Karl,
I quote the Greek foreign affairs ministries words: Helmut Kohl was a leader with a sense of historical responsibility who brought to pass the historic endeavour of the peaceful reunification of Germany.
He was one of the most emblematic figures of postwar Europe and one of the main architects and visionaries of European integration, who worked from his position to consolidate peace and democracy in Europe." (End quote)
Wikipedia states that Kohl was committed to European integration, maintaining close relations with the French president Mitterrand. Parallel to this he was committed to German reunification. Although he continued the Ostpolitik of his social-democratic predecessors, Kohl supported Reagan's more aggressive policies in order to weaken the USSR.
Der Spiegel Online International states that Helmut Kohl pushed Germany forward. On top of that, he gave Europe the decisive boost for deeper integration and understanding. He was a great statesman, whose services to the country are little diminished by the relatively trivial, self-created scandal shortly after his time in office.
His Eternality" was how the leader of Germany's Greens, Joschka Fischer, once referred to him. Indeed, Helmut Kohl led his country for 16 years, the longest tenure of any chancellor in the 20th century. Reagan, Thatcher, and Mitterrand, who shared the international stage with him when he took office in 1982, are all history. But the determined Bundeskanzler, 67, ran for for four succesive four-year terms, from 1982 until 1998.
By far the senior leader among the industrialized nations, Kohl dominated German and European politics more than any chancellor since World War II. He made possible the rapid yet smooth achievement of German unity in 1990 and into the ninties. He arrogated an air of indispensability in the next great project, the creation of a single currency for the European Union (EU), which he promoted as the one sure way to permanently embed Germany in an irreversibly united Europe. And ever since he backed deployment of American missiles in Germany at the start of his first term, which his predecessor Helmut Schmidt was unable to do, Kohl had presented himself as essential to maintaining Germany's alliance with the United States.
Despite his air of confident irreplaceability and his historic achievement of unification, there was a whiff of failure in Bonn's autumn air, a hint that the Kohl era was drawing to a close in 1997. The chancellor was facing complex domestic economic problems for which his political talents seemed unsuited and with which his tired and ineffective ministers of finance and economics were manifestly incapable of dealing. These included a persistent economic performance gap between eastern and western Germany; structural unemployment of nearly 12 percent, the highest since the 1930s; and high social benefits that made both problems harder to deal with because they undermined the competitiveness of an economy dependent on exports.
THE TOWERING OAK
Kohl's long tenure typifies Germany's astonishing political continuity. From 1949, when the Federal Republic was established, until 1990, when it unified with the once-communist east, there were but two changes of power: in 1969, when the Social Democrats and the Free Democrats received a majority of votes in the German parliamentary elections, and decided to form a common government SPD-FDP. And October 1 1982, when Helmut Kohl replaced Helmut Schmidt as Chancellor of Germany through a constructive vote of no confidence.
Kohl reached his goal in autumn 1982. The Free Democratic Party (FDP), which had been the SPD's junior coalition partner, switched its allegiance to the CDU and parliament elected Helmut Kohl as West Germany's sixth chancellor. At first, Kohl faced considerable headwinds from the media he liked to call the "Hamburg opinion mafia" -- German public broadcaster ARD, Der Spiegel, Stern and Die Zeit -- but also from those intellectuals who were still clinging to their vision of a leftist, socially liberal society. For its part, the FDP had long since abandoned that vision. In 1983, Chancellor Kohl and his coalition government were re-elected for the first time, completing the transition to a socially conservative government.
During his election campaign, he had brashly called for a "spiritual and moral renewal," which many progressives took to mean the end of all reforms and a relapse to the gray, staunch-conservativism of the Adenauer era. Yet despite all indications to the contrary, the CDU chancellor proved to be a pragmatist. He stayed true to the reforms that his two predecessors had undertaken and he maintained their détente-oriented policies with Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He even assigned an important role to his eternal adversary Strauss in the form of a multibillion mark contract with East Germany, which was in economic dire straits. In 1987, he was re-elected, despite a pair of scandals.
Within the party, support for Kohl only began to slip when, at the end of the 1980s, the CDU began losing ground in important elections and a serious adversary emerged from within the ranks -- the very same CDU Secretary-General Heiner Geissler that Kohl had brought into politics.
The most serious error underlying reunification and the Unification Treaty between the two parts of Germany, as we know today, was rooted in a vast deceit. East Germany and its state statisticians had invented economic numbers to cover up the country's impending bankruptcy. And nobody except for those who had produced the numbers knew anything about it.
Following his fourth re-election, Kohl suddenly realized that there was a need to change course, criticizing German society by saying that the country's people lived in a "collective amusement park." People were retiring, he complained, "at a younger and younger age, staying in university longer, working for fewer years over the course of their lives and taking more vacation." He did nothing, however, to address the issues he had identified.
Even as politicians and analysts were complaining about the necessity of reforms, Kohl and his last cabinet bumbled along with neither political élan nor a plan. Behind the scenes, though, Kohl was working during this period on the fulfillment of the promise he had made to Germany's European neighbors in 1990 in exchange for their approval for reunification. He wanted to push European unity forward with a common currency and strengthen integration in the hopes of removing the fear of an overly strong Germany.
One part of his concept was successful: The euro was introduced and border controls within Europe now seem like something out of the European Middle Ages. But it was left to Kohl's successor Gerhard Schröder to push through necessary reforms in the form of his package of social welfare cuts known as Agenda 2010. It was voted into law with the approval of all parties represented in parliament, but has since come to be intimately associated with Schröder's Social Democrats, and the party has been punished severely by voters ever since as a result.
It is interesting, though, to briefly consider the question: What would have happened if Kohl had, shortly before the retirement he had planned for himself, attempted to push through similar social reforms? He and Wolfgang Schäuble, who Kohl had designated as his successor, would have gone down in history as the "chancellors of reform" -- and it seems likely that Chancellor Schäuble would have been re-elected.
Sources:
www.britannica.com/biography/Helmut-Kohlwww.thenews.pl/1/10/Artykul/312116,Polish-FM-deeply-saddened-by-Kohl-death
www.economist.com/news/obituary/21723676-former-german-chancellor-piloted-his-country-and-europe-through-unification-obituary-helmutwww.spiegel.de/international/germany/former-german-chancellor-helmut-kohl-dies-at-87-a-1152601.htmlwww.ft.com/content/22e547b2-0ada-11e5-9df4-00144feabdc0www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-11477991video.aljazeera.com/channels/eng/videos/former-german-chancellor-helmut-kohl-dead-at-87/5474947344001;jsessionid=4A1C599030DC195B90DBD35C593C2DFC