Michael Mertes

Michael Mertes, 2014

Michael Mertes (born March 26, 1953 in Bonn ) is a German lawyer , political official ( CDU ), author and literary translator .

Life

family

Michael Mertes is the oldest of five children of the Hiltrud Mertes born. Becker and Alois Mertes . He is married and has four kids. One of his brothers is the Jesuit Father Klaus Mertes . As the son of a diplomatic family, he spent most of his childhood and early youth abroad ( Marseille , Paris , Moscow ) until 1966 .

education

In 1972 he passed the old language Abitur at the Aloisiuskolleg in Bonn- Bad Godesberg . During his two-year service with the Bundeswehr , he was trained as a reserve officer. From 1974 to 1980 he studied law in Bonn , Tübingen and at the London School of Economics and Political Science (there with a focus on legal philosophy , scientific theory and international law ).

Professional background

After the first state examination in law, he worked as a Bundestag assistant to Carl Otto Lenz in 1981 . After the second state examination he was first as an authorized officer in the 1984 Federal Office of Defense Technology and Procurement , then as a consultant in the personnel department of the Federal Chancellery operates. In 1985 he switched to the department for cultural and church affairs. At the beginning of June 1986 he was appointed to the development team of the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety , which was founded after the Chernobyl disaster ; there Walter Wallmann made him head of the ministerial office.

After Wallmann had been elected Prime Minister of Hesse , Mertes went back to the Federal Chancellery in May 1987 to take over the management of the speechwriting department. As editor-in-chief of Chancellor Helmut Kohl , he was involved, among other things, in the drafting of the “ ten-point program to overcome the division of Germany and Europe” on November 28, 1989. In 1993 he became head of the planning group. At the beginning of 1995 he took over the management of the planning and culture department in the Federal Chancellery as the successor to Ministerialdirektor Eduard Ackermann . After the change of government in 1998, the new Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder put him into temporary retirement.

In December 1998, Mertes joined the editorial team of the weekly Rheinischer Merkur . In 1999 he became deputy editor-in-chief and head of domestic affairs; In 2001 he became head of the foreign policy department. At the beginning of 2003 he started his own business as a partner in the political consultancy firm "dimap consult GmbH", which he co-founded , from which he left in July 2006. He remained connected to the Rhenish Mercury as a freelance author; He also wrote for the international newspaper network Project Syndicate and - until 2004 - for the German-Jewish newspaper Aufbau .

From August 2006 until the replacement of the Rüttgers government by the Kraft I government in July 2010, Mertes was State Secretary for Federal and European Affairs as well as the federal state's representative of North Rhine-Westphalia . In January 2008 he also became State Secretary for Media. His area of ​​responsibility included the state representation of North Rhine-Westphalia in Berlin and the state representation in Brussels.

From June 2011 to July 2014 he headed the Israel office of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Jerusalem .

Activity as an author

Since the mid-1980s published Mertes in German and foreign newspapers and magazines (u. A. Daedalus , The Political opinion , Foreign Affairs , International Politics , Neprikosnowénnij Sapa (Неприкосновенный запас) Obshchaya Tetrad (Общая тетрадь), Politique étrangère , Prospect , The Washington Quarterly , Transit , Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, Voices of the Times ) Contributions to European integration, foreign policy, questions of Christian-Jewish dialogue, socio-cultural and political-contemporary issues.

Together with Norbert J. Prill, the then head of the planning group at the Federal Chancellery, he published an article in the FAZ in July 1989 , which presented the concept of a “Europe of concentric circles” developed by both authors, with the concept of a Europe of two Speeds , especially with the considerations of the Schäuble - Lamers paper from 1994, is closely related. In their essay, Mertes and Prill demanded that the European Community should open up to new democracies in the collapsing Eastern Bloc . At the same time, they pleaded for a European “core federation” as the “crystallization point and center of gravity of an ever growing community”.

In the course of the 1990s, Mertes published several “trilateral” pleadings for eastward expansion and the simultaneous institutional modernization of the EU, together with the British Timothy Garton Ash and the French Dominique Moïsi .

In 2006 Mertes published a translation and commentary on William Shakespeare's sonnets . In 2009, 2011, 2016 and 2019 the magazine Sinn und Form published translations of his love poems by John Donnes and Andrew Marvells .

Memberships and engagements (selection)

1971 Mertes joined the CDU . He was a member of the CDU Policy Program Commission in 2006/07 and was a member of the board of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation from 2009 to 2011 . He is a member of the Commission for Contemporary History and was a founding member of the sponsoring association of Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk . Since 1994 he has been volunteering at the Moscow School of Civic Education. He was a board member of the 2001-2009 Institute for Human Sciences at Boston University . In 2006, together with Rabbi Nathan Peter Levinson and Pastor Johannes Hildebrandt, he received the "Roncalli Award" for interreligious understanding from the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation.

