Bild

The Bild newspaper (or Bild-Zeitung, literally Picture Newspaper; pronounced [ˈbɪlt]) is a German tabloid published by Axel Springer AG.

The paper is published from Monday to Saturday; on Sundays, its sister paper Bild am Sonntag ("Picture on the Sunday") is published instead, which has a different style and its own editors. Bild is tabloid in style but broadsheet in size. It is the best-selling non-Asian newspaper and has the sixth-largest circulation worldwide.

Bild has been described as "notorious for its mix of gossip, inflammatory language, and sensationalism" and as having a huge influence on German politicians. Its nearest English-language stylistic and journalistic equivalent is often considered to be the British national newspaper The Sun, the second highest selling European tabloid newspaper, with which it shares a degree of rivalry.

Der Spiegel wrote in 2006 that Bild "flies just under the nonsense threshold of American and British tabloids ... For the German desperate, it is a daily dose of high-resolution soft porn". According to The Guardian, for 28 years from 1984 to 2012, Bild had topless girls featuring on its first page; the paper published more than 5,000 topless pictures.

Helmut Kohl

Helmut Josef Michael Kohl (German: [ˈhɛlmuːt ˈjoːzɛf 'mɪçaʔeːl ˈkoːl]; born 3 April 1930) is a German statesman, who served as Chancellor of Germany from 1982 to 1998 (of West Germany 1982–90 and of the reunited Germany 1990–98) and as the chairman of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) from 1973 to 1998.

His 16-year tenure was the longest of any German chancellor since Otto von Bismarck, and by far the longest of any democratically elected chancellor. He oversaw the end of the Cold War, and is widely regarded as the main architect of the German reunification. Together with French president François Mitterrand, he is also considered the architect of the Maastricht Treaty, which established the European Union.

Kohl was described as "the greatest European leader of the second half of the 20th century" by U.S. Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Life

Youth and education

Helmut Kohl was born on 3 April 1930 in Ludwigshafen am Rhein (at the time part of Bavaria, now in Rhineland-Palatinate), Germany, the third child of Hans Kohl (1887–1975), a civil servant, and his wife, Cäcilie (née Schnur; 1890–1979). His family was conservative and Roman Catholic, and remained loyal to the Catholic Centre Party before and after 1933. His older brother died in the Second World War as a teenage soldier. At the age of ten he was obliged, like any child in Germany at the time, to join the Deutsches Jungvolk, a section of the Hitler Youth. Aged 15, on 20 April 1945, Adolf Hitler's birthday, he was sworn in to the Hitler Youth by leader Artur Axmann at Berchtesgaden, just days before the end of the war. Kohl was also drafted in 1945, but he was not involved in any combat, a fact he later referred to as the "mercy of late birth" (German: Gnade der späten Geburt).