I Sleep in Hitler's Room (25 page)

I go there. I arrive. I am at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

I owe a debt of gratitude to the good people of Deutsche Börse, as it’s called here, who are kind to me and let me be here on my own, not with the tourists babbling and mumbling and clicking their digitals all over. I get what they call a “private tour” of this property. I need it. I need time to meditate on the Almighty Euro. I want to unite with the Almighty Euro, I want to be born again, to hear His Voice calling me, and to totally devote myself to Him. For this I need quiet surroundings.

I am also thankful to them for releasing the security man from breathing his secured air behind me. It’s me and the Almighty only. I pray to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty Euro, and praised be Thy Name.

One floor below me, of which I have a perfect view, is where the Almighty’s army resides: the brokers. Many of them will leave this place in about two years, when machines will perform most of the trades. But now they are here, each trading different stocks. One trades in BMW stock, another has Siemens, and so on.

Let me take a look at the Almighty’s soldiers. That one on the left is surfing the web, the one on the right is using his iPhone, another drinks coffee, an athletic guy watches—what else!—soccer, two ladies are chatting in a lively manner.

Besides being an army, it’s also a big show. The huge electronic boards all around, displaying the various stock symbols, are purely for theatrical purposes. None of the brokers ever looks at them. The brokers, each of whom has six screens and two keyboards at their disposal, wouldn’t even notice if the boards went dark or changed to Hebrew-language programming or to ancient Greek. But theatricals are good for money. Quite a few media organizations set up shop here. DW-TV, CNBC to my left, Reuters and DAF in front of me, among others. Seeing it from here, for real, you laugh at how “cheap” this all is. But on TV it probably looks great.

What one cannot ignore in this place is the flag. Sorry, flags. German flags all over. In all sizes and in all places. On walls, on chairs, on desks. Germany is in love with itself. And the brokers let it be known.

I am intrigued by the brokers, and I want to talk with them.

I am a naïve man.

“If you want to talk to the brokers,” I am told, “first you need to get approval from the banks that employ them.”

Why the banks are so scared of the media is something I’m not clear about. Maybe they want me not to work too hard.

So, I just watch what’s cooking down under. A German TV crew enters and walks the floor. They get two people from the floor, a man and a woman, and they position them next to each other. The TV crew, consisting of two women, make their wish known. They want to see the brokers giving a thumbs-up. So, two thumbs go up. Then they get the man to give two thumbs up, and the woman another two thumbs up. They check it on the screen. Not good. They get the brokers to give the thumbs-up together, each one thumbs up. They check it, and decide No. OK: Let the man give two thumbs up while the woman stands by his side posing with a big smile under her blond hair. Yes. This is good.

The TV ladies go for it and broadcast a “spontaneous” thumbs-up at the exchange.

This is News.

I feel bad for the German nation. They watch TV and think it’s reality, but in reality it’s just a show, “Unwilling TV.”

A man fom the press office comes to join me. “How many flags do you usually have here?” I ask him at the sight of so many.

“Only now [WM season] do we have them,” he answers me. “Usually we don’t have any flags, not even one. Our history, you know. We are not America.”

Oh, my Germans: Why are you so extreme?! Can’t you take a middle ground for once?

I am given a little toy, a green bull. That’s nice. I walk out.

I drive to Farah’s to bid her good-bye and thank her for being such a great host. She shows me an old Quran she has, a family heirloom. She says that Islam as practiced today is not mentioned in this book, that the Quran is a spiritual book, that she remembers the elders in Iran who studied the Quran and had shining faces. But those days are over. And now she’s in Germany.

“I feel like a Jew,” she tells me. “The Germans say that they respect me and my culture but they don’t get any of it, and don’t make any real effort. They just talk. They understand nothing about my culture, about the spirit of my culture. I understand theirs, but they never bothered to really understand mine. To them I am a foreigner, no matter what they say. I know. Farah knows. Farah knows people.”

I arrive at the main station in Frankfurt, ready to board a train going somewhere.

This is Germany. Flags abound, and people are buying. Three colors to the flag, all of them earthy, hot, serious, dooming, stubborn, and almost very clear.

Can anybody explain to me this country, and in plain English?

Kai Diekmann, the editor in chief of
Bild
, the biggest paper in Europe, as I’m told, is willing to give it a shot.

To Berlin I ride, Answers is my destination.

After passing through X-ray screening, à la modern-day airports, I am led to his office. Two other gentlemen join the meeting. Are they lawyers? CIA? Mossad? No. They are just nice folks who speak good English and go by the names of Tobias and Ulrich. Nice to meet them both.

Time to talk. Kai enters. Gel-haired, white shirt without a wrinkle, black-framed glasses, clean-shaven, he approaches me and shakes my hand. He sits opposite me, behind him an artsy
Bild
painting, and he is all ready for the talk. In his hands he holds a big plate full of fruit salad, which is probably his lunch. He bites into the chunks of fruit with great craving, which makes me think that the man hasn’t eaten for quite some time. Yet his attention is not focused on the food but rather on the upcoming interview. He seems to be ready for some tough questions, big-time. That’s why, I assume, he has here with us The Two Gentlemen of Berlin.

Not wanting to disappoint him, I ask him the most personal, intimate question I can come up with: Is Germany one nation or a collection of tribes? The Two Gentlemen of Berlin look as if a rock had just hit their unprotected heads. What is this?! Their eyes roll in disbelief. But Kai, keeping focused, replies.

