Helmut Schmidt at the Chancellor’s Ball (1977) By the mid-1970s, mainstream politics was making good use of the very youth culture that had provoked such alarmed responses from representatives of the state and the established order only a decade earlier. That this led to interesting new encounters and juxtapositions can be seen in this photograph, which shows Helmut Schmidt sharing the stage with a trio of scantily clad singers at the Chancellor's Ball. Photo by Hanns Hubmann.