I Sleep in Hitler's Room (26 page)

What does this “opening up” mean?

“Very simple: To fill the newspaper with subjects, with content that would be different from what’s in
FAZ
.”

He tells me of an exhibition that
Bild
has put on at a museum: the sixty most important pieces of art in the last sixty years. An editor from
FAZ
even called to tell him he’s ashamed it was not his paper doing it. “This would not have happened in
Bild
fifteen years ago,” he says. “Fifteen years ago culture in
Bild
was, you know, on a stage if a light fell down and somebody was killed. That was then
Bild
reporting about culture. Today we are serious players. I lifted the standards. The only interview President George W. Bush gave to any German newspaper, a one-on-one interview, was to
Bild
. Every important book, if we want it, we get first serial rights to at
Bild
. This was unimaginable years ago. And we don’t even pay for it. This was my idea. If we want to see the pope, we go to Rome for a one-on-one meeting. Another thing that I brought to the paper is politics. Page two of the paper today is dedicated to politics. The whole page.”

Talking about his paper, his baby, Kai gets close, and quite friendly. We have eight hundred journalists working in
Bild
, he says. “If you want to be the best newspaper in Germany, you need eight hundred journalists.” Personally, he says, he knows three hundred of them. He is the one with the authority to make final decisions. And he does. Every day. And as many times a day as he thinks it’s important to be in touch and on top. In short: Everything that’s published in
Bild
, whatever edition, must get his approval.

But the most important thing for him, strangely enough, is Israel. When he talks about Israel, he gets passionate. “A journalist who is against Israel has no place on our team,” he declares. “If he’s an anti-Semitic asshole he’ll be fired.”

All during the interview, and we are talking for more than an hour already, Kai shows much more passion when he talks about Israel than when he talks about Germany. He had just come back from London, where he attended a party with Elton John, and he is a little tired. But when the name
Israel
is mentioned, he jumps like a lion to defend it.

I try to push the envelope and I make a comment against some Israeli settlers, particularly the extreme among them. I compare their philosophy to that of the Nazis. Kai lets me have my say, but he definitely doesn’t accept one word of it. If I ever entertained the idea of writing for
Bild
Zeitung
, forget it. I stand no chance. This man is committed to the Israeli cause. This man is definitely not a Jew. I don’t think I ever met a Jew that committed.

Being that he’s not Jewish, and likely not circumcised, it’s time to talk about the really important stuff: His penis. I ask Kai if he has a small penis.

This gets him really animated. “That’s not true,” he says. “You can see on the wall, over there!” He gets up, asks me to come to the window of his office, and then points to a location outside. “You see that red flag there? That’s the building of the
TAZ
[the paper
Die Tageszeitung
paper]. You see that yellow sign on the wall? To the left of the yellow sign, that’s the top of my penis. Four stories high. My penis. That’s true. You don’t believe it? It’s true.”

Yes, he’s right. Projected all over the building, from the bottom to the top, is an image of a huge penis, supposedly Kai’s penis. And Kai Diekmann, this guy next to me, is seen at the bottom. With sizable balls, by the way, as he proudly presents his junk to whoever wants to see. That’s culture, I guess. German-style. Some artist, hired by
TAZ
, created it. I try to imagine this image in New York: the penis of a newspaper editor on the Empire State Building. Will never happen. Even if God himself orders it, no God-fearing New Yorker will ever dare to do it. But this is Berlin. This is Germany. Sophisticated. Cultured.

It turns out that
TAZ
, for whatever reason, published a fictitious news item about Kai Diekmann, their chief ideological enemy. Kai, they said, was having an operation to enlarge his tiny penis. Very complex operation, mind you, where parts of dead corpses were used to create his new, enhanced organ.

Kai, taking a step that could only backfire, sued
TAZ
for 30,000 euros. He lost in court. And the folks at
TAZ
hired an artist to create this image.

What does this have to do with news? As much as the penis of Barack Obama would have.

