Helmut Kohl, Germany’s reunification chancellor, dies aged 87

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Helmut Kohl, Germany’s reunification chancellor, dies aged 87

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Helmut Kohl, the chancellor who presided over both German reunification and the creation of the eurozone, has died aged 87.

Kohl was a towering figure of European politics in the second half of the 20th century, serving as Germany’s chancellor for a record 16 years from from 1982 to 1998.

The foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, said he was grieving for a “great German and above all a great European”. Former US president George W Bush described the ex-chancellor as “a true friend of freedom and the man I consider one of the greatest leaders in post-war Europe”.

European Council president Jean-Claude Juncker tweeted: “Helmut’s death hurts me deeply. My mentor, my friend, the very essence of Europe, he will be greatly, greatly missed”

A photograph showing Kohl holding hands with French president François Mitterrand at the Douaumont cemetery in Verdun became the defining symbol of Franco-German conciliation after decades of bloody conflict between the two countries.

The gesture was made even more poignant by the fact that Mitterrand himself had been injured at Verdun in the second world war while Kohl had lost a brother in the same conflict.

In July 1990, Kohl had managed to reach an agreement with Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev that an enlarged West Germany would be able to stay a member of Nato in return for footing the bill for withdrawing Soviet troops and resettling them at home, a deal which spelled the end of the cold war and guaranteed Kohl’s place in history.

Relations with British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, a noted sceptic of Germany’s renewed power after reunification, remained frosty throughout their time in office.

Convinced that monetary union was crucial for harmonious European integration, Kohl argued against popular opinion in Germany when he made the case for the introduction of the euro – a stance which he later said contributed to him losing the 1998 elections against Gerhard Schröder. European leaders had reached an agreement on the creation of the eurozone only half a year before he was voted out of office.

Kohl left active politics in 2002. Since a fall in 2008, he had suffered from impaired speech and used a wheelchair.

Before becoming chancellor, Kohl had been the state premier for Rhineland-Palatinate for seven years, and was often mocked in Germany for his regional accent and fondness for a noted local delicacy, stuffed pig’s stomach.

Earlier this year, he was awarded €1m (£842,875) damages over an unauthorised biography that a judge said had “deeply violated” the former German chancellor’s personal rights.

Kohl acted as a mentor for Germany’s current chancellor, Angela Merkel, handing her her first ministerial post in 1991 and referring to her as his Mädchen or girl. But relations between the two soured when Merkel turned against him after a party funding scandal in 1999.

In recent years Kohl had taken to criticising his former protege and her policies during the eurozone and refugee crises in anything but name, warning of the unintended consequences of unilateral actions in April 2016.

“Solitary decisions, no matter how well-founded they may appear to individuals, must belong to the past – along with national, unilateralist action”, Kohl had written in an essay in newspaper Bild.

In his last public interventions, Kohl warned European leaders against “unnecessary severity and haste” after Britain’s vote to leave the EU in 2016.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... es-aged-87


RIP.
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German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, architect of reunification, has died

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I predict he will be remembered fondly.
Helmut Kohl obituary
Dour and imperturbable German chancellor for 16 years who was the main architect of the country’s reunification


Helmut Kohl, who has died aged 87, will be remembered for his pivotal role in two extraordinary events: the fall of the Berlin wall and the rise of the euro. He devoted his entire adult life to Christian Democratic Union (CDU) politics and was Germany’s longest-serving chancellor of the 20th century.

Superficially, sheer physical bulk apart, Kohl bore unlikely comparisons with Otto von Bismarck. The aristocrat who unified a proliferation of states in 1871 and made Germany mainland Europe’s most important power was a Prussian Protestant of overwhelming intellect and resources who treated Europe like his personal box of building bricks. Kohl was a Roman Catholic Rhinelander, devoted as much to unifying Europe as to placing a united Germany at its head and heart.

His doctorate (on post-1945 Rhineland politics) was early evidence of an intelligence often masked by a thick skin, a dour impassivity, tactlessness and an apparently invincible optimism. His favourite tactic in a crisis was to sit tight and do nothing, to the despair of friends and the fury of opponents, in the usually justified belief that the trouble would go away. The image of the stolid, bloated monolith with the stentorian voice, the cartoon German with no sense of irony and a huge appetite was, however, grotesquely at odds with his political record.

Kohl was born at Ludwigshafen in the Palatinate, the son of Hans Kohl, a middle-ranking tax official, and his wife, Cäcilie (nee Schnur). He joined the Hitler Youth, like nearly all male contemporaries, including Pope Benedict XVI. The young Helmut soon shot up to 6ft 6in. Never one to forget a favour, or a grudge, he recalled postwar food handouts from American soldiers with rare affection and always had a soft spot for the US, although he never mastered English.

Early photographs show a handsome young man with an attractive smile and a shock of dark hair. As he began to put on weight, he became known as “the black giant” – as much a reference to the CDU’s party colour as to his own swarthiness. After studies at Frankfurt and Heidelberg universities, Kohl was elected to the Palatinate parliament in 1959.

By 1969 he was presiding minister. The federal CDU surprised everybody by making him its candidate for chancellor in the 1976 national election, even though he had been federal party chairman for only three years. He took on perhaps the most gifted politician produced by Germany in the 20th century: Helmut Schmidt of the Social Democrats (SPD).

The shambling, provincial booby faced the brilliant hatchetman from Hamburg. Nobody gave the black giant a chance against “Schmidt the Lip”. It was hard to wring even a vestige of light relief from Kohl, whereas Schmidt paraded his wit, dazzling everyone with his mastery of economics and world affairs.

Schmidt duly wiped the floor with his dull opponent intellectually, and Kohl became the butt of sometimes cruel satire. But on the night, his CDU/CSU alliance got 48.6% of the national turnout, becoming the largest single party in the Bundestag. Only Kohl’s political idol, Konrad Adenauer (CDU), the first West German chancellor, had done better.

Thanks to his coalition with the liberal Free Democratic party (FDP), Schmidt retained a tiny majority. Kohl became leader of the opposition in the Bundestag, but Schmidt’s brilliance saw to it that Kohl’s strong achievement at the ballot box was offset by his lacklustre parliamentary efforts. Once again he was the butt of satire, nicknamed “the Pear” for his girth.

His life’s ambition to become chancellor – embarrassing to sophisticated observers because of his lack of visible talent – suffered a setback when the next campaign began in 1980. Kohl was impatiently pushed aside by Franz Josef Strauss, the rightwing leader of the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the CSU, who alone could match Schmidt in intellect and wit. But Strauss was erratic and unsteady under fire. Schmidt thrashed him, too, and led his SPD-FDP coalition into its fourth successive term, with a bigger Bundestag majority. Kohl trudged on as opposition leader in Bonn, even more underestimated than before.

As its chairman, he devoted much of his time to mastering the CDU party machine, winning the support of activists at all levels and earning exceptional personal loyalty. This was one of the secrets of his remarkable success and longevity in politics and office alike, which were eventually to surpass even Adenauer’s, whom he matched in 1994 with a fourth general election triumph (one more than Margaret Thatcher, whom he admired but heartily disliked).

In 1990, on the crest of the unification wave, he had won the CDU/CSU a record 48.8% share of the vote. His other assets included energy and stamina. In keeping with his enormous bulk, Kohl had what the Germans bluntly and appropriately call Sitzfleisch (staying power), literally the flesh on which to outsit everyone else. He could also stump the country from dawn to midnight, delivering crushing speeches that started at maximum volume and stayed there.

