This is not a review, and I don't hand out stars either. It is part of my annotated reading list. Whatever first comes to mind when I pick up the book. More about it in this blog post. The English text is a translation made with an LLM, which I check and revise myself.
written on November 13, 2026, read 2018
I have several books by or about Helmut Schmidt. I think this is the third one I bought. I got it second-hand, which is why it has that wonderful smell of books that have spent some time living among their own kind on a shelf. I once joked to my father that Helmut Schmidt should have shipped his books with a scent of tobacco and menthol. By now, though, it would probably have faded long ago.
On the date of the foreword, Helmut Schmidt was already 89. If Giovanni di Lorenzo wrote it between Christmas and New Year, he was even 90 – Schmidt’s birthday was on 23 December. In the years before, a series of pieces had appeared in ZEITmagazin, the magazine of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit, under the title “Auf eine Zigarette mit Helmut Schmidt” (“Over a Cigarette with Helmut Schmidt”), and this book collects them.
They are many short conversations that di Lorenzo mostly had with Schmidt over the cigarette of the title. In some of them you can catch a glimpse of the vanity he was said to have. In other places you can tell that Schmidt was approaching 90.
But there are some sentences in this book that are simply true. One answer has stayed with me in particular: “Doing one’s duty includes humanity towards others. Showing humanity towards other people is a duty. Mitmenschlichkeit, humanitas, is one of the fundamental responsibilities of every single human being.”
That’s what I would wish for from today’s politicians. I sometimes have the impression that it has been completely lost, whether in the debate about Bürgergeld, Germany’s basic income support, or in the one about refugees. Populism is simply more convenient than doing one’s duty.