Kai leaves me to my thoughts and leaves the room, but only to come back with a black folder. Here are quite a few documents. Some
TAZ
stuff, plus a fake
TAZ
that
Bild
published at the time. Yes, they did that.

“They did it to provoke me,” he says. “They hoped that I’d tell them to take it off, but I said, ‘It’s great.’ If you go out of this building, and go there, you’ll see me. It’s me. My face and everything. But I will always say, ‘It’s a great piece of art but it’s not me, it’s their lawyer.’ And then they got crazy. They said, ‘It’s not our lawyer.’ So I said, ‘It’s a left-wing columnist from the
Berliner Zeitung
.’ And then they had a big discussion, because they are feminists. The chief editor then was a new girl, and she publicly stated in the newspaper that she didn’t want to park her bicycle for the next two years under the penis of Kai Diekmann. Then we secretly published a newspaper—it looks like
TAZ
, the same layout—with the title
We Are Penis
, where we argued that the mural had to stay. And everybody thought it was the real
TAZ
. We had great fun!”

But Kai is not a man to step down and accept defeat.

“When the
TAZ
turned twenty-five, four years ago, they asked their most beloved enemies to publish their jubilee edition. They asked me to be chief editor for a day. I did it. And even today, that one issue is the highest-circulated ever in the history of
TAZ
. When they turned thirty, they made the mistake of sending me a letter, which they sent to many others, offering me the opportunity to join their corporation.”

Kai accepted. And he loves it! He goes to their annual meeting, asks stupid questions, and “I have great fun.”

I have fun, too. He and I get along.

He gets up, brings in his iPad and his iPhone, sits next to me and shows me tomorrow’s edition. His iPad, by the way, is the shiniest and cleanest machine I have ever seen. You won’t get it from Apple in a minter condition.

We start with the front page. His Apple brings up tomorrow’s front page as it now stands. He doesn’t like the way it looks and feels. He doesn’t even like the fonts used. Why not?

“This is like old-fashioned,” he says. There’s nothing new to it. We need something different. This will not go to print; it must be changed. “There are only three people allowed to do the newspaper, my two deputies and me. I am here from nine o’clock and I preside at all the conferences. I pick the pictures.”

I get up, thank the Jew-lover gentile Kai Diekmann for his time, and tell him it was a pleasure meeting him. He takes one look at me and says, “But you are not a Jew, ah?” He doesn’t mean it in a bad way, he’s simply still shocked by the comments I made earlier. Before I leave, I take one look at this Jew Lover and “box” him: I register him in my brain under “Jewish Bride.” Kind of a “Jew Lover.” Yes, “Jewish Groom” would better but it is already taken, supposedly, by God.

Kai surprised me, I must admit. I expected to meet a bully, based on what some told me, but what I saw was a believer. A man driven to do what he believes is right. We might not see eye-to-eye on this or that issue—where Kai sees a great Jew, I see a potential little Nazi; where he sees bikinis, I see hijab—but he’s driven by ideals and he says what he thinks. I respect this.

Did I achieve what I set out to achieve, did I decipher the German character? No. Kai might influence twelve million men and women in his country, but he’s only one man. A man with a big penis on a Berlin wall, and a much bigger love for the Jews in his heart. This is not the Normal German, at least not the one I’ve seen so far.

Perhaps I should cross the political divide and get me somebody from the left—from, let’s say, Die Linke (the Left [Party]). They impress me as educated people, maybe they know that which mere mortals don’t.

Where should I start?

The man who answers to the name Gregor Gysi would be a good start, I think. But how do I get to him?

Through his sister.

I would like to introduce you to . . . Gabriele Gysi. Please applaud.

Gabriella is also the ex-girlfriend and lover of Frank Castorf, the artistic director of the prestigious Volksbühne theater in Berlin. She made him famous, did his p.r., they lived together for five years, and once he became famous he had affairs with other women. That’s when she decided to leave him, thirty years ago. “I knew the type,” she says to me. “My father was like this.”

