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 3, 2026, read June 2026
Strictly speaking, I should hardly have any memories of Helmut Schmidt as chancellor – and I don’t really have any significant memories of my own, apart from snippets of the Tagesschau, Germany’s main evening news. Even back then I was allowed to watch it regularly.1 Then again, I don’t know whether even those are just borrowed memories, because in the years that followed I read a lot about Schmidt and watched many news broadcasts from that era.2
The fact that I voted SPD for many years had a lot to do with Helmut Schmidt, besides my family background. I found the years under Helmut Kohl increasingly leaden and oppressive.3 After all, the latter accompanied me as chancellor through my entire youth and beyond – from 9 to 25.4
Somehow I always saw Schmidt as a person you could look up to. A role model, if you like – even though I never had any desire to become politically active myself.5 It was more a set of character traits that impressed me.
And role models are also what the book is about. “Was ich noch sagen wollte” (“What I Still Wanted to Say”) was Helmut Schmidt’s last book. In it, he writes about whether we need role models and which people he took his bearings from.
Helmut Schmidt, like every human being, was a complex personality. I think he raises an interesting question at the beginning of the book. We wish for role models who are worth emulating in every respect. But he also writes: “Some whom history calls great turn out, on closer inspection, to be rather unpleasant characters” (p. 13).
And I consider that an essential point: anyone who waits for moral purity in their role models will probably go through the world without any. I can’t actually think of a single morally pure person whom I would also grant the status of a role model.
It’s the same problem I have with many an absolute statement on the internet: do I have to reject an artist’s work because he is an altogether unpleasant person?
I once called this the Kevin Spacey problem. I think “K-PAX” is a great film, I think “Se7en” is excellent, but I also know that Kevin Spacey’s reputation was badly damaged in the course of the #MeToo debate and that his work can no longer be seen without that discussion. But: does his personal behaviour diminish or erase his contributions to art? I sometimes have the feeling that the expected answer is “yes”, especially when you spend time on the internet. But I struggle with an unqualified “yes” as much as with an unqualified “no”. Wagner was an antisemite, and yet his works undoubtedly belong to Germany’s cultural canon. I find J. K. Rowling’s statements on gender issues more than questionable, but I also see with what enthusiasm children and adults immerse themselves, as readers, in the world she created.
So what is the solution? Schmidt repeatedly describes himself as an eclectic – someone who took his inspiration from everywhere.
Perhaps role models call for the same eclecticism: knowing that no human being is perfect, taking fragments of a person as one’s model.
And that’s also what I read out of Schmidt’s book: considering Winston Churchill a great European while also holding him responsible for the bombing of German cities – to use one of Mr Schmidt’s own examples (p. 119 ff.). I’d like to add another example: Obama is one of the great presidents (my opinion as an outsider), yet he not only continued the drone war but expanded it.
It takes weighing up whether a person’s negative deeds outweigh their positive influence. I think there have been historically significant people who were so devoid of any positive influence and brought so much horror into the world that nobody can still see them as a role model – except perhaps the utterly deluded.6
For most people, this assessment is complicated. I think there are many people whose negative traits outweigh the positive ones to such an extent that they are not fit to be role models – someone you look up to and want to emulate. And then there are those people whose negative sides you can overlook because they don’t dominate the person.
Looking for a role model and seeing one in a person, however, also means that you have to come to terms with the role model having unpleasant sides. Because, as I said: many people who have accomplished things worthy of emulation do not deserve the status of a role model in every respect.
After reading the book, I had the impression that I’m not alone in my ambivalence. And this ambivalence also applies to the author himself. He doesn’t write about his own role as a model, and I think that was a good decision. By discussing your own role as a model, you also elevate yourself to some extent. You don’t declare yourself a role model – that’s for others to do.
He, too, has to be read with ambivalence. Nevertheless, I consider him one of the great chancellors of the Federal Republic, perhaps even the greatest,7 and therefore, in large parts, a very worthy role model.
In the end, what I took away from this book was not so much Helmut Schmidt’s role models as thinking about my own. And that brings us back to one criterion for good non-fiction: after reading it, I had more questions than before – above all, though, new questions.
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After all, I was already 9 and of the opinion that I’d be a grown-up soon anyway and should therefore be allowed to stay up late already. My parents naturally took a somewhat different view. I think 9 p.m. was the absolute maximum on weekdays back then. And only because I was an early riser even as a child and nobody had to prise me out of bed with a crowbar. ↩
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The first memory I have in connection with Helmut Schmidt, however, comes from “Rudis Tagesshow”, Rudi Carrell’s satirical TV show.8 After Helmut Kohl had become chancellor, Helmut Schmidt shook his hand in congratulation. In the version on Rudi Carrell’s show, this was set to the schlager song “Ich wünsch dir die Hölle” (“I wish you hell”). I seem to remember laughing at it. Yes, I was already peculiar back then. ↩
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Of course, at 9 I didn’t yet have a real political opinion on this; that only came later. ↩
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I remember a conversation while walking along Broadway on holiday in New York. I wondered how that country could have elected George W. Bush again, and the woman I was talking to merely replied, more or less, that we Germans had, after all, managed to keep voting for Kohl for 16 years. Back then I didn’t yet know that we would do the same with Merkel. I found that period much less oppressive, though. Might have been down to the SPD acting as a corrective. ↩
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In my observation, politics increasingly became more of a career than a calling – or, in the words of Max Weber, whom Schmidt also discusses at length in the book: people lived “off” politics rather than “for” politics. I didn’t want to expose myself to that. ↩
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I surely don’t need to name a name here. Besides, I don’t want to trigger Godwin’s Law. ↩
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There are probably more shades of opinion on this than there have been chancellors. So you’re welcome to hold a completely different opinion. ↩
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Yes, the show that got into trouble over women’s underwear. ↩