Estate of Helmut Kohl
The estate of Helmut Kohl are essentially handwritten notes and files of the politician Helmut Kohl from his 16-year term as Federal Chancellor, his time as Rhineland-Palatinate Prime Minister and his 25-year term as CDU Federal Chairman.
estate
Helmut Kohl was Federal Chancellor from 1982 to 1998 . He died at the age of 87 on June 16, 2017 in his house in Oggersheim , a district of Ludwigshafen .
Helmut Kohl's estate consists of files, records, notes and papers from his time in office and his political life. Dealing with the documents from Kohl's 25 years of work as CDU chairman is seen as difficult . Here, the "drawing the line between private and party official documents" is particularly delicate, wrote the Berliner Zeitung.
Helmut Kohl's biographer Heribert Schwan , the author of the first three volumes of Kohl's memories, had free access to a wide variety of files. Some of them were stored in the basement office in Kohl's bungalow in Oggersheim for a long time after his tenure.
In 1998, Kohl gave a large part of his hand files to the archive of the CDU-affiliated Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Sankt Augustin . It was a bundle of 400 personal folders. In 2010 he had a large part of his reference files retrieved. The official reason was that he and his second wife Maike Kohl-Richter needed this to be able to complete the fourth volume of his memoirs. "But nobody who had seen the severely disabled former chancellor at his rare public appearances in recent years believed in this version," wrote the Berliner Zeitung.
Financially, the former Chancellor left behind a fortune estimated at several million euros, which was mainly made up of the proceeds from his book publications.
History and disposal
In 2006 Helmut Kohl gave his second wife Maike Kohl-Richter sole power to decide on his historical estate. It has the whereabouts and use of the files, records, notes and papers in its possession. Kohl's attorney, Holthoff gatekeeper , and his wife regulate the estate .
In 2008 Helmut Kohl suffered severe traumatic brain injury when he fell down the basement stairs in his house in Ludwigshafen-Oggersheim . He did not overcome the consequences of the accident until his death.
Dispute over Kohl documents 2014
Maike Kohl-Richter has the sole right of disposal over his estate. She announced in an interview with Welt am Sonntag in 2014 : My husband has stipulated that I should take care of him if he could no longer do it myself and that I should have sole decision-making authority over his historical estate. In the same interview, she stated: I am unable to manage my husband's historical estate on my own. That would be an absurd idea. My husband and I have long thought about how to ensure that his estate is carried safely into the future and that it falls into the right hands.
The former CDU Prime Minister Bernhard Vogel , honorary chairman of the Konrad-Adenauer Foundation, upheld his institution's legal claim to the files in 2014: For me there is no conflict, but a very clear situation: The Adenauer Foundation took over files for safekeeping in 1998 and has At the request of Helmut Kohl, with whom the custody contract was also concluded at the time, these files were made available to Kohl again, in view of his intention to write and complete the fourth volume of his memoirs. I assume, however, that the files will then be returned to the Adenauer Foundation for safekeeping.
Also that year, Holthoff-Pförtner said that Kohl had asked him to announce that after his death a foundation would be set up to preserve his “intellectual and political legacy”.
After the death of Helmut Kohl
After the death of Helmut Kohl, the family, his companions and historians asked what would happen to his estate. The head of the Federal Archives, Michael Hollmann , wrote to Maike Kohl-Richter in a letter on June 21, 2017 and, following expressions of condolence, offered his support in arranging the written estate. He left Kohl-Richter to hand over private documents. In clear words, according to Welt am Sonntag , he called for the "forwarding" of state documents. The widow should pass the documents on to the Federal Archives via the Federal Chancellery .
Hollmann had previously emphasized the importance of Kohl's estate in an interview with ARD : Last but not least, it depends on our documents that one will still be able to form an image 500 years from now.
rating
Christian Mayer wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung after Kohl's death: “However, it is not entirely unusual for a widow to seize control over his life after the death of her husband, as the last insider who sees it as her sacred duty, just one to defend their revealed legacy against all external enemies. People who were close to Helmut Kohl, who was recently seriously ill, had suspected what would happen after his death. ”After all, Maike Kohl-Richter announced this in 2014.
"The sole decision-making authority: In the case of a historically significant person like Helmut Kohl, who has two sons from his first marriage to Hannelore Kohl , this is a daring claim to validity that even outsiders perceive as a provocation," Mayer continued.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Holger Schmale: Death of Helmut Kohl: What happens to the legacy of the former Federal Chancellor? In: Berliner Zeitung . June 20, 2017, accessed on May 6, 2020 (German).
- ↑ a b Norbert Seitz: Helmut Kohl's estate - a drama in 400 acts. In: Deutschlandfunk . September 8, 2014, accessed May 6, 2020 .
- ↑ a b Christian Mayer: Everything in your hand. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . June 23, 2017, accessed May 6, 2020 .
- ↑ Legacy of the former chancellor: Helmut Kohl's estate goes into his own foundation . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . June 22, 2017, ISSN 0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed June 22, 2017]).
- ↑ a b tagesschau.de : Federal Archives want Kohl estate. Retrieved June 26, 2017 .