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273 D Chapter Eighty-Two d mArTin And The worLd Being received by such distinguished personalities as the Queen of England, the monarchs of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, Dwight D. Eisenhower , Pandit Nehru, and Indira Gandhi, deeply honored but did not change Martin’s way of dealing with regular people. In the summer before our wedding, Yehudi Menuhin had invited him to spend a day on his estate in Gstaad, Switzerland, in the company of painter Oskar Kokoschka and actor Peter Ustinov. This casual and unrehearsed get-together of four rather unusual men, with the beautiful Swiss Alps as a backdrop,was made into an hour-long film for television. With two exceptions, the countless honorary degrees bestowed upon my husband left him basically unaffected. The first, the“doctor theologiae honoris causa,”from the ancient University of Prague while he was Hitler’s prisoner, moved him to tears. The last degree, from the University of Puerto Rico,honored him together with the man whose violent death he would never stop mourning, Martin Luther King, Jr. With equanimity, Martin accepted medals and decorations from right and left alike, provided that they were bestowed upon him for his peace efforts and for no other reason. Those honors included the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize Medal and the International Lenin Peace Prize as well as both the German Federal Republic’s highest and most distinguished order, the Cross of Merit, and its counterpart from the German Democratic Republic . The medals usually disappeared into a drawer. Among his close personal friends he counted Albert Schweitzer, Robert M. Kempner, who had been assistant chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, and the American writer Dorothy Parker. In his campaign for peace, he was joined by Linus Pauling and the Bishop of Chichester George Bell, who, during the Hitler years, never ceased to protest the pastor’s incarceration. The first West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, decidedly not one of Martin’s admirers, was not amused by remarks that the churchman had dropped in a 1949 interview with the noted American reporter Margaret Higgins, in which he made the statement that, as far as he was concerned, “The Republic of West Germany was begotten in Rome and born in Washington.” In the fall of 1971,Pimen,the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church,invited both of us for a rather spectacular stay in Moscow and Zagorsk.During the formal banquet in my ParT Three 274 husband’s honor,I noticed something that almost caused me to choke.Before the meal,with the obligatory huge portion of black caviar as a starter, one of the nuns, noiselessly tending our table of twelve, approached Pimen to remove his headgear and to fasten a huge, snowwhite , starched napkin the size of a table cloth to our esteemed host’s front with a hideous black safety pin, after first lifting the long white beard that covered his chest. At home, not all of our visitors who sought Martin’s advice about personal problems, political issues, or church matters came with amicable intentions. Some of those barely able to disguise their animosity were quite baffled when they found that he, whom they had come to challenge and insult, never attempted to force his own convictions on them. It happened more than once that ideological adversaries, who stamped into Martin’s study with the sole purpose of giving this political renegade a piece of their own minds, left visibly mellowed and in inexplicable awe over so much unexpected tolerance and kindness on the part of the pastor, who seldom failed to cast a spell on friend and foe. As one of his biographers expressed it,“He could charm the birds out of the trees.” Billy Graham, before holding a mass rally in Frankfurt, came to pay his respects to the man he so admired.“Herr pastor,” he asked at the end of a long conversation,“can you tell me what might be wrong about my approach?” Martin answered, “Instead of telling the people that they must embrace Jesus Christ, ask instead the question if they will embrace Him!” Billy Graham never forgot. A lasting concern for my husband remained the young generation in Germany, intentionally cheated out of the truth, willfully kept in the dark about their nation’s sinister past. He maintained that it was not only the geographical and ideological border that split Germany ; the infinitely more disastrous crack was the one separating the generations. “What...

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