Word: kurt
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger one morning last week tapped a brass bell with a wooden gavel, thus convened the first Cabinet meeting of West Germany's new black-and-red coalition government. For the next six hours, the ten Ministers from Kiesinger's Christian Democratic Union and the nine from the Social Democratic Party got their initial taste of working with longtime political foes. The main task: formulating a policy statement of government objectives, which Kiesinger will present this week to the Bundestag. Some of the points: warmer relations with Paris, fiscal reform, budget cuts...
Poetic Talent. Kurt Kiesinger seemed fated for a conciliator's role. His home is in Swabia, a good-natured area of Germany that lacks the fierce regional pride that burns so intensely in many parts. He came from a home that was both Lutheran (his father) and Catholic (his stepmother), though he himself is a Catholic today. His regal bearing leads most people to think he is an aristocrat, but he springs, in fact, from a lower-middle-class family, in which he was the eldest of seven children. His father?now a sprightly 90?was a bookkeeper...
...time Kurt was in high school, the ruinous inflation of the 1920s was sweeping Germany. Deciding to become a teacher, he left Ebingen for a small Catholic academy in a nearby town, where he got a first-class education, mastered the organ, piano and violin, and became something of a linguist (today he speaks English, French, Spanish and Italian). After graduating in 1925, the young teacher found himself only another among Germany's millions of unemployed. But he had taken to writing poetry, and this proved to have a practical value. A millowner in Ebingen read some of Kurt...
...place of coffee-house cynicism, lax morality, biting political satire and continual political turmoil. More interested in a degree than dialectics, Kiesinger at first stayed out of politics, but later joined the politically aware Catholic fraternity Askania. Fortunately, Askania was not all politics. At a fraternity ball, Kurt met the lovely 18-year-old daughter of one of the alumni. They danced together, and won the first prize in the dancing contest. On Christmas Eve 1932, Marie Luise Schneider and Kurt were married, set up a home near Berlin's Kurfürstendamm...
About this time, Kurt Kiesinger was also making another important decision. Politics in Germany had boiled down to a battle between the Communists and the Nazis, and many Catholic and Protestant leaders saw in the Nazis the only chance to save Germany?and Christianity? from the Red Peril. In 1933?the year that Hitler was elected Reich Chancello ?Kurt Kiesinger became a member of the Nazi Party. It took only a year for Kiesinger to realize that he could not hope to influence developments within Hitler's increasingly brutal movement. For a time he considered emigrating to Brazil...