Günter Nooke

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Günter Nooke (2015)

Günter Nooke (* 21st January 1959 in Forst (Lausitz) ) is a former GDR - civil rights and a German politician ( Alliance 90 , CDU ). Nooke has been the Chancellor's Personal Africa Representative since 2010 and has also been the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development's Africa Representative since 2014 . From 2006 to March 2010 he was the Federal Government Commissioner for Human Rights Policy and Humanitarian Aid .

Life and work

Nooke completed an apprenticeship as a construction worker with high school diploma from 1975 to 1978 and then did military service with the NVA . He then began studying physics at the University of Leipzig in 1980 , which he completed in 1985 with a degree in physics. He then worked as a research assistant and most recently as a department head at the industrial hygiene inspection of the Cottbus district . In 1990 he finished his postgraduate studies as a medical physicist .

In 1995 he worked for the Expo 2000 general commissioner in Hanover and then until 1998 as head of the controlling department in the office of the control and budget committee for lignite refurbishment.

Günter Nooke is married to Maria Nooke , b. Herche, and has three children.

Political party

Günter Nooke (1990)

After Nooke had already joined a church opposition group in the GDR in 1987, in autumn 1989 he was one of the founders and on the board of the Democratic Awakening (DA). During this time he was also a member of the Central Round Table in the GDR. Due to differences about the further political orientation, Nooke resigned from the DA in January 1990 and joined the citizens' movement Democracy Now , for which he also ran for the 1990 Volkskammer election.

After Democracy Now merged in 1991 with the New Forum and the Peace and Human Rights Initiative to form Bündnis 90 , Nooke was a member of the executive committee of the Bündnis 90 regional association of Brandenburg until 1993. As a staunch opponent of the party association to Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen , he resigned from Bündnis 90 in May 1993 and founded the political association BürgerBündnis together with Matthias Platzeck .

Günter Nooke (2002)

Günter Nooke joined the CDU on December 17, 1996 together with other well-known civil rights activists . He participated in the basic program of the Brandenburg State Association. In 2000, Nooke pleaded in a thesis paper for the Berlin CDU regional association for a more relaxed approach to the SED successor party, the PDS . In the federal election campaign in 2002, he was the top candidate on the Berlin state list . His advocacy for a renewal of the Berlin regional association as part of the “Capital Union Discussion Group”, which saw itself primarily as a bridge into the pre-political area, led to internal party tensions from 2002 onwards, as a result of which he also resigned as chairman of the Berlin CDU regional group Bundestag lost.

Since November 2018, Nooke has been the country chairman of the Evangelical Working Group (EAK) of the CDU in Berlin and Brandenburg . In this function, he invited to the series of events Christian Kulturschoppen in June 2019 , thus continuing an earlier series of talks. From 2007 to 2009 he was deputy chairman of the CDU Pankow and from 2005 to 2009 chairman of the CDU branch in Prenzlauer Allee .

Nooke is a member of the CDU Federal Committee on Development Cooperation and Human Rights .

MP

From March to October 1990, Nooke was now a member of the GDR's first freely elected People's Chamber via the Alliance 90 list . Here he was a member of the Economic Committee and was also a member of the Board of Directors of the Treuhandanstalt from July to October .

From 1990 to 1994 Nooke was a member of the state parliament of Brandenburg . During this time he was also chairman of the Bündnis 90 parliamentary group , which in the traffic light coalition provided ministers Matthias Platzeck, Marianne Birthler (until 1992) and Roland Resch (from 1992). After the unification of Bündnis 90 with the Greens and the split of the unification opponents (including Nooke and Platzeck) as a citizens' alliance of free voters , both groups continued to participate in the government. After Nooke publicly questioned the credibility of statements made by Prime Minister Manfred Stolpe in the investigative committee on his earlier contacts with the Ministry for State Security in the spring of 1994 , the SPD terminated the coalition on March 22, 1994.

