Germany's new first couple,
Joachim Gauck and Daniela Schadt

IF YOU WANT TO get a feel for the profound differences between Old Europe and the New America, you need look no further than the current pseudo-controversy surrounding the private life of Germany's designated new Federal President, Joachim Gauck. (I wrote a brief biography of him HERE.)

Gauck, a former East German pastor and civil rights activist, married his wife Gerhild in 1959 and they have four children together. The couple separated in 1991 without ever applying for divorce. Since 2000, the 72 year-old Gauck has been conducting a relationship with the Nuremberg-based journalist Daniela Schadt (born in 1960). He lives in Berlin and she lives and works in Nuremberg. They both intend to move into Bellevue Palace together following Gauck's official election in March.

That's where the trouble started. In an interview this week, conservative "family values" Bundestag Member Norbert Geis (73) of Bavaria's Christian Social Union party, an unevolved Catholic still best known for his abortive effort to ban an "obscene" Madonna concert back in 1993, commented to the Passauer Neue Presse that the new president really ought to marry his girlfriend, since "it is certainly in Herr Gauck's interest to order his personal affairs as quickly as possible so as not to leave himself open to attack."

In Germany these days, making such a suggestion is far worse than calling the president a "Muslim." Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle of the coalition Free Democrats - who himself lives in a "registered partnership" with his lover Michael Mronz, another complete non-issue over here - told the press that this "criticism of the nominated Federal President's personal living arrangements is in bad taste." After all, "Germany is a modern country."

The Social Democratic politician Dieter Wiefelspütz told the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung: "I can only shout to my friend Norbert Geis: Shut your mouth! ... This is an absurd discussion. As if we didn't have any other worries!"

Green parliamentary chairman Volker Beck said that "How Herr Gauck lives his private life is nobody's business. And part of reality is that unmarried people live together. I expect Herr Geis [to treat the president] with the appropriate respect." 

Even the chairman of the Left Party, Klaus Ernst, who is dead set against Gauck because of his work as a Stasi hunter and his conservative attitudes, tweeted: "What a medieval debate! There are plenty of reasons not to elect Gauck, but his living arrangements are not among them." 

Now let's cut to the Land of the Free, where Republican frontrunner Rick Santorum has been stinking up the political culture with statements like the following:

One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country.... Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that's okay, contraception is okay. It's not okay. It's a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.

Now isn't that precious? I'd like to have watched a President Santorum telling this to former first lady Bettina Wulff, who not only spoke out in favor of birth control but actually visited schools to show children how to apply condoms.

 
Former first lady Bettina Wulff teaching
sex ed at a school in Hanover

And this one, of course:

If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does. ... That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing.

Particularly the latter statement wouldn't go over very well in this country, where we've got an openly gay foreign minister and an openly gay mayor of the nation's capital, Berlin. It's not that people necessarily like homosexuality, it's just that hardly anyone gives a damn these days.

But don't think Germany is some sort of civil liberties paradise. Sure, it has nude beaches and legalized prostitution, among other unchallenged freedoms, and a thorough battery of sex education is mandatory in the schools. But conformism is rank among many social groups, neo-Nazis terrorize gays in provincial towns, and the country curiously still provides a habitat for a particularly aggressive and small-brained tribe of paleo-Catholics who, for example, made divorced ex-President Wulff's life into hell - although compared to Santorum you might confuse these believers with your local chapter of Planned Parenthood. Over here, Catholicism just hasn't been the same since the Thirty Years War.

So is Germany ready for a notorious and admitted adulterer to unpack his bags in Bellevue Palace? As another American candidate used to say, You betcha! I can't imagine a similar scenario in the Home of the Brave - look what happened to Bill Clinton when his secret got out - although serial adulterer Newt Gingrich will put my thesis to the test.

For his part, Gauck said back in 2010 that he would divorce Gerhild and marry Daniela if he won the presidency that year. That may still be the plan, but the couple has not commented on the matter - as if it concerned anybody but themselves.

To me, the Gauck case demonstrates the benefits of minding one's own effing business when it comes to how people choose to organize their personal lives. It is also living, vivid confirmation of Hamlet's insight that "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so."

Actually, thinking isn't such a bad idea, considering the problems the next US president is going to face once he takes office. I suggest we all try it for a change - we have nothing to lose but our ignorance and our prejudice. Who wants to join me?

dpa
Berliner Morgenpost
Passauer Neue Presse
Focus