He was one of the most beloved politicians in Germany, who managed to ensure economic wealth while crushing the deadliest terror group in German history. What I will remember most was his class. When he was accused by the wife of a dead kidnap victim of the communist terrorists of sacrificing the victim for the greater good, he always refused to say a bad word about it.Helmut Schmidt, who has died aged 96, was West Germany’s fifth head of government and, by a comfortable margin, its most competent and gifted chancellor, serving from 1974 to 1982. The bitterness of his later years after his fall was only intensified by the extraordinary luck of his successor, Helmut Kohl, who united Germany after the collapse of communism. Kohl changed the course of German and European history; Schmidt was denied the opportunity, of which he would surely have made the most.
An incisive mind and a decisive character marked out this high-flying pragmatist for supreme power in his early 30s, despite eight youthful years lost to the Wehrmacht. Not only was Schmidt outstandingly good at politics and statesmanship; he knew it, and made sure everyone else did, too. Clearsightedness, one of his main strengths, may help explain his perceived main weakness as a leader – his lack of a political concept. He disavowed any desire for power or wealth but hungered for public recognition.
Born in Hamburg the son of Gustav, a teacher, and his wife, Ludovica (nee Koch), he was protestant by family tradition rather than conviction. He qualified for university in 1937, but instead of studying architecture was conscripted, first into the Nazi Labour Front and then the artillery, with which he fought in both the east and the west. In his teens, after Hitler came to power in 1933, he had learned a dreaded secret from his father: his paternal grandfather was a Jew, a fact that would have ruined the prospects of both of them, so they acquired false documents. Schmidt ended the war with an Iron Cross as a first lieutenant in charge of a battery and was briefly held by the British in Belgium in 1945.
Returning to a shattered Hamburg, he started to study politics and economics and joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1946, driven not by idealism but by the plight of the poor in the city. He passed the state examination for teachers in 1949 but went straight into the service of the reborn Land (federal state) of Hamburg, where he soon showed his administrative brilliance.
The SPD put him on its list of Hamburg candidates for the Bundestag election in 1953. Only three years later, his mastery of rhetoric and the detail of policy got him elected to the party’s parliamentary executive. He specialised in defence and made his name as a superb debater, taking on Franz Josef Strauss, the rightwing defence minister and political boss of Bavaria, who was his only intellectual and oratorical equal in German politics. But the mercurial Strauss was prone to scandals, enabling the always focused Schmidt to gain the upper hand in many of their crackling parliamentary exchanges. He acquired the nickname “Schmidt-Schnauze” (Schmidt the Lip), and in 1980 wiped the floor with Strauss when the latter ran against him for the chancellorship. Kohl had received the same treatment in 1976.
When the SPD failed to topple the ageing Konrad Adenauer, the first postwar chancellor, at the 1961 election, Schmidt left the Bundestag and went home to serve as senator (local minister) of transport and later of the interior in the Hamburg city-state government.
The Elbe floods in 1962, in which more than 300 people died, gave him the chance to prove he was as much a man of action in power as a master of invective in opposition. His expertly organised rescue and clearing-up operations won him nationwide notice and a place in the SPD “team for government” – but the party lost again in the 1965 federal election. Schmidt returned to the Bundestag as deputy parliamentary leader.
Two years later he was elected parliamentary chairman and in 1968 deputy chairman of the party overall. But he never stood for party chairman, even when chancellor. The SPD got its first postwar taste of power in 1966 when it became junior partner in a “grand coalition” with the Christian Democrats (CDU), led by Kurt Georg Kiesinger, who succeeded Ludwig Erhard as chancellor. Schmidt stayed on as parliamentary leader, working closely with the people he had been savaging in opposition only weeks before.
