Peter Florin

Peter Florin
Peter Florin and Kurt Waldheim
President of the United Nations General Assembly
Preceded by	Humayun Rashid Choudhury
Succeeded by	Dante Caputo
Personal details
Born	(1921-02-10) February 10, 1921 Cologne, Germany

Peter Florin, born in Cologne on October 2, 1921, is a former East German politician and diplomat.

Early life

Peter's father, Wilhelm Florin, was a leading figure in the pre-war Communist Party of Germany.

Florin left Germany with his parents in 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power and began persecuting Communists, moving first to France and then to the Soviet Union, where he attended the Karl Liebknecht School. There, he studied chemistry at the University of Mendeleyev.

During the Second World War, he fought with the Soviet partisans in Belarus. In 1944, Florin became editor of Freies Deutschland, a weekly anti-nazi newspaper. At the end of the war, he returned to Germany as a member of the Ackermann Group, one of the regional groups sent to lay the groundwork for the Soviet Military Administration in Germany.

Political and diplomatic career

Following the war, he entered politics in the German Democratic Republic and served as vice-president of the regional parliament of Wittenberg, while working as chief editor of the daily newspaper Freiheit. Then, from 1949 to 1952, he was an advisor for the East German Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1953, he was promoted to the head of the department of foreign affairs of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany's Central Committee. From 1954 to 1971, he was a member of the country's parliamentary committee on foreign affairs, which he presided over for a time.

From 1967 to 1969, Florin was East Germany's ambassador to Czechoslovakia. He openly supported the Russian crushing of the Prague Spring uprising in 1968.

In 1969, he was named Secretary of State and first deputy Foreign Minister.

From 1973 to 1982, Florin was the German Democratic Republic's Permanent Representative to the United Nations. In 1982, he became president of the National Commission for UNESCO in East Germany. In 1987 and 1988, he presided over the forty-second session of the United Nations General Assembly.

Florin speaks fluent German, Russian and English, and good French. During his presidency of the United Nations General Assembly, he was, according to the New York Times, "nicknamed 'Comrade Glasnost' by delegates, who s[aw] him as a symbol of the modern Communist of the Gorbachev era".

Personal life

Peter Florin is married, and has three children. His wife Edel was, in the late 1980s, a professor of Russian literature at Humboldt University in East Berlin.

External links

• "Forty-second General Assembly opens in hopeful atmosphere of increasing multilateral co-operation", UN Chronicle, November 1987

References

Diplomatic posts
Preceded by Humayun Rashid Choudhury	President of the United Nations General Assembly 1987–1988	Succeeded by Dante Caputo