Personal Life
- He is a great admirer of the philosopher Karl Popper, and contributed a foreword to the 1982 Festschrift in Popper's honor.
- The University of Germany's Federal Armed Forces in Hamburg was renamed Helmut Schmidt University – University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg in 2003 in honour of the politician who – as minister of defence – had introduced obligatory academic education for German career officers.
- Born and raised in Hamburg, Schmidt is regarded in Germany as an embodiment of hanseatic values, according to which he has never accepted a medal or an order of merit (not even the Federal Republic's Federal Cross of Merit).
- Schmidt is also a talented pianist, and has recorded piano concertos of both Mozart and Bach with the well-known German pianist and conductor, Christoph Eschenbach.
- Schmidt (as was his late wife) is a smoker. He is well known for lighting up cigarettes on TV interviews and talkshows. In January 2008, German police launched an enquiry after Schmidt was reported by an anti-smoking initiative for defying the recently introduced smoking ban. The initiative claimed that Helmut Schmidt had been flagrantly ignoring laws "for decades". Despite pictures in the press, the case was subsequently dropped after the public prosecution service decided that Schmidt's actions had not been a threat to public health.
- On April 6, 2010, with a lifespan of 33 342 days he surpassed Konrad Adenauer in terms of longevity and is now the oldest former chancellor in German history.
- His wife, Loki Schmidt, died on 21 October 2010.
- At the beginning of August 2012, Schmidt gave an interview on German television where he revealed that at 93 years of age he had fallen in love again. His new fiancée is Ruth Loah, 79, a long-time associate of his.
Read more about this topic: Helmut Schmidt
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)