THE PEACE-LOVING GREAT SON OF A SMALL FRANCONIAN CITY

I. Mathildenstraße

Mathildenstraße 23, Fürth, Middle Franconia. A narrow house on a narrow street in a small city next to a large one. Fürth beside Nuremberg — always the sister, never the bride. In this house, on 27 May 1923, Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born. His father Louis taught history and geography at the Fürth girls' lyceum. His mother Paula was the daughter of a Jewish cattle dealer from Leutershausen near Ansbach.

Fifteen years Heinz Alfred was allowed to live in Fürth. Fifteen years of Franconian childhood — SpVgg Fürth at the Ronhof stadium, school, the Jewish community, the security of a family that belonged to the patriotic, conservatively minded bourgeoisie. In 1933, aged nine, he was informed that Adolf Hitler had become Reich Chancellor. Julius Streicher had already questioned the survival of the Jewish communities of Nuremberg and Fürth in his newspaper Der Stürmer.

In 1938, the family fled — via London to New York. Heinz Alfred became Henry. Mathildenstraße became a memory. Fürth became the city from which one had to flee.

Eighty-five years later, in June 2023, he came back. A hundred years old. Three black Mercedes limousines. Bodyguards. A ceremonial event at the city theatre. Schäuble gave the speech. Söder was there. The mayor beamed. Kissinger said: "The circle of my life rounds itself off here harmoniously."

Harmoniously. That word should be savoured slowly.

II. The Transformation

The story of Heinz Alfred Kissinger from Fürth is a story of transformation so complete that it serves as parable.

A Jewish boy flees state violence. State violence has taken everything from him — his homeland, his language, his security, thirteen relatives murdered in the camps. He knows what state violence can do. He has experienced it himself. He has the accent that will accompany him for a lifetime — the last trace of Fürth that could not be erased.

And this boy becomes the architect of American state violence. Not of resistance to state violence. Not of the containment of state violence. Not of the control of state violence. But of its unleashing.

That is the transformation. From victim to perpetrator. From the persecuted to the persecutor. From the Jewish boy who fled bombs to the man who ordered bombs — on a country that had done him no harm. Cambodia. A neutral country. Bombed without Congressional approval. In secret. 500,000 tonnes of bombs. More than the Allies dropped on Japan in the entire Pacific War.

The result: the Khmer Rouge. Two million dead. A quarter of the population.

Kissinger never saw a connection between what was done to him and what he did to others. Or he saw it and declared it irrelevant. One was fate. The other was realpolitik.

III. The Nobel Peace Prize

In 1973, Henry Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize. For peace in Vietnam.

One must read this sentence several times to grasp its full absurdity.

1973 was the year the United States signed the Paris Peace Accords ending the Vietnam War — a war Kissinger had prolonged for four years. As National Security Advisor under Nixon, he had in 1969 ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia. He had sabotaged the peace process when it was politically inopportune. He had supported the Christmas bombardments of 1972 — the heaviest since the Second World War. And when peace finally came, it was so fragile that Vietnam was unified under communist control two years later, in 1975.

Le Duc Tho, his Vietnamese negotiating counterpart, also received the prize — and declined it. On the grounds that there was no peace in Vietnam. Tho had more honour than the Nobel Committee.

Two committee members resigned in protest. The prize became a caricature of itself. And Kissinger accepted it. Naturally. A realpolitician does not decline an honour. Not because it is deserved. But because it is useful.

IV. Henry Kissinger's Sons of Bitches

One cannot tell the history of realpolitik since 1969 without finding Kissinger on every page.

Chile, 1973. Salvador Allende, democratically elected, nationalises the copper mines. Kissinger said: "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people." On 11 September 1973 — a date that would later acquire a different meaning — Allende was overthrown. Pinochet took over. Seventeen years of dictatorship. Thousands murdered, tens of thousands tortured. Kissinger congratulated.

Bangladesh, 1971. Pakistan committed genocide in East Pakistan — the future Bangladesh. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions dead. The American Consul General in Dhaka, Archer Blood, sent a telegram to Washington calling it what it was: genocide. Kissinger suppressed the telegram, transferred Blood, and continued to support Pakistan — because Pakistan was the channel through which he was conducting secret negotiations with China. A genocide was an acceptable price for a diplomatic opening.

East Timor, 1975. Indonesia's dictator Suharto invaded East Timor. Kissinger and President Ford had been in Jakarta the day before. They gave the green light. A third of East Timor's population was killed — approximately 180,000 people. The weapons were American. The permission was Kissinger's.

