FOR 68 years, Loki Schmidt matched her chain-smoking husband Helmut cigarette for cigarette.
Yesterday, the popular wife of the former German chancellor died in Hamburg aged 91.
Hannelore “Loki” Glasner was born in 1919 in Hamburg and met her future husband in junior school. They married in 1942 and Loki worked as a school teacher, though her husband’s rising political star in the 1950s drew her increasingly to his side for official engagements.
Mrs Schmidt gave up teaching when he became defence minister in the 1960s. She was propelled into the spotlight after Helmut Schmidt succeeded Willy Brandt as West German chancellor in 1974, when a Brandt adviser was exposed as an East German spy.
Though Mrs Schmidt suffered many miscarriages, the Schmidts had two children – a son, who died as an infant, and a daughter.
Even when first lady, Mrs Schmidt pursued a career of her own as one of Germany’s leading conservationists.
“I’ve been talking about conservation for 100 years, but who listened to a teacher from Hamburg?” she recalled recently, joking that she attracted support for her cause by “shamelessly taking advantage of my husband’s name”.
Even after Helmut Schmidt exited politics, the couple remained public figures and regular guests on talk shows, puffing their way through each entertaining appearance.
Loki Schmidt’s continued popularity in Germany was reflected in the extraordinary outpouring of grief on news of her death yesterday.
Chancellor Merkel said she was “mourning like millions of Germans”.
President Christian Wulff praised Ms Schmidt’s “sovereign modesty” and recalled her maxim: “I always want do go decently through life.”
In one of her last interviews, Mrs Schmidt said her love of nature had taken the fear out of dying. “It’s a consolation,” she said, “that nothing in the Earth’s cycle is ever really lost.”
