Fritjof Meyer

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Fritjof Meyer (* 1932 ) is a German political scientist and journalist .

Life

Meyer worked for five years as a factory worker in West Berlin (machine factory Fritz Werner, Klöckner Eisenhandel, castle brewery) after graduating from high school at the cathedral and monastery high school in Magdeburg , then from 1955 to 1962 as a clerk in the compensation office in Berlin (reparation authority). Until 1966 he was a training manager in the Berlin regional association of Socialist Youth in Germany - Die Falken (participants including Rudi Dutschke, Bernd Rabehl, Eike Hemmer, Joachim Bischoff) and in 1959 took 600 young people from West and East Berlin to Auschwitz on the first memorial tour. At the same time he studied a. a. at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut of the Free University, seminar Prof. Walter Bussmann: Meyer holds the diploma of the German University of Politics , diploma political scientist ( Otto-Suhr-Institut of the Free University Berlin ), diploma- cameralist ( Verwaltungsakademie Berlin ) and Graduated from the legal department of the Eastern European Institute at the Free University of Berlin .

Meyer worked from 1966 to 2002 as the chief editor for Eastern and foreign policy at the news magazine Der Spiegel . He traveled to the Soviet Union over 100 times and visited China at the height of the Cultural Revolution in 1967. He published 108 cover stories and over 1200 articles, he interviewed most of the important Eastern Bloc leaders and top Chinese people and established close contact with Mikhail Gorbachev, who in a commemorative publication congratulated Meyer's 70th birthday "warmly and amicably".

Controversy over Auschwitz casualty numbers

His essay The Victims of Auschwitz , published in the journal Eastern Europe in 2002, caused a sensation . New findings through new archive finds , in which, after research on behalf of Spiegel publisher Rudolf Augstein, he gives the number of victims in the Auschwitz concentration camps as 510,000, of which 356,000 were murdered in the gas. These numbers were far lower than widely believed. Spiegel editor-in-chief Stefan Aust had declined to publish this article and recommended a trade journal.

On the basis of his article, several criminal charges were filed, including by the right-wing extremist journalist Horst Mahler , for sedition against Fritjof Meyer, against the publisher of the journal Eastern Europe, Rita Süssmuth , and two senior staff members of the journal. Mahler saw in the investigation the proof that not only the previously assumed number of murdered Jews, but also the fact of the systematic murder of Jews by the National Socialists had been invented, and wanted to clarify the criminal law relevance of this statement. The investigations of five public prosecutor's offices were discontinued due to “lack of suspicion ”, led by the Stuttgart public prosecutor's office on the grounds that “the accused in his article clearly distinguishes himself from any efforts to deny or trivialize the Holocaust and its horrors, by expressly pointing out at the end of his remarks that the result of his investigations does not relativize barbarism, but verifies it.

Honors

  • Priobresti wes mir - Festschrift for the anniversary of the German publicist Fritjof Meyer (Russian), ed. by Jörg R. Mettke, Moscow. Izvestia-Verlag 2002, authors: MS Gorbachev, AN Jakowlew, GA Arbatow, WI Daschitschew, OT Bogomolow, WW Sagladin, WN Markow, IN Kuzmin, W. Seiffert, AS Tschernjajew, WM Falin, LA Besymenski, AL Besymenskaja, Ju. V. Voropaeva
  • Mavriks Vulfsons Prize of the Latvian Writers' Association for Meyer's “meritorious contribution to regaining Latvian independence” 2006. Meyer had caused a facsimile of the secret supplementary agreement to the Hitler-Stalin Pact to be published for the first time in the USSR (1988 in Riga) .
  • Golden badge of honor of the Social Democratic Party of Germany 2015 for fifty years of membership

