Married to a monster

Spectator, The, Jul 28, 2001 by Gimson, Andrew

The suicide of Helmut Kohl's wife was a tragedy that underlined the ex-Chancellor's poisonous legacy. By Andrew Gimson

HELMUT KOHL has buried many bodies in his time, and now he has buried his wife Hannelore. Earlier this month, while Mr Kohl was in Berlin, she committed suicide by taking an overdose of painkillers and sleeping tablets at their home in Ludwigshafen, on the Rhine. The way he disposed of her body was characteristic, combining elements of mendacity, effrontery and the ability to dominate those around him. He assembled the entire German establishment for a requiem mass in a Roman Catholic cathedral for a Protestant who had committed suicide. The German media had already, almost without exception, swallowed Mr Kohl's explanation for her death, which was that she was suffering from such an agonising allergy to light that for the last 15 months she had only been able to leave the house under cover of darkness.

Doctors have been unable, from the scant details given, to identify her illness, and she was buried without post mortem. Some people have reported that she seemed well able to withstand daylight within the last few months. A friend of mine recently saw her going for a walk in the Grunewald forest on the edge of Berlin, and Mr Kohl himself alluded, on the day before she died, to their forthcoming summer holiday in Austria.

Only Stem magazine ventured to point out that the official account did not hang together. It also remarked that a few weeks ago, when the Kohls' son Peter married a Turkish woman, Elif Sozen, in Istanbul, Mr Kohl attended the wedding not with Mrs Kohl, but with his personal assistant, Juliane Weber, who started working for him in Mainz in 1964 and has long been his right-hand aide. What Mrs Kohl thought of this we may never know. Mr Kohl and Mrs Weber were flown to Istanbul in a jet belonging to the media mogul Leo Kirch. A close friend of Mr Kohl, Kirch owns 40 per cent of the Springer group, which has lapped up the official version of Mrs Kohl's death.

German journalists have speculated for several decades among themselves about the relationship between Mr Kohl and Mrs Weber, but it was quite extraordinary for Stem to mention her in print, since German journalists pride themselves on reporting nothing about the private lives of politicians, or nothing of which the politicians themselves would not approve. This self-denying ordinance is in many ways admirable. It certainly gives parts of the German press a more elevated tone than anything found in London. Lord Reith would feel more at home there than here, in part because the old-style BBC played a large role in educating the postwar generation of German journalists.

There is a moral seriousness in Germany, which we in our degraded frivolity have lost. But there is also an almost criminal naivety when reporting the activities of an operator like Mr Kohl - a preposterous willingness to take someone like him at his own estimate, and a sense that it would be tasteless and unprofessional to ask awkward questions.

The person who tolerated Mr Kohl the longest was his poor wife. Born in March 1933, at the age of 11 Hannelore Renner, as she then was, found herself tending German soldiers as they halted at Dobeln, between Dresden and Leipzig, on hospital trains from the eastern front. The German civil population also fled westwards in the depths of winter as the Russians advanced. Hannelore could remember mothers refusing to surrender babies who had frozen to death. She remembered the smell of burning flesh during air raids. As the Russians arrived, she saw women raped, and has implied that she was raped too. She spent many months as a refugee on the hard journey westwards to the Rhine.

She never spoke at any length or in any detail about these experiences. Like most of her contemporaries and their parents, her response to the horrors she had witnessed was the deepest possible silence. What had taken place was unspeakable. At the age of 15 she met the 18-year-old Helmut Kohl at a dance. Hannelore's family were in straitened circumstances and her dress was made out of three flags, from two of which she or her mother had unpicked the swastika. As Hannelore herself said, `Nothing could be more practical, when you're poor and you want to dance.' She was one of millions of West German women who after the war made a desperate attempt to lead normal lives, baking cakes with the aid of modern kitchen equipment, allowing themselves to be bullied by their husbands, clinging with a courage born of incipient barminess to every last petty-bourgeois banality.

Hannelore became fiercely normal. She qualified as an interpreter into French and English, and did not marry Helmut until 1960: `when we could afford to buy ourselves a washing machine'. The loneliness of the politician's wife descended on her. By day Mr Kohl worked, and by night he went out with his buddies to eat, drink and talk politics. She brought up their two sons almost on her own, fiercely defended their privacy, refused to give way to self-pity, won respect for her charitable work, but found herself mocked for the extreme orderliness of her hair and other domestic arrangements. In the Seventies, a large concrete wall had to be erected round the family house and armoured glass was installed in the windows to ward off terrorist attacks. She was seldom seen in Bonn. In 1998, when her husband lost the chancellorship, she might have hoped to see more of him in Ludwigshafen, but he carried on as a backbench MP, joined the move of the politicians to Berlin in 1999, and was soon embroiled in an unending struggle to defend his reputation.