Bettina Wulff: Happy on the third attempt

Love. It is a big topic in the life of Bettina Wulff (50). Love for children, for the good Lord and – of course! – again and again to Christian Wulff (64), our youngest former Federal President. Some contemporaries would perhaps add the question: Love for yourself too?

Bettina is Christian Wulff’s second wife, also his third and fourth, because the couple married three times in a row, which prompted the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” to write the lovely line: “Yes, yes and yes again!” Who knows what will happen next, because Bettina Wulff is still (relatively) young. She turns 50 on October 25th.

She is a blonde, tall, attractive woman, 1.80 meters and therefore impossible to miss. As a young girl, she suffered from her height and knock-knees. At home in Großburgwedel near Hanover, her mother sent her to ballet lessons, to which her big brother commented: “Ah, Miss Piggy is swinging through space again.” This is how she describes it in her book “Different than I thought – How I learn what really counts” (Droemer Knaur). Finally, the parents realized “that I was better off playing basketball, despite a doctor’s recommendation and with knock-knees.”

This is how Christian and Bettina Wulff met

Christian Wulff (1.87 m) didn’t miss Bettina either. Back then her name was Körner, she was a trained media manager, press officer for the automotive supplier Continental AG in Hanover and a young single mother (a son from a previous relationship). That was 2006, Wulff was Prime Minister of Lower Saxony and the two met on a business trip to South Africa that she had organized. Wulff asked for her phone number, “the rest is history,” as she later wrote. And: She was “fascinated by the clarity and determination with which Christian showed me that he wanted to be with me. He had made a decision for himself and was prepared to accept the consequences.”

At this time Christian Wulff was still married (one daughter). But then Bettina came and with her great love. The divorce took place at the beginning of 2008, a month later he exchanged rings with Bettina, and their son was born in the summer of 2008.

This marriage had a fairytale-romantic beginning based on the classic model of “Prince marries girls from the people”. The Continental press woman became the national mother. Two years later she even became German First Lady, the first lady in the state. As one of the country’s leading CDU politicians, Wulff became the youngest Federal President in the history of the Federal Republic on July 2, 2010 at the age of 51. The couple lived and resided in Berlin’s Bellevue Palace, the seat of the Federal President.

The bottomless case of the Wulff couple

It can’t get any higher than that, which makes the couple’s desolate fall all the more tragic after revelations that began about the controversial financing of a rather average home in Großburgwedel and free invitations and vacations with entrepreneur friends. Wulff resigned from his position in February 2012. Less than a year later, the couple also separated. It was a succinct, even sappy end to a marriage that many saw as glamorous, but some as contrived.

Bettina Wulff has often been described as goal-oriented, and sometimes there has been an underlying defamation that she could be a female “golddigger,” someone who purposefully plans her future with the appropriate life partners. She was definitely wronged there. Bettina Wulff just tried to go her own way: here the claim to be an independent, responsible woman, there the wife at the side of a high-ranking politician who always had to smile for the cameras, no matter how her own state of mind may be. This balancing act was a complete failure.

If you will, Bettina Wulff anticipated the end of her marriage with the publication of her first book, “Beyond the Protocol,” in fall 2012. Party friends of her husband, who had to go through the worst crisis of his life after his resignation, read with surprise how Bettina Wulff complained that she had to suppress her own needs at his side. In an interview with the magazine “Brigitte” she added: “I sometimes accuse him of pushing me into the role to a large extent. And when I look at it in retrospect, this also takes its toll on the relationship. “

“I would marry my husband again”

He wasn’t doing well after the breakup, and you could see that on his face. Christian Wulff lost around ten kilos after his resignation. The man had become grayer and had aged years. Even the new boyish messy hair look that his wife Bettina had supposedly given him had given way to the old, correct parting hairstyle.

But then, oh wonder, two years after the separation, the love must have flared up again, which means it probably never went out. He moved back into the house in Großburgwedel and got married again on October 17, 2015, this time in church. : “I would marry my husband again and again. We went through a difficult phase and then met like new people. That bonds us together.”

In September 2018, Bettina Wulff caused a car accident. She has over two per mille of alcohol in her blood, but remains uninjured, her car is totaled, her driver’s license is gone for eleven months – and love is in the dumps again.

In her second book “Unlike Thought” she writes: “Despite all the damage and horror, there was ultimately something good about me crashing into the tree: it literally woke me up. I noticed that it Nothing helps to stare at the symptoms any longer… And when I walked home late in the evening after the accident, I decided: My life had to change immediately.” Shortly afterwards, the Wulffs announced that their second attempt at marriage had also failed. Divorce.

Bettina Wulff then lives with a music teacher who teaches her sons. A man who also puzzles over her ego and (according to her book) sometimes asks her: “When are you going to start being kind to yourself?”

Third wedding in spring 2023

At some point this intermezzo also ended, and in 2021 the former First Lady announced on the sidelines of a charity golf tournament: “Yes, we are living together again.” While, according to media reports, Christian Wulff, in his own sibylline way, fueled the rumors in a lecture (“Love and Hate. Thoughts on Democracy”) at the Hanover Legal Society that he had become Prime Minister on the third attempt, Federal President on the third attempt and from a “third Marriage” spoke. This took place in March 2023 in the “circle of family and friends.”

Apparently this on-off-on love is the biggest and most difficult event in Bettina Wulff’s life. There is only one thing left above that, as she confided to her book readers: the knowledge that “God is perfect love.”