Processes
Court bans further passages from book about Helmut Kohl
The author Heribert Schwan published a book with unauthorized quotes from Kohl on his own initiative. photo
© Oliver Berg/dpa
The widow of former Chancellor Helmut Kohl has been at loggerheads with his ghostwriter for years. Now she has won a victory in court.
In the ongoing legal dispute over a tell-all book about the former Chancellor Helmut The Cologne Higher Regional Court has banned Kohl from further passages. These not only concern quotes from Kohl, but also descriptions and assessments by the author Heribert Schwan, who previously worked as a ghostwriter for Kohl.
Although witnesses such as Kohl’s son Walter confirmed in the previous trial that Kohl had not entered into a written confidentiality agreement with Schwan, the court assumed that confidentiality was implied because Schwan worked for Kohl.
Swan disappointed with decision
The journalist and historian Schwan wrote his memoirs together with Kohl as a ghostwriter in the early 2000s. Schwan recorded Kohl’s long descriptions of his political life on cassette. However, before writing the final volume of memoirs, which was supposed to deal with Kohl’s deselection and the CDU donations affair, the two fell out. Schwan then published the book “Legacy. The Kohl Protocols” without consulting Kohl, in which he published unauthorized statements by the former Chancellor, in particular drastic value judgments about other politicians. Kohl then sued Schwan. He argued that the comments made public by Schwan were never intended for the public. Since his death in 2017, the proceedings have been continued by his widow Maike Kohl-Richter. Kohl is considered one of the most important chancellors in German history, primarily due to his contributions to German reunification and European unification.
Schwan was disappointed with the decision. “If I had been asked to keep things confidential, I would have run away,” he told the German Press Agency. From a journalistic point of view, it is “unbelievable” that even quotes that do not refer to Helmut Kohl’s statements at all, but to evaluations of him, Schwan, have now been banned. This includes, among other things, descriptions of how the conversations went and why, from Schwan’s point of view, there was a break. Schwan blames Kohl’s second wife Maike Kohl-Richter for this.