Theodor Heuss

Theodor Heuss came up as a political journalist before the war, writing his way through the Weimar years with a social-liberal pen. When the Federal Republic stood itself up in 1949, he took the presidency - the ceremonial post that would set the tone while Konrad Adenauer ran the hard politics from the chancellor's office. Heuss served until 1959, through the Wirtschaftswunder boom, and the contrast mattered: where Adenauer was stern and unyielding, Heuss was cordial, measured, pointedly civil. In a country relearning how to be a republic, that temperament was the work. He died in December 1963, remembered as one of German liberalism's steadiest voices.