Karl-Hermann Flach was in the 1960s and 1970s a crucial liberal thinker who decided at any point to deal with the applicable implementation of his ideas and as a consequence made an crucial contribution to refresh both liberal reasoning in Germany and the programming form of the FDP party. From the point of view of the modern world, Flach appears in many respects to be an early inspiration for the transformation of liberalism, which present seems simply necessary. As a social liberal, he entered the FDP with momentum at the time of her engagement in the coalition with SPD Willy Brandt after 1969, previously as a writer and publicist, working to push through a liberal organization respective crossovers. Thus, Flach was a promoter of inclusion in liberal programmes and environmental issues, and the broad democratization of society with a lowering of barriers to civic participation, and expanding equality of educational or professional opportunities, yet the construction by the state of a network providing any minimum social security. Today, these are matters of the utmost importance and, in fact, obvious, but from 1968 to 71, they required considerable efforts to tame the average Western Liberal and that was Flach's mission.
Karl-Hermann Flach was born in the Royal in 1929. For all biography of this policy, it is highly crucial to mention the fact, which is usually cited in the last conviction in biography, but in his case this should be mentioned earlier. Flach was to have a very short life – at the age of 44 he died highly sudden, caused by a stroke of death, which shocked his loved ones and co-workers, bringing FDP into overwhelming mourning.
Flach was a 15-year-old man erstwhile Hitler's Reich fell and was forced into the ranks of the alleged Volkssturm, which was composed of children and old men of the formation, which was ordered to hysterically defend Germany against the inevitable defeat in the last months of planet War II. Young Karl-Hermann then had small more "pleasance" to face the realities of life in the russian business zone. However, it was this contact with the reality of communist power that helped him to discover his political beliefs early, even before he was 18, erstwhile he joined the Liberal LDPD group in 1946. The organization was later to become a satellite of the Communist SED (in the form of the Polish Democratic Party), but Flach had a right not to worry about it, as in 1949 he managed to flee to West Berlin and become a citizen of the German national Republic.
In 1953 Flach completed his political studies at the Free Berlin University and began working in the media as an editor and publicist, moving to Bonn and Frankfurt am Main. His liberal views pushed him to work with the FDP and during the run before the 1957 Bundestag election. Flach became a staff advisor led by Wolfgang Döring, a politician promoting the beginning of the FDP to cooperate with the SPD and criticizing the rigid attachment to the chadecia. This was entirely in line with Flach's philosophical project, which in the FDP saw an equal 3rd power in the Bosnian politics, not just "junior-partner" Chancellor Adenauer.
Flach decided to work with the organization on a permanent basis and became its executive manager (protoplast of today's secretaries-general parties; Flach was besides to become the first "gensek" of the FDP, but in 1971). At that time, the FDP was in opposition and its future was open. erstwhile Flach abandoned the organization post in 1962 and withdrew from the operation, this was the aftermath of a step backwards that the organization had made under the leadership of a reasonably conservative leader Erich Mende, who had decided a year earlier to return to the coalition with the Adenauer CDU on rather humiliating conditions for the FDP.
In the political years of “abstinence” Flach became a crucial editor, led the national policy department in “Frankfurter Rundschau”. He besides directed the editorial release. He returned to politics at the FDP convention in Freiburg in 1971. The elected secretary-general was to play a leading function in the party, which had already co-ordinated for over a year in the preferred coalition of the "social liberal" of the SPD. The time has come for reforms and changes whose Flach was the promoter, and which he summarised in the historical FDP programming document, in the celebrated "Fryburese Thesis".
Flach promoted there (and in his book “One more chance for Liberals”) the thought of “modernized liberalism”. It was an anti-conservative and progressive idea, but at the same time Flach – who was far from any crypto-socialist – was very attentive to the clear discrimination between his model and "socialist social theories". “ erstwhile a serious threat to their condition of possession arises, the dominant circles in capitalist countries like to search rescue in fascist regulation than to let their fall, ” he said. However, in socialism, the established leadership clique will scope for Stalinist practices alternatively than let to extend the actual control of the people, free public opinion, which could request its cancellation."
Liberalism according to Flach should advance and take into account the political activity of citizens widely. Man's right and ability to individualize has since been seen there as a value incompatible with the ideas of the community, human empathy and democratic participation. Modernized liberalism stood on the side of human dignity as a way towards self-determination (Thesis 1), on the side of advancement based on reason (Thesis 2), demanded the democratisation of society (Thesis 3) and the improvement of capitalism (Thesis 4). The last and most controversial explanation was to include labour councils in the management of workplaces, consistently demanding full equality between women in work and household life (equal pay), and besides making demands for basic social security. Many places in Thessa besides occupied the postulates that we would consider present as a canon of moral liberalism, depenalizing abortion and protecting the lives of intimate people at the head.
Flach left suddenly, but left a powerful charge of optimism in German liberalism. His memory survived long, and the achievements of the 1969-82 Social Liberal Coalition are mostly his child. The posterity was Karl-Hermann Flach's opinion on freedom: “Freedom does not mean deficiency of discipline, but a commitment. Being a Liberal does not mean to regulation but to service freedom.”
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