After a hard day’s politicking, something he loved in all its forms, he would sit down with his kitchen cabinet and eat a huge helping of belly of pork, a quintessentially German peasant dish and his favourite. The cronies of those days say that this was when he came into his own as a convivial companion, free to shed the German convention that inhibited even Schmidt – that politicians must be solemn if they wish to be taken seriously.

Whereas in private it could be over-whelmingly genuine, his bonhomie in public seemed less real than the occasional flash of rage at protesters. Hit by an egg in Halle, Saxony-Anhalt, in 1991, Kohl crashed into the crowd to confront the single offender with the roar: “You’re a rabble!” Here was passion at last from the father of the fatherland of which he so often spoke sentimentally. It was also a vintage Kohl story, complete with infelicitous choice of word.

Stamina, however, was one of his hallmarks. He would go to a health farm in Austria every summer and shed two stone in three weeks, a potentially dangerous undertaking, but the weight was just as rapidly regained. The stamina seldom flagged, even when everything was running against him and he neither took action nor produced any stratagem to save himself, except to sit tight. Reports of his political demise were exaggerated for more than 20 years. It is difficult to think of a politician so consistently underrated.

Kohl’s vengeful satisfaction knew no bounds in October 1982 when Schmidt, the man who had mocked him for years, fell out on economic policy with the FDP, which crossed the floor to present the CDU with a Bundestag majority – and Kohl with the chancellorship. As the Guardian said at the time, a great man made way for a large one.

The blunders and fiascos soon mounted. Two of his ministers were embroiled in corruption scandals. Kohl went to Israel and infuriated his hosts by presenting himself as leader of the new majority of Germans who had nothing to do with the past. The subtext was that they were not going to be pushed around by emotional blackmail. The visit was a diplomatic disaster.

So was President Ronald Reagan’s trip to West Germany in 1985 for the 40th anniversary of the Nazi surrender, when an insensitive Kohl sent him to lay a wreath at a cemetery where Waffen-SS men lay among the buried. Kohl’s remedial afterthought was to take Reagan to Belsen, thus digging himself even more deeply into the hole of his own lack of tact. Nor could he understand why he was left out of allied celebrations of the big anniversaries of D-day and of the end of the war. The point that Germany had been the villain of the piece seemed to be lost on him.

These were stupefying blindspots for a postwar chancellor, who nonetheless eventually learned to condemn “crimes committed in the German name”, even though he seemed unable to grasp that they had been done by Germans, albeit long dead, rather than aliens. Ironically, the East German regime held exactly the same view, a rare demonstration before 1990 of German unity. Yet his determination that no war would ever again be unleashed from German soil was unquestionably genuine, and he insisted, against his mother’s pleas, on naming his two sons respectively after his uncle, her brother, killed in the first world war, and his own elder brother, killed in the second.

Kohl’s early difficulties in office often resulted from reluctance to do his homework. He was always ready to stay up half the night, convivially talking politics and persuading people behind the scenes, but the German bureaucracy’s briefings on every conceivable eventuality (except, quite often, the one that actually happened) left him cold.

But in time, he found the right people to whom to delegate such chores. Banana skins proliferated but the thick-skinned Kohl refused to fall over. Here was another component of his success: a master of machine politics, Kohl also knew what ordinary Germans felt and wanted. He managed always to be seen to be on their side; the ordinary chap, the intellectual underdog who made mistakes like everybody else but doggedly hung on while lefties and media sophisticates mocked.

It was an extraordinary act. The man who dominated the state got away for years with presenting himself as its principal opponent. Like Thatcher and Reagan, the contemporaries he outlasted, he presented himself as “against the government” even as he led it. Unlike them, he knew when to stop, never questioning the social market economy, the moderate consensus among big business, liberalism and social democracy that lay behind West German postwar success. He cultivated his provincial, anti-intellectual image with care – and usually had the last laugh, as he did with Schmidt. He loved being in the chair at cabinet, even when those around him were in disarray and waiting for a lead that did not come. He would merely urge people to agree so they could all go home.

Home in the Palatinate was where his wife since 1960, Hannelore Renner, mother of the two sons and looking the very model of a German countrywoman, spent most of her time while her husband got on with the business of government in Bonn. Just as they had glossed over the incorrigible philandering of the SPD chancellor Willy Brandt, Schmidt’s predecessor, the not always benevolent West German media drew a veil over Kohl’s longstanding relationship with a woman on his personal staff in Bonn. The liaison even survived the moralising calls for a return to family values – part of his first campaign as incumbent – making him the secret envy of many an Anglo-Saxon politician. Like the French, the Germans – down-to-earth and unpuritanical – saw no hypocrisy in such private arrangements.

Having become chancellor through a constitutional coup, Kohl felt vindicated and legitimised by the first of his four successive election victories in March 1983. The SPD’s prolonged inability until 1998 to produce a real challenger (and the elimination of any likely rival in the CDU) helped to turn him from a joke into a monument. Under him, Brandt’s famous remark – that (West) Germany was an economic giant but a political pygmy – ceased to be true, as German troops turned out for Nato and the UN.

Luck played a role in the spectacular rise of Kohl. There was Schmidt’s virtual political suicide, which gave him the chancellorship; and there was the Soviet Union’s implosion at the peak of his career. Kohl’s hatred of communism did not prevent him from doing business with Mikhail Gorbachev. The chancellor relied totally on his political instinct in making the moves that led to the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and reunification within a year. “We all felt as if we were taking part in a dream,” said one of his intimates. The cartoonists’ blundering buffoon knew he had to get Gorbachev’s signature on as many pieces of paper as possible – while stocks lasted.

Unfazed by the Russian leader’s intellectual superiority, Kohl knew he faced a man whose days were numbered. He probably knew it before Gorbachev himself. The politics and even the diplomacy worked like a charm, and the world was stunned when Gorbachev pulled the rug from under the East German regime of Erich Honecker. The last Soviet leader made it clear he would not help to crush mounting East German civil disobedience, which led to the panicky decision to open the wall in November 1989. With unflagging energy, Kohl pursued the complex settlement that led to reunification on 3 October 1990.

The wheeling and dealing with Gorbachev was his moment in history, and he made the most of it. But the blunder factor never quite went away. The economic side of reunification was a shambles. With an election coming, Kohl not only refused to raise taxes to pay the huge bill; he promised that there would be no extra taxes at all and that nobody would suffer as a result of union. The first colossal instalment for regenerating the economy in the east was therefore borrowed, which meant that taxpayers (after the 1990 election, which Kohl won with a record majority) had to pay interest as well as the capital while the new, united Germany plunged into unprecedented debt.

But the chancellor’s luck did not yet desert him. Within four years, the east began to come right. Neo-nazi nastiness notwithstanding, the east Germans were not destabilised by unemployment of up to 40%, free-market forces, western patronising and ruthless carpetbagging. Consumption and construction boomed as Kohl prepared to shift the government from sleepy, westerly, Rhineside Bonn to bracing, ex-Prussian, east-facing Berlin in time for the new millennium.

With reunification achieved, the next item on his agenda was to re-energise and strengthen the European Union. During his long watch, the EU had expanded to 15 states. Even Thatcher’s Britain had adopted the Single Euro-pean Act and the Maastricht treaty, foreshadowing monetary union, had been agreed.

