lying in my grave," Kohl said in a conversation in October 2011. He later said: "If I had died four years ago, it would be completely clear today that Hans-Dietrich Genscher was responsible for German reunification, supported by Weizsäcker and an entire group of people."
In retrospect, Kohl's greatest triumph, German reunification, began to take shape in 1989. But in late summer of that year, he almost lost his chairmanship of the CDU as a result of a conspiracy led by Lothar Späth, governor of Baden-Württemberg at the time. When the CDU convention began in Bremen in mid-September 1989, Kohl's power was hanging by a thread.
His fate may have taken a different turn if he hadn't met secretly, a few days earlier, with Hungarian Prime Minister Miklós Németh near Cologne. In the meeting, Kohl held out the prospect of billions in aid to Németh, in whose country tens of thousands of East Germans were waiting to be allowed to depart for the West. At the beginning of the CDU convention, Németh returned the favor to Kohl. At Kohl's request, he moved forward the date on which the border was to be opened so that Kohl could announce the sensational news at the convention.
"Of course, it was an amazing event at the convention. In this sense, one could certainly be of the opinion that he was on his way out and had already been lynched, or already had a rope around his neck. And now he had managed to jump down from the gallows once again," Kohl said. In the end, Späth did not challenge the CDU leader and Kohl was confirmed, albeit with a margin of 79 percent, which was slim by his standards.
The Bremen convention was a groundbreaking experience for Kohl. He had always believed that loyalty was the most important virtue. But after the attempted coup, he divided the party once and for all into friends and foes, into loyal followers and traitors, with almost no gray tones in between. This is how he described the 1990 CDU executive committee: "I had a clear majority when it came to issues of power, but I lacked a majority on the sympathy issue. Rühe was clean on the sympathy issue, while Blüm was underhanded. I have to state quite clearly that Albrecht was not underhanded. Stoltenberg was underhanded but not courageous. Süssmuth, Geissler and Thoben were very clearly underhanded."
The politicians who had fallen out favor were primarily those who had participated in the coup attempt at the party convention: former Bundestag President Rita Süssmuth, the ousted CDU General Secretary Heiner Geissler and North Rhine-Westphalia CDU politician Christa Thoben who, after the failed uprising, said with regret: "Someone should have stepped up to the plate in Bremen."
Späth, the leader of the group Kohl derisively called the "Town Musicians of Bremen," had lost his nerve at the last minute. He lost everything in the end, including his seat on the CDU executive committee. Kohl gloated over his defeat, partly because SPIEGEL had supported Späth in his rebellion. "Späth joined that bunch. They played him up." Then Späth was dropped by everyone, including SPIEGEL, and for once Kohl was pleased with the magazine.
In the conversations, Kohl instructed his ghostwriter to sufficiently acknowledge the Bremen conspirators. "At some point, it has to be made clear that all of these people only became what they became with my support, and that my mother was right when she said: 'The hand that blesses is the first to be bitten.' I think this can be used as the motto for the chapter. It's mean, of course, but it's good."
The former chancellor also wanted Schwan to include a special dedication to Norbert Blüm, who had served as Kohl's labor minister for 16 years. "With Blüm, it's important to mention the word traitor -- in some form."
'Everyone Else Was an Idiot'
Although the word traitor isn't actually used, the memoirs note that it was a serious mistake to keep Blüm as minister for labor and social affairs until the end. "In light of what happened, I wonder today how I could have been so wrong about his character."
Kohl also included then President von Weizsäcker in the larger group of his political opponents. "Of course he didn't dare admit to this openly in any form, because it would have been unseemly in his position," Kohl recalls. "But in front of the warm fireplace at the office of the federal president, he offered advice to those who sought to overthrow me."
Kohl's relationship with Weizsäcker was problematic even before the Bremen convention. He told Schwan: "It was clear to me that Richard felt that he was the smartest, best and most morally upstanding of all. He left no doubt that he was one of the most important men of the present time. And that basically everyone else was an idiot. It went without saying that he could also have been chancellor."
Of course, Kohl is also settling a score with a man who, in 1992, barely concealed his contempt for the Kohl system. Even worse, he did so in a book of interviews with two journalists from the despised newspaper Die Zeit. In the book, the president blasted the party state and portrayed himself as the intellectual counterpart to the power machine in the Chancellery. Kohl's name wasn't mentioned, but everyone knew whom Weizsäcker meant when he said: "It's time to step away from the old German tradition of a contradiction between intellect and power."
