Heinrich "Heiner" Geißler (3 March 1930 – 12 September 2017)Heiner Geissler, top aide to Germany's Kohl, dies at 87 Omaha World-Herald 12 September 2017. was a German politician and judge who served as the Federal Minister for Youth, Family and Health from 1982 to 1985. A member of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), he served as the party's general secretary from 1977 to 1989.
Geißler served as a government minister in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate under the minister presidents Peter Altmeier, Helmut Kohl and Bernhard Vogel before becoming general secretary of the CDU. During his tenure, he served as federal minister and attempted to overthrow Kohl, then the party chairman, at the 1989 CDU party congress in Bremen, but failed and thereafter lost his position within the party.
Both during his tenure and after, he took on increasingly left-leaning positions in economic questions and questions of women's emancipation, and eventually joined the activist organisation ATTAC, which is critical of globalisation. Later in life, he served as a mediator in employer-employee disputes, as well as a mediator in the conflict surrounding the Stuttgart 21 railway.
Early life Geißler was born on 3 March 1930 in Oberndorf am Neckar as the fourth of five children of civil servant Heinrich Geißler and his wife Maria, née Buck. His father was a member of the Centre Party and did not adopt Nazi ideology, as a result of which he was subjected to several disciplinary measures and moved to Tuttlingen (between 1938 and 1940) and eventually to Spaichingen, where the Geißler family experienced the war's end.Heiner Geißler im Interview. In: domradio.de, April 2017. Toward the end of World War II, Heiner Geißler was drafted to the Wehrmacht, from which he fled together with a school friend. Afterwards, he attended schools in Ravensburg, Tuttlingen, Hannover, and Spaichingen, after which he entered into the private, Jesuit-run Kolleg St. Blasien, since there was no school in Spaichingen that led to the Abitur.Interview mit Heiner Geißler. In: Katholische Nachrichten-Agentur (KNA), 9 February 2010. After attaining the Abitur in 1949, he entered the Jesuit order as a novice, leaving four years later, just before he had to take the monastic vows (the evangelical counsels), which stipulated poverty, chastity and obedience. He later commented: "At 23 I noticed, that I cannot uphold two – so at least one – of these vows. It was not poverty."Katharina Sperber: . In: Frankfurter Rundschau, 3 March 2010, Interview.
After leaving the order, Geißler went on to study philosophy at the Jesuit-run Munich School of Philosophy, and afterwards law at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and the University of Tübingen. While a student in Tübingen, he became a member of the KStV Alamannia Tübingen, a fraternity belonging to the Kartellverband. He finished his legal studies in 1957 with the first state examination, followed by becoming a juris doctor in July 1960 and the second state examination in 1962. In 1962, he briefly worked as a judge at the Amtsgericht in Stuttgart, followed by employment as a civil servant in the office of the Minister for Labour and Social Affairs in Baden-Württemberg, Josef Schüttler, from 1962 to 1965.
Career Party offices Geißler was a life-long member of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany. Together with Franz Sauter, Erwin Teufel, and Josef Rebhan, Geißler founded the Rottweil district group of the Young Union (JU), the CDU's youth wing. He was JU chairman of Baden-Württemberg from 1961 to 1965. In 1977, he succeeded Kurt Biedenkopf as general secretary of the federal CDU. As such, he managed the party in three federal elections (1980, 1983, and 1987). To this day, he is the longest-serving general secretary of the CDU and the only one to concurrently serve as a government minister. During this period, he was responsible for the new basic program of the party and was decisively involved in formulating the CDU's new positions in foreign policy, which were developed on the youth party congress in Hamburg and were considered a precondition for the coalition with the Free Democratic Party (FDP) that later became a reality. Geißler was also responsible for the modernisation of the party's position on women's rights, put forth at the 1985 CDU party congress in Essen.
When, during the Flick affair, party chairman Helmut Kohl was questioned as to whether he had accepted bribes for the CDU, Geißler defended him in a 1986 television show by proposing that Kohl may have had a "blackout". After that point, relations between both soured. After reports appeared that Geißler was to be replaced after the CDU lost elections in West Berlin and Frankfurt am Main in 1989, and achieved only 37.6% of the vote in the European election of that year, a drop of 8.2% from the 1984 European election, Geißler was not re-nominated for the position of general secretary by chairman Kohl. Previously, differences on policy had created a rift between chairman and general secretary. Together with Lothar Späth and Rita Süssmuth, Geißler attempted to overthrow Kohl on the 1989 CDU party congress held in Bremen, but was unsuccessful, leading to his resignation as general secretary. Until 1998, he belonged to the party presidium and, until 2002, to the federal board.
Geißler remained critical of Kohl following his loss of power. In 1995, he called the party, referring to Kohl's role, as a "party with a cult of personality" ("führerkultische Partei").Interview mit Geißler, Die Woche, 13 October 1995, Nachweise. At the 1990 CDU party congress, he apologised for using the word Führerkult, stating: "The term was wrong, the issue remains."'Der Begriff war falsch, das Anliegen bleibt' / Auf dem CDU-Parteitag entschuldigt sich Heiner Geißler. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 19 October 1995. During the CDU donations scandal, he admitted to slush funds being upkept during Kohl's tenure as chairman.
