Johannes Rau

Johannes Rau was a German politician of the Social Democratic Party who served as President of Germany from 1999 to 2004. Born in 1931 in the Barmen district of Wuppertal into a strongly Protestant family, he was active in the Confessing Church as a schoolboy and worked as a publisher with the Protestant Youth Publishing House. He joined the Social Democratic Party in 1958 after the dissolution of the All-German People's Party, entered the North Rhine-Westphalia Landtag the same year, became Mayor of Wuppertal in 1969 and, as state Minister of Science and Education from 1970 to 1975, founded five universities and Germany's first distance learning university at Hagen. He was Minister-President of North Rhine-Westphalia from 1978 to 1998, led his party to four election victories there and twice served as President of the Bundesrat. He lost the 1987 federal election as the Social Democratic candidate for chancellor against Helmut Kohl and lost the 1994 presidential election to Roman Herzog, but was elected President by the Federal Assembly in 1999 and was succeeded by Horst Köhler on 1 July 2004. In February 2000 he became the first German head of state to address the Israeli Knesset in German. His maxim was to reconcile, not divide. He died on 27 January 2006.