Kohl's fury over Weizsäcker is understandable, especially as Weizsäcker behaved as though he had nothing to do with the domination of political parties he had disparaged in the interviews. "I'm not a product of the system of political parties," Weizsäcker said in the book. It sounded cynical to Kohl, who knew perfectly well how long Weizsäcker had been a member of the CDU Executive Committee and held a seat in the Bundestag.
Betrayal and Ingratitude
Kohl retaliated in his memoirs in his own way. He had several confidential letters from Weizsäcker included in which he had literally begged Kohl and then CSU Chairman Strauss for the position of president. Kohl was determined to destroy the myth of Weizsäcker as an altruistic servant of democracy.
Kohl didn't just take offence at Weizsäcker's attempt to portray himself as his antithesis, as a noble, graying political philosopher who, from his position as president, viewed the man in the Chancellery with horror. In Kohl's eyes, Weizsäcker had made it to the top with the help of the CDU in general and his support in particular, only to place himself above the party and the chancellor. In Kohl's world, betrayal and ingratitude are two deadly sins.
For Kohl, politics was a cycle of giving and taking. The Kohl system was based on granting favors and, when the need arose, asking for favors in return. It was Kohl's approach from the very beginning, as the conversations with Schwan reveal. In the run-up to his 1975 state election campaign, Kohl wrote a letter to automaker Daimler-Benz and asked for a donation to the CDU. Then Daimler Chairman Joachim Zahn promptly wrote a check for 50,000 deutsche marks, as Schwan and Jens write in their book.
Kohl returned the money, "with an expression of regret that the company was apparently having problems and I didn't want to inflict any harm on it." In other words, the donation was much too small. Kohl knew that Hans Filbinger, who was chairman of the CDU in Baden-Württemberg, had just received 250,000 deutsche marks from Daimler.
Hanns Martin Schleyer, a member of the Daimler executive board and an old friend of Kohl, promptly took the matter into his own hands. An agitated Schleyer turned up at the state chancellery, according to the book, and told Kohl that he was going too far. Kohl replied that he would not take back his letter, but that the matter would be resolved if Daimler donated a larger amount. Daimler relented and, in the end, Kohl received 100,000 deutsche marks.
For Kohl, power and money were inextricably linked. He believed that collecting donations was part of the business of politics. His power was partly based on his practice of making minor monetary contributions to the state organizations when they were short of money. This made it all the more incomprehensible to him when fellow party members turned their backs on him during the donations scandal. Shouldn't they have been grateful to him for keeping things going?
The Subject of Merkel
Kohl was disappointed by almost the entire top echelon of the CDU, and he felt that he was peering into an abyss of hypocrisy. He saw himself surrounded by moralizers and sharp-tongued do-gooders who were seizing the opportunity to vent their anger with the fallen leader. Christian Wulff was one of these people. As opposition leader in Lower Saxony, Wulff was one of the first to pass judgment on Kohl and, from Kohl's perspective, also had the audacity to declare the former patriarch persona non grata in the Lower Saxony CDU. Kohl retaliated with a long tirade: "He's an enormous traitor. At the same time, he's also a zero. He has nothing but bad luck. A group of people from Lower Saxony was sitting in a restaurant recently. I was walking by, and a few very decent people asked me to join them for a bit. I did so, and I said: 'I will join you, but only under the condition that you tell your state chairman… that he'll receive a letter from me, two weeks after the next state parliamentary election, in which I'll congratulate him on his election to deputy president of state parliament. That's what he will become. It's predictable.' (Eds. Note: Kohl was saying he thought the CDU under Wulff would lose the election.) He was capitalizing on his youth, but now the governor is younger than him. And there is, of course, open destruction in the party. He was completely barking up the Merkel tree, but now he's climbed down."
Merkel is a special subject for Kohl. In his book "My Diary," which he published in 2000 to explain his view of the donations scandal, he did not openly attack Merkel. He referred to her article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in which she called upon her party to emancipate itself from that "old warhorse" Kohl, as an "open declaration of war." Otherwise, however, he refrained from airing his rage in public. Instead, he limited himself to reminding his readers of how Merkel had come to power, and of all the help she had from him in furthering her career. The underlying message was that this was Merkel's idea of gratitude.
Kohl was less restrained in his conversations with Schwan. In one interview, Kohl described how Juliane Weber, his longstanding office manager, felt about Merkel. Like Kohl, Weber was deeply disappointed in the new CDU leader. "When Merkel approaches her," Kohl said, "she turns the other way. When Merkel has an appointment for nine o'clock, you'll find that the woman who normally sits in the front office isn't at her desk. She's vanished. She's probably at the hairdresser, or someplace else. She won't say a word to Merkel anymore."