He attracted considerable controversy in 1977 after publishing a brochure which accused several leftist and liberal artists and politicians in West Germany of being "sympathisers of terror", referring to the attacks of the Red Army Faction (RAF). Mentioned in the pamphlet were, among others, Helmut Gollwitzer, Heinrich Albertz, Günter Wallraff, Herbert Marcuse, and Federal Minister for the Interior Werner Maihofer. In 1983, Geißler called the Social Democratic Party (SPD) a "fifth column of the other side", referring to the Eastern Bloc, during the debate concerning the stationing of American MGM-31 Pershing missiles in Europe.Peter Reinhardt: . In: Mannheimer Morgen, 13 September 2017. During the electoral campaign for the 1983 federal election, Geißler also attracted controversy by calling the pension policy of the SPD the "pension lie", elaborating: "He who does not know the truth is merely an idiot, but he who knows it and calls it a lie, is a criminal!", originating in Bertolt Brecht's play Life of Galileo.Bertolt Brecht: Leben des Galilei, Bild 9. In 1985, after several mayors of cities bombed by the Luftwaffe were invited by the SPD to Nuremberg under the slogan "Never again war from German soil!", Geißler rhetorically asked why the Social Democrats had also invited the mayors of Dresden and Leipzig (both then part of communist East Germany) and cited the slogan of Kurt Schumacher "Never another dictatorship on German soil!", contrasting it with the SPD slogan. Due to Geißler's persistent attacks against the SPD, then-chairman Willy Brandt accused him of being "the worst demagogue in this country since Goebbels".Bayerischer Rundfunk: Dr. Heiner Geißler Bundesminister a. D. im Gespräch mit Werner Reuß. (PDF; 72 kB); Sendung α-Forum 25 January 2000.
Bundestag deputy Geißler first entered the Bundestag following the 1965 federal election as a directly elected candidate for the electoral district of Reutlingen. From 1971 to 1979, he belonged to the Landtag of Rhineland-Palatinate. From 1980 to 2002, he again served as deputy, this time as a directly elected deputy for the electoral district of Südpfalz. Following the first German election after reunification in 1990, he served as deputy chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, from January 1991 to October 1998.
During a debate in the Bundestag concerning the NATO Double-Track Decision and the stationing of Pershing II missiles by the United States of America in European countries, Geißler responded to a Der Spiegel interview given by the deputies Otto Schily and Joschka Fischer (both Greens), in which they had compared the potential nuclear war following the stationing of the missiles with the Holocaust, stating:
While this statement was defended by advocates of the missile's stationing, several deputies accused Geißler of spreading revisionist narratives. The left-liberal FDP deputy Hildegard Hamm-Brücher asked in this context: "What did pacifism have to do with antisemitism in Germany?" He himself later stated in an interview with the NDR that he was referring to pacifist movements in France and the United Kingdom, whose policy of Appeasement had encouraged Hitler to "attack other countries and to carry out his racist policies until they became mass murder".15 June 2008 – Vor 25 Jahren: Heiner Geißler hält „Skandalrede" im Bundestag: „Pazifismus hat Auschwitz möglich gemacht". In: WDR, 15 June 2008.
State and federal minister On 18 May 1967, Geißler entered the cabinet of Peter Altmeier, then minister-president of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, as Minister for Social Affairs, which he kept after Helmut Kohl replaced Altmeier in 1969. He retained the position, renamed to Minister for Social Affairs, Health and Sports, under Kohl's successor Bernhard Vogel until 23 June 1977. During his tenure, he introduced the first kindergarten law in the history of West Germany. He also was the first to introduce a general reform of hospitals and the first law to financially support physical exercise programs. He was also the intiator and founder of the first state-run nursing services and thus considered one of the founders of the German nursing infrastructure.Erneuerer, Querdenker und Schlichter. Ex-Gesundheitsminister Heiner Geißler gestorben. In: CAREkonkret, Ausgabe 38, 22 September 2017, S. 11.
On the federal level, he served from 4 October 1982 to 26 September 1985 as Federal Minister for Youth, Family and Health in the Kohl I and Kohl II governments. He renewed the legislation on conscientious objection, increased parental financial assistance and parental leave, reformed the education of new physicians, and founded the Bundesstiftung Mutter und Kind.Stephan-Andreas Casdorff: Heiner Geißler – Athlet des Geistes. In: Tagesspiegel, 3 March 2010. During his tenure, he decided against introducing a compulsory registration for anyone who had contracted the newly discovered acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).
Political activities after 1997 Mediator in wage disputes On several occasions, Geißler served as a mediator in wage disputes, mediating four times between 1997 and 2002 in the construction industry, during a wage dispute within the German Telekom in 2006, and (together with Kurt Biedenkopf) during the wage dispute between the Gewerkschaft Deutscher Lokomotivführer (GDL) and the Deutsche Bahn (DB).Sandra Fluhrer: . In: Europolitan, 9 August 2007.
Membership in anti-globalisation initiatives
Later, Geißler took on increasingly left-wing positions in economic questions. He called opposing positions "ultra-conservative", "turbo-capitalist", "neoliberal", "backward", and "from yesterday". Based on this criticism, in May 2007, he announced his entry into the anti-globalisation organisation ATTAC, supporting the organisation's goal of humanising globalisation.Björn Hengst: Attac-Neumitglied Heiner Geißler: „Die Globalisierung läuft aus dem Ruder". In: Spiegel Online, 16 May 2007, Interview.