His timbre was just one reason I always looked forward to hearing Henry Kissinger, who died today after living a full century, expound on international relations. It was gravelly and deep, and grew only more so over the years. But it wasn’t just the voice. It was his unique accent, eccentric to some but strangely familiar to me.
I’ve heard Kissinger, who was born as Heinz into a Jewish family in Weimar Germany, hold forth in both his native German and in English, his adopted language after the Kissingers fled Nazi Germany and he became Henry. Visiting Germany — which he did often, both as US Secretary of State and eminence grise later — he liked to open in German, then switch to English with the joke that “I have reached a stage where I speak no language without an accent.”
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