Henry Kissinger's

In an excerpt from his new biography,
Walter Isaacson reveals
how the statesman never acknowledged
the traumas of being a Jewish boy in Nazi Germany.

111[ is first thought
was to cross
the street — a
natural reac-
tion, one that
had been rein-
forced by years
of beatings and
taunts. He was
walking alone on Manhattan's West
185th Street, from Amsterdam Avenue
toward the ice cream parlor he had dis-
covered on Broadway, when he spotted
the group of boys — strangers, not Jew-
ish — approaching. In Furth such an en-
counter was sure to produce, at the very
least, some small humiliation. He start-
ed to step off the sidewalk. Then he re-
membered where he was.
Henry Kissinger had been in Ameri-
ca only a few months when this small
epiphany occurred. It was 1938, and his
" family had moved into a comfortable
but modest three-bedroom apartment
in a six-story brick building at Fort
Washington Avenue and 187th Street.
Across the hall lived Paula Kissinger's
cousin. Other friends from Furth and
Nuremberg were among the hundreds
of new Jewish immigrants who filled
similar bulky buildings up and down the
bustling avenue.
Like many of the Jewish families liv-
ing in Washington Heights, the
Kissingers had once enjoyed a prosper-
ous, stable life in Fiirth. Louis Kissinger
took great pride in his status as a Stu-
dienrat, or schoolmaster, an eminent po-
sition in German society. When he
married Paula Stern in 1922, her par-
ents bestowed upon them a dowry large
enough to buy a five-room, second-floor
corner apartment. Nine months later,

From Kissinger, A Biography by Walter
Isaacson. Copyright ©1992 by Walter
Isaacson. Reprinted by permission of
Simon & Schuster, Inc.

on May 27, 1923, their first child was
born there.
Heinz Alfred Kissinger. His first name
was chosen because it appealed to Paula.
His middle name was a Germanicized
updating of Abraham. From his father,
Heinz inherited the nickname Kissus.
When he moved to America 15 years
later, he would become known as Hen-
rY.
By the time Heinz Kissinger was
born, the Jewish popula-
tion of Furth had shrunk
to 3,000. A new period of
repression was under way.
And Jews were increas-
ingly treated as aliens.
Among other things, they
were barred from attend-
ing public gatherings — in-
cluding league soccer
matches.
Nonetheless, Heinz be-
came an ardent fan of the
Kleeblatt Eleven, the
Furth team that had last
won the German championships in
1914. He refused to stay away from their
games, even though his parents ordered
him to obey the law. He would sneak off
to the stadium, sometimes with his
younger brother, Walter, or a friend,
and pretend not to be Jewish. "All we
risked was a beating," he later recalled.
Kissinger's love of soccer surpassed
his ability to play it, though not his en-
thusiasm for trying. In an unsettled
world, it was his favorite outlet. But it
was as a student rather than as an ath-
lete that Kissinger excelled. Like his
father, he was scholarly in demeanor.
His mother even worried that books had
become an escape from an inhospitable
world. "He withdrew," she recalled.
"Sometimes he wasn't outgoing enough,
because he was lost in his books."
Louis badly wanted his two children

to go to the Gymnasium, the state-run
high school. After years at a Jewish
school, Heinz was likewise eager to
make the change. But by the time he
applied to the state-run school, the tide
of anti-Semitism had risen. Because he
was Jewish, he was rejected.
The Isnzelitsche Realschule, where he
went instead, was every bit as good aca-
demically. It was small, with about 30
children in each grade. But it eventually
grew to about 50 per class
as the state school system
barred Jews and as many
Orthodox children began
commuting there by trolley
from Nuremberg. Religion
was taken seriously. Each
day, Kissinger and his
friends spent two hours
studying the Bible and the
Talmud.
As a child, Kissinger
was more comfortable hav-
ing one close friend than
being part of a group. In
Furth, his inseparable companion was
Heinz Lion. They spent almost every af-
ternoon together. On Saturdays, Lion's
father would teach the boys the Torah,
then take them on hikes. Along with
Heinz Lion, Kissinger went to syna-
gogue every morning before school. On
Saturdays, Lion's father read and dis-
cussed the Torah with them. Young
Kissinger "would be totally engulfed in
the atmosphere of piety," according to
Lion's mother. "He would pray with de-
votion."
When Kissinger graduated from
school in Furth, he went to study at the
Jewish seminary in Wurzburg. But he
had not gone to Wurzburg to become a
Jewish teacher, for it had become clear
that there was no future for Jewish
teachers, or even Jews, in Germany. In-
stead he went to Wurzburg for lack of

anything better to do for the moment.
By then, the Kissinger family, led by
Paula, was coming to an anguishing de-
cision.
In 1923, the year that Kissinger was
born, Julius Streicher had founded the
rabid anti-Semitic weeklyDer Stuermer
in Nuremberg, where he headed the lo-
cal branch of Hitler's Nazi party. His in-
citement of hatred against the Jews was
not only fanatic, but sadistic. He de-
manded the total extermination of Jews,
whom he called "germs" and "defilers."
Streicher paved the way for the
Nuremberg Laws of 1935. These stat-
utes negated the German citizenship of
Jews, forbade marriages between Jews
and German Christians and prevented
Jews from being teachers in state
schools or holding many other profes-
sional positions.
As a result, Louis Kissinger was sud-
denly deemed unfit to teach true Ger-
mans and lost the job of which he was
so proud. For a while, he worked to es-
tablish a Jewish vocational school in
Fiirth, where he taught accounting. But
he was a broken man, humbled and hu-
miliated by forces of hatred that his
kindly soul could not comprehend.
In later years, Henry Kissinger would
minimize his Jewish heritage. When he
discussed his childhood, he would de-
scribe it as typical middle-class Ger-
man Jewish. His family, he would say,
was assimilated, and the Jews of Furth
were not all that segregated or tribal. (E:,
He also minimized the trauma he
faced as a child, the persecution and the
beatings and the daily confrontations c'=/ N
with a virulent anti-Semitism that made
him feel like an outcast. As he told a re-
porter from Die Nachrichten, a Furth
newspaper, who was writing a profile of
him in 1958: "My life in Fiirth seems to
have passed without leaving any last-
ing impressions."

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