When 10-month-old "Wimbledon Baby" Anna Ermakova starts asking awkward questions about her parentage she will need look no further than back issues of Bild for answers. For weeks Germany's biggest-selling newspaper has slavishly documented the daily disintegration of Boris Becker's marriage and the alleged infidelity that brought Anna into the world.
The news that Russian-born Angela Ermakova had allegedly borne Becker's child was broken by Rupert Murdoch's British-based News of the World. But Bild, the World's German soul sister, has taken the story to extremes of taste that would leave British editors redfaced.
Two weeks ago Becker said he could not be Anna's father as he had only engaged in oral sex with Ms Ermakova. "Was it Semen Theft?" inquired Bild on its front page, followed last Thursday with a frontpage profile of Ms Ermakova, headlined: "The Bizarre Life of the Semen Thief".
The Becker story is classic Bild: a daily drip of allegations, the truth of which is immaterial once it sells newspapers. And nothing gets into Bild unless it sells newspapers. Every day more than 11 million Germans, from binmen to bankers, read Bild. The newspaper employs over 800 full-time journalists and hundreds of stringers.
Legend has it that no place or person in Germany is more than half an hour away from a Bild reporter.
When Chancellor Gerhard Schroder wants to address the nation he knows he needs only to talk to, in his own words, "Bild and the goggle box". Talking to Bild is often enough.
The newspaper feeds its readers a steady diet of sensation in five-centimetrehigh headlines. Occasionally a political story comes along that lends itself to the Bild treatment. Last Monday was just one of those days.
Bild published a video still of a 1994 left-wing demonstration that showed Germany's environment minister Jurgen Trittin surrounded by protesters wearing balaclavas.
Bild superimposed arrows onto the image pointing to a man near Mr Trittin carrying a pair of bolt-cutters and another man carrying a stick. "What was Mr Trittin doing at this violent demo?" Bild asked its readers.
The answer emerged the next day: nothing. The newspaper had simply scanned in the photo from another magazine and had cropped it in a way that disguised two important details. When compared with the original photograph it was obvious the "bolt-cutters" held by one protester was actually a glove while the "stick" was a piece of rope.
"The photo was not manipulated by us, only the caption was wrong," said Kai Diekmann, Bild's unrepentant editor last week. But Mr Trittin pounced on the doctored photograph as proof of a campaign to discredit him and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, in trouble for their past lives as left-wing anarchists.
When photographs emerged showing Fischer beating up a policeman in the 1970s, the most damaging attacks came from Bild. The newspaper's daily allegations, some old some new, were supplemented by blanket coverage in its conservative sister newspaper, Die Welt. No ministers with such wild backgrounds could be credible ministers, the newspapers intoned day after day with increasing ferocity.
THE SALVO-FIRE between the Springer office block in Berlin, named after the newspaper group's late owner, Axel Springer, and the Reichstag (parliament) building across town marked the end of a 30-year ceasefire between the conservative newspaper group and the centre-left government populated with men and women touched by the 1968 student revolution.
"Springer-Presse, halt die Fresse" - Springer Press, shut your mouth - chanted students outside Springer headquarters in Hamburg in 1969. The students were protesting against the conservative ideology of the Springer newspapers. More than once the students posed a threat to the company's business: they blocked deliveries, set fire to the newspaper stock and are suspected of planting a bomb that exploded near the Springer building in 1972.
The students did not bring the business to its knees, however, and the might of the empire remains inestimable. Axel Springer Verlag is Europe's largest newspaper company with an annual turnover of DM5.2 billion (£2.1 billion) and only a foolish or reckless politician does anything to earn its wrath.
Last week, Chancellor Schroder took that chance and openly accused the Springer press of running a campaign to discredit his ministers. "Personally I don't believe [the campaign] will be successful," he said. He may be right.
Bild's tradition of never letting the truth get in the way of a good story has backfired.
Last Thursday it was Bild, not the revolutionary past of Trittin or Fischer, that filled the pages of competing newspapers.
A humbled Bild has stopped trying to make political waves and has returned to the safer territory of the Boris Becker story. For one Bild journalist the episode was a return to the bad old days of Springer Verlag. "The public used to treat us as if we had leprosy," he said. "It looks like it will soon be that way again."