When the SPD at last formed an administration in 1969, in coalition with the much smaller Free Democrats (FDP), chancellor Willy Brandt appointed Schmidt to the sensitive post of minister of defence. He set about reforming the Bundeswehr (defence force). Some 22 generals and admirals and a swathe of grumbling colonels and naval captains resigned en masse. At the same time, the world was amazed and amused by the “German Hair Force” (Schmidt’s own English-language pun) as residual Prussian discipline made way for “hippies in uniform”. Efficiency was not allowed to suffer, but the Bundeswehr became a more humane environment for the nation’s conscripted youth.
Schmidt worked 18 hours a day and undertook arduous foreign tours, but came under constant attack from the SPD left for his centrist stance and his unshakeable commitment to Nato, and its nuclear weapons on West German soil. Early in 1972 he all but collapsed from overwork and was in and out of hospital. Some of his stupendous energy derived from an overactive thyroid, as suggested by his piercing and prominent eyes.
His large, handsome head, boyish profusion of hair and angular features belied an unexpectedly stocky figure, usually masked by a waistcoat. His addiction to tobacco in all its forms (including snuff, his way of getting round the Bundestag ban on smoking in the chamber) did nothing for his health, and although he seldom touched alcohol, he drank litres of cola. In 1981, however, his health improved dramatically when he gave up smoking and was fitted with a pacemaker. It was not until 1990, when he was 71, that he had a heart attack. He resumed his love affair with tobacco some years before the end of an unusually long life.
The job that opened the way to the top came in July 1972, when Brandt appointed Schmidt to the double ministry of finance and economics (normally separate). Fortunately, the heavy load was his for only four months as Brandt’s majority ebbed away in the great controversy over Ostpolitik, or detente with the Soviet block, including East Germany. But the constitutional upheaval that Brandt had to engineer in order to be able to call Bonn’s first premature election was the prelude to a smashing SPD victory in November, the greatest in its history. Europe east and west rejoiced to see the West Germans voting for peace and stability.
Brandt sent Schmidt back to finance (without economics, which went to the FDP coalition partners), enabling him to distinguish himself on the world stage in the oil crisis a year later, proving once more that he was at his best in a crisis.
Thus when Brandt suddenly resigned over the discovery of the East German “spy in the chancellery” in May 1974, there was only one plausible successor. A genuinely shocked and reluctant Schmidt was sworn in, but had the wit to leave Brandt in the party chair to shield him from the left. Schmidt took to the arduous job as if born to it. In the early days, he would blow a whistle as he took the short walk from his official bungalow in the chancellery grounds to his office, alerting the staff to his approach. He worked them all hard, but drove himself even harder. Yet his critics soon claimed he had no strategy, dismissing him as “a wire-puller with no ideas”.
He certainly seemed to be a man of reaction rather than action, responding, however brilliantly, to events rather than initiating them. But he formed a close friendship with Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the right-of-centre French president, who also spoke almost perfect English. Politically, too, they spoke the same language, while the “Bonn-Paris axis” on which the European Union turned grew even stronger. Their chief joint achievement was the European currency unit (Ecu) in 1978, the prelude for the Euro.
There was one inherited sore that Schmidt handled no better than Brandt: the nihilist terrorism of the Baader-Meinhof gang, also known as the Red Army Faction, which began in the late 1960s, the years of protest against the Vietnam war and of the “extra-parliamentary opposition” to the grand coalition, which was all but unchallenged inside parliament.
A handful of middle-class devotees of a perverted idealism, who enjoyed a surprisingly large supportive network, carried out bombings, kidnaps and other crimes against the large American military presence in West Germany and the bourgeois, capitalist state, including 34 murders of “symbolic” personalities. The results included alarming police hyperactivity, legislative over-reaction and a reduction in personal freedoms.
Although most of the pressure within government for restrictions came from the FDP, which controlled the interior ministry, and from the CDU opposition, which ran several state governments, Schmidt and the SPD were also carried away on the tidal wave of panic. His old enemy Strauss even took to sporting a pistol as well as a bodyguard. It was a most oppressive and uneasy time to be living in Bonn, but then the terrorist leaders were German and knew instinctively where to apply pressure through the “propaganda of the deed”, including their own trials and eventual prison suicides.
