Sabine Bergmann-Pohl (née Schulz; German:[zaˈbiːnəˈbɛʁkmanpoːl]; born 20 April 1946) is a German doctor and politician. A member of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), she was president of the People's Chamber of East Germany from April to October 1990. During this time, she was also the interim head of state of East Germany, holding both posts until the state's merger into West Germany in October. She was the youngest, only female and last head of state of East Germany. After the reunification of Germany, she served in the government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, first as one of many Minister for Special Affairs appointed to provide representation for the last East German government in the Kohl cabinet, then as Parliamentary State Secretary in the Ministry of Health for the remainder of Chancellor Kohl's time in office.[1]
You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (April 2022) Click [show] for important translation instructions.
View a machine-translated version of the German article.
Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 9,116 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Sabine Bergmann-Pohl]]; see its history for attribution.
You should also add the template {{Translated|de|Sabine Bergmann-Pohl}} to the talk page.
She was born as Sabine Schulz in Eisenach, Thuringia. After leaving school in 1964, Bergmann-Pohl was initially not admitted to university and entered a two-year internship at the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the Humboldt University in East Berlin. In 1966, she began to study medicine and graduated in 1972 with a diploma in medicine. From 1979, she worked as a lung specialist and in 1980 earned a medical doctorate.
From 1980 to 1985, she was medical director of the polyclinic department for lung diseases, and tuberculosis in Berlin-Friedrichshain. From 1985 to 1990, she was medical director at the District Office for lung diseases and tuberculosis in East Berlin.
Since 1990, Bergmann-Pohl has been the Patron of the General Disabled Persons in Germany (ABID eV) and since 2003 President of the Berlin Red Cross. Also since 2003 she has been a member of the Presidium of the International Federation and has been a vice president since 2007.
In the general election of March 1990, the only free and fair election ever held in East Germany, she was elected to the People's Chamber, which on 5 April elected her its president. On the same day, parliament also abolished the State Council, the country's collective presidency. Under the Constitution, the president of the People's Chamber was ex officio vice president of the GDR; as such, Bergmann-Pohl assumed the role of interim head of state as well. In that role, she presided over the People's Chamber formally petitioning to join the Federal Republic of Germany on 23 August, as well as the overwhelming approval of the unification treaty on 12 September.
Sabine Bergmann-Pohl was married to Ulrich Pohl from 1972 to 1979. They had two children. Since 1990 she is married to Jürgen Bergmann. She is a Protestant.[3][4]
Offices
Parliamentary mandates
Member of the People's Chamber of the GDR (1990)
President of the People's Chamber (1990)
Member of the German Bundestag (1990–2002)
Government Offices
Federal Minister for Special Affairs (1990–1991)
Parliamentary State Secretary in the Ministry of Health (1991–1998)
Writings
Frequency of a history and clinical findings of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in childhood, their relationship to lung function and determination of reference values for the ventilation and distribution parameters on Pneumotestgerät. Results of a school investigation. Dissertation Academy for Medical Training of East Berlin, 1981, Berlin-Karow, 1976.
Farewell without tears. Looking back at the year of the Unification. Recorded by Dietrich von Thadden. Ullstein, Berlin – Frankfurt/Main, 1991 ISBN3-550-07802-1
Sabine Bergmann-Pohl & Paul B. Wink (ed.): Panel Discussion 1953-1989: Germany on the way to unity and freedom on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the uprising in East Germany on 17 June 2003 at the Academy of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Berlin, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, Berlin 2004 ISBN3-937731-00-8
Sabine Bergmann-Pohl & Wilhelm Staudacher (ed.): "The cry for freedom." The Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, Berlin 2007 ISBN978-3-939826-46-0
Torild Skard (2014) "Sabine Bergmann-Pohl" in Women of Power – Half a century of female presidents and prime ministers worldwide, Bristol: Policy Press, ISBN978-1-44731-578-0
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Sabine_Bergmann-Pohl, and is written by contributors.
Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.