❮ ◯ ❯ Helmut Schmidt in his 95th year

Oil on Canvas on Panel, 134 x 87 cm, 2013

About the love of contradiction in conversation

As a teenager, I would have demonstrated against his policy in 1983. But I grew up in the GDR and could not bounce up in Bonn against the NATO double-decision.

Later, when I was 25, I was drafted against my will for military service. I ended up at the transport police. When Helmut Schmidt took the train across the inner German border to Güstrow to Erich Honecker in 1981, I, like countless others, lay as sergeant to secure him on the railway line near Bad Kleinen. I never thought I would paint the smoking guy up there by the window of the dining car.

My Hamburg painter friend Karmers invited me to his exhibition opening in 2005 to the publishing house of the ZEIT. There, in a narrow corridor, I met Helmut Schmidt and thought: 'Strange, what a charismatic person'.

Over the years, I read his books. While I was painting, I heard his Mozart and Bach interpretations. Piano concerts with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Hamburg Philharmonic. He played this to his Chancellor times.

2012, coincidence it wanted that the ZEIT editor Urs Willmann with his Swiss charm gave me an appointment with Helmut Schmidt. I was warned. One had to be able to cope with his long pauses, not only to endure his silence, but to use them immediately for new ideas. Toady and crawler he did not like. He loved the contradiction in conversation, was wide awake and curious even in old age. I very much like to remember this musical person. He was also a great joker full of humor.

Before he sat me model, he had cleared his old-fashioned cigar box, which contained several boxes of cigarettes, from his desk. Schmidt with a cigarette was not my topic either. I wanted my pilot in his cockpit called Knowledge.

More than a year after creating the picture sketches, I presented him the finished panel in his ZEIT office. His words were: 'Paint, paint Mr. Juergens!'.

© MWJ, Hamburg, 06/02/2013

Piano Helmut Schmidt · Christoph Eschenbach, Justus Frantz and the Hamburg Philharmonic

Johann Sebastian Bach · BWV 1061: II. Adagio ovvero Largo | By courtesy of © Deutsche Grammophon