One of the few regrets he mentioned in later life was his decision in 1975 to allow an exchange of Red Army Faction prisoners for Peter Lorenz, the CDU party leader in West Berlin, who had been taken hostage. He resolved the very next day never to repeat the mistake. But the successful assault by a new West German police unit on a Lufthansa airliner, hijacked by Red Army and Palestinian terrorists, at Mogadishu in Somalia, showed his resolve and consolidated Schmidt’s can-do reputation in October 1977.
The recession caused by the Middle Eastern oil embargo was his millstone for the rest of his time as chancellor and indirectly brought him down in October 1982. The West Germans’ love affair with the car was dramatically interrupted by Sunday closure of the road network. It was a crisis not only of the economy but of confidence, drawing a line under the postwar “economic miracle”. Schmidt personally exuded confidence but his best efforts to talk the country out of the crisis did not succeed, even though West Germany coped better than most, thanks to his adroit damage-limitation.
In the end, the SPD-FDP coalition broke up because the partners fell out over economic policy in 1982, but also because the FDP, the tail that had so often wagged the dog in Bonn, decided to switch loyalties and join the resurgent CDU. The SPD old guard, including Brandt, fearing a split in the party, left Schmidt in the lurch. He was as ready as ever to adopt a confrontational course, forcing the FDP ministers to resign and thus take the blame for his fall in October 1982, even though it amounted to political suicide.
The SPD had been in government for 16 years and was tired, bankrupt of ideas and at odds with itself as a huge row loomed over the stationing of new US medium-range nuclear missiles on West German soil. The party was thus already out of office when it turned against this result of Schmidt’s “twin-track” strategy, of negotiating arms reductions with Brezhnev’s Soviet Union while preparing to increase the nuclear arsenal in West Germany if they failed. The Greens had become a national political force after the 1980 election, and the SPD leadership and grass roots felt the need to recover ground lost on the left. The party ditched Schmidt, along with his conservative defence policy, and he withdrew from politics. The party did not recover for 16 years, during which Kohl had no serious rival outside or inside the CDU.
There is no knowing what Schmidt might have achieved had he been in power during a period of expansion rather than retrenchment, or at the end of the 1980s when Mikhail Gorbachev was winding down the Soviet Union. He was the most skilled, experienced and respected western statesman of his time. Unburdened by modesty, he was fully aware of the fact. He once told me, wagging his famous admonitory finger, that he was “tired of educating American presidents”, being then on his fourth. Intolerant of fools, he had the common German didactic and omniscient tendencies in full measure, along with frankness. Because the Germans like their politicians to be solemn as well as serious, his sense of humour and dazzling smile were seldom seen or heard (but not when speaking in Britain, of which he was very fond). What he always showed was wit.
It was an unforgettable privilege for foreign correspondents to go electioneering on the chancellor’s private train (Hermann Göring’s legacy to democratic Germany). We were treated to a nightly tour de force as Schmidt sat at a table in the saloon in the early hours after a hectic day on the hustings, solving world problems, knocking back the coffee, the Coke or the odd cognac, gesturing with pipe or menthol cigarette and puffing smoke in all directions, switching from German to the English of which he was so proud, and back again.
Out of office, out of favour and out of luck, he took his wagging finger on the international lecture circuit while Kohl got off to a decidedly modest start. As the Guardian put it at the time, a great man had made way for a large one. Schmidt, however, lacked the vision associated with the highest plane of great statesmanship. Perhaps there is no need to see this as a weakness: his predecessor had vision, but made a poor fist of government.
