Hans Apel

The title of this article is ambiguous. Further meanings are listed under Hans Apel (disambiguation) .

Hans Apel at a lecture in the Free Evangelical Congregation Heidelberg (2005)

Hans Apel (1978)

Hans Eberhard Apel (born February 25, 1932 in Hamburg ; † September 6, 2011 there ) was a German economist and politician ( SPD ). From 1972 to 1974 Apel was Parliamentary State Secretary to the Federal Minister of Foreign Affairs , from 1974 to 1978 Federal Minister of Finance and from 1978 to 1982 Federal Minister of Defense .

Life

Married for 55 years: Ingrid and Hans Apel

Hans Apel was born in the working-class district of Hamburg-Barmbek and baptized as a Protestant. His mother died in 1946. In the same year his father, an authorized signatory, returned from captivity .

Tombstone of Hans Apel

After graduating from high school in Uhlenhorst-Barmbek in Hamburg in 1951, Apel completed an apprenticeship as an import and export salesman in the mineral oil industry and attended evening courses in English and French. In 1954 he began to study economics at the University of Hamburg , joined the SDS and in 1957 earned his degree in economics. In 1961 he was at Heinz-Dietrich Ortlieb with the work about the British economist Edwin Cannan for Dr. rer. pole. PhD ("Edwin Cannan and his students. The New Liberals at the London School of Economics").

Apel took part in the parish life of his church and worked temporarily on the church council. In 1955 he married the accountant Ingrid Schwingel, whom he had met in the Protestant youth . They lived intermittently in Hamburg-Volksdorf and had daughters Ingrid and Hanne and four grandchildren. Hans Apel died in 2011 after a two-year illness. His final resting place is in the Ohlsdorf cemetery .

Political career

From 1958 to 1961 Apel was Secretary of the Socialist Group in the European Parliament in Strasbourg . From 1962 he was a civil servant at the European Parliament, where he was head of department responsible for economic and financial policy as well as for transport policy .

Apel saw himself as a representative of the people and was deliberately in the phone book. He was proud to have made around 10,000 house calls as an election campaigner. As a supporter of the line of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and the NATO double decision , he was attacked by groups of his party and pelted with tomatoes at the 1981 Kirchentag .

In 1990, Apel left the Bundestag after 25 years and withdrew from active politics. He worked as honorary professor for financial policy at the University of Rostock and on behalf of the Treuhand supervisory board chairman of the combine Schwarze Pump and in 1994 EKO-Stahl . He saw their "winding up" by the federal government and the trust as a dark spot in the reunification .

In 1991 he published the book The Deformed Democracy , in which he settled with party rule and clique . In the book The Sick Colossus: Europe - Reform or Crisis , published in 1994, he targeted the European Community at that time as "an expensive illusion". Unusual insights into the back room of politics is offered by Apel's book Der Abstieg , which not only describes the decline of the SPD in favor of the voters, but also his own. The former finance minister dated the emergence of the buzzword pension lie to October 1976. At that time, Helmut Schmidt declared in a television discussion: "The pension is safe." Apels comment: "That was the beginning of the pension lie."

Even as a schoolboy, Apel was a passionate supporter of the Hamburg football club FC St. Pauli and has been a member since 1947. From 1988 to 1991 he was vice-president and from 1997 to 1998 chairman of the supervisory board of the association.

Political party

Poster pasting 1976 in Hamburg-Barmbek

Apel joined the SPD in 1955 to protest against rearmament . For a while, he was given a small office in the Kurt-Schumacher-Haus , the headquarters of the Hamburg SPD, as Juso state manager . In 1957 he was one of Helmut Schmidt's election workers . Apel's political home was the SPD district of Hamburg-Nord, the second largest of the seven SPD districts in Hamburg. From 1966 to at least 1978 he was a member of the executive district board as an assessor for propaganda . Apel saw himself as a pragmatic politician, he was assigned to the conservative wing and developed into the spokesman for the Seeheimer Kreis . At the state party of the SPD Hamburg in January 1970, he spoke out jointly with January Ehlers , Peter Blach stone , Jens Litten and Wilhelm Nölling contrast from, is that the Axel Springer Verlag at Studio Hamburg , a 100 percent subsidiary of the Norddeutsche Rundfunk involved. The state party congress then passed a resolution in which it said, among other things: "The state party congress expects all decision-making bodies of the NDR and its subsidiaries to oppose the planned transaction in its current form." From 1970 to 1988 he was a member of the national executive committee of his party from 1984 to 1986 he was also a member of the Presidium. In 1985 he ran as the top candidate of the Berlin SPD in the elections to the House of Representatives for the office of Governing Mayor of Berlin , but could not prevail against the incumbent Eberhard Diepgen . When he was not re-elected to the party executive in 1988, Apel resigned from all party positions. The honorary membership in the SPD district of Berlin-Wedding remained .

