Helmut Kohl

Chancellor of West Germany (1982–1990) and Germany (1990–1998)

• Born: April 3, 1930
• Birthplace: Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Germany
• Died: June 16, 2017
• Place of death: Ludwigshafen, Germany

A skilled politician, Kohl was able to project to the world a benevolent and nonthreatening image for a united Germany, rehabilitating his country’s postwar reputation and distancing it from its Nazi past. This new image helped to persuade the major powers to accept the reunited German state.

Early Life

Helmut Kohl (HEHL-muht kohl) was born to Cacilie Schnur and Hans Kohl, a minor government official in the Weimar Republic. His family upbringing was Roman Catholic and middle class. In the final days of World War II, Kohl’s older brother was drafted into the German army but died in combat, and Helmut himself was in the Hitler Youth movement as a troop leader. At war’s end, he was briefly detained but returned home to continue his education. From 1951 to 1956 he studied in the history and political science program at the University of Heidelberg, graduating with a bachelor’s degree.

Kohl became a political activist at the age of sixteen, joining the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), a moderate-conservative political party formed by Konrad Adenauer during the formative years of the Federal Republic of Germany. Kohl worked his way through the CDU’s ranks as a youth organizer and was later named to the directing board of the party’s branch for the Rhineland-Palatinate. In 1958 he received his PhD in political science at Heidelberg and subsequently spent two years working in private industry. Politics, however, remained his life’s calling, and beginning in 1960, he steadily, if unspectacularly, made his way up the CDU Party ranks. He was town councilor for Ludwigshafen (1960–1963), a member of the Rhineland-Palatinate legislature (1963–1978), and president of the Rhineland-Palatinate (1969–1976). In 1976, after a sixteen-year stint in local and provincial electioneering, Kohl was elected to the federal parliament (Bundestag) at Bonn, West Germany.

Life’s Work

Kohl made his first bid for the office of chancellor in 1976 but lost a close election to incumbent Helmut Schmidt (1974–1982), who since 1971 had headed a governing alliance between his Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the smaller Free Democratic Party (FDP). Kohl’s CDU had entered into a similar pact with the more conservative Christian Social Union (CSU).

On October 1, 1982, a rift between the Social Democrats and Free Democrats led to the FDP defecting to the side of Kohl’s CDU-CSU alliance, thus ending Schmidt’s ministry. Kohl, now majority leader of the Bundestag, succeeded Schmidt as federal chancellor. During his eight-year tenure as the last chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Kohl energetically pursued European integration as an active participant in the development of the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which furthered the goals of uniting Europe. In a significant move aimed at pushing the agenda of a united Europe, Kohl met with French president François Mitterrand at a 1984 ceremony honoring the 700,000 French and German soldiers killed at the Battle of Verdun during World War I. In March, 1983, Kohl had called for elections, in a move that caught his opposition off guard and won handily. He also prevailed in the 1987 election.

Kohl was an ardent supporter of Ostpolitik, a term coined to denote the easing of strained relations between West Germany and East Germany during the Cold War period. The Cold War saw the partitioning of Germany, intense superpower rivalry, and the construction of the Berlin Wall, setting Germany at the apex of the US-Soviet standoff. Ostpolitik had actually begun under West German chancellor Willy Brandt (1969–1974) and had been continued under his successor, Schmidt. Kohl assumed this mantle through the unprecedented invitation of East German chancellor Erich Honecker to the Federal Republic in 1987.

During the following two years, as the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite nations steadily unraveled, Kohl became more assertive over Germany’s new and more independent role in global affairs and in moving past its war legacy. On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall was at last demolished, and Kohl lost nothing in pressing for a speedy reunification of the two Germanies. Almost unilaterally dashing off a blueprint for German reunification, he met Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev three months later to secure his acceptance of the proposed merger. Then, during the course of the following year, he mollified the United States and the major Western European allies. A reunited Germany, with its capital at Berlin, was officially proclaimed on October 3, 1990.

Kohl overwhelmingly won the first pan-German elections since 1932 and became the restored nation’s first chancellor. Continuing his diplomatic initiative, Kohl successfully laid to rest another issue, that of the frontier with Poland, a remnant of World War II, by renouncing any German claims on Polish territory beyond the boundary of the Oder and Neisse rivers. Three years later Kohl finalized an agreement with the Czech Republic, dropping any German claims to the former ethnic-German enclave of the Sudetenland the same issue that had been in contention over Adolf Hitler’s so-called Munich appeasement of 1938.

Not long after those first, exhilarating months of reunification, however, major strains began to appear in the fabric of the new Germany. The long-separated populations of the former East and West proved more difficult to integrate, soon leading to economic dislocation and increased unemployment, particularly among the easterners. Resentment between what were still, in effect, two separate communities raised concerns, as did a sometimes violent backlash against the foreign “guest worker” (mainly Turkish) population. Skinheads and neo-Nazi groups began to spring up, frustrating Kohl’s public relations efforts aimed at rehabilitating Germany’s human-rights image around the globe.

Signs of malaise and discontent appeared in 1994, when Kohl barely survived an electoral challenge from the Social Democrats. In 1998 he was defeated by SDP candidate Gerhard Schröder and left the chancellery after sixteen years. In 1999, Kohl was dogged by allegations of accepting illegal campaign funding from the French oil company Elf Aquitaine, and of skimming funds from an arms deal with the Saudi Arabian government.

