Horst Pehnert

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Horst Pehnert (right) 1984

Horst Pehnert (born November 3, 1932 in Neukirchen ; † April 1, 2013 in Bad Saarow ) was a journalist and party functionary in the GDR , most recently Deputy Minister for Culture .

Life

Horst Pehnert was born in the Saxon town of Neukirchen (today part of Borna ) as the son of a tailor. He attended elementary school and then a vocational school. After the end of the war , he trained as a book printer from 1947 to 1950 . In 1946 he joined the FDJ , in 1955 also the SED . In 1950 he attended a course for “young correspondents” and worked for the following four years as a journalist for the FDJ central organ Junge Welt (JW). From 1954 to 1957 Pehnert studied journalism at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig . The Faculty of Journalism was directly subordinate to the Central Committee of the SED and was colloquially called "Red Monastery" because of its loyalty to the line.

As a qualified journalist, Pehnert returned from his studies to Junge Welt , where he worked as an editor from 1956. After six years he was promoted to deputy editor-in-chief in 1962. In 1966 he was appointed editor- in- chief of JW as the successor to Dieter Kerschek . At the same time, Pehnert was a member of the office of the Central Council of the FDJ from 1965 to 1971 . In 1968 he received the Patriotic Order of Merit . In 1971 Pehnert left the Junge Welt , and was succeeded by Klaus Raddatz .

From 1971 Pehnert was deputy chairman of the State Committee for Television , a political control and steering instance of the SED for the GDR television . On December 1, 1976, he moved to the Ministry of Culture, where he was Deputy Minister for Culture and headed the main film administration . His predecessor there was Hans Starke . Pehnert, colloquially also known as film minister, was together with DEFA general director Hans Dieter Mäde the decisive authority below the Politburo when it came to the approval, modification or censorship of films in the GDR. From 1978 he was also a member of the Presidium of the Film and Television Council. Pehnert's main contact in the party apparatus was Jürgen Harder , film manager in the Culture Department of the Central Committee of the SED . In Pehnerts tenure of the exodus of DEFA stars like fell Manfred Krug , of the Biermann followed -Ausbürgerung 1976, the prohibition of the film Jadup and Boel of Rainer Simon in 1981, the resolution of the documentary film studios Heynowski & Scheumann and preventing the performance of critical Soviet Films from the Glasnost period in 1988. The successes included DEFA films such as Solo Sunny (1980), Die Verlobte von Günther Rücker (1980) and Die Abunruhigung von Lothar Warneke (1981)

After the fall of the Wall , Pehnert retired in 1990. As a PDS member, he was temporarily a local councilor in his place of residence Zeuthen and also a member of the district council for the Dahme-Spreewald district . He also worked as an editor and author. The reviewer of the Berliner Zeitung described his memoirs, published in 2009, as a “disappointing text” and the book was primarily “a justification for his own thirteen ministerial years”. In 2013, Pehnert died of cancer .

Publications

  • Julius Mader , Gerhard Stuchlik, Horst Pehnert: Dr. Worry radio from Tokyo . Military publishing house of the GDR, Berlin 1966. ("Documentary report on the communist Richard Sorge ", numerous new editions and translations)
  • Horst Pehnert (Ed.): Grief is the continuation of love: Farewells and memories . Das Neue Berlin, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-360-00945-2 .
  • Horst Pehnert: Cinema, Artists and Conflicts: Film Production and Film Policy in the GDR . Das Neue Berlin, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-360-01959-2 .

literature

  • Ingrid Poss, Peter Warnecke: Trace of the Films: Contemporary Witnesses about DEFA . Ch. Links, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-86153-401-0 .
  • Norbert Wehrstedt: Who was Horst Pehnert? In: the daily newspaper of February 17, 1990, pp. 40–41. (Published under the pseudonym "Manfred Martin")
  • Michael Meyen and Anke Fiedler (eds.): The limit in your head. Journalists in the GDR Publisher: Panama Verlag, 2010, ISBN 978-3-938714-16-4 .

Cinematic contributions

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d e Bernd-Rainer BarthPehnert, Horst . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 2. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
  2. Brigitte Klump : The red monastery . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1978, ISBN 3-455-03030-0 .
  3. ^ Ingrid Poss, Peter Warnecke: Trace of Films . Ch. Links, Berlin 2006, pp. 346-348.
  4. a b Ralf Schenk: Truth and party reasoning . In: Berliner Zeitung , March 3, 2009.
  5. ^ A b Norbert Wehrstedt: The last GDR film minister: Horst Pehnert is dead . In: Leipziger Volkszeitung from April 3, 2013.