Helmut Kohl

Helmut Josef Michael Kohl was born on April 3, 1930, in Friesenheim, a district of Ludwigshafen am Rhein in the Palatinate region of western Germany ^[1]. His father, Hans Kohl, was a civil servant in the local tax administration, and the family belonged to the Catholic, politically conservative milieu of the Rhineland. Helmut was the youngest of three children.

The Second World War marked his boyhood. Ludwigshafen, home to the giant BASF chemical works, suffered heavy Allied bombing, and Kohl was drafted into auxiliary service as a teenager in the war's final months, though he never saw combat ^[1]. His elder brother Walter was killed in 1944. Kohl later described himself as belonging to a generation granted what he called the mercy of late birth, young enough to bear no responsibility for the Nazi regime yet old enough to remember its collapse ^[2].

After the war he finished secondary school in Ludwigshafen and studied at Frankfurt and then Heidelberg, where he read history and political science. He completed a doctorate at Heidelberg in 1958 with a dissertation on the postwar revival of political parties in the Palatinate ^[1]. Politics had already claimed him: he joined the newly founded Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 1946 or 1947, while still a schoolboy, and helped organize its youth wing in his home town ^[3].

Kohl's climb through the CDU of Rhineland-Palatinate was steady and deliberate. He entered the state parliament in Mainz in 1959, at twenty nine its youngest member, and built a reputation as an energetic organizer who modernized a party still dominated by older notables ^[3]. In 1969 he became minister president of Rhineland-Palatinate, a post he held for seven years while reforming the state's schools and founding the University of Trier-Kaiserslautern ^[1].

National leadership followed. Kohl took over as federal CDU chairman in 1973 and set about rebuilding the party after its loss of power to Willy Brandt's Social Democrats. As the CDU and CSU candidate for chancellor in 1976 he won 48.6 percent of the vote, one of the best results in the party's history, yet fell just short of a majority ^[2]. Rivals in Bonn, notably the Bavarian leader Franz Josef Strauss, dismissed him as a provincial heavyweight, and Strauss ran in his place in 1980 and lost.

Kohl waited. In October 1982 the small Free Democratic Party abandoned its coalition with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt over economic policy, and the Bundestag removed Schmidt through a constructive vote of no confidence, the first successful use of that instrument in the Federal Republic's history. Kohl was elected chancellor on October 1, 1982, and confirmed by voters in the general election of March 1983 ^[4].

Anyone asking who was Helmut Kohl in the mid 1980s would have heard a mixed answer. He promised a geistig-moralische Wende, a spiritual and moral turn, favoring fiscal restraint, closer ties with Washington, and traditional values, though his governments changed West Germany's welfare state less than critics feared or supporters hoped ^[2]. He held firm on the NATO decision to station American Pershing II missiles in West Germany in 1983 despite mass protests, a stance that cemented his standing with the Reagan administration ^[4].

His partnership with French President Francois Mitterrand became a defining image of the decade. In September 1984 the two men stood hand in hand at the Verdun battlefield, a gesture of Franco-German reconciliation photographed around the world ^[5]. Kohl treated European integration as a personal mission, arguing that German unity and European unity were two sides of the same coin.

Not every symbolic act succeeded. His 1985 visit with President Ronald Reagan to the military cemetery at Bitburg, where members of the Waffen-SS lay buried, provoked international protest ^[2]. Domestically he survived the Flick party donations affair and repeated predictions of his political demise. Opponents mocked his provincial accent and bulky frame; Kohl absorbed the ridicule and outlasted nearly all of them, a pattern that became a running theme of any honest Helmut Kohl biography ^[1].

The opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, transformed Kohl's chancellorship. Within three weeks he presented a ten point plan to the Bundestag sketching a path toward German confederation, acting without consulting the Western allies and seizing the initiative while others hesitated ^[4]. When East Germans flooded westward and the East German state visibly crumbled, he campaigned across the East in early 1990, promising blooming landscapes, and his allied parties won the March 1990 Volkskammer election decisively ^[2].

Diplomacy moved just as fast. Kohl won the confidence of US President George H. W. Bush and, in a July 1990 meeting in the Caucasus, secured Mikhail Gorbachev's agreement that a united Germany could remain in NATO, in exchange for troop limits and substantial German financial support for the Soviet Union ^[5]. The Two Plus Four Treaty, signed in September 1990 by the two German states and the four wartime Allies, restored full German sovereignty. Economic and monetary union between the two Germanys took effect on July 1, 1990, converting East German marks at generous rates, and formal unification followed on October 3, 1990 ^[4].

