Heinrich Droste (publisher)

Heinrich Droste (born July 3, 1880 in Sölde , Westphalia , † September 24, 1958 in Nellingen - Aichen ) was a German business journalist and publisher . He was the founder of Droste Verlag .

Life

Droste was born in 1880 as the son of a teacher and his wife into a liberal family. He was a brother of the pacifist Hulda Pankok , who also worked as a journalist and publisher and was married to the artist Otto Pankok .

Droste completed a commercial apprenticeship at the Essen Credit Institute in Bochum from 1898 to 1901 . He then worked for two years as a trainee in the trade department of the Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung in Essen . From 1905 to 1910 he was head of the trading section at General Anzeiger in Düsseldorf , after which he founded his own agency , the Rheinisch-Westfälische Korrespondenz . From 1914 to 1917 he served as a soldier in the First World War .

In 1917 he took over the editor-in-chief and management of the Deutsche Bergwerks-Zeitung in Essen. A year later he bought the shares in the Düsseldorfer Zeitung . On May 15, 1920 the first edition of the newspaper Der Mittag came out. In 1921 he founded the Industrie-Verlag und Druckerei AG . In 1926 the publishing house moved to the press house in Düsseldorf . The first edition of the Düsseldorfer Stadt-Anzeiger appeared on May 6 of the same year .

From 1928 to 1932 he reorganized the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (DAZ) in Berlin as a delegate of the supervisory board . In May 1933 he sold the Düsseldorfer Stadtanzeiger to the Volksparole . In March 1934 he joined the NSDAP - previously a member of the German People's Party (DVP) . On April 24, 1935, his publishing house was renamed Droste Verlag und Druckerei KG. In 1941 he founded the Netherlands magazine . Despite his membership in the NSDAP, Der Mittag and the Deutsche Bergwerks-Zeitung were banned in 1944.

On July 9, 1945, the Allies confiscated the press building. But on September 26, 1945, the British military government gave Droste a printing permit and in February 1946 handed the press house back to the publisher.

On December 23, 1947, he was " denazified " and classified in Category IV , whereas on April 16, 1948 he filed an objection without success. It was not until July 6, 1948 that he was reassigned to Category V (exonerated) . The decisive factor was that he did not deny his liberal attitudes during the Nazi era and that he had often helped the ostracized and persecuted.

On October 1, 1948, his publishing house and on September 27, 1949, the three magazines German Exporter , Welthandel and Ohr der Welt received the necessary licenses. The noon appeared again after the license requirement was discontinued in October 1949. From February 1953, the late edition appeared daily .

In 1949 he founded the book club Deutscher Bücherbund , which was later sold to the Georg von Holtzbrinck publishing group . In 1956 the Heinrich Droste Literature Prize was announced.

He was married and had one child.

Honors

Droste was honored with the Great Federal Cross of Merit for his services .

literature

• Vera Derschum et al .: The German-language press. A biographical-bibliographical handbook . KG Saur Verlag, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-598-11710-8 , pp. 220-221.
• Gudrun H. Liersch: Heinrich Droste (1880-1958) . In: Heinz-Dietrich Fischer (Ed.): German press publishers from the 18th to the 20th century (= journalism-historical articles . Volume 4). Verlag Documentation, Pullach near Munich 1975, pp. 329–336.
• Heinrich Droste , in Internationales Biographisches Archiv 49/1958 of November 24, 1958, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)

Web links

• Literature by and about Heinrich Droste in the catalog of the German National Library
• Search for "Heinrich Droste" in the SPK digital portal of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation