Philipp Mißfelder

Philipp Mißfelder (25 August 1979 – 13 July 2015) was a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) who became nationally known as federal chairman of the Junge Union and later as a foreign-policy spokesman in the Bundestag. He held that youth chair from 2002 until 2014 and a Bundestag seat from 2005 until his death. He died at the age of 35 from a pulmonary embolism.

Born in Gelsenkirchen, he was a Roman Catholic; the Bundestag's official biography records him as married with two daughters. He passed the Abitur in Bochum in 1999, performed compulsory military service from 1999 to 2000, and studied history until 2008. He joined the Junge Union in 1993 and the CDU in 1995, chaired the Schüler Union Deutschlands from 1998 to 2000, and sat on the CDU federal executive from 1999. From October 2002 he was federal chairman of the Junge Union; from 2008 he belonged to the CDU presidium and was a deputy member of the board of the European People's Party.

He entered the Bundestag in 2005 on the North Rhine-Westphalia state list for constituency 121, Recklinghausen I. In 2009 he became foreign-policy spokesman of the CDU and Christian Social Union (CSU) parliamentary group. Until 1 April 2014 he was the Federal Foreign Office's coordinator for transatlantic cooperation. On 26 April 2014 a state party congress in Düsseldorf elected him treasurer of the North Rhine-Westphalian CDU with 68.2 percent of the vote, at the same meeting that confirmed Armin Laschet as state chairman. Later that month he attended a St Petersburg birthday reception for former chancellor Gerhard Schröder at which Vladimir Putin was present; Angela Merkel and CDU/CSU floor leader Volker Kauder had not been told of the trip in advance.

Two remarks made while he led the Junge Union shaped his early public profile. In a Tagesspiegel interview in early August 2003 he said he saw no point in 85-year-olds still receiving artificial hip joints at the expense of the solidarity community, adding that people had previously walked on crutches. In February 2009 he called an increase in Hartz IV benefit rates a boost for the tobacco and spirits industry and declined to apologise. Disclosures published by the Bundestag for the 18th legislative period listed a paid consultancy for teNeues Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, placed in income band 8, until 31 December 2014, and, from 1 May 2015, paid advisory-board seats at Thiel Capital LLC in San Francisco (band 6) and at Impulsus clean Technologies GmbH (band 5). The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, citing Bild, reported that the Thiel Capital role with the firm of Peter Thiel paid less than 50,000 euros a year.

The CDU federal executive learned of the death during its meeting on 13 July 2015. Merkel said the party was shocked and that its thoughts were with his wife and two small children; Kauder called him one of the group's most prominent foreign-policy figures and a convinced friend of Israel. On 17 July, Bundestag President Norbert Lammert opened a special sitting with a tribute and the House stood for a minute of silence; Lammert described Mißfelder as one of Israel's close friends and offered the House's condolences to his wife and two young children. He was buried on 18 July 2015 in Dülmen. Volker Mosblech succeeded him as a member of the Bundestag.

Early life and education

Family and schooling

Philipp Mißfelder was born on 25 August 1979 in Gelsenkirchen, in the Ruhr region of North Rhine-Westphalia. The Bundestag biography for the 18th legislative period describes him as a member of the Roman Catholic Church, married, and the father of two daughters. A 2010 profile in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, written when he was 30, recorded that he had married at 26.

He lived in Wattenscheid, a district of Bochum; the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung reported that he remained registered there until 2005, and in 2000 Die Welt described him as coming from Bochum-Wattenscheid. Published accounts place his father in the steel industry but do not use the same job title. The Süddeutsche Zeitung called him an employee in the steel industry with little interest in party politics, who nonetheless saw to it that his son followed public events in the newspapers. The Berliner Morgenpost later referred to Mißfelder as the son of a low-level salaried employee in a steelworks, while the Munzinger biographical archive describes the father as a steelworker (Stahlarbeiter). The Morgenpost added that neither his parents nor his siblings shared his attachment to Helmut Kohl.

According to the Süddeutsche profile, Mißfelder experienced German reunification at the age of ten, on television, and Kohl, then federal chancellor, left a lasting impression. At his Gymnasium, the Morgenpost wrote, classmates and teachers made jokes at Kohl's expense. In 1999 he passed the Abitur at the Märkische Schule in Bochum-Wattenscheid. That school is a Gymnasium which has stood on Saarlandstraße since the 1960s.

Military service and university

After leaving school he performed basic conscription service (Grundwehrdienst) in the Bundeswehr from 1999 to 2000. While he was still doing that service, he told Die Welt that he intended to study law in Berlin, and the paper identified him as a member of the Christian Democratic Union from Bochum-Wattenscheid.

