Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg

Education

In 1991, after finishing high school (Gymnasium) in Rosenheim, Guttenberg completed his mandatory military service reaching the rank of Sergeant. Guttenberg studied law at the University of Bayreuth, where he passed the first legal state examination (said to be the equivalent of a master's degree) in 1999. Guttenberg chose not to pursue the second state examination (the equivalent of a bar exam), and focused on running the Munich-based "Guttenberg GmbH" holding where, along with a few employees, he managed his family's significant assets and various participations. Due to the holding's low revenue and small number of employees, it was said that Guttenberg had exaggerated his business experience. The Guttenberg GmbH had assets under management of at least a quarter billion euros, including a 26.5 percent stake in Rhön-Klinikum AG, which was sold in March 2002 to Bayerische Hypo- und Vereinsbank for 260 million euros. From 1996 to 2002, Guttenberg was a member of the board of directors of Rhön-Klinikum AG. Until September 2004, he was a managing director of the KT-Kapitalverwaltung GbR in Munich.

Guttenberg studied law at the University of Bayreuth. He successfully defended his dissertation Verfassung und Verfassungsvertrag. Konstitutionelle Entwicklungsstufen in den USA und der EU (lit. 'Constitution and Constitutional Treaty. Stages of Constitutional Development in the USA and EU'), and was awarded the academic degree Doctor of Law (Doktor der Rechte) in 2007. Following accusations of plagiarism in Guttenberg's dissertation, the University of Bayreuth conducted an investigation, culminating on 23 February 2011 with the revocation of Guttenberg's doctorate.

In 2019, Guttenberg was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Southampton.

Political career

Guttenberg is a member of the Christian Social Union of Bavaria (CSU) and held different positions within the party, including that of secretary general.

Member of Parliament

In 2002, Guttenberg was elected to the Bundestag as the representative of Kulmbach. He was reelected in 2005, winning 60.0% of the votes in his constituency. In 2009, he was reelected again with 68.1% of the votes in his district, obtaining the highest percentage of votes of all elected representatives in Germany for that election cycle.

From October 2005 to November 2008, Guttenberg served as chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag's Foreign Affairs Committee and as spokesman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag's Committee on disarmament, non-proliferation and arms control. He also chaired the CSU Foreign Policy Expert Committee and the German-British parliamentary group during that time.

In early 2004, Guttenberg introduced the concept of a Privileged Partnership between Turkey and the European Union as a viable alternative to accession of Turkey to the European Union into the German political discourse. Guttenberg based his opposition to full Turkish membership in the EU on the country's insufficient fulfillment of relevant accession criteria, for example with regard to the Cyprus dispute. At the same time, he stressed the necessity of maintaining good relations with Turkey and was therefore critical of a French initiative to criminalize the denial of the Armenian genocide.

Guttenberg also repeatedly warned of the looming threat posed to German and European security by Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs. However, he rejected taking rash military action against Iran and instead called for an international diplomatic effort to deal with Tehran's nuclear program. As a Member of Parliament, he was a strong critic of the far-left party Die Linke, which he accused of links to terrorists. He was also a member of the Europa-Union Parliamentary Group of the German Bundestag and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

In September 2008, the CSU suffered heavy losses in the Bavarian state election and lost its absolute majority in the Bavarian Landtag for the first time in 46 years. As a result of this political defeat, the CSU party leadership stepped down and Horst Seehofer, the new CSU chairman and minister-president of Bavaria, appointed Guttenberg as secretary general of the CSU in November 2008.

Federal Minister of Economics

After the resignation of Michael Glos on 9 February 2009 Guttenberg became Federal Minister of Economics and Technology in the first Merkel cabinet.

Guttenberg, the youngest economics minister in the German post-war era, came to office during the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession.

During the 2008 financial crisis, several major German banks were near failure, including Hypo Real Estate, which received €102 billion of credit and guarantees from Germany's bank rescue fund. In this case, Guttenberg opposed an overly hasty nationalization of Hypo Real Estate, which he considered only as "ultissima ratio, a measure of the very last resort". A few months later he drafted a legislative proposal to minimize the financial risks of failing banks, which caused controversy but later became the foundation of the German bank restructuring bill.

In the case of troubled German companies asking for state aid, including automaker Opel and now-defunct mail-order service Arcandor/Quelle, Guttenberg was reluctant to commit government resources. He insisted on strict conditionality, including restructuring, and limited support to only those companies which were otherwise competitive but were temporarily affected by the crisis.

In November 2008, Opel had appealed for governmental assistance because of severe financial problems facing its American parent, General Motors (GM). In 2009, Opel employed 25,000 workers in Germany and indirectly supported 50,000 additional jobs through its supplier network. In March 2009, Guttenberg made his first visit to the US as economics minister, focusing his trip on the future of Opel. In his talks with U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the director of the United States National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers, and Rick Wagoner, then CEO of General Motors, Guttenberg demanded that GM provide a viable restructuring plan for Opel as a precondition for receiving financial assistance from the German state. Guttenberg and Wagoner agreed on the necessity of a private investor for Opel.

