Only a few weeks ago, Germans voted him one of their top ten "greatest Germans" of all time, alongside Einstein, Luther and Goethe. On January 3rd, Helmut Kohl, for 16 years Germany's chancellor, was put under formal investigation in connection with what is becoming Germany's biggest political corruption scandal since the second world war. Even leaders of his own party, the Christian Democratic Union (cdu), are now pressing him to resign both as a member of parliament and as honorary party chairman, in order to protect the party he ruled with an iron hand for 25 years and which he continues, for most Germans, to symbolise.
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