Renée Haferkamp was there when the treaties of Rome were negotiated. In spite of Brexit and the new nationalism, the 90-year-old remains calm and has a Council. A portrait of Brussels, by Frank Hofmann.
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Belgium: midwife of the EU
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Belgium: midwife of the EU
The German visitors most depressing topic in a conversation with Renée Haferkamp seems to be in your house in the Brussels district of Uccle at the least present: The Holocaust Survivor escaped the assassination of the Nazis only by the foresight of her father, a businessman from the Western German Cologne.
The parents settled in the Netherlands, shortly after the Reichstag, Adolf Hitler had transferred the Power. When the German Wehrmacht Holland attack, fled the family to neighboring Belgium. The independent Switzerland refused entry. So they hid for many years in the Belgian capital of Brussels and survived the persecution of the Jews by Nazi Germany.
A stroke of luck for Europe’s unification. Because the escape history of the family brought Renée Haferkamp, to speak in addition to German, fluent in Dutch and French. English you studied. At the end of their studies, the Belgian exiled Prime Minister of the war time, Paul-Henri Spaak, was aware of them – randomly.
Renée Haferkamp in the DW-Interview in your Brussels home
“We were together on a ship,” says Haferkamp during the conversation in the living room. “He was a European. And as someone who had spent the entire war in England, he understood English very well. And yet not a word of Flemish, not a word of English, even after five years in England, could only speak one language: Only French.”
Europe’s unification after the Second world war was therefore a question of mentality and a political project, not the language. The remains in the 1990s, says the interpreter. Helmut Kohl, Margaret Thatcher – they needed all the help.
Therefore, the interpreter Renée Haferkamp was so important – she’s taken care of, as she says, that the heads of state and government have understood. Because interpreting is not translation, but understand what the other says.
The first German Federal President Theodor Heuss (l), the Belgian exiled Prime Minister of the war time, Paul-Henri Spaak (m) and Renée Haferkamp
Option for the West
The Belgian and Europe-founder Spaak, first gathered for the UN children’s Fund, donate to Unicef, to help Europe’s hungry children. Then he became the Director of the European integration. First of all, as the first Chairman of the Assembly of the coal and steel community, the predecessor of the European economic community. Finally, he was instrumental in the Treaty of Rome – the founding document of today’s European Union.
At that time, the European partners, West Germany and paved the way back into the community of civilized States. The first West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer opted clearly in favour of integration with the West. The partners of the West German displaced, that you, as some former supporters of the Nazi dictatorship sat opposite. “Of course the Germans all had a past,” says Haferkamp. Also the first President of the European Commission, the German Walter Hallstein.
“I hear more and more that he was really as clean as we thought. You have been looking for him, you wanting him, and for ten years he was there – but you thought of him never at a Nazi connection, now will not come out, that he was quite as kosher,” says Haferkamp.
The trust for the West German and German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, was great. But above all: The hope to leave the war and the killing of the German behind. It was their mother who asked them to work for Europe’s unification, says Renée Haferkamp: “As a response to the two world wars”.
The only woman at the table of the first Commission in Brussels under the chairmanship of the German Hallstein: Renée Haferkamp
In the first world war, her father had fought on side of the Germans, and carried like so many German Jews the Iron cross as a Veteran. He had fought in Belgium. The family was later in the Belgian capital of Brussels from the Nazis, hiding them is another mark in this so-European biography of Renee oats Kamps.
The first career woman in Brussels
After the establishment of the EU makes fast career: In the Brussels Commission, she is the first woman to head a Directorate-General – for the interpreter service. Your current last name has a.from her second husband, the long-term EU-Commissioner Wilhelm Haferkamp
The German trade unionists had been sent at the beginning of the 1970s by Nobel peace prize laureate, Chancellor and SPD Chairman Willy Brandt to Brussels, and from the later conservative Chancellor Helmut Kohl (CDU) confirmed. Nearly seven decades of European integration history.
That Europe is now made by so many in question and right-wing populists, the Integration of the EU turning to the last living witness of the Foundation of Europe, has a surprising explanation: a Lot of Integration had been promised and not met.
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Europe without borders – the Schengen agreement
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Permalink https://p.dw.com/p/30UcA
Europe without borders – the Schengen agreement
“We have not done what we ourselves have made” – a political Union of Europe with a common European foreign policy, secure external borders, and also a balance between the East and the West, between the North and the South,” says Haferkamp. The nuclear agreement with Iran is the only example of the 28-EU countries have found a common line first.
But the agreement is bad and the USA, therefore, also dropped out. In the reverse conclusion this means: If the Europeans wanted to claim, you would have to implement your promise also. Otherwise, Europe would remain on the so far Achieved are: A free trade zone, “is that so bad?” The question is the 90 year-old European, also as a deliberate provocation. Who wants to Europe, to the hot, must also win the people for it and implement it.