After Guttenberg's visit to the US, negotiations between the German government, GM, and potential Opel investors, including Fiat and Canada's Magna International, were stalled by GM and the U.S. Treasury. In contrast to Merkel and other German political leaders, Guttenberg preferred insolvency for Opel rather than the infusion of unconditional financial assistance from the German state. Because of the resultant financial risks to the German state, Guttenberg opposed the sale of Opel to Magna International, favoured by Chancellor Merkel, and—according to media coverage—even offered his resignation over the controversy. The Opel-Magna deal later failed, and Opel remained a subsidiary of GM, who had to reimburse financial assistance to Germany. In the summer of 2009, he surpassed Angela Merkel as the most popular politician in Germany.

Federal Minister of Defence

The 2009 Bundestag elections led to a change in government, as the incumbent grand coalition of CDU/CSU and SPD was replaced by a center-right coalition of CDU/CSU and FDP.

According to German press reports, Chancellor Merkel offered Guttenberg the choice between the interior and the defence ministries while negotiating the distribution of ministerial posts within the new coalition government. Guttenberg decided to opt for the defence portfolio and took the oath of office on 28 October 2009 as part of the Second Cabinet Merkel. He was the youngest-ever German defence minister in the post-war era.

The first political challenge facing defence minister Guttenberg was dealing with the Kunduz airstrike of 4 September 2009. Initially, he adopted the position of his predecessor Jung and defended the air strike as "militarily appropriate". However, in contrast to Jung, Guttenberg conceded that the strike had also caused civilian casualties. After Guttenberg had received additional information and investigative reports dating back to the tenure of his predecessor Jung, Guttenberg changed his position concerning the "Kunduz airstrike" and dismissed Bundeswehr Chief of Staff Schneiderhahn and Parliamentary State Secretary of Defence Wichert on 26 November 2009.

Jung, who in the meantime had assumed the position of labor minister in the second Merkel cabinet, took full political responsibility for the delay in sharing relevant Kunduz air strike information and resigned the following day.

At the demand of the opposition parties, the Bundestag subsequently established a special investigative committee to shed light on the defense ministry's communications policy in connection with the Kunduz air strike.

The final report of the Bundestag's special investigative committee cleared Guttenberg from the accusation that he had been responsible for the defence ministry's inadequate communications policy following the Kunduz strike. The findings were supported by members from the ruling CDU/CSU-FDP coalition while the opposition parties criticized the special investigative committee's report and later published their own account of the investigation.

Plagiarism scandal and resignation

In 2011, Guttenberg resigned amid controversy over the doctoral dissertation he submitted at the University of Bayreuth, after the first accusations of plagiarism became public in February 2011. Guttenberg's dissertation, Verfassung und Verfassungsvertrag (lit. 'Constitution and Constitutional Treaty'), had been the basis of his 2007 doctorate from the University of Bayreuth. Guttenberg at first denied intentional plagiarism, calling the accusations "absurd," but acknowledged that he may have made errors in his footnotes. In addition, it emerged that Guttenberg had requested a report from the Bundestag's research department, which he had then inserted into his dissertation without attribution. On 23 February 2011, Guttenberg apologized in parliament for flaws in his dissertation, but denied intentional deception and denied the use of a ghostwriter.

On 23 February 2011, the University of Bayreuth rescinded Guttenberg's doctorate. In part due to the expressions of confidence by Angela Merkel, the scandal continued to evoke heavy criticism from prominent academics, legal scholars (who accused Guttenberg of intentional plagiarism), and politicians both in the opposition and in the governing coalition. On 1 March 2011, Guttenberg announced his resignation as Minister of Defense, from his seat in the Bundestag, and from all other political offices.

In May 2011, a University of Bayreuth commission tasked with investigating Guttenberg's dissertation came to the conclusion that Guttenberg had engaged in intentional deception in the writing of his dissertation, and had violated standards of good academic practice. The commission found that he had included borrowed passages throughout his dissertation without citation, and had modified those passages in order to conceal their origin.

In November 2011, the prosecution in Hof discontinued the criminal proceedings for copyright violations against Guttenberg on condition of Guttenberg paying €20,000 to a charity. The prosecutor found 23 prosecutable copyright violations in Guttenberg's dissertation, but estimated that the material damage suffered by the authors of those texts was marginal.

The scandal also led to scrutiny of other politicians' doctorates, notably that of his colleague in the federal cabinet Annette Schavan and Hungarian President Pál Schmitt, who lost their doctorates for similar reasons.

2017 German federal election

Guttenberg returned to German politics by making a speech during the 2017 German federal election in which he hailed Chancellor Angela Merkel. The speech was widely reported on in German media and described as marking his comeback in German politics. Guttenberg also said Germany should preserve its relationship with the United States in order to renew the ties after the end of the Trump era, noting that "they won't forget it if, at a time when they were being mocked by the whole world, we maintained contacts with them and said this relationship is important now and will remain so in future." Guttenberg himself has always ruled out the possibility of a comeback.

