Helmut Schmidt dies; West German chancellor was transformative leader
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Version 0 of 1. Helmut Schmidt, the former West German chancellor whose talent, determination and outspokenness helped complete the transformation of his country from a subdued and still recovering post-World War II ally into the leading political and economic power in Europe, died Nov. 10 at his home in Hamburg, Germany. He was 96. The German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, of which Mr. Schmidt was a co-publisher, announced the death. No cause was reported. Mr. Schmidt, a Social Democrat, was more conservative than his party. He governed what was then the Federal Republic of Germany for more than eight years — from May 1974, when an espionage scandal forced the resignation of Chancellor Willy Brandt, until the fall of 1982, when his governing coalition with the small Free Democrat Party (FDP) collapsed. He was succeeded as chancellor by the conservative opposition Christian Democrat Union’s Helmut Kohl. He was the fifth chancellor to lead the 60 million Germans in the western two-thirds of the country since 1949, when the Federal Republic was formed out of a demolished and divided Germany. About 16 million Germans lived under Communist rule in the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany. Although West Germany had three chancellors of global respect in its early years — Konrad Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard and Brandt — it was Mr. Schmidt who was widely seen as probably the most able, the one who personified West Germany’s transformation to a more assertive, self-assured and independent course. That assertiveness was on display especially when it came to relations with the administration of President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981. These years were marked by more sharp policy disagreements and personal rancor, especially on Mr. Schmidt’s part, than one can recall until recently between a modern American president and a major ally. Mr. Schmidt came to office as perhaps the most well-prepared leader of the postwar world, and the timing seemed perfect. A defense minister and finance minister under Brandt, he led West Germany through the global recession that followed the 1973-1974 oil crisis better than other industrialized nations. He rallied all the European Common Market countries, except France, behind the United States in that crisis. But the chancellor was a complicated man; an impatient intellectual yet a dedicated pragmatist, what they call a “macher” in German, someone who gets things done but also gives off the sense that he knows best. He earned that reputation first in his native port city of Hamburg in 1962, when, as interior minister, his actions were credited with saving many lives in a disastrous flood. Later, there would be another sobriquet, “Mr. Schmidt Schnauze,” or Mr. Schmidt the Lip, for often-stinging speeches, articles and comments that at times infuriated both left and right. The author of books on defense, politics and economic policy, he also played the piano well enough to record Mozart concertos. He was a serious smoker, the most celebrated of Germany’s 600,000 “schnupfers,” or snuff-takers, and also unable to resist colas and sticky buns. His health deteriorated while in office, and in 1981 he was fitted with a cardiac pacemaker. Inducted into the Hitler youth movement at 16 and the army in 1937, he served for eight years, fought for a while on the Russian front, was awarded an Iron Cross as an artillery officer and was eventually captured by the British in 1945. He managed to keep secret a dangerous family fact during the Third Reich: His father was an illegitimate child, and his grandfather was Jewish. Mr. Schmidt was a Lutheran, but there was no outward sense that religion played a role in his life. Rather, he worshiped at the altar of “predictability” and “calculability,” as he put it, among nations and leaders. These were Mr. Schmidt’s yardsticks, and as he took the measure of the Carter administration, they fell short, in his view. Mr. Schmidt and West Germany in the mid-’70s were strongly pro-American. He had visited the United States dozens of times and felt he understood it. He spoke fluent English, “better than Kissinger,” some American diplomats joked, referring to President Richard M. Nixon’s German-born national security adviser, adding that they wished Mr. Schmidt could run for office in America. The United States had been West Germany’s protector for almost 30 years, but the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal had tarnished U.S. leadership. The Cold War was still hot. Dozens of Soviet and East German divisions were on or near West Germany’s borders. The Soviets had also begun deploying new mobile, medium-range, nuclear-tipped SS20 missiles that could reach West Germany and other NATO countries and, in Mr. Schmidt’s view, tip the balance of power against the West and shear Europe away from