Walter Scheel
West German president who liked a good party and helped to dispel negative national stereotypes
WALTER SCHEEL, who has died aged 97, was President of West Germany from 1974 to 1979, during which time he did much to humanise his country’s image abroad, helping to dispel boring or threatening national stereotypes.
A jolly Rhinelander and a former foreign minister under Willy Brandt, Scheel sang well and gave good parties. In Germany he was best known for his lilting performance on television of the popular song Hoch auf dem Gelben Wagen (“Up On the Yellow Car”), a ditty ostensibly about the demands of the postal service, although some experts interpret the lyrics as a haunting allegory about death. In January 1974 the song, released to raise money for charity, rose to No 1 in the German pop charts.
The son of a wheelwright, Walter Scheel was born in Solingen in what is now North Rhine-Westphalia on July 8 1919. After leaving school he worked as a bank clerk.
During the Second World War he served in the Luftwaffe, in the last years of the war as a radar operator on a Bf 110 night fighter, rising to the rank of lieutenant. Much later it emerged that he had also joined the Nazi party in 1942, though Scheel claimed that he had never applied for membership. The Nazis apparently had a habit of bestowing unsolicited favours of this kind.
After the war ended Scheel worked for a time in industry and subsequently as an economic consultant in Düsseldorf. In 1958 he became managing director of a market research firm and in the same year co- founded the Düsseldorf company M& A International Finance.
In 1946 Scheel joined the newly formed Free Democratic Party (FDP), joining its national executive in 1956. He served as a town councillor in Solingen, as a member of the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia and finally, from 1953, as a member of the West German Bundestag. From 1956 to 1961 he was also a member of the European Parliament.
His party, the FDP, was the liberal tail which wagged the postwar West German political dog, and when it formed a coalition with Konrad Adenauer’s CDU in 1961, Scheel was appointed minister of economic cooperation and development.
He continued in that office under Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, but was one of the FDP ministers whose resignation in 1966 brought down the Erhard administration. Under the subsequent CDU-SPD Grand Coalition led by Kurt Georg Kiesinger, in 1968 Scheel took over the FDP presidency.
The following year, Scheel led his party to form a new coalition with the Social Democrats under Chancellor Willy Brandt, becoming foreign minister and vice chancellor in the new administration. He and Brandt worked together to develop the policy of “Ostpolitik”, officially recognising the existence of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Though the policy caused ructions in both the FDP and SPD, provoking a spate of defections, it proved popular with German voters, helping Brandt (and the coalition) to win a famous election victory in 1972.
In 1970 Scheel became the first German foreign minister to visit Israel, and in 1973, during a visit to Beijing, he established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China.
When Brandt resigned as Chancellor in May 1974 after one of his aides, Günter Guillaume, was charged with spying for East Germany, Scheel, as vice chancellor, chaired government meetings until Helmut Schmidt was elected Chancellor. Hans Dietrich Genscher replaced Scheel as party chairman and foreign minister, while Scheel was elected to the largely honorary post of president.
As president, Scheel was sometimes attacked for his lavish lifestyle, though he made a refreshing contrast to his highly religious predecessor President Heinemann.
Scheel won numerous awards, including the Grand Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Medal for Combating Deadly Seriousness, an award presented by the German city of Aachen. He was honorary president of the GermanBritish Society.
In 2012, Scheel was one of four surviving German presidents (with Richard von Weizsäcker, Roman Herzog and Horst Köhler) who boycotted a parade in honour of Christian Wulff, who had resigned from the presidency in February over a political favours scandal.
Walter Scheel’s first wife Eva died in 1966 and his second wife, Mildred, in 1985. In 1988 he married Barbara Wiese, who survives him with a son of his first marriage and a daughter, a stepdaughter and an adopted son of his second marriage.