Profile: Germany's Joachim Gauck

BERLIN. March 18. KAZINFORM. Who would ever have thought that the two highest posts in Germany would be held by products of the old communist state?

Joachim Gauck will be elected to the presidency on Sunday, so both the head of state and the chancellor will have grown up in the old German Democratic Republic. East Germans will symbolise the united country itself and actually run it.

Mr Gauck and Chancellor Angel Merkel were both raised in the East, which crumbled in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Both too have backgrounds in the Lutheran Church - she as the daughter of a pastor, he as a pastor himself and the son of a pastor.

And both give a very untypical tenor to the public life of the unified Germany - unflashy, feet-on-the -ground and independent of mind and spirit.

They are very different from many of the men in suits who populate German politics.

Chancellor Merkel is often shown in the newspapers doing the supermarket shopping at the end of a day which she started by meeting a president or prime minister.

She lives in her own flat in the centre of Berlin, rather than in the grand official quarters.

Mr Gauck speaks his mind and is a forthright confronter of what he perceives to be wrong.

He went into politics in the East after his father was deported to Siberia for his civil rights activism.

He became a Lutheran pastor in 1965 in the northern port of Rostock, having opted to study theology when other university courses were denied him because of his father's dissidence and because he was not a member of the communist youth organisation.

Then, when the Church spoke out in favour of democracy in the old East Germany in the late 1980s, the younger Pastor Gauck held services which preceded the big demonstrations that eventually toppled the regime.

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