When a reporter and photographer from Stern, the West German mass-circulation weekly, arrived at Room 317 in Geneva's Beau-Rivage Hotel last week for an interview with Politician Uwe Barschel, they got a bigger scoop than they bargained for. The journalists found Barschel, 43, who had recently resigned as minister-president of the state of Schleswig-Holstein, sitting in the bathtub, clothed, upright and very much dead.
An interim autopsy report cited tranquilizers and sleeping pills as the cause of death, and press speculation ranged from suicide to murder. Barschel, once the rising star of Prime Minister Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrats, resigned last month after a former campaign aide claimed that he had used political dirty tricks to sabotage a Social Democratic opponent in a recent election. Barschel died one day before he was to testify before a parliamentary panel looking into the charges of wrongdoing.