Publications

Books
  • China. The rise and fall of the gang of four. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1981, ISBN 3-499-33009-1 .
  • World power in decline. The decline of the Soviet Union. Bertelsmann, Munich 1984, ISBN 3-570-04408-4 .
  • USSR, face of a world power. From the self-destructive urge for superiority. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1986, ISBN 3-499-18305-6 .
  • After the storm, the bent bamboo rises. China in transition. Bertelsmann, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-570-01041-4 ; Goldmann, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-442-11464-0 .
  • SPIEGEL special "The Catastrophe of Communism - From Marx to Gorbachev", Hamburg 1991.
  • Anatomia morderstwa ks [iędza] Jerzego Popiełuszko. Hutnicy 82, Warszawa 1995 (German orig .: Murder as a lesser evil )
  • The mosquito in the bear's fur, Olzog / Lau, Reinbek 2020, ISBN 978-3-95768-213-0
Article (selection)
  • The Soviet reunification offer of January 1955 and its rejection by the federal government , in: Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, 1/1966, p. 31 ff.
  • System-immanent limits of a reform policy in the Soviet Union , in: Richard Löwenthal, Boris Meissner (Ed.): Sowjetische Innenpolitik , Stuttgart 1968, pp. 87 ff.
  • Socialist opposition to state capitalism in the USSR , in: Rudi Dutschke, Manfred Wilke (ed.): Solschenizyn und die westliche Linke , Reinbek 1975, p. 155 ff.
  • Whose dictatorship in China? , in: Fritjof Meyer (Ed.): Der Papiertiger , Hamburg 1975 p. 9 ff.
  • What if Russia's proletariat goes on strike? , in: Der Spiegel, 36/1980, pp. 142–144
  • Mikhail Gorbachev's noble dream (1985), and: Albania, dream kingdom for the Greens and model state of Stalinism, and: Vacation in Siberia, in: Rudolf Augstein (ed.): Die Welt im Wandel - Reportages 1980 - 1995, Hamburg 1996:
  • The "devil guy" and the "brilliant guy" - Hitler and Stalin: Tangents between German and Russian National Socialism , in: Eastern Europe 12/2000, p. 1385 ff.
  • The number of victims of Auschwitz , in: Osteuropa, 5/2002, p. 631 ff.
  • Marx, very modern, in: Der Spiegel 12/1998; russ .: A prophet named Karl Marx , in: Jörg R. Mettke (Hrsg.): The whole world to win (russ.), Moscow 2002, p. 287ff.
  • We didn't know about this , in: Secession 17/2004, p. 22 ff.
  • The angel of Budapest - The fate of Raoul Wallenberg, in: Stefan Aust, Gerhard Spörl (ed.): The present of the past, Munich 2004
  • Did Stalin bluff? New files found on the Soviet note from 1952, in: Osteuropa 3/2008 p. 157 ff.
  • Dispute in Poland - why the Oder-Neisse border, why the expulsion? in: Deutschland-Archiv 4/2008 p. 609 ff.
  • The "Prager Frühling" in the "Spiegel", in: Stefan Karner, Natalja Tomilina, Alexander Tschubarjan (Eds.): Prager Frühling - The international crisis year 1968, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2008, pp. 1125–1146
  • The poison of power , in: Siegfried Prokop (Ed.): The missed paradigm shift , Schkeuditz 2008, p. 369 ff.
  • My case, Georg Solmssen, in: Die Zeit, September 9, 2010
  • News for the Kremlin , in: A. Watlin, M. Wilke (ed.): People between the peoples (Russian), Moscow 2010, p. 191 ff.
  • Spiegel interviews: With Gorbachev (3x), his advisors: Sagladin (6x), Arbatow (3x), Daschitschew (2x),,, Janajew, Jakowlew, Portugalow; with heads of government: Hua Guo-feng, Maurer, Sihanouk, Ceausescu, Brasauskas, Kravchuk, Kuchma, Sjuganow, Shevardnadze, Ilyarionov, Kassyanov, Sligorow, Willy Brandt, Kreisky; with ministers: Kutschera, Gwischiani, Gorbenko, Qian Qi, Bo Jibo, Bartoszewski, Abalkin (2x), Gromyko, Bakatin, Schatalin; with politicians: Melnikow (2x), Dedijer, Mandel, Sjuganow, Jastreschembski, Luschkow, Berezovsky (2x), Vulfsons; with dissidents: Kuznetsov, Voslensky (2x), Walesa, Pachman, Blumstajn, Levtschenko; with diplomats: Falin (2x), Reischauer, Puja, Siegfried Book; with writers: Ernst Fischer, Lukacz, Goldstücker, Nolte, Kopelew, Zhang Jie, Solschenizyn (2x), Reemtsma. :
Sound carrier:
  • Crime scene of horror. Auschwitz in a new perspective. 2 CDs. Homilius, Werder 2009, ISBN 978-3-89706-701-1 .

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ "In a difficult hour of my life we ​​talked for hours ... It was not an easy, but a wonderful conversation ... He understands me, he understands Russia." Jörg R. Mettke (ed.): Festschrift for the anniversary of the German publicist Fritjof Meyer , Moscow 2002, p. 14 ff. (Russian)
  2. ^ Andreas Förster: What happened in Auschwitz . In: Berliner Zeitung . February 28, 2003
  3. ↑ Juramagazin, sd
  4. ↑ AZ 4 Js 75185/02

SPIEGEL in-house communications published on the Internet

personal data
SURNAME Meyer, Fritjof
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist
DATE OF BIRTH 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Magdeburg