Joachim Gauck
Joachim Wilhelm Gauck (German: [joˈʔaxɪm ˈɡaʊk] ⓘ; born 24 January 1940) is a German politician who served as President of Germany from 2012 to 2017. A former Lutheran pastor, he came to prominence as an anti-communist civil rights activist in East Germany.[1][2][3][4]
Joachim Gauck
Office established
Constituency established
24 January 1940
Rostock, Nazi Germany
Independent (since 1990)
New Forum/Alliance 90 (1989–1990)
Daniela Schadt (since 2000)
4
During the Peaceful Revolution in 1989, Gauck was a co-founder of the New Forum opposition movement in East Germany, which contributed to the downfall of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) and later with two other movements formed the electoral list Alliance 90. In 1990, he was a member of the only freely elected East German People's Chamber in the Alliance 90/The Greens faction. Following German reunification, he was elected as a member of the Bundestag by the People's Chamber in 1990 but resigned after a single day having been chosen by the Bundestag to be the first Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records. This made him the Bundestag member with the shortest tenure. He also served as Federal Commissioner from 1990 to 2000, earning recognition as a "Stasi hunter" and "tireless pro-democracy advocate" for exposing the crimes of the communist secret police.[5][6][7][8]
He was nominated as the candidate of the SPD and the Greens in the 2010 presidential election but lost in the third ballot to Christian Wulff, the candidate of the government coalition. His candidacy was met by significant approval of the population and the media; Der Spiegel described him as "the better President",[9] while the Bild called him "the president of hearts".[10][11][12] Later, after Wulff stepped down, Gauck was elected as president with 991 of 1,228 votes in the Federal Convention in the 2012 German presidential election, as a nonpartisan consensus candidate of the CDU, the CSU, the FDP, the SPD, and the Greens.
A son of a survivor of a Soviet Gulag,[13][14][15][16][17] Gauck's political life was formed by his own family's experiences with totalitarianism. Gauck was a founding signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, together with Václav Havel and other statesmen, and of the Declaration on Crimes of Communism. He has called for increased awareness of Communist crimes in Europe, and for the necessity of delegitimizing the Communist era.[1] As president, he was a proponent of "an enlightened anti-communism",[18] and he has underlined the illegitimacy of Communist rule in East Germany.[19] He is the author and co-author of several books, including The Black Book of Communism. His 2012 book Freedom: A Plea calls for the defense of freedom and human rights around the globe.[20][21] He has been described by Angela Merkel as a "true teacher of democracy" and a "tireless advocate of freedom, democracy, and justice".[22] The Wall Street Journal has described him as "the last of a breed: the leaders of protest movements behind the Iron Curtain who went on to lead their countries after 1989."[23] He has received numerous honours, including the 1997 Hannah Arendt Prize. In 2022, he criticized Germany's policies towards Russia in the period after the Cold War, and said that "we should have listened to the voices of our eastern neighbours – Poles and the Baltic states as well as our Atlantic friends" when they warned about Russian aggression.[24]
Childhood and life in East Germany (1940–1989)[edit]
Gauck was born into a family of sailors in Rostock, the son of Olga (née Warremann; born 1910) and Joachim Gauck Sr. (born 1907). His father was an experienced ship's captain and distinguished naval officer (Kapitän zur See – captain at sea), who after World War II worked as an inspector at the Neptun Werft shipbuilding company. Both parents were members of the Nazi Party (NSDAP).[25] Following the Soviet occupation of Germany at the end of World War II, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) was installed into power in what became the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). When Gauck was eleven years old in 1951, his father was arrested by Soviet occupation forces; he was not to return until 1955.[26] He was convicted by a Russian military tribunal of espionage for receiving a letter from the West and also of anti-Soviet demagogy for being in the possession of a western journal on naval affairs, and deported to a Gulag in Siberia,[27] where he was mistreated to the extent that he was considered physically disabled after one year, according to his son.[28] For nearly three years, the family knew nothing about what had happened to him and whether he was still alive. He was freed in 1955, following the state visit of Konrad Adenauer to Moscow. Adenauer negotiated the release of thousands of German prisoners of war and civilians who had been deported.[29]
Gauck graduated with an Abitur from Innerstädtisches Gymnasium in Rostock. According to Gauck, his political activities were inspired by the ordeal of his father,[30] and he stated that he grew up with a "well-founded anti-communism".[31] Already in school in East Germany, he made no secret of his anti-communist position, and he steadfastly refused to join the SED's youth movement, the Free German Youth. He wanted to study German and become a journalist but because he was not a member of the ruling Communist party, he was not allowed to do so.[10] Instead, he chose to study theology and become a pastor in the Protestant church in Mecklenburg. He has stated that his primary intention was not to become a pastor but that the theology studies offered an opportunity to study philosophy and the church was one of the few institutions in East Germany where Marxist–Leninist ideology was not dominant.[32] Nevertheless, he eventually became a pastor. His work as a pastor in East Germany was very difficult due to the hostility of the Communist regime towards the church, and for many years he was under constant observation and was harassed by the Stasi (the secret police).[33][34] The Stasi described Gauck in their file on him as an "incorrigible anti-communist" (unverbesserlicher Antikommunist).[35] He has said that "at the age of nine, I knew socialism was an unjust system."[10]
In his memoirs, Gauck writes that "the fate of our father was like an educational cudgel. It led to a sense of unconditional loyalty towards the family which excluded any sort of idea of fraternisation with the system."[36]
Personal life[edit]
Gauck married Gerhild "Hansi" Gauck (née Radtke), his childhood sweetheart whom he met at age ten;[98] the couple has been separated since 1991.[99] They were married in 1959, at 19, despite his father's opposition, and have four children: sons Christian (born 1960) and Martin (born 1962), and daughters Gesine (born 1966) and Katharina (born 1979). Christian, Martin and Gesine were able to leave East Germany and emigrate to West Germany in the late 1980s, while Katharina, still a child, remained with her parents. His children were discriminated against and denied the right to education by the communist regime because their father was a pastor.[100] His son Christian, who along with his brother decided to leave the GDR in early 1984 and was able to do so in 1987, studied medicine in West Germany and became a physician.[101]
Since 2000, his domestic partner has been Daniela Schadt, a journalist.[102][103][104] Gauck is a member of the Protestant Church in Germany, and served as a pastor for the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Mecklenburg—a member church of that federation.[105]