“Definitely a nation,” he says. Especially after unification, and after the government moved to Berlin. Now there’s a center. Everybody looks to Berlin.”

What makes a German German?

“Germans are great at rebuilding. You know what I mean? But we have a problem maintaining it.”

There’s going to be quite a lot of rebuilding to be done in Afghanistan, if peace is ever achieved there. Does he support having German forces in Afghanistan?

“I think it’s good that our forces are in Afghanistan. We are the strongest economic power in Europe.”

This is an explosive political issue in Germany. Not all see eye-to-eye on this, to say the least. I’d like to know Kai’s take on Germany’s various political parties. So I ask him:

What’s the difference between the conservatives and the liberals?

“It’s about how much freedom we have.”

What?

“Conservatives want different types of school, more choices, while the left wants the same school for all. People are not all equal, and I don’t want to make them all equal.”

It’s not exactly what I wanted to know, but it’s interesting to hear nonetheless.

Whatever the differences between the various political parties, Kai still believes in consensus. “Consensus-building is very important. And this may be the answer to your first question about the defining characteristic of this country. It is consensus. A consensus-building society. We spend a whole lot of money to maintain consensus.”

Not that consensus is easy. “This is the only country in the world where the majority wants to raise taxes. Why? Because taxpayers are the minority. And I am totally against raising taxes. More than 50 percent of the people get more from the government than they pay for it.”

Consensus is one thing, multiculturalism is another. “Multiculturalism here has gone wrong. The idea was to let them [workers from Turkey] live in the same way they’ve lived before, but many of those who came to Germany were poor people. Many of the Turkish people here still live in the Stone Age. We did not put enough pressure on the immigrants to learn and adopt to the culture here.”

This brings me to my favorite fashion item: hijab.

Are more Turkish women wearing hijab in Germany today?

“No. There are more of them wearing bikinis.”

I want to ask him where I can find them, but I decide to stay polite and stick to politics.

What’s the story with your paper regarding Israel? Is it true that you have here a Legacy to Protect Israel—

“Worse . . . Every journalist working for us has to sign on to four ‘principles’:

“To reject all forms of political totalitarianism.

“To uphold the principles of a free social market economy.

“To support the Transatlantic alliance.

“And very important: To promote the reconciliation of Jews and Germans and support the vital rights of the people of Israel.

“In my opinion, the state of Israel is where the survivors of the Holocaust found refuge, after the Germans murdered six million of them. And because of this special relationship I am deeply convinced that whenever Israel’s right to exist is in danger we cannot be neutral and our place is to be on the side of Israel. This is our responsibility: We have to take care of Israel.

“This does not mean that we do not criticize Israel. We do.

“What I ask our journalists to do is to always take a closer look, not just follow the mainstream. This is what I tell my people.”

What so you think of Obama?

“I think he is going to be a big disappointment. He’s a one-term president. He is very charismatic, politically very naïve, and very left. But first of all, I don’t like his attitude toward Israel. He gave dangerous speeches, not understanding at all the Arab world.”

One of Kai’s office workers tells me that Kai hardly grants interviews anymore, that in fact he gave only one other this year. I’m intrigued why he granted this interview to me of all people, but I’m more intrigued about his leadership of this paper and how he sees his job here. This man, after all, is one of the most influential people in Germany today.

I ask him the same question I asked Sheikh Jens of
Die Zeit
: Is the
Bild
the best paper in Germany?

“
Bild
is the most successful paper in Germany, the most successful in the whole of Europe. Twelve million read it every day. In its category, it’s the best. We manage to explain politics, and other things, to people who probably would not understand it otherwise. We have got a totally different readership from that of
Die Zeit
.”

Who are your readers?

“Mostly the typical German citizen. Our reader structure is very similar to our [country’s] demographics. It’s a little younger and it’s a little bit more male. As for influence, we reach more academic, educated readers than does
FAZ
[popular name for the German daily
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
]. If somebody told me I’m allowed to read only two newspapers, that’s it! I’d decide for
FAZ
and
Bild
.”

And if you are allowed to read only one paper?

“Of course,
Bild
. . . You know why?
FAZ
is a newspaper governed by logical criteria, it simply reports what is going on.
Bild
has an emotional approach, we are not only reporting what’s happening, we are also reporting what people think is going on, what they feel about it and how they speak about it, and very often this is more important than what actually happened. To give you an example: In New York, when you check the weather you don’t get just the temperature, “minus two degrees,” but you also get the wind-chill factor. With the winds, it feels like minus twenty. So if you go out, you don’t take the coat for the minus two but for the minus twenty. This is what
Bild
is doing, and this is what makes
Bild
so important. There’s nothing like
Bild
in the whole world.”

What’s your contribution to
Bild
?

“I always had one strategy, and I think this is the most important thing: I always said,
Bild
has to be so ‘boulevard’ so that there’s no other newspaper that could attack us from down under. We always have to be so boulevard—so simple, so funny, so surprising—that no other newspaper can be better than we are from down there, can get to the masses better than we can. But, to get new readers, to change the image of the newspaper, to be attractive as a platform for politicians, it is important to open the newspaper up at the top. To attract more readers who’d usually not read
Bild
, thinking it’s just for the man in the street. And this is what we have done for nine and a half years now, trying to open up
Bild
. And we managed to do it.”