The phantom of the Bundestag

EVEN though ordinary Germans may have missed it, Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, celebrated an important anniversary on December 9th. It marked the day 35 years ago when Jakob Maria Mierscheid became a member of parliament, then located in Bonn. Mr Mierscheid is a rare Social Democrat in that he is esteemed, indeed revered, across the party spectrum, and possibly by all 631 members of the Bundestag. In 2013, when Mr Mierscheid turned 80 and the Bundestag’s president, Norbert Lammert, congratulated him, all present gave their heartfelt applause.

Mr Mierscheid was not present this week, or last year on his birthday. Nor was he available for an interview with The Economist, even though favourable coverage was virtually assured. It is indeed hard to find Mr Mierscheid. As Mr Lammert has put it, “we are at times desperately looking for him”. In a technical and biological sense, Mr Mierscheid does not exist. He was created, 35 years ago this week, as a fictional composite member to replace Carlo Schmid, a founding father of Germany's constitution, after his death. The first name came from one former member of parliament, the date of birth from another. Over time, the members of the Bundestag added a rich and detailed biography. Today Mr Mierscheid has a walkway named after him and his own Twitter account.

As far as is known, Mr Mierscheid is a father of four, a widower, who trained as a tailor. Despite his recurring truancy, Mr Mierscheid has accumulated a rich legacy of accomplishments. In 1983 he fathered the hypothesis, not sufficiently tested since but dubbed the “Mierscheid Law”, that the electoral results of the Social-Democratic Party (SPD) are correlated with steel production in North-Rhine Westphalia. He is also known as a passionate opponent of red tape: it was he who proposed striking from the Bundestag's official transcripts the final sentence of every member’s speech, since this is always exactly the same (“And thus I conclude...”). Intellectually omnivorous, Mr Meirscheid is also an expert on columba palumbus, a species of pigeon.

Notwithstanding his obscurity abroad, the members of the Bundestag agree that Mr Mierscheid should serve as an example of politics at its best, from stolid Germany to polarised America and other democracies throughout the world. His method is thorough and persistent. He is guided by a consistent moral compass and yet open to compromise. Through his very being he has humanised and enlivened German democracy. And throughout his career, he has remained humble, indeed media-shy. In this sense too, among politicians, Mr Mierscheid is unique.