Kohl's most complicated relationship was with Wolfgang Schäuble, the current finance minister. The former chancellor gave Schwan precise instructions on how to proceed with his longstanding close associate: "Schäuble is a completely different case. It has to be done in a more subtle way. It can't be done in three sentences. In Schäuble's case, I simply want to relate how much I built him up, how I trusted him, and so on. Then I want to express my great respect for the way he has coped with the difficulties of life and how he continues to cope with the accident." Kohl referred to the wheelchair to which Schäuble has been confined since a mentally disturbed would-be assassin shot him on Oct. 12, 1990 as "the little wagon."
In the third volume of his memoirs, Kohl notes that he had decided after the 1994 elections to hand over the Chancellery to Schäuble in the middle of the legislative period. He told Schwan: "Schäuble and I often discussed that he was to become my successor. He knew how often I passionately defended him and said publicly that he was up to the job. I was deeply convinced that this was the right approach."
That plan, of course, never materialized. Kohl ran again in the 1998 Bundestag election -- and lost. In conversation with Schwan, Kohl said that there was a great deal of resistance to Schäuble. "In 1996, there were some truly influential voices saying that if I went and there was a secret vote, Schäuble would not get the support he needed. And because I didn't have all the votes in 1994, that most certainly was the case."
But Kohl added that, at the time, he had not believed that a secret vote would have gone against Schäuble. Why, then, didn't he transfer power to Schäuble? In their book, Schwan and Jens suggest that the chancellor didn't trust Schäuble to push through the euro. At a Dublin summit meeting to prepare for the euro in late 1996, Kohl said: "Why exactly do you think I'm still in office? I'm still here because of Europe. Without me, no one in Germany will get this done."
Schäuble, for his part, believes that Kohl never intended to give up his office voluntarily. Still, after Gerhard Schröder was nominated as the Social Democratic challenger in March 1998, Schäuble began an attempt to convince the chancellor to resign. This is how he described the situation in a conversation with SPIEGEL four years ago: "My wife said: It can't be that everyone is coming to you and complaining that we can no longer win with Kohl, and yet no one is telling him. So I eventually said: I'll talk to him. I had known him for such a long time, I was Kohl's ally, and I knew that it would destroy our relationship. One Monday morning, I went to see him and said: 'Helmut, we'll lose the election with you.' I had expected Kohl to reply: With whom else do you expect to win? Maybe with you? If he had said that, I would have responded: No, but at least we wouldn't lose as badly. But all he said was: 'I don't believe that. We won't lose.' That was it."
The final blow to their relationship wasn't the election defeat in 1998, but the donations scandal more than a year later. On Jan. 18, 2000, Schäuble went to see Kohl in his office at the Bundestag. He wanted to convince him to disclose the names of the anonymous donors or give up his seat in parliament. Kohl, who had no intention of complying, asked Schäuble, who was also under pressure: "Are you resigning?" There was a heated exchange, after which Schäuble rolled to the door in his wheelchair and said furiously: "I will never enter this office again as long as I live."
'No One Will Ever Find Out'
"That scene was one of the worst experiences of my life," Kohl noted in "My Diary," and described how painful the loss of his friend of many years was. But in conversation with Schwan, he expresses a much more prosaic view of the situation. He says that the memoirs should clearly show that Schäuble, "whether through incompetence or intent, invited all enemies into that campaign of destruction during the donations scandal, a campaign into which he too was dragged." Kohl paused for a moment to think, and then he added: "Yes, we can certainly say that."
It is still unclear what will ultimately happen to the interview tapes. Schwan had proposed that they be held in safekeeping by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, which is aligned with the CDU, but Kohl and his wife rejected the idea. Now the Court of Justice will likely have the last word; it will soon decide whether to hear the case.
The case involves more than the question of who owns the audiotapes on which Schwan recorded the conversations with Kohl. Kohl's speech has been limited since an accident in 2008, when he stumbled and fell on the stairs, suffering a traumatic brain injury.
That too makes the tapes so valuable. For historians, they are a unique source when it comes to how the CDU éminence grise sees his era. This is why Bernhard Vogel, the honorary chairman of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, says that the tapes should be made available for academic study. Before pronouncing his judgment Hubertus Nolte, the judge on the Cologne court who had ruled on the Kohl tapes, said: "These tapes shouldn't be stored in someone's private basement."
Despite the malice and bitterness that pervades the conversations, the legacy of Kohl's chancellorship will be that he presided over a successful German reunification, and that Kohl, more than anyone else, subsequently pushed for Germany to become firmly embedded in the European Union. But those hoping the former chancellor revealed his greatest secret in his basement rec room will be disappointed. Of course, Schwan also asked about the anonymous donors. Kohl replied that he would take his knowledge with him to the grave. "No one will ever find out."