Gerhart Baum: The left -liberal conscience of the FDP has died

Next to the toilet they all hung: Helmut Schmidt, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Burkhard Hirsch. The top politicians of Bonn’s politics, which Gerhart Baum had accompanied through his political life, did not have a place next to the fireplace or opposite the book wall of his old building in the Südstadt in Cologne. No, they were banished to the bathroom.

There he also hung himself there, preferably in caricatures. Gerhart Baum was a politician from the variety, who does not primarily drive his own advancement, but rather unbreakable beliefs. The fact that he held on them led to the sudden career snap in 1982 when the social -liberal coalition was broken. Baum has now died in Cologne at the age of 92.

He worked every day to almost last. At the age of 89, he arranged a long-standing agreement between the bereaved of the Israeli victims of the Munich Olympic attack in 1972 and the Federal Government. In addition, he represented Russian forced laborers and relatives and victims of an air show accident on the US military airfield in Ramstein. Sitting on a park bench or doing the dog-that is not for him, he said shortly before his 90th birthday of the German Press Agency.

When you spoke to him, he always gave the impression that he was in a hurry. “Let’s start!” He said. There was no space for Small Talk, it was time -wing time.

Baum was one of the last that had consciously experienced the entire Federal Republican history. He was born in the last months of the Weimar Republic, on October 28, 1932 in Dresden. He grew well -protected in an educational household. His father was a lawyer, his mother, a native Russian from Moscow who had fled in 1917 before the October Revolution.

The bombing of Dresden in the night from 13th to February 14, 1945 experienced tree as an eyewitness. The pictures never got out of his head: “I put my school things right for the next day, the booklets with homework, I will train my carnival costume. Then I go to bed. And the next day everything is gone. The school matters, the costume, The house, the school. 77 years later, these pictures caught up with great force when he followed the war in Ukraine on television.

While his father died in the Soviet captivity, his mother fled to Bavaria with Gerhart and his two siblings. There he rowed over Tegernsee every day to get to school for a while. A family relationship was the reason that they finally landed in Cologne, at that time a “gray, dark, destroyed city”. Nevertheless, he should never leave them again. Baum studied law and entered the FDP. In 1972 he moved into the Bundestag via the state list of North Rhine-Westphalia, six years later he became Federal Minister of the Interior in the social-liberal coalition of Helmut Schmidt (SPD).

He always respected him, but also said: “The tree is too liberal for me.” As a RAF understander, he was oked by the right because he not only wanted to pursue the left-wing extremist terrorists, but also wanted to understand it. “I did the research of causes,” he told the German Press Agency in 2022. “I was looking for traces: What happened in society that this murder series has occurred?” Schmidt had no understanding for that. The SPD Chancellor was also a “muffle” when it comes to human rights. “I have often argued about it with him. He always said: ‘What interests the Chinese what we think of their human rights?'”

When FDP boss Genscher led the party in 1982 to a 16-year partnership with the CDU Helmut Kohls, Baum did not go this way. Together with his friend Burkhard Hirsch (1930-2020), he from then on represented the left-liberal party wing, which, however, only represented a promised pile. In retrospect, what he wrote the most in retrospect: “The FDP gave up the green topic in 1982, even though it created the basics.” He was responsible for environmental policy as a Federal Minister of the Interior.

After leaving the Bundestag, Baum worked as a lawyer again. In addition, he led constitutional complaints against state surveillance-often together with Burkhard Hirsch and Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger: against the great eavesdropping, the data retention or the air security law of red-green to shoot off kidnapped passenger machines. Again and again he spoke up when he had the impression that the FDP drifted too much into neoliberal waters. Some saw him a troublemaker, others the left -liberal conscience of the FDP.

At the end of his life, the convinced Democrat and human rights lawyer had to admit that western values ​​were under pressure. “Democracies worldwide weaken,” he admitted. For him that was not a reason for resignation, but an incentive to continue fighting. As far as Germany affected, he turned against black seizure: “We still have a stable democracy and no split society. Let’s not talk to ourselves. We have threats to freedom, especially through right -wing extremism, I still take it very seriously. But still we have a very strong, successful democracy. “

Numerous politicians paid tribute to the deceased on Saturday. “With Gerhart Baum, our country loses a large liberal and committed democrats who are not afraid of a dispute,” wrote Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) in the online service X. “He has spoken out cleverly until the end and made himself well earned by Germany.”

Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) recognized her predecessor as “a great political personality and a strong voice for democracy, civil rights and the rule of law”. He would “remember our democracy as a passionate defender”. Faeser emphasized that Baum had been a lawyer until old age and had carried out many significant procedures. “For many lawyers in our country, he will remain a role model.”

FDP boss Christian Lindner called Baum “one of the strongest voices for freedom, human rights and democracy”. He made sure that “civil rights were also heard in delicate locations”. Baum also “took responsibility for the liberal thing for decades and shaped our party”-including from 1982 to 1991 as Vice-FDP boss. The FDP is therefore “thank you very much”.

“With Gerhart Baum, a big liberal of us is going,” wrote FDP general secretary Marco Buschmann on X. “A fighter for civil rights. And above all: a great person.”

Baum was “a clever thinker, a great strike for civil rights, an uncomfortable impulse, a stubborn discussant,” the FDP European politician Marie-Fagen Strack-Zimmermann paid him to X. He had his party and party friends up to the extreme stimulus can. “None of us was spared. Nevertheless, he formed an important pole in the broad spectrum of liberalism.”

North Rhine-Westphalia’s Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst (CDU) recognized the died FDP politician Gerhart Baum as the “busy lawyer of human rights and liberalism”. “We have lost a great North Rhine-Westphalia. His legacy of liberality and cosmopolitanism will remain,” said Wüst.

Note: This article has been extensively updated and further information was added.