The curriculum vitae published by the CDU, and archived from the party website in December 2013, is the most detailed public account of what followed. It lists legal studies from 2000 to 2003, then a change of subject: history at the Technische Universität Berlin from 2003 to 2008, completed with the degree of Magister Artium. Shorter biographies omit the law years. The Bundestag entry says only that he studied history until 2008. Munzinger states that, after the Abitur and military service, he began history at the TU Berlin and finished in 2008 with a Magister thesis on the Jewish publicist Maximilian Harden. A Welt sketch of February 2009 likewise moved directly from military service to history in Berlin.

The party biography places the Magister in 2008. By then he had sat in the Bundestag since 2005, so the degree was finished alongside the mandate rather than before it. Writing in Die Tageszeitung that September, Ralph Bollmann reported that Mißfelder had finished a long-delayed history course and that the Magisterarbeit, written at the university's Center for Research on Antisemitism, dealt with Harden, whom Bollmann called the investigative journalist of the era of Wilhelm II. Bollmann observed that the subject offered material on politics in the age of the mass media. Neither that report nor the Munzinger entry gives the thesis a title beyond the description of its subject.

Youth politics

Schüler Union

Philipp Mißfelder joined the Junge Union in 1993 and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 1995, while he was still at school. The Schüler Union Deutschlands, which describes itself as the school-students' organization in the Union family, lists him as federal chairman from 1998 to 2000 for its North Rhine-Westphalia association, between Christian Jung (1997–1998) and Sebastian Warken (2000–2001). The term covered his 1999 Abitur in Bochum. The same roll of federal chairmen includes Christian Wulff for 1978–1980.

From 1998 he sat on the Junge Union's federal executive, and from 1999 on the CDU federal executive. When he moved up again in 2002, Die Welt described the 23-year-old as the youngest member of that CDU board.

Chairmanship of the Junge Union

Mißfelder chaired the Junge Union, the joint youth organization of the CDU and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU), from October 2002 until September 2014. The Deutschlandtag, its federal congress, returned him through Rostock in October 2012; reports of those ballots describe them as uncontested, and the statutes then in force made 2012 his last candidacy because a youth organization barred office-holders of 35 and over.

A Welt report dated 18 October 2002 described his election the previous evening at the Deutschlandtag in Düsseldorf, in succession to Hildegard Müller, who had just entered the Bundestag, and called the 23-year-old the youngest chairman in the organization's history. A later account put that uncontested vote at 80.5 percent, above the 72.8 percent Müller had received in 2000.

In October 2004 in Oldenburg, Der Spiegel described his re-election as one of the best results in the Junge Union's history and reported a membership of 127,000. At the same congress Helmut Kohl received a prolonged ovation, and Mißfelder said he had joined the youth organization because of Kohl. On 20 October 2006 in Wiesbaden the delegates gave him 239 votes in favour, 44 against and two abstentions, recorded as 84.5 percent. At the Deutschlandtag in Rust, Baden-Württemberg, in early November 2008 the share rose to 89.1 percent, which the Frankfurter Rundschau called the best of his four elections.

The 2010 Deutschlandtag in Potsdam re-elected him with 77.4 percent, the low point of the published series, still with no rival. In Rostock on 5 October 2012 he received 86.5 percent. The Rheinische Post put membership then at about 122,000, larger than the FDP and more than twice the Greens, and described a new basic programme that kept an organization it characterized as more conservative than its parent parties had been since the 1980s.

Standing inside the Union parties

The Junge Union's statute defines it as an independent association that is to win young people for democracy and to represent their interests in public and inside the Union parties. Membership of the CDU or CSU is not a condition of joining, though members of the federal executive are expected to belong to one of the two parties, and ordinary membership ends at 35 unless the member still holds a Junge Union office. In 2002 Mißfelder had argued for Edmund Stoiber as the Union's chancellor candidate and criticized the CDU, expressly not the CSU, for failing to debate its federal-election defeat.

During the grand coalition he used the congress against accommodation with the Social Democratic Party of Germany. At Wiesbaden in 2006 he said he could not support the government's health reform in the Bundestag, called the coalition a marriage of convenience that should end in 2009, and told the CDU and CSU: "They are Sozis, and they remain Sozis." From the same rostrum, Hessian minister-president Roland Koch defended the coalition. In 2008 he spoke of a vacancy in economic policy after Friedrich Merz left the CDU's front rank, and called Horst Seehofer's absence from Rust "annoying." The Frankfurter Rundschau treated the 89.1 percent as a step, on the proposal of the North Rhine-Westphalian CDU, into the party presidium, and noted that the Junge Union mattered inside the parties because of its electioneering. The Rheinische Post reported that Angela Merkel telephoned for the Rust result herself.

Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote in 2010 that his weight as chairman had grown from year to year, that he cultivated a conservative profile—including opposition to Turkish membership of the European Union and to higher Hartz IV rates—and that he avoided an open breach with Merkel. The national notoriety dated from 2003, a year after he took the chair, when his remarks on artificial hips for the very old produced a public storm; the substance of that dispute, and of the later Hartz IV comments, belongs to his social-policy record. At the 2014 Deutschlandtag in Inzell, Merkel thanked him for what she called a twelve-year record tenure, referred to the hip remarks as an "unhappy start," and said he had since grasped that the generations had to hold together, citing the Junge Union's cooperation with the Senioren-Union.

The age limit then forced a change of leadership. On 19 September 2014 in Inzell, Paul Ziemiak, 29 and chairman of the Junge Union in North Rhine-Westphalia, defeated deputy chairman Benedict Pöttering by 63 percent to 37 percent. Der Spiegel reported a months-long campaign that Mißfelder, before the vote, called more professionally and more bitterly fought than earlier contested candidacies.

Bundestag and party offices

Elections and the parliamentary mandate

Philipp Mißfelder sat in the Bundestag from the 2005 federal election through the 16th, 17th and 18th legislative periods. He did not win a constituency. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) returned him on its North Rhine-Westphalia state list, and his Bundestag biographies attached the mandate to Recklinghausen I—constituency 122 in 2005 and 2009, and constituency 121 in the 18th Bundestag—where the direct seat remained with the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).

In 2005 the SPD's Frank Schwabe took Recklinghausen I with 55.7 percent of the first votes (74,750), against 31.0 percent (41,620) for the CDU. Second votes in the district divided 50.7 percent for the SPD and 28.4 percent for the CDU. Mißfelder, listed with Recklinghausen as his place of residence and then still a student, was declared elected from place 28 on the CDU state list. The Rheinische Post later described that contest as the first between him and Schwabe, both of them newcomers, and recorded that Schwabe took the direct mandate while Mißfelder entered through the list.

On 27 September 2009 he stood again in constituency 122. The state returning officer had admitted him at place 16 on the CDU list. Schwabe won the direct mandate with 43.1 percent of the first votes (52,627) to the CDU's 30.7 percent (37,504); second votes were 35.5 percent for the SPD and 28.3 percent for the CDU. On election night the Rheinische Post reported that the number of constituencies the CDU had won outright left his return on the state list in doubt. He was nevertheless a member of the 17th Bundestag, again recorded as elected on the North Rhine-Westphalia list for Recklinghausen I.

At the election of 22 September 2013 the constituency, now numbered 121, again returned Schwabe. He received 45.2 percent of the first votes (54,504); the CDU received 34.3 percent (41,383). CDU second votes in the district rose to 33.8 percent (40,898), against 39.8 percent (48,070) for the SPD. Mißfelder was among those elected from the state list, at list place 14, the seventh CDU name taken from that list. The 18th-Bundestag biography continued to list the seat as a state-list mandate for constituency 121, Recklinghausen I.

Committee posts on the official biographies changed across the three terms. In October 2006 he was deputy chairman of the subcommittee on new media and a full member of the Committee on the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, and a deputy member of the Committee on Culture and Media. By February 2009, still in the 16th Bundestag, that biography instead listed the Committee on Economic Affairs and Technology and the Foreign Affairs Committee, while he remained deputy chairman of the new-media subcommittee. In the 17th Bundestag the biography recorded him as a full member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and as a deputy member of the subcommittee on foreign cultural and education policy. In the 18th Bundestag the Foreign Affairs Committee and that deputy seat remained, and the biography listed a full seat in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

CDU executive, presidium and state treasurer

His Bundestag biographies stated throughout that he had been a member of the CDU federal executive since 1999. At the federal party congress in Stuttgart the delegates elected him to the narrower presidium with 66.49 percent of the vote. A Deutsche Presse-Agentur report carried by the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung said that, at 29, the Junge Union chairman was the youngest person yet chosen for the body. From 2008 the biographies also described him as a deputy member of the board of the European People's Party.

He was among the seven additional presidium members chosen at the 23rd federal party congress in Karlsruhe. The North Rhine-Westphalia association's account of the December 2012 federal congress recorded 495 votes for him in the presidium ballot, 55.49 percent. In May 2014 Der Spiegel reported that he had told Die Welt he would leave the presidium in the autumn so that a representative of the younger generation would remain, and that he and Jens Spahn, the Union group's health-policy spokesman, had an understanding to that effect. Mißfelder confirmed to Reuters that he had informed party chair and chancellor Angela Merkel on 1 April. The magazine also reported that the North Rhine-Westphalia leadership did not regard a private arrangement between the two as the right way to fill the seat. At the federal congress in Cologne that December he did not stand. Spahn was elected on the second ballot with 66.18 percent, after Hermann Gröhe withdrew.

