Hermann Katzenberger

Hermann Johann Georg Katzenberger (born April 20, 1891 in Mannheim , † November 23, 1958 in Heidelberg ) was a German civil servant and diplomat.

Live and act

After attending grammar school , Katzenberger studied in Heidelberg, Berlin and Greifswald . From 1914 he took part in the First World War. As he was seriously wounded in the first year of the war , he was discharged from the army in 1915 due to the loss of his left arm. He then embarked on an academic career. First he completed his studies with a double doctorate in philosophy in 1916 and a doctorate in law in 1918. At the same time, from 1916 he was assistant at the Technical University in Berlin and scientific assistant at the statistical office in Mannheim, before becoming director of the Academic Aid Federation was appointed.

After the collapse of the German Empire and the establishment of the Weimar Republic , Katzenberger, who in his 1917 dissertation had pleaded for the Center to merge with the Social Democrats for the post-war period, began to be active in the Catholic Center Party : in 1920 he gave up his finally embarked on a scientific career to devote himself entirely to politics. In 1920 he worked in the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture and from 1920 to 1922 held the office of Reich Secretary General of the Center Party. He was then appointed head of the Germania publishing house , the center's party newspaper in Berlin. He headed it for almost five years until Germania came into the possession of Franz von Papen in 1927 , who dismissed Katzenberger because he, as a representative of the left wing of the party, was unsuitable for the right-wing course that von Papen intended to take the newspaper. From April 1922 to 1927 he was also a member of the Germania publishing board.

In 1927 Hermann Katzenberger was appointed senior councilor in the Prussian State Ministry . From August 1927 he represented the Reich government in the Reich press conferences in this capacity. In 1928 he moved to the United Press Department of the Reich Government and the Foreign Office , whose deputy head he was. In 1929 he was appointed head of the domestic department. In June 1932, Katzenberger was replaced by Walther Heide as head of the domestic department of the press department . His departure, like the departure of Reich Press Chief Walter Zechlin , followed the dismissal of Reich Chancellor Heinrich Brüning . He was given temporary retirement in October of the same year. He was adopted in 1933, but then again temporarily employed in the press department of the Foreign Office from 1934 to 1938, most recently as head of the Far East and Switzerland department.

From 1938 Katzenberger worked as a commercial clerk in Frankfurt and as a sales representative for the publishing house Deutschlanddienst GmbH in Berlin. From 1939 to 1941 he was head of the newspaper correspondence service from Germany published by this publisher .

After the Second World War , Katzenberger took part in the political reconstruction in West Germany. In mid-1945 he was initially responsible for the establishment of Union-Verlag GmbH in the four-sector city of Berlin and for the publication of the SMA- licensed newspaper Neue Zeit , which was later subtitled as the daily newspaper of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany . He developed the first concept for the daily newspaper on June 21, 1945 and suggested the newspaper name Neue Zeit , which was retained in a further concept from July 4, 1945 under the direction of the designated editor-in-chief Emil Dovifat . Together with Otto Nuschke , Katzenberger was given the management of Union Verlag. As the first publishing director of the Berlin CDU newspaper, he tried to preserve the freedom of the press vis-à-vis the SMA press officers. Hermann Katzenberger belonged - together with Jakob Kaiser , Ernst Lemmer , Otto Heinrich von der Gablentz , Alfred Gerigk , Johann Baptist Gradl , Hugo Hickmann (CDU regional association of Saxony), Kurt Landsberg (regional association of Berlin), Hans Peters (legal scholar) and Robert Tillmanns - to the Berlin delegation of the CDU from the former Reich capital and the Soviet occupation zone , which traveled to Koenigstein / Taunus in February 1947 to take part in the constituent meeting of the working group of the CDU / CSU, which was decided in Bad Godesberg at the end of 1945. In the same year from 1947 to 1949 Katzenberger was ministerial director and head of the state press office (state press chief) of the North Rhine-Westphalian Prime Minister Karl Arnold through the mediation of his Germania colleague Carl Spiecker . In 1950 he became executive director of the Federal Council . From 1951 to 1956 Katzenberger was consul general and from June 1951 envoy in Dublin .

Fonts

• Social democracy and the imperial financial reform from 1906–1913 up to the war. Leipzig 1917 (dissertation).
• The Academic Aid Association. 1920.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Johann Baptist Gradl: Beginning under the Soviet star. The CDU in the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany (= publication by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung Archive for Christian Democratic Politics ). Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, Cologne 1981, ISBN 3-8046-8584-6 , p. 26.
2. ^ Peter Strunk: Press Control and Propaganda Policy of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD) . Inaugural dissertation to obtain the title of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History of the Free University of Berlin, Berlin, 1989, p. 139.
3. ↑ See the article “Invisible helmsman” in DER SPIEGEL 12/1950 digitized version
4. ^ Johann Baptist Gradl: Beginning under the Soviet star. The CDU in the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany (= publication by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung Archive for Christian Democratic Politics ). Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, Cologne 1981, ISBN 3-8046-8584-6 , p. 84.

literature

• Bärbel Holtz (edit / ed.): The minutes of the Prussian State Ministry 1925–1938 / 38. Vol. 12 / II. (1925-1938) . Olms-Weidmann, Hildesheim 2004. ISBN 3-487-12704-0 ( Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences [Hg.]: Acta Borussica . New series .)