(b. Göttingen, 3 Feb. 1926) German; mayor of Munich 1960 – 72, SPD chairman 1987 – 91 The son of middle-class Bavarian Catholics, Vogel was a brilliant law student. Although his studies were interrupted by wartime military service he gained his doctorate in 1952. He had a successful career in the Bavarian legal service before becoming a professional politician. He joined the SPD in 1950, was elected to the SPD executive in 1970, and was mayor of Munich from 1960 to 1972. His greatest success there was to host the Olympic Games in 1972. He turned down re-election because of his disagreements with the left in the SPD in Munich.
Vogel was appointed by Brandt Minister for Building and City Planning in 1972 but he failed to achieve his aim of reducing land speculation. From 1974 to 1981 he served as Minister of Justice. He was drafted by the SPD to take over as governing mayor of Berlin in 1981 at a time when the Berlin party was facing a crisis. Despite his many skills he could not stave off SPD defeat in the election in the same year, and then led the party in opposition until 1983 when he was drafted once again to challenge Kohl in the federal election. The SPD suffered a resounding defeat, but he remained leader in the Bundestag until 1991. After Brandt gave up the chairmanship of the SPD in 1987 Vogel took over until 1991. In 1990 he opposed Lafontaine's cautious approach to German reunification.
Hans-Jochen Vogel
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After serving as mayor of Munich for 12 years, Hans-Jochen Vogel (born 1926) became a member of the West German government. In 1983 he led the Social Democratic Party ticket, but lost to the Christian Democrats led by Helmut Kohl. He was chairman of the Social Democrats from 1987 to 1991.
Hans-Jochen Vogel was born on February 3, 1926, in the north German city of Göttingen. He came from a middle-class, politically active family. His father was a university lecturer, and his mother inspired excellence in her sons. His brother Bernhard became the Christian Democratic Party prime minister of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate.
During World War II, Vogel served a mandatory term in the Hitler Youth. He served in the German army in 1943 and was wounded in Italy and taken prisoner. After the war, he studied law and became active in politics. Despite his north German origins, Vogel rose to political prominence in the southern state of Bavaria. After studying at the universities of Marburg and Munich and qualifying for the bar in 1951, Vogel became a member of the Bavarian civil service.
Vogel was typical of young men who came to political prominence in the 1950s and 1960s and steered the SPD away from its Marxist ideas toward becoming a pragmatic and reformist party. Throughout his career, he had a reputation as a master of compromise and a man who was willing to listen to a variety of opinions. Vogel disdained emotional and demagogic appeals and relied on logical persuasion both in intimate settings and in addressing large rallies. For Vogel, Democratic Socialism was essentially a belief in human progress and rationality, in equal opportunity for all members of society and affirmative action for the economically and socially disadvantaged.
Mayor of Munich
Soon after his graduation from college, Vogel, like many West German Social Democrats of his generation, became active in municipal politics. In 1958 he was elected to the Munich city council and two years later was elected mayor of the Bavarian capital. Vogel remained the city's chief executive for the next 12 years, becoming one of the most popular and influential of the big city mayors in the Federal Republic of Germany. His administration was noted for its systematic expansion of Munich's system of urban transport. In 1965, he visited Rome and convinced officials of the International Olympic Committee to designate Munich as the site of the 1972 Summer Olympics. The games provided Vogel with the support needed to undertake a vast urban renewal project.
Rise in National Politics
Vogel's popularity gave him national exposure, and in 1970 he became a member of the Social Democratic Party's national executive board. Despite opposition from the left wing of the SPD, Vogel in 1972 was elected state chairman of the SPD in Bavaria, a state dominated by Franz Joseph Strauss' Christian Democratic Union. In November 1972 he was elected to the federal Bundestag (legislature), and in December was appointed minister of regional planning, housing and urban development in Chancellor Willy Brandt's coalition cabinet of Social Democrats and Free Democrats.
After Brandt's resignation in 1974, Vogel moved to the more important position of minister of justice in the cabinet of Helmut Schmidt. In his seven years as justice minister, Vogel modernized and liberalized the West German judicial code in such areas as abortion rights, divorce law, and sex discrimination. This work helped him make peace with the left wing of his party. Vogel also won praise for his strong actions curbing resurgent Nazi activity and leftist terrorism. By 1980 Vogel was viewed as Schmidt's likely successor as federal chancellor.