The state party gave him a different office the same spring. Before the congress, the Rheinische Post reported that the 34-year-old was to succeed Andrea Verpoorten, who was moving to Berlin for her work, as treasurer of the CDU in North Rhine-Westphalia, with the vote set for the state party congress on 26 April 2014 in Düsseldorf. At the 36th Landesparteitag, held in the Congress Centrum with 607 delegates present, he was elected Landesschatzmeister with 68.2 percent, as part of the new state executive. The same sitting confirmed Armin Laschet as state chairman with 481 of 570 votes, reported as 87 percent, and re-elected general secretary Bodo Löttgen with 90.6 percent. The Rheinische Post described Mißfelder's 68.2 percent as comparatively modest next to those other leadership votes.

Foreign policy

Spokesman of the CDU/CSU group

Philipp Mißfelder was foreign-policy spokesman of the CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag from 2009. In a March 2014 interview published by the Federal Foreign Office he said he had been on the Committee on Foreign Affairs for six years, with German–American friendship and ties to Israel among his main themes. He said that, as a freely elected member and group spokesman, he would not simply repeat Foreign Office texts once he was coordinator.

On 23 September 2014 the group confirmed him with 74.2 percent, down from 91 percent in January and the weakest result in its leadership. Der Spiegel linked the weaker result to the Saint Petersburg trip and to further criticism inside the group, and wrote that backing from North Rhine-Westphalia’s Landesgruppe under Peter Hintze kept the post safe.

Transatlantic coordination

At the start of 2014, with the grand coalition in office, he became Coordinator for Transatlantic Cooperation—covering intersocietal, cultural and information-policy contacts—at the Federal Foreign Office, a role he called honorary. The Bundestag’s disclosures date the end of the appointment to 1 April 2014. On 10 April the Office named CDU member Jürgen Hardt as his successor, subject to cabinet approval, with a brief centered on civil-society links with North America.

He took the job while publicly calling relations with the United States a low point over National Security Agency surveillance. On 16 January 2014, after seeing ambassador John B. Emerson, he said German trust in the United States was lower than at the start of the 2003 Iraq war, that WikiLeaks and the NSA affair went “to the substance of the relationship,” and that Washington seemed to treat Germany with “the greatest possible mistrust.” Confidence would return, he said, only if “the American word” meant something again; if no-spy talks failed, the SWIFT agreement should be suspended. From New York in February he told Deutschlandfunk that intercepting the phones of Chancellor Angela Merkel and her predecessor was embarrassing for US officials, while “Germany and America are and remain the closest partners.”

In an interview of 20 March 2014 he named two priorities: concluding the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the European Union and the United States—he cited a preliminary estimate of a 1.6 percent gain in German purchasing power per person—and closer work with Jewish organizations in the United States and Canada.

On 3 April he confirmed to Spiegel that he was stepping down after about three months. Quoted by Spiegel and the Süddeutsche Zeitung from Die Welt, he said a state treasurer’s office could not be combined with the America brief and that he wanted a closer link to the CDU in North Rhine-Westphalia, where he was the only candidate for treasurer on 26 April. He said he would stay on the Atlantik-Brücke board and keep arguing for transatlantic ties.

Russia, Ukraine and the 2014 St Petersburg visit

The tone on Russia had shifted since his years at the head of the Junge Union. In December 2007 he said on Phoenix that Gerhard Schröder’s work for Gazprom was “only the first harbinger” of a “Russian dictatorship” extending its influence through energy. Spiegel later wrote that, as group spokesman, he no longer called Russia a dictatorship, objected to what he termed the partly “religious drive” of Russia’s critics, and spoke up for German firms in Russia and for Moscow’s point of view.

During the Crimea crisis he argued against Cold War reflexes. On 1 March 2014 he told the Lübecker Nachrichten that the United States and the EU should, with Kyiv’s transitional government, address “the concerns of the Russian population,” that any solution required Russia, and that Cold War ideology “on both sides is now out of place.” On 6 March he told Bloomberg that sanctions over Russian action in Ukraine would mean “cutting our own flesh,” because German exports and jobs came first. He questioned Commission president José Manuel Barroso’s offer of up to 11 billion euros, saying assets of the “Ukrainian kleptocracy” should be seized before outside money was spent.

Late in April he attended a Saint Petersburg reception for Schröder’s 70th birthday, hosted by Nord Stream AG—the Gazprom-dominated pipeline company on whose shareholders’ committee Schröder sat—at the Yusupov Palace. President Vladimir Putin was there; Spiegel reported that Mißfelder sat with Schröder and Putin on the evening of 28 April, and that Gazprom chief Alexey Miller and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern’s SPD minister-president Erwin Sellering were also guests. Merkel and group chairman Volker Kauder had not been informed; Kauder heard of the trip from the press just after criticizing Schröder’s meeting with Putin.