Argentina, 1976. The junta seized power. The "Dirty War" began. 30,000 disappeared. Kissinger, by then Secretary of State, told the Argentine foreign minister: "If there are things you need to do, do them quickly." They did them quickly.

In every case the same pattern: a country has an elected leader or an independent trajectory. This does not suit American interests. Kissinger arranges the coup, the support for the dictator, the suppression of the opposition. The son of a bitch is installed. Our son of a bitch. Kissinger did not invent the phrase. But he elevated it to a global doctrine.

V. The Consultant

In 1977, Kissinger left office. And became a consultant.

Kissinger Associates — founded in 1982 — became the most profitable consulting firm in the world. Not because Kissinger sold clients clever strategies. But because he sold access. Access to governments, intelligence agencies, heads of state he had cultivated over decades. Yesterday's son of a bitch was today's business contact.

The client list: American Express, Coca-Cola, Fiat, Merck, Anheuser-Busch, JP Morgan. Companies that wanted to do business in countries where Kissinger knew the rulers — because he had put them in power. China after the opening. Latin America after the coups. The Middle East after the wars.

That was the aftermath of realpolitik: first you destabilise a country. Then you install a dictator. Then you advise companies that do business with the dictator. Three deals from one coup. Management.

Kissinger Associates was the privatisation of foreign policy. The man who as a public servant had installed dictators earned as a private citizen by selling access to them. The revolving door between power and money, through which he stepped so elegantly that nobody heard it squeak.

VI. The Franconian Paradox

Fürth has two honorary citizens who achieved world fame: Ludwig Erhard and Henry Kissinger. One created the social market economy. The other created the realpolitik of the Cold War. One believed in prosperity through trade. The other believed in order through violence.

Both from Fürth. Both from the Franconian bourgeoisie. Both shaped by a neighbourhood that embodies the twentieth century in all its contradictions: Fürth beside Nuremberg. The Jewish community beside the Party Rallies. Craftsmanship beside the propaganda machine. The bratwurst beside Der Stürmer.

Nuremberg — the city where the racial laws were proclaimed that forced Kissinger's family to flee. And the city where the Nuremberg Trials established the principle of individual responsibility for state crimes. Precisely the principle that could have been applied to Kissinger himself — and never was.

There are courts in Chile, Argentina, France, and Spain that sought to summon Kissinger. He never appeared. He did not have to. He was American. And America does not extradite its citizens. Not even to the principle it helped establish in Nuremberg.

VII. The Return

In June 2023, Kissinger returned to Fürth. A hundred years old. Ceremonial event at the city theatre. Wolfgang Schäuble gave the eulogy. Markus Söder was present. The mayor spoke of "pride" and "connection."

Nobody spoke about Cambodia. Nobody spoke about Chile. Nobody spoke about East Timor. Nobody spoke about Bangladesh. Nobody spoke about the disappeared in Argentina.

The Fürth Left party submitted a motion to revoke the honorary citizenship. The motion was not put to a vote. The mayor had "in the past repeatedly spoken positively about Kissinger." The honorary citizenship remained.

In the town hall, his portrait in oils hangs beside Ludwig Erhard's. In the pavement of Mathildenstraße lies a bronze plaque. At the Ronhof, SpVgg Fürth's stadium, they remembered their most famous fan. On the birth house, since 2023, a "simple plaque."

Simple. As simple as the memory. As simple as the question nobody asks: how does one commemorate a man who fled as a victim and returned as a perpetrator? Who is celebrated in a city thirty kilometres from the Nuremberg Trials — the trials that prosecuted precisely the crimes he later committed in different form and at different scale?

VIII. The Lesson Fürth Does Not Learn

Fürth celebrates Kissinger because Fürth needs famous sons. Erhard has the market economy. Grundig has the radio. Kissinger has world politics. For a city that always stood in Nuremberg's shadow, an honorary citizen to whose birthday state premiers and Bundestag presidents travel is a treasure one does not voluntarily surrender.

But the price of this treasure is blindness. Blindness to the fact that the man being celebrated has more human lives on his conscience than any other single American of the twentieth century — with the possible exception of those who decided on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A city's honorary citizenship is a symbol. It says: this person embodies what our city stands for. What does Fürth stand for if it honours Kissinger? For realpolitik? For the conviction that power politics trumps human rights? For the sentence "He's our son of a bitch"?

