German ex-leader Herzog dies
FORMER German president Roman Herzog, best remembered for urging “a jolt” of political and social reform in his country, has died, the presidential office said yesterday. He was 82.
Herzog died early yesterday in a hospital near his hometown in the southwestern state of Baden-Wurttemberg, a spokeswoman said.
A former conservative regional politician and chief judge of Germany’s Constitutional Court, Herzog served as head of state, a largely ceremonial but influential post, from 1994 to 1999.
He is best remembered for the phrase “Germany needs a jolt” from his 1997 Berlin speech titled “Moving into the 21st century”, in which he warned that a country scared of change would go under in a globalised world.
“Everyone is addressed, everyone has to make sacrifices, everyone has to participate,” he implored the nation, a year before centreleft chancellor Gerhard Schroeder would take power and implement sweeping social welfare and labour reforms.
Chancellor Angela Merkel praised Herzog as a patriot who had served the country in multiple posts and was “plain-spoken, unpretentious, humorous and quite self-ironic”.
Herzog, who was born in the southern state of Bavaria and grew up under the Nazi regime, is also remembered for travelling to Poland as soon as he assumed his post to ask for forgiveness on the 50th anniversary of the 1944 Warsaw uprising.
The following year, half a century after the liberation of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz, he attended a Jewish ceremony at the site.
The World Jewish Congress yesterday honoured Herzog as a “great fighter for the rule of law and for a free and tolerant society”. – AFP