The EU, already augmented by the former East Germany, was poised to admit new members from further east while Kohl worked tirelessly, with the French above all, towards the creation of a European central bank in Frankfurt as midwife for the euro, on the model of the Bundesbank which had so successfully nurtured the deutschmark.

If Kohl had vision, it surely lay here: he knew that he was upsetting the German conservative majority with its folk memories of currency catastrophes in 1923 and 1945 in preparing to ditch the sacred deutschmark in the name of an increasingly unpopular mission, but ploughed on regardless. For the prize of currency union, he tolerated very high unemployment, accompanied by outbursts of sometimes violent xenophobia and neo-fascism as well as high taxes, while pouring money into the bottomless east German pit.

He worked tirelessly with such disparate and often uneasy French colleagues as presidents François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac on the great Euro-project and on the German-French partnership, which remains the core of the EU, symbolised by such pet initiatives as the Franco-German integrated army brigade and the Arte bilingual television channel. We are left with the faintly ridiculous but also touching photograph, taken from behind, of the mountainous Kohl and the diminutive Mitterrand side by side, holding hands at a remembrance ceremony on the battlefield of Verdun. His sensitivity in handling a prickly western neighbour was not matched by his tactless treatment of a no less prickly Poland, whose tenure of what was before 1945 German territory he took far too long to accept. But accept it he did.

Yet by the time the euro was launched at the beginning of 1999, Kohl was out of office. The SPD was back in the shape of Gerhard Schröder, who trounced an exhausted Kohl at the federal election in September 1998. Kohl led the CDU to its worst defeat, even losing in his own constituency of Ludwigshafen (he was also top of his party’s list of candidates in the dual ballot and therefore kept his Bundestag seat until he retired in 2002).

Within a year of his defeat, he was up to his ears in a vast CDU funding scandal involving alleged kickbacks from the sale of German tanks to Saudi Arabia, deposits of more than 300m deutschmarks in Swiss banks and a dubious deal whereby French oil interests got control of more than 2,000 state-owned petrol stations in the former East Germany in exchange for investment in the dilapidated chemical industry there (and more alleged secret subventions to the CDU). The seemingly interminable Bundestag inquiry appeared incapable well into the 21st century of coming to a conclusion.

Hannelore, his estranged wife, suffered from photodermatitis, a rare condition that forced her to live in the dark to protect her hypersensitive skin from daylight. She took her own life in 2001.

Kohl appealed successfully to the courts for the suppression of his Stasi file, the undoubtedly fat dossier assembled by the spies and informers of the insatiable East German ministry for state security. Inevitably, observers wondered what embarrassments it might contain as lesser Stasi targets, east and west, had to endure painful exposures of their secrets and betrayals. Even so Kohl enjoyed a rehabilitation of sorts and was invited for coffee and cakes by the next CDU chancellor, Angela Merkel.

After his retirement from politics Kohl lived quietly, but not without drama. In December 2004, a Sri Lankan air force helicopter rescued him from a hotel where he had been stranded by the tsunami in the Indian ocean. And in April 2008, he suffered a bad fall and was taken into intensive care, unable to speak. But he made a remarkable recovery and was married for the second time that May to his partner of some years, Maike Richter, then aged 43.

She became fiercely protective of the ailing statesman, who underwent major operations in 2010 and 2012 and latterly relied on a wheelchair. His speech was permanently impaired by the stroke that accompanied the 2008 fall. His wife took control of his correspondence and archives, writing letters for him and denying most people, including old friends and colleagues, access to him. This led to the estrangement of his sons, Walter and Peter, who gave indignant interviews to the German press.

In his later years Kohl gave interviews in which he criticised his successor and erstwhile protegee Merkel for her austerity policies in the euro crisis and for not standing up strongly to the Russian president Vladimir Putin over his conduct towards Ukraine.

Earlier this year Kohl won record damages of €1m from the Random House publishing group for an unauthorised biography that allegedly breached his right to privacy by assembling a mass of comments from a series of interviews the former chancellor had given over a period about a decade earlier.

Kohl may have been as different from Bismarck as Bonn is from Berlin, but he was just as much of an iron chancellor, iron in endurance, unshakable in his self-confidence. The author of several books, including memoirs, the man once mocked as Helmut II for being so much duller than Schmidt’s Helmut I, will have his revenge in the history books too. It was Kohl, not Schmidt, who stood ready when the bandwagon of German reunion came by. In his paradoxical, bumbling way, he proved in the end to be great as well as large – and lucky with it.

He is survived by Maike and his sons.
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Re: German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, architect of reunification, has died

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Re: Helmut Kohl, Germany’s reunification chancellor, dies aged 87

Post by Thanas »

And a more friendly obituary:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... as-germany

Helmut Kohl, who died on Friday aged 87, was one of a trio of dominant western conservative politicians – along with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – whose determined ideological and practical opposition to the Soviet Union helped lead in the closing months of 1989 to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent end of the cold war that had gripped Europe since 1945.

But despite his reputation as a hardliner and his achievement as Germany’s longest-serving chancellor since Bismarck, Kohl in person was a shambling bear of a man (he was 193cm or 6’4” tall) who often did not take himself too seriously. Rather than claim a perspicacity he did not possess, Kohl freely admitted later that he did not foresee the sudden Soviet implosion and was as surprised as anyone when it happened.

The days when Europe was divided between east and west are hard to picture now. But a visitor to West Berlin in December 1988 was confronted by a grim reality that owed nothing to Hollywood movies or John Le Carré spy novels: watchtowers manned by armed East German border guards, snow falling on barbed-wire coils suspended over the river Spree, the forbidding no-man’s land of Checkpoint Charlie, and the burned-out Reichstag building silhouetted against an icy black sky.

A few kilometres down the road, on an evening just before Christmas that year, Kohl was to be found in a bar-restaurant near the Kempinski hotel on the Kurfürstendamm, mixing gaily with the crowd of drinkers without need of minders or aides. Kohl did not want to talk about politics that night. He appeared oblivious to any thought of the seismic changes that were about to shake Europe. But he was happy to share generous amounts of his favourite tipple, sweet riesling wine from Rhineland-Palatinate where he had formerly served as minister-president.

It is difficult to imagine Angela Merkel, Kohl’s protege and now chancellor herself, behaving so artlessly in public. Unprepared though he might have been, Kohl rose to the occasion presented by East Germany’s collapse with a purposeful single-mindedness that shocked and alarmed many in the west, not least Margaret Thatcher.

Kohl took literally theinjunction in the West German constitution to restore the country’s unity. He produced his own unilateral 10-point plan for “Overcoming the Division of Germany and Europe” without reference to the western wartime powers – the US, Britain and France. In a series of bold and rapid moves in 1990, he travelled to Moscow to seek President Mikhail Gorbachev’s acquiescence in German reunification, signed a fast-track economic and social union treaty with the East German leaders who had ousted Erich Honecker’s Communists, and with the help of his able foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, won the backing of the US.


Kohl had luck on his side, too. In part his success was rooted in Ostpolitik (“east policy”) pursued by the former Social Democrat (SPD) chancellors Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt. Their policy of détente towards the Communist-controlled East had been steadfastly opposed by Kohl’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and the hard right. But in the end, Kohl’s breakthrough vindicated that policy.