From 1998 to 2005 he was a member of the German Bundestag . From February 2000 to October 2002 he was deputy chairman of the CDU / CSU parliamentary group and also chairman of the parliamentary group working group for affairs in the new federal states . From October 2002 to October 2005 he was chairman of the working group on culture and media and thus also the cultural and media policy spokesman for the CDU / CSU parliamentary group. He was also the spokesman for the CDU / CSU parliamentary group in the Enquête Commission on Culture in Germany .

Nooke has always entered the Bundestag via the Berlin State List .

In the 2005 federal election , Nooke ran again in the Berlin-Pankow constituency . At the constituency assembly on June 21, 2005, Nooke prevailed against his challenger, Vice-President of the House of Representatives , Christoph Stölzl , with 83 percent of the vote. Although he was still the top candidate of the Berlin CDU for the 2002 Bundestag election , he was not given a place on the state list in 2005. Since he received only 15.3 percent of the first votes in his constituency , he left the Bundestag after the general election.

Public offices

After initially being discussed as Minister of State for Culture, on March 8, 2006, he was appointed Federal Government Commissioner for Human Rights Policy and Humanitarian Aid . Since the FDP claimed this position in the new coalition , Nooke was appointed the Federal Chancellor's Africa Commissioner on March 31, 2010. He has been the Africa Commissioner of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development since 2014.

Political

As a cultural politician at the federal level, he primarily focused on the culture of remembrance . The planned construction of a Freedom and Unity Monument goes back to Nooke's initiative in May 1998 . As the rapporteur of the Union parliamentary group for culture of remembrance in Germany, he was in charge of the application “Funding of memorials on the history of dictatorships in Germany - overall concept for a worthy commemoration of all victims of the two German dictatorships”, which in 2004 sparked a public controversy. The hearing took place on February 16, 2005 in the Bundestag Committee for Culture and the Media, and the result showed a corresponding need for action. As chairman of the working group of the CDU / CSU for the study commission “Culture in Germany”, he took positions on fundamental changes in the framework conditions of the cultural scene in Germany.

In 1996, Nooke was a founding member of the Citizens' Bureau for dealing with consequential damage caused by the SED dictatorship.

In October 2018, Nooke came under fire after he said in an interview, "Experts, including Africans, say: The Cold War damaged Africa more than the colonial era." Colonialism has helped to free Africa from archaic structures. Critics from the parties SPD, FDP, Die Linke and Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen saw historical revisionism and racism in it ; Union politicians defended it with the argument that the colonial era was long ago. Yet African governments cited "colonialism as an excuse to divert attention from failure". That's Nooke's point. He countered the criticism that he was far from "relativizing the crimes of the colonial era in any way". The comparison comes from the British-Sudanese entrepreneur Mo Ibrahim ("I think the Cold War was worse for Africa than colonialism").

Following a parliamentary question, the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development stated that a comparison of the colonial era and the Cold War was inappropriate. In November 2018, a group of well-known German Africanists complained in an open letter to Chancellor Merkel about Nooke and his image of Africa, because he was spreading “colonial stereotypes” with “racist undertones”. Nooke not only “mocked” the descendants of victims of colonial violence, but also “adopted a perspective that accommodates populist and racist positions”. Because of his "colonial revisionist statements" they demanded the dismissal of Nooke. Politicians from the opposition, the FDP and the Greens also demanded his dismissal.

In August 2019, Nooke came under fire again after the meat industrialist Clemens Tönnies , as a keynote speaker at the Day of Crafts in Paderborn, spoke out against tax increases that reduce meat consumption as a means to combat climate change. It would be better to build twenty power plants a year in Africa so that “the Africans stop cutting trees and they stop producing children when it's dark”. Nooke showed solidarity: "The problems raised by Tönnies such as the disappearance of the rainforest and population growth on the African continent are real and must be talked about and possibly discussed controversially." Nooke's words caused CDU member Charles Huber to leave his party. The trigger for this, Huber explained, was that Nooke had relativized "racially motivated communication". "Flank protection for a racist statement is unacceptable", so Nooke had "specifically supported" Tönnies' statements.

