Helmut Kohl: Giant of late 20th-century Europe who oversaw German unification

Helmut Kohl, Germany’s long-serving unity chancellor and a towering figure in European unification, has died aged 87 after a long illness.

Dr Kohl was elected West German chancellor in 1982 and presided over Germany’s peaceful unification in 1990 following the fall of the Berlin Wall a year earlier.

He served a further eight years in power in Bonn, making him Germany’s longest-serving leader since Bismarck, but retired from politics after losing the 1998 federal election.

As the influential chairman of Germany’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) he was the dominant figure of domestic politics for 16 years and, in 1990, appointed to his first unity cabinet an unknown East German he dubbed his “Mädchen”: Angela Merkel.

Trump announces plans to dilute key US-Cuba deal

---

Donald Trump confirms he is under investigation for obstruction of justice

---

Woman who urged friend to kill himself found guilty of manslaughter

---

US sceptical about Russian claim to have killed Isis leader

---

Mentor and protégée fell out in 1999 over a fundraising scandal and the two never fully reconciled, although they agreed an uneasy truce in recent years after a fall and partial stroke limited his speech and mobility.

Beyond Germany, Dr Kohl was a colossus on the European stage in the Cold War’s final thaw. He prioritised Franco-German reconciliation, drove forward the European integration project, and helped create the modern European Union and its single currency.

Throughout his political career – from the back-rooms in his home state of Rhineland-Palatinate to the stages of Bonn and Berlin – Kohl was admired and feared equally as a politician who loved power, knew how to use it, but kept that well hidden behind a jovial, avuncular persona.

Heir to Adenauer

Early on in his five-decade membership of the CDU, he emerged as the true heir of party founder Konrad Adenauer, modernising the party through close contact with all levels of party leadership. In European politics he had an ear for the concerns of smaller EU member states, calling in their support in crucial battles with French president François Mitterrand and, his favoured nemesis, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

Despite declining health problems, and difficulty speaking, he remained a regular voice in the German and European political debate, urging today’s EU leaders – in particular Dr Merkel – to see the recent crises as a final warning: to complete the continent’s integration process or risk the European project’s collapse.

The key to understanding Helmut Kohl, as he explained to Israeli Knesset in 1984, was that he had the “mercy of a late birth”.

He was old enough to remember the horrors of Nazi Germany and the war it inflicted on the war, but too young to have been tainted by the fascist doctrine.

Helmut Kohl was born in 1930 in Ludwigshafen to Catholic, Nazi-critical parents, the youngest of three children after sister, Hildegarde and brother Walter, whom he idolised.

Walter’s early death, during an air raid in Normandy in 1944, was a “life-changing experience”, Kohl said later. His dead brother’s memory drove Kohl’s pursuit of peace in a united Europe and, in September 1984, hung over the image of Kohl holding Mitterrand’s hand in the military cemetery in Verdun, a symbolic moment of reconciliation between two former sworn enemies.

Though Kohl was too young to be called up as a soldier, he worked on a juvenile fire crew in his home town before being evacuated to Berchtesgaden, on the Bavarian border with Austria.

Hitler Youth

He was signed up as a flak helper and was forcibly enrolled in the Hitler Youth, swearing an oath of allegiance to the führer. Five weeks later Hitler was dead and Kohl took to the road, walking 500km home through a ruined country.

In Ludwigshafen he completed his interrupted schooling and began an agriculture traineeship before switching to studying law and history in Frankfurt and Heidelberg. After completing his doctorate in 1958 he took up a job with a chemicals lobby group in Ludwigshafen, now capital of the West German chemicals industry.

He joined Konrad Adenauer’s CDU as a 16-year-old, demanding a party rule change to allow him in. A decade later Dr Kohl was appointed to the state party board in Rhineland-Palatinate and, aged 29, was elected MP to the Landtag or state parliament. He rose quickly, becoming Germany’s youngest state premier in 1969, aged just 39, before switching to federal politics in 1976 as the CDU’s parliamentary party leader in Bonn.

As member 00246 of the CDU, Dr Kohl belonged to the party’s reforming wing in Bonn, determined to wrest control from the old party men of the Weimar era.

That early reformer reputation was later forgotten, as West German journalists and satirists mocked him as a country bumpkin. Later biographers attributed his Pfälzisch accent, and public love of hearty meals of Saumagen – pig’s stomach – as key to the symbiotic relationship he enjoyed for decades with German voters.

Growing stature

As his status grew, so too his stature: 1.93 metres tall and weighing, at his peak, about 16 stone.

His status as a political heavyweight was sealed, unexpectedly, in October 1982, with a vote of no-confidence in then Social Democrat chancellor Helmut Schmidt. In a daring move, Kohl wooed the junior Free Democrats (FDP) to cross the Bundestag floor, promising them greater leeway to implement their neoliberal reform policies in a CDU-FDP coalition.

The smaller party’s allegiance switch remained controversial for many years, but the CDU-FDP alliance would last longer – 16 years – thanks largely to the close relationship between Kohl and FDP leader and long-time foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher.

A 1983 general election on a renewal platform, and a record 55 per cent support, secured Kohl’s grip on power. Key to his power was the so-called “Kohl network”. Working the phones until late into the night, no CDU official was too junior not to get a call from the chancellor bungalow. Birthdays were remembered and favours granted -- all in exchange for absolute loyalty and early tips offs that allowed Kohl see off several attempts to depose him by CDU grandees and disgruntled backbenchers.