For her part, Thatcher remained opposed to reunification throughout, fearing that a resurgent, reviving Germany would once again dominate Europe. She was comprehensively out-manoeuvred by Kohl. But 25 years later, it could be said that Thatcher’s premonition has proved accurate. The Greek government would certainly agree. Reunification, ratified in September 1990, turned out to be an enormously costly business for both Germanys. The eastern states were poor, persecuted and polluted, while the taxes levied in western Germany to pay for the project, and accompanying westwards migration of jobless Ossis (East Germans), caused deep resentment in some sections of German society.

The fact that Germany has ultimately proved able to afford this epic act of national reconstruction is attributable, in part at least, to Kohl’s other signal political achievement: the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 that brought the European Union into existence and paved the way for the creation of the euro currency. Whatever else they may have done, the EU and the euro (replacing the former, less politically integrated European Economic Community) gave Germany the markets and the means to produce a second German industrial and manufacturing miracle.

In this ambitious vision for a united Europe, Kohl found a willing partner not on the political right but in the rotund form of François Mitterrand, France’s Socialist president. Both men remembered the bad old times. Both reasoned that Europe would only be safe and secure if its two leading powers and its most frequent antagonists, France and Germany, worked in tandem. For Kohl, such cooperation was at one with his instinct for peaceful reconciliation. Early in his second term as chancellor, in 1984, he shook hands with Mitterrand on the first world war battlefield at Verdun, as if to finally bring down the curtain on two world wars.

In the same year he became the first German leader to address the Knesset in Israel. At the same time, he was not afraid to confront strength with strength, in facing down the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. West Germany played a full part in the controversial 1980s US deployment of intermediate-range cruise and Pershing nuclear-tipped missiles in Europe, under the banner of Nato, the target of the Greenham Common protests in Britain.

And it was Kohl who was happy to play host to Reagan, the hawkish US leader, and sit with him on a platform near the Brandenburg Gate in divided Berlin in 1987 when Reagan issued his challenge: “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Kohl served as chancellor continuously from 1982 to 1998. He retired from public life in 2002. His later years were marred by a scandal over CDU party financing and the suicide, in 2001, of his popular wife, Hannelore. Until he suffered the first of a series of serious illnesses, he continued to air his views, and was sharply critical of Merkel’s pro-austerity policies in response to the global financial crisis. Kohl’s verdict was terse: “Die macht mir mein Europa kaputt” (“She’s destroying the Europe I built.”)
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Re: Helmut Kohl, Germany’s reunification chancellor, dies aged 87

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And finally, the Spiegel has the one I agree with the most:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/ger ... 52601.html

The Political Legacy of Helmut Kohl

He was the chancellor who reunited Germany and advanced European unification. He governed longer than any other German leader before him and became a global statesman who dedicated his life to his country, even if scandals threatened to obscure parts of his legacy.

Helmut Kohl pushed Germany forward. On top of that, he gave Europe the decisive boost for deeper integration and understanding. He was a great statesman, whose services to the country are little diminished by the relatively trivial, self-created scandal shortly after his time in office.


He had almost always found success in his political career -- he was almost always the youngest and at 1.93 meters tall (six feet, four inches), always one of the tallest. When he joined his party, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), at 16, he became its youngest member. Later, he would be the youngest person to serve as the head of the CDU's party caucus in his state parliament. Then he became the youngest governor before rising to become the country's youngest chancellor. He remained chancellor for 16 years unchallenged, until the voters finally wielded their power over him -- pushing aside a man whose primary political currency had been power.

His career outside of politics, was an altogether different story. In terms of career preparation, Kohl was something of a late bloomer. He didn't finish high school until the age of 20 in his cherished hometown of Ludwigshafen and he balanced out extremely poor grades in mathematics with nearly perfect ones in German. Of course, school wasn't really about being a talented speaker (grade: poor) or possessing management qualities (grade: satisfactory) nor persistence (excellent). After 16 semesters at the universities in Frankfurt and Heidelberg, he graduated with a cum laude doctorate in history. He was 28 years old at the time -- and had already been a member of the board of the state chapter of the CDU in his home state of Rhineland-Palatinate for three years.

Kohl's Life Goal: To Never Experience War Again

But it wasn't just his drive for politics that slowed the start of his career -- it also had to do with World War II and the turmoil of the postwar period. If it were possible to formulate a life goal for the young Kohl, then it would be this: He never wanted to experience another war.

Shortly before his older brother Walter fell in the war, he had made Helmut promise that he would always take care of their mother. But even more formative for Kohl were the periods shortly before and after the war. During a celebration on his 15th birthday, he was sworn in at a Nazi facility in Berchtesgaden as a member of the Hitler Youth. Five weeks later, the German Reich, Hitler and all the other authorities would disappear.

Basically still a child, Kohl, together with a group of comrades of the same age, began wandering without money, without food and really without any hope for almost two months on foot through a southern Germany destroyed by the ravages of war until they finally caught a glimpse of their hometown across the Rhine River from Mannheim. But the Rhine Bridge had been blown up and the young men had no ID papers. After all the exertion they had gone through, the American military officials only let them return to their parents on the other, French-occupied side of the river several days later. It was an awful time.

Kohl didn't have to decide to become a politician -- the adverse conditions drove him to it. At school, he soon became his class- and later school president because he quickly gained the trust of fellow students and showed talent for organizing good parties, field trips or school lunches. It had a knock-on effect: The pride he found in his achievements provided him with the boost he needed for his next task.

At the time he got involved in the CDU, it was still a party of gray-haired conservatives from the Weimar Republic generation. But he familiarized himself with every current within, and facet of, the party and he quickly adopted one of the basic principles of democracy -- that all that one does for society can also turn out to be beneficial to oneself. As a young university student, he likewise realized that embedding personal relations within a fixed network was vital to a successful career. It was the only way to continue climbing the rungs on the ladder of success -- it was how you rose from the district level to the regional level and then to the state level.

With incredibly hard work and a Lambretta scooter he had saved up to buy with money from his student job as a stone polisher at BASF, he soon began his slow rise within the party, initially working his way up through regional party committees, where he first got to know his later role model Konrad Adenauer (from afar). He put up posters and urged fellow residents of the Palatinate region, who lacked experience with democracy after the years of Nazi dictatorship, from a truck with a loudspeaker to get out and vote. This is how he rose, at the age of 23, to membership in the local party board in the Palatinate region. It was already an early breakthrough for the budding politician.

Establishing the Kohl System

Yet even then, it was possible to discern what would develop into a reliance on personal connections to stay in power as head of the national party. He had discovered the "Kohl System," which holds that, if you know a lot of people, there are a lot of people you can rely on -- people who can then benefit from having provided that help.

Kohl deftly applied his youthful drive in areas like education. At the time, the older generation still clung to the outmoded teaching style of traditional village schools, over which the local priest constantly held a protective hand. He also rallied against the ossification in party leadership positions, targeting the state's governor at the time, the authoritarian Peter Altmeier. As he did so, he continually sought out support from newfound friends. When an unnerved Altmeier stepped down in 1969 after 22 years in office, he offered an exhaustive thanks to his chauffeur but didn't dedicate a single word to his successor, Helmut Kohl.

By that point, Kohl no longer needed that kind of attention anyway. The youngest head of a state government in Germany, he already had his sights set on the national level. That same year, 1969, he was elected as the deputy chair of the national CDU party and also announced his candidacy a year later for party chair after the election loss suffered by former Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger in the 1969 Bundestag election.