Huber wrote that in his office Nooke did not bring Germany and African countries closer together, his repetitive and tenor similar statements paint the image of a man who has not made a name for himself through competence, instead he often has his position as Africa representative used to depict the continent, its inhabitants, the diaspora and people of African descent "in a humiliating way".

Honorary positions

Publications

Honors

literature

Web links

Commons : Günter Nooke  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development BMZ: Günter Nooke. Retrieved April 8, 2020 .
  2. a b c d e Document on the BMZ website , accessed on February 17, 2017
  3. (idea) Nooke new chairman for Berlin and Brandenburg. Retrieved May 16, 2019 .
  4. (Evangelischer Kirchenkreis Berlin-Mitte) Christian Kulturschoppen: “What use is the folly of the gospel today?” Retrieved on June 2, 2019 .
  5. (KNA) Stäblein: Also mention the differences in ecumenism. June 2, 2019, accessed June 3, 2019 .
  6. (KNA) Church must counteract division. June 2, 2019, accessed June 3, 2019 .
  7. (Die Welt) "Kulturschoppen" with police appearance. May 5, 2003, accessed June 2, 2019 .
  8. Bundestag printed paper 15/3048 , German Bundestag , May 4, 2004.
  9. About us | Buergerbuero Berlin. Retrieved April 25, 2017 .
  10. ^ Günter Nooke. Retrieved April 25, 2017 .
  11. “We thought too long in the help mode” , in: BZ am Sonntag of October 7, 2018, accessed on March 30, 2019.
  12. “Bursting with Racist Stereotypes”. Africa Officer Nooke after interview under pressure , Focus, October 11, 2018
  13. ^ Accusations of racism against Merkel's Africa representative , Die Welt, October 11, 2018
  14. Racism allegation against Africa commissioner Nooke , Der Tagesspiegel, October 11, 2018
  15. Africa policy with healthy egoism , Rheinische Post, February 2, 2018
  16. Jana Anzlinger: "Far be it from me to relativize the crimes of the colonial era" , in: Süddeutsche Zeitung. Article dated October 12, 2018, accessed November 1, 2018.
  17. ^ Mo Ibrahim's Search for Good Governance , The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Canada. Published May 10, 2010 Updated May 1, 2018
  18. a b Christoph Titz: Anger over the Federal Government's Africa Commissioner Learning from despots , Der Spiegel, February 27, 2019
  19. ^ Open letter from the Institute for African Studies and Egyptology at the University of Cologne , Association for African Studies in Germany, November 14, 2019.
  20. New demands for resignation against Merkel advisor Nooke , Der Tagesspiegel, April 11, 2019
  21. Clemens Tönnies outraged with racist statements .
  22. Uschi Diesl, Lord of the Pork Halves, in: Junge Welt, August 8, 2019.
  23. "The CDU allows racism, I can no longer accept that" .
  24. Former television commissioner Huber leaves the CDU
  25. Georg Schwarte: The Chancellor's Africa Commissioner wants debate on Tönnie's statements , tagesschau.de, August 7, 2019
  26. Tönnies' statements inexcusable for many , tagesschau.de, August 4, 2019.
  27. Kuratorium - Foundation for Ecology and Democracy eV In: Foundation for Ecology and Democracy eV ( stiftung-oekologie-u-demokratie.de [accessed on April 25, 2017]).
  28. CV Nooke German. (PDF) Retrieved March 30, 2019 .
  29. Earthquake in Haiti: World Vision appoints board of trustees. (No longer available online.) Aktion Deutschland Hilft , archived from the original on July 18, 2010 ; Retrieved July 18, 2010 .
  30. https://amrefgermany.de/informieren/ueber-uns/vereinsorgane/guenter-nooke/