When ego becomes a handicap: Gerhard Schröder in his signature role as a bon vivant.
Photo: NDR/Lucas Stratmann
A golf course. Naturally. Anyone who has or asserts influence, who desires or exercises power, who pulls or cuts strings, feels not only at home on feudal sports grounds, but also protected. Before plebeian impertinence, for example. That’s why it’s both plausible and strange that the most feudal of all German politicians, apart from Christian Lindner, asks the mob for their first audience at the first tee of his Hanover hometown club. Appearance: Gerhard Schröder.
The filmmaker Lucas Stratmann just runs alongside. Play along? God forbid! But at least the ex-chancellor lets his ex-subject accompany him through his extreme retirement for six months. Or as the award-winning NDR journalist put it from the off while playing passive golf at the start of the long-term accompaniment: “Gerhard Schröder got involved in our film.” Although after an hour of ARD portrait one should say: Lucas Stratmann got involved with him – the one Pariah of the executive elite.
Head of government, party chairman, social democrat, statesman – all a. D., but with an ego bigger than the official residence of Vladimir Putin, whom Schröder paid his respects to shortly after the attack on Ukraine. Gas lobbyists for a brutal dictator will no longer be an official, but the only persona non grata in German politics without the AfD. Party book: At almost 80, the alpha animal is doing well in the global game reserve.
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The title of the “Gerhard Schröder story”, which Stratmann enriches with archive images of this career of ascent and descent, is therefore given a question mark by the first: “Out of service?” But the person with the title may have been so rigorously removed from state offices and party honors that the SPD from every ancestral gallery – his word, as he sees it, still has weight. And it was so huge that Schröder even gave NDR the filming locations.
Schröder golfing and Schröder dining, Schröder in Hamburg and Schröder in China, Schröder at the celebration of 33 years of German unity and Schröder at the celebration of 60 years of SPD membership. That’s exactly where Stratmann’s team follows him, to the local club in Hanover, and we see an old-school control freak clenching the reins of lost power like a jockey whose horse runs away. Sounds tense – wouldn’t it exude the relaxedness of a leisurely ride.
It’s hard to grasp this autodidact of male power. Even for a filmmaker whose celebrated portrait “Kevin Kühnert and the SPD” proves how close he comes to even aloof political strategists. However, for almost 60 intensely filmed (camera: Sven Wettengel), cleverly edited (editing: Tim Rieckmann), discreetly set to music (music: Christopher Dierks) minutes, Stratmann allows the person portrayed to penetrate deep into the unrest – but not a millimeter close to himself.
What sounds like a resounding failure is actually a scoop worth seeing. Because Schröder’s distance, which he places with a malicious smile between the observation subject and the reporting object, exposes the latter in every scene as a fossil of a dying type of macho man for whom reflection is weakness and self-criticism is sick. The SPD leadership? “Pure characters!” Your general secretary? “A poor wretch!” Your own mistakes? “Just developments!” On the other hand, Schröder: “Sometimes a little different than others,” he decides, “what I think is right.” For example, berating Stratmann like an intern reporter, whom he interrupts with practically every question.
Stratmann: “There are really many reports that…”
Schröder: “I continued what I did as Chancellor!”
Stratmann: “Did you ask Vladimir Putin why he started this in the first place…”
Schröder: “Well, listen, we’re not making a fairy tale here!”
Stratmann: “Did you see this debate as unfair to you…”
Schröder: “At least that, I have had to endure a lot of injustice!”
Stratmann: “There are voices in Germany that are causing people to be blackmailed…”
Schröder: “I don’t understand this reporting!”
Stratmann: “Let me finish once…”
Schröder: “No!”
This is how it goes from the first to the 59th minute. And Schröder’s fifth wife, So-yeon, constantly films everything with her smartphone. Unless, like a head of the general staff, she shows laminated minutes of conversations between Chinese sales representatives or leads the guests through Gerhard Schröder’s home full of Gerhard Schröder memorabilia. As a bust, as a photo, as a painting, as an overpowering ego that we understand a little better after this documentary. A little better than intended, actually.
Available in the ARD media library.
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