Kohl at the Peak of His Power Nationally

But then, the man whose political career had only known one direction to that point lost his first important vote. In October 1971, Rainer Barzel, opposition floor leader in federal parliament, was chosen to lead the CDU, garnering twice the number of votes as his challenger Kohl. He overcame the shame it brought only two years later after Barzel spectacularly failed in his effort to topple center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) Chancellor Willy Brandt with a confidence vote in parliament. Barzel stepped down from his leadership role and 86 percent of the party's delegates voted Kohl in as the CDU's chairman -- an initial high point in his aim to secure national power.

Germany's conservatives at the time were still having trouble getting used to their new role in the opposition after being voted out of power in 1969. For years, Kohl would face bitter and even malicious adversary Franz Josef Strauss, the chairman of Christian Social Union -- the Bavarian sister party to the CDU that often acted more like a squabbling sibling than a partner. Strauss also had his sights set on the Chancellery and he worked tenaciously to try to derail the possibility of a Kohl candidacy, telling people he was "totally incapable" and even threatening to end the decades-long partnership between the two parties and transform the Bavarian party into a national one. This all happened in 1976 at a time when Kohl achieved an impressive election result (with 48.6 percent of the votes) and just barely missed obtaining an absolute majority in parliament.

Kohl then moved to the West German capital of Bonn to become opposition floor leader and, in a clever tactical move, yielded the next chancellor candidacy to Strauss who, as widely predicted, suffered a worse defeat in the 1980 election. This paved the way for Kohl to assume the unchallenged leadership role over Germany's conservatives.

Now all Kohl had to do was wait until then Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of the SPD lost the trust of the left-wing of his own party and, thus, his majority in parliament. With his brash personality and his NATO rearmament policies, Schmidt had strained his relations with leftist SPD members to the point that many preferred to go into opposition than remain in power. After 13 years, SPD rule had come to an end.

Election as Chancellor

Kohl reached his goal in autumn 1982. The Free Democratic Party (FDP), which had been the SPD's junior coalition partner, switched its allegiance to the CDU and parliament elected Helmut Kohl as West Germany's sixth chancellor. At first, Kohl faced considerable headwinds from the media he liked to call the "Hamburg opinion mafia" -- German public broadcaster ARD, Der Spiegel, Stern and Die Zeit -- but also from those intellectuals who were still clinging to their vision of a leftist, socially liberal society. For its part, the FDP had long since abandoned that vision. In 1983, Chancellor Kohl and his coalition government were re-elected for the first time, completing the transition to a socially conservative government.

During his election campaign, he had brashly called for a "spiritual and moral renewal," which many progressives took to mean the end of all reforms and a relapse to the gray, staunch-conservativism of the Adenauer era. Yet despite all indications to the contrary, the CDU chancellor proved to be a pragmatist. He stayed true to the reforms that his two predecessors had undertaken and he maintained their détente-oriented policies with Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He even assigned an important role to his eternal adversary Strauss in the form of a multibillion mark contract with East Germany, which was in economic dire straits. In 1987, he was re-elected, despite a pair of scandals.

There wasn't much he could have done about one of the scandals. Using the skimpiest of pretexts, his defense minister at the time, Manfred Wörner, had forced the German military's highest-ranking general into early retirement. There had been unproven and unprovable rumors that the senior military official had engaged in same-sex relations, leading the government to believe he could be a security risk. When the truth came to light, Kohl didn't dismiss his defense minister, who was a friend of his, even though he had offered his resignation. Indeed, Kohl, as he would later reveal in his memoirs, also initially shared the belief that there was something to the rumors that had been raised by the military's intelligence service.

Far worse for the chancellor was the role he played in the party donations scandal. In that affair, Kohl worked together with other party leaders in his effort to obtain amnesty for all those donors -- but especially for those who received donations in the party's headquarters -- who had been giving or obtaining illegal donations and violating tax laws for years.

Kohl was particularly groveling on behalf of the donors who, he said, had only wanted to help the party and had unknowingly violated the law. "They should pay their back taxes, but they should not be prosecuted," he argued. Fifteen years later, he would ask that the same approach be applied to himself.

In fact, Kohl had his party's treasurers in mind, whom amnesty would have protected from prosecution. And that's precisely why the audacious plan failed after Kohl's own ally in the party, former German Constitutional Court President Ernst Benda, accused the party of trying to become its "own judge and jury."

The Miracle of Bremen

The repercussions of the party donor scandal persisted for a long time to come. When Otto Schily, at the time a member of the Green Party in parliament, sought legal action against the chancellor, accusing him of falsely testifying before a parliamentary subcommittee, then-CDU Secretary-General Heiner Geissler tried to cover for Kohl with the strange claim that the chancellor had suffered a brief "blackout." It turned out to be the ultimate insult to Kohl, who never forgave Geissler.

But voters didn't seem to care much about this and other shortcomings on the chancellor's part. They seemed to think he just needed to practice a little more. But Kohl had also been making some foreign policy gaffes at the time -- when, for example, he sought to proclaim the innocence of his generation -- born in 1930 -- in the Holocaust with his flippant remark that they had the "mercy of late birth." Or when he compared Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev -- just as he was beginning to restructure his ossified state -- to Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels, a man he said also had a good understanding of PR. Then he forced U.S. President Ronald Reagan to visit a military cemetery in the city of Bitburg, even though members of the SS had been buried there.

Within the party, support for Kohl only began to slip when, at the end of the 1980s, the CDU began losing ground in important elections and a serious adversary emerged from within the ranks -- the very same CDU Secretary-General Heiner Geissler that Kohl had brought into politics.

In September 1989, Kohl then experienced and celebrated the threefold "Miracle of Bremen." At a party conference held in the West German city, the revolt Geissler had initiated swiftly collapsed after the chancellor announced the imminent opening of the Iron Curtain along the Austrian border as a result of secret talks with Hungary. He did not, as Geissler had hoped, get voted out as party chief -- and neither did he get replaced with the desired candidate, Lothar Späth. Kohl had attended the conference in poor health and under high doses of pain medication because he had delayed a needed prostate operation.

He was then able to watch miracle number three from his sick bed as he anxiously followed the erosion of the Eastern Bloc. First Hungary, then Poland and later Czechoslovakia were suddenly able to determine their own futures after Gorbachev renounced the Brezhnev doctrine of limited sovereignty for Soviet satellite states. Many East Germans were quick to sense the shift that was happening. Thousands of them traveled to other Eastern European countries and sought protection in the buildings of West German embassies there. But Kohl and his most important adviser Horst Teltschik were likewise sensing what Willy Brandt had prophetically told the Bundestag in September 1989: "I will openly express my feelings that an era is coming to an end" -- an era of arms buildups and the Cold War and, for Germany at least, one of the Berlin Wall and barbed wire. Shortly before its 40th anniversary, Eastern Germany was teetering on the brink. Thousands of its citizens had occupied the West German Embassy in Prague.

Chancellor Kohl, still bedridden, wanted to personally facilitate their departure on site, but doctors forbade him from traveling. Which explains why it was left to his deputy, Foreign Minister Hans-Dieter Genscher, to speak from the embassy balcony in Prague, uttering what is likely the most famous unfinished sentence in history: "We have come to you in order to inform you that today, your departure..." It would remain Genscher's most important contribution to the reunification process. Because from that point on, up to and after the fall of the Wall, which happened while Kohl was in Poland, the chancellor took over control: unflinchingly and with both conviction and diplomatic finesse. It was the performance of his lifetime.