Career after politics

In September 2011, Guttenberg joined the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). At the Halifax International Security Forum in November 2011, Guttenberg made his first public appearance since joining CSIS. During a plenary session on the Great Recession, he voiced pessimism about the current state of the EU and decried a severe "crisis of political leadership".

In November 2011, Guttenberg published the book Vorerst gescheitert (lit. 'Failed for Now'). The publication is based on a series of conversations with the editor-in-chief of Die Zeit, Giovanni di Lorenzo, in which Guttenberg talks extensively for the first time about his political career, the plagiarism scandal and his resignation, as well as his plans for the future. Guttenberg's criticism in the book of the direction which the CSU is headed sparked some controversy within his party.

Since 2013, he has been a member of the International Advisory Board of Barrick Gold Corporation.

Guttenberg is a strong critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin's expansionist foreign policy. In Spring 2014, he decried an "astonishing leadership vacuum in the world" and demanded that the West, and especially Europe, respond to Moscow's aggressions with strong political action. He praised Chancellor Merkel for her firm stance against Putin. Guttenberg appeared together with Henry Kissinger during a CNN interview about the Russo-Ukrainian war and explained the significant domestic political resistance that Merkel's Russia policy faced in Germany. Several months later Guttenberg accused the EU of inaction and a lack of capabilities given the crises in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Since July 2014, he has also been an advisor to Ripple Labs.

In October 2015, former CSU chairman Horst Seehofer appointed Guttenberg to his competence team for the election campaign. He has also been advising Deutsche Lufthansa on innovation issues since 2015.

At Edelman, he was initially a founding member of the Global Advisory Board, established in 2018, and was later appointed to the Board of Directors. He is also a board member of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD).

Family and personal life

Guttenberg is a member of the House of Guttenberg, first documented in 1158, and conferred the rank of baron by the Holy Roman Emperor in 1700. Since the adoption of Germany's 1919 Weimar Constitution, which abolished the nobility's privileges, "noble titles form part of the name only".

His grandfather, Karl Theodor Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg (1921–1972), was a CSU politician and hard-line conservative during the Cold War, noted for his opposition to the Ostpolitik. During the Second World War, he narrowly escaped execution after refusing to kill Jews, stating that he would rather shoot SS members. Several other members of Guttenberg's family also offered resistance to the Nazi regime, among them his great-grandfather Georg Enoch Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg, and Karl Ludwig Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg, a great-great-uncle of Guttenberg. Karl Ludwig was a Catholic monarchist, who prior to the Second World War published the "Weiße Blätter" (White Papers), an important publication of the conservative opposition to the Nazi regime. He belonged to the circle of anti-Hitler conspirators around Hans von Dohnányi, Justus Delbrück, and Hans Oster. After the failure of the 20 July plot he was arrested and later executed. His grandmother, Rosa Sophie Prinzessin von Arenberg (1922–2012), was a member of the House of Arenberg.

Guttenberg was born in Munich. He lived at his family castle in Guttenberg, Bavaria (district of Kulmbach), a village whose history is closely associated with the House of Guttenberg, and in a mansion in a refined part of Berlin, Berlin-Westend. The castle has been in the possession of the Guttenberg family since 1482. In September 2011, it became known that Guttenberg had bought a house for his family in Greenwich, Connecticut, close to New York City.

Guttenberg's father was Enoch zu Guttenberg, a conductor, who has been decorated with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (Officer's Cross) as well as the Bavarian Order of Merit. He has received many awards for his contributions to classical music, including the German Cultural Award and the Echo Klassik award. Previously, Enoch zu Guttenberg also owned the winery estate Weingut Reichsrat von Buhl.

Guttenberg's mother, Christiane zu Eltz is a member of the Eltz family, which has strong ties with Croatia. She is the daughter of Ludwine, Countess Pejacsevich de Verocze. Her father was Jakob von und zu Eltz, a former President of the Association of Winemakers in Rheingau who became active in Croatian politics after Croatian independence. She divorced Enoch zu Guttenberg in 1977, and Karl-Theodor grew up with his father. His mother married secondly Adolf Richard Barthold von Ribbentrop, owner of an Eltville art gallery and son of Joachim von Ribbentrop, in 1985, and has two children from her second marriage. Guttenberg has a younger brother, Philipp Franz zu Guttenberg (born 1973), who married a daughter of Godfrey Macdonald, 8th Baron Macdonald.

Awards

Guttenberg was awarded the "Politikaward" in 2009, which is a German "Politician of the Year" award. It was awarded by politik & kommunikation, a German periodical for political communications.

In 2010, the German news magazine Focus named him "Man of the Year".

In 2011, the Carneval Association of Aachen awarded him the "Order Against Dead Seriousness" (German: Orden wider den tierischen Ernst), although he did not attend the ceremony in person, sending instead his younger brother.