LACKING ANY AMBITION—except a desire to be happy—and being by nature impulsive, I decided to become a literature or history teacher. Such an important decision would have been better made with a father to advise me. But perhaps he did influence me, in spite of everything: he died a slave, and ordering others or obeying others has always repulsed me. I am fine directing a collective action carried out by equals who agree to follow my suggestions, and I am fine taking orders that I accept of my own volition, but I have always preferred to remain free, not only in my head, but in my work, too. I am not the type of man who will be happy as an employee.
Anyway, I found myself in the first year of an intensive preparatory degree at the prestigious Lycée Henri-IV. To follow the best students, one must work hard; I did my best, and I passed my favorite subjects, but my Latin result was awful. Even so, I was accepted for my second year. The grading was so rigorous that the teachers’ comments on my essays took up more space than my own writing. I worked hard and realized that I was becoming less superficial and more intelligent.
I passed my exams, receiving the best grades of all in history and literature. Having received another Zellidja travel grant in 1956, I decided to head east. I hitchhiked to Istanbul, stopping off in Venice, which I adored, then I took the train to Belgrade and Skopje, where a policeman threw me off a train for flirting with a Yugoslavian girl.
I went as far as Tehran and tried to reach Afghanistan but had to give up because flooding had destroyed so many bridges. In Thessaloníki, on my way back to France, I was seduced by a beautiful young woman named Helga, who consoled me for my romantic disappointment: a blonde girl with a ponytail, Djinn, a schoolgirl at the Lycée Jules-Ferry, had rejected me the previous year.
In the fall, I began a history degree at the Sorbonne. The following February, I visited my sister in Moscow, where she lived in a diplomatic ghetto, teaching Russian to French diplomats. Our quality of life there was good: with her modest wages, my sister was able to eat in the best restaurants. It was difficult to work out the true nature of the regime in that country, where on the surface everything seemed so orderly and, in social terms, similar to France in 1957. My knowledge of Russian came in handy, but even more useful for understanding that this was not the best form of governance was my experience of Romania in 1946.
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IN 1958, I fell in love with the first young woman I met in the Descartes amphitheater in the Sorbonne. Mireille was born on November 2, the same day as my sister. She was from a Protestant family in Alsace. There was every reason for me to fall for her: she was beautiful and brilliant, with an intelligence founded not only on culture but on introspection. At Easter, I sailed on a small Dutch freighter to Casablanca, where I received a letter from Mireille telling me that she loved me. So I jumped on a boat that left the next day and never saw anything more of Morocco than the post office in Casablanca. We talked about marriage, but the relationship ended a few months later. She wrote to me: “We are too different. I know different personalities can complete one another, and I wanted to believe that for a long time. But I suffered too much from those differences to be able to delude myself any longer. Serge, when we do not have the same basic reactions to anything—not even the smallest things—we cannot be happy together. And that is what happened to us: we clashed constantly in spite of the love we felt for each other, and I probably suffered the most.” Mireille was undoubtedly right. She was reasonable and clearheaded, and I was not.
I was not inconsolable; I met a Finnish girl and then a Dutch girl; I passed my degree and entered Sciences Po as a second-year student to study international relations. I felt at ease there: the work was within my capabilities, and I played on the soccer team. I was also studying history at the Sorbonne with the famous historian Pierre Renouvin.
In the summer of 1959, I went to Israel again, as one of my professors, Georges Balandier, had gotten me a grant so I could study the trade union confederation Histadrut. I returned from Israel on a Turkish boat that took me to Istanbul, where I went to see the Romanian consul. I convinced him to give me a visa allowing me to go to Bucharest to visit my aunt Lida because I feared I might never see her again: I was due to do my military service in the middle of the Algerian War.
At passport control on the Romanian border, the police told me that I was considered a deserter—my passport bore the words “born in Bucharest,” even if I had been naturalized as French in 1950—and that, when I reached the capital, I would have to report to the police station. There, they examined my case and decided to leave me in peace. Aunt Lida had no idea I was coming, but as soon as I called out her name, standing outside her building, she immediately guessed who it was. It was so wonderful to see each other after twelve years of separation. I spent a few days with her and got back in touch with my father’s family: my cousin Sylvio and his wife, Gaby, who had a two-year-old boy named André; they did not believe that I was who I claimed to be at first, so used were they to living in a climate of suspicion, but I was able to convince them in the end. My cousin Sophie accompanied me on the train to the Hungarian border. She dreamed of freedom; it would take her more than ten years to escape.