According to his own telling of events, he realized following his visit to Dresden in mid-December that reunification could not be stopped. "The people want it." Concurrently, then-East German Prime Minister Hans Modrow requested 15 billion deutsche marks in aid from West Germany. Kohl considered the sum to be grotesquely exorbitant. He would rather, he told his adviser Teltschik at the time, send the money to the Soviet Union in order to win over Moscow's support for unification.

Resistance in the West

Half a year later, as he and Gorbachev met both in Moscow and in the Caucasus Mountains to negotiate the size of reunified Germany's future military as well as its alliance loyalties, Teltschik was busy figuring out how much reunification would cost. According to his calculations, 15 billion deutsche marks would have to be paid to the Soviet Union -- but to Moscow, and not to East Germany, so as not to prolong the country's existence.

Kohl, of course, couldn't simply buy East Germany from his Soviet counterpart. He also had to overcome significant resistance in the West -- from Margaret Thatcher in London, for example, and François Mitterrand in Paris, but also from several smaller neighbors who feared an enlarged Germany for historical reasons. The chancellor was able to do so because he linked German unification tightly with the process of European unity, ultimately producing unification on multiple levels: the German and the European, embedded in a currency union in addition to regulations for an internal market free of customs and border controls. "That is why," Kohl would write in his diary not long later, "I tied the introduction of the euro to my own political destiny."


It is useless to ask if German reunification would have come about without the promised discarding of the D-mark: The euro is here and the common currency has benefited eurozone member states more than it has hurt them. It is also useless to consider the question, hypothetical as it is, as to whether a different chancellor would have done the same thing: Helmut Kohl was at the right place at the right time -- and he made but few mistakes as he grasped for the cloak of history.

Back home in the Oggersheim district of Ludwigshafen, he dictated to his wife Hannelore the 10-point roadmap that would lead to reunification just one year later. In the development of the roadmap, the Ramstetter brothers acted as his advisors -- one of them was a pastor and the other a teacher in Ludwigshafen. The two had helped Kohl previously with the formulation of his Christmas address. Kohl, the man of the people, was both eager and able to avoid groups of experts or advisors from ministries, political coalitions or academia. From that point on, he was his own adviser, convinced he knew what the people wanted. And he was usually right.

The most serious error underlying reunification and the Unification Treaty between the two parts of Germany, as we know today, was rooted in a vast deceit. East Germany and its state statisticians had invented economic numbers to cover up the country's impending bankruptcy. And nobody except for those who had produced the numbers knew anything about it.


Even in September 1990, an economic research institute predicted that reunification would not prove deleterious to either the East or the West and would actually result in a profit within two years. The Unity Treaty likewise includes a reference to "revenues" generated by the agency formed to privatize East German enterprises (the Treuhandanstalt), from which East German citizens were to receive a share. Despite the rosy predictions, however, the project quickly produced billions in debt. And Chancellor Kohl made the mistake in the first post-reunification election campaign of categorically ruling out tax increases. It allowed him to win the election easily, but things quickly went downhill from there. Even German President Richard von Weizäcker, traditionally a largely ceremonial position that keeps away from day-to-day politics, openly criticized Kohl's generosity: "Unifying means learning to share," he said.


Kohl Had No Real Plan for Future in Final Term


It was only four years later, following his fourth re-election, that Kohl suddenly realized that there was a need to change course, criticizing German society by saying that the country's people lived in a "collective amusement park." People were retiring, he complained, "at a younger and younger age, staying in university longer, working for fewer years over the course of their lives and taking more vacation." He did nothing, however, to address the issues he had identified.

Even as politicians and analysts were complaining about the necessity of reforms, Kohl and his last cabinet bumbled along with neither political élan nor a plan. Behind the scenes, though, Kohl was working during this period on the fulfillment of the promise he had made to Germany's European neighbors in 1990 in exchange for their approval for reunification. He wanted to push European unity forward with a common currency and strengthen integration in the hopes of removing the fear of an overly strong Germany.

One part of his concept was successful: The euro was introduced and border controls within Europe now seem like something out of the European Middle Ages. But it was left to Kohl's successor Gerhard Schröder to push through necessary reforms in the form of his package of social welfare cuts known as Agenda 2010. It was voted into law with the approval of all parties represented in parliament, but has since come to be intimately associated with Schröder's Social Democrats, and the party has been punished severely by voters ever since as a result.

It is interesting, though, to briefly consider the question: What would have happened if Kohl had, shortly before the retirement he had planned for himself, attempted to push through similar social reforms? He and Wolfgang Schäuble, who Kohl had designated as his successor, would have gone down in history as the "chancellors of reform" -- and it seems likely that Chancellor Schäuble would have been re-elected.


That Darn Pledge


Kohl, though, proved adept at preventing such a scenario. He was always the chancellor of campaign promises, not a man of reforms or of insight into harsh societal realities, such as falling birth rates or the financial shape of pension and health care funds. And he certainly didn't trust his hand-picked successor.

Kohl did not, as had been internally agreed, step down prematurely to make way for Schäuble. It was left to the voters to push him out of office in 1998, likely because they were yearning for a new face and new ideas. And so Kohl cleared the way for his successor Schröder, but left only hurdles in the path of Schäuble, who took over leadership of the CDU.

When arms lobbyist Karl-Heinz Schreiber reported a donation he had made to the CDU and state prosecutors began taking an interest in the party's finances, Kohl gratuitously admitted that he had made a "mistake" and had accepted more than 2 million deutsche marks from a benefactor, but said that he had given his word to never reveal where the donation had come from.

The result was an earthquake in the CDU of unforeseen strength. At the insistence of former party allies, he resigned from his position as honorary chairman and Schäuble withdrew from all official party functions -- clearing the way for the rise of then-CDU General-Secretary Angela Merkel.


From Then On, Kohl Avoided the Public Eye


Indignant, bitter and disappointed, Kohl withdrew from day-to-day politics -- weakened by two knee operations and a bad fall, ill and limited in both his motor functions and verbal articulation. Before doing so, however, he collected private donations in order to compensate for the damage his illegal activities had done to the party.

From then on, he avoided the public eye even more -- and he stayed away from the media, which he had never held in high regard. It seemed as though he was waiting for a form of rehabilitation: He, the chancellor of reunification, the European statesman, did not want his legacy sullied by slush funds and dirty deals -- and seemed to think he could wait it out.

In October 2010, Kohl once again found himself at the center of global attention. He was considered to be a favorite for the Nobel Peace Prize that year, but the committee in Oslo ultimately opted for Liu Xiaobo of China. Kohl, though, was unperturbed: It wasn't the first time he had been on the list, he said.

In the final years of his life, media attention was primarily focused on Kohl due to his private life: the suicide of his wife Hannelore, who suffered from an incurable allergy to light; his second marriage to Maike Richter-Kohl, a former Chancellery employee who was 34 years his junior; and the estrangement from his two sons, Walter and Peter. All of it had the elements of a vast family drama, in which the public at large had great interest.

