"No reaction whatsoever," Chancellor Gerhard Schröder told the "Berliner Zeitung" earlier this month. No matter what happens. The subject at hand was the approaching publicity campaign for Das Herz schlägt links (The Heart Beats on the Left), Oskar Lafontaine's tell-all to be unveiled at the Frankfurt Book Fair in two weeks time.

That campaign was officially launched on Sunday in an interview for the "Welt am Sonntag", a newspaper owned by the same conservative media company, Axel Springer Verlag, that owns Econ, the publishing house that forked over an advance rumored to be in the hundreds of thousands of marks (and dollars as well) for Lafontaine's attack on the centrist chancellor from the left. Starting this coming Sunday, the "Welt" will be trickling tidbits from the book daily.

On March 11, Lafontaine abruptly and curtly announced his resignation as finance minister and chairman of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). He is said to have got in his car and headed back home to Saarland, refusing to answer calls from Chancellor Schröder. As nothing more than a private citizen now, Lafontaine emphasized, he refused to talk to journalists. Schröder quickly named Hans Eichel finance minister and was voted party chairman himself. The new team immediately reversed Lafontaine's demand-driven economic policies and proposed the largest budget cuts in postwar German history.

In Sunday's interview, Lafontaine blamed Schröder's dramatic turnaround for voters' massive rejection of the SPD in an ongoing string of state and local elections that won't let up until Berlin's state elections on October 10. Had the SPD stuck with Lafontaine's program, he says, the party would still be flying at least as high as it was when it knocked Helmut Kohl out of the chancellor's office last fall after 16 years.

Schröder argues that Lafontaine's old school leftist policies isolated Germany economically, and he is rumored to have planned to force Lafontaine out of his government from the very beginning. Conservative economists throughout Europe did indeed wring their hands over the direction Lafontaine was taking Germany and the British tabloid "The Sun" once branded him "the most dangerous man in Europe."

But Lafontaine argues his policies weren't isolationist at all and that in fact he worked closely with Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the popular finance minister in France, where economic indicators show that the country is doing quite well in comparison.

Economics aside, the manner in which Lafontaine has struck back at Schröder has drawn fire from Lafontaine's own party. Schröder may keep silent during this long PR campaign, but other SPD party leaders will not (see below). Designated party general secretary Franz Müntefering said on Monday, "I am angry at the way he left... but I'm even more disappointed in the way he's marketing his reasons." Rheinland-Pfalz State Premier Kurt Beck: "I don't think he's doing himself any favors... The SPD will actually rally around Gerhard Schröder more tightly than before Lafontaine's performance; as paradoxical as that might seem, [the party] is actually strengthened rather than weakened by the attack."

Of the many ironies of this situation, the SPD's performance in run-off elections in cities throughout North Rhine Westphalia (NRW) is certainly not the least. The news here is that Sunday did not spell out another disaster for the SPD. Yes, the Christian Democrats (CDU) took Cologne and the state capital, Düsseldorf. But the SPD held onto Bonn and Dortmund. These relatively minor elections matter quite a bit to the governing coalition because the general perception is that if the SPD loses in the NRW state election in May, Schröder will most likely not be able to hold onto the chancellorship. The signal on Sunday from NRW is that he just might have time to turn his fortunes around.

Meanwhile. Following Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer's announcement of his intentions to become more actively engaged in domestic politics and the inner workings of his party, yet another debate over structure, purpose, identity, and well, everything has broken out among the Greens. The party is uniquely led by two people at once, and one of them, Gunda Röstel, has decided that this probably isn't a good idea anymore. This "Doppelspitze" structure, says Röstel, only leads to endless debates like, yes, this one.

Because the other party leader, Antje Radke, identified with the Greens' left wing, insists that the "Doppelspitze" is essential to the principles of the party: "There must always be a woman leading the party," says Radke, and if there were only one position at the top, she has no doubt that a man would grab it.

Of more immediate concern is the fate of the Greens within the coalition. Several voices have been raised within the party arguing that Green values are dissolving as the party shares power with a troubled SPD that all but ignores the Greens anyway. Röstel counters that the party should move its congress, scheduled for next March, up the calendar and draw up a plan to "fight" for what they believe in. Regardless of the date, though, both Röstel and Radke agree that talk of abandoning the coalition is reckless and certainly doesn't strengthen the Greens' position. Radke: "I think the republic is laughing itself silly at us."

Germany and Europe on the Web today:

Andrew Gimson rounds up reactions to Oskar Lafontaine's interview in Monday's "Telegraph": "German ministers launched a series of venomous attacks on their former colleague Oskar Lafontaine yesterday, accusing him of being a deserter, a backstabber and a spoilt child."

The London "Times", on Sunday or any other day, rarely misses an opportunity to call Lafontaine "Red Oskar", an epithet that turns up twice in as many days. Roger Boyes on Monday: "He may no longer be the most dangerous man in Europe but, for sure, he will be the most dangerous author at the Frankfurt bookfair." Peter Conradi in the "Sunday Times": "He has never forgiven Schröder for beating him to be the candidate to stand against Helmut Kohl in last September's election."

Same edition, different Oskar. Critic and author John Carey selects Günter Grass's The Tin Drum as his "Book of the Century": "The story is told by a scabrous midget, Oskar Matzerath."

Peter Mandelson, who's had a hand in developing Tony Blair's Third Way, defends Schröder's version, the Neue Mitte, in this week's "Observer": "We have New Labour. There is as yet no New SPD." Denis Staunton on Joschka Fischer and the troubles facing the junior coalition partners: "Without his rhetorical gifts and broad-based appeal, the Greens would not be in government." Also: George Steiner on Walte r Benjamin. Free registration required

"[F]or the leaders of a dissident movement that banished nearly six decades of totalitarian rule under Nazi and Communist regimes, the early hopes engendered by a new era of democratic freedoms have yielded bit tersweet results." William Drozdiak reports from Leipzig for the "Washington Post".

"Ber lin, it has long been said, is damned: the city is so busy becoming, it never gets around to being." Which is why Roger Cohen is able to dip into it again and again for the "New York Times" and never once come up empty. Also: Kenneth N. Gilpin interviews Michael J. Browne, head of European equities for Chase Global Asset Management Inc.: "The problem that Schröder has is that if these reforms don't go through, Germany's competitiveness comes under question, and its social security system will come under attack." Free registration required

In Monday's "Guardian", Simon Hattenstone profiles General Klaus Reinhardt who will take over command of Nato's peacekeeping unit in Kosovo next week: "He will be the first German to command a British force since the battle of Leipzig in 1813.... Sometimes, he says, he feels Germany cannot win. If they were to reduce their army, they would be accused of not contributing to the upkeep of Europe. If they were to expand they'd be accused of aspiring to a fourth Reich." Free registration required

Once a week, poet Robert Hass introduces or riffs on a poem or poet, or perhaps a group of poems related in some way, expected or not, in the "Washington Post". Calling his column an exercise in poetry appreciation would be unfairly reductive, but that element is there, which is why, one assumes, Hass rarely returns to the same subject and certainly not two weeks in a row. This week, he has. Perhaps because translations of the same poet appearing at once "by one of our best poets, Galway Kinnell" and "by one of our best fiction writers, William Gass" is an event; or perhaps because, "No one emerges from reading Rilke entirely unchanged."

"The philosopher [Peter] Sloterdijk has kindled an extremely German argument among intellectuals with words like 'human breeding' and 'anthropotechnology'. Is the age of genetically-optimised human beings dawning?" Summaries in English of the cover story and other articles from this week's DER SPIEGEL.