Kohl never forgot or forgave, reserving particular disdain for the hostile Hamburg "media mafia", who questioned his intellectual capacity, mocked his rhetorical skills and dubbed him Birne – pear. Throughout his career Kohl reserved special hatred for Der Spiegel news weekly, refusing to give them any interviews in office.

With the Kohl network securing his domestic dominance, the chancellor turned his attentions to the transatlantic relationship, earning credit in Washington by backing the deployment of US intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Germany against massive domestic protest.

German reunification

When push came to shove, however, and East Germans toppled the Berlin Wall in November 1989, Dr Kohl chose to ignore Europe and pursue unification on his terms.

Kohl was caught off guard by events in Berlin and flew home from a banquet dinner in Warsaw. Three weeks later he got ahead of the game with a 10-point plan to fast-track German unification. His pre-emptive move outsmarted his domestic rivals, surprised East Germans and infuriated Mitterrand and Thatcher, fearful a unified Germany would dominate Europe.

Dr Kohl later recalled the Strasbourg EU summit, the first after the Berlin Wall fell, as the most “tense and unfriendly” he had ever attended.

To overcome concerns of former US allies, he vowed to bed the united Germany down in the western alliance; to placate western Europeans, he agreed to Mitterrand’s demand that Germany commit to deeper European economic and currency union. Eastern bloc countries welcomed his pledge to recognise the disputed Oder-Neisse line, the post-war German-Polish border. To Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow, Kohl pledged to cover the multi-billion cost of the Soviet troop withdrawal from East Germany and resettlement at home.

At Dublin Castle in June 1990, Kohl secured European backing for unification and, two months later, the unification treaty was signed. A united Germany emerged on October 3rd, 1990 amid cheers and fireworks, overseen from the steps of Berlin’s Reichstag by a weeping Helmut Kohl.

Unification gave the struggling chancellor a second political wind, and he saw off another putsch attempt to secure a third term in December 1990.

But Kohl’s unification honeymoon was short. East Germans cheered him for ignoring economic advice, pushing through a 1-to-1 conversion rate for Ostmarks to Deutschmarks, securing easterners’ wages and pensions. But in May 1991, furious easterners pelted Kohl with eggs on a visit to Halle, as mothballing rusting industry resulted in a jobless spike and not the promised “blossoming landscapes”.

European integration

As the transformation struggled at home, demanding economic and social reforms that never came, Kohl made good on his promise to Mitterrand and pushed economic and currency union. The 1992 Maastricht Treaty was followed by European currency union two years later and, in May 1998, Kohl backed the introduction of the single currency.

“In that matter, I was a dictator,” he said later, aware that selling out the beloved Deutschmark would cost him political support.

Just how much became clear that autumn, when his fatal decision to run for a fifth term backfired. Voters had tired of Helmut Kohl, who looked tired compared to the dynamic Social Democrat leader, Gerhard Schröder.

The 16-year Kohl era ended in political defeat but worse was to come when, months later, it emerged that CDU leader had overseen a DM 2.1 million (€1 million) “black” account, from political donors that Kohl said he had given his word not to name.

It wasn’t the first such controversy – in 1974 it emerged that Kohl accepted 565,000DM (€282,500) from a convicted Nazi war criminal – but the 1999 donation scandal undermined his political legacy and, in a final humiliation, cost him the CDU honorary chairmanship.

The scandal’s collateral damage cost his successor Wolfgang Schäuble the CDU party leadership and catapulted his “Mädchen”, Angela Merkel, into the top job.

But Kohl never forgave the circumstances of her power grab, using a newspaper opinion piece to demand the CDU isolate Kohl. Their relationship never recovered. In the euro crisis, Kohl attacked his protégée for leaving Europe unsure of “where Germany stands and where it wants to go”.

Merkel hit back, describing as an epic mistake Kohl’s readiness to push through the single currency before closer political and fiscal integration.

In a final dig, Kohl said in leaked recordings that Dr Merkel was so inexperienced when he appointed her to his cabinet in 1990 that she “couldn’t eat with a knife and fork”. Last April, in a final public victory, a court awarded Kohl €1 million in damages to be paid by the ghostwriter who used those remarks in an unauthorised memoir.

Long retirement

Though Dr Kohl’s reputation recovered in later years, his retirement was marked by personal tragedy and ill health. In 2001 his wife of 41 years, Hannelore, took her own life after battling with a rare allergy to daylight. Dr Kohl was rarely seen in public after 2008, after a severe brain trauma following a fall left him with limited speech. Three months after the fall, he married Maike Richter, a former chancellery official 34 years his junior, dragging into the open a long-running feud with his estranged sons, Walter and Peter.

In a 2012 event to mark the 30th anniversary of Kohl’s election as chancellor, former US president Bill Clinton described the ex-leader as a visionary who “helped usher the global community into the 21st century”.

In what would be his last public speaking engagement, a shrunken and wheelchair-bound Helmut Kohl expressed thanks for “our greatest victories: the unity of Germany and a peaceful Europe”.

His final years of ailing health were wracked by a growing fear that younger generations had forgotten the raison d’être for European unity: the brutality of war he had seen as a teenager.

Fearful for his political legacy, he wrote in The Irish Times in 2014 that there was no alternative to a united Europe, for Germany above all.

“I wish that, for our people, Europe would once again become a matter of the heart,” he wrote, “so that we can continue to build our European house.”