Klaus von Dohnanyi

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Klaus von Dohnanyi (1978)

Klaus Karl Anton von Dohnanyi [ doˈnaːni ] (born June 23, 1928 in Hamburg ) is a German lawyer and politician ( SPD ). From 1972 to 1974 he was Federal Minister for Education and Science , from 1969 to 1981 a member of the German Bundestag and from 1981 to 1988 First Mayor of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg.

life and work

Life

Klaus von Dohnanyi (left) with Bruno Kreisky at the SPD party conference (1982)
Klaus von Dohnanyi (left) with Eberhard Diepgen (1986)

Klaus von Dohnanyi spent the first ten years of his life in the Berlin district of Grunewald .

His father Hans von Dohnanyi was transferred to Leipzig in 1938 as a Reich judge. From 1938 to 1940 Klaus von Dohnanyi attended the St. Thomas School in Leipzig , from 1940 to 1944 the Benedictine high school in Ettal and finally the Victoria high school in Potsdam .

From autumn 1944, at the age of 16, he was assigned to the “ Volkssturm ”, but in November 1944 he was still listed as “fit for war” and in January 1945 of the next year he was called up to a combat battalion of the Reich Labor Service in Karstädt in Prignitz . Shortly before the end of the war, the battalion marched towards northwestern Mecklenburg and was disbanded around May 8 or 9. He was then taken prisoner in Canada for a few days in May and was released from captivity because of his father's resistance. He stayed with his comrade Nils Otto von Taube with an estate family in Mecklenburg. Because of the advance of the Red Army, he and his comrade crossed the Elbe in a boat with the help of a fisherman. Then he rode a bicycle to Friedrichsbrunn in the Harz Mountains in search of information about his father . From there to Treysa in Northern Hesse and on to Frankfurt am Main and Wiesbaden to the American troops. From there to the estate of the Truchseß von Wetzhausen family in Bundorf in Franconia. In autumn he hitchhiked or took a bus to the Birklerhof, an offshoot of the Schloss Salem school, and met his mother there. From there he drove with his mother and siblings to Windach to attend the St. Ottilien school.

He graduated from high school in 1946 at the Benedictine monastery of St. Ottilien . He then began in 1946 to study law at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich , which he completed in 1949 with the first state examination in law. In 1949 he was magna cum laude with a dissertation on "The division of property - appearance and legal consequences under applicable law" to become a Dr. jur. PhD .

He studied from 1950 to 1951 with two scholarships in the USA at Columbia and Stanford University . In 1953 he earned a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) degree from Yale University, which was not very widespread at the time .

From 1951 to 1952 he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Tübingen and from 1952 to 1953 as an assessor in an American law firm in New York City and at the Ford plant in Detroit . From 1954 he worked as a trainee at Ford in Cologne , from 1956 as head of the planning department. In 1957 he passed the second state examination in law. From 1960 to 1968 he was a managing partner and head of the “Planning and Forecasts” department at the Infratest market research institute .

From 1990 to 1994 von Dohnanyi worked, among other things, as a representative of the Treuhandanstalt for the privatization of East German combines, in particular for the hoisting machine and crane manufacturer TAKRAF in Leipzig. From 2003 to 2004 he was the spokesman for the Eastern Discussion Group .

In 1997 von Dohnanyi spoke in front of the German Bundestag on the occasion of the memorial service for the day of commemoration of the victims of National Socialism .

In 1998 Dohnanyi resigned from the advisory board of the non-profit Bertelsmann Foundation, to which he had been a member since 1989.

He is the founding commissioner of the Bucerius Law School in Hamburg.

Klaus von Dohnanyi at the matinee for Siegfried Lenz's 85th birthday, 2011

Today von Dohnanyi is a deputy chairman of the Convention for Germany chaired by Rupert Scholz , a non-partisan body that, among other things, advocates federalism reform in Germany, which, with clear responsibilities for the Bundestag and Bundesrat, should enable faster decisions in German politics . He was also the curator of the New Social Market Economy Initiative , chairman of the advisory board of the Berlin publishing house Wegweiser GmbH, member of the supervisory board of Audi AG and PrimaCom AG and chairman of the supervisory board of Design Bau AG and the German Association for Protection of Securities . He has headed the Federal Government's Minimum Wage Committee since 2009, and in 2010 he was the lead mediator in the collective bargaining dispute at Lufthansa .