And then Kohl also engaged in a legal battle with his former biographer Heribert Schwan. A former journalist with German public broadcaster WDR, Schwan had recorded around 600 hours of interviews with Kohl shortly after the party donation scandal and published portions of the discussions in a book in fall 2014. Kohl was furious, particularly given that he, in his interviews with Schwan, had made extremely disparaging remarks about Angela Merkel and other politicians from both the CDU and opposition parties.

Until the very end -- even after a bad fall from his wheelchair in 2006 and despite his poor physical state and extreme difficulties speaking -- Kohl sought to defend his political legacy with the help of his second wife. In 2014, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, he didn't just arrange for the republishing of a book in which he described the path to German reunification. That same year, he also released a slim volume called "Out of Concern for Europe."

Now, Helmut Kohl has died. Historians, journalists and party allies will likely spend the next several days saying that, while he made some mistakes, he always wanted the best for his party, his country and, of course, for his legacy. In that order.

It would, however, have been even better if the party soldier had thought a bit less about his party and a bit more about his country. In his book about Europe, he wrote: "Trust is just as valuable as it is fragile. It can't be bought, it can't be forced, it must be earned -- over and over again." It seemed as though Kohl were passing judgment on himself, a man whose donation scandal eroded many people's trust in politics.

But there is no such thing as a perfect chancellor. And one thing is certain: When it comes to the unity of Germany and Europe, Helmut Kohl was a great statesman.
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Re: Helmut Kohl, Germany’s reunification chancellor, dies aged 87

Post by Thanas »

Kohl was essentially the chancellor of my childhood and while we joked about his figure and some of the things we said, one thing we never doubted - that we were in safe hands with him.

He was not considered a likely successor to the chancellery. And yet he had a unique timing for the right moment and he always proved himself in that moment. He was blundering and somewhat of a funny figure in everyday life, but when the time came to prove himself, he never failed himself or his country. Reunification was the greatest achievement of any German chancellor since Bismarck and it was largely his strategy that made it happen. He convinced both Bush and Gorbachev, outplayed Thatcher and won over the support of the other European nations.

He was one who could suffer indignities such as these if he would be able to achieve his larger strategic goal. Think of him as the anti-trump in his public performance. He preferred to ruin his rivals with inner-party machinations.

All in all, he was a great personal charmer. He ruled with his phonebook, where he could phone anybody in a position of power and charm them to do something for him. People who met him and talked in private with him always came away feeling entertained and taken seriously. This talent and charisma was what helped Germany immensely with the unification.

He was not the greatest statesmen or the greatest intellectual Germany has ever produced. In fact, he was rather ordinary. He liked simple dishes, rhenish wine, long walks and to dance the tango. But he always made the best of his chances and in doing so became a great statesmen.

I shall end this with two of my favourite anecdotes about him.

1) When he was opposition leader in Bonn, Kohl used to be driven to Bonn from his home via the mercedes. Kohl would do paperwork in the back. One time, there was construction on the autobahn and somebody had messed up in not designating it correctly. So the mercedes had to do some sharp breaking and then slid into a heap of sand. Most Germans would have called the police or emergency agencies to help them get their car out of it. But this was late at night and I suppose Kohl did not want the visuals of that to make it to the press. So he called for his driver to fetch two shovels and then he and his driver spent about two hours shovelling the car free of sand before continuing on. The next day, Kohl arrived in his office on time to continue working.

2) Kohl and his rival Strauss used to go on long solitary walks together in the Bavarian alps. Strauss, who was as bit as fat as Kohl and not as much of a giant as he, suffered a heart attack (in other versions, he suddenly collapsed from exhaustion). As it was getting dark, Kohl had a bit of a problem. He could leave Strauss alone without shelter for the night in the mountains. But the problem for Kohl was that if Strauss would die, he very well could have been accused of murdering his biggest rival and it would also be against his ethics to leave somebody to die. So the very corpulent Kohl carried the very corpulent Strauss on his back to the nearest mountain hut and thus most likely saved his life. Those details btw were not made public until Strauss had died decades later.


I feel those two anecdotes show more than anything what kind of character Helmut Kohl was. He was a very flawed man who nevertheless managed to do the right thing and seized a historic chance for his country and himself. In doing so, he well deserves the honored place in German, European and World history.
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Re: Helmut Kohl, Germany’s reunification chancellor, dies aged 87

Post by Ziggy Stardust »

Thanas wrote:Reunification was the greatest achievement of any German chancellor since Bismarck and it was largely his strategy that made it happen. He convinced both Bush and Gorbachev, outplayed Thatcher and won over the support of the other European nations.
I'd be curious for more details on the "outplayed Thatcher" part (or referral to a good source that discusses it). I never learned all that much about German reunification in school.
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Re: Helmut Kohl, Germany’s reunification chancellor, dies aged 87

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Thatcher thought that reunification of Germany would lead to a recreation of a power-hungry Germany wanting to dominate Europe again. In other words, Germany must be kept permanently weak in her view.
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Re: Helmut Kohl, Germany’s reunification chancellor, dies aged 87

Post by Steve »

My condolences to the German (and indeed European) people on their loss.
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Re: Helmut Kohl, Germany’s reunification chancellor, dies aged 87

Post by Highlord Laan »

Condolences to the people of Germany for the loss of such a towering figure.

On a lighter note:
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Re: Helmut Kohl, Germany’s reunification chancellor, dies aged 87

Post by Thanas »

Ziggy Stardust wrote:
Thanas wrote:Reunification was the greatest achievement of any German chancellor since Bismarck and it was largely his strategy that made it happen. He convinced both Bush and Gorbachev, outplayed Thatcher and won over the support of the other European nations.
I'd be curious for more details on the "outplayed Thatcher" part (or referral to a good source that discusses it). I never learned all that much about German reunification in school.
So Thatcher was virulently opposed to reunification because she thought it would lead to WWIII and she even said so. She even said "We beat the Germans twice, and now they're back." She also invented a lot of lies on what Kohl allegedly said (including that he -
according to her - had told her that he would not recognize the Polish borders, implying that he wanted a return to pre-1945 borders.
Here is more background info.

She even flew to moscow to convince Gorbachev to stop reunification. She also tried to get the french on her side.

Kohl outmaneuvered her the following way:
1. He gained the trust of the US president. Like I said, Kohl was somebody people trusted easily. With Bush on his side, the British had lost one ally.
2. He got Mitterand on his side by promising to give up the Deutschmark in favor of the Euro and to agree to further European integration

Gorbahev was a bit trickier, because earlier Kohl (with his usual flair for words) had called him the best propagandist since Goebbels. Gorbachev had lost his father (and I think his sister?) to the Germans in the war, so he was more than a bit...skeptical. Kohl flew to Moscow and performed a masterpiece of personal charisma. First of all, he started the talks by saying that he had two sons in the army reserve, that both Gorbachev and he remembered the horrors of war and that he had come here to prevent any such future war.

And then they took long walks in the caucasus together, talking about a lot of topics but not about politics. And after building such a friendship, Kohl got Gorbachev to agree to the following, which kohl declared for both of them:
Thanks to intensive, candid talks and consultation at all levels – unprecedented in their number and frequency – we can now speak of a breakthrough in regulating the external aspects of German unification. We also begin to see clearly the contours of a future European architecture. [ . . . ]
Today I can announce to all Germans the good news that all other external aspects have been agreed upon by the Soviet Union and ourselves.

We want forward-looking agreements, extensive cooperation, trust, and, last but not least, a broad-based meeting of our peoples, particularly the younger generation.

