Karl-Hermann Flach

Who was Karl-Hermann Flach?

Karl-Hermann Flach was a German journalist of the Frankfurter Rundschau and a politician of the liberal Free Democrats.

Flach became a member of the liberal LDP and worked in 1948/1949 for the LDP newspaper Norddeutsche Zeitung in Schwerin. In October 1949 he fled to West-Berlin and became a member of the FDP. In 1949-1953 he studied political science.

In 1956 he started to work for the federal headquarters of the party and had important campaign jobs in 1957 and 1961. But in 1962 he left the party organisation for the Frankfurter Rundschau, a leading newspaper then considered liberal. From 1971 on he worked again for the FDP, this time as secretary-general of chairman Walter Scheel. Being elected to the Bundestag in 1972 he became vice chairman of the Bundestag party.

Flach died at the age of 44 in 1973 after having suffered a stroke a month before.

Flach belonged to the left wing of his party and is considered an important contributor to social liberalism. He was one of the authors of the left liberal Freiburger Thesen, a programmatic paper the party accepted at its congress in October 1971.