Mayor of West Berlin
In 1981, Vogel was chosen by the SPD's national leadership to clean up an embarrassing scandal in West Berlin. That city's SPD mayor, Dietrich Stobbe, had resigned amid charges of massive graft in his administration. Vogel was elected interim mayor by the SPD-dominated city council, and weeded out many of the corrupt elements in the Berlin SPD organization and in the administration. During his 100 days in office, he tried to make peace with squatters who were protesting the city's severe housing shortage, granting them status as tenants and authorizing $10 million to repair their houses. In June 1981 Vogel and the SPD lost the mayoral and city council elections to the Christian Democrat Union (CDU), but Vogel stayed in West Berlin as opposition leader.
Bid for Chancellor
Schmidt's coalition collapsed in 1982, and the Social Democrats no longer had a majority in the Bundestag, which named Christian Democratic leader Helmut Kohl as chancellor. Kohl scheduled federal elections for March 1983. The SPD named Vogel as its candidate for chancellor. Kohl campaigned in support of NATO deployment of Cruise and Pershing II nuclear missiles in West Germany and on a free-market, private-investment platform. Vogel opposed unconditional acceptance of the missiles, took a strong pro-environment stand, and called for higher taxes on the rich and a shorter work week. Vogel lost to Kohl and the CDU, but remained as the party's leader of the opposition in the Bundestag.
Vogel's failure to lead the party to victory in 1983 cost him the SPD nomination for chancellor in the 1987 election. Johannes Rau led the party, but he too went down to defeat at the hands of Kohl. That year, Vogel succeeded Willy Brandt as SPD chairman and remained in that post until 1991, and he gained praise for putting a lid on the party's internal bickering. "A notorious early riser with a punctilious lawyer's mind, he demands hard work and discipline and smartly raps the knuckles of those who get out of line," according to an assessment in The Economist in 1988. But Vogel never again headed the party's national ticket. He remained a member of the Bundestag in the 1990s.
Further Reading
Literature in English on Vogel is scant; no full-scale biography has appeared. Vogel provided an autobiographical account of his Munich years in Die Amtskette (The Badge of Office, 1972) and of his political ideas in Reale Reformen: Beiträge zu einer Gesellschaftspolitik der neuen Mitte (Real Reforms: Contributions to a Social Policy of the New Center, 1973). Vogel also wrote a book on urban policy, Städte im Wandel (Cities in Transition, 1971). The best analysis of Social Democratic politics in English is Gerald Braunthal, The West German Social Democrats, 1969-1982: Profile of a Party in Power (1983). Klaus Bölling, Die letzten 30 Tage des Kanzlers Helmut Schmidt: Ein Tagebuch (The Last 30 Days of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt: A Diary, 1982) is the best insider account of the dramatic events that brought Vogel to his position of leadership.
| Wikipedia: Hans-Jochen Vogel |
Hans-Jochen Vogel (born February 3, 1926 in Göttingen) is a German politician.
Vogel was born in Göttingen. He attended school in Gießen and graduated in 1943. Vogel was a Scharführer of the Hitlerjugend[1] and was conscripted into Wehrmacht service in 1943, where he served as an officer cadet for two years until the end of World War II. He studied law in Marburg and Munich from 1946–48.
Vogel was Mayor of Munich from 1960–72. After the general election in 1972 he became Federal Minister for Regional Planning, Construction and Urban Development. He served as Federal Minister of Justice from 1974–81.
In January 1981 he was elected Mayor of West Berlin but lost the election in June to Richard von Weizsäcker. From June 1981 to 1983 he chaired the SPD's parliamentary group in the state parliament of Berlin.
In 1983 he was his party's candidate against Chancellor Helmut Kohl. He lost the election and succeeded Herbert Wehner as the chairman of the SPD's parliamentary group and in 1987 he succeeded Willy Brandt as the party chairman. In 1991 he resigned from both positions and was succeded by Hans-Ulrich Klose and Björn Engholm, respectively.
Vogel is the older brother of CDU politician Bernhard Vogel.
References
External links
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- Short biography (German)
| Party political offices | ||
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| Preceded by Willy Brandt |
Chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Germany 1987–1991 |
Succeeded by Björn Engholm |
| Political offices | ||
| Preceded by Dietrich Stobbe |
Mayor of Berlin 1981 |
Succeeded by Richard von Weizsäcker |
| Preceded by Thomas Wimmer |
Mayor of Munich 1960–1972 |
Succeeded by Georg Kronawitter |
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