Or does it simply stand for what many German cities stand for: the inability to endure one's own history in its full contradictoriness? For the longing for famous names that is more important than the question of what those names stand for?

IX. Kissinger and the Seven Pillars

One cannot understand the seven pillars of the peace-loving — the pillars that together operate the machine converting conflicts into wars and wars into revenue — without understanding Kissinger. For Kissinger was not one of the pillars. He was the keystone that held them together.

He was the connection between intelligence and diplomacy — Operation Condor, the coordination of the South American dictatorships, ran through his office. He was the connection between politics and the arms industry — the weapons deliveries to the Shah, to Pakistan, to Indonesia, required his signature. He was the connection between government and think tanks — as a Harvard professor and adviser to the Council on Foreign Relations, he had supplied the theory before implementing it as National Security Advisor. He was the connection between public service and private enterprise — Kissinger Associates proved that realpolitik pays even after leaving office.

And he was the living proof that the machine manages not only conflicts but also biographies. The Jewish boy from Fürth who fled the Nazis became the icon of American power — and the story of his flight became the proof of his moral authority, while his actions as a power politician demonstrated the opposite.

The machine made Henry Kissinger out of Heinz Alfred Kissinger. Made the architect out of the victim. Made the Nobel laureate out of the refugee. And made out of the Nobel laureate the man who prolonged more wars, supported more coups, and installed more dictators than any other diplomat of his generation.

X. The Accent

Kissinger never lost the Franconian accent. Eighty years in America, and one still heard Fürth when he spoke. His brother Walter, a year younger, spoke accent-free American English. Psychologists have speculated that the accent was a bridge — a last connection to the childhood that was taken from him.

Perhaps that is the saddest dimension of this story. That the boy from Mathildenstraße never entirely disappeared. That in the voice of the man who ordered bombs on Cambodia, there always lay the sound of a Franconian childhood. That the language his parents spoke when they tucked him in at night was the same language in which he later said: "If there are things you need to do, do them quickly."

Fürth did not make him what he became. Fürth only gave him the accent. Everything else — the transformation from victim to architect of violence, from refugee to Nobel Peace laureate, from Heinz Alfred to Henry — that was not Fürth's fault. But it is Fürth's responsibility to ask whether one honours this man with a bronze plaque and a ceremonial event at the city theatre — or whether the honour perpetuates precisely the blindness that Kissinger himself elevated to an art.

The blindness to the suffering one causes when one is far enough removed from it.

XI. Five Months

On 29 November 2023, Henry Kissinger died at his home in Kent, Connecticut. A hundred years old. Five months after the ceremonial event in Fürth. The circle had rounded itself off. Harmoniously, as he himself had said.

The mayor issued a statement. He had come to know Kissinger as a "modest, down-to-earth and very warm-hearted person." The man who let Bangladesh burn was down-to-earth. The man who consigned East Timor to death was warm-hearted. The man who had Chilean democrats tortured and murdered was modest.

The words are not lies. They describe the Kissinger the mayor knew. The old man showing his grandchildren the birth house. The SpVgg fan. The honorary citizen who eats Sauerbraten and orders Franconian bratwurst for dessert.

But they describe only half the man. And the other half — the half that raged in Santiago and Dhaka and Dili and Phnom Penh and Buenos Aires — does not exist in Fürth. It is not mentioned. It is not remembered. It is not painted in oils and hung in the town hall.

In Fürth, Kissinger is the great son. The boy who made it despite everything. The victim who became the victor. The success story.

The dead have no bronze plaque on Mathildenstraße.

XII. Peace-Loving

Henry Alfred Kissinger. Nobel Peace laureate. Honorary citizen. Great son. Peace-loving.

In a world where words still mean what they say, this would be a contradiction. But in the world of realpolitik — the world Kissinger himself created — it is not. For "peace-loving" in this world does not mean: inclined towards peace. It means: done with peace. Ready to sacrifice it. Able to destroy it. And clever enough to receive the Nobel Prize for doing so.

The peace-loving great son of a small Franconian city. Born at Mathildenstraße 23. Died in Kent, Connecticut. In between: a century, a continent in ruins, and the certainty that the world would be a better place if the boy from Fürth had remained a footballer.

Fürth celebrates its great son. Cambodia, Chile, Bangladesh, East Timor, and Argentina bury him. The bronze plaque on Mathildenstraße is silent about the millions who died because a Jewish boy from Fürth learned not to fear state violence but to wield it. And Fürth is silent with it.