Armin Laschet, the CDU’s leader in North Rhine-Westphalia, said anyone with access to Putin should speak plainly and demand the release of OSCE observers held in eastern Ukraine. Mißfelder told Bild that using such contacts was better than refusing them, that the dinner had been “very serious,” and that he had gone as a private citizen, not as spokesman, “to do what was called for.” Spiegel reported that few in the Union believed a 34-year-old MP could move Putin, and that any freeing of the German observers would be credited to Schröder; separatist leader Vyacheslav Ponomaryov told Bild his men had no contact with Moscow and did not obey Putin. The Tagesspiegel, cited by Spiegel without named sources, said CDU and CSU foreign-policy MPs doubted he could remain spokesman; he did. Spiegel also reported a suspicion in the Union that a sympathetic Russia line, not only the conflict of interest he cited, had made the America post untenable.

Israel and other bilateral work

In the March 2014 Foreign Office interview he called commitment to Israel’s right to exist part of Germany’s raison d’état. At Berlin’s third Israel Congress in November 2013, Israelnetz reported, he said Israel could count on Germany as a loyal partner, including for arms deliveries, and dismissed EU labeling rules for West Bank settlement goods as far from “good realpolitik.” On 8 July 2014, after rocket fire from Gaza and the opening of Israeli strikes, a CDU/CSU statement in his name said Israel had a clear right to defend its territory and people, that action against Hamas was justified because Hamas denied Israel’s existence, and that Germany stood with Israel while still seeking a two-state fixing of the borders. That August an Israeli public-diplomacy center gave him a “Magen Israel” award for what Israelnetz quoted as a “courageous, continued, clear and fearless” position beside Israel and against antisemitism.

Bundestag disclosures list related honorary seats: the Atlantik-Brücke board, the Königswinter Conference steering committee, the Deutsch-Russisches Forum board, the presidium of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik, and the Israel Congress advisory board.

Social-policy controversies

Hip-replacement remarks

In early August 2003, during the dispute over financing Germany's pensions and health care, Philipp Mißfelder, then 23 and federal chairman of the Junge Union, told Der Tagesspiegel that statutory pension and health-insurance benefits should be reduced to a basic provision and that artificial hips for the very old should no longer be paid for by the solidarity community. Der Spiegel, recounting the interview published on 3 August, quoted him: he saw nothing in 85-year-olds still receiving artificial hips "auf Kosten der Solidargemeinschaft," and "Früher sind die Leute auch auf Krücken gelaufen." Reports at the time also treated dentures for people over 85 as part of the proposal. In a Welt interview that May he had argued only for a co-payment on hip operations over age 80.

The August wording was attacked inside the Union and outside it. Maria Eichhorn, the CDU/CSU group's spokeswoman on policy for older people, said she noted the demands "mit Befremden und Empörung" and called them unforgivable. CDU general secretary Laurenz Meyer said the leadership found them wholly inappropriate, "vor allem auch in ethischer Hinsicht," and the opposite of the party's health-reform plans; generational justice, he said, must not become a "Generationenkrieg." Edmund Stoiber, Bavarian minister-president and CSU chairman, was quoted by the Münchner Merkur calling the remarks "unter aller Sau" and telling Mißfelder to learn Catholic social teaching before talking such "Unsinn." Bavarian Junge Union chairman Manfred Weber said he should apologize, and family minister Renate Schmidt of the Social Democratic Party called the statements inhuman. The Deutsche Hospiz Stiftung, through Eugen Brysch, and the Graue Panther, through Trude Unruh, demanded his immediate resignation; Brysch urged the Junge Union's Deutschlandtag to vote him out, and Unruh said he was "noch nicht politikreif."

On 7 August he qualified the claim without giving it up. On ZDF's Morgenmagazin he said no pensioner need be afraid, that he wanted no "Generationenkrieg," and that he meant the health system in 20 or 30 years, not today's pensioners; the lines on hips and dentures, he said, were an image of how much "es brennt in meiner Generation," sharpened ("zugespitzt") but not meant to injure anyone. Later that day he told dpa, "Es tut mir Leid, dass ich Gefühle verletzt habe," and called that an unambiguous apology, while telling the Tagesspiegel, "An meinem Thema Generationengerechtigkeit halte ich fest." To Die Welt he said he had not demanded that pensioners now forgo care, only more personal responsibility from his own generation, and that he rejected two-class medicine. He did not resign.

Hartz IV comments

In February 2009, at a morning gathering of the CDU branch in Haltern am See, Mißfelder—by then a member of the Bundestag and still Junge Union chairman—said, as the Ruhr Nachrichten reported and Die Welt relayed: "Die Erhöhung von Hartz IV war ein Anschub für die Tabak- und Spirituosenindustrie." Hartz IV, the basic benefit for jobseekers introduced under Agenda 2010, then paid an adult 351 euros a month. Senioren-Union chairman Otto Wulff read the sentence as an attack on the rise in the child rate, which he defended.