MP

Hans Apel (1976)

Apel was a member of the German Bundestag from 1965 to 1990 and was also a member of the European Parliament from 1965 to 1970 . He was deputy chairman of the SPD parliamentary group from 1969 to 1972 and again from 1983 to September 5, 1988 . From 1969 to 1972 he was also chairman of the committee for transport and for postal and telecommunications .

Hans Apel put 1987 on the national list of Hamburg and otherwise always as directly selected delegates of the constituency Hamburg-Nord I and since 1980 the constituency Hamburg-Nord in the Bundestag one.

Public offices

In 1972 Apel became Parliamentary State Secretary for European Affairs in the Foreign Office. After the resignation of Willy Brandt , he was appointed Federal Minister of Finance in the Schmidt I cabinet on May 16, 1974 by the new Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt . His saying “I thought I was kicking a horse” became legendary, with which he responded to the discussion about the tax reform in an ARD television interview in 1975. After the reshuffle in the spring of 1978 he took over as the first Ungedienter on 16 February 1978, the leadership of the Ministry of Defense. After Helmut Kohl was elected Federal Chancellor, he left the Federal Government on October 1, 1982.

Awards

In 1992 Hans Apel was appointed honorary professor in the economics department at the University of Rostock.

In 2004 the Church Collection of the Bible and Confession in Bavaria (KSBB) awarded him the Walter Künneth Prize . Apel received the award, named after the Erlangen theologian, in particular for his book Volkskirche ohne Volk , in which he opposed what he believed to be the rampant modernism in the Protestant church. For this reason, Apel himself left the North Elbian Evangelical Lutheran Church and joined the Independent Evangelical Lutheran Church in 1999 .

Works (selection)

• Volker Bredenberg: I thought a horse would kick me. Federal Minister of Finance Dr. Hans Apel will answer 100 questions. A written talk show. Glöss, Hamburg 1975, ISBN 3-87261-006-6 .
• The descent. Political Diary 1978–1988. Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart 1990, ISBN 3-421-06559-4 .

Signature of Hans Apel

• The deformed democracy - party rule in Germany. Droemer Knaur, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-426-80000-4 .
• The sick colossus. Europe - reform or crisis. Rowohlt, Hamburg 1994, ISBN 3-498-00046-2 .
• State without measure. The financial policy in the dead end. Econ, Düsseldorf 1997, ISBN 3-430-11066-1 .
• Destroyed illusions. My East German years. Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-421-05412-6 .
• People's Church without a people. The decline of the regional churches. Brunnen, Giessen 2003, ISBN 3-7655-1845-X .
• Europe without a soul. Brunnen, Giessen 2007, ISBN 978-3-7655-1952-9 .
• Hans, do it! Life memories. Brunnen, Giessen 2010, ISBN 978-3-7655-1793-8 .

Web links

Commons : Hans Apel  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Hans Apel in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry on Hans Apel in the Catalogus Professorum Rostochiensium
• Short biography of the BMVg
• Ex-Finance Minister Hans Apel, a reminder and doer , obituary by Jan Haarmeyer in the Hamburger Abendblatt from September 8, 2011
• An interview with Hans Apel can be viewed in the historical archive of the EU in Florence.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Former SPD Federal Minister Apel is dead , Spiegel Online , September 7, 2011, accessed on September 7, 2011
2. ↑ Hans Apel: Hans, do you do that. P. 177.
3. ↑ The Descent / Political Diary of a Decade. 5th edition. DVA, Stuttgart 1990, p. 24.
4. ^ Former finance minister Hans Apel died in Hamburg , Hamburger Abendblatt dated September 7, 2011
5. ^ Obituary in the Hamburger Abendblatt from September 8, 2011 , accessed on September 8, 2011
6. ↑ The Descent / Political Diary of a Decade , p. 11
7. ^ Jörn Westendorf: SPD Hamburg-Nord district; Annual report 1976/77; Edited by the SPD district of Hamburg-Nord
8. ↑ Former SPD Federal Minister Apel is dead. In: Spiegel Online . September 7, 2011, accessed February 22, 2013 . 
9. ^ "Studio participation is checked" , in: Hamburger Abendblatt from January 26, 1970, accessed on March 22, 2020.
10. ↑ Hans Apel: The Descent / Political Diary of a Decade. 5th edition, p. 334, DVA, Stuttgart 1990.
11. ^ Dudenredaktion (Ed.): Quotes and sayings. Origin and current use (Duden; Vol. 12) . Dudenverlag, 2002, p. 260 .
12. ↑ Hans Apel . In: Der Spiegel . No. 23 , 1975, p. 148 ( online ).