Hannelore Kohl: Years of pain

Kohl had rarely been seen in public since 1998

BERLIN, German -- Hannelore Kohl, the wife of former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who committed suicide, had been suffering from a rare allergy for seven years.

She had rarely been seen in public since Helmut Kohl failed to be re-elected in 1998.

The last 15 months were spent at her family's home "without any daylight," a statement from Kohl's office said on Thursday.

The allergy was triggered by a penicillin treatment in 1993. She acknowledged it was untreatable, and her condition worsened last year.

Hannelore Kohl was born March 7, 1933 in Berlin, the daughter of an engineer from Rhineland-Palatinate who designed anti-tank rocket launches.

She grew up in the eastern city of Leipzig until the end of World War II in 1945, when the family moved west.

She was the childhood sweetheart of the future chancellor and married him in 1960.

They met when she was just 15 and he 18 in the tough years after the war. Kohl finally won her over with an avalanche of love letters, she said -- more than 2,000 in all, Reuters news agency reported.

She stood by his side throughout a long political career, including both his time as chancellor from 1982 to 1998 and during a slush fund scandal after he was voted out of office.

"We survived World War II. We will also cope with this ... I stand by my man," she said at the time.

She tried to keep herself and the couple's two sons out of the public spotlight as her husband rose through the ranks in post-war West Germany's conservative Christian Democratic party, taking over as leader in 1973.

A commercial interpreter from English and French, she dedicated her energies to charitable causes, notably an organisation for accident victims suffering neurological injuries -- the Hannelore Kohl Foundation -- as her husband's political career took off.

A few years ago, she wrote a cookbook of German food with her husband, which included some of his favourite dishes such as stuffed pig's stomach.

Her illness prevented her from attending her son Peter's wedding to his Turkish fiancee in Istanbul, Turkey. But she won lavish praise in Turkey for supporting her son's choice of wife.

For many Turks, the wedding was a symbolic olive branch -- during 16 years in power, Helmut Kohl was seen in Turkey as one of the main obstacles to Turkey's efforts to join the European Union.

In a recent interview with the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, she expressed sadness that the couple's Berlin apartment was too bright for her to spend much time in.