Eberhard Diepgen

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Eberhard Diepgen in April 2016 when naming Hanna-Renate-Laurien-Platz in Berlin-Lankwitz
Signature of Eberhard Diepgen

Eberhard Diepgen (born November 13, 1941 in Berlin ) is a German politician ( CDU ). He was state and parliamentary group chairman of the CDU Berlin and from 1984 to 1989 and from 1991 to 2001 mayor of Berlin .

He is also the namesake and patron of the Eberhard Diepgen Prize .

Life

Diepgen was born in the Pankow hospital "Maria Heimsuchung". During the war he was evacuated to Klingenthal . Diepgen grew up in the Wedding district in the Gesundbrunnen district in the 1950s . He lived here from the age of ten until he began studying in the Atlantic Garden City . Diepgen is the grandson of the medical historian Paul Diepgen ; the local politician Martin Diepgen , who is 15 years his junior, is his half-brother. After graduating from high school in 1960 at Diesterweg-Gymnasium , Diepgen began studying law at the Free University of Berlin (FU), which he completed in 1967 with the first state examination. He completed his legal traineeship in 1972 with the second state examination.

Diepgen has been a member of the CDU since 1963. At the end of January 1963, the 14th convention of the Free University of Diepgen, which was a member of the Ring of Christian Democratic Students (RCDS) and the Saravia fraternity in Berlin, a striking connection, elected AStA chairman. This provoked the displeasure of the convention's council of elders. With the reason: "The elders consider it incompatible with the spirit of the Free University and the ideas of a modern university ... that a member of a striking association represents the entirety of all students of the Free University", he decided on February 2, 1963 a strike vote on the validity of the election. Thereupon the student body of the FU Diepgen voted out on February 15, 1963 with a high turnout with a clear majority. Two years later, Diepgen was elected deputy chairman of the AStA umbrella association VDS .

Together with friends from the time he was studying law, Diepgen founded a group that, referring to one of the heads, Peter Kittelmann , was also ironically called the “ K group ”. Since his studies at the law faculty of the Free University of Berlin, Diepgen has been closely known to Klaus-Rüdiger Landowsky , the later parliamentary group chairman and the “ gray eminence ” of the CDU in the House of Representatives during Diepgen's mayor.

Eberhard Diepgen at an election campaign event in the 1980s

In 1971 Diepgen became a member of the state executive committee and in 1983, finally, for a total of 19 years, state chairman of the CDU Berlin . During this time he was also a member of the executive committee of the federal CDU. When he was elected to the Berlin House of Representatives in 1971 , he was first elected to the Berlin House of Representatives, to which he was a member until 2001. From 1980 until his election as governing mayor in 1984 and from 1989 to 1991 he was chairman of the CDU parliamentary group. In 1980 he was also elected to the German Bundestag , but resigned his mandate on February 3, 1981. In 2002 Diepgen moved with his wife Monika von Zehlendorf to Wilmersdorf and has been working as a lawyer ever since. Diepgen has a son and a daughter, both of whom are of legal age.

Diepgen as Governing Mayor

Diepgen with Rupert Scholz in the Federal Council , 1988
Eberhard Diepgen at the opening of a S-Bahn line, 1998

On February 9, 1984, Eberhard Diepgen was elected Mayor of Berlin to succeed Richard von Weizsäcker , who was running for the office of Federal President . Within the Berlin CDU, Diepgen had previously prevailed against the opposing candidate Hanna-Renate Laurien . In the 1985 elections to the House of Representatives , the CDU under his leadership was able to assert itself as the strongest parliamentary group despite slight losses (46.4% of the votes). Diepgen prevailed against his opponent, the long-standing Federal Finance and Defense Minister Hans Apel ( SPD ).

In the course of the so-called " Antes Affair " in 1985/86 it was revealed that Diepgen had received at least 75,000  marks as a "donation" from the building contractor Kurt Franke. Numerous people from Berlin's politics and administration were on his list of donors. In the election for the Berlin House of Representatives in 1989 , the CDU suffered losses of 8.7 percent. Since his coalition partner FDP also failed at the five percent hurdle , he had to leave office in favor of Walter Momper , who formed a red-green Senate . After the first all-Berlin elections on December 2, 1990 , the CDU was again the strongest parliamentary group. Diepgen was re-elected Mayor of Berlin on January 24, 1991 by a grand coalition of the CDU and SPD.

After the elections to the Berlin House of Representatives in 1995 and 1999 , he was re-elected as head of a grand coalition. Diepgen was able to assert himself against Ingrid Stahmer in 1995 and again against Walter Momper in 1999, despite his own loss of votes . In 1999 Diepgen also took over the justice department because the coalition parties could not agree on the number of cabinet posts. The department's lack of independence has been criticized by associations of judges, public prosecutors and lawyers.

