Sometimes a political degradation is a stroke of luck for the degraded, even if he sees it completely differently at first. In any case, it was exactly the same for Hans Zehetmair, who was Bavarian Minister of Education for 17 years. When Edmund Stoiber divided the ministry again in 1998 into a school ministry and a science and art ministry, he didn’t just want to rejuvenate his cabinet. He hoped to get rid of Zehetmair as well. Just like Franz Josef Strauss did in 1986 with Zehetmair’s predecessor, Hans Maier. Strauss had also shared the ministry at the time (it was a constant back-and-forth with the house) in the expectation that Maier, whose recalcitrance had long been a thorn in Strauss’ side, would then throw down offended. That’s how it happened, Maier didn’t want to head a rump ministry.
In Zehetmair’s case, however, Stoiber’s calculations did not work out. He also found it humiliating that Stoiber withdrew his responsibility for the schools without any prior warning. But the “Erdinger Moosbüffel” like the long-gone one Week once described, bravely accepted the amputation carried out by Stoiber without anesthesia – and thus found late political happiness.
Actually, Zehetmair would have liked to have become finance minister instead of Kurt Faltlhauser, but in terms of vanity and arrogance he could easily compete with the smart honorary professor from Munich. But Zehetmair quickly realized that as Minister for Science and Art he “actually got my dream constellation”. Of course, he was offended by the increasing criticism of his school policy, which was characterized by little enthusiasm for reform. For many years, Zehetmair had been the conservative figurehead of the entire Union on educational issues and had fought against everything he sensed left-wing zeitgeist behind. Against the comprehensive school, against a twelve-year grammar school, which Stoiber then pushed into the eye of his successor Monika Hohlmeier a few years later. He defended the school prayer all the more zealously.
They called him “His most Catholic Majesty” in the CSU because Zehetmair was also the chairman of the Tuntenhausen Catholic Men’s Association, a heart chamber of Bavarian Catholicism, which many felt was not just conservative, but reactionary. Zehetmair was the beneficiary of Strauss’ maneuver against Maier in 1986. Strauss called the district administrator of Erding at the time and offered him the position of secretary of state for education. Zehetmair is said to have said to Strauss: “I also trust the minister.” Strauss was obviously impressed by so much self-confidence, because Zehetmair actually became the new Minister of Education right away. And after Strauss died in 1988, the ministry was merged again under his successor Max Streibl. As I said, with this house it was a constant back and forth.
Group picture with lady: In the photo from October 30, 1986, the then Prime Minister Franz Josef Strauss presents his cabinet. To the right of Strauss, he is fifth from the left in the front row, stands – half hidden – Hans Zehetmair. After him come Max Striebl, Edmund Stoiber and Mathilde Berghofer-Weichner, who was the only woman in the state government at the time.
(Photo: dpa/SZ Photo)
For Zehetmair, the multicultural contact with artists and scientists, for which he was now exclusively responsible, was a late political ennoblement. The most Catholic majesty became an increasingly liberal esthete. Zehetmair’s gradual change was also registered in the CSU parliamentary group. “He no longer has to worry about school prayers, that’s his luck,” said the group at the time.
And Zehetmair has left its mark. It was primarily his merit that the Pinakothek der Moderne was built in Munich. The project was on the brink several times, but Zehetmair fought for it for years – and was successful in the end. The politically well-connected Zehetmair also benefited from the fact that a red-green government came into office in Berlin in 1998. He fought fierce feuds with the short-time Minister of State for Culture Michael Naumann and the Minister of Education and Research Edelgard Buhlmahn and bitterly defended the cultural sovereignty of the states against all claims of the federal government, which in his eyes were encroachments. He once said of the idea of a federal ministry of culture that such an institution was “as unnecessary as a flu virus.”
In his last years, Zehetmair was a kind of grand seigneur in the Bavarian cabinet, who also had a word of comfort for colleagues. Before entering the agenda, Stoiber liked to dig into the wounds of his subordinates at cabinet meetings. When the Justice Minister at the time, Manfred Weiß, got hopelessly tangled up in one of Stoiber’s feared cross-examinations, his neighbor Zehetmair patted his arm in a friendly manner and whispered to him: “Never mind.”
Zehetmair also admitted his own mistakes in the spelling reform
Before the state elections in 2003, Zehetmair announced his departure from politics, completely voluntarily, as he liked to emphasize, which of course was a hoax. Because he would have liked to have gone on a bit more, but he knew very well that Stoiber was keen to rejuvenate his cabinet. He wanted to forestall that. In addition, Zehetmair had cunningly made sure that he did not suddenly have to sit on the sofa at home after his long years as a minister. Zehetmair became chairman of the Hanns Seidel Foundation in 2004, an office that the then President of the State Parliament, Alois Glück, would have liked to have had. But because Stoiber didn’t think much of the concentration of power outside of himself, he was suspicious of the combination of parliamentary president and foundation chairman and decided in favor of Zehetmair.
As head of the foundation, he was able to indulge his love of travel and made little secret of how nice he found it not to have to coordinate every one of his activities with the Federal Foreign Office in this function. Another office that Zehetmair took over as a retiree was far more strenuous. From the end of 2004, as chairman of the newly created “Council for German Spelling”, he helped to repair the worst excesses of the spelling reform, which he himself had helped to initiate as Minister of Education. Zehetmair also admitted his own mistakes. “Language cannot be politically decreed, it has to develop, it has to grow,” he said in an interview with the SZ last summer.