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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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[sev…] eral newspapers with blazing headlines.
All their front pages were devoted to the previous day's incident, with many
pictures showing the Chancellor with his face behind his hand or, a moment
later, looking disgruntled and with his eyes hidden behind sunglasses. There
were also pictures of me in my Cross-of-Lorraine coat, surrounded by policemen,
or in the defendant's box leaning toward Mahler, or challenging Kiesinger in
the Bundestag with my fists upraised.
The insult to the Chancellor
eclipsed all other news. The word "slap" entered the German political
vocabulary. All the front-page headlines featured the word.
In
reporting Kiesinger's embarrassed opinion: "That woman goes around with
university hooligans," and that of his spokesman, Günter Diehl: "She is a
monomaniac about the Chancellor," the press gave even more space to my true
motives: "She slapped the Chancellor because she wanted to reveal to the world
his Nazi past and demonstrate German youth's refusal to have Germany
represented by a former Nazi."
It was impossible to picture me
convincingly as a hysterical woman. The work I had been doing for almost two
years was beginning to pay off. I had written too much, spoken too many times,
agitated too frequently for anyone to be able to pretend that I was just a
hothead.
Back in Paris, only a few minutes after the incident, Serge
had distributed to the press agencies a release that emphasized:
"By
slapping Chancellor Kiesinger my wife committed an act long planned and
premeditated, which aimed at stressing the Chancellor's Nazi past for the
edification of German youth."
The statement I had recorded before I
left Paris was broadcast over several stations that afternoon.
It
became clear that the Germans were wondering how their Chancellor could have
put himself into a position of being slapped because of his past, especially
when he had so solemnly declared: "German youth has a right to know how their
Chancellor stood during the Third Reich," but had not kept his word.
To
the crime of lèse majesté combined with humiliation – a
unique one in the annals of German history – now was added the scandal of
the sentence: one year of imprisonment. The act itself and the Berlin court's
reaction to it were going to encounter severe criticism during the weeks to
come. Some people approved of my
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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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Page 62 |
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