Josef Deimer

Josef Deimer was born on 29 May 1936 in Landshut, Bavaria, the youngest of five children. He grew up in simple circumstances in Achdorf, a working class district of the city, and as a child saw the hardships of the Second World War. His father died early, as did his older brother Richard, from whom he inherited the nickname "Dick" by which friends and the people of Landshut knew him all his life. In his youth he played football as a left winger. He trained as an engineer and graduated as a Diplom-Ingenieur (FH).

Deimer's political career began in 1966. At 30 he was elected to the Landshut city council with the highest number of votes of any CSU candidate, and in the same year he won the Landshut constituency in the Bavarian Landtag, where he sat until 1970. From 1970 to 1974 he also served on the CSU's state executive.

In 1969 he was elected Oberbuergermeister (lord mayor) of Landshut and took office on 1 January 1970, aged 33, making him the youngest mayor of his rank in the Federal Republic. Landshut voters returned him six times, with shares of up to 83.6 percent against several rivals. He served until 31 December 2004, by then the longest serving lord mayor in Germany. Under his leadership the city invested heavily in its Gothic old town and its infrastructure. The defining and much debated project of his tenure was the Hofberg tunnel, a road tunnel 1,470 metres long that relieved the medieval centre of through traffic; it was named the Josef Deimer Tunnel in 2007.

From 1975 he chaired the Bavarian Association of Cities (Bayerischer Staedtetag) for almost 30 years, turning it into a forceful critic of the state government on questions of local finance and self government, and he was later its honorary chairman. He sat in the Bavarian Senate, the state's former second chamber, from 1982 until it was abolished at the end of 1999, served on the presidium of the German Association of Cities from 1984 and was its vice president from 1994 to 2005. He also sat on the broadcasting council of Bayerischer Rundfunk and on the executive committee of the International Union of Local Authorities.

Alongside his offices he was president of the Bavarian adult education association from 1979 to 2014 and president of Lebenshilfe Landshut, which supports people with physical and intellectual disabilities, from 1971 to 2021. He wrote and edited books on local government, bureaucracy, housing and public services.

Deimer was married to Hildegard. Although a lifelong CSU member, he was hard to place politically, drawing on Catholic social teaching. Living near the Isar nuclear power plants, he became an opponent of nuclear power, saying it was an ethical question because thousands of generations could not be burdened with keeping plutonium safe. He called the Wackersdorf reprocessing plant uneconomic long before it was abandoned, and he campaigned for all day schools and for local voting rights for EU citizens. His blunt language and disputes with Franz Josef Strauss, Edmund Stoiber and Markus Soeder became part of Bavarian political lore; the Social Democrat leader Hans-Jochen Vogel once joked that with his positions he really belonged with the SPD. He was also a man of letters who wrote verse in the form of Japanese haiku.

Josef Deimer died on the evening of Wednesday 12 August 2026 in a hospital in Landshut, aged 90, from the effects of pneumonia. The City of Landshut announced his death the next day on behalf of his widow, Hildegard. Lord Mayor Thomas Haslinger called him the epitome of the hands-on mayor close to the people and said his death marked a deep break for the city. The city planned a requiem in the collegiate basilica of St Martin and a memorial ceremony in the town hall's ceremonial hall, and opened a book of condolence in the town hall foyer from 18 to 21 August.

Deimer is remembered as one of the most influential local politicians in postwar Germany, a mayor who shaped modern Landshut and used the Bavarian Association of Cities to give local government a strong voice against the state. His honours included the Grand Cross of Merit of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (1999), the Bavarian Order of Merit (1979), the Bavarian Constitutional Medal in gold (2002), the Golden Ring of Honour of Landshut (2000) and honorary citizenship of Landshut (2006), as well as of Sibiu in Romania and Schio in Italy. The tunnel that carries traffic beneath Landshut bears his name.