The Reckoning: Kohl Tapes Reveal a Man Full of Anger --- Helmut Kohl spent over 600 hours speaking with the journalist Heribert Schwan about his life's work. The secret tapes reveal a chancellor resentful of his public image and disdainful of many of those around him, including Angela Merkel. -- Once, at the end of a long hike in the Bavarian Alps, former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had to carry his heavy hiking companion on his back. Franz Josef Strauss, the head of Bavaria's conservative Christian Social Union (CSU) at the time, wasn't in the best of shape. As Strauss and Kohl were preparing for the hike, his wife Marianne made sure he had a decent lunch and a package of tissues in his backpack. Strauss perspired a lot. -- When the two men encountered a thunderstorm during their hike, the path became slippery and narrow. In the end, Strauss no longer felt secure on his feet. -- "So I carried him on my back for the last 50 meters (165 feet). It wasn't until later that I thought about what would have happened if he had fallen off. No one would have believed me. Everyone would have written that I had thrown him down on purpose." -- There are many stories about Kohl and Strauss, whose rivalry has been examined by historians of recent German history. An unforgettable moment is Strauss' speech at the Munich conference center owned by the Wienerwald roast chicken chain in November 1976, when he declared that the young Kohl, who was about to become his party's parliamentary leader, lacked all aptitude to become chancellor. "He is completely incapable. He lacks the character, and he lacks the intellectual and political qualifications. He lacks everything." -- Later, in the 1980s, when Kohl was chancellor, he gloated over the CSU leader's waning influence in faraway Munich. "When the Bavarian lion roars, the only thing he spreads nowadays is bad breath," Kohl said. Neither man saw a need to back down. -- But Kohl also told Heribert Schwan, a journalist with the West German Broadcasting Corporation (WDR), that there was a different and almost tender side to the political friendship between the two men. Strauss and Kohl shared a common bond, in that they both came from humble beginnings. Kohl was the son of a tax official and Strauss was from a family of butchers. Kohl admired the Bavarian politician for his eloquence and his courage in political combat. "He was an original thinker, and he wasn't a copycat. He stood on his own two feet and had his own stature," the former chancellor said during an interview with Schwan in the basement recreation room of his house in Oggersheim, near Frankfurt. --- A Valuable Treasure -- Schwan recorded more than 600 hours of interviews with Kohl in a total of 105 conversations between March 12, 2001 and October 27, 2002. Even during his tenure in office, Kohl had ruminated over his place in history. He sees himself on a level with former German Chancellors Otto von Bismarck, Konrad Adenauer and Willy Brandt. He is probably justified in doing so. -- In the Schwan conversations, Kohl's objective was to document his own view of the Kohl era -- they are an extremely valuable treasure for historians. And the tapes served as the basis for Kohl's three-volume memoirs, which were ghost-written by Schwan. The relationship between the two, however, has soured of late, with Kohl having sued Schwan for possession of the tapes, a spat which is likely to worsen with the release this week of Schwan's book about the interviews. -- The interviews contain, at least in part, Kohl's "historic legacy," according to the December 2013 ruling of a Cologne court on the ownership of the tapes. And they add new facets to Kohl's image. They reveal him to be a man who views both his rivals and the world at large through the lens of a calculating machtpolitiker (power politician). -- Read More, René Pfister, Der Spirgel, http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/helmut-kohl-tapes-reveal-disdain-for-merkel-and-deep-sense-of-betrayal-a-997035.html