In his contribution to the “Required Reading for Democrats” series, Simon Strauss deals with the 1958 novel “Il Gattopardo” by the Sicilian Prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Based on the assumption that Wolfgang Schäuble gave a copy of the German translation of the novel to Friedrich Merz in February 2022, but that he returned the book to his friend a week later with the question: “What should I do with it?”, Strauss argues that The current chairwoman of the CDU could have done something with the novel, and even that he could have drawn political lessons from it. What lessons?
