Helmut Kohl

Helmut Kohl: The Provincial Who Reunited Germany

For most of his career the political class of two continents took him for a plodder — a heavy, slow-talking Rhinelander with a provincial accent whom cleverer men expected to see off. Then the Berlin Wall opened, and within eleven months Helmut Kohl had dissolved a country, absorbed sixteen million people, persuaded Moscow to let a united Germany stay in NATO, and talked a frightened France and a hostile Britain into acquiescing. He governed for sixteen years, longer than any other chancellor in the Federal Republic's history, and he ended in disgrace over envelopes of cash.

The Boy from Ludwigshafen

He was born on 3 April 1930 in Ludwigshafen am Rhein, into a Catholic family of modest circumstances, and he died in the same town eighty-seven years later. The war took his brother, killed on service at eighteen — a loss that fixed in Kohl a lifelong, almost physical conviction that Europe must never again be organised for war.

He joined the CDU in 1946, aged sixteen, and never belonged to anything else. He was the first in his family to go to university, taking a doctorate in history at Heidelberg in 1958 — a training that mattered more than his critics allowed, since he tended to think in decades while his opponents thought in news cycles.

The Provincial Who Would Not Go Away

Elected to the Rhineland-Palatinate parliament in 1959 as its youngest member, he became the state's Minister-President in 1969 and held it until 1976. National chairman of the CDU from 1973, he lost his first bid for the chancellorship and was written off, repeatedly, by better-connected rivals inside his own party. He outlasted every one of them, because his real talent was not oratory or policy but the patient accumulation of personal loyalty in a party organisation.

On 1 October 1982 he became Chancellor without an election, when the FDP switched partners and the Bundestag removed Helmut Schmidt by constructive vote of no confidence. Foreign observers assumed an interlude. It lasted sixteen years.

Ten Points, Eleven Months

The Wall opened on 9 November 1989, and nobody — not Bonn, not Washington, not Moscow — had a plan. Kohl produced one within three weeks. His Ten-Point Plan of November 1989 laid out a path from confederation to unity while the rest of the world was still deciding what it thought.

What followed was the most concentrated piece of diplomacy any postwar European leader has attempted. He had to convince Mikhail Gorbachev to accept a united Germany inside NATO — a proposition every Soviet strategic doctrine since 1945 had treated as unthinkable. He had to reassure Mitterrand and overcome Margaret Thatcher, both appalled at the prospect of a Germany of eighty million at the centre of Europe. And he had to hold together a US administration that, alone among the powers, actively wanted it. The price he paid to Paris was Germany's currency: France would accept reunification in exchange for deeper European integration, which meant the Deutsche Mark dissolved into a common European money. He took the deal. The Two Plus Four Treaty settled the external questions, and on 3 October 1990 Germany was one state again.

The Bill

The domestic settlement was cruder and it cost him. He converted East German marks into Deutsche Marks at one-to-one, a rate economists warned was indefensible, because he judged that anything less would drive easterners west in numbers that would destroy the political basis of unity. It was a political decision taken against the economics, and it left what remained of East German industry unable to compete.

He then promised that the east would become *blühende Landschaften* — flowering landscapes — and that it would cost the western taxpayer nothing. Neither was true. Estimates of the eventual reunification bill run to two or three trillion euros, and the resentments that followed shaped German politics for a generation. Kohl won the first all-German election handsomely and spent the rest of the decade paying for it.

Europe, and the Euro

Reunification was one of his two grand objects; the binding of Europe was the other, and he pursued them as a single project. With Mitterrand he co-authored the Maastricht Treaty, which created the European Union and set the course toward monetary union. Giving up the Mark was profoundly unpopular in Germany and he did it anyway, on the argument that a Germany embedded irreversibly in Europe was the only Germany its neighbours could live with. It was Adenauer's *Westbindung* logic, applied to a country twice the size.

The Fall and the Envelopes

He lost to Gerhard Schröder in 1998, sixteen years being long enough. Then, in 1999, came the CDU party finance scandal: undisclosed donations, secret accounts, an apparatus of cronyism running underneath the party he had built. Kohl admitted taking the money and refused, absolutely and to the end of his life, to name the donors — invoking a personal word of honour that placed his private code above German law. It destroyed his standing. His own protégée, Angela Merkel, publicly called for him to go; the article that launched her leadership was an act of patricide, and it worked.

The last years were bleak. His first wife, Hannelore, died by suicide in 2001. He married Maike Richter in 2008, while hospitalised, and lived largely out of public view until his death on 16 June 2017.

Why Helmut Is Called a Genius

The case rests almost entirely on eleven months in 1989 and 1990, and it is strong enough to carry the rest. Kohl possessed a quality that is rare and easily mistaken for stupidity: he was not clever in argument, but his strategic judgement under maximum uncertainty was close to flawless. In November 1989 every serious analyst thought unification was a question for the next decade or the one after. Kohl grasped that the window was measured in months and that it would close, and he moved before anyone else had finished thinking. He then correctly identified the single price that would buy off the opposition — surrendering the Deutsche Mark to Europe — and paid it, over the objections of his own voters and bankers. Reading a historical moment accurately, in real time, and acting at the necessary speed is a distinct form of intelligence, and 1990 is one of the cleanest examples of it in modern politics. His mastery of party machinery, which allowed a provincial nobody to outlast every rival, was formidable in a smaller way.

The counter-case is substantial and permanent. He lied to his citizens about the cost of unification, and the one-to-one currency conversion was a decision he knew was economically indefensible when he made it. He was an indifferent domestic administrator whose later years produced little. Above all, the finance scandal revealed that the man who had preached the rule of law to a continent maintained secret accounts and, when caught, ranked his personal promises above his country's statutes. Analysts who admire him still call him one of Germany's greatest leaders and one of its most flawed. He was not a thinker, not an economist and not, in the end, entirely honest. He simply saw one thing more clearly and sooner than everybody else, and it happened to be the most important thing of his century.

Legacy

Germany buried him with an unprecedented European act of state, a ceremony designed for a man who belonged to more than one country. The Federal Republic he handed on is unified, the European currency he traded the Mark for circulates across most of the continent, and the argument over what unification cost and who paid for it is still running in the states he brought in.

Achievements

• Federal Chancellor of Germany (1982–1998)
• Minister-President of Rhineland-Palatinate (1969–1976)
• member of the German Bundestag (1976–1980)
• member of Landtag of Rhineland-Palatinate (1959–1976)
• Grand Cross special issue of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, special issue — 1998
• Grand Cross of Honor for Services to the Republic of Austria — 1973
• Charlemagne Prize — 1988
• Order of Merit of Baden-Württemberg — 1999
• Educated at Goethe University Frankfurt and Heidelberg University