Helmut Kohl

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Helmut Josef Michael Kohl governed Germany for sixteen years, the longest chancellorship in the country's post-war history. He was described by two American presidents, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, as "the greatest European leader of the second half of the 20th century." And yet at home, he was lampooned as a pear. Cartoonists drew him as one. Comedians sold books with him as the bumbling protagonist. A man who reunited a divided nation and helped design the very architecture of the European Union spent much of his career being dismissed as too provincial, too verbose, too folksy for the serious business of running a complicated industrial country. How does someone like that end up reshaping a continent? That is the question this documentary will follow.

• 2. The Palatinate Roots

  ›

  Kohl was born on the 3rd of April 1930 in Ludwigshafen, the third child of Hans Kohl, a Bavarian army veteran and civil servant, and his wife Cacilie, nee Schnur. The family was conservative, Catholic, and loyal to the Catholic Centre Party both before and after 1933. That faith and that region would mark Kohl for life. His elder brother died in the Wehrmacht in 1944 at the age of 18. Kohl himself, aged ten, joined the Deutsches Jungvolk, a section of the Hitler Youth, as most German children of the time did. On the 20th of April 1945, just days before the war ended, the fifteen-year-old Kohl was sworn into the Hitler Youth by leader Artur Axmann at Berchtesgaden. He was also drafted for military service that year but was not involved in any combat. He later described this circumstance as the "mercy of late birth" (Gnade der späten Geburt), acknowledging that his age had shielded him from the possibility of complicity in Nazi atrocities.

• 3. The Party Builder

  ›

  Kohl joined the CDU in 1946 at the age of sixteen. By 1947, he was co-founding the Junge Union branch in Ludwigshafen, the party's youth organization. He was elected to the Landtag of Rhineland-Palatinate on the 19th of April 1959, becoming its youngest member. His early years in the party were defined by a push to open the CDU toward younger voters and away from its tight relationship with the churches, a reformist posture that put him at odds with the conservative wing.

  When Kohl became minister-president of Rhineland-Palatinate on the 19th of May 1969, succeeding Peter Altmeier, he was the youngest person ever elected as head of government in a German state. He abolished school corporal punishment and the parochial school, both of which had been controversial with party conservatives. He founded the University of Trier-Kaiserslautern and established two new ministries, one of which went to Heiner Geißler, who would work closely with Kohl for the next twenty years.

  At the federal level, the path to party leadership was harder. When CDU chairman Kurt Georg Kiesinger stepped down in 1971, Kohl ran for the succession and lost to parliamentary chairman Rainer Barzel, 344 votes to 174. Barzel's own fortunes then collapsed. A 1972 constructive vote of no confidence against Chancellor Willy Brandt failed when two opposition members voted against Barzel. Barzel then lost the general election. On the 12th of June 1973, at a party convention in Bonn, with Barzel having announced he would not run again, Kohl took the chairmanship, winning 520 of 600 votes as the only candidate. He remained chairman until 1998.

• 4. The Long Road to Power

  ›

  In March 1975, the CDU faced state elections in Rhineland-Palatinate, with Kohl already positioning himself as the CDU/CSU candidate for chancellor. The result, 53.9%, was the highest the party had ever achieved in the state. But the path to the chancellorship was not smooth. CSU chairman Franz Josef Strauss publicly pressured Kohl and harbored his own ambitions. A transcript of a Strauss speech published in Der Spiegel in March 1975, in which he claimed the Red Army Faction had sympathizers within the SPD and FDP, effectively ended his candidacy. On the 12th of May 1975, the federal board of the CDU unanimously nominated Kohl, without consulting the CSU beforehand.

  In the 1976 federal election, the CDU/CSU coalition won 48.6% of the vote but was kept out of government by a centre-left cabinet led by Helmut Schmidt. In the 1980 elections, Kohl had to stand aside while Strauss became the CDU/CSU's candidate; Strauss also failed to defeat Schmidt. Kohl remained leader of the opposition. Then, on the 17th of September 1982, the SPD/FDP coalition fractured over economic policy. The FDP sought to radically liberalize the labor market; the SPD preferred greater job security. The FDP began talks with the CDU/CSU. On the 1st of October 1982, a constructive vote of no confidence was called. It passed. To date it remains the only time a chancellor has been removed by that mechanism. Three days later, Kohl was voted in as chancellor. He was 52 years old.

• 5. The Franco-German Engine

  ›

  On the 22nd of September 1984, Kohl met French president Francois Mitterrand at Verdun, where the battle of the same name had been fought between France and Germany in the First World War. Together, they stood in commemoration of the dead of both conflicts. The photograph of their handshake, which lasted for several minutes, became one of the defining images of Franco-German reconciliation. From that moment, Kohl and Mitterrand operated as the principal drivers of European integration.

