Im Keller

by Jan Philipp Reemtsma

Jan Philipp Reemtsma, now forty-seven years old, inherited one of Germany's largest private fortunes. That wealth has made him a potential target all his life. He is also a brilliant intellectual, the founder and director of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, which has produced much important (sometimes unwelcome) scholarship about Germany's role in the twentieth century. That uncompromising honesty has made both him and the institute the focus of hate groups in recent years. On the evening of March 25, 1996, in front of his house, Reemtsma was attacked, beaten, and abducted. He had no idea where he was going, why he had been taken, who his captors were, or whether he would survive. For the next thirty-three days, he lived chained by the ankle to the wall of a small cellar, the prisoner of kidnappers whose motives, it turned out, were not political but mercenary: they wanted $20 million in exchange for his life. With incredible, unsparing honesty, driven by the will, he says, "