DIE ZEIT is mourning its publisher: Helmut Schmidt passed away in Hamburg. The former German chancellor was 96 years old.
Former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and DIE ZEIT publisher has passed away. He died on Tuesday at the age of 96 in his home in Hamburg.
DIE ZEIT newspaper and publishing house bid farewell to Helmut Schmidt in deep mourning and profound gratitude: “As publisher of Die Zeit – for a time as head of the Time publishing house and managing director – he oversaw the fate of our paper for 32 years. We have lost a shrewd counsellor, a reliable companion and a good friend. We will miss Helmut Schmidt terribly.”
Schmidt’s influence on German politics is almost unmatched, initially as Senator in the Hamburg city-state government and then, as a federal Cabinet member before becoming chancellor. He gained the reputation for pragmatism and for being a successful crisis manager as Hamburg Interior minister by organizing relief measures during the massive 1962 Hamburg floods: He even went beyond constituted authority and requested the help of helicopters from the German military and from the Royal Air Force to rescue people from the disaster zone.
Four years later, he joined Social Democratic Party (SPD) head Willy Brandt to form Germany’s first “Grand Coalition,” pairing the SPD with the center-right Christian Democrats. In 1967, Schmidt became SPD floor leader in the Bundestag, Germany’s Federal Parliament. In 1969, Schmidt was tapped as Defence minister in Brandt’s second cabinet. He formed a coalition with the business-friendly Free Democrats Party (FDP). Shortly before 1972 general elections, he took over leadership of the Finance ministry and, temporarily, the Economics ministry.
When Brandt was forced to step down in 1974 after a close advisor of his was revealed to be an East German spy, in what became known as the Guillaume Affair, the SPD-FDP coalition elected Schmidt as chancellor. His government found itself confronted with numerous foreign and domestic crises. But under Schmidt’s leadership, Germany found its way through the global economic downturn and the 1970s oil crises relatively unscathed. It was the terror attacks perpetrated by the left-wing militant group Red Army Faction That exacted of the most difficult decisions of his tenure. Can a state allow itself to be blackmailed? That was the question facing the Chancellor when the Lufthansa passenger jet Landshut was hijacked to Mogadishu, Somalia in 1977 and the Red Army Faction (RAF) kidnapped and threatened to murder Hanns Martin Schleyer, president of the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations, in order to force the release of RAF prisoners. Schmidt decided against a prisoner exchange and ordered GSG-9 special forces unit to storm the plane. The RAF murdered Schleyer in response.
Schmidt’s party and a significant share of the populace distanced themselves from Schmidt. Two years later, he pushed through NATO’s Double-Track Decision, which foresaw the stationing of medium-range ballistic missiles in West Germany. Then, in 1982, Schmidt’s ‘governing coalition with the FDP collapsed in a no-confidence vote and Helmut Kohl, of the Christian Democrats, was chosen to replace him as chancellor.
Just a short time later, DIE ZEIT’s founding publisher Gerd Bucerius Brought Schmidt on board as publisher of the weekly paper. He did remain in position for more than 32 years. Up until the very end, he enriched the paper with his analyses, commentaries and interviews on current events.
-DIE ZEIT