Carl Flick

Carl (Charles) Flick , called Flick-Steger (born December 13, 1899 in Vienna , † January 24, 1969 in Bad Orb ) was an American journalist.

Life and activity

Origin and early years

Flick was a son of the Austrian-born engineer Lorenz Flick and his wife Ruperta, b. Steger. He was a native American citizen.

Flick grew up in the American state of Rhode Island . In the US he was called Charles L. Flick or Carl Flick. He used the double name Flick-Steger from 1929, when he married a Munich opera soprano.

In his teens, Flick attended high school in Pawtucket , Rhode Island. In 1918 he passed the Abitur. He then studied music in Providence, Boston. After completing his studies at Brown University, he moved to Austria to undertake further musical studies in Vienna. In the following years he was active as a composer in the USA and Europe (including Berlin and Brussels). As a composer, Flick wrote numerous compositions. As early as 1929, the catalog of his compositions included fourteen works of serious music. His best-known works are the opera Dorian Gray (world premiere: Aussig 1930), an adaptation of the book of the same name by Oscar Wilde , and the opera Leon and Edrita (world premiere in Krefeld 1936).

In 1930 Flick-Steger, as he called himself Flick since 1929, turned to journalism: He was hired by the Hearst Press as chief correspondent for Central Europe. From 1930 to 1936 Flick-Steger, who spoke German with a strong American accent, reported in this position for the Hearst newspapers in Berlin . During this time, Flick-Steger joined the NSDAP on July 1, 1931.

In 1936 Flick-Steger returned to the USA: There he was first editor-in-chief of the weekly magazine Literary Digest , before he switched to the Philadelphia Inquirer as foreign affairs editor in 1937 .

Flick-Steger's parents revoked their American citizenship in 1937 and returned to Germany. According to his own statements, Flick-Steger himself gave back his American passport at the time. In 1938 he was naturalized in Germany. Freyeisen thinks it is conceivable that the authorities in Berlin realized that a German-American could be very useful to them in the foreseeable future. According to the head of the intelligence department at the RSHA, Walter Schellenberg , the naturalization of Flick-Steger took place at the instigation of Joseph Goebbels .

Flick-Steger's musical career was of mixed success in these years: his comic opera Leon and Edrita was premiered on January 5, 1936 in the Stadttheater Krefeld and allegedly broadcast by American radio stations, including NBC. The staging of his opera Dorian Gray at the Deutsches Opernhaus in Charlottenburg, planned for the summer of 1934 , did not materialize then or later: Although Alfred Rosenberg had spoken out in favor of the performance of the work to the director Wilhelm Rode in August 1934 , the project ultimately failed, because the Reich dramaturge Schlösser, as the representative of the Propaganda Ministry, informed the artistic directors in March 1935 that a performance of the opera at the German opera house did not appear to be desirable. There followed a legal battle over the performance of the opera. Flick-Steger's plans for a German-American opera studio dropped Flick-Steger under these circumstances. In 1938/1939 he worked as a conductor of the Orechester in Bad-Orb.

In 1938 Flick-Steger published the book So ist Amerika , which Astrid Freyeisen describes as a “primitive anti-Semitic inflammatory pamphlet”.

Activity during World War II

In 1939 Flick took a position at the German Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in Berlin, where he became head of the American editorial team in the wireless service . From May 15 to October 20, 1940, Flick-Steger worked as a front-line reporter. In this capacity, he reported on the German invasions in Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as the evacuation of the British Army Expeditionary Corps from Dunkirk after the German army's successful breakthrough through the French defense lines in the spring of 1940, as well as the German invasion of Paris. He also contributed to radio broadcasts and translated foreign radio reports.

On November 1, 1940, Flick-Steger signed a service contract with the Foreign Office (AA) as senior radio officer at the AA in Shanghai. From November 16, 1940, he was assigned to the German Consulate General in Shanghai by the broadcasting department of the Foreign Office.

Flick-Steger arrived in Shanghai on December 12, 1940. There the diplomat Erwin Wickert handed over the running of the German radio station in East Asia XGRS to him before Christmas 1940 , which he led in the following years as manager / program director.

During the years when Flick-Steger ran the station, XGRS was a political combat station that had the task of putting the German warfare in a favorable light for the East Asian radio audience and at the same time ridiculing the politics and military actions of the war opponent. His main focus was on broadcasts in German and English. After the beginning of the Pacific War, he concentrated primarily on the USA as a target for political propaganda, with anti-Semitic attacks in particular. The orientation and activities of the station were controlled in the guidelines from Berlin. Flick-Steger's immediate superior in Shanghai was the press attaché of the German embassy Fritz Cordt . On the other hand, he was not obliged to the radio attaché, but directly to the embassy in Beijing, which was stipulated in an express decree of the Foreign Office. Flick-Steger himself had officially been on the embassy staff since February 10, 1941, when his assignment was changed from the consulate to the embassy.

The historian Astrid Freyeisen has investigated an American secret service report on Flick-Steger from his East Asian time, in which it is said that while he was working in Shanghai he “gave the SS any matter of interest, namely police, economic and military information, from which [ …] By listening to radio and radio transmissions ”reported. In addition to the SS - especially the police attaché of the embassy Josef Meisinger - he had close contacts with the Abwehr's war organization (KO) in Shanghai. In an interrogation by the Americans after the end of the war, Meisinger even testified that Flick had worked for them.

In the Foreign Office, however, Flick-Steger was also judged extremely critically: In February 1941, Martin Luther from the Foreign Office noted that the Gestapo had “considerable files” about him and that they feared “that he is still English today Spy ".

post war period

After the Second World War, Flick was a representative of the Associate Press in Bonn from the late 1940s to the 1960s , where he was particularly closely related to the then Prime Minister Konrad Adenauer .

family

In 1923 Flick married Aline Sanden for the first time . On February 29, 1940, a second marriage followed with Elfriede Hüsken. The second marriage resulted in a daughter, Fanny (December 22, 1941).

Fonts

• America is like that. With illustrations based on mostly own photos by prominent German-American employees , Reutlingen, Leipzig 1939. (New edition 1942)

literature

Entries in reference works :

• Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Historical Service: Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service, 1871-1945 , Vol. 1 (letters A – F), 200, p. 571.

Other literature :

• Gerd Rohmann / Jeff Philipps: "Carl Flick-Steger: An Opera Version of Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray." Rüdiger Ahrens (Ed.): Anglistik, Mitteilungen des Deutschen Anglistenverbandes 10.2, 1999, 129-131.
• Astrid Freyeisen: Shanghai and the Politics of the Third Reich , 2000.
• Christian Taaks: Leadership for the nation without reservation ?: German media in China during the Nazi era , 2009.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Erwin Wickert: Mut und übermut: Stories from my life , 1991, p. 305.
2. ↑ Astrid Freyeisen: “The relationship between long-established and expelled Jewish Germans in Shanghai”, in: Georg Armbrüster (Ed.): Exil Shanghai , Vol. 1, 2000, p. 88.