Life
Alfons Goppel was born in 1905 as one of nine children of the baker Ludwig Goppel and his wife Barbara.
He married Gertrud Wittenbrink in 1935 and together they had six sons.
Goppel studied law in Munich from 1925 to 1929 and, after graduating, moved back to Regensburg, where he became a lawyer. He joined the state prosecutors office in 1934 and was posted to Mainburg, Kaiserslautern and finally Aschaffenburg. He joined the conservative Bavarian People's Party in 1930 and was a member until the party's self-dissolution in November 1933. He joined the SA (1933) and the NSDAP (1937) in the following years.
He took part in the campaigns in France and Russia in the German Wehrmacht during the Second World War and later became an instructor at the Infanterieschule Döberitz, near Berlin, a trainings camp of the German army.
Returning from the war, he became an official at the city of Aschaffenburg, responsible for housing and refugees. He was elected to the Bavarian Landtag in October 1947 but barred from taking up his seat due to his political past. He, unsuccessfully, campaigned for the Landtag in 1950 again, became second mayor of Aschaffenburg in 1952 and finally, in 1954, was elected to the Landtag and permitted to take up his seat. He remained in the Bavarian parliament until 1978, when he gave it up to become a member of the European Parliament.
He unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Würzburg in 1956 and became an under secretary in the Bavarian Ministry of Justice the year after. He was Bavarian Minister of the Interior (1958–1962) and prime minister of Bavaria from December 11, 1962 to November 7, 1978, serving as President of the Bundesrat in 1972/73. In 1974 he gained the highest election victory for the CSU in Bavarian history with 62.1% of the votes.
From 1979 to 1984 he was a member of the European Parliament, as such being part of the first freely elected group of MPs in 1979.
One of his sons, Thomas Goppel, later served as Minister of Science, Research and the Arts (2003–2008).
The Alfons-Goppel-Stiftung (Alfons Goppel Foundation), formed in 1980 and named after him, supports needy children in third-world countries.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another.”
—Augusto Roa Bastos (b. 1917)
“I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“Young, and so thin, and so straight.
So straight! as if nothing could ever bend her.
But poor men would bend her, and doing things with poor men,
Being much in bed, and babies would bend her over,
And the rest of things in life that were for poor women,
Coming to them grinning and pretty with intent to bend and to kill.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)