the alliance. The chancellor got off on the wrong foot even before Carter took office when he let it be known that he favored President Gerald R. Ford, the known and thus calculable quantity, over the unknown Carter in the 1976 election. Almost always polite and correct in official public statements, Mr. Schmidt was often scathing in his private assessments and — surprisingly incautious for a head of government — allowed a fair number of people to hear them. Indeed, as Mr. Schmidt’s personal views became more widely known, they tended to legitimize a growing anti-American sentiment among some segments of West German opinion. Mr. Schmidt, a strong supporter of nuclear energy at home, objected when pressed to cancel West Germany’s 1975 agreement to sell civilian nuclear reactors to Brazil. He would rant about how the U.S. administration didn’t understand global economic policy and how it would intentionally “talk down” the dollar to improve the U.S. trade balance while damaging West Germany’s export-driven economy. He took a leading role in development of the European Monetary System, which, except for the British pound, tied major European currencies together as protection against wide dollar fluctuations. Reluctantly and virtually alone among Europe, West Germany went along with Carter’s boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics after the invasion of Afghanistan. But Mr. Schmidt felt Carter and his Polish-born national security adviser, Zbigniew Bzrezinski, did not consult about the implications of White House human rights policies toward the Soviet Union — specially on behalf of Soviet dissidents — that affected West Germany. Mr. Schmidt had a deep appreciation of arms-control issues and was the Western leader who most stressed the need for a new strategy and weapons to balance the growing threat from those Soviet SS20 missiles that could hit Europe but not the United States. The presence of the missiles raised many questions, including whether the United States, in theory, would trade Chicago for Hamburg if the Russians attacked only in Europe. It was a complex issue and produced great strains because of what Mr. Schmidt again felt, fairly or not, were poor consultations and lack of understanding. West Germany agreed to take new U.S. missiles, as long as other NATO allies took some as well. But it was unpopular with much of the West German public. When Carter said the United States would produce a new neutron bomb, Mr. Schmidt was reserved in public and has said he told Carter that his support would have been “steadfast.” But the notion of such a weapon was also extremely unpopular in the chancellor’s party. Then Carter changed his mind. Mr. Schmidt’s positions on both these weapons programs, plus souring economic news at home and lingering health problems, contributed to a loss-of-confidence vote, the defection of the FDP and his eventual ouster. Mr. Schmidt continued Brandt’s “Ostpolitik” policy of reaching out to former enemies that were now communist neighbors in the East but was always an advocate of a strong defense and a balance of power. He grew impatient with others, not just Carter, and had, at times, sharp words for his British, French and Italian counterparts. On occasion, he spoke broadly about Europe’s common cultural identity, from the Atlantic to the Urals in Russia, another semipublic trend of thought that led some who heard him to believe that Mr. Schmidt was leaning too much toward the East, to the exclusion of the Americans, something that he vigorously denied. In Europe, he deepened relations with France especially. With his good friend French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, he was a founder of the World Economic Summits that began in 1975. In 1979, what had been a traditional “big three” summit meeting of the United States, Britain and France on Guadeloupe became, for the first time, a “big four.” At home, he took an early hard-line stance against a wave of terrorism and kidnappings by the Red Army faction of the Baader-Meinhof gang in West Germany in the mid-1970s. His popularity and image of decisiveness soared in 1977 when he successfully used a West German hostage rescue team to storm a hijacked Lufthansa airliner in Somalia and rescue its passengers. Helmut Heinrich Waldemar Schmidt was born into a middle-class family in Hamburg on Dec. 23, 1918. His parents were teachers. His teenage years were shaped by the war, and it was on a leave in 1942 that he married a childhood friend, Hannelore “Loki” Glaser. Two smokers, chess players and lovers of art and music, they always lived modestly. She died in 2010. They had two children, an infant son who died of meningitis in 1945 and a daughter, Susanne, who, like her father, is an economist. The former chancellor led an active life in retirement, most notably through his role at Die Zeit. In its pages and in his books, Mr. Schmidt continued to make his views known. Getler, a former Washington Post reporter, covered Central Europe for many years. |