Germany;Former Chancellor of Germany Helmut Schmidt Retains Wit and Smoking Habit at 95 - by Alison Smale

When he was born, World War I had just ended. He was German chancellor for eight years, roughly as long as he served in Hitler’s Wehrmacht. And now, in a country where old men are much revered, Helmut Schmidt is turning 95, and his nation is reflecting on a politician once renowned if feared for his sharp tongue but now elevated to the status of icon.

Not that the gruffness or laserlike judgment have disappeared. Mr. Schmidt may not have been chancellor for over 30 years — he was forced from power in fall 1982 when some in his Social Democratic Party and others withdrew support — but he still commands attention, is still co-publisher of the respected weekly Die Zeit and just was named Germany’s most significant chancellor in a poll by Stern magazine. 

In the two weeks before his 95th birthday on Monday, he was in Moscow seeing old Soviet friends and was invited to a chat at the Kremlin with President Vladimir V. Putin. He used his pulpit at Die Zeit to pen an appeal for curbing German exports of small arms. An hourlong conversation in his sixth-floor office proved as bracing as the sea winds that buffet his hometown, this ancient Hanseatic port of Hamburg. 

In his supposed dotage in this country of rules, Mr. Schmidt enjoys a rare impunity. A heavy smoker, he does as no other mortal may: puff away anywhere, on television, at meetings, even, according to German journalists who have witnessed it, in Washington. When the European Union threatened earlier this year to ban menthol cigarettes, Mr. Schmidt’s friend Peer Steinbrück reported that the old chancellor had stockpiled 200 cartons of his favored Reynos — enough to feed his two-to three-pack-a-day habit for two or three years.

Aside from a low wheeze that growls at times through his throat, Mr. Schmidt seems to have thrived on his nicotine intake (augmented, always, by snuff). A greater impediment, he explains with something of a glint in his gray-blue eyes, is deafness: he wears a hearing aid and conversation must be seated at his desk so his brain and eyes can knit together the audiovisual strands, he says.

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