Tonight I dreamed of Helmut Schmidt. I have no idea why. We somehow met in a hotel backroom where he took a break from attending a conference as a speaker. I was a bit shy and didn’t want to bother him. However, he understood right away through my body language that I would have something to say. So, without me speaking up he surprisingly said: Well, why don’t we just go over there and pointed to the corner. I felt like a little boy, and while moving over there I didn’t know what to say. Having his unexpected encouragement I told him that he was the first politician I came to know through my father when I was a kid, and that their birthdays and haircut is the same which he somehow seemed to amuse him. He told me that he was in Istanbul back in the 50s to find out whether it would be profitable to establish shipping routes between Hamburg and the Black Sea via the Bosporus.
I was a bit ashamed to ask whether we could take a photo together. He promptly seized me towards him, so we stood really close, even arm in arm. I didn’t realize that he wasn’t in his weelchair but in fact standing very upright. We took a photo of us without jackets just in our same white shirts as if we were good friends. I made the picture in reverse mode off the phone and thought how good that I wore a white shirt.