Gerhard Schrder

German politician, a Social Democrat elected Chancellor on 9/27/1998, defeating Helmut Kohl and ending a 16-year era in Germany. After a hard fought campaign, the victory was decisive. With the exit of Kohl, the last of the European politicians who were in office when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 has departed, reflecting the new priorities that confront Europe today. Along with Tony Blair in England and Lionel Jospin in France, Schroder will confront a central issue; how to adjust Germany's expansive welfare system to global competition without dismantling it, and at the same time, create jobs. Born in poverty, Schroder lost a father he never knew in WW II and survived a hard childhood with his mother working as a cleaner to support the family. He quit school at 14 to work; at 17, he was an apprentice salesman. He studied nights and eventually put himself through law school in Gottingen and began to practice. He entered into politics on the leftist wave of the '60s. With an outlook that evolved toward pragmatism, he fought this campaign on an often vague platform of modernization and renewal under the slogan of "the New Middle." He was the youngest state governor in 1969 and the youngest Party National Chairman in 1973. His wife, Doris, is a reporter whom he met in 1995 when she was covering a Party congress. Two years later she moved to Hanover and in October 1997, a few weeks after Schroder had divorced his third wife, they married. Working together as a power couple, Doris is called an advisor to her husband's campaign. Schroder married his first wife during his student years in law school. He and his second wife were Young Socialists, and his third wife, Hiltrud, shared his premier days in Lower Saxony; they were together for 13 years. Her causes were vegetarianism and gay rights; his had to do with keeping Volkswagen and its 80,000 workers happy. It was a show that she played well, joking about being called "Hillary," and referring to Schroder's political career in the plural possessive. When she discovered his affair with Doris, she threw him out of the house and wrote a book, "On My Feet," with less than complimentary reference to him. His last two wives shared an extreme, slender chic, and it was remarked that now, with Doris, he may have "nice, calm dinners with a cheerful wife." Link to Wikipedia biography