Helene Rahms

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Helene Rahms (born September 25, 1918 in Cologne , † January 14, 1999 in Oberursel ) was a German journalist and author . She began her journalistic career in the Third Reich . From 1954 to 1978 she was editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung .

Life

Childhood and youth

Helene Rahms grew up as one of two children in a working-class family in Cologne . Her father Karl was a senior executive and social democrat, her mother Fanny an orphan raised in a boarding school. Helene Rahms was brought up in the Protestant faith.

The family had financial difficulties at times, as a result of which the grammar school could not be paid and Helene Rahms had to attend elementary school for a year longer than usual. In 1937 she finally graduated from high school in Cologne.

Helene Rahms actually wanted to be an athlete. After graduating from high school, however, she followed her second passion and began studying art history , German and newspaper studies in Halle .

Adulthood

At the age of 26, Helene Rahms married an officer named Hans, from whom she soon became pregnant. Her sister died of blood poisoning that same year. Shortly before the birth of her daughter, Helene Rahms gave up her job as a journalist. While she and the child were living with their mother-in-law in northern Germany, her husband Hans had been moved from Dresden to Milowice near Prague, where he was taken prisoner by the Soviets.

In the first post-war years, Helene Rahms moved into an emergency community with her parents at the age of 28. Her husband returned from captivity after five years and started working for Aral. During her time at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , Helene Rahms had two sons.

Journalistic work

Journalistic beginnings during the Third Reich

Saale newspaper

Helene Rahms began her journalistic career parallel to her studies with an internship at the bourgeois Saale-Zeitung , also in Halle. There she mainly edited provincial news, but also wrote her first newspaper articles.

Three months after starting her traineeship at the Saale-Zeitung , Helene Rahms passed the examination required by the editors' law in the Reich Press Chamber in Berlin . Of the 14 participants who took the exam, only two finished positively. Helene Rahms, the only female candidate, was one of them. Above all, knowledge of Adolf Hitler's book Mein Kampf was necessary for this.

Central German national newspaper

With the beginning of the Second World War , the Saale-Zeitung editorial team was dissolved due to a lack of editors. Helene Rahms and her remaining colleagues were drafted into military service for the Mitteldeutsche Nationalzeitung in what was then the province of Halle-Merseburg . “Military service, that meant being transferred here and there where there was need.” In November 1941 she was finally transferred to a one-man editorial office in Querfurt for local news. During this time she began to write her first individual articles, which were published in the weekly newspaper Das Reich . She was later brought back to the main editorial office of the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung .

Back in the main editorial office, she was introduced to the life of a journalist, dealt a lot with art criticism and was allowed to take part in her first business trips for articles about art exhibitions. Among other things, she met the journalist of the Frankfurter Zeitung Carl Linfert , "who was considered an authority among art critics."

An article written by Helene Rahms about the world premiere of Alboin and Rosamunde in Leipzig caused a strict reprimand from the Reich Ministry of Propaganda for the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung and resulted in a writing ban for Helene Rahms herself. In her autobiography she further describes that a short time later she received an offer to work with the Reich Security Service of the SS : She was supposed to have “a double report, the official version for the newspaper, a second, critical one, in which you [Helene Rahms] did not Mince words ”, wrote for the Reich Security Service itself in order to improve the quality of the cultural offerings in Germany, which she refused.

The Empire

Based on the offer from the Reich Security Service, Helene Rahms wrote a feature section on urban cultural life that was published in the weekly newspaper Das Reich . Thereupon the newspaper became aware of Helene Rahms and wanted to poach her. Despite her military service, she was brought to the weekly newspaper founded by Joseph Goebbels in Berlin. There she worked under the editors Elisabeth Noelle and Margret Boveri and met her friend Christa Rotzoll. At the beginning she mainly dealt with "harmless" topics such as observing nature and everyday occurrences in order not to fall victim to the prevailing press censorship again.

In 1943, after the Frankfurter Zeitung was closed, the journalist Carl Linfert, whom Rahms admired, also joined the editorial team of the weekly newspaper.

In 1944, when the war was drawing to a close, the editorial team was reduced due to the war. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, who had now married, also left the newspaper.

post war period

Hannoversche Zeitung

Through Christa Rotzoll, who was now in a relationship with the former art critic Carl Linfert, Rahms got back in touch with Werner Oehlmann , the features editor at the Hannoversche Zeitung and former music critic at Das Reich . He got her a job with the newspaper, which went bankrupt a short time later.

The world

In 1947 Helene Rahms got a job as an editor at the newspaper Die Welt in Hamburg, founded by the British . The chief editor at that time was Rudolf Küstermeier , who was soon replaced by Bernhard Menne . Because he and Rahms had different views on the tasks of the women's sides, she was fired in 1949. In his opinion, she had expressed herself in her articles too academically for a woman's side.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

While many of her colleagues switched to the newspaper Die Zeit , Rahms came to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 1954 through Karl Korn , which inherited the renowned Frankfurter Zeitung . There she worked for the features section . After that she was responsible for the women's side, which she says she never wanted to be. Rahms later saw to it that this was abolished, as Rahms saw it as the opposite of emancipation. Helene Rahms also became the FAZ's first architecture critic and was very much appreciated for her work. In total, Helene Rahms worked for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung for 25 years as an editor until 1978 . She ended her permanent position for reasons of age. Up until old age, however, she mainly wrote archaeological reports for the newspaper.

