Background
Brentano was born in Offenbach am Main, the son of the Centre politician Otto von Brentano, a member of the 1919 Weimar National Assembly.
Brentano was born in Offenbach am Main, the son of the Centre politician Otto von Brentano, a member of the 1919 Weimar National Assembly.
Upon his Abitur degree in 1922, Heinrich von Brentano studied jurisprudence at the University of Munich and took his first and second Staatsexamen in 1925 and 1929.
He served as Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1955 to 1961. He also attended the proceedings of the Parlamentarischer Rat assembly drafting the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany. In the federal elections of 1949, he obtained a seat in the West German Bundestag parliament by directly winning the mandate of the Bergstraße constituency.
In 1952 he and other Christian Democratic Union MPs advocated the implementation of a plurality voting system instead of the personalized proportional representation concept, though to no avail.
In the federal parliament, he served as head of the Christian Democratic Union/Christlich Soziale Union (Christian Social Union) faction from 1949 to 1955 and again from 1961 until his death. After the Allied occupation statute had been lifted in 1955, he was appointed Foreign Minister of Germany at the suggestion of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who prior had filled the office himself.
Brentano resigned when Adenauer had to form a coalition government with the Free Democratic Party (Freie Demokratische Partei (Free Democratic Party)) after the federal election of 1961 and had to accept the appointment of a Freie Demokratische Partei (Free Democratic Party) state secretary in the Foreign Office.
He was succeeded by his party fellow Gerhard Schröder.
After World World War II, Brentano was one of the founders of the Christian Democratic Union in Hesse and became a member of the Landtag of Hesse in 1946, from 1947 as chairman of the parliamentary group. A member of the European Movement Germany, the European Common Assembly and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Brentano was an important figure in the foundation of the European Economic Community (European Economic Community).