Many years later, in 2006, he asked her to become his personal rep and made her the
Chef Dramarturg
of the Volksbühne in 2007. He threw her out in 2009. “He is selfish, he is a bitch, he thinks only of himself. . . . He had many fights in the theater, but there are people there he can’t fire, because, according to German law, they can’t be fired—for example, those who have worked for more than fifteen years. They didn’t obey him, and there were always fights. He asked me to come and help him. I did. I fought for him. I defended him against his enemies. They asked him to fire me. He thought that if he fired me they would be good to him. So he fired me. That’s Frank.”

Gabriele is the sister of Gregor Gysi, the
Fraktionsvorsitzender
(parliamentary leader) of Die Linke in the Bundestag and arguably the most recognizable of eastern Germany’s politicians.

She is a strong supporter of Die Linke and she loves Obama. If Obama ran for office in Germany she would vote for him. Certainly. Before Obama, America was bad and “treated the whole world as if everybody were an Indian.”

She asked Gregor to meet me, she tells me, but he stipulated two conditions: Though he is willing to meet and talk politics, he doesn’t want to talk about anything personal; also, though I never raised this issue, “he insisted that his Jewish background not be discussed.” Period.

Strange, since a quick Google search will immediately scream this fact in anybody’s face. But still, that is his wish, and I cannot accept such a condition.

No meeting with this man shall take place.

How did you get to be Jewish, by the way?

“The mother of my father was Jewish, and the grandfather of my mother was Jewish. That’s why my mother had a
J
on her student ID card and couldn’t get a doctorate; the same happened to my father.”

Are you Jewish?

“We grew up godless. But we also grew up in the context of this experience.”

Whom do you relate to more, atheist Jew or atheist Christian?

“The atheist Jew, naturally.”

She also informs me that “there is no anti-Semitism in Germany. There’s more anti-Semitism in the United States.”

How do you know this about the United States?

“Because more Jews live there.”

What else do you know about America?

“Google is a military instrument of the United States government.”

What!

“Yes, it is! What, you don’t think so?”

What will happen if Die Linke wins?

“This is an American question.”

Why?

“Because Die Linke will never win.”

Why?

“Because all the media are against them. And they have no army. It will not happen. Never. People will never believe in them.”

Do you think your brother thinks like you?

“I am sure Gregor is not worried about what he will do when he becomes chancellor . . .”

What’s your dream in life?

“Life without TV.”

Her TV, of the big-screen variety, is on in the other room. It’s soccer time.

You have issues with TV—what are they?

Before the war in Iraq, she tells me, she caught American TV faking news. “American reporters were shown on American TV walking around Saddam Hussein’s private home. They went to his kitchen, opened the fridge, and claimed that the items inside were parts of weapons of mass destruction [WMD].” American reporters, so she claims, “were doing propaganda for the American government.”

She and André Schiffrin, I think, should form a
Verein
.

So, soccer is on. Are you pulling for Germany to win?

“I would like North Korea to win.”

Gabriele, I’m writing this all down. This is going to be in the book. I want to make it clear: Did you say that you’d like North Korea to win?

“Yes.”

Well, that’s her wish. Politics and soccer are connected by an umbilical cord. And she has her preferences.

Gabriele is a gracious hostess. We combine interview and dinner here. The lamb she prepared for this evening is outstanding, one of the best I ever tasted. And even if she doesn’t always make sense to me, I still can see where she comes from. She is a believer, and her faith is Atheism. President Ahmadinejad of Iran is waiting for Prophet Mahdi, who will never show up, and she waits for a Die Linke chancellor, who will never materialize. Everybody is Waiting for Godot, that great and brilliant invention by ancient Jews and Christians. But she is not blind. No matter how she worshipped Frank Castorf in the past, and still defends him as a talented artist, her eyes have never closed to what she sees as his endless games. “No other director can succeed Frank at the Volksbüne,” she tells me. “When other directors work there, Frank always goes to the actors and says to them, ‘Do you like what he did?’ ‘Do you really like it?’ The actors get the hint and they say ‘No,’ and the new director is out.”