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Helmut Schmidt
Following Brandt's resignation in May 1974, the SPD-FDP coalition partners
unanimously agreed that Minister of Finance Helmut Schmidt should head
the new government. At fifty-five, Helmut Schmidt became the youngest chancellor
of the FRG. Born in Hamburg in 1918, he served as an officer in World
War II. After the war, he joined the SPD and served in Hamburg's municipal
government, where he acquired a national reputation as a top-notch manager
because of his competence in dealing with a severe flood in 1962. He was
the SPD faction leader in the Bundestag and minister of defense in the
first SPD-FDP cabinet. Schmidt gradually became recognized at home and
abroad as a pragmatic politician and an expert in economic and defense
matters. His first cabinet included the FDP's Hans-Dietrich Genscher as
minister of foreign affairs. Genscher replaced Walter Scheel, who had
been elected federal president in 1974.
Schmidt was confronted with a number of serious problems. The economic
turbulence caused by the oil crisis of 1973 had affected the FRG, and
a ban on the use of automobiles on Sundays had been introduced to preserve
scarce fuel reserves. Perhaps as a result of the crisis, Germans began
to recognize limitations to economic growth and simultaneously to become
aware of ecological dangers to the environment inherent in their lifestyle.
As a result, environmental movements sprang up throughout the FRG.
Worries about the environment and about long-term economic growth became
widespread in the next few years, and the almost limitless optimism of
the postwar period began to give way to a mood of uncertainty about the
future. Unemployment was also on the rise, and labor unions, traditionally
reliable allies of the SPD, began to depart from their position of solidarity
with the SPD-FDP government. In this increasingly difficult economic and
political environment, Schmidt tried to steer a steady course, one often
too conservative for his party and from which necessary support was at
times lacking.
- Willy Brandt
- Ostpolitik
- Helmut Schmidt
- The Student
Movement and Terrorism
- The Greens
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