Karl Carstens

Karl Carstens was a German jurist and politician, 1914 to 1992, who served as president of West Germany from 1979 to 1984. He studied law and political science at several German and French universities between 1933 and 1936, took a doctorate in 1938 and the second state examination in 1939, and earned a Master of Laws at Yale Law School in 1949. After the war he practised as a lawyer in Bremen, lectured at the University of Cologne, and was appointed professor of public and international law there in 1960. His career moved between diplomacy and government, as Secretary of State at the Foreign Office and in the Ministry of Defence and as head of the Chancellery, before he sat in the Bundestag and became its president in 1976. His earlier Nazi Party and SA membership was disputed when he was nominated for the presidency.