display

Helmut Kohl has been dead for almost four years, but it is only now that the Bundestag has set up a foundation for the former chancellor like the one that also exists for Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt.

The project is proving to be extremely arduous, and its problems are far from over with the adoption by the Bundestag.

Because there are huge differences of opinion between the CDU and Kohl's widow.

The Foundation Act was adopted in the third reading late on Thursday evening with a large majority;

only the AfD abstained.

But Maike Kohl-Richter explicitly sticks to her resistance - she even reserves the right to take legal action.

Because the establishment of the foundation contradicts the last will of her husband, criticizes the 57-year-old on her website.

"Playball of changing political majorities"

Kohl, who holds a doctorate in economics, is convinced that his heiress and widow must be included in the process of coming to terms with his work and legacy.

Kohl-Richter should contribute in terms of content and concept and bring in "coordinated ideas and considerations";

also, if necessary, express concerns, such as the alleged demand of the deceased.

But all of this was "not taken into account", according to an eleven-page press release published by the Freiburg lawyer Stefan Wieser on behalf of Maike Kohl-Richter.

It is now their concern that the foundation will get a "wrong content orientation" and that Helmut Kohl "could become the plaything of changing political majorities".

Fall of the Berlin Wall: Helmut Kohl speaks in front of Schöneberg Town Hall on November 10, 1989

Source: picture alliance / imageBROKER

display

There had been several conversations and phone calls between CDU representatives and Kohl-Richter over the years.

As the widow portrays it, it was mainly on her initiative.

You have "stretched out your hand to the CDU for a common path," emphasized lawyer Wieser.

But an agreement was not even close in sight.

Therefore, the grand coalition decided on the last few meters before the end of the legislative period to introduce the necessary law without Kohl-Richter's blessing.

A Helmut Kohl Center is to be built in a “representative location” in Berlin, with a permanent exhibition documenting the life and work of the Palatinate.

Special shows and events are also planned;

2.94 million euros have already been allocated to the current budget.

Worry about the sentry box

One point of contention among several is the seat of the “Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl Foundation”.

Maike Kohl-Richter would have liked to see him in the Ludwigshafen district of Oggersheim.

From 1971 onwards, Kohl had lived with his late wife Hannelore and their two sons in the bungalow including the police station for the chancellor's 24-hour protection.

Maike Kohl-Richter later moved in before she married Kohl in 2008.

Two years ago, the former employee of the Chancellery tried in vain to have the “Chancellor's bungalow” listed.

Among other things, she wanted to prevent the guardhouse from being demolished.

display

But that in Oggersheim, for example, the ten-point plan for German unity was typed out and state guests from all over the world were visiting, from Margaret Thatcher to Boris Yeltsin to Bill Clinton, was not a convincing argument for the preservationists. The Rhineland-Palatinate General Directorate for Cultural Heritage rejected monument protection - because of the “simple architectural design” of the buildings. Because it has also been rebuilt several times, they have "no monument value according to the Rhineland-Palatinate Monument Protection Act". Thereupon Kohl-Richter bought the property adjoining her house, including the guard, privately. The fact that she was not thanked by the Chancellery or the CDU - ideally through the establishment of the planned Helmut Kohl Center - hurts her noticeably.

Helmut Kohl at the New Year's reception of the Bremen CDU on January 21, 2000

Source: picture-alliance / dpa

But it is at least as much a matter of the content orientation and the time when the foundation will start working on it.

Kohl-Richter would have liked to have waited in the hope that the perception and memory of the party donation affair would change with some time.

The time factor is helpful, says the eleven-page document.

An “unencumbered generation” naturally finds it easier to “deal with and classify the events and roles of those affected, some of whom are still in political office, without prejudice” with the “necessary distance”.

In the document she published, Kohl-Richter complained several times that the CDU had not responded to the “confidence-building measures” it offered and demanded.

The party must first clarify its own relationship to Helmut Kohl "at the beginning of the common path" and also internally classify the events "from autumn 1999".

display

The CDU's black box affair began in November 1999 with an arrest warrant against the then treasurer Walther Leisler Kiep on suspicion of tax evasion.

Shortly afterwards, the then General Secretary Heiner Geißler admitted that the CDU had "black accounts" in the Kohl era.

Kohl's widow is bothered by the fact that the view of her husband's life performance is always overlaid by what she calls this "so-called donation affair".

Obviously, she considers the criticism of Helmut Kohl to be excessively exaggerated and calls for a "fair, fact-based classification of events and the disproportionality in dealing with him and a 'mistake'".

From their point of view, it is not about “objective reappraisal”, but “more than ever about convictions, ideology, destruction and falsification of history”.

That is another reason why she did not want to join the foundation's board of trustees or approve the project.

December 22, 1989: Helmut Kohl in the crowd in front of the Brandenburg Gate, 28 years after the wall was erected

Source: picture-alliance / dpa

The question now is how to proceed.

Because after being voted out of office as Chancellor, Kohl had sent an estimated 200 Leitz files with historically valuable documents to the CDU-affiliated Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung in 1998, some of which were borrowed again in 2010 for his memoirs.

You were transferred to Oggersheim.

There they are, or at least in the care of the current homeowner, to this day.

They should therefore be permanently inaccessible for a sighting.

Walter Kohl, son of the former chancellor, criticized this in the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”: “Nobody should pursue any private interests here.

All official documents belong in the foundation so that they can be scientifically processed there. "

Meanwhile, the Union is afraid of a flop. A foundation without these files, so the fear, would be a "empty box".