Publications

Books

Works

• Немецкие вопросы - европейские ответы (German questions - European answers) . Moscow School of Political Studies, Moscow 2001, ISBN 5-93895-017-1
• On the origin and effect of the ten-point program of November 28, 1989. A workshop report . Forum Politicum Jenense, Jena 2001, ISBN 3-9805570-8-1
• You, my rose, are space for me. The sonnets by William Shakespeare translated into German and commented on by Michael Mertes with an afterword by Arnold Stadler . Verlag Franz Schön, Bonn 2006, ISBN 978-3-9811154-0-6 . Second, revised edition (without commentary and afterword). Verlag Franz Schön, Bonn 2014, ISBN 978-3-9816420-0-1
• Parodies, counterfactures and variations on sonnets by William Shakespeare . Verlag Franz Schön, Bonn 2008, ISBN 978-3-9811154-5-1
• At the center of the world. Jerusalem - encounters in a divided city (together with Barbara Mertes). Bonifatius , Paderborn 2015, ISBN 978-3-89710-612-3
• I think of the far north with sadness. Carl Wilhelm Diehl's cisatlantic poetry (together with Eva Mertes and Oranna Dimmig). Verlag Franz Schön, Bonn 2016, ISBN 978-3-9816420-3-2
• Silence at last and let me love! . A John Donne Reader. Verlag Franz Schön, Bonn 2017, ISBN 978-3-9816420-6-3 . Second, revised edition. Verlag Franz Schön, Bonn 2020, ISBN 978-3-947837-02-1
• experimenta sonettologica. laboratory experiments with the most famous form of poetry of italian origin. Verlag Franz Schön, Bonn 2018, ISBN 978-3-9816420-9-4

As editor

• In Search of Germany (together with Steven Muller and Heinrich August Winkler ). Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick and London 1996, ISBN 1-56000-880-6

Book chapters (selection)

• Alois Mertes - A picture of life. In: Günter letter (ed.): Alois Mertes: The primacy of the political. Speeches and essays. Droste , Düsseldorf 1994, ISBN 3-7700-1872-9 .
• The magic of departure - the banality of the end: cycles of governance. In: Gerhard Hirscher and Karl-Rudolf Korte (eds.): Rise and fall of governments. Power acquisition and erosion of power in Western democracies. Olzog Verlag , Munich 2001, ISBN 3-7892-8060-7
• The information and decision management of the government headquarters . In: Gerhard Hirscher and Karl-Rudolf Korte (eds.): Information and decision . Westdeutscher Verlag, Wiesbaden 2003, ISBN 3-531-14025-6
• What Distinguishes Europe? In: Krzysztof Michalski (Ed.): What Holds Europe Together? . Central European University Press, Budapest and New York 2006, ISBN 978-963-7326-47-9
• Government communication in Germany: complex barriers . In: Werner Weidenfeld (Ed.): Communicating reforms. Political challenges . Bertelsmann Stiftung publishing house , Gütersloh 2007, ISBN 978-3-89204-910-4
• Michelangelo's sonnets translated into German. In: Rudolf Rieger: MICHELANGELO. "Il Divino Riprodotto". 18th and 19th century graphics based on drawings by Michelangelo , Verlag Franz Schön, Bonn 2015, ISBN 978-3-9816420-2-5
• Rising from the Ashes: The Holocaust and the European Integration Project . In: Sharon Pardo and Hila Zahavi (eds.): The Jewish Contribution to European Integration . Lexington Books, Lanham MD 2019, ISBN 978-1-79360-319-7

Web links

• Literature by and about Michael Mertes in the catalog of the German National Library
• CV Michael Mertes on the KAS Israel website (PDF; 101 kB)
• Against forgetting , 1999 interview with Joachim Gauck for Rheinischer Merkur on the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall
• Advocate of the people? Populism in Germany and Europe (PDF) - KAS 2019
• Chancellor Kohl presents a ten-point program in the Bundestag to gradually overcome the division of Germany and Europe. In: Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung , calendar: November 28, 1989.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ For a detailed description, see Wolfgang Jäger : Die overcoming the division. The internal German process of unification 1989/90. DVA, Stuttgart 1998, p. 58ff. See also Mertes' own account - “It was a mood of uncertainty” - on Deutschlandfunk on November 27, 2009.
2. ↑ See July 2014 newsletter of KAS Israel.
3. ↑ See website Neprikosnowénnij Sapás . Here: 1968-й как миф (4/2008).
4. ↑ See website Obshaya Tetrad - Quarterly Magazine .
5. ↑ See The Autumn of Our Discontent: Germany Facing Populism , 2018. doi: 10.1080 / 23739770.2018.1470784
6. ↑ The fatal error of an either-or. A vision for Europe . In: FAZ of July 19, 1989. On this and other concepts of graded integration cf. Helene Sjursen (Ed.) In: Enlargement in perspective ( Memento from December 25, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), there p. 44 and 67; PDF; 759 kB.
7. ↑ See the relevant notes by Timothy Garton Ash in a letter to the editor to the London Review of Books of January 6, 2000 ( A Ripple of the Polonaise ). The first article of this “trilateral” series of debates appeared in The New York Review of Books on October 24, 1991 ( Let the East Europeans In! ).
8. ↑ See Moscow School of Political Studies International Advisory Council .
9. ↑ See website The Institute for Human Sciences .
10. ↑ See In Berlin the Wallenberg Foundation distinguished three outstanding leaders , January 31, 2006.