Von Dohnanyi is a member of the Atlantik-Brücke and the German Society for Foreign Policy . In 1986 he was the founder of the Hamburg Foundation for the Politically Persecuted .

family

Bärbel von Dohnanyi (* 1926), Klaus and his younger brother Christoph von Dohnányi (* 1929, later conductor) are the children of Hans von Dohnanyi and his wife Christine Bonhoeffer (1903–1965), a sister of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Protestant theologian and resistance fighter ). The lawyer Hans von Dohnanyi worked in the Reich Ministry of Justice from 1929 to 1938; since 1934 he had contact with circles of the Nazi resistance . His parents were arrested on the same day (April 5, 1943) as Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Hans von Dohnanyi was murdered in Sachsenhausen concentration camp shortly before the end of the war .

His first wife Renée Illing (1926-1958), daughter of the journalist and writer Werner Illing , whom he married in 1951, was a children's book illustrator and died of a brain tumor. From this marriage in 1952 the son Johannes was born. He is a German-American investigative journalist and writer. He was involved in the Cicero affair with Bruno Schirra in 2005 .

His second marriage was with the psychotherapist Christa Seidel, née Groß, who came from a Heidelberg merchant family. In the second marriage, daughter Babette von Dohnanyi (* 1966), artist, was born and Jakob von Dohnanyi (* 1961), architect, was adopted.

His brother's son, Justus von Dohnányi (* 1960), is a well-known actor.

Von Dohnanyi has been married to the writer Ulla Hahn since 1996 .

Political party

Von Dohnanyi has been a member of the SPD since 1957 . In 1979 he was elected state chairman of the SPD in Rhineland-Palatinate . As such, he led his party as the top candidate in the 1979 state election , but was unable to prevail against incumbent Bernhard Vogel .

After his election as Hamburg's First Mayor , he resigned from his party positions in Rhineland-Palatinate. As first mayor, he led the SPD into the mayor election campaigns in June and December 1982 as well as in 1986 and 1987 . In the new elections in December 1982 and June 1987, he was able to prevail against his CDU challengers Walther Leisler Kiep (1982) and Hartmut Perschau (1987), after the SPD was only the second strongest party in the regular elections in June 1982 and December 1986 behind the CDU and because of the “ Hamburg conditions ” there was no sufficient parliamentary majority to form a Senate.

Alienation from his party is unmistakable. In the Maischberger program on September 27, 2017, after the Bundestag election that the SPD had lost, he declared that the leader of the party Martin Schulz was the wrong chairman and unsuitable, and blatantly urged him to resign. In any case, he, Dohnanyi, did not vote for the SPD. He emphasized his personal friendship with Angela Merkel .

Klaus von Dohnanyi (2018)

MP

From 1969 until his resignation on June 24, 1981, Dohnanyi was a member of the German Bundestag . He always entered the Bundestag via the Rhineland-Palatinate state list .

In 1979 von Dohnanyi was elected to the Rhineland-Palatinate state parliament , but resigned the mandate after a short time. From 1982 to 1988 he was a member of the Hamburg Parliament .

Public offices

On March 1, 1968, von Dohnanyi joined the Federal Ministry of Economics , headed by Karl Schiller , as a permanent state secretary . He worked there until October 17, 1969. The Kiesinger government ended on October 21 (after the 1969 federal election the SPD and FDP formed a coalition).

On October 22, 1969 he became Parliamentary State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Education and Science ( Brandt I cabinet ). When Hans Leussink resigned from this office, von Dohnanyi was appointed his successor on March 15, 1972. When Willy Brandt resigned from the office of Federal Chancellor on May 7, 1974, von Dohnanyi also left the Federal Government on May 16, 1974 ( Brandt II cabinet ). Von Dohnanyi is the last living member of the government of the Brandt I cabinet and thus, according to the dating, the longest-serving retired Federal Minister. D. The oldest living former Federal Minister in years of age is the CSU politician Oscar Schneider .

On December 16, 1976 he was appointed Minister of State to the Foreign Office .

On June 24, 1981 von Dohnanyi was elected as the successor to Hans-Ulrich Klose as First Mayor of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and at the same time resigned from the office of State Minister in the Foreign Office. After the general election on June 6, 1982 , he remained in office as managing director; the general election on December 19, 1982 again gave the SPD an absolute majority in the citizenry. After the general election on May 17, 1987 , a social-liberal coalition carried its Senate .

