Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
German politician and English academic who was a minister under Willy Brandt, European commissioner, director of the LSE, and warden of St Antony's College, Oxf
On the island
Eight records
It reminds me of a whole lot of things. I heard Mahogany first soon after the war, in Berlin actually. I have an obvious link to a writer like Bert Brecht.
Van Wer Schweiten Zeit und Zeit
We spent the whole of Christmas Day singing working class labor movement songs. This is one I remember.
it's about Auschwitz, but it's sung by Joan Bass, who is a great campaigning artist and I like her a lot.
Clarinet is an instrument I like. Sidney Besche and the Bass and Street Blues epitomises really what I liked about jazz.
Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli
One of the groups which I always liked in my jazz days and they continue to the present day.
Record number six is George Gershwin and Summer Time.
Blueberry HillFavourite
Al Lewis, Larry Stock, Vincent Rose
for a jazz pan, of course, to the classical man, Satchmal Louis Armstrong, who clearly belongs in the discs which I take along, and I've chosen Blueberry Hill.
Melancholy instrument, northern instrument, total music as I see it. I don't think I've often confessed even my wife, who knows me very well, will be surprised to hear that I have chosen this as my last record, The Pipers Lament.
In conversation
Presenter asks
4:14Tell me about your origins. Your father was a member of the German Parliament, but that hardly tells the whole story.
My father was a politician and I was thus born into a political family, but not only was I born into a political family, I was of course born into a family which was kicked about by the political events in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. My father was a social democratic member of the Weimar Parliament. Thus one of those who voted against Hitler's enabling law in May 1933, arrested after that, had to start from scratch, moved away from Hamburg, where everybody knew him and where I was born, moved to Berlin, where it was a little easier to disappear from sight at least for a few years. … I was tiny. I was four when we went to Berlin. I remember the move, but naturally not much else. I went to school in Berlin. But then my father was in the resistance movement and was arrested once, released again. And then after the 20th of July 1944, he was put on trial and was actually one of the first not to be sentenced to death, but to seven years' prison.
Presenter asks
6:55Can you recall the moment when you realized how very vulnerable your father had been?
That was when I was 13, 14, yes indeed. And indeed, I was first challenged within the organization, the Hitler Youth Organization for the 10 to 14 year olds, of which everybody was a member, and so was I, in 1943, when one of the leaders in the hierarchy called me in and said, you are a social democrat, a term I had never heard. I had never heard because there was no particular reason why one should hear it in Nazi Germany. And from that moment onwards, I suppose it was pretty clear what was going on around me and where I stood.
The keepsakes
The book
Sappho
It's got to be poetry, which one can read time and again, and it's got to be a bit mysterious. So it's [Sappho's] poetry, the fragments of it, and some of them complete.
The luxury
I'm sort of torn between playing cards, patience cards to be exact, and dice, but I think it'll be dice so that I can test my luck and even the luck of a ship coming over the horizon and collecting me.
Presenter asks
11:39Even though it was only two months, it presumably influenced the rest of your life?
They have influenced the rest of it. You know, it makes a difference whether you have a sort of gut feeling about liberty or whether liberty is an intellectual sense of what may be right for intellectual reasons. And for me, liberty has always remained almost a response to, if not claustrophobia, then solitary confinement and prison and camp existence and the cruelty which I've seen with my own eyes. Yes, yes, it was quite important.
Presenter asks
18:48What stirred you from academic life and attracted you into politics?
My interest in politics has always been an interest in constitutional politics, that is, in the critical situations in which the question of liberty itself is at stake. I'm not particularly interested in normal everyday politics. In personal power. … And so in the mid sixties there was a time in Germany where the question of how a change of government can be brought about was rather important. I published a lot in newspapers, made speeches and then in 1967 an accident, that is the unfortunate death of a sitting member, brought the German Liberal Party to approach me and ask me whether I was prepared to stand for the land parliament of the region of Germany in which I was teaching, the southwest, Baden-Württemberg, in the spring of 1968. So I started, I think I could say, two years of campaigning on behalf of the small Liberal Party, which then in October 1969 formed a government with Billy Brandt and his Social Democrats to bring about the change which I was about.
Presenter asks
28:32You wrote in 1978 that there is a fundamental liberty in Britain not easily found elsewhere. Is that still true?
Yes, it is still true. And at the same time I'm saying now what I wouldn't necessarily have said what I wouldn't have said fifteen years ago, and that is that it would now be desirable to have our liberties entrenched in a Bill of Rights. Which perhaps was not so necessary in the past, in which one could rely. I mean, when refugees came from Germany in the 1930s, they came from a country which had a marvellous constitution, and all sorts of things were guaranteed, to a country which had no constitution, at least no written constitution. And yet they came from a country in which they were persecuted to a country in which they felt safe. That's the old British liberty which lived in all institutions and was never threatened. I'm afraid I'm no longer entirely certain that we can make the same statement without adding something about the need to have it put on paper that there are certain rights which are justiciable, where we can go to court to fight for them and make sure that they are not violated by governments and public administration as well as by private agencies. So there is a certain change, perhaps inevitable.
Presenter asks
31:45Did you believe that you would live to see the fall of the Berlin Wall and the changes in Eastern Europe?
Uh no, is the honest answer. I believed that these regimes would collapse. But I didn't act in everyday life as if I really believed it. That is I assumed, like most others, that we would have to come to terms with these horrible regimes over a fairly long period of time. But when it happened, it was one of the most wonderful times of my life, and I'll never forget it. It was the great liberating time. And the euphoria, the delight, the sheer pleasure. From Mazowiecki being elected and sitting a lonely and slightly sad man in the Polish same through the Berlin Wall, the breaching of the Berlin Wall, to Wáclaw Havel, the unlikely president, going up to the castle in Prague. Just marvellous.
“I'm really an inveterate crosser of boundaries and will be forever.”
“For me, liberty has always remained almost a response to, if not claustrophobia, then solitary confinement and prison and camp existence and the cruelty which I've seen with my own eyes.”
“It is a seismograph of the earthquakes of society.”
“When it happened, it was one of the most wonderful times of my life, and I'll never forget it. It was the great liberating time.”
“I would probably take the Louis Armstrong. The Blueberry Hill.”