Former chancellor’s legacy honoured in controversial European state ceremony

July 1, 2017 by: Stefan Wagstyl in Berlin

Angela Merkel and other world leaders paid tribute on Saturday to former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, the architect of German reunification, in a controversial ceremony at the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

Kohl, who died last month at the age of 87, was lauded in a unique event organised in accordance with his wish for a European commemoration instead of a German state funeral.

Kohl was praised as a dedicated European who worked to overcome the divisive effects of the second world war and the Cold War.

Ms Merkel said Kohl’s motive was always to try to make sure there would be no more war in Europe. Speaking next to his coffin, which was draped in the blue European Union flag, Ms Merkel said: “Now it’s up to us to preserve your legacy. I bow before you and your memory in gratitude and humility.”

Former US president Bill Clinton said: “Helmut Kohl gave us the chance to be involved in something bigger than ourselves, bigger than our terms in office and bigger than our fleeting careers.”

French president Emmanuel Macron, Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker also paid their respects. “Helmut Kohl was a German patriot and a European patriot,” Mr Juncker said. Kohl’s funeral request divides the nation he reunited Choice of Strasbourg for European state ceremony seen as snub to German politicians

Kohl’s casket was later flown by helicopter to his hometown of Ludwigshafen, where hundreds of mourners filled the streets. Now covered in a German flag, the coffin was taken down the Rhine river to the historic town of Speyer, for a Roman Catholic funeral mass in the medieval cathedral.

Kohl’s contribution to German and European reunification at the end of the Cold War and his 16 years’ service as German chancellor are widely acknowledged. But so was his capacity to make enemies and bear grudges.

He never forgave Ms Merkel, his former political protégée, who replaced him as leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union after he was embroiled in a party-financing scandal. He was bitter at the way he felt he was hounded out of power.

Kohl’s decision to bypass a German state funeral in favour of a European ceremony was widely seen in Berlin as partly an act of revenge against Ms Merkel and other German politicians he felt had crossed him.

Ms Merkel referred obliquely to their differences in her eulogy. “I could tell you stories as well,” she said. “But all that paled in comparison to his life’s achievements.”

Kohl also left a divided family. Walter and Peter, his sons from his first marriage to Hannelore Kohl, who died in 2001, were at logger heads with Maike Kohl-Richter, the late chancellor’s second wife, whom he married in 2008.