[5] Many years later his journalist daughter would tell an interviewer that wartime experiences of innumerable nights spent in bomb shelters and, in particular, of the destructive English air attack of 15 October 1944, would have a lasting impact on the child.

Shortly before it ended he was sent for two weeks as part of a large schoolboy contingent to the Netherlands "to dig trenches" (intended, it would appear, to serve as "tank traps").

[7] He was then assigned to walk the streets of his home town and the surrounding countryside in the company of other equally bemused reluctant soldiers "equipped with anti-tank weaponry and pistols".

[2][12] During this period he came to the attention of the pioneering media magnate Rudolf Augstein who assiduously – and in the end successfully – sought to recruit him for a job as a political editor at Der Spiegel in Hamburg.

[15][16][17] On 10 April 1963, the German public television broadcaster ZDF transmitted the first episode of the series called "Zur Person – Porträts in Frage und Antwort".

A few years later Hannelore Kohl, who had evidently noticed the effect the article had on her husband, and who in the opinion of most commentators never relished the possibility of becoming the wife of a German chancellor, accosted Gaus with a three word accusation, "Sie sind schuld" ("It's your fault").

[13][19] During the mid-1960s he produced a number of well-received books on the political situation in West Germany at that time; and in 1969, having successfully persuaded him back to Der Spiegel, Rudolf Augstein installed Günter Gaus as editor-in-chief.

On 2 May 1974 West Germany's "Permanent Representation" office opened at Hannoversche Straße 28–30 in East Berlin under the direction of Günter Gaus.

He turned out to be exceptionally well suited for that work, with a talent for listening deeply, shrewd political insight, and a genuine empathy for the achievements in the "German Democratic Republic" of a Leninist government structure which, for all its acknowledged brutishness and economic naïveté, had engendered an absence of social hierarchies and a form of social solidarity between citizens that were conspicuously absent in the west.

[2] In retirement, looking back on his career, Gaus would insistently identify his seven years as an unconventional diplomat in East Berlin, as the most important time in his whole life.

[23] The writer Christoph Hein has characterised Günter Gaus as "unbequem, unbeirrbar und integer" (loosely, "... an awkward, unflappable man of total integrity"), an assessment as relevant to his diplomatic dealings as to his broadcast television interviews of the previous decade.

In breach of the almost universal group-think shared between West German political elite during the 1970s and 1980s, he found himself in sympathy with aspects of the eastern "social" order that had emerged with the rest of the baggage in the legacies of Stalin and Ulbricht.

One of several important differences, however, was that Bölling was a "Schmidt insider", just as Gaus had been a trusted Brandt lieutenant and effective backer during the early Ostpolitik years.

[18] Following the loss of his intra-German diplomatic posting, between February and June 1981 Günter Gaus served briefly as the West Berlin Senator for Sciences, Arts and Research in succession to his party colleague Peter Glotz.

Bettina Gaus writes: "My father had identified his life's theme, and it stayed with him till the end: the love for his own country – and the enduring worry as to where it was headed".

It quickly turned out that the Soviet troops watching had received no orders to intervene, while the number of the protesters rapidly increased, helped by a breathtaking piece of media mismanagement by the aging East German party leadership.

Günter Gaus was part of a generation that had seen an earlier attempt by East Germans to rid themselves of Soviet-sponsored tyranny end very differently, back in 1953.

Over the ensuing twelve months, however, he became progressively more horrified by the frenetic pace with which the western government of Helmut Kohl steam-rollered through a quasi-colonial reunificant process, committing what he viewed as a succession of serious and very basic political errors.

Instead, he had his own vision, which he shared, for the establishment of a "Central European Confederation": this should comprise not just East and West Germany, but also Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.

(These last three were all undergoing their own versions of East Germany's successful and largely peaceful popular rejection of any further prolongation of domination by "Soviet Socialism").

The vision might have been expected to stir residual folk memories of the pre-1806 Holy Roman empire, but that had collapsed nearly two centuries ago, and the Gaus blueprint for reunification gained very little traction with commentators.

Meanwhile, the West German government in Bonn (and many of the newly promoted leaders in East Berlin) were simply determined to "get reunification done" as quickly as possible, for fear that the sweet "Winds of Glasnost" from Moscow or even the cautiously supportive mood music in Brussels and Washington might, at any moment, be changed.

The publication's longer title included, during the early 1990s, a second line: "Die Ost-West-Wochenzeitung" ("The East-West weekly newspaper"), neatly summing up a principal preoccupation of Freitag's controlling minds.

Between 1991 and 2004 he was a co-producer of "Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik", during that period a serious minded Berlin-based monthly publication concentrating on German and international politics.

Günter Gaus died on 14 May 2004 at Reinbek, just outside Hamburg, where he and Erika had made their home together (subject to lengthy breaks for work-related assignments in Berlin) since 1969.

The burial site had an added poignancy deriving from the fact that it was only a couple of streets away from the former West German "Permanent Representation" office over which he had presided, in what was at the time East Berlin, between 1974 and 1981.