Healer of divided nation
HELMUT Kohl, the physically imposing German chancellor whose reunification of a nation divided by the Cold War put Germany at the heart of a united Europe, died on Friday at his home in Ludwigshafen. He was 87. “A life has ended and the person who lived it will go down in history,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in Rome. “It will take some time, however, until we can truly judge what we have lost in him.”
During his 16 years at the country’s helm from 1982 to 1998 – first for West Germany and then all of a united Germany – Kohl combined a dogged pursuit of European unity with a keen instinct for history. Less than a year after the November 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, he spearheaded the end of Germany’s decades- long division into East and West, ushering in a new era in European politics.
“When a new spirit began to sweep through Eastern Europe in the 1980s, when freedom was won in Poland, when brave people in Leipzig, East Berlin and elsewhere in East Germany staged a peaceful revolution, Helmut Kohl was the right person at the right time,” said Ms Merkel.
It was the close friendships that Kohl built up with other world leaders that helped him persuade anticommunist Western allies and the leaders of the collapsing Soviet Union that a strong, united Germany could live at peace with its neighbours.
“Helmut Kohl was the most important European statesman since World War II,” Bill Clinton, the former US president, said in 2011.
Former US president George H. W. Bush said the world had lost “a true friend of freedom.” President Donald Trump said Kohl was “a friend and ally to the United States as he led the Federal Republic of Germany through 16 pivotal years. He was not only the father of German reunification but also an advocate for Europe and the trans- Atlantic relationship.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin credited Kohl with “playing a key role in putting an end to the Cold War and with the reunification of Germany.”
Born on April 3, 1930, in Ludwigshafen, a western industrial city on the Rhine, Kohl joined the Hitler Youth but missed serving in the Nazi army. As a 15- year- old, he was about to enter service when World War II ended. His oldest brother, Walter, was killed in action a few months earlier.