In December 1990 Kohl won the first all-German election since 1932 and entered the history books as the chancellor of unity. Among the most cited Helmut Kohl achievements stands his role in the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which created the European Union and set the timetable for a common currency. Kohl pressed the euro on a skeptical German public, giving up the Deutsche Mark as the price of binding a larger Germany irreversibly into Europe ^[5]. The costs of rebuilding the East proved far higher than promised, unemployment there stayed stubbornly high, and a solidarity surcharge on taxpayers endured for decades, but Kohl never wavered on the decision itself ^[2].

Kohl married Hannelore Renner in 1960. She had trained as an interpreter of English and French and remained a constant, if deliberately private, presence through his career. The couple had two sons, Walter and Peter, and kept their family home in the Oggersheim district of Ludwigshafen, where Kohl lived for the rest of his life ^[1]. Hannelore Kohl, who suffered from a rare and painful light allergy in her final years, died in 2001.

His tastes were emphatically regional. He famously served visiting dignitaries Saumagen, a Palatinate dish of stuffed pig's stomach, and took pride in his Rhineland roots. Standing 1.93 meters tall and heavily built, he was caricatured relentlessly, often as a pear, yet he turned his ordinariness into a political asset, presenting himself as a plainspoken man of the provinces rather than a Bonn intellectual ^[2].

Kohl's later family life grew painful and public. Both sons became estranged from him, and Walter Kohl published a critical memoir in 2011. In 2008 Kohl married Maike Richter, a former economics ministry official thirty four years his junior, who guarded access to him closely during his final years of illness ^[6].

Sixteen years in office ended in September 1998, when voters turned to Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats and their Green partners. It was the first time in the Federal Republic's history that a sitting government was voted out completely rather than replaced through shifting coalitions ^[4]. Kohl stayed in the Bundestag until 2002 and was named honorary chairman of the CDU.

That honor did not last. In late 1999 investigators revealed that Kohl had accepted roughly two million Deutsche Marks in undeclared donations to the CDU during the 1990s. He admitted the secret accounts existed but refused, to the end of his life, to name the donors, saying he had given them his word of honor ^[6]. The affair, which broke party finance law, forced him to resign the honorary chairmanship in 2000 and badly strained his relationship with Angela Merkel, his onetime protegee, who publicly urged the party to break with him. Criminal proceedings were closed in 2001 against payment of a fine, without a finding of guilt.

Health troubles accumulated. A severe fall in 2008 left him dependent on a wheelchair and impaired his speech. He continued to receive world figures at his Oggersheim home and occasionally intervened in debates, warning against abandoning the euro during the Greek debt crisis. Helmut Kohl died at home in Ludwigshafen on June 16, 2017, at the age of eighty seven ^[1]. He was honored with the first European act of state in Strasbourg, attended by leaders including Merkel, Bill Clinton, and Dmitry Medvedev, and was buried in Speyer rather than in the family grave in Ludwigshafen ^[7].

Kohl governed the Federal Republic for sixteen years, longer than any German chancellor since Otto von Bismarck, and the basic Helmut Kohl facts explain his standing: he unified a divided nation peacefully, kept it anchored in NATO, and traded the Deutsche Mark for a common European currency ^[4]. Historians debate how much of reunification was Kohl's doing and how much was circumstance, yet most agree that his speed and single-mindedness in 1989 and 1990 closed a window that might not have stayed open ^[5].

His European legacy is equally durable. Mitterrand, and later Bill Clinton and other contemporaries, credited him with making German power acceptable to its neighbors by embedding it in European institutions. Kohl received honorary citizenship of Europe from EU leaders in 1998, a distinction previously granted only to Jean Monnet ^[7].

The donations scandal permanently complicated his reputation inside Germany, and the economic disappointments of the eastern states are still traced in part to his optimistic promises. Even so, the chancellor of unity remains the phrase most often attached to his name. The verdict of many obituaries in 2017 was that a politician long underestimated as a provincial machine boss had, at the decisive moment, acted with greater vision than any of his critics ^[2].