He was an old-school conservative: Hans Zehetmair, Bavaria’s Minister of Education for many years, liked to embellish his speeches with quotations from Latin. After all, the CSU politician from the Erding district attended the Freising Cathedral Gymnasium and then studied ancient Greek, Latin, German and history. “Contra naturam” and not just “contra deum” is homosexuality, he said in 1987 in BR, which earned him a reputation as a reactionary. At that time he had only been Minister of State for Education and Culture for a year and had to put up with a weekly newspaper dubbing him “Moosbuffalo”.
Bavaria’s Prime Minister Franz Josef Strauss brought the Erdinger district administrator into his cabinet in 1986, as a side entrant, so to speak, without a seat in the state parliament. The former high school teacher Zehetmair soon made a name for himself, not necessarily with progressive school politics, but with religion, discipline and order – concepts that still dominated the family and social image of the CSU at the time. He also acted as chairman of the Tuntenhausen Catholic men’s association, a function in which he campaigned against all kinds of moral depravity.
In spite of this, or precisely because of this, Zehetmair remained in office after Strauss’s death and the resignation of his successor Max Streibl. Under Edmund Stoiber, Zehetmair even rose to become deputy prime minister, until Stoiber ousted him after the state elections in 1998: He divided up the large ministry: the young Strauss daughter Monika Hohlmeier took on the tuition and culture, Zehetmair was left with science, research and art. For a moment he only thought of quitting, as he later confessed.
But then Zehetmair made the best of it: Contact with artists and intellectuals also left their mark on Zehetmair, at least Stoiber is said to have said at this time that Zehetmair Hans suddenly showed moderate mood swings. Zehetmair confirmed this in 2001 in an interview with the SZ. “I’ve become more liberal, definitely,” he said at the time. And he even regretted his gaffes in relation to homosexuality: “That was definitely nonsense.”
In 2003 Zehetmair left the state parliament and took over the job as chairman of the Hanns Seidel Foundation, which he held until 2014. In addition, Zehetmair was chairman of the Council for German Spelling until 2016, the reform of which he brought to an end that he found acceptable.
Now Zehetmair died at the age of 86. Prime Minister Markus Söder praised him as a man to whom Bavaria owes the fact that it is one of the strongest science locations in the world.