Biography|Klaus Töpfer — The Oath That Put Him in Palais Schaumburg

People remember Klaus Töpfer as the environment minister who later jumped into the Rhine.

The appointment that put him in Bonn came first, and it put him in a palace that was still doubling as a makeshift ministry.

On 7 May 1987 he took the oath as Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety.

The Bundestag's own later biography of the member dates the start of that office to the same day.

His predecessor, Walter Wallmann, had left for the Hessian premiership after less than a year in a ministry created only in June 1986, after Chernobyl.

The Konrad Adenauer Foundation records that Töpfer then walked into an authority still assembled from pieces of other ministries and still sitting, among other rooms, in Palais Schaumburg.

The late-neoclassical house at Adenauerallee 139 had been the Chancellor's everyday seat from 1949 until the mid-1970s.

By 1987 it was no longer the working Chancellery, but the young environment brief still used space on that riverside campus while it found a building of its own.

Töpfer came from Mainz, where he had been Rhineland-Palatinate's minister for environment and health since 23 May 1985.

He left a Landtag mandate unclaimed to take the federal job under Helmut Kohl.

The portfolio mixed reactor safety with nature conservation because Chernobyl had forced Bonn to put both files in one pair of hands.

He would hold the ministry until 17 November 1994, when Angela Merkel took it over.

The palace still stands on the former government axis.

A visitor now sees a restored second official seat of the Federal Chancellery, not a press room for a new department.

The moment to mark is the oath that handed an economist raised in Höxter a federal brief that barely existed the year before.

Photo: Palais Schaumburg, Bonn. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.