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Helmut Schmidt, Germany's 89-year-old former chancellor and its most renowned and inveterate nicotine addict, became the first prominent victim of his country's new anti-smoking laws yesterday and faced the prospect of court action for lighting up in public.
Schmidt and Loki, his 88-year-old wife, are well known in Germany for their chain-smoking. The ex-chancellor even has a weekly interview column in the respected Die Zeit magazine entitled A Cigarette with Helmut Schmidt.
The couple attended a New Year reception at a theatre in their home town of Hamburg only days after Germany's ban on public smoking was introduced on January 1. As guests of honour, the Schmidts were provided with ashtrays as they sat down.
Photographs of the Schmidts drawing heavily on cigarettes and clearly enjoying their smoke at the theatre were plastered across the mass-circulation Bild newspaper the next day. In Germany, such a flagrant breach of the law was bound to have consequences.
Yesterday, they arrived in the form of a declaration by Hamburg state prosecutors that they were investigating the Schmidts on suspicion of causing "bodily harm" to other guests at the theatre and of being in breach of the city state's ban on smoking in public places.
The case against the Schmidts was brought by the anti-smoking lobby group, Non Smoker's Initiative. Roland Keiser, the group's spokesman, said: "Their illegal behaviour was encouraged by the theatre, which provided them with ashtrays despite the ban on smoking."
The former Social Democrat chancellor is one of Germany's elder statesmen and invariably lights up when interviewed on television.
If convicted, the Schmidts could face a fine or a maximum five-year prison term.
The case marked the latest attempt to flout Germany's controversial and unpopular ban on smoking, now at least nominally in force in 10 of the country's 16 federal states.
However, as most of the states have said that they will allow pubs and restaurants a six-month grace period before enforcing the rule, the ban is being widely ignored.
More than 30 per cent of Germans smoke.
- THE INDEPENDENT
