Historical Figure
Helmut Schmidt
1918–2015
Chancellor of Germany from 1974 to 1982
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Biography
Helmut Heinrich Waldemar Schmidt was a German politician and member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), who served as the chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982. He was the longest lived chancellor in German history and had the longest post-chancellorship, at over 33 years.
Timeline
The story of Helmut Schmidt, told in moments.
Managed the Hamburg flood crisis as interior minister. Took over military and police coordination without legal authority. 315 people died, but thousands were saved. It made his reputation.
Became Chancellor after Willy Brandt resigned over a spy scandal. Schmidt was blunt, technocratic, and chain-smoked during press conferences. He called himself a "managing director," not a visionary.
Refused to negotiate with the Red Army Faction during the German Autumn. Hanns Martin Schleyer was kidnapped and murdered. Schmidt authorized the GSG-9 rescue of Lufthansa Flight 181 in Mogadishu.
In Their Own Words (20)
If you look closely, you'll see that the political journalists actually more belong to the political class and less to journalism.
in the interview with Giovanni di Lorenzo, ZEITmagazin 25. March 2010, nr. 13, 2010
Whoever has visions should go to the doctor.
''from Schmidt confirmed in a letter from the 26. February 2009 to the Student Council Social Sciences St.-Ursula-Gymnasium Attendorn., 2009
Of course, nuclear power has its risks. But there is no power and nothing in the world without risks, not even love.
Zeit Online, 23. July 2008, 2008
One is left, the other is right. But comparable populists are Lafontaine and Le Pen already.
''In the interview with Kai Diekmann, Walter Mayer and Hans-Jörg Vehlewald Bild am Sonntag, 15. September 2008, 2008
Did it have to come to this? The paradox is that when Europe was less united, it was in many ways more independent. The leaders who ruled in the early stages of integration had all been formed in a world before the global hegemony of the United States, when the major European states were themselves imperial powers, whose foreign policies were self-determined. These were people who had lived through the disasters of the Second World War, but were not crushed by them. This was true not just of a figure like De Gaulle, but of Adenauer and Mollet, of Eden and Heath, all of whom were quite prepared to ignore or defy America if their ambitions demanded it. Monnet, who did not accept their national assumptions, and never clashed with the US, still shared their sense of a future in which Europeans could settle their own affairs, in another fashion. Down into the 1970s, something of this spirit lived on even in Giscard and Schmidt, as Carter discovered. But with the neo-liberal turn of the 1980s, and the arrival in power in the 1990s of a postwar generation, it faded. The new economic doctrines cast doubt on the state as a political agent, and the new leaders had never known anything except the Pax Americana. The traditional springs of autonomy were gone.
Perry Anderson, "Depicting Europe", London Review of Books (20 September 2007), 2007
Artifacts (15)
This is the best book ever written! It has to be translated into Norwegian!
ing company. Undset then threw a copy of Chesterton's The Everlasting Man on the manager's desk and exclaimed, "This is the best book ever written! It has to be translated into Norwegian!" Whether...
New Correlation Between a Human Subject and a Quantum Mechanical Random Number Generator
It is generally assumed that experiments involving statistical processes can always be designed in such a way that the outcome is independent of the experimenter. In order to test this basic...
A Grand Strategy for the West: The Anachronism of National Strategies in an Interdependent World
The former West German chancellor examines the political and economic problems that face the world today and aruges that the U.S. and Europe must work more closely together to solve them.
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