Peter von Zahn

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Peter von Zahn (born January 29, 1913 in Chemnitz , † July 26, 2001 in Hamburg ) was a German radio and television journalist .

Life

The first years

Peter von Zahn grew up in Dresden as the son of an officer . He attended grammar schools in Dresden and Freiburg im Breisgau . From 1931 to 1939 he studied law , history and journalism in Vienna , Jena , Berlin and Freiburg , where he after a successful defense of his dissertation The social ideas of Anabaptism at Gerhard Ritter doctorate was. He had a lifelong friendship with his colleague Michael Vermehren since they were studying together in Freiburg .

At the end of August 1939 he married a British woman. The Second World War, spent Peter von Zahn with war coverage as an officer in 1942 in a propaganda unit of the Wehrmacht in the Ukraine and was assigned for two months an SS Sonderkommando.

After his escape and captivity, he became editor and commentator at Radio Hamburg in June 1945 .

NWDR

Radio Hamburg was converted into the NWDR on September 30, 1945 . He became the first head of the talks & features department , which later became the main word department . In 1948 he worked as a correspondent in Düsseldorf , and in 1949 took over the management of this studio. There, von Zahn oversaw the fifteen-minute program Von Rhein und Ruhr . Constant conflicts with the general manager Adolf Grimme because of provocative statements soon led Peter von Zahn abroad.

As the first permanent German foreign correspondent after the Second World War, von Zahn went to the USA . From 1951 to 1960 he was known to the German public as a radio correspondent in Washington , initially with the fifteen-minute radio program From the New World . On October 3, 1955, the 30-minute television program Pictures from the New World was added, 50 episodes of which had appeared up to 1960. They established the first systematic international reporting on West German television. From 1955 to 1957, the State Department supported these efforts through its subordinate United States Information Agency (USIA), which assumed the production costs. In 1957, the NWRV paid for the broadcast, the contract ran until March 31, 1961.

Compass rose

Even before this contract expired, von Zahn was lured away by the Freie Fernsehen Gesellschaft (FFG), which paid considerably more for its most prominent figurehead: an order volume of 50 million DM for the next eight years made the financially risky establishment of a private foreign reporter network possible, Windrose Film - and Fernsehproduktions GmbH , whose managing director of Zahn was from 1961 to 1980. This company was already very progressive, for example the footage from a location was used for various projects in order to save costs. After the FFG had to disband before broadcasting began, the WDR showed the films that had already been completed from 1961 to 1963 with great success. This then resulted in its own magazine , Weltspiegel , which was broadcast for the first time on April 5, 1963. Von Zahn used the documentary game as a medium early on to impart knowledge about contemporary history : 1969 for Die Kuba Crisis 1962 and Die Five Examinations des Oberbürgermeister (about the former Cologne mayor Konrad Adenauer ), 1975 The Pentagon Papers (about the former Pentagon employee Daniel Ellsberg ).

Back in Europe

Cushion stone Peter von Zahn, Ohlsdorf cemetery

After his time in the USA, Peter von Zahn worked as a freelance writer, director and producer . He created almost 3,000 radio reports and over 1,000 television films, mostly reports . He had a very concise style of speech with idiosyncratic emphasis. The ZDF pre-evening program Pictures That Moved the World, which he designed in the 1980s, also received a lot of attention , in which he dealt with one major media event (mostly catastrophes) on a monothematic basis. In 1982 he became managing director of Anatol AV und Filmproduktion GmbH . In 1987 he published the essay Leaving Us America? and in 1991 his autobiography Voice of the First Hour . The last part of his memories was still being worked on when Peter von Zahn died in Hamburg in 2001 after a long and serious illness. This part was then not published.

His grave is on the Hamburg cemetery Ohlsdorf , grave site Z11 (159).

Peter von Zahn was related to the naval officer Friedrich Ruge .

Awards and honors

Works

  • Studies on the Origin of Social Ideas of Anabaptism in the First Years of the Reformation , Univ. Diss. Freiburg, 1939
  • Black sphinx. Report from the Rhine and Ruhr , 1949
  • Foreign friends. Report from the New World , 1953
  • At the borders of the New World , 1955
  • Report from the world of color , 1960
  • Wind rose of time. From the diary , 1963
  • Everything flows. A book about water , 1985
  • America leaving us? , 1987
  • The Light We Live In , 1988
  • Voice of the first hour: Memories 1913–1951 , 1991
  • Reporter of the wind rose. Memoirs 1951–1964 , 1994
  • Two millennia of childhood (with Marie-Louise von Plessen ), 1995

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter von Zahn - The great radio man with the memorable tremelo [sic] ( Memento from December 14, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensions/2019-1-162
  3. ↑ a b c d Peter von Zahn. Retrieved July 27, 2011 .
  4. ↑ knerger.de: The grave of Peter von Zahn
  5. ↑ Celebrity Graves
  6. ↑ http ://www.hamburgerpersoenitäten.de/hamburgerpersoenitäten/login/person.asp?reqid= 995
  7. ^ Wiebke Spannuth: Hamburg Citizens Prize for a Master of the Word. Die Welt, October 30, 1999
  8. ↑ Hamburg personalities from 801 - 2013: Peter von Zahn .
personal data
SURNAME Zahn, Peter von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German radio and television journalist
DATE OF BIRTH January 29, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Chemnitz
DATE OF DEATH July 26, 2001
Place of death Hamburg