The head of the Munich Security Conference, Christoph Heusgen, is the new marksman in his hometown of Neuss. The former adviser to Angela Merkel fulfilled a big dream.
The wooden bird falls with the 42nd shot. The crowd on the fairground cheers. The cannons roar. And a dream come true for a man who has achieved everything in his career. Almost everything.
Christoph Heusgen, 68, was foreign policy advisor to Chancellor Angela Merkel. He represented Germany as ambassador to the United Nations. For a long time he was considered a kind of secondary foreign minister in the federal government. He now heads the Munich Security Conference, the annual high office of foreign and security policy. A man who knows how to avert crises and nurture relationships. For whom it is part of everyday life to be surrounded by top diplomats, foreign ministers and royal heads.
On Tuesday evening at 18:42, Heusgen put the crown on himself. With a precise shot from a shotgun, single shot, caliber 16, he decided the competition at the bird bar against a competitor in his favor. Now he is the marksman of his home town of Neuss: His Majesty Christoph II.
Christoph Heusgen: “A moment when a childhood dream was realized”
“The moment when the bird fell was a very special moment. A moment when a childhood dream came true,” said Heusgen, who is attending the Schützenfest for the 50th time this year. “The fact that we celebrate with you here afterwards is the best thing there is,” said the new king to his people. He has experienced many festivals around the world, but the one in Neuss is the “greatest”.
Heusgen has always remained connected to the festival in his hometown, with almost 7,600 shooters and musicians one of the largest in Europe, in all his professional positions. Wherever he was, he was always drawn back to Neuss on the last weekend in August. Angela Merkel also had to see that. The chancellor, so it was said in Berlin, didn’t really seem to be able to understand why she had to lend three of her top executives to Rhenish customs for a period of four days. Hermann Gröhe, ex-minister of health and before that minister of state in the chancellery, and Johannes Geismann, former commissioner for the federal intelligence services, also grew up in Neuss – and were enthusiastic shooters.
Congratulations for the new King Heusgen came immediately from the FDP on Tuesday. Secretary General Bijan Djir-Sarai has also been marching in Neuss for years. “I’m very happy for him,” he said star. “A great personality who embodies the values of the Bürger-Schützenfest: close to home, cosmopolitan and tolerant.”
Again and again he steered ambassadors to the Neuss Festival
Heusgen’s joy and desire for fairs, as the people of Neuss say, were not always rewarded with carefree days. In 2013, for example, US National Security Advisor Susan Rice called him shortly before the “parade,” the highlight of the festival. She wanted to warn him, she explained, that Obama would intervene militarily in Syria in the next few hours. Heusgen immediately informed the chancellor, he phoned and phoned, tried to combine shooting matches and crisis diplomacy – it didn’t work. He flew back to Berlin.
In other years, Heusgen managed to share the Rhenish cheerfulness with influential interlocutors from Berlin. Again and again he steered ambassadors as guests of honor to the Neuss Festival: British, French and Americans. The Chinese ambassador even came once. And with some of them, a close friendship has developed. To Heusgen, and also to Neuss. Former US ambassador Phil Murphy, for example, now governor of New Jersey, still raves about his visits to the Rhine.
Why did Heusgen keep going to the trouble of bringing prominent guests to his homeland? “Such friendships are worth their weight in gold in diplomatic business, because they guarantee that contacts are maintained even in turbulent times, that speechlessness never develops and you can be sure that confidential information will remain confidential,” he writes in his book “Leadership and Responsibility”. which was released earlier this year.
The former British Ambassador in Berlin, Simon McDonald, liked it so much that he came back to Neuss a year later to celebrate as a simple shooter. Guest of honor was his French counterpart Philippe Étienne. And so an episode happened that makes them smile in Neuss to this day. Étienne and McDonald spontaneously sent a diplomatic note to former guest of honor and Neuss fan Phil Murphy: “Where are you?”
Heusgen wants to open Neusser Schützenwesen for women
Heusgen will not be able to do without politics even in his king year. In his main job as head of the security conference, he is busy with a possible second term of Donald Trump as US President. “We have to dress warmly,” he warned recently star-Interview.
As a marksman king, his diplomatic skills will be in demand in a debate that no one outside the city limits of Neuss can understand. The question is whether the rifle club will also open up to women after 200 years. Yes, you read that right: Up to now it has been the privilege of men to march through the city once a year.
Heusgen has already indicated that he tends towards an “inclusive approach” and would like to open the Neuss rifle club to women.
The question remains as to who will come to Neuss as a guest in honor of Christoph II Heusgen next year. About the former chancellor? Hardly, the new king has already waved it off. It was already difficult enough, said Heusgen, to convince Angela Merkel to come to the security conference in Munich.
Merkel’s successor Olaf Scholz, on the other hand, will then have to do without a proven force, in this case a diplomat in his service, which is almost a tradition, because of the Neusser Schützenfest. Heusgen’s wife, Queen Ina, works as a department head in the Chancellery.