Exorcising Hitler (59 page)

Two million more eastern Germans followed the wartime refugees to the West from the then Soviet Zone between 1949 and 1961, often at considerable personal risk – two million more reminders, if needed, of how unattractive the alternative really was to Western-style democracy.

And third, there was a growing, genuine conviction in the West that this time democracy might work and be found good. Especially among the young, the very ‘brainwashed’ Hitler Youth products that the Allies had originally feared would prove irreconcilable in a post-Nazi world, there grew a willingness to try the new post-war democratic political diet that had originally been forced upon Germany but which after a while started to taste a little better than it had amidst the bitter reek of defeat.

For Ulrich Frodien, for instance, who, after finding his Silesian refugee family in Soviet-occupied Thuringia, spent almost three years there, increasingly chafing against the new thought-dictatorship that was the developing East German communist state. He desperately wanted to write and express opinions he was not, in this part of Germany, allowed to express. Ulrich’s father, after practising medicine in the East under conditions of professional and personal hardship, managed to escape across the border into the West. Ulrich followed some while later, making a dramatic winter escape, on crutches, across the snowy border between the Soviet and British zones from a sanatorium where he had been undergoing treatment for lung problems. By the time young Ulrich, now twenty-one, collapsed on a road he believed to be in the West – he knew for sure that he was safe only when a military vehicle stopped to pick him up, and he saw to his immense relief that it bore British Army number plates – he was half dead with fever and exhaustion, but he survived to begin a new life in the West.
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Less than two years later, Ulrich began work at the liberal
Süddeutsche Zeitung
in Munich, where he would later found and manage the paper’s picture agency. Likewise, Lothar Löwe, three years younger and also once a fanatical Hitler Youth leader, who had avoided study at Humboldt University out of fear of arrest, also went into journalism, although from a more unsteady start. His first ever encounter with an American GI, on a Berlin tram, had not been encouraging. Seeing this smartly uniformed, conspicuous figure smoking a cigarette next to him among the drab crowd of commuters, young Lothar decided to try out his school-learnt English. ‘How do you do, sir?’ he said brightly. As Löwe now recalls with retrospective amusement:

He said nothing. He looked at me like I was a piece of sh*t . . . And then he threw his cigarette on the floor and stepped on it . . . This was the moment I knew we had lost the war . . .
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However, spending the first couple of years after the war in the eastern part of Berlin was enough to persuade Löwe that the Soviet-imposed version of ‘freedom’ held little appeal. After moving with his mother to the US sector, he met an altogether friendlier kind of American. He was drawn into the youth clubs set up by the US military authorities precisely with the purpose of encouraging teenagers like him, who had grown up under Hitler, to learn about America and to involve themselves in a new, democratic post-war Germany. It helped, in those times of shortage, that the youth clubs offered hot drinks (real coffee and hot chocolate) and snacks.
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Once the connection with the occupiers was made, Löwe became involved with an American-sponsored youth newspaper, and after that he was hooked. By his early twenties, he was employed as a reporter by the popular Berlin daily newspaper
Der Abend
(The Evening – even though it appeared at midday), which had been founded in 1946 under licence from the American authorities by Hans Sonnenfeld, a former executive of the Ullstein publishing house, and Maximilian Müller-Jabusch, a veteran editor from the pre-war liberal newspaper of record, the
Vossische Zeitung
. Müller-Jabusch had extra reason not to love the Nazis, who had mistreated his Jewish wife. Löwe learned his trade, he recalls, from the Americans (‘learning by doing’) and from Müller-Jabusch and the other ‘old gentlemen’ from the Weimar press, who were now able to return to their desks.
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Reporting from a democratic but firmly anti-communist standpoint on Berlin and regional matters, including the 1953 workers’ uprising in East Germany, young Löwe quickly made a local reputation. In his thirties he became a national figure as the correspondent of ARD (German state television) in America, from where he reported on the American reaction to the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 and two years later on the assassination of President Kennedy. He was then ARD’s man in East Germany, whence he was expelled because of his brutally frank accounts of conditions there and especially the East German government’s secret ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy at the border.

It was perhaps in the rise of a lively, and in many cases highly politicised, press in West Germany that the new three-quarter-country’s idiosyncratic route to democracy was most vividly expressed. Of the hundreds of newspapers and magazines licensed by the Western Allies in the years immediately following the war, several would form the basis of internationally important newspaper concerns.

In a country hungry for information and eager to express itself freely after twelve years of dictatorship, dynamic proprietors could quickly carve out profitable and influential niches for themselves. Most arose in the British Zone, where press regulations were from the outset more liberal than elsewhere. And it was in the north-western part of the British Zone, in the autumn of 1948, that a group of concerned German journalists from Hamburg and its surrounding area got together, along with local academics, churchmen and psychologists, for a conference at which the theme was ‘the journalist as entrepreneur’, but which most importantly dealt, in an amateur sociological kind of way, with what they, as newspapermen, could do to help prevent a recurrence of the Nazi rise to power. The general conclusion was that the press in the Weimar Republic, written mainly by earnest liberal intellectuals (including many of the participants in the conference), had failed to attract a mass readership and thus to influence the general public in a positive way. In other words, for all its good intentions, it had been boring. This must change.
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Whether this was correct or not, certainly the evolving press in the Western zones was not all boring. Sometimes both the Allied occupiers and the nascent West German government would come to wish it had been. Whatever the serious gentlemen who had proposed the ‘journalist as entrepreneur’ in 1948 had actually expected, what they got was – in the left corner – Rudolf Augstein, and – in the right – Axel Springer.