On July 5, 2001, Hannelore Renner Kohl, Kohl’s wife of thirty-one years and the mother of the couple’s two children, was found dead in the Kohl home at the age of sixty-eight. She apparently killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills, but the media buzzed over Kohl's personal life. The former chancellor retired from public life in 2002, refusing to stand for reelection to the Bundestag.

In the twenty-first century, Kohl was mainly seen as a relic of the past, occasionally making headlines for his comments on Germany's contemporary leadership, such as his former protégé Angela Merkel, most of which were negative. For example, he famously remarked that modern leaders were "ruining my Europe," and he steadfastly opposed the austerity policies put in place as the global financial crisis and recession hit in 2007–8. However, he denied some of the most demeaning quotations attributed to him, many of which were published in the controversial book Legacy: The Kohl Transcripts, released in 2014 by Tilbert Jens and Heribert Schwan, a journalist who had helped ghostwrite Kohl's memoir and claimed to have quoted remarks from private interviews. Kohl would subsequently sue the authors and publisher of the book, and in April 2017 he was awarded a record-setting one million euros (US$1.1 million) in damages, though the defendants appealed the ruling.

In 2008 Kohl fell and suffered a head injury, which confined him to a wheelchair with partial paralysis and marked the beginning of a general decline in health. Later that year he married Maike Richter, who had formerly served as an economic adviser. She was later accused by some of Kohl's family members and associates with restricting their interactions with him, and other controlling behavior. Kohl had heart surgery in 2012 to install a pacemaker, but he continued to experience health problems. In 2015 it was reported he was in critical condition after undergoing hip-replacement surgery and then requiring and intestinal procedure. On June 16, 2017, Kohl died at the age of eighty-seven. Tributes were immediately held throughout Europe and the rest of the world, with many global figures remembering the former German leader as a visionary and influential force in German, European, and world politics.

Significance

Kohl’s seemingly slow, sometimes bumbling manner masked the mind of a consummate and skillful political operative who amazed both his friends and his foes with his resilience and ability to survive. Ruthless when it came to political infighting, Kohl was nonetheless able to project to the world a benevolent and nonthreatening image for Germany and was thus able to sufficiently rehabilitate his country’s postwar reputation, putting it at more distance from the Nazi past to persuade the major powers to accept the reunited German state.

Within Europe, Kohl fostered a renewed sense of trust among former antagonists. Within Germany he proved less successful, however, as daunting economic problems associated with the absorption of the former East German population and foreign workers remained unresolved at the end of his tenure as chancellor.

In recognition of his career achievements, Kohl was awarded the Henry A. Kissinger Prize by the American Academy in Berlin in May 2011. In the years following his departure from public office, Kohl has expressed doubt that he would have won a referendum on Germany's transition to the euro during his time as chancellor. In his later life, Kohl remained a staunch advocate of continued European integration.

Bibliography

Bering, Henrik. Helmut Kohl: The Man Who Reunited Germany, Rebuilt and Thwarted the Soviet Empire. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1999. A detailed account of Kohl’s career. Depicts the chancellor as a powerful but underestimated presence, whose accomplishments often were credited to Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher.

Buckley, William F., Jr. The Fall of the Berlin Wall. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2004. A rather personalized account by a notable conservative columnist, who implies that Kohl was a somewhat less consequential factor than many other sources and was an individual whose talents lay more in political manipulation than in initiating real change.

Fenner, Angelica, and Eric D. Weitz, eds. Fascism and Neofascism: Critical Writings on the Radical Right in Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Collection of essays that address both historical fascism and contemporary neofascism throughout Europe. Several chapters discuss neofascism in Germany.

Fisher, Mark. After the Wall: Germany, the Germans, and the Burdens of History. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Goes heavily into Kohl’s background and credits the chancellor with a critical, if somewhat devious, role in reuniting the two Germanies. Also discusses the implications of Kohl’s miscalculations and his genuine accomplishments.

Gilbert, Mark. European Integration: A Concise History. New York: Rowman, 2011.

Long, Robert Emmett, ed. The Reunification of Germany. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1992. A compilation of articles from major periodicals that provide varying perspectives on the East-West German merger.

Oltermann, Philip. "Helmut Kohl, Germany's Reunification Chancellor, Dies Aged 87." The Guardian, 16 June 2017, www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/16/helmut-kohl-ex-chancellor-and-architect-of-german-reunification-dies-aged-87. Accessed 7 July 2017.

Orlow, Dietrich. A History of Modern Germany: 1871 to Present. New York: Pearson, 2011.

Pruys, Karl Hugo, ed. Kohl, Genius of the Present: A Biography of Helmut Kohl. Chicago: Edition Q, 1996. Heavily biased in favor of the subject. This volume is so lavish in its praise for Kohl that it is sometimes difficult to see the real human being behind the praise.

Romoser, George K. Christian Soe. Power Shift in Germany: The 1998 Election and the End of the Kohl Era. New York: Berghahn, 2000.

Wallach, H. G. Peter, and Ronald A. Francisco. United Germany: The Past, Politics, Prospects. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. Not so much about Kohl but useful in delineating the background against which German unity had to occur, and what Kohl had to cope with to attain unification.

Whitney, Craig R., and Alan Cowell. "Helmut Kohl, Chancellor Who Reunited Germnay, Dies at 87." The New York Times, 16 June 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/06/16/world/europe/helmut-kohl-german-chancellor-dead.html. Accessed 12 July 2017.