Dirk Koch

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Dirk Koch (born March 10, 1943 in Amsterdam ) is a German journalist and book author who lives in the Rhineland and Ireland . From 1973 to 1997, Koch was the head of the capital city editorial office of the news magazine Der Spiegel in the federal capital Bonn, then until 2006 Spiegel chief at the EU headquarters in Brussels.

Life

Dirk Koch and Peter Koch - also a journalist - are brothers.

While at school, Koch worked for the regional programs of the WDR . He graduated from high school in 1962 at the Siebengebirgs-Gymnasium Bad Honnef . Parallel to studying history in Bonn, he wrote as a freelance journalist for the Neue Ruhr Zeitung and the Bonner General-Anzeiger , where he was trained as a volunteer and taken on as an editor in the POLITICS department. In 1966, Koch moved to the federal capital's editorial office of the German Press Agency (dpa), from there in 1968 to the parliamentary editorial office of the Stuttgarter Zeitung , responsible for page three reports and comments.

In 1970 the magazine Der Spiegel recruited him for his Bonn political editorial team, which Koch then took over as head in 1973.

Act

Koch was there when, in 1969, the chairman of the SPD parliamentary group, Helmut Schmidt , tried to find out in Moscow whether ways to détente between East and West could still open up, and Schmidt was doing preparatory work for German East and peace policy. Koch was on the special train to Erfurt in 1970 when Willy Brandt pays the first visit to the Chancellor of the GDR .

While struggling for the Eastern Treaty, Koch shuttled between Bonn, Warsaw and Moscow. The dispute over the treaties culminated in the - failed - vote of no confidence by the Bundestag against SPD Chancellor Brandt. A little later, the CDU Bundestag member Julius Steiner confessed to Koch that he had not voted for the CDU / CSU candidate for Chancellor Rainer Barzel .

FDP Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher had Koch at his side on the tour of the strategic nuclear weapons of the USA, to which Henry Kissinger had invited. In 1981, Koch uncovered the Flick donation affair and, at the same time, the secret agreements made by Bonn politicians to amnesty themselves. Federal Minister of Economics Otto Graf Lambsdorff , who had accepted bribes for the FDP, had to resign.

In 1991 he worked on Wolfgang Schäuble's book about the Unification Treaty .

Since the 1970s, Koch has been regularly on the Irish south-west coast.

Works

  • The ambulant slaughterhouse or How to teach politicians to fear again. The last secrets of the Federal Republic . Westend, Frankfurt am Main 2016, ISBN 978-3-86489-124-3 .
  • Murt the Irishman. Tales from the island of the moon . Eire Verlag, Salzkotten 2014, ISBN 978-3-943380-18-7 .
  • Editing u. Preface; Wolfgang Schäuble : The contract. How I negotiated about German unity . German Verl.-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1991, ISBN 978-3-421-06605-3 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Koch, Dirk
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist and publicist
DATE OF BIRTH March 10, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Amsterdam