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IN 1960, I passed both diplomas—at the Sorbonne and Sciences Po—but I remained careless and lacking in foresight. Instead of preparing seriously for the École nationale d’administration (National School of Administration), I chose to do my military service, when I could have gotten out of it. Not only that, but I was not of much interest to the army, as my father’s death spared me deployment to the war in Algeria. But I was stubborn, and I obeyed my instincts.
At the same time, however, I had met a young German woman and was beginning to feel a deep attachment to her. For all my travels, it was at Porte de Saint-Cloud, on the platform of the metro station, that I saw her for the first time. She was wearing a blue dress cinched at the waist; from behind, I could tell she had a nice figure, and when she turned around, I discovered that I liked her bright, spirited face, too. I was on my way to a meeting, and I was wearing my best three-piece suit, a Prince of Wales check. I was going to Sciences Po, at the metro station Sèvres-Babylone; she was holding a blue Alliance Française book, which suggested she would get off at Notre-Dame-des-Champs.
That meant she would have to change trains at Michel-Ange–Molitor and at Sèvres-Babylone. Standing near her in the carriage, I kept looking at her; at the first station, we climbed the stairs side by side, and it was on the platform at Molitor that I finally dared speak to her: “Are you English?” She replied, “No, I’m German.” At Sèvres-Babylone, she gave me the telephone number for the family in Boulogne where she worked as an au pair. The day we met was May 11, 1960: the very day that Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped by the Israelis in Buenos Aires. Could that have been a sign of our destiny?
For me, energy was an essential quality in a woman. My mother and sister were both energetic, and so were Stendhal’s heroines. I sensed that Beate had the energy of Mathilde de la Mole and the tenderness of Madame de Rênal. My mother sensed it, too; she liked Beate instantly and entrusted her son to a woman who she knew could love him all his life and, when it ended, have the courage to close his eyes.
Of the two of us, Beate is the more reliable, the more steadfast. She does everything, big or small, conscientiously, intelligently, and coolly. She is an excellent housewife; she always writes “hausfrau” in the box for occupation when filling out forms. She is capable of adapting to any situation and is always cheerful and smiling. In this, she resembles Marlene Dietrich, another Berliner, who became Beate’s friend toward the end of her life and whom we consider to be one of the most iconic women of her century. Her first contact with Marlene came in the form of a postcard to Beate: “Dearest Madame, I am writing to tell you that I admire you and love you deeply, and I am sure you know why. As I have become an atheist, I cannot say: ‘God bless you!’”
Beate was the woman of my dreams, capable of lifting me up above myself despite my flaws. I didn’t know this yet, but I sensed it. From the start of our relationship, I respected her character. She was not East German or West German but simply German. When she was confronted with the image of Nazi Germany, she accepted it; but I could already feel the resolve accumulating within her to react against that image, not through denial, but through positive action. First she had to learn from her country’s history how it had reached this point, this division of Germany and its capital. I gave her books and articles that enabled her to educate herself. She wanted to understand; she wanted to act, too.
The two of us rented a ground-floor studio apartment on Avenue de la Bourdonnais. We didn’t stay there long. On an impulse, I bought an adorable kitten at a pet store. In my mother’s family, everyone owned a cat; now it was our turn. That evening, we brought it to show my mother, who loved it so much she refused to let it go. As we refused to abandon it, we came up with a compromise. My sister, who lived with our mother, had seen our apartment, which she liked a great deal. So she moved into it, while Beate and I took her room in my mother’s small apartment. My mother’s open-mindedness can be gauged by the fact that she didn’t bat an eyelid over us living together when we were not married or even engaged, and this at a time when such behavior was often judged harshly.
We married on November 7, 1963, at the town hall in the sixteenth arrondissement. The mayor, who married us, asked us to be an exemplary couple, as we were Franco-German. While we were on our honeymoon in Munich, I learned that I had finished first in the competitive exam for management assistants.
Not long before our wedding, one of my friends had tried to dissuade me from marrying Beate. A few days later, she and I had lunch in a little Russian restaurant, where a fortune-teller approached us and offered to read my palm. I had never done that before; I hesitated, but ended up agreeing. She looked at the lines in my hand, then took me aside and said, “You’ve been advised not to marry this woman. You must marry her.” And I remember vividly what she said next: “She is the only woman in the world you can be happy with.”
Today, after fifty-four years of marital bliss, I can confidently state that what the fortune-teller said to me was true: no other woman could have given me what Beate has brought into our private life and our public life. Together we are united, strong, and happy; without each other, we probably wouldn’t have achieved very much. She owes me a lot, and I owe her even more …