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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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where the conference had just begun. Michel Lang was
reading the text of my speech. I was greeted with a frantic ovation.
"We won't let Beate leave!" the students shouted.
Some of them
suggested blocking the campus gates at 4 P.M. so that I would be protected from
the police, but I refused to let them. Once I had finished speaking, a
delegation of students got the police to extend my stay until 6 P.M., which
gave me time to talk at length with Der Spiegel's correspondent.
Kiesinger delivered his speech that evening. The Belgian students
staged a demonstration that I learned about from the newspapers the next
morning in Paris. Kiesinger had been deeply humiliated before the Belgian
government, Prime Minister Gaston Eyskens, Foreign Minister Pierre Harmel, NATO
Secretary General Manlio Brosio and other officials, the Common Market
directors, and the entire diplomatic corps – all of which, of course, was
reported in Germany, where the press emphasized that it was the second time in
less than a week that Kiesinger had been insulted at my instigation.
The following day, the Munich Süddeutsche Zeitung ran a
cartoon that summed up the situation: an airplane in flight and below it a
witch on a broomstick trailing a streamer that read "Beate Klarsfeld." The
cartoon was captioned, "The Chancellor's Advance Guard." The Germans were
beginning to realize the embarrassment to which they were exposed by keeping on
as Chancellor a man whose reputation was being assailed not only in Germany but
outside of Germany as well. The influential weekly Die Zeit emphasized
this by stressing that Kiesinger's stock and his image were in a decline, and
that a crisis had just occurred. It attributed this in a large degree to the
Berlin and Brussels incidents. According to some reporters who had access to
the Chancellor at that time, the Belgian ordeal had been much more painful to
him than the one in Berlin.
November 15. Paris. German reporters
stormed our apartment in order to see how "that hysterical young woman who goes
around with university hooligans," as Kiesinger had described me, lived. They
seemed to think they would find the place in a mess, but everything was
impeccable. As soon as they came in they were impressed by our large foyer and
our three rooms overlooking the Seine; in fact, they were so amazed that they
mistook the repro […ductions]
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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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Page 67 |
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