PageK46 ING KOHL
Helmut Kohl, who’s died aged 87, hated Maggie, called Prince Philip a blockhead, had a disastrous private life and, oh yes, reunited Germany . . .
Some will always regard him as a giant among German Chancellors, a visionary who helped end the Cold War and without whom Germany might never have been reunified.
And yet, at his death aged 87, so much that surrounded Helmut Kohl was failure. The euro with which the former Hitler Youth member had pressed ahead, blinded by his own obsession with european integration, lurches from crisis to crisis, keeping many of its member states on the breadline.
And many leading analysts, even in Germany, believe that in bringing about his other obsession, German unity, he sowed the seeds of the eventual break up of his european dream.
For today’s all-powerful Germany may now be simply too big and powerful to be a genuine partner — as opposed to the dominant member pulling the strings to its own advantage — in the european Union.
As Wolfgang munchau, one of Germany’s leading economic analysts, said: ‘Unification is not only one of the underlying causes of the euro crisis, it is also one of the reasons behind our inability to solve it.
‘This is exactly the tragedy of Helmut Kohl: with his great political coup of German unity, he sowed the seeds for the destruction of his greatest political dream of european unity.’
As for the family life of this huge man obsessed with politics, that tragically disintegrated long ago. His two sons Walter and Peter had nothing to do with him — even though his last seven years were spent in a wheelchair following a fall — after he married a woman of whom they disapproved following the suicide of their mother.
If all political lives really do end in failure, then, surely, here is failure on a grand scale, astonishingly enough for a man whose 16 years in office from 1982 to 1998 dwarfed both margaret Thatcher’s 11 years and Tony Blair’s ten, and made him Germany’s longest-serving Chancellor since Bismarck.
even his retirement from politics two years after election defeat in 1998 was tarnished by a corruption scandal within his CDU party over illicit donations.
WHo knows, his great adversary Thatcher, about whom he had scarcely a good word to say, even when she died — ‘She was difficult just as our relationship was difficult’ — may be looking down on him now with a measure of sympathy instead of the anger and exasperation he usually set off in her.
‘She was ice cold in pursuit of her interests,’ he wrote in a memoir of mrs Thatcher’s fight to win a rebate from Britain’s contributions to the european budget.
‘When a compromise was reached which allowed her to appear the winner, she didn’t even say thank you.’ Understandably perhaps, since she had won a whopping 66 per cent rebate to which Britain was entitled.
Kohl was not only infuriated by Thatcher’s intuitive opposition to German reunification, he was also angered when she complained about him being ‘so German’ in serving his favourite dish of pig’s stomach with sausage and sauerkraut. In return, he made deeply unflattering observations about her, pointedly claiming she would ‘doze off’ at leaders’ summits.
once he had retired, the opinionated ex-Chancellor dispensed with the niceties of international diplomacy. In conversations taped for a memoir, he described Prince Philip as a ‘blockhead’, and Prince Charles’s marriage to Diana as ‘an absolutely idiotic affair’.
‘Had she become Queen immediately she would have done her bit in bed, created three princes and her duty to the nation would have been fulfilled,’ he ruminated.
But divorced from the Prince, he continued, ‘she had to travel around, talk to mayors and so on and then she withered away’.
even Angela merkel, once his protegee — and now his successor as Chancellor and the most powerful politician in europe — didn’t escape his disparagement. He observed that she used to be so awkward that she could ‘barely hold a knife and fork properly’.
And yet there was another Kohl, a figure described by Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton as the ‘greatest european leader of the second half of the 20th century’, a man anxious for Germany to confront its Nazi past and take a leading role in the world as a peacemaker.
early in 1984 he became the first post-war German Chancellor to address the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, saying he’d had ‘the mercy of a late birth’ — in other words, he was grateful he had been too young to serve in Hitler’s forces of destruction.
His elder brother Walter served and died in the war.
Later that year he and France’s President mitterrand met at the site of the Battle of Verdun, where French and German soldiers had slaughtered each other in World War I. Their interminably long handshake became a symbol of reconciliation.
A month later he visited President Ronald Reagan in the White House, and in a reciprocal visit the following year, the two leaders significantly visited the BergenBelsen concentration camp.
All this from the son of a provincial civil servant who was not expected to survive for very long when he came to power in 1982.
After the intellectual sophistication of his predecessor Helmut Schmidt, Kohl was seen as a rough-cut figure, a stumbling public speaker. But then, he hadn’t reached the top without knowing how to pull the levers of power.
And the German public felt a bond with this large but otherwise ordinary-sounding man.
When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 he claimed he ‘grabbed the mantle of history’ and speedily set up the machinery for reunification — with Soviet Russia’s approval.
The moment came on october 3, 1990 — the high point of his political life — when he became known as the Unification Chancellor, the father of German unity.
meanwhile, on the personal front, Helmut Kohl did not enjoy the same kind of success. He had been a Rhineland local conservative politician when he married a pretty village girl, Hannalore. She had no idea he was fanatically ambitious with his sights set on becoming Chancellor. As he climbed the greasy pole she hated the publicity so much that she refused to talk politics even with her husband, and banned their two sons from doing so.
The more powerful he became, the greater the public adulation, the more she deplored their life together. With her tightly shaped blonde hair she began to be known as his ‘Barbie Doll’. Then came rumours of his affairs, especially one involving a party official.
Despite 16 years in office as Chancellor, in 1998 Kohl decided to run once again. He was 68, and he and Hannalore had been married for 38 years, yet he hadn’t even discussed the plan with her. She learned of his decision from the evening news.
Hannalore suffered from a condition called photodermatitis, a debilitating allergy to light believed to have started in 1993 when she took the wrong antibiotics.
BY then, her condition was so bad that on all but the darkest days she stayed in their shuttered home all day, only going out at night. Friends urged her to divorce him, but she never did.
Kohl lost the 1998 election, heavily defeated by the Social Democrats, led by smooth former lawyer Gerhard Schroeder.
But it was another two years before he gave up politics in the wake of the corruption scandal. The following year, 2001, Hannalore Kohl committed suicide with sleeping pills.
Four years later, Kohl introduced the trim maike Kohl-Richter, 34 years his junior, as the new woman in his life. She was a former party youth wing supporter who had worked her way up to become a government economic official.
Walter and Peter were not invited to the wedding in 2008. They were told about it by telegram. ‘You could feel that my father saw his future with maike, even if it meant ending his relationship with us,’ Walter Kohl wrote afterwards.
The couple settled into an increasingly secluded life in their bungalow in the West German village of oggersheim. When old friends complained they had lost contact with Kohl, Der Spiegel magazine described his wife as the ‘Lady macbeth of oggersheim’.
Then, not long after their wedding, came that fall — after which Kohl became a tragic figure who slurred his words and couldn’t talk for more than a few minutes at a time.
A few years ago, his eldest son, Walter, a businessman, published a bitter memoir in which he said: ‘For my father, politics was, and is, his true home. His real family had the name CDU, not Kohl... I was not able to reach my father.’
Whether or not the euro survives, what a damning and tragic epitaph for the father of modern Germany.