A memoir by Helmut Kohl’s son paints a damning portrait of a politician married to his job
WHEN A GENERATION of Irish politicians departs the public stage next month, what kind of private life awaits them? And, for the younger generation taking their place in the Dáil, who’ll take care of family life during their endless TD days? With so much at stake in the upcoming general election, few will ask about the personal cost of public life. Yet the huge demands put on our politicians by our political system, voters and the media is one key reason why we have the politicians we have.
Walter Kohl, son of Germany's former chancellor Helmut Kohl, has come forward with a timely reminder of how badly it can all go wrong. His new memoir, Leben oder Gelebt Werden (Live or Be Lived), is a shocking exposé of Germany's former first family, so caustic it could be titled Daddy Dearest.
The memoir asks how Helmut Kohl managed to balance a four-decade political career, including 16 years as Germany’s chancellor, with the demands of being a husband and father of two sons. Walter Kohl’s simple answer: he didn’t. Helmut Kohl united Germany – and, with it, the European continent – but to do that, his son says, he sacrificed his family to the shadows. Walter Kohl paints himself as an extra in his father’s political rise, later degraded to the role of spectator once his father became chancellor.
As leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Kohl never put his family above party meetings, his son writes, while as chancellor his absentee father spent his days “churning out decisions”.
At school and during military service Walter Kohl was mocked for his famous father. At home, meanwhile, he felt more like one of his father’s MPs than his son. His only emotional contact with his father was when he was berated for not making more of the advantages available to him.
“My father dealt with conflict first with belittlement, then by toughing it out and finally, when all else failed, rhetorical rigour to wipe out any upsetting arguments,” writes Kohl. “I simply wanted to be allowed to be like others my age. A father has to be judged as a father and not a chancellor.”
The only words of advice he remembers from his absentee father were: “You have to be there for yourself.” Walter Kohl was just 14 when he realised that his father, then a state governor, would never be there for him. In his early 20s Kohl junior lost interest in public life. It was during the left-wing-terrorism wave of the late 1970s, when German public figures were being abducted and murdered, he remembers a senior police officer explaining to the family the rules for dealing with terrorists. The maximum ransom the German state would pay if Kohl were kidnapped was five million marks (€2.5 million), he remembers. Alongside Walter’s label of “Kohl’s son”, he felt a price tag being added.
In Helmut Kohl’s final years as leader, as he received one honour after another for helping end the cold war, no one knew of the chilly standoff with his son. It was only when Kohl’s political career ended in disgrace in 1999, over undeclared donations to the CDU, that Walter realised it was too late to repair the damage.
The Kohl family fell apart on a sunny day in July 2001 with the bitter irony of a Russian tragedy. After 41 years of marriage Walter’s mother, Hannelore Kohl, took her life with an overdose of pills. For years, it was reported, she had suffered from a rare allergy to sunlight and was confined to her home.
For Walter, in whose childhood room her body was found, her illness was a psychosomatic reaction to the internal contradictions of her life. She could never resolve her role as a prop in her husband’s public drama with her lonely private life raising two sons, he writes. “It was always part of our mother’s job to propagate the hope that at some time it would be different,” writes Kohl. “But in this she let herself be deceived.”
Just a year after her death Walter Kohl planned his own suicide, until a chance encounter with his own son prompted him to change his plans. Instead he ended his relationship with his father in a letter, “the same ruthless way in which he himself liked to free himself of problems”. “My father’s real home is politics,” writes Kohl. “His true family is not called Kohl. He is the clan chief of a tribe called the CDU.”
With his memoir Walter Kohl strips his ailing 80-year-old father of the sentimental cloak of family life that he draped around his political career. In doing so he has provided the triumphant Kohl legacy with a tragic epilogue – and a cautionary tale for all TDs and TDs-to-be.
