Karl-Hermann Steinberg

Karl-Hermann Steinberg (22 June 1941 – 17 October 2021 ) was an eminent German university lecturer in Chemistry who became a politician (CDU) and briefly, in 1990 a deputy party chairman, and a Government Minister during the final months of the German Democratic Republic.

Life

Early years Steinberg was born at the height of the war in what had been a spa town in the south of what was then the central part of Germany. His father was a clerical worker. The war ended shortly before he was four, and the entire region became the Soviet occupation zone in what had formerly been Germany. When he was eight, in October 1949, the establishment of the German Democratic Republic formally put an end to Soviet Military Administration, substituting a stand-alone German state with its constitutional arrangements closely modeled on the Soviet Union and its governing class supported by Moscow. Steinberg successfully concluded his schooling and in 1954 joined the Free German Youth (FDJ / Freie Deutsche Jugend), which was in effect the "youth wing" of the young country's .

Politics Although the German Democratic Republic had been formally founded only in 1949, the basis for a return to one-party government had been established in April 1946, with the contentious merger of the old Communist Party with the Moderate-left SPD. Since 1950 elections had been choreographed to ensure that approximately 99% of the vote went to the ruling SED, but the bloc parties also received a fixed quota of seats in the national legislative assembly Volkskammer, and from 1971 till October 1990 Karl-Hermann Steinberg served as a member of the assembly.

Awards and honours Steinberg's awards and honours have included the Patriotic Order of Merit in Bronze (1985) and the Banner of Labor.