ABSTRACT
Helmut Kohl was the first German leader in East or West to have been born too late to have served in the war or to have been involved with the Nazis. The composition of Kohl's government remained virtually the same after the election as before. The Kohl government sought to wring concessions out of Honecker's regime using its economic muscle for this purpose. Like previous Chancellors since 1949, Kohl fully acknowledged Germany's responsibility for Nazi crimes. Inter-German relations continued to improve throughout the Kohl era with ever increasing contacts. Ambitious West German politicians felt obliged to visit Honecker to demonstrate that they were doing all they could to improve relations. The late 1980s the Greens had the biggest number of women enrolled as party members, next came the SPD, FDP, CDU and CSU. By the 1980s the earlier differences between the sexes in voting habits had been largely eroded.
