Childhood and early years
Horst Köhler was born in Skierbieszów, Poland, on 22 February 1943. His parents, German farmers from Bessarabia in Romania, had been forcibly resettled to Poland, which was in turn occupied by the Wehrmacht. Horst Köhler was the seventh of eight children.
During the war in 1944, the family fled from the advancing Soviet troops and settled in Markkleeberg-Zöbigker near Leipzig. Here the parents built a new livelihood for themselves on a small farm. Soon, the mother in particular wanted to improve her family's opportunities. In 1953, before the uprising on 17 June, the Köhlers managed to flee to the Federal Republic of Germany via West Berlin. For four years they lived in various refugee camps before finally finding a new home in the Swabian city of Ludwigsburg in 1957.
Köhler sited his university entrance examination at Ludwigsburg's Mörike Grammar School in 1963. He did his military service, signed up for two years in the armoured infantry and became second lieutenant of the reserve. He financed his economics studies through part-time jobs. In 1969 he completed his studies at the University of Tübingen and became an academic assistant at the Institute for Applied Economic Research. That same year, he married Eva Luise Bohnet, a teacher from Ludwigsburg.
In 1977, Köhler obtained his doctorate from the University of Tübingen. His dissertation looked at the effect of technical advances on labour.
Career
In 1976, Köhler joined the Policy Principles Directorate-General of the Federal Ministry of Economics in Bonn under Minister Otto Graf Lambsdorff. In 1981, he left Bonn for Kiel and became Advisor to Gerhard Stoltenberg, then Minister-President of Land Schleswig-Holstein, in the State Chancellery. When Stoltenberg became Federal Finance Minister with the change of government in 1982, Köhler left Kiel to return to Bonn, where he joined the leading officials in the Finance Ministry, becoming Head of the Minister's Office. Later he took over the Policy Principles Directorate-General and the Finance and Credit Directorate-General, which was responsible for international financial and monetary policy.
In 1990 Federal Finance Minister Theo Waigel appointed Horst Köhler State Secretary. Köhler negotiated the German-German monetary union with the GDR leadership. And in Moscow he negotiated the agreement on the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the GDR. He was chief negotiator for the Maastricht Treaty on European Monetary Union, as well as the Personal Representative (Sherpa) of Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl for the World Economic Summits of the then G7. Köhler organized the World Economic Summit in Munich where Germany hosted the G7 in 1992.
In 1993 Horst Köhler left the Federal Government and became President of the German Savings Bank Association. He worked to create a modern image of the organization and recognizes the particular responsibility of the savings banks for small and medium-sized enterprises and for the social climate in the municipalities. In 1998, Helmut Kohl asked him to become President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London. The Bank's task was to build up the market economy and democracy in the former Eastern bloc states. Köhler changed the bank's policy to give greater support to small and medium-sized enterprises. Market economy structures war to be built from the bottom up.
In 2000, Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder proposed Köhler as the new Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, DC. Köhler set himself the goal of making the IMF's work transparent and more geared to crisis prevention. So he steped up IMF cooperation with the World Bank under James D. Wolfensohn. Köhler was convinced that more has to be done to alleviate poverty if peace and stability are to be secured in the long term. To this end, he instigated far-reaching reforms in the IMF.
In 2003 he was awarded an honorary professorship by the University of Tübingen.
On 4 July 2004, Horst Köhler was sworn in as the ninth President of the Federal Republic of Germany. In the domestic arena, the Federal President was concerned above all with preserving and creating new sustainable jobs. In his opinion, Germany also needed a better education system and a creative approach to demographic change in order to regenerate itself. We now have an opportunity, Horst Köhler believed, to forge closer bonds between young and old in a more inclusive society. He also considered Germany to be a "land of ideas" with the confidence and unity required to shape its own future, a country that is shouldering its responsibility to be a force for good in the world and especially in the European Union. In the field of foreign policy, he advocated a human dimension to globalization with clearly defined rules. He was therefore a staunch campaigner for poverty eradication and the African continent.
On 23 May 2009, Federal President Köhler was re-elected for a second term of five years by an absolute majority of 613 votes in the Federal Convention in the first round of voting.
On 31 May 2010, Horst Köhler resigned from his office of Federal President.
Horst Köhler, Protestant, was married to Eva Luise Köhler. They have two children. Köhler has been a member of the CDU since 1981, but his membership was suspended during his term of office as Federal President.
Horst Köhler died on 1 February 2025 in Berlin.