WITH the death of Reinhard Hesse, Germany has lost one of its most energetic and internationally experienced journalists, and Gerhard Schröder, the Chancellor, has lost a trusted and effective speechwriter and adviser.

Hesse brought broad intellectual interests and a special knowledge of the Middle East and Islamic world to his work, and was an important figure in Germany’s continued search for its new role after reunification and the resumption of a “normal” foreign policy.

As well as giving the Chancellor effective words and images with which to articulate his political vision, Hesse remained a distinctive commentator in his own right, both at home and through international forums such as the openDemocracy website.

Hesse’s original and unusually broad-minded approach to his work sprang from his upbringing as the son of German parents living in Cairo. He learnt fluent Arabic as well as excellent English and French, and returned to the Middle East when he began work as a journalist. His wife was Lebanese.

Later he began work with magazines in Germany, including Die Woche and Transatlantik, founded by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Broad editorial roles as well as writing suited his huge range of interests, which went from culture and sport to economics and every aspect of politics.

His work with Gerhard Schröder began while the future chancellor was still a state politician. The pair collaborated on two books, in which they sought to set out a modern vision for Social Democratic politics that addressed the sense of stasis in German society while coming to terms too with the pressures of globalisation. For the second book, Und weil wir unser Land verbessern (“Because we’re improving our country”), which served as a kind of manifesto for Schröder’s bid for federal power, Hesse hit on the format of 26 letters which cleverly gave the political appeal a more personal touch.

In the speeches he wrote later for Schröder as Chancellor, Hesse helped to articulate the mood of a new German generation which sought not only to revive society at home but also to take its place unashamedly in the world, freed finally from the residual guilt of the post-Nazi era. In the speech the Chancellor made at the D-Day commemorations this year, he reminded his audience how he had never known his father, who died as a Wehrmacht soldier in Romania, and he stated: “I don’t represent that Germany of those dark war years. My country has found its way back into the circle of civilised nations.”

However, the resumption of an active foreign policy, including the potential deployment of troops abroad, did not sit easily with the more pacifist instincts that remained strong in German thinking. And Hesse was also in the forefront of the German rejection of the American-led invasion of Iraq. With his intimate knowledge of Middle Eastern affairs and Islamic thinking, he wrote a swift response to the events of 9/11 in a book entitled Ground Zero — The West and the Islamic World against Globalised Terror, which explained how disaffected young men from the Middle East could be attracted to the perversion of Islamic thinking represented by al-Qaeda, and challenged the West and the mainstream Islamic world to address the sense of injustice which could fuel such movements.

Hesse was also a powerful advocate of a specific kind of Western-Islamic rapprochement, namely the admission of Turkey to the European Union. He saw in the cultural mingling of Turkish immigrants in Germany an optimistic sign of what could be achieved on a European scale.

“More integration,” he argued “is the only European road.” And he saw the firm embedding of Turkey in Europe as a powerful aid to the broader modernisation of the Muslim world.

Hesse never fully submerged his thinking into his official role as part of Schröder’s staff. For most of his years as speechwriter he remained living in Munich rather than Bonn or Berlin. And he enjoyed retaining an independent voice, reflecting on all kinds of issues in essays, for example, for the British-based website openDemocracy. In a recent contribution he wrote on European integration with a characteristically mischievous and unexpected leitmotif: that of roundabouts, spreading throughout the European landscape and representing a more flexible and durable kind of co-operation than crossroads.

Reflecting his closeness to some of the new Labour architects in Britain, he also praised Tony Blair’s decision to promise a referendum on the new EU constitution. This, Hesse suggested, might at last engage European public opinion more directly, even if it risked derailing the progress towards integration that he broadly supported.

Anthony Barnett of openDemocracy described Hesse as “a comet” in the “slowly moving solar system of the German Federal Republic”. Other friends recalled his huge energy and love of argument as well as writing, sustained by a constant supply of red wine and cigarettes. It was cancer that silenced this powerful and original voice so early.

Reinhard Hesse, speechwriter and political commentator, was born on August 17, 1956. He died on October 11, 2004, aged 48.