Glamorous Guttenberg reenters German spotlight

By Jean-Baptiste Piggin Nov 25, 2011, 2:06 GMT

Berlin - An aristocratic German politician who left Berlin in disgrace nine months ago for self-imposed exile in the United States reentered the spotlight this week with an image makeover.

Gone are Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg's gelled black hair, owlish glasses and springy gait.

A 208-page book of interviews with him is to be published November 29 and shows the 39-year-old on the cover with short tousled hair, contact lenses and a pudgier look.

It seems no coincidence that the book is coming out just days after prosecutors let Guttenberg off charges of criminal breach of copyright in exchange for a donation of 20,000 euros (26,800 dollars) to a charity for children with cancer.

Germany's most charismatic politician before his sudden exit from Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet on March 1, the former defence minister was felled by revelations that he plagiarized part of a dissertation he wrote to obtain a doctor of laws degree in 2006.

The rise and fall of the man the German press refers to as Dr Googleberg is the stuff of soap opera.

Married to a glamorous Swedish-German countess descended from Germany's 19th century Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, Guttenberg made women swoon and impressed men as a straight-talking guy.

He rapidly rose through the ranks of the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU) of Bavaria to become one of Germany's youngest cabinet ministers. Bavaria, where his family owns a palace in a park, is his home state.

But he must have had a foreboding when he told a celebrity television show last year, 'In politics, you can crash out at any moment.' And he did. Just months later, he was exposed as a cheat. He resigned and the University of Bayreuth revoked his degree.

The title of the new Guttenberg book, Provisionally Failed, is a clear hint that he aims to win out in the end.

The interviews were conducted by Giovanni di Lorenzo, editor of Die Zeit, and extracts appeared in that weekly newspaper this week.

Political talent is thin on the ground in Germany, the exile declared. Asked if he would return to politics, he showed off his Greek in reply. 'I'm a zoon politikon,' a political animal, he said.

A newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, joked that putting on weight with a contract at a think-tank in the US state of Connecticut had helped Guttenberg raise his body mass index to what beer-guzzling Bavarians expect in a leader.

Party officials in his old parliamentary district of Kulmbach-Lichtenfels said Guttenberg would be welcomed back with open arms if he sought nomination again to Germany's parliament.

He said he was 'currently' in the CSU, but accused it and Merkel's Christian Democratic Union of 'sitting in the middle, not standing up for it.' In a jibe at his political friends, he said: 'People want politicians who don't lower the sails when the wind gets strong.'

Those remarks have led to speculation that he might be thinking of setting up his own centrist party.

Responding to Guttenberg's remarks, the CSU leader, Bavarian Premier Horst Seehofer, said the baron was 'pulling others down to lord it over them.'

'This is far too early for his comeback,' said a Bavarian minister who asked not to be named.

Critics say that Germans who have worked hard for their own education are ill-inclined to forgive a man who denies that the plagiarism in the thesis was deliberate.

The public prosecutor said he was convinced 23 passages of the book-length study, which compares the theories behind the US constitution and a proposed EU constitution, had been copied without credit from articles and textbooks by other authors.

The cash settlement, a common bargain in the German justice system, has been condemned by some of Guttenberg's opponents, who say it is no penalty at all for a man whose family has a fortune of 300 million euros (400 million dollars).

But lawyers say Germany's criminal law on copyright is intended to catch people who make a living from vending pirated movies, not academics who crib, and the prosecutor arrived at a pragmatic solution.

Asked in the book, why he doesn't just own up, he said: 'I do. But it's a question of how you say it, because there's a difference between doing it deliberately or copying text as the terrible result of your chaotic and messy way of working.'

He added: 'It matters to me because it's a question of honour.'