‘We Germans have lost a father figure’
Charming former chancellor was a commanding figure
Helmut Schmidt, the former West German chancellor who marshalled personal dynamism, managerial brilliance and often acid-tongued impatience to push his country into an assertive international role as the Cold War dragged on into the 1970s, died Tuesday at his home in Hamburg. He was 96.
His death was confirmed by Teresa Maria Frei, spokeswoman for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit, where Schmidt was co-publisher.
In a statement, Chancellor Angela Merkel said she had visited Schmidt at his home less than a year ago and praised him as “a political institution” and a source of “advice and judgment I valued.”
Schmidt, a Social Democrat, had not shied from criticizing policies put forth by her as leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union Party.
For decades, Schmidt was one of West Germany’s most popular politicians. With a firm jaw and intense gray eyes, he was handsome, witty and supremely self-possessed. In public he was a magnetic speaker and a pugnacious debater.As recently as 2013, in a poll by Stern magazine, he was ranked as Germany’s most significant chancellor.
“We Germans have lost a father figure,” said Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, one of a generation of Social Democratic leaders formed by Schmidt, Willy Brandt and the pursuit of détente with the Soviet bloc in the 1970s.
Schmidt’s life all but traced the history of 20th-century Germany. A son of working-class Hamburg, he was born in the wake of Germany’s humiliating defeat in the First-World War, witnessed the rise of the Nazis, joined the Hitler Youth, served in Hitler’s army — while hiding the fact that he had a Jewish grandfather — and emerged politically in a postwar Germany divided against itself.
Schmidt rode a difficult period as chancellor after being elected in 1974: The global economy was in turmoil and tensions with the communist east had not slackened. Unlike his more accommodating predecessors, he openly jousted with the U.S. over global economics and relations with the Soviet Union.
He barely concealed his disdain for Jimmy Carter, and was wary of a bellicose Ronald Reagan.
At home, he compelled his leftleaning Social Democratic Party to embrace pro-business policies and to support the buildup of the West German armed forces.
At the same time, he pressed the Federal Republic of Germany to forge closer ties with the communist regime in East Germany.
And working with his close friend president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing of France, hse helped soften European distrust of his country for its Nazi past — a past that to many of its survivors was still fresh in painful memory 30 years on.
(Meanwhile, a cigarette smoker almost to the end of his life, he was the only public figure in Germany allowed to disregard smoking bans.)
Schmidt made grievous policy errors. These were compounded by his unwillingness to admit fallibility and his seeming disregard for diplomacy. That led the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, to dismiss him after eight years in office.
His detractors accused him of being overwilling to accommodate Moscow in his desire to salvage détente.
Moreover, his intemperate criticism of Washington promoted neutralist, anti-American tendencies in his Social Democratic Party, which only helped undermine his chancellorship.
Schmidt was confident — too confident, some said — about his ability to sustain prosperity in West Germany. Under his stewardship, his nation fared better than the rest of Europe during the economic crisis of the 1970s, provoked by OPEC. But he was criticized in the early 1980s as having failed to prepare West Germans for a recession.
Still, Schmidt remained popular, owing in no small part to the affection West Germans felt for his downto-earth wife, Hannelore Schmidt. A biologist and amateur botanist, she eschewed ceremony in favour of promoting conservation and protecting endangered plants. Flowers in Latin America and Africa were named after her, and she wrote or co-wrote books on plants and ecology. She died in 2010 at 91.