Josef Stingl

Josef Stingl (19 March 1919 – 19 March 2004) was a German politician who served as the longstanding president of the Bundesanstalt für Arbeit (West German [National] Employment Agency) from 1968 to 1984. By that time he had already established himself as a national politician as a member of the CDU and, after he relocated to Munich, the CSU). From 1953 to 1968, he served as a member of the Bundestag (West German parliament). There, he took a particular interest in pensions and labour law.

Life Provenance and early years Stingl was born in Maria Kulm, Czechoslovakia (today Chlum Svaté Maří in the Czech Republic), which is where he grew up in a Catholic family. Georg Stingl, his father, was a master baker, who died in 1933, as a result of which the latter part of Josef's childhood was spent in relative poverty.

New beginnings in Berlin With much of the German capital reduced to rubble, as the rubble was cleared there was no shortage of building work, and it was as a building worker that Stingl initially supported his family. In 1947 he switched to a management/administrative position with a building business. Between 1948 and 1952 he was employed by a major home-building firm. At a time when "media political correctness" was not yet ubiquitous, Josef Stingl, who was a more than averagely rotund gentleman, was also referred to as "der Bundesunke" (loosely, "the national toad") in reference to his monthly media appearances to announce the deteriorating West German unemployment statistics.

Away from the frontline Between 1983 and 1990 Stingl took a post as an honorary (though apparently not entirely inactive) professor at the University of Bamberg where he was assigned to the department of "professional further education" ("Berufliche Weiterbildung"). He did not go quietly into retirement. Instead he increased his involvement with the church and established himself as a leading spokesman for the victims (and their families) of ethnic cleansing from the "Sudetenland" during 1944/45. He was committed to dialogue and reconciliation between the descendants of the (former) Sudeten Germans and of the Czechs who had taken their place in those territories.

After the death of his first wife Josef Stingl remarried and moved to Leutesdorf (downriver from Koblenz). During his final years he suffered from serious heart disease. He died at Leutesdorf on his eighty-fifth birthday.

Awards and honours