He refused to apologize. He told Bild am Sonntag that he would go on with the subject, and Bild that every discussion should not be fenced off by taboos. He said he was not insulting recipients—many, he said, had landed there "völlig unverschuldet"—and that he wanted the money to reach their children; any abuse was the work "nicht von bösen, sondern von armen und manchmal auch überforderten Menschen." In the Leipziger Volkszeitung he said he was not accusing every recipient of misuse. In place of a further cash rise he proposed vouchers for school meals, tutoring and sport.

Union politicians split. Saxony-Anhalt's minister-president Wolfgang Böhmer called the remark an unjustified generalization, and Thuringia's social minister Christine Lieberknecht said addiction was real but the remedy was help, not stigma. Bavarian Junge Union chairman Stefan Müller called the comments "unanständig," and Bavarian districts demanded the federal chairman's resignation. Maximilian Böltl of Munich-Land said he could not stay; Georg Rohleder of Upper Bavaria called him a repeat offender over 2003. Wulff said one apologizes when a remark has misfired. North Rhine-Westphalia's labor minister Karl-Josef Laumann said anyone who found the rates too high should try living on 351 euros a month. Brandenburg's Junge Union chairman Jan Redmann, by contrast, said a pointed remark had opened a necessary debate.

Outside the party, Juso chairwoman Franziska Drohsel said he was pretending that everyone without work treated their children badly. Katja Kipping of Die Linke called the mockery of people in need intolerable, and the party's parliamentary vice-chair Klaus Ernst demanded his resignation, again citing the hips. The Sozialverband Deutschland called vouchers stigmatizing. Deutsche Kinderhilfe took another line: Georg Ehrmann told sueddeutsche.de that the style could be argued over but not the substance, because many parents in Hartz IV families were dependent on nicotine and alcohol and about 2.1 million children lived in households of alcoholics. Mißfelder neither apologized nor left the Junge Union chair.

Outside positions and disclosed income

Members of the Bundestag notified outside activities and the resulting income to the President of the Bundestag, who published the required details in the official handbook and on the parliament’s website. For the 18th legislative period, ten bands replaced three that stopped once receipts exceeded 7,000 euros. In committee the CDU/CSU and the Free Democratic Party backed it against the SPD, Die Linke and the Greens, who wanted each sum to the euro and cent. The bands covered one-off or regular monthly gross receipts: stage 1 from 1,000 to 3,500 euros, then ceilings of 7,000, 15,000, 30,000, 50,000, 75,000, 100,000, 150,000 and 250,000 euros, and stage 10 above 250,000, from the first sitting of that Bundestag. Figures were gross, including benefits in kind; a member’s own costs were not deducted, and a band was not taxable income. In July 2007 the Federal Constitutional Court left the earlier rules standing after a four-to-four split, so no breach of the Basic Law could be established; the prevailing view was that voters should know from whom, and in what order of magnitude, representatives received money.

Publishing consultancy

The paid activity beside the mandate was a consultancy for teNeues Verlag GmbH & Co. KG in Kempen, marked annual, stage 8, and ended on 31 December 2014. On 21 March 2014, when the new bands appeared, the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that Mißfelder, then chair of the Junge Union, had declared stage-8 income as a historian there, a band it put at 100,001 to 150,000 euros. Die Welt wrote on 3 April 2014 that his outside income the year before had been between 100,000 and 150,000 euros, and that only four of 631 members had earned more on the side. The same day the Süddeutsche called him a “strategic adviser” to the art-book publisher and said the side job had drawn criticism. The register did not describe the advice. Der Spiegel in 2019 described teNeues, a family firm founded in 1931, as a Kempen house for elaborate photo books and for books on architecture, cars, design, fashion and cooking. Die Welt said a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article the Monday before he left a government post had treated the income as a scandal, and quoted the FAZ calling nonsense the idea that the money rewarded a vote against tighter inheritance-tax rules. He told Die Welt that the treasurership of the North Rhine-Westphalia CDU was incompatible with the coordinator’s post for transatlantic cooperation in the Federal Foreign Office, listed in the disclosure until 1 April 2014; he said he wanted to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest. A Welt obituary on 13 July 2015 said journalists had called the high but properly published income closeness to business, while he argued that a mandate was not a profession and that he would not depend economically on those who award list places.

Corporate advisory roles

From 1 May 2015 the register added the advisory board of Impulsus clean Technologies GmbH in Merzig, annual, stage 5, and the advisory board of Thiel Capital LLC in San Francisco, annual, stage 6. Stage 5 is the band above 30,000 euros up to 50,000, and stage 6 above 50,000 up to 75,000; marked annual, the band is the yearly gross, as the press read stage 8 for teNeues. North Data’s copy of the commercial register describes Impulsus (Amtsgericht Saarbrücken, HRB 18804) as a Merzig firm for holding stakes and giving advice that needs no licence, formerly named Edwin Kohl Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH.

