Theodor Heuss

Biography

Theodor Heuss was born in 1884 in Brackenheim in Württemberg. He studied economics, art history and political science in Munich and Berlin, taking a doctorate in Munich in 1905 under Lujo Brentano, and became a follower of the liberal politician Friedrich Naumann. He worked as a political journalist, editing Naumann's magazine Die Hilfe and from 1912 to 1918 the Neckarzeitung in Heilbronn.

A member of successive left-liberal parties, Heuss joined the German Democratic Party after 1918 and sat in the Reichstag from 1924 to 1928 and again from 1930 to 1933. He was also managing director of the Deutscher Werkbund and lectured at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik. Although he wrote an early critical study of Hitler, he voted with his party for the Enabling Act in March 1933. Under the Nazis he lost his posts, saw his books burned, and wrote under pseudonyms, including for the Frankfurter Zeitung until it was closed in 1943.

After the war the American authorities licensed him to publish the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung, and he briefly served as culture minister of Württemberg-Baden. He helped found the Free Democratic Party, was elected its chairman in December 1948, and influenced the drafting of the Basic Law in the Parliamentary Council.

On 12 September 1949 the Federal Convention elected him the first president of West Germany; he was re-elected almost unopposed in 1954 and left office in 1959. His informal, non-partisan style and his state visits helped rebuild trust in the new republic abroad. He died in Stuttgart in 1963.