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Villain or Victim?

By Ursula Sautter

(TIME.com Europe) -- In January, when former Chancellor Helmut Kohl was ignominiously hissed off Germany's political stage for his dubious role in a slush fund scandal, most observers thought that this was the final act in his political career.

With the publication of his memoirs of the last two years, however, the once mighty King Kohl has dramatically re-entered the limelight.

"Helmut Kohl: My Diary 1998-2000" (Droemer; 352 pages) is both an indictment of those who assisted in his demolition and a vindication of his own behaviour.

In mingling tones of maudlin pathos and self-righteous outrage, Kohl casts himself in the part of a man more sinned against than sinning.

Although he admits to having made a "mistake" in failing to declare more than $1 million in secret donations in the Christian Democratic Union's official accounts, the 70-year-old, still refusing to break his "word of honour" and reveal the names of the donors, accuses his political enemies and the media of unfairly depicting him as "a corrupt and power-hungry politician."

The goal of their "unprecedented campaign" was to "criminalise" him, Kohl complains, and "discredit" his 16 years as Chancellor. "I can't accept that."

Yet it is not the centre-left parties that ousted him from power in 1998 that are the butt of Kohl's harshest verbal attacks.

Accusing them of "colluding" against him at the height of the uproar over the funding scandal last December, the ex-Chancellor reserves his most personal criticism for two people he once considered his closest confidants and most faithful followers: Wolfgang Schauble, his successor as CDU leader, and Angela Merkel, who took over as party chairman when Schauble resigned after lying to parliament about a $50,000 donation he accepted from an arms lobbyist.

About a telephone call with Schauble last Christmas Eve Kohl writes: "The conversation made something clear to me which I had not wanted to believe -- that Wolfgang Schauble wanted to make a final break from me."

His disappointment and sense of betrayal at the defection of Angela Merkel, whom he regarded as his favourite protege and affectionately referred to as "the girl," is even greater.

With few of his comrades daring to openly weigh into Kohl despite the devastating effect of the continuing scandal, Merkel, then the CDU's general secretary, played Cordelia to Kohl's Lear and publicly broke with him.

Her exhortation in an open letter published in the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung for him to come clean about the matter, Kohl laments, was like an attack "from the camp of the political foe."

While the governing coalition criticised Kohl's book as an attempt to portray himself as a victim, reactions among the Christian Democrats have been remarkably low-key.

Friedrich Merz, the head of the CDU's parliamentary group, said the memoirs didn't "bother" the party and Angela Merkel commented it was Kohl's "right" to present his view of things but contradicted his claim "that he suffered most" under the quarrel.

Others were less diplomatic. Klaus Dreher, author of a Kohl biography, scoffed that the ex-Chancellor's suggestion of a concerted campaign against him was "utter nonsense" and said "it would have been better if [Kohl] had remained silent." Readers of these memoirs might well agree.