On 20 May 2015 the FAZ, citing Bild, reported that he had joined Thiel Capital’s advisory board, a firm it attributed to the German-American investor Peter Thiel, for less than 50,000 euros a year. That sum is below the floor of stage 6, the annual category the Bundestag published from 1 May 2015. A seat on the board of trustees of Bonner Akademie für Forschung und Lehre praktischer Politik (BAPP) GmbH in Bonn was marked honorary.

Voluntary boards and forums

The other entries were seats in associations, foundations and public-law bodies, almost all marked honorary and none given an income band. They were the board of Atlantik-Brücke, the advisory board of Atlantische Initiative, the steering committee of the Königswinter conference of the Deutsch-Britische Gesellschaft, the presidium of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik, and Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum; the board of the Deutsch-Russisches Forum, a trusteeship of Deutschland-Russland – Die neue Generation, and the board of the Deutsch-Turkmenisches Forum; and the advisory boards of Israel-Kongress / I like Israel and of Jewish Voice from Germany, plus the board of trustees of the Koordinierungsrat deutscher Nicht-Regierungsorganisationen gegen Antisemitismus. Also honorary were the advisory board of the Deutsches Digital Institut, a deputy seat on the administrative board of the Filmförderungsanstalt, a deputy seat on the board of trustees of the Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland until 13 February 2014, and the parliamentary advisory board of the Bundesverband Deutscher Stiftungen until 31 March 2014. Membership of the Stiftungsrat of the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik appeared without the word “honorary” and without an income stage.

Death and immediate aftermath

Circumstances of death

Philipp Mißfelder died in the night leading into Monday, 13 July 2015, at the age of 35. Participants told Der Spiegel that the federal executive of the Christian Democratic Union was informed he had died of a pulmonary embolism; he left a wife and two children. A few days earlier Christiane Amanpour had interviewed him in London for CNN, and he had appeared well. Newspapers reported a serious fall that spring, a back injury and weeks away from public life. Der Spiegel wrote that there was as yet no sign of a link with the embolism, a blockage of a lung vessel usually by a clot from a leg vein.

Later reporting placed the fall in February 2015, on a staircase in Dülmen, after which he was treated at the university hospital in Münster. In 2016 the embolism was described in the press as a long-term consequence of that fall. A hospital spokeswoman said he died at the Universitätsklinikum Münster and rejected a version, which his parents' lawyer said the parents had heard, that he had died in his flat in Dülmen. The Westfälische Nachrichten, citing other media, reported that his wife, a cardiologist, resuscitated him once that night and that he then died in the clinic.

Tributes, funeral and succession

Party colleagues and opponents responded within hours. On 17 July the Bundestag marked his death at the opening of a special sitting.

The news reached a meeting of the CDU presidium. Chancellor Angela Merkel said colleagues were shocked and that their thoughts were with his wife and two small children. Volker Kauder, chairman of the CDU/CSU group, said it had lost one of its most prominent foreign-policy politicians, and that he had lost a friend and travelling companion; he called Mißfelder a convinced friend of Israel. General secretary Peter Tauber said he had shaped the Junge Union as no one else had. Foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier of the Social Democratic Party offered condolences to the widow and two young daughters. Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and SPD foreign-policy spokesman Niels Annen also spoke.

That Friday a requiem was held at St. Hedwig's Cathedral in Berlin, with Merkel, Bundestag president Norbert Lammert, several federal ministers and many members present. At the end of the mass Kauder called Mißfelder an extraordinary young man and said he had made the Junge Union a factor in substantive political work. The same morning Lammert opened the special sitting on aid for Greece by asking the House to rise. He said Mißfelder had been torn without warning from a short life spent in politics from early youth, recalled a Junge Union chairmanship from 2002 to 2014 longer than any predecessor's, and noted that as foreign-policy spokesman Mißfelder had given his 121st speech in the chamber weeks earlier, at 35. Lammert said he had counted among Israel's close friends and, citing Otto von Bismarck on the fear of responsibility, said Mißfelder had not shared that fear. The Bundestag's account calls the standing tribute a minute of silence; Lammert conveyed the House's sympathy to the widow, the two small children and the wider family.

On Saturday 18 July he was buried after a private funeral at St. Pankratius in Buldern, a district of Dülmen, in the Coesfeld district of North Rhine-Westphalia. The Westfälische Nachrichten reported about 500 mourners, among them Lammert and the CSU politician Peter Gauweiler, and that his wife led the procession to the cemetery with their two daughters. A CDU spokeswoman told the Rheinische Post that several hundred people, including political companions, had attended. He had been a candidate in the neighbouring constituency of Recklinghausen. Volker Mosblech, a CDU insurance agent and second mayor of Duisburg, took the seat on 20 July 2015 as the next name on the North Rhine-Westphalia state list and joined the Defence Committee.