We also want this to be a contribution to lasting, peaceful development in Europe.

This provides a model – and on this point, President Gorbachev and I are in full agreement – for a comprehensive treaty of cooperation between united Germany and the Soviet Union, to be concluded as soon as possible following unification.

This treaty will be based on a solid foundation and in the mutual understanding that German-Soviet cooperation, together with our firm position in the West, will provide an essential contribution to stability in Central Europe and beyond.

Based upon these common philosophies – as President Gorbachev also stated – we have resolved the practical problems that still lie ahead on the path to German unification.

I would like to review the most important points here:

1) The unification of Germany includes the FRG, the GDR, and all of Berlin.

2) With unification of Germany, the rights and responsibilities of the Four Powers with respect to Germany as a whole and Berlin will be terminated. Starting at the time of unification, united Germany will receive total and unrestricted sovereignty.

3) United Germany, in exercising its total and unrestricted sovereignty, can freely and autonomously decide whether and to which alliance it wishes to belong. This corresponds to the spirit and text of the CSCE final acts.

I have declared the view of the federal government that united Germany would like membership in NATO, and I know that this corresponds to the wishes of the GDR. Minister President de Maizière made this clear in his comments yesterday. We reconfirmed our decision in this respect when we spoke early this morning.
You notice the details here?
1. A unified Germany
2. Such a unified Germany would be allowed to join Nato
3. That the soviets agreed to terminate the occupational status of Germany and agree to restore full German sovereignty to such a unified Germany.

The last concession was a masterplay by Kohl Remember back then Germany was still officially an occupied country and not fully sovereign. But since Kohl got the Russians to agree to making Germany fully sovereign again, the western allies (who had not decided on that matter or were opposed to it like Britain) could hardly veto it.

So a fuming Thatcher had to agree to a unified Germany and even more, had to agree to give up the occupational rights in Germany Britain still had.
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Re: Helmut Kohl, Germany’s reunification chancellor, dies aged 87

Post by Iroscato »

Anyone who stuck it to that old trout Thatcher back in the day gets my respect, and Kohl already had that. I admit I wasn't fully clued up about him before he died, but he was one hell of a political figure. RIP and my condolences to the German people for their loss of this badass.
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Re: Helmut Kohl, Germany’s reunification chancellor, dies aged 87

Post by Ziggy Stardust »

Much obliged for the details, Thanas. Very interesting.
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Re: Helmut Kohl, Germany’s reunification chancellor, dies aged 87

Post by K. A. Pital »

FRIEND HELMUT!
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Lì paludi, minacce, cecchini coi fucili, documenti, file notturne e clandestini
Qui incontri, lotte, passi sincronizzati, colori, capannelli non autorizzati,
Uccelli migratori, reti, informazioni, piazze di Tutti i like pazze di passioni...

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Re: Helmut Kohl, Germany’s reunification chancellor, dies aged 87

Post by Elfdart »

Iroscato wrote:Anyone who stuck it to that old trout Thatcher back in the day gets my respect, and Kohl already had that. I admit I wasn't fully clued up about him before he died, but he was one hell of a political figure. RIP and my condolences to the German people for their loss of this badass.
By that point, she was old news. She's remembered somewhat fondly here because she was the first female head of state, but like Hillary, people were simply sick of her and novelty doesn't last long. Bush the Elder didn't hesitate to drop her when her regime started to fizzle (Bush's retainers like Baker preferred John Major anyway). Kohl was simply the most level-headed of the big four: Reagan was senile/stupid, Thatcher was Norma Desmond if she was played by Greer Garson (fake upper-class accent and all) and Mitterand was well, Mitterand. Peacefully putting Germany back together with few hiccups while still maintaining one of the very highest standards of living in the world is probably the most impressive political feat of the last 50 years.
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Re: Helmut Kohl, Germany’s reunification chancellor, dies aged 87

Post by Thanas »

Sorry for posting this so late, I was travelling when it happened.



What I thought to have been the best speech from the memorial.
World leaders have gathered to pay tribute to the “architect of the world order” Helmut Kohl at the first ever memorial of its kind for a European politician.

Draped in an EU flag, the former German Chancellor’s coffin sat in the centre of the European Parliament as more than 800 dignitaries including Bill Clinton, Dmitry Medvedev and Angela Merkel paid emotional tributes.

“Helmut Kohl gave us the chance to be involved in something bigger than ourselves, bigger than our terms in office and bigger than our fleeting careers,” Mr Clinton said, fondly remembering their frequent visits to each other during his time as US President.

“He wanted to create a world where nobody dominated over anybody else.

“You did well to achieve that during your lifetime and those of us who experienced it love you for it.”

Mr Kohl, who served as Chancellor from 1982 to 1998, oversaw the end of the Cold War and is widely regarded as the mastermind of German reunification.

He skillfully negotiated the dissolution communist East Germany with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and relocated the capital to Berlin.

Together with French counterpart Francois Mitterand, he was the architect of the 1992 Maastrict Treaty, which established the euro and EU, which he ardently supported.

Medvedev, the Russian Prime Minister, described Mr Kohl as the “the architect of the world order”, adding: “In Russia, we'll remember him as our friend – a wise and sincere person.”

“Helmut Kohl was a German patriot and a European patriot,” said European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, a close friend. “We've lost a giant of the post-war era.”

Ms Merkel, who served as a minister under Mr Kohl in the 1990s but later had a falling out over his role in receiving $1 million in illegal campaign cash donations, remembered her predecessor as a sometimes controversial figure with numerous enemies.

“I could tell you stories as well,” she said. “But all that paled in comparison to his life's achievements.”

Antonio Tajani, President of the European Parliament, said Mr Kohl deserved “a place of honour in the European pantheon” for unhesitatingly extending the hand of friendship to fledgling democracies in Eastern Europe following the fall of the Iron Curtain.

The two-hour ceremony was attended by leaders including Theresa May, Emmanuel Macron, Donald Tusk and Petro Poroshenko, in a show of unity amid continuing divisions over Brexit and the Ukrainian war.

t concluded with the German national anthem and excerpts from Beethoven's 9th symphony “Ode to Joy”, which is used as the EU anthem.

Mr Kohl, who died on 16 June at the age of 87, was to be buried at a funeral in Germany later on Saturday.

His coffin had been transported from the home he shared with his second wife Maike in Oggersheim to Strasbourg for the memorial service.

It was taken by helicopter on to his birthplace in Ludwigshafen, being carried in a procession and then transported to Speyer Cathedral along the Rhine for a Catholic requiem to be attended by 1,500 mourners.

The resting place of many rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, the cathedral was seen by Mr Kohl as a symbol of European unity – a place he showed to contemporary leaders including Mr Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher.

But the mass will be boycotted by Mr Kohl’s sons, since their father will not be laid to rest alongside his first wife and their mother, Hannelore Kohl.
Something that is not mentioned in the article - when the coffin was carried by river barge alongside the river rhine, the populace stood at the river banks to say farewell. Which is another parallel to Konrad Adenauer.

The guest list at the European act of state was quite impressive
Whoever says "education does not matter" can try ignorance
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A decision must be made in the life of every nation at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at its throat. Then, it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival upon what is expedient, to look the other way. Well, the answer to that is 'survival as what'? A country isn't a rock. It's not an extension of one's self. It's what it stands for. It's what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult! - Chief Judge Haywood
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