12 Facts About Karl Carstens

Karl Carstens served as the president of West Germany from 1979 to 1984.

Karl Carstens studied law and political science at the universities of Frankfurt, Dijon, Munich, Konigsberg, and Hamburg from 1933 to 1936, gaining a doctorate in 1938 and taking the Second Staatsexamen degree in 1939.

From 1939 to 1945, during the Second World War, Karl Carstens was a member of an anti-aircraft artillery unit in the Luftwaffe, reaching the rank of Leutnant by the war's end.

Karl Carstens had joined the Nazi SA paramilitary organisation already in 1934.

In 1944 Karl Carstens married the medical student Veronica Prior in Berlin.

In July 1960 Karl Carstens reached the position of secretary of state at the Foreign Office and in the same year was appointed as professor for public and international law at University of Cologne.

In 1972 Karl Carstens was first elected into the Bundestag, of which he was a member until 1979.

Karl Carstens famously denounced the author and Nobel laureate Heinrich Boll as a supporter of left-wing terrorism for his 1974 novel The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum.

On 23 May 1979, Karl Carstens was elected as the fifth President of the Federal Republic of Germany, prevailing against the SPD candidate Annemarie Renger in the first ballot.

On 7 January 1983, President Karl Carstens nonetheless dissolved the Bundestag and called for new elections.

In 1984 Karl Carstens decided not to seek a second term on account of his age and left office on 30 June 1984.

Karl Carstens was a member of the Protestant Church in Germany.