In his heyday, only 30 years after Hitler, the rich, western three-quarters of a divided Germany, with its historical burden, was a powerbase too limited for even such a talented man to take the lead internationally in the kind of problem-solving at which he excelled. The ideas and advice were freely available; the clout to get them adopted abroad, and in the end at home, was not. It was sad to watch the SPD conference rejecting him almost unanimously, along with his passionate plea for the new missiles, in 1983.
The rise of Gorbachev and a couple of backward-looking critical books unfairly congealed his reputation as a passé cold warrior, or less unkindly, the right man in the right place at the wrong time; the chancellor who missed the bus of German unification in advance.
What a pair of pragmatists such as Gorbachev and Schmidt might have done together, given the chance, is a challenge to the imagination. But it was the ever-underestimated Kohl who was to seize the moment and pluck unification from the ruins of communism with unexpected skill and speed. Schmidt was undoubtedly jealous and was heard to say, “I told you so” when Kohl made a mess of the economic side of unification.
It was Schmidt who had the brains of a second Bismarck, but it fell to Kohl, who seemingly had only the bulk, to achieve more than any other 20th-century chancellor, not only in uniting Germany but also in leading Europe to economic and monetary union. How ironic it was that a player with Schmidt’s egregious talent and record should have spent much of his long retirement musing on what might have been. To have run the Federal Republic so well with so little room for manoeuvre was not enough for this “crisis-manager without a programme”. A German cartoonist in 1982 adapted Tenniel’s 1890 Punch cartoon, substituting Schmidt for Bismarck stepping down from the ship of state over the caption, “dropping the pilot”.
After politics, Schmidt worked as publisher of Die Zeit of Hamburg, Europe’s leading intellectual weekly, writing increasingly pessimistic books and articles and lecturing on world affairs. He disliked his successor intensely but supported Kohl’s commitment to Europe, and for the same reasons: it was in the best interests of democracy and peace in Germany and Europe that the one should be indissolubly locked into union with the other.
The private Schmidt was very private indeed, almost a blank space for the media. His self-effacing but strong wife Hannelore (“Loki”), a teacher whom he married in 1942, made few public appearances and gave fewer interviews, while their daughter, Susanne, managed to pursue her life without intrusion, although she exiled herself to London to avoid the attentions of the Red Army Faction. A son had died in infancy. Helmut liked to play the organ and the piano, and to sail his yacht in the waters north of his beloved Hamburg, where he lived in a waterside villa. His “Prince Heinrich” sailor’s peaked cap became a trademark and enjoyed a huge fashion revival.
In autumn 2008, shortly before his 90th birthday, he gave an extraordinary, 70-minute television interview, publicising his new book, Ausser Dienst (Out of Service), a reflection on a long life. The programme revealed as never before a man who not only had no religious convictions but blamed clerics – Catholic, Protestant, Islamic – for the mutual intolerance he identified between Christianity and Islam. He admitted that he was not “a seeker after truth” but he took an interest in all manner of philosophies and was a particular admirer of Confucius. He developed a friendship with Hans Küng, the progressive Catholic theologian whose views antagonised the Vatican.
In a masterly analysis of the world financial and economic crisis, he regretted that none of those responsible for the credit crunch would be brought to book. As an experienced economist, he dismissed the generality of contemporary politicians, including George W Bush, as economic “dilettantes”. He revealed that his political hero was Anwar Sadat, the assassinated Egyptian president, who had been a close colleague and friend.
One of his watchwords (and another of his English puns) was: “The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.” This could have served as Schmidt’s political epitaph when his eight-year chancellorship ran down to its frustrating end. He was not a “conviction” politician and his heart never got the better of his head, but a democratic leader needs a party, and in both Hamburg politics and his own family tradition, the SPD was the only place to be. In exchange for a power-base, Schmidt gave the party eight more years of power in Bonn and two federal election victories before the inevitable falling-out between the ideological left and the centrist master of realpolitik. But in the constrained art of government in difficult times, there was never a safer pair of hands.
Editorial about his geopolitical impact