Family feud threatens to mar mourning for Kohl
HELMUT Kohl was called the chancellor of German unity but a week after his death, a family spat has highlighted deep divisions and a looming battle over his legacy.
A long-running feud between Kohl’s widow and his two adult sons from a previous marriage reached a new low when she denied one entry to his childhood home to pay his respects this week.
Both sides have since traded angry recriminations that threaten to overshadow the mourning period for one of Europe’s great statesmen, who died on Friday last week, aged 87.
Der Spiegel weekly, meanwhile, reported that Kohl’s widow, Maike Kohl-Richter, who was 34 years his junior, had planned to bar Chancellor Angela Merkel from speaking at the funeral of her political mentor.
This would reflect the bitterness over what Kohl saw as Merkel’s betrayal when she turned against him in 1999 over a campaign finance scandal.
Kohl-Richter told Merkel last Friday, according to Der Spiegel, that she would invite as a speaker Hungary’s hardline Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has harshly attacked Merkel’s liberal refugee policies.
The matter has been resolved, and Merkel is now set to address the July 1 service in Strasbourg, along with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, French President Emmanuel Macron and former US president Bill Clinton.
Parliamentary speaker Norbert Lammert said that “the way and the place in which this outstanding political lifetime achievementis honoured are more than a family affair”.
Kohl is hailed as the father of Germany’s 1990 reunification, having convinced Western partners and Russia’s Mikhail Gorbachev that Germany’s capitalist west and communist east must become one nation again.