Rudolf Augstein was just twenty-three, a former artillery observation officer who ended the war as a deserter from the Wehrmacht, when he founded
Der Spiegel
(The Mirror), a weekly news magazine, in British-occupied Hanover in January 1947. He had spent the previous year writing for British-controlled newspapers, and he consciously based
Der Spiegel
on the British news magazine
News Review
and its even more famous American equivalent,
Time
magazine. Critical, satirical, left-liberal,
Spiegel
acquired a devoted readership as the 1940s turned into the 1950s and it moved its headquarters to Hamburg,  which was once more thriving as Germany’s second city after Berlin.

Axel Cäsar Springer, born in Altona near Hamburg in 1912, son of a successful printer and newspaper publisher active in liberal politics before Hitler came to power, was thirty-four when, courtesy of the British authorities, he launched
Hör Zu
(Listen), a popular radio (and later TV) listings magazine, in Hamburg in 1946. This was followed by the women’s magazine
Constanze
, and then, two years later, by the daily
Hamburger Abendblatt
. Finally, he put in place the cornerstone of the Springer concern, the mass-circulation, heavily illustrated
Bild-Zeitung
(Picture Newspaper). This garish broadsheet, consciously modelled on highly successful, sensationalist British newspapers such as the
Daily Mirror
and the
Daily Sketch
, soon gained the biggest sales (2.5 million by 1956, 5 million by the 1980s, fifty years later still 3.5 million) of any European newspaper outside the United Kingdom, and second in the world only to the Japanese daily
Yomiuri Shimbun
.

In 1953 Axel Springer acquired the British-owned paper
Die Welt
. This had been the official mouthpiece of the occupation authorities in the early post-war days, based on the London
Times
, and was reckoned, unlike most of Springer’s titles at this point, to be a serious publication. He turned it into the ‘respectable’ (but loss-making) flagship of his empire. By 1968, the Springer Publishing House was responsible for nineteen major publications, making up 88 per cent of all Sunday newspapers in West Germany, 81 per cent of all newspapers sold at street outlets such as tobacconists (many Germans subscribed to and received their newspapers by mail), 70 per cent of all newspapers sold in Berlin and Hamburg, and 56 per cent of all radio and television listings magazines.
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Augstein’s
Spiegel
and its sister papers were left-liberal and oppositional, critical of Adenauer’s West Germany, while Springer’s papers, like the man himself, were vehemently anti-communist and conservative – in the case of
Bild-Zeitung
, when it chose to turn its attention away from scandal, shock and celebrity stories to deal with political matters, aggressively and raucously so. His papers opposed recognising the Russian and Polish acquisition of Germany’s eastern provinces, and for decades would print the name of the East German state only as ‘DDR’ (in inverted commas), thus constantly emphasising the illegitimacy of Walter Ulbricht’s ‘German Democratic Republic’. Augstein, by contrast, was in favour of recognising the communist regime, and formalising the loss of the eastern territories, and even of conciliatory negotiations with the Eastern Bloc over the status of West Berlin.
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Not so Springer. He moved his headquarters to West Berlin, where he built an eleven-storey office block yards from the Berlin Wall, from where he could see and be seen by East Berlin’s citizens and their guards. It was a typically quirky and clever move, a permanent reminder of what he and his papers stood for – and what Augstein and his liberal friends, as Springer saw them, did not.

All the same, despite its relentless muckraking and shrill right-wing bias, even the Springer Press could not be accused of encouraging a Nazi revival. Springer himself was, superficially at least, not the tough, ruthless press baron one might expect to own a paper such as
Bild
. Spare-framed, dandyish, with an interest in religion and esoteric philosophy, Axel Springer was also possessed of a powerful charm, which he used with great success on those he liked or needed – from the British newspaper controllers who gave him his licences in the early days to politicians, journalists and also women (he was married five times).

According to George Clare (who later worked for him), Springer picked up his first newspaper licence from the British in Hamburg, against stiff competition from other would-be proprietors, because he was the first applicant not to complain loudly and often unconvincingly about being persecuted by the Nazis. The officer asked Springer, in German, with ill-suppressed sarcasm if he too had been persecuted by anyone (the German verb
verfolgen
can also mean ‘pursued’ or ‘chased’), to which young Springer replied cheekily, ‘Only by women’. He got the licence.
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After he became Germany’s most important and richest newspaper proprietor, Springer spent Christmas every year in Jerusalem and was the recipient of several awards from the Israeli government and Jewish charities.

Under the Weimar Republic, swathes of the popular press had been owned by extreme, anti-democratic nationalist figures, most especially Alfred Hugenberg, former director of Krupp Steel, leader of the German National People’s Party, and ally of Hitler. Springer was different. His was consciously a post-war, post-Hitler version of what it meant to be German and of the right. In the 1960s Springer himself drafted four articles of faith that summed up his media group’s commitments, which changed little in the next twenty years and still appear on its website today in a form amended to suit changing historical circumstances:

1. Advocacy of German reunification.

2. Reconciliation between Germans and Jews.

3. Rejection of all forms of political totalitarianism.

4. Defence of the social market economy.
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