SPD politician
Hamburg’s ex-mayor Klose died – he was 86 years old
Hans-Ulrich Klose (SPD), former mayor of Hamburg
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At 37, he was the youngest head of government in the republic. Hamburg’s former mayor Hans-Ulrich Klose has now died.
Hamburg’s ex-mayor Hans-Ulrich Klose is dead. The SPD politician died on Wednesday at the age of 86, as his wife Anne Steinbeck-Klose told the German Press Agency on Thursday. Her husband passed away peacefully at home. In recent years he has suffered from Alzheimer’s.
Klose was Prime Minister in Hamburg from 1974 to 1981. He then made a name for himself in the Bundestag as a faction leader and an experienced foreign politician. Within the party, he was treasurer until 1991 and belonged to the SPD’s closest leadership circle.
At the age of 37, Hans-Ulrich Klose was the youngest mayor
Klose became mayor of Hamburg at the age of 37, making him the youngest head of government in a federal state. For seven years he was in charge of Hamburg City Hall until he surprisingly resigned in May 1981. Two years later he became a member of the German Bundestag and stayed there until 2013.
After the resignation of Hans-Jochen Vogel, Klose was elected chairman of the SPD parliamentary group in 1991, but had to cede the post to Rudolf Scharping in 1994.
Klose started as mayor of Hamburg in 1974 with a rigorous austerity program. As a representative of the left wing of the party, he criticized the extremist decision and tried to get Hamburg to abandon nuclear energy. Klose resigned as mayor in 1981 because of the lack of support from the SPD for his course against the Brokdorf nuclear power plant, located around 70 kilometers away in neighboring Schleswig-Holstein.
Since 1998 he has devoted himself to foreign and security policy at the federal level, was chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee and in 2010 also became coordinator for transatlantic cooperation at the Federal Foreign Office – a post which he gave up again early in 2011 for family reasons.