1 / 19

HELMUT KOHL (born 1930 in Ludwigshafen)

HELMUT KOHL (born 1930 in Ludwigshafen). 1946: Joined CDU at age 16 1958: Earned Ph.D. in political science and contemporary history 1969-76: Became Germany’s youngest state premier in Rhineland-Palatinate 1976: Lost his first national election campaign

adie
Télécharger la présentation

HELMUT KOHL (born 1930 in Ludwigshafen)

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. HELMUT KOHL (born 1930 in Ludwigshafen) • 1946: Joined CDU at age 16 • 1958: Earned Ph.D. in political science and contemporary history • 1969-76: Became Germany’s youngest state premier in Rhineland-Palatinate • 1976: Lost his first national election campaign • 1980: Forced to defer to Franz Josef Strauss as chancellor candidate of the CDU/CSU • 1982: Came to power by forging coalition with FDP (see Kettenacker, pp. 148-51)

  2. FAR RIGHTISTS IN WEST GERMANY • The National Democratic Party (NPD): founded by 4 ex-Nazis in 1964 to demand the borders of 1937, a ban on immigration, and removal of all leftists from government. It won representation in 7 state legislatures in 1966-68, peaking at 9.7% of the vote in Baden-Wuerttemberg, but only 4.3% of the national vote in 1969. • The Republikaner, founded by Franz Schönhuber in 1983. It won 7-11% of the vote in 1989/90 in state elections in Bavaria, Baden-Wuerttemberg, Hesse, and West Berlin, and it gained representation in the European parliament. • Neo-Nazi youth groups, with an average membership of about 1,400 in the 1980s. They beat up thousands of people with dark skin and committed at least 25 murders.

  3. “Security through Law and Order”(September 1969):10% of this party’s 30,000 members and 15% of its staff had formerly belonged to the NSDAP.It called for a “People’s Democracy” resembling the Weimar constitution.

  4. Franz Schönhuber(1923-2005):Son of a butcher, Waffen-SS volunteer, Munich TV journalist,leader of the Republikaner, 1983-1994

  5. “A solemn moment at the ground-breaking for the House of German Art. The Papal Nuncio Vasallo di Torregrossa has just said to the Führer:‘For a long time I did not understand you. I have tried to for a long time. Today I do understand you.’Today every German Catholic understands Adolf Hitler as well and will therefore vote ‘YES!’ on November 12”(referendum campaign poster, fall 1933)

  6. The Republikaner won 7.3% of the European vote in June 1989:“Yes to Europe.No to this European Community.German Interests Come First!”

  7. “The Boat is Full!End the Asylum Swindle!”REPUBLIKANERplacard, 1991.The Republikaner denounced Article 16 of the Basic Law: “Persons persecuted on political grounds enjoy the right of asylum.”

  8. Friedlund Refugee Camp (1976), the largest camp for the 1.4 million ethnic Germans who arrived from the East, 1950-87; they automatically gained West German citizenship.

  9. Asylum Seekers in West Berlin wait for their checks (1982):In 1980 a record 107,818 persons applied for asylum.

  10. Helmut Kohl and Ronald Reagan at the Bitburg Military Cemetery, May 5, 1985: The 2,000 soldiers’ graves included about 50 from the Waffen-SS

  11. Pandering to the Far Right? • “Germans should get off their knees and learn to walk tall again. That means saying yes to the idea that we have been born German, and not letting the vision of a great German past be blocked by the screens of those accursed twelve years between 1933 and 1945.... German history cannot be presented as an endless chain of mistakes and crimes.” {Franz Josef Strauss, leader of Bavaria’s CSU, speaking in 1987 after his party suffered losses to the Republikaner.} • “Those young men [German soldiers buried at Bitburg] are victims of Nazism also.... They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps. Germans have a guilt feeling that’s been imposed on them, and I just think it’s unnecessary. I feel strongly that instead of re-awakening the memories, we should observe this day as the day when, forty years ago, peace began.” {President Ronald Reagan, responding to critics of his decision visit Bitburg in 1985}

  12. CONSERVATIVE HISTORIANS OF THE 1980s:ANDREAS HILLGRUBER • “Hitler’s scheme for the Eastern war represented an attempt, largely realized in the occupied areas, to transfer aims and methods heretofore common only in non-European colonial warfare to a conflict between two European great powers.... For the first time, an enemy great power was not simply to be reduced to a middle-level power.... Rather, the conquered state was to be reduced to the level of a colony in every respect. This was the ultimate exaggeration of imperialism.” {Germany and the Two World Wars} • Hillgruber later published a book in 1986, Zweierlei Untergang, which compared the sufferings of Jewish victims of the Holocaust with those of German expellees from Eastern Europe.

  13. ERNST NOLTE, Free University, Berlin: • “All those who talk about the ‛guilt of the Germans’ fail to see how much this resembles the talk about the ‛guilt of the Jews’ that was one of the main arguments of the National Socialists.... Is it not possible that the Nazis and Hitler carried out their ‛Asiatic’ deed [i.e., the Holocaust] only because they honestly feared becoming the victims of an ‛Asiatic’ deed? Was not the GULAG Archipelago [Stalin’s network of labor camps] in some sense the origin of Auschwitz? Was not the ‛class murder’ of the Bolsheviks the logical and historical precondition for the ‛race murder’ of the National Socialists?” {Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 6, 1986} • The leftist philosopher Jürgen Habermas responded indignantly that historians close to the CDU were violating all rules of historical scholarship to pander to radical nationalists. This gave birth to the Historikerstreit, a tempestuous debate among historians…

  14. Revulsion against the far right spread in May 1993 after extremist youths hurled firebombs into this house in Solingen, and five Turkish women and children died in the fire

  15. “German Asylum Seekers” (1993; including Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Rudolf Hilferding, etc.) “Together, against hatred of foreigners” (1991)

  16. IN 1993 THE CDU AND SPD AGREED ON THE FOLLOWING CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT: • Article 16a: “The right of asylum cannot be claimed by anyone who enters [Germany] from a country of the European Community or from another country where the application of the Convention on the Legal Status of Refugees and the Convention to Protect Human Rights and Civil Liberties is ensured.” • Active cooperation with all countries on Germany’s borders greatly reduced the flow of applicants for asylum and the backlog of asylum cases. • The vote for the Republikaner sank almost immediately, and bitter feuds broke out among its leaders…

  17. NPD Rally against Immigration, with Skinheads(Magdeburg, February 27, 1999)

  18. “No Mercy for Child Molesters” and “Europe without Turkey”(Hesse, 2003)

  19. Republikaner humor, 2005: Gerhard Schröder leads to the slaughterhouse, and Angela Merkel, to the cemetery

More Related