Dr von Dohnanyi was born 23 June 1928 in Hamburg. He is a German politician and a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD)and is the son of Hans von Dohnanyi and Christine Bonhoeffer, and thus a nephew of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

After studying law at the universities of Munich, Columbia, Stanford and Yale, he started his career working at the Max-Planck-Institute for Civil Law. He then moved to Ford Motor Company, the car manufacturer, working for the company in both Detroit and Cologne where he was head of the Planning Division. From 1960 to 1967 Dohnanyi was a Managing Partner of the Institute for Market Research and Management Consulting in Munich.

In 1969 he was elected to the Bundestag (German Federal Parliament) from the land of Nordrhein-Westfalen and served in the Economics, Education and Science ministries until 1981. That year he was elected First Mayor (prime minister) of his home city of Hamburg. He served two terms as First Mayor, from 24 June 1981 until 8 June 1988.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and with German unification, Klaus von Dohnanyi became involved with the restructuring programme in East Germany, and from 1993 to 1996 was a special adviser on Market Economy and State to the Board of the Treuhandanstalt and BvS, its successor company, responsible for privatising state-owned companies in the former East Germany.

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Klaus von Dohnanyi

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