Dispute over medical records

In April 2016 Mißfelder's parents sued the university hospital at the Amtsgericht Münster for his medical file. According to the Funke newspaper group, as reported by Die Welt and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the claim spoke of "inconsistencies" and "discrepancies" (Unstimmigkeiten and Ungereimtheiten) in the circumstances of the death. Their lawyer, Karoline Seibt, said accounts of the fall and of the injuries differed, and that the parents were seeking clarity rather than accusing the doctors.

The hospital refused. A spokeswoman said Mißfelder had expressly wished that only his wife see the records and that relatives' usual right of access did not apply against that wish. The widow, who the hospital said still worked there, had her lawyer say that her husband would not have wanted the file released and that relations with his parents had broken down—a claim the parents denied, vehemently according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. An offer to inspect the file at the lawyer's office, on condition that the parents not discuss its contents, was refused, and the hospital asked the court to dismiss the claim.

In May 2016 the parents withdrew. Der Spiegel reported that they wanted to spare their son a posthumous legal dispute in public, and that the widow's lawyer considered the claim to have had no prospect of success. The withdrawal ended the case without a ruling on the questions they had raised about the fall and the death.

Reception and legacy

Contemporary assessments

July 2015 tributes cast Philipp Mißfelder as both a youth leader and a senior figure in the Christian Democratic Union. Party chair Angela Merkel said she was shocked. Volker Kauder, chair of the CDU/Christian Social Union group in the Bundestag, called him one of its most distinctive foreign politicians: a convinced friend of Israel, committed to transatlantic ties, an Eastern Europe specialist with strong contacts in Asia. General secretary Peter Tauber said he had shaped the Junge Union as no one else had, and foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier called him a talented politician. Benjamin Netanyahu, through the Israeli foreign ministry, mourned a "true friend" of Israel and the Jewish people. Former Jusos chair Niels Annen said that, despite their differences, the two had fought for independent youth organizations.

Bundestag president Norbert Lammert credited him with "an astounding gift for building bridges," and Deidre Berger of the American Jewish Committee called him a friend of the United States, Israel and the Jewish people. The New York Times, citing Robin Alexander in Die Welt, wrote that parliament had lost one of its youngest deputies and one of its most experienced. Obituaries cast him as a Kohlian, not a Merkel courtier. Günter Bannas wrote that he stood outside Merkel's entourage and had a tense relationship with Kauder. Thorsten Denkler called him one of the CDU's few remaining conservatives, unwilling to become Merkel's subordinate: after 2013 he declined a defence-ministry state secretaryship. Kai Biermann and Michael Schlieben placed him in the "Kohl generation" but not as a typical member of it—an admirer of Helmut Kohl's will to power who, they wrote, never stood for a programme. Many saw only the careerist, and he agreed that influence was what he wanted. They also read his Junge Union chairmanship as a turn to the right that made the youth wing more powerful and, they said, more boring, and less critical of the party leadership. The antagonist of that "Mißfelder generation" was Ursula von der Leyen; its heroes were Friedrich Merz and Roland Koch. Elisabeth Niejahr argued that calling him merely a "talent" undersold him.

Obituaries treated the 2003 remarks and the 2014 Russia trip as the limit of that independence. In 2003 he said he saw no point in 85-year-olds receiving artificial hips at the solidarity community's expense, because people had once "walked on crutches." Denkler wrote that this made him "the man with the hip" and brought resignation demands, and that he later made peace with Otto Wulff of the Senioren-Union; the two co-chaired a CDU circle on "cohesion of the generations." Severin Weiland wrote that he admitted the mistake and was forgiven. In 2009 he called a planned rise in Hartz IV rates a boost for the tobacco and spirits industry. Peter Deutschland, of the DGB in northern Germany, accused him of staging the debate on the backs of recipients; Stefan Müller of the Bavarian Junge Union called the remarks indecent, and parts of that organization sought his resignation as federal chairman. In spring 2014, weeks after the annexation of Crimea, he attended Gerhard Schröder's birthday reception in St Petersburg, hosted by Gazprom and attended by Vladimir Putin. Denkler wrote that he had not told his group, and that pressure to sideline him did not fully succeed: he left the presidium and the transatlantic-coordinator post but remained foreign-policy spokesman. Severin Weiland added that Peter Hintze, a Bundestag vice-president, made clear the parliamentary group would re-elect him to that role.

Posthumous recognition

At the Junge Union's Deutschlandtag in Hamburg on 16 October 2015, about 1,000 participants, after a minute of silence, unanimously elected him honorary chairman. Successor Paul Ziemiak said he had modernized the organization. Merkel announced that from 2016 the CDU and the Junge Union would hold an annual foreign-policy meeting, the "Philipp Mißfelder Lectures," and the congress announced a grove of 10,000 trees in the northern Negev, to be planted with the Jewish National Fund in memory of his attachment to German-Israeli friendship.