Karl Carstens

Karl Carstens was a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union who served as President of West Germany from 1979 to 1984. Born in Bremen in 1914, the son of a commercial school teacher killed in the First World War shortly before his birth, he studied law and political science at several universities, took a doctorate in 1938 and earned a Master of Laws at Yale in 1949. He served in a Luftwaffe anti-aircraft unit during the Second World War and had joined the Nazi Party in 1940 and the SA in 1934, a past that made his later nomination contested. After a legal career in Bremen and a chair at the University of Cologne he entered the diplomatic service in 1954, joined the Christian Democratic Union in 1955, became Secretary of State at the Foreign Office in 1960 and later head of the Chancellery. Elected to the Bundestag in 1972, he chaired the CDU/CSU parliamentary group from 1973 to 1976 and became President of the Bundestag in 1976. Elected fifth President of the Federal Republic on 23 May 1979, he was known for hiking across Germany to narrow the gap between politics and the people, and in January 1983 dissolved the Bundestag after Helmut Kohl's deliberately lost confidence vote, a step the Federal Constitutional Court approved. He declined a second term because of his age and was succeeded by Richard von Weizsäcker in 1984. He died in 1992.