Ole von Beust

Origins and early life

Ole von Beust was born in Hamburg on 13 April 1955 into a family of the Baltic German nobility on his father's side, and his connection to this directory is his maternal grandfather, a Jewish man of the Wolff family — his mother Hanna was born Wolff.

Work and career

Von Beust has stated the fact publicly himself, telling the Rheinische Post in 2009 that his maternal grandparents, a Protestant grandmother and a Jewish grandfather, had drawn lots to decide in which religion their children would be raised, and that his mother was accordingly brought up Protestant. This fiche states plainly that the grandfather is not named in the accessible sources, that von Beust was raised a Protestant and is not Jewish by religion, and that the descent rests on his own public testimony, which the site accepts as an explicit and sourced declaration.

His mother's family had to leave Germany under the Nazis; his father, an officer's son and later a businessman, returned from the war. He read law, entered the Hamburg parliament for the Christian Democrats at twenty-three, led the opposition for eight years, and in 2001 became First Mayor of the city-state. He was the first openly gay head of a German government, having been outed by a political rival in 2003 in an episode he handled by simply confirming it, and the first Christian Democrat to govern a Land in coalition with the Greens, from 2008.

His government reformed Hamburg's schools, expanded the port, backed the building of the Elbphilharmonie concert hall — whose cost overruns were the great controversy of his tenure, and this fiche says so — and pursued an urban development policy that reshaped the harbour city. He resigned in 2010 and works as a consultant.