  Together they helped found Eureka in 1985, a research and development network of national funding ministries and agencies from 16 countries, distinct from the European Union, that supported collaborative international projects. They were also the architects of the Maastricht Treaty, which established the European Union and the Euro currency. Kohl was jointly awarded the Charlemagne Prize alongside Mitterrand for their contribution to Franco-German friendship and to the European Union. In 1998, the European Council named Kohl Honorary Citizen of Europe, an honor that had previously been bestowed on only one other person: Jean Monnet.

• 6. Reunification

  ›

  When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Kohl, like most West Germans, was initially caught off guard by the pace of events. But he moved quickly. Without consulting his coalition partner the FDP or the Western Allies, he presented a ten-point plan for overcoming the division of Germany and Europe. In February 1990, he traveled to the Soviet Union to secure assurances from Mikhail Gorbachev that the USSR would allow reunification to proceed.

  On the 18th of May 1990, Kohl signed an economic and social union treaty with East Germany. The reunification treaty was signed on the 31st of August 1990 and overwhelmingly approved by both parliaments on the 20th of September 1990. At midnight Central European Time on the 3rd of October 1990, East Germany ceased to exist. Its territory joined the Federal Republic as the five states of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia. East and West Berlin were reunited as a city-state and became the capital of the enlarged Federal Republic.

  Not every decision was smooth. Kohl allowed a 1:1 exchange rate for wages, interest, and rent between the West and East Marks, over the objections of Bundesbank president Karl Otto Pohl. The policy would seriously hurt companies in the new federal states. Kohl also caused a diplomatic crisis earlier that year when he suggested a reunified Germany might not accept the Oder-Neisse line as the border with Poland and implied the Federal Republic might wish to restore the frontier of 1937. After international backlash threatened to halt reunification altogether, he retracted. On the 14th of November 1990, he signed a treaty in Warsaw confirming that former German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line were definitively part of Poland.

• 7. The Man Behind the Office

  ›

  Kohl stood 193 cm tall and weighed over 136 kg during his leadership years. His opponents on the German left mocked his size, his Palatinate dialect, his alleged provincialism, and his verbose speeches. The left-leaning satirical journal Titanic regularly depicted him as a pear, drawn by Hans Traxler in the manner of historical French caricatures of Louis-Philippe of France. The German word Birne became his unofficial nickname.

  Biographer Hans Peter Schwarz identified five weaknesses in the 46-year-old candidate ahead of his first chancellorship run: unfamiliarity with Bundestag group politics, no international experience, limited knowledge of economics, a lack of charisma, and little cultural acceptance in northern Germany. Schwarz noted that while Kohl was fascinating in small circles and was a perfect host, the larger the crowd, the more he faded. He was not a great orator. His speeches ran long and vague. To the Hamburg press, including Der Spiegel and Die Zeit, his folksy Catholic manner simply felt foreign.

  And yet, what his critics dismissed as weakness was also the source of his durability. Kohl invested extraordinary time in personal relationships, from backbenchers in the Bundestag to local party officials. One federal minister from his own party told biographer Henrik Gast: "He was capable of both, being empathetic and being extremely confrontational. If you did not do what he wanted, empathy was over." Angela Merkel, whom Kohl appointed to the federal cabinet in January 1991 when she was still little known, was called "Kohl's girl" throughout the 1990s. She would go on to succeed him as chancellor and later preside at his European act of state in Strasbourg.

• 8. Legacy and Death

  ›

  Kohl died at 9:15 a.m. on the 16th of June 2017, in the Oggersheim district of Ludwigshafen, the city where he was born, aged 87. He was honored with the first-ever European act of state, held on the 1st of July in Strasbourg. A Catholic requiem mass followed at Speyer Cathedral. He had chosen his burial location, the Cathedral Chapter Cemetery adjacent to the Konrad Adenauer Park in Speyer, in the late summer of 2015, as his health began to deteriorate.

  His final years had been shadowed by family estrangement. After suffering a stroke and serious head injuries in February 2008, Kohl, then 78, married Maike Richter, a former Chancellery employee, while still in hospital. His sons, Walter (born 1963) and Peter (born 1965), said their father had not intended to remarry and that he had been pressured into it. For the last six years of his life, his children and grandchildren were prevented from seeing him. None of them participated in any of his funeral ceremonies.

  The CDU donations scandal, which became public in 1999, had damaged his domestic reputation in the immediate years after he left office. Der Spiegel reported that while Kohl had not personally benefited from illegal donations, he had led the party's financial system outside legal boundaries, including through secret bank accounts. But outside Germany, the scandal barely registered. George H. W. Bush called him "a true friend of freedom." Bill Clinton said his "visionary leadership prepared Germany and all of Europe for the 21st century." Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev said it was "real luck" that at the critical moment of 1989-1990, leading nations were headed by statesmen capable of mutual trust. In 2017, a German court ordered publisher Random House and two journalists to pay his estate 1 million euros for violating his privacy by publishing 116 comments Kohl had made in interviews in 2001 and 2002 without his consent, the highest judgment ever rendered under German law for privacy violations.