Annemarie Renger was the first woman to become president (Speaker) of the Bundestag (lower house of the German parliament). She won wide acclaim during her four years in the post. She had a dominant grasp of procedure, was crisp and clear in her rulings and utterly unyielding in her imposition of discipline. Behind her usually unfailing courtesy lay an iron determination. As Norbert Lammert, the present Speaker, put it: “She acted with as much dignity as decisiveness in the chair.”

When her party, the Social Democrats, lost its tenuous majority again in the Bundestag and the speakership reverted to the Christian Democrats in 1976, Renger remained a deputy Speaker until she gave up her seat in 1990 at the age of 70.

Renger also held leading posts in the West European Assembly, and with tact and sense made a key contribution to the building up of the first transnational institutions in Western Europe.

Annemarie Renger was born in 1919, one of seven children fathered by a Berlin carpenter and social democrat politician, Fritz Wilding. She had to give up her grammar school education at the age of 14 when the Nazis came to power and her father’s politics singled her out for discrimination. That left her few options but to become a salesgirl, a job she held until the German defeat in l945.

By then herself a young war widow, she became personal secretary and ultimately companion to Kurt Schumacher, the first postwar leader of the German Social Democrats until he died in l952. From l946 onwards she was also in charge of the SDP executive leadership office, first in Hanover and then in Bonn. That gave her a key role in the building of a new German democracy on the rubble of the Nazi regime. She was first elected to the Bundestag — the lower house of the new German parliament — in l953, and before she became Speaker, she was for three years from l969 to l972 the parliamentary leader of the SDP. That ended in her election to the speakership on December 13, l972.

In and out of parliament she also made reconciliation with the remnants of the German and European Jewish community, one of her principal causes, and was prominent in fostering relations with the state of Israel. This was ultimately recognised with the award of an honorary doctorate to her by the Ben Gurion University in southern Israel, named after the state’s founder.

Once her speakership ended, she also chaired a number of prominent charitable foundations in Germany.

In her later decades Renger became a venerated figure both in European social democracy and in German feminism.

Renger married the advertising executive Emil Ernst Renger in l938. He was killed fighting in France in l944, and her only son of that marriage predeceased her. She married secondly the Yugoslav economist Alexander Loncarevic in l965. He died in l973.

Annemarie Renger, parliamentarian and Speaker of the Bundestag, was born on October 7, 1919. She died on March 3, 2008, aged 88