Richard von Weizsäcker obituary

Richard von Weizsäcker, who has died aged 94, was the first postwar president of a united Germany and one of half a dozen chancellors and presidents (three of each) who made Germany uniquely fortunate in its leaders during 40 years of partition.

Few if any heads of state have less power than Germany’s, a legacy of 1933, when the doddering president, Paul von Hindenburg, awarded the chancellorship to Adolf Hitler (but in strict accord with the constitution of the Weimar Republic, which decreed that the post be offered to the leader of the largest parliamentary party). The West German constitution of 1949, extended to united Germany with minor adjustments from 1990, requires the Bundestag, or lower house, to elect the chancellor and ministers before they collect their certificates of appointment from the federal president, whose constitutional role is thus limited to the absolute representational minimum.

But it was precisely in this role as spokesman of his people and personal embodiment of the second democracy on German soil after Weimar that Von Weizsäcker excelled. He consolidated its reputation and good name as lesser leaders made their gaffes, unable to cope with the Nazi past by honestly facing up to it. Although presiding with dignity over the peaceful unification of West and East Germany was no minor claim to fame, his greatest moment was of his own making, and came five years earlier, on 8 May 1985 – the 40th anniversary of the defeat of Nazism.

It was left to him to restore democratic Germany’s reputation after the embarrassing damage done to it by a tactless Chancellor Helmut Kohl during a visit on that date by the US president Ronald Reagan. Reagan naturally planned to honour the memory of American servicemen killed in the second world war. But Kohl took the view that this should be somehow balanced by laying a wreath at a German war cemetery.

There was one handily close to the US air force base at Bitburg; unfortunately some of the graves belonged to Waffen-SS men. Kohl sought to quell the ensuing uproar by adding a visit to the memorial at Belsen death camp to the bewildered Reagan’s programme. This “correction” was understandably seen as a cynical afterthought and therefore an insult to Holocaust victims.

Kohl, though in a hole, carried on digging: he protested that he had been born too late to bear any guilt for the war (but not too late to join the Hitler Youth, as some recalled at the time). The only man with the power to restore Bonn’s tattered dignity was the powerless president, who rose splendidly to the occasion.

“Every single German was in a position to witness what Jewish citizens had to suffer,” he said uncompromisingly. “Anyone ... who cared to inform himself could not escape the fact that the deportation trains were rolling.” Too many Germans had simply refused to acknowledge what was happening, he said: there was no such thing as national guilt, but there was individual guilt. While young Germans could not be blamed for the crimes of their elders, they had been left “a hard legacy” and young and old alike had to accept the facts of the past. “Those who close their eyes to the past will remain blind regarding the future,” he said. Von Weizsäcker ended with a passionate appeal to young Germans to show tolerance and face the historical truth. The contrast with his Austrian presidential contemporary, Kurt Waldheim, who lied about his war record, could not have been greater. It was a privilege to be present when he made peace with the past.

The effect of the speech in the Bundestag chamber was all the greater because the German leaders and foreign dignitaries present knew these were not the words of a professional speechwriter. They were written by the president himself, a man who had worn German uniform throughout the war. Worldwide admiration ensued and Bonn could hold up its collective head once more.

Von Weizsäcker’s steadying voice was heard again in the euphoric days at the end of 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down, opening the way to German unification as the Soviet bloc collapsed. Instead of crowing on the ruins of the wall, he went to the bombed remnants of the Memorial Church in Berlin and warned against triumphalism and euphoria, cautioning against hasty actions and pleading for patience with the East Germans. He also correctly foresaw problems if political union ran ahead of economic integration. In this, too, the apolitical president and conscience of the nation revealed acutely sensitive political antennae, acquired in his earlier career as a party politician in the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

Von Weizsäcker was born in Stuttgart, the son of Marianne (nee von Grävenitz) and Ernst von Weizsäcker, the administrative head of the foreign ministry, a brilliant career diplomat who inevitably played a big background role in Hitler’s diplomatic coups at Munich and Moscow and was his ambassador to the Vatican during the war. The young Richard would help to defend his father at Nuremberg, where he was convicted on one charge and briefly imprisoned.

Richard began to study law at Grenoble and Oxford, before army training in 1938. He joined the 9th Infantry division, the showcase regiment at Potsdam that provided the guard of honour at state ceremonies. He fought with the regiment from the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 onwards, to the end of the second world war, rising to captain. A regimental comrade decided in 1943 to check on rumours of German atrocities in occupied eastern Europe; Von Weizsäcker admitted later that he knew from then on that they were true.

After the war he continued his legal studies at the University of Göttingen, obtaining his doctorate in 1954, the year he joined the CDU and took up a career in industrial management. Always a convinced Lutheran, Von Weizsäcker was active in the councils of the Evangelical church as president of its convention from 1964-70 and a member of its synod until 1984, when he became federal president.

He was elected to the Bundestag in 1969 and from 1971 rose in the CDU party organisation, becoming chairman of key policy committees. He was vice-president of the Bundestag (deputy speaker) for two years until 1981, when he was elected governing mayor of West Berlin, a post he held until chosen as federal president by the electoral college of federal and state parliamentary deputies. He was elected for a second term in 1989 and retired in 1994 after a job universally recognised as well done.

Historically he ranks no less than equal to the strong-minded Social Democrat Gustav Heinemann (1969-74) and the Liberal Free Democrat Walter Scheel (1974-79), co-architect with Chancellor Willy Brandt of “ostpolitik”, the detente with the communists that helped to end the cold war.

Von Weizsäcker earned the right to preside over its most dramatic result, the fall of the wall and the unification that followed – not least because he was one of the first to see and warn of the dangers that accompanied it.

He is survived by his wife, Marianne von Kretschmann, whom he married in 1953; and their two sons, Robert and Fritz, and daughter, Beatrice. Another son, Andreas, died in 2008.