The chancellor who united both Germany and Europe

In German, his surname means cabbage, and Helmut Kohl was not the most charismatic of politicians. Overweight, tactless, curiously impassive, he was considered dull and (in the UK) overly Teutonic, with his appetite for stuffed pig’s stomach and his seeming lack of humour. But Kohl, who has died aged 87, was a master political strategist, said Dan van der Vat in The Guardian. He cultivated an image as the regular chap from the provinces, the “intellectual underdog”, who hung on while “lefties and media sophisticates mocked”: he managed to seem on the side of ordinary voters against the government, even when he was running it. He became the longest-serving chancellor since Bismarck, and played a pivotal role in two extraordinary events: the fall of the Berlin Wall, leading to German reunification; and the rise of the euro. “It is difficult to think of a politician so consistently underrated.” Kohl, the son of a civil servant, was born in 1930 and brought up in a Catholic family in the town of Ludwigshafen am Rhein. His elder brother was killed in WWII, and their home town was all but destroyed in bombing raids. Aged 12, Kohl helped drag his neighbours’ charred bodies from the wreckage of their home. He was too young to fight, but the War formed him nonetheless. It convinced him of the need for European integration and for better relations with France. Memories of being given sweets by US soldiers also left him with a fondness for America, which might help explain his later willingness, despite popular opposition, to allow US Pershing II missiles on German soil. Above all, said The Times, he ended the War fascinated by how best to rebuild, and reshape, a country that was “materially and morally” ruined.

Aged 17, Kohl formed a youth wing of the centre-right CDU in his home town, before going on to read political history at university. His political career began almost as soon as he graduated. In 1969, he became the state premier for Rhineland-palatinate; in 1973, he was elected CDU chairman; and three years later, he was chosen to fight for the chancellorship, against Helmut Schmidt of the SPD. Kohl lost. But by 1979, unemployment was rising and the SPD was divided (not least over how to deal with left-wing terrorism). And when the SPD’S business-friendly coalition partner, the FDP, switched allegiance in 1982, Kohl was elected chancellor by the Bundestag.

So it was that it fell to Kohl, not to the statesmanlike Schmidt, to preside over the end of the Cold War and German reunification. Schmidt had pursued a policy of détente with the Soviet Union – and Kohl extended it, forming a close bond with Mikhail Gorbachev that proved vital in persuading Russia it had nothing to fear from a unified Germany joining Nato. (It also helped that he gave tens of billions to fund the cost of Soviet military withdrawal and prop up the ailing Soviet economy.) Kohl got on well with successive US presidents, too. But the key relationship was his close friendship with France’s François Mitterrand: the two men were the architects of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which created the EU and which played a pivotal role in the formation of the euro (later introduced in 1999) – something Kohl pursued in the face of a strong desire on the part of most Germans to retain their beloved Deutschmark. It was the price he knew he had to pay to win France’s support for reunification.

Reunification was finally achieved in 1990, and that same year – such was the euphoria in Germany – Kohl won the first postwar all-germany elections by a landslide. But after that, the economic costs of reunification began to bite, and in the elections of 1998 he was defeated and stood down. Soon after, his reputation was greatly tarnished by revelations that he had presided over a huge party funding scandal, involving undeclared donations. His personal life also came under scrutiny, when his wife, Hannelore, committed suicide: she had been suffering for years from a severe sensitivity to light. In retirement, Kohl wrote a series of memoirs in which he discussed, among other things, his toxic relationship with Margaret Thatcher – one of the few world leaders he could not win round. “I will never forget [her] angry observation: ‘We have beaten the Germans twice. Now they’re back.’”