This is Merz ‘guest gift to Trump: “I would like to keep it best”

How is the mood, the chemistry fits? This is almost the most important topic on such a day. The right gift can help. Or harm if it is the wrong one. Friedrich Merz chose a personal souvenir, even more: a family. As soon as the two gentlemen had taken a seat in the Oval Office, the Chancellor presented the framed facsimile of the birth certificate of Trump’s grandfather to the US President-because on March 14, 1869 he was born in the Palatinate Kallstadt “Close to Bad Dürkheim” (Merz).

The name of the grandfather: Friedrich. Is that enough as an icebreaker? Apparently. “Dürkheim? That’s Serious German,” jokes Trump, heavy German.

Merz had still recorded a short video for social media on the plane. Then he stood in the meeting room on board the government machine and presented the golden (!) Frame – visibly enthusiastic. The Federal Foreign Office procured the certificate and made an English translation in the same calligraphy style. “Really sensational!” I would love to keep it, “enthused Merz in the short film.

Now Trump belongs. And Merz has to hope that the host is just as enthusiastic about the guest gift as the guest. Which is by no means agreed, because in the Trump family there is always a little shade above the memory of the distant old homeland.

Frederick, as Friedrich called himself to America after his emigration, was later no longer so enthusiastic about “Good Old Germany”. When he returned to the Palatinate in 1905, where he was particularly pulled by his young wife Elisabeth, there was official anger.

Because the young Friedrich had forgotten to do the military service before he left, the now US citizen Frederick did not receive a residence permit in the Bavarian Palatinate at the time-on the contrary: the family suddenly threatens to designate. A few years ago, the former director of the Institute for Palatinate History and Folklore, Roland Paul, found out.

After that, a petition that Trump’s grandfather at the Prince Regent Luitpold – the “much -loved, noble, wise and just national father” and “sublime rulers” – wrote nothing about the situation. Luitpold stayed hard and rejected the “most subdent request”. In July 1905, the Trumps in Hamburg climbed a steamship towards New York. Trump’s father Fred was born three months later.

If the Germans had made a less bureaucratic manner at the time, Merz would have needed a completely different gift today-for a completely different US president.