Gerd Schuchardt is an electrical engineer who built his career and reputation in East Germany before 1990 in microprocessor technology and related forward-looking branches of science.
In the resulting "Grand coalition" government that ensued he served as vice-minister-president until 1999 under the leadership of Bernhard Vogel (CDU) and as Minister for the Sciences, Research and the Arts.
[1][2][3] Gerd Schuchardt was born in Erfurt (Thuringia), a midsized city in central southern Germany, at the height of the Second World War.
He attended junior and middle schools locally at Greiz and in Erfurt between 1948 and 1956 and then moved on to undertake and complete an apprenticeship as a radio technician.
From 1964 until 1969 he studied successfully for a degree in Theoretical Elector-technology and Control Systems Engineering at the relatively small specialist Technical University of Ilmenau, a short distance outside Erfurt, to the south.
Sources state that his research work earned a large amount of money for the enterprise, though it is also recorded that he failed to secure the promotion that his contribution should have justified because of his refusal to join The Party.
The value of his contribution was nevertheless officially acknowledged in 1985, when the collective to which he belonged was among that year's recipients of the prestigious National Prize of the German Democratic Republic.
[1] For reasons having to do both with national trends and with political divisions within the Thuringia party leadership, Landtag election results in 1999 were disappointing, with the SPD vote share down from 29.6% (1994) to 18.5%.
[17][18] He has also been involved in similar oversight roles at the Ernst Abbe Foundation,[19] the Pont Alpha prize association for the Kuratorium of German Unity and the SPD's "Forum East".