A place in social history

By Roon Lewald

Philipp Roesler

Proving how perilously close success is to failure in politics, the swift rise of Guido Westerwelle to power as Germany’s first openly gay vice-chancellor, foreign minister and party leader has ended just as quickly. As reported in “Coming Strongly” late last year, Westerwelle’s marriage last September to Gerhard Mronz, a prominent sport events manager who had been his publicly acknowledged lover for several years, was a notable step forward for gay social normalization. The low-key public reaction to a wedding that would have been legally meaningless and both socially and politically suicidal only a few years ago also burnished the country’s international image by showing that liberal democratic values are here to stay in Germany.