On June 8, 1988, von Dohnanyi resigned from the office of First Mayor because of intrinsic power intrigues and a lack of political leeway. During his tenure fell among other things

  • the affair surrounding the long encirclement of anti-nuclear demonstrators (so-called " Hamburger Kessel "),
  • the peaceful solution to the Hafenstrasse conflict - he pushed through this together with his deputy Ingo von Münch ( FDP ) against resistance in both parties,
  • the construction of the Brokdorf nuclear power plant . His predecessor Klose had resigned, among other things, because he was against the construction of the power plant, but could not prevail against Werner Staak , the chairman of the Hamburg SPD.

Since March 2011 von Dohnanyi has been a member of the ethics committee for secure energy supplies .

Awards

Works

  • Letter to the German Democratic Revolutionaries. Munich 1990, ISBN 978-3-378-00428-3
  • The German risk. Droemer Knauer, Munich 1990, ISBN 978-3-426-26495-9 .
  • Central bank loan to the state ?: Contributions and comments on the proposal to finance public investments with interest-free and redemption-free central bank loans . Klaus von Dohnanyi (ed.). [Willi Albers ...]. 1st edition, Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden 1986. (Writings on monetary economics; 22) ISBN 3-78901214-9 .

See also

literature

  • Jochen Thies : The Dohnanyis. A family biography. Propylaea, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-549-07190-6 .
  • Marikje Smid: Hans Dohnanyi - Christine Bonhoeffer. A marriage in the resistance against Hitler. Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh 2002, ISBN 3-579-05382-5 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Klaus von Dohnanyi: My end of the war - the year in which I grew up. In " Hamburger Abendblatt ", May 5, 2020, p. 13.
  2. ↑ Trust: Good Spirit of the East . In: Der Spiegel . No. 18 , 1993 ( online - May 3, 1993 ).
  3. ↑ http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/archiv/klaus-von-dohnanyi-kritisiert-den-real-existierenden-aufbau-ost-ringkaempfe-in-der-treuhand,10810590,9839256.html
  4. ↑ http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/es-war-eine-total-zerstoerte-wirtschaft.694.de.html?dram:article_id=68240
  5. ↑ Chronicle. Bertelsmann Stiftung, accessed on May 15, 2020 .
  6. ↑ Illustrations for "Herr Bo travels around the world" by Siegfried von Vegesack , 1948
  7. ↑ welt.de: Interview with Klaus von Dohnanyi from August 8, 2008
  8. ↑ https://www.coburger-literaturkreis.net/app/download/15678891/Vortrag+Ulla+Hahn.pdf
  9. ↑ “When Klaus von Dohnanyi became Minister of State in the Foreign Office in December 1976, the high point of his political career seemed to be behind him. The Yale graduate, a discovery by Willy Brandt and appointed by Karl Schiller as State Secretary to the Ministry of Economic Affairs in 1968, was thrown out of the Bonn cabinet in May 1974 because the new Chancellor Helmut Schmidt couldn't stand the intimacy of his predecessor. Even before Development Minister Erhard Eppler, Education Minister Dohnanyi (Schmidt: "Noch so'n crazy") had to quit his job because he was full of ideas, but administratively inadequate. Since then, Dohnanyi has had the reputation of being untalented to run a ministry - not exactly a recommendation for what to expect in the largest West German municipality. Two years after his ministerial fall, his remaining on Bonn's political stage seemed to be endangered: With the accusation that he had atrophied the base in his constituency of Germersheim-Landau, the Rhineland-Palatinate SPD placed Dohnanyi (party nickname: 'But never- da ') on the apparently hopeless list position 13. Contrary to expectations, the unloved aristocratic comrade made the leap back to the Bonn parliament. And two months later, Hans-Juergen Wischnewski was changed to the Chancellery on Schmidt's request, as a Minister of State, joined Dohnanyi, through the intercession of his mentor Brandt, Genscher in AA services. " On a knife . In: Der Spiegel . No. 25 , 1981, pp. 102-103 ( Online - June 15, 1981 ).
  10. ↑ HAMBURG: Carpet gone . In: Der Spiegel . No. 20 , 1988 ( online - May 16, 1988 ).
  11. ↑ Pointed on button . In: Der Spiegel . No. 25 , 1981, pp. 102-103 ( Online - June 15, 1981 ).
  12. ↑ Die Zeit No. 11 of March 9, 1990 / Friedrich Dieckmann : Review

Web links

Commons : Klaus von Dohnanyi  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Dohnanyi, Klaus von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dohnanyi, Klaus Karl Anton von (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer and politician (SPD), MdHB, MdB, MdL
DATE OF BIRTH June 23, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg