“Currently its top has been torn off to make way for a new and larger hood.

The tower will then be about 320 meters high,” the author wrote of the Eiffel Tower.

With his humorously described impressions of the French capital, he also allowed himself a little joke.

According to the author, there is a restaurant on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower "where fine Parisians eat so that they no longer have to see the tower themselves".

Alphonse Kaiser

Responsible editor for the department "Germany and the World" and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Magazin.

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Yes, this author was Ulrich Wickert.

But it wasn't Ulrich Wickert who, as ARD correspondent from 1984 to 1991, brought the French closer to the Germans in an inimitably charming way.

And it wasn't Ulrich Wickert who served the viewers with the news so finely in his "Daily Topics" years from 1991 to 2006 that they hardly had to see the indigestible world situation.

The enthusiastic and yet also ironically broken Paris article appeared in the weekend edition of 20/21.

July 1957 on the youth page of the Heidelberg "Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung".

Ulrich Wickert was just 14 years old and his last name was not as important as his first name, which is why the article had the beautiful title "Ulrich climbed the Eiffel Tower".

He was calibrated to Paris early on

So early on he was calibrated to Paris.

His father, the diplomat Erwin Wickert, who had lived with his family as a freelance writer in Heidelberg after the war, was given a post at the German NATO embassy in Paris by the Foreign Office.

In May 1956 the family moved from Heidelberg to Meudon, a suburb in the hills.

From his bedroom, the boy could see the Eiffel Tower.

So the topic came up.

"I was as proud as Bolle," Wickert wrote two years ago in the FAZ magazine about his first newspaper article.

He didn't earn any money with his text.

But he got three marks for his photo of the Eiffel Tower, which was also printed.

Wickert, who was born in Beijing on December 2, 1942 and will be 80 on Friday, has particularly fond memories of his early years.

He told the German Press Agency how he was thrown out of confirmation class as a teenager: “That was in Paris.

So I helped the pastor into his coat – and held his left sleeve closed.

Everyone laughed their heads off.

But he was so angry that he wrote a letter that I had to give to my father.

It said that I was excluded from confirmation classes.” He was then confirmed by another pastor.

He didn't neglect the side issues either

Wickert originally wanted to be a diplomat, like his father.

So he studied law in Bonn and political science in Connecticut, where he learned critical thinking.

As early as the early 1960s, he was active in Bonn's student parliament against a former Nazi at the university - and dealt early on with the role of his grandfather and father in National Socialism.

No wonder he ended up with the WDR political magazine “Monitor” in 1969.

In 1977 he went to Washington as an ARD correspondent, soon after to New York and then to Paris.

The political subjects were of course his first duty.

But he did not neglect the side issues.

He became known as a correspondent in 1984 with an exciting little report on how best to cross the Place de la Concorde: Wickert simply marched straight ahead across the busy square with the many lanes that aren't lanes, without looking at the cars .

And he really made it to the other side without being run over.

That was almost symbolic: you have to be brave to be accepted by the French.

On July 1, 1991, he became the first moderator of the "Tagesthemen" in Hamburg.

Alternating weekly, first with Sabine Christiansen, then with Gabi Bauer and Anne Will, he moderated one of the most important German news programs in a gentle parlando.

His farewell greeting at the end of the program became a trademark, saying that one should spend "a good night's sleep".

But some of the spectators were already dozing off.

Incidentally, he wrote many books.

"The Honest is the Stupid: On the Loss of Values" (1994) became a huge hit.

The darling of the audience did not shy away from popular statements, as in "Identify yourself!

Why we need a new sense of home” (2019).

He has just published his seventh thriller about the examining magistrate Jacques Ricou with Piper-Verlag: "The Shadows of Paris".

So he no longer steps out of the shadow of this city.

When Wickert is not in the south of France, he lives with his wife, the publishing manager Julia Jäkel, and their twins, who were born in 2012, in Hamburg.

Even the Federal President thanked him for his milestone birthday "for 15 years of 'Daily Issues' and your excellent journalistic work".

Despite such weighty words of congratulations, the passionate author and father will not go into a peaceful retirement any time soon.