Publications

In addition to numerous newspaper articles, Helene Rahms also published three autobiographies :

  • Helene Rahms: On thin ice: My childhood in the twenties. Bern / Munich / Vienna 1992, ISBN 3-502-18606-5 .
  • Helene Rahms: Between the lines: My life as a journalist in the Third Reich. Bern / Munich / Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-502-18607-3 .
  • Helene Rahms: The Clique: Journalist Life in the Post-War Period. Bern / Munich / Vienna 1999, ISBN 3-502-18608-1 .

Awards

In 1979, Helene Rahms was one of the first to receive the Silver Hemisphere for her work as an architecture critic . This has been awarded by the German National Committee for Monument Protection since 1979 to people or groups of people who, through their initiative, have made an important contribution to the preservation and rescue of buildings, ensembles, old town centers, villages and archaeological monuments.

Web links

Commons : Helene Rahms  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rahms, Helene: On thin ice. My childhood in the twenties. Bern / Munich / Vienna: Scherz Verlag 1992, p. 25.
  2. ↑ Rahms, Helene: On thin ice. My childhood in the twenties. Bern / Munich / Vienna: Scherz Verlag 1992, pp. 45–50.
  3. ↑ Rahms, Helene: On thin ice. My childhood in the twenties. Bern / Munich / Vienna: Scherz Verlag 1992, pp. 35, 177.
  4. ↑ Rahms, Helene: On thin ice. My childhood in the twenties. Bern / Munich / Vienna: Scherz Verlag 1992, p. 159.
  5. ↑ Rahms, Helene: Between the lines. My life as a journalist in the Third Reich. Bern / Munich / Vienna: Scherz Verlag 1997.
  6. ^ Wiegand, Wilfried (1999): Loving accuracy. Passionate and incorruptible: on the death of Helene Rahms. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , No. 13, p. 41.
  7. ↑ Rahms, Helene: Between the lines. My life as a journalist in the Third Reich. Bern / Munich / Vienna: Scherz Verlag 1997, pp. 195–208.
  8. ↑ Rahms, Helene: Between the lines. My life as a journalist in the Third Reich. Bern / Munich / Vienna: Scherz Verlag 1997, pp. 213-231.
  9. ↑ Rahms, Helene: The Clique. Journalist life in the post-war period. Bern / Munich / Vienna: Scherz Verlag 1992, pp. 72–94.
  10. ↑ Rahms, Helene: The Clique. Journalist life in the post-war period. Bern / Munich / Vienna: Scherz Verlag 1992, pp. 103–152.
  11. ↑ Wiegand, Wilfried: The city does not live on stone alone. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. No. 223 1998, p. 41.
  12. ↑ Rahms, Helene: Between the lines. My life as a journalist in the Third Reich. Bern / Munich / Vienna: Scherz Verlag 1997, p. 9ff.
  13. ↑ Rahms, Helene: Between the lines. My life as a journalist in the Third Reich. Bern / Munich / Vienna: Scherz Verlag 1997, pp. 17-23.
  14. ↑ Rahms, Helene: Between the lines. My life as a journalist in the Third Reich. Bern / Munich / Vienna: Scherz Verlag 1997, p. 59.
  15. ↑ Rahms, Helene: Between the lines. My life as a journalist in the Third Reich. Bern / Munich / Vienna: Scherz Verlag 1997, pp. 57–77.
  16. ↑ Rahms, Helene: Between the lines. My life as a journalist in the Third Reich. Bern / Munich / Vienna: Scherz Verlag 1997, p. 87.
  17. ↑ Rahms, Helene: Between the lines. My life as a journalist in the Third Reich. Bern / Munich / Vienna: Scherz Verlag 1997, p. 100.
  18. ↑ Rahms, Helene: Between the lines. My life as a journalist in the Third Reich. Bern / Munich / Vienna: Scherz Verlag 1997, p. 100.
  19. ↑ Cf. Rotzoll, Christa: Women and Times. Portraits. Munich: Dt. Taschenbuch-Verlag 1991, ISBN 3-423-11352-9 (Helene Rahms is not mentioned here, however.)
  20. ↑ Rahms, Helene: Between the lines. My life as a journalist in the Third Reich. Bern / Munich / Vienna: Scherz Verlag 1997, pp. 102–122.
  21. ↑ Rahms, Helene: Between the lines. My life as a journalist in the Third Reich. Bern / Munich / Vienna: Scherz Verlag 1997, p. 172f.
  22. ↑ Rahms, Helene: Between the lines. My life as a journalist in the Third Reich. Bern / Munich / Vienna: Scherz Verlag 1997, p. 172f.
  23. ↑ Rahms, Helene: The Clique. Journalist life in the post-war period. Scherz Verlag, Bern / Munich / Vienna 1992, pp. 48–54.
  24. ↑ Rahms, Helene: The Clique. Journalist life in the post-war period. Bern / Munich / Vienna: Scherz Verlag 1992, pp. 72–94.
  25. ^ Wiegand, Wilfried: Lovingly accurate. Passionate and incorruptible: on the death of Helene Rahms. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. No. 13 1999, p. 41.
  26. ↑ Wiegand, Wilfried: The city does not live on stone alone. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. No. 223 1998, p. 41.
personal data
SURNAME Rahms, Helene
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist and author
DATE OF BIRTH September 25, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Cologne
DATE OF DEATH January 14, 1999
Place of death Oberursel