BERLIN — As West German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt marshalled personal dynamism, managerial brilliance and often acid-tongued impatience to push his country into an assertive international role as the Cold War dragged on into the 1970s.

Dominating the European stage more than any other politician during the 1970s, his eight years in office (1974-1982) were marked by his restless energy and personal command of such difficult areas as defence and finance.

Schmidt was for decades one of West Germany’s most popular politicians. With a firm jaw and intense grey eyes, he was handsome, witty and supremely self-possessed. In public he was a magnetic speaker and a pugnacious debater. (He was known as “Schmidt the Lip” early in his career.) Cultured and erudite, he was also an accomplished classical pianist and writer. As recently as 2013, in a poll by Stern magazine, he was ranked as Germany’s most significant chancellor.

“We Germans have lost a father figure,” said Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, one of a generation of Social Democratic leaders formed by Schmidt and Willy Brandt.

Schmidt’s life all but traced the history of 20th-century Germany. A son of working-class Hamburg, he was born in the wake of Germany’s humiliating defeat in World War I, witnessed the rise of the Nazis, joined the Hitler Youth, served in Hitler’s army — while hiding the fact he had a Jewish grandfather — and emerged politically in a postwar Germany divided against itself.

Schmidt rode a difficult period as chancellor after being elected in 1974: The global economy was in turmoil, and tensions with the Communist east had not slackened. Unlike his more accommodating predecessors, he openly jousted with the United States over global economics and relations with the Soviet Union.

At home, he compelled his left-leaning Social Democratic Party to embrace pro-business policies and to support the buildup of the West German armed forces into a bulwark of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). At the same time, he pressed the Federal Republic of Germany to forge closer ties with the Communist regime in East Germany.

And working with his close friend, then-President Valery Giscard d’Estaing of France, he helped soften European distrust of his country for its Nazi past, still fresh in painful memory.

A committed European, Schmidt will also be remembered as the joint architect in 1978 — with d’Estaing, like Schmidt, a former finance minister — of the European Monetary System, in which the robust German currency was destined to play a pivotal role. He could thus claim to be a pioneer of European Monetary Union.

Schmidt’s contribution to German, European and Alliance politics was great, and will be remembered especially for its uncompromising stance on defence in the face of the Soviet arms build-up during the Leonid Brezhnev years.

Mindful of the events in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, Schmidt’s priority was to ensure that an inward-looking US was securely coupled to Europe. He thus became the chief architect and protagonist of NATO’s so-called “dual track” decision to counter Moscow’s SS-20 medium-range rocket arsenal by stationing American Cruise and Pershing-II missiles in Europe.

Schmidt was confident — too confident, some said — about his ability to sustain prosperity in West Germany. Under his stewardship, his nation fared better than the rest of Europe during the economic crisis of the 1970s, provoked by a sharp rise in petroleum prices controlled by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the cartel of oil-exporting countries. But he was criticised in the early 1980s as having failed to prepare West Germans for recession.

The Schmidt era ended in bitterness and disappointment, and he preferred not to linger long in active politics, even though he remained personally popular with the electorate, owing in no small part to the affection West Germans had for his down-to-earth wife, Hannelore Schmidt, who he had known since childhood. A biologist and amateur botanist, she eschewed ceremony in favour of promoting conservation and protecting endangered plants. She died in 2010.

Germans were shocked earlier this year when Schmidt admitted that some 45 years earlier he had undertaken an extra-marital affair, but had turned down his wife’s offer to stand aside for his mistress.

After losing his job as chancellor, he was at least cushioned by his interests outside politics — notably music, in which he was an accomplished performer. He could, moreover, sit back and pontificate through the pages of the weekly Die Zeit, of which he became a joint publisher, and through a spell on the lucrative American lecture circuit.

Nearing retirement, Schmidt spent much of his time in Hamburg, his native port city. Agencies