WHEN HELMUT Schmidt turns 90 tomorrow, it's certain that Germany's oldest living former chancellor will not lack for company, opinions or cigarettes.
More than a quarter of a century after he left office, the chain- smoking Schmidt has achieved in recent years the kind of popular approval and cult status he never enjoyed in power.
Schmidt is one of Europe's last renaissance men: he is a celebrated author whose latest book tops the non-fiction bestseller list; and an accomplished musician whose new CD of Mozart and Bach piano concertos is doing well in the classical charts. German newspapers have printed countless column inches of lifetime eulogies, all agreeing on one point: that Schmidt is an indispensable, plain-spoken man of conscience.
It has been a remarkable outpouring of thanks and a comforting gesture in a country that still bases public importance on intellectual rigour rather than goals scored or reality television appearances.
Born in Hamburg to teacher parents, Schmidt served as a soldier in the second World War and in 1942 married his childhood sweetheart, Loki.
He joined the local Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1946 and rose to prominence as Hamburg's interior minister during the catastrophic flood of 1962 that left 315 dead.
Schmidt's pragmatic crisis management was acknowledged later for preventing further deaths.
Within a decade he had risen through the SPD ranks to be chosen to succeed Willy Brandt in 1974 after Brandt's closest adviser had been unmasked as a Stasi spy.
That baptism of fire would set the tone of Schmidt's two-term, crisis-racked reign - the longest of any SPD chancellor, including Gerhard Schröder.
The new chancellor first faced the economic calamity of the oil crisis, then the constitutional crisis wrought by homegrown left-wing terrorists, the Red Army Faction (RAF).
It was Schmidt's decision to stand firm during the "German autumn" of 1977, a series of high-profile hostage-takings and killings through which members of the Baader-Meinhof gang hoped to force the release of their imprisoned founder members.
Asked recently about his decision not to give in to the gang's demands - even at the price of hostage lives - Schmidt said he stood by his decision but felt "mired in guilt", 30 years on.
Last week the final curtain fell on that era when Christian Klar, the last prominent RAF ringleader, was released from prison.
After holding his nerve in the RAF crisis, Schmidt appeared to score again in 1981 with party backing for Nato's dual-track proposal.
The highly controversial deal offered the Soviet Union arms control talks while threatening to station missiles in Europe directed at the Kremlin unless it dismantled its missiles targeted at the West.
The high-risk strategy eventually paid off with Moscow pulling back but, after huge public demonstrations, Schmidt lost the backing of his party and, in 1982, lost the chancellorship to Helmut Kohl.
Schmidt's departure from active politics marked the beginning of an even longer second career as co-publisher of the weekly Die Zeit. It is a forum he has used to present often controversial views, whether support for nuclear power, opposing Turkey's EU ambitions or criticising Nato enlargement to Russia's borders.
He has attracted critics too, who view him as a vain intellectual exhibitionist. But as sales of his latest book, Ausser Dienst (Out of Service), suggest, the critics are in the minority.
After several volumes of autobiography, including very personal memoirs from his Third Reich childhood, it seems that Germans are anxious to hear what he has to say.
More than 25 years after being ousted by Kohl, Schmidt has eclipsed his successor as a quasi father of the nation, the kind of public intellectual Germany no longer produces.
He may use a cane and wear a hearing aid, but Schmidt is the last man standing. And smoking.