Franz Josef Strauß

Franz Josef Strauß: Bavaria's Unbeatable Bull

In 1980, West Germany's opposition ran an entire national election on two words: "Stop Strauss!" It worked. Franz Josef Strauß, the bull-necked Bavarian who had already survived one career-ending scandal and clawed his way back to the edge of the chancellorship, lost that race and never got closer. It was, in miniature, the story of his whole career — enormous ambition, real power, and a personality so combustible it kept costing him the very thing he wanted most.

A Butcher's Son Turns Politician

Strauß was born September 6, 1915, in Munich, the son of a butcher, and raised Catholic in a household where academic distinction was expected and delivered. As a young man he was active in a Catholic youth organization that clashed openly with the Nazi Party. Drafted into the Wehrmacht on September 1, 1939, he spent two years as an artillery officer on the Eastern Front before the war ended for him in American captivity. In 1945 he helped found the Christian Social Union, the distinctly Bavarian sister party to Konrad Adenauer's Christian Democrats, and his combative speeches in the young Bundestag, where he sat from 1949, quickly made him one of the chamber's most watched figures. He became CSU chairman in 1961, a position he would hold for the rest of his life.

The Elbow Minister

Strauß entered Adenauer's cabinet in 1953 and became defense minister in 1956, earning the nickname "the elbow minister" for the sharpness with which he pushed rivals aside. In that post he pressed hard for West Germany to acquire nuclear weapons capability, a position that put him at odds even with the Kennedy administration in Washington. He also studied economics at the University of Innsbruck during these years, building a technocratic credential to go with his political muscle.

The Night They Raided Der Spiegel

Strauß's defense ministry collided with the press in October 1962, after Der Spiegel published an article assessing West German forces as only partially ready to defend against a Warsaw Pact attack. Strauß ordered police raids on the magazine's Hamburg offices and journalists' homes on October 26, and personally telephoned West Germany's military attaché in Madrid to have the article's author, arrested while traveling in Spain, detained — action West Germany's own interior minister called "somewhat outside of legality." Strauß initially denied any personal involvement to parliament, then was forced to admit he had lied. Five Free Democratic ministers resigned in protest on November 19, demanding his removal, and the new coalition formed that December excluded him from government entirely. The Spiegel affair became the defining scandal of his career — and, voters would remember nearly two decades later, the reason many distrusted him with greater power still.

Even out of the cabinet, Strauß dominated coverage of West German politics through the 1960s. A 1965 Time profile described him as "bull-necked" and "imperial — and imperious," noting that his "burly charisma" made him impossible to ignore even in political exile. The same period produced one of the stranger footnotes of his career, when Lockheed arranged a dinner with the American actress Jayne Mansfield amid reports — which both the company and Mansfield disputed — that the encounter was meant to influence a West German arms contract. His chief antagonist throughout remained Rudolf Augstein, the Spiegel publisher whose paper had broken the 1962 story and who continued campaigning against any Strauß return to national power for years afterward.

Finance Minister, Grand Coalition

Strauß did not stay out of government for long. He helped engineer the collapse of Ludwig Erhard's government in 1966 and returned to the cabinet as finance minister in the Grand Coalition that followed, working, to the surprise of many who saw him as an unreconstructed conservative brawler, in effective partnership with Social Democratic counterparts on economic policy.

King of Bavaria

Strauß's most durable power base was always Bavaria itself. As CSU leader he became the state's minister-president in 1978, a post from which he governed with a degree of regional dominance that eluded him nationally — building Bavaria's postwar reputation as a hub for aerospace and high-technology industry along the way. He later served as president of the Bundesrat, the federal chamber representing Germany's states, from 1983 to 1984.

The Campaign Built to Stop Him

Strauß's ambitions finally reached their ceiling in 1980, when the CDU/CSU nominated him as its candidate for chancellor against the incumbent Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt. The contest became less a debate over policy than a referendum on Strauß's own personality and history, with opponents rallying voters around the slogan "Stop Strauss!" — an explicit appeal to memories of the Spiegel affair and his reputation for combativeness bordering on recklessness. He lost decisively, and never again mounted a serious bid for the national leadership he had spent three decades pursuing.

Why Franz Is Called a Genius

Strauß was, by nearly every account, formidably intelligent, but "genius" is not the frame his biographers or contemporaries reached for, and the record explains why. His gift was tactical and rhetorical: an academically gifted student turned combative parliamentary speaker who could dominate a debate, a cabinet room, or a party congress through sheer force of intellect and personality, memorably describing himself as "not a devil and not a saint" but "a human being with all his contradictions." That is political talent of a high order — command of economic policy detailed enough to serve credibly as finance minister, strategic patience to rebuild after the Spiegel affair, and the organizational skill to make Bavaria a genuine industrial and technological power center. It is not, however, the kind of originating, field-defining brilliance the word "genius" is usually reserved for, and Strauß's own defining crisis is a caution against overstating him: the Spiegel affair showed a man willing to misuse ministerial authority and then lie to parliament about it, and his 1980 defeat showed that a majority of his own country's voters, when given the chance, chose not to hand him the highest office in the land. He was a formidable, brilliant, deeply divisive operator — not an intellectual innovator.

Legacy

Strauß died in Regensburg on October 3, 1988, having spent his final years still shadowed by his wife's death in a 1984 car accident. He remains, more than three decades later, the figure against whom Bavarian conservatism measures itself: the man who turned the CSU into a durable regional power, dragged West Germany's finance ministry through a difficult coalition, and came within one national campaign of the chancellorship — undone, in the end, less by his opponents than by the same combative instincts that had built his career in the first place.

Achievements

• Bavarian Order of Merit — 1959
• Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St. Sylvester — 1962
• Educated at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
• Worked as politician