It’s been a while since the last long conversation. The screen comes on, zoom switches to Italy – and there he sits: Otto Schily. At a table in his home in Tuscany. Nothing spectacular at first glance, soft earth tone ambience, nice wooden furniture, lots of art on the walls, soft sunlight. What you can catch by looking over your shoulder.
Schily himself looks quite curiously into the camera, suntanned and mischievous as he can be. Not tired, neither exhausted nor strained, but present, close, open-minded, and that at 89. Wow – that’s the first feeling that jumps out at you.
The impression is confirmed in the following hour and a half. It’s August 2021, we’re talking about the attack on the World Trade Center twenty years ago. Schily was the Federal Minister of the Interior at the time. He talks about the fright and shock in the first few minutes and reminds of the anti-terrorist measures. But he also admits that there were “unsensical exaggerations of threat scenarios” at the time. And when he searches for the why, he states that “we are only at the beginning, if we will ever understand it at all”. Nothing can be solved in this conflict with the police and military alone. “It’s the battle for people’s minds and souls.” A fight nobody knows if it can ever be won.
The former SPD sheriff in the Ministry of the Interior: so thoughtful?
Otto Schily, the former SPD sheriff in the Ministry of the Interior, so thoughtful? The same Schily who had his picture taken in office with a police baton? The video call shows a man who, despite his age, is investigating, wants to know, and openly admits to self-doubt. One could almost call him mild in age. At least as long as you ignore the fact that the thoughtful-friendly Mr. Schily almost always had a second Schily at his side during his long, checkered career, who could be arrogant, angry and terribly resentful. Many in his former ministry will never forget how one or the other file folder learned to fly at Brass Schilys.
Could bring files an unimagined radius of action: Otto Schily 1984.
(Photo: Dieter Bauer/Imago)
Otto Schily, born on July 20, 1932, is one of the most dazzling and independent politicians in post-war Germany. He first became known as a lawyer. In the 1960s he became friends with Rudi Dutschke in Berlin and with Horst Mahler, whom he defended in one of the first RAF trials in the early 1970s. A little later he becomes Gudrun Ensslin’s attorney of trust in Stammheim. Again and again he assures later that he did not do this as a sympathizer of any kind of terror, but as a defender of the rule of law.
1972: Otto Schily enters the court in Frankfurt, where he defends the lawyer Horst Mahler in the so-called Mahler trial.
(Photo: Imago)
Shortly thereafter, he began his political career, co-founded the Greens in 1980, elected to the Bundestag for them in 1983 and quickly made a name for himself as a sharp-tongued speaker. The bourgeois-liberal, but also elitist Schily never really warmed to most of the Greens, in 1989 he switched to the SPD. This causes him a lot of trouble with old companions. In his new party, on the other hand, he soon became close to Gerhard Schröder, who made him Minister of the Interior in 1998.
In 2001, Schily, seen here as the Social Democratic Federal Minister of the Interior, whispers to the Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer – while Chancellor Gerhard Schröder is making a government statement.
(Photo: Rainer Unkel/Imago)
But it’s not so much the career steps that make him so special. It is the radical independence in thought and action that defines Schily from an early age. Whether as a Green, as a Social Democrat, as Minister of the Interior – Schily doesn’t care what others expect of him. He thinks, talks and acts as a free spirit who doesn’t give a damn when he offends whom and why. Many people saw this as arrogance early on, and Schily was (and is) able to make his counterpart feel this arrogance as well. But in his own way he is an intellectual who – like in the interview a year ago – thinks everything through, wants to understand and penetrate. That can also be very impressive.
Laments a “certain bellicialism” among the Greens: Schily, here in 2005 with Chancellor Schröder during an election campaign in Bavaria.
(Photo: Frank Mächler/DPA)
Schily remained true to himself for his 90th birthday this Wednesday. In an interview with the German Press Agency, he complained about a “certain bellicialism” with regard to Russia’s war against Ukraine, especially among the Greens, who would think too much about arms deliveries and not enough about ways to end the war. “I am unreservedly critical of the murderous war. But we have to ask what prospects there are beyond supplying arms and donating money to Ukraine,” warns Schily. “Necessary is political imagination.”
He criticizes the simultaneous exit from nuclear and coal
At the same time, he criticizes a hasty exit from nuclear power: “The complete abandonment of nuclear technology has put us in a highly risky economic situation.” According to Schily’s analysis, Germany had become dependent on gas as a result of the simultaneous phase-out of nuclear power and coal.
The Greens, parts of the SPD, former Chancellor Angela Merkel – in the DPA talks, too, many are again receiving a fair amount of criticism from someone who has never allowed party reasons to limit his thinking. Typical Schily, and for his 90th birthday.