After the Berlin banking scandal , the grand coalition broke in early summer 2001. Finally, on June 16, 2001, Diepgen was voted out of office with the votes of the SPD, PDS and Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen by means of a vote of no confidence. The SPD parliamentary group leader Klaus Wowereit was elected as his successor . Diepgen was Governing Mayor for a total of 15 years and five months, making it the longest-serving Governing Mayor in the city's history. During his “government break” from 1989 to 1991, the phase from the fall of the Berlin Wall (on November 9, 1989) to reunification (on October 3, 1990) fell - in these almost two years he had to leave the office of mayor to his SPD rival Momper. In addition, Diepgen did not make it into the office of Federal Council President, as the State of Berlin also held the Federal Council Presidency during Momper's term of office (November 1, 1989 to October 31, 1990), only to return it six months after Diepgen resigned (November 1, 2001) to take over. His successor Klaus Wowereit, in turn, holds the record for the longest uninterrupted term of office as Governing Mayor of Berlin.

Diepgen is the only governing mayor who managed to return after leaving office. This process is rare among German heads of state government. Before Diepgen, this was only the case with the Bavarian Prime Minister Wilhelm Hoegner (1954) and Hans Ehard (1960), Hamburg's First Mayor Max Brauer (1957) and the Lower Saxony Prime Minister Hinrich Wilhelm Kopf (1959).

The time after the mayorship

Eberhard Diepgen (2015)

For the early election of the House of Representatives in October 2001 , Diepgen renounced both a new top candidate and a candidacy for a seat in the House of Representatives. The top candidate was Frank Steffel . In 2002 he gave up the office of regional chairman of the Berlin CDU to the former Senator for Culture Christoph Stölzl after his own party refused to place him on the list for the 2002 Bundestag election . Until the end of 2011, Diepgen worked as a lawyer in an international law firm specializing in commercial law.

In 2004 the Berlin CDU elected Eberhard Diepgen as its honorary chairman. In the election to the 16th German Bundestag in 2005 , he ran as a direct candidate in the constituency of Berlin-Neukölln , but was defeated by his opponent from the SPD, Ditmar Staffelt . After the experience in 2002, he had voluntarily given up a place on the list. Diepgen regularly uses his position as honorary chairman of the CDU in Berlin to get involved in his party, for example in the election of Friedbert Pflüger as parliamentary group leader, the election of his former office manager Frank Henkel and the quarrels about Ingo Schmitt as state chairman in September 2008.

In October 2007 Diepgen was awarded the Order of Merit of the State of Berlin at the suggestion of his successor, the Governing Mayor Klaus Wowereit . In 2014 he finally received the title of city ​​elder in Berlin.

He is the namesake and patron of the Eberhard Diepgen Prize announced by the CDU Berlin in 2018 , which is awarded to people or organizations who have made an outstanding contribution to social cohesion in Berlin.

Volunteering

Awards (excerpt)

Senates

Works

Filmography

literature

  • Michael Sontheimer and Jochen Vorfelder : Antes & Co. stories from the Berlin swamp. Rotbuch Verlag, Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-88022-324-6 .
  • Mathew D. Rose: Berlin. Capital of felt and corruption. Transit Buchverlag, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-426-26930-9 .
  • Mathew D. Rose : Good company. Transit Buchverlag, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-88747-179-2 .
  • Mathew D. Rose: Waiting for the Flood. About clique economy, self-service and the rampant public debt with special attention to our capital. Transit Buchverlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-88747-196-2 .
  • Werner Breunig, Andreas Herbst (ed.): Biographical handbook of the Berlin parliamentarians 1963–1995 and city councilors 1990/1991 (= series of publications of the Berlin State Archives. Volume 19). Landesarchiv Berlin, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-9803303-5-0 , p. 117 f.

Web links

Commons : Eberhard Diepgen  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Anja Reich: In Berlin it is completely different everywhere (interview with Eberhard Diepgen). In: Berliner Zeitung , 25./26. April 2015.
  2. ↑ Mathias Stengel, Sabine Flatau: Atlantic garden city as beautiful as it used to be . In: Die Welt , October 26, 2005
  3. ↑ 50 years 1968. Interview with Eberhard Diepgen and Knut Nevermann. In: Berliner Geschichte , Issue 11 ( Berlin 1968 ), October 2017.
  4. ↑ Rolf Elker: Diepgen and the consequences . In: Josef Fendt (Ed.): Fu60. Counter notices . AStA FU, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-926522-31-3 , pp. 12-15. PDF .
  5. ↑ Anett Seidler. Diepgen as Justice Senator overwhelmed . In: Die Welt , January 14, 2001
  6. ↑ Sabine Deckwerth: Governing and Senator: Diepgen negotiates with himself. In: Berliner Zeitung , February 23, 2001
  7. ↑ Eberhard Diepgen. Thümmel, Schütze & Partner, archived from the original on September 21, 2011 ; Retrieved on November 27, 2017 (biography on the law firm's website; end of activity in archive version not proven).
  8. ↑ List of all decorations awarded by the Federal President for services to the Republic of Austria from 1952 (PDF; 6.9 MB)
personal data
SURNAME Diepgen, Eberhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (CDU), MdA, MdB
DATE OF BIRTH November 13, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin