Gerhard Loewenthal

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Gerhard Löwenthal (born December 8, 1922 in Berlin , † December 6, 2002 in Wiesbaden ) was a German journalist . From 1969 to 1987 he directed and moderated the ZDF magazine .

Life

Youth and education

Löwenthal was born on December 8, 1922 as the son of the Jewish merchant Julius Löwenthal in Berlin. During the Nazi era , he and his father were temporarily imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . His grandparents were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto and murdered in the Shoah . Due to his mother's luck and family connections, he survived the Nazi regime under dramatic circumstances as one of only a few hundred Berlin Jews as an employee of an optics company that was important to the war effort . He saw the invasion of the Red Army as liberation and rescue. When a Red Army soldier tried to shoot him as a supposed member of the SS , he was able to make his Jewish ancestry credible by singing the Kaddish .

Journalist in Berlin

In 1946 Löwenthal began studying medicine at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin and at the same time worked for the radio station in the American sector ( RIAS ), where he received his own advisory and reportage program. He saw the takeover of power by communist functionaries in the eastern sector of the city as a second conformity . So restricted z. B. the SED youth organization FDJ its scientific work increasingly. In 1948 he reported critically about the Communist influence on the University of Unter den Linden , whereupon the " SED administrative director" Anna von Pritzbuer cut his microphone cable during the report. After being verbally and physically threatened because of his reporter work, he broke off his studies in the eastern part of Berlin. In West Berlin he became one of the student co-founders of the Free University of Berlin . From 1951 he was deputy program director of the RIAS and the SFB . He worked for the OWZE in Paris for five years . In 1963 he came to ZDF , initially as editor-in-chief in Brussels .

Regarding his work at RIAS, Löwenthal wrote in his memoirs that he had "carried out propaganda , the aim of which was at least in phases to destabilize the GDR".

Journalist in Mainz and head of the ZDF magazine

In 1968 the television council unanimously transferred the management of the ZDF magazine to him , which he moderated from January 8, 1969 to December 23, 1987. Here, as before at the RIAS, he represented decidedly anti-communist positions. In the course of the emerging extra-parliamentary opposition (APO) and Willy Brandt's new Ostpolitik , he internally distanced himself from the SPD . Together with ZDF director Karl Holzamer , he was one of the founders of the Federation of Scientific Freedom in 1970 . He mainly dealt with human rights violations in the GDR . Many TV reports dealt with the harsh persecution measures taken by the SED regime against applicants for leaving the country, political opponents and dissidents, as well as with the harsh prison conditions for political prisoners in the GDR. The reports on domestic political issues in the Federal Republic mostly turned against the ruling SPD- FDP coalition. He targeted left and left liberals and their Ostpolitik, which he described as "change through ingratiation". He saw APO students as “Marxist muddles who are preparing the ground for a new totalitarianism (and terrorism)”. His lectures at universities were accompanied by disruptive maneuvers and physical attacks.

In a magazine article, Löwenthal alleged that the head of Stern , Henri Nannen , was employed as a Nazi war criminal and suggested that Nannen himself was involved in these crimes. Only after a court case and intensive research by Stern, which showed that neither Nannen nor his employee, the former SS-Obersturmführer Hans Weidemann , had been directly involved in Nazi crimes, the ZDF partially withdrew his reports.

Perception and criticism

In the Federal Republic of Germany he was criticized by his political opponents as an opponent of the policy of détente. In the GDR , the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) took action against him. His Stasi files filled 25 files, 16 of which have been preserved. The use of forged documents about an alleged cooperation between Löwenthal and the Gestapo and letter bombs was considered. They sat spy one in the West against him. The aim of the measures was the one to discredit Lowenthal with disinformation, on the other hand, that he initiated auxiliary network calls for help from the other side for departure request manufacturers and political prisoners spy in East Germany and to hinder.

He was often denounced by the left as the epitome of a conservatively dominated public service broadcaster. For example, the rock cabaret group Floh de Cologne dedicated the song Der Löwenthaler to him in 1972 in the form of a parody . His ZDF magazine was seen in part as the western counterpart to the propaganda broadcast on GDR television , the Black Channel, by and with Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler :

“The dogged television agitators Löwenthal (“ ZDF-Magazin ”) and Schnitzler (“ The Black Channel ”) have for decades carried the German small and small version of the Cold War into the living room of viewers in East and West. An amusing look back at the stone age of propaganda television. "

The Berlin correspondent and later director of Deutschlandfunk , Ernst Elitz , said in retrospect about such comparisons :

“But the western tendency to equate Gerhard Löwenthal and his SED-critical“ ZDF-Magazin ”with Schnitzler's propaganda show was completely off the mark. Both were zealous, but Löwenthal uncovered the fate of politically persecuted people and, broadcast after broadcast, scourged the fatal shots. Schnitzler, on the other hand, reviled the victims of the Wall with the cynical saying: 'If you should stay away from the state border' - then 'you save yourself blood and screaming'. Löwenthal was a humanist, Schnitzler the dictatorship puppet . To offset the two against each other was an act of moral blindness. "

Western secret services suspected that Löwenthal was extremely threatened by RAF terrorists and, after the Schleyer kidnapping , arranged for personal protection until the end of his broadcast in 1987.

As the historian Andreas Kahrs from Humboldt University was able to show in spring 2019, Löwenthal agreed in 1984 with the content of two positive reports on the subject of South Africa with the apartheid regime of South Africa , about which there is a whole secret file in the material examined by Kahrs.

The cartoonist Klaus Staeck dedicated the graphic Attention! To Löwenthal in 1971 . - Observe the operating instructions. Turn off when this image appears , which appeared as a poster and postcard.

politics

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Löwenthal was also politically active. In the 1970s he got involved with the Bund Free Germany , a Berlin regional party that opposed social liberal Ostpolitik and communist attempts at infiltration. From 1977 to 1994 he was chairman of the conservative Germany Foundation . He resigned his chairmanship, among other things, because of their connections to the Bund Freie Bürger , which was said to be close to the FPÖ . In the 1980s he was the curator of the Conservative Action , which had emerged from the Citizens' Action Democrats for Strauss and carried out campaigns against the so-called "useful idiots of Moscow"; In 1982, for example, she organized a pro-American event on the occasion of the visit of US President Ronald Reagan . In February 1979 he made an unsuccessful attempt with Lothar Bossle , Heinrich Hellwege , Franz Meyers and Paul Wilhelm Wenger to found a conservative collection movement entitled “ Liberal-Conservative Action ”.

During the fall of the Berlin Wall, Löwenthal participated in the development of the German Social Union (DSU) in Leipzig . Among other things, he wrote large parts of the program for the upcoming election campaign for the first all-German Bundestag. At the same time, he advised the DSU board on contract negotiations with the CDU in advance of the establishment of the later victorious alliance for Germany . At that time he took the position that a conservative regional party based on the model of the CSU had to emerge in the middle and east of Germany . After the overwhelming victory of the alliance, Helmut Kohl caused the CSU to break off its commitment to the DSU.

Löwenthal was also the curator of the Institute for Conservative Education and Research (IKBF). He was a member of the International Society for Human Rights , which primarily campaigned against human rights violations in communist countries. In 1993 he was honorary chairman of the “Courage for Ethics” congress. The congress was organized by the Association for the Promotion of Psychological Knowledge of Human Beings (VPM).

With Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing , Lothar Groppe , Christa Meves and Count Hans Huyn , he organized the “Conservative Office” in Bielefeld . Löwenthal, who sympathized with the CSU, saw himself as a "middle man". He lamented an increasing shift in society towards leftist positions.

Awards and commemorations

Lowenthal was in the 1950s with the European Literature Prize Cortina Ulisse , 1969 with the silver medal of the European Community , in 1975 the Konrad-Adenauer Prize of Germany Foundation of Journalism, in 1978 with the Golden Camera for the series calls for help from the other side in the ZDF magazine , Awarded the Federal Cross of Merit in 1979 and the Bavarian Order of Merit in 1983 .

The Gerhard Löwenthal Society was founded in Eisenach in 2004, although it has not appeared since then. Ingeborg Löwenthal, the newspaper Junge Freiheit and the Foundation for Conservative Education and Research (FKBF) have been awarding the Gerhard Löwenthal Prize for publications since 2004 to commemorate Löwenthal's political and journalistic legacy.

Peter Scholl-Latour , one of the 2008 award winners, praised Löwenthal as a "man who was really not encouraged under the Nazis to stand up for his fatherland, and then did it with verve and emphasis, as some others did, whose natural duty it would have been not to have done ”.

Private

Gerhard Löwenthal had been married to the doctor Ingeborg Löwenthal (1925-2019), née Lemmer, since 1950, the daughter of the CDU politician and Federal Minister for All-German Issues Ernst Lemmer . From 1967 until his death in 2002 he lived in Wiesbaden . The marriage had two children. Löwenthal was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Heerstrasse in the Berlin district of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf .

Fonts

  • I stayed. Memories. Herbig Verlag, Munich 1987, ISBN 978-3-7766-1486-2 .
  • Will we talk in speech bubbles tomorrow? On the way to a new media landscape. HwK Koblenz, Koblenz 1985, ISBN 3-924871-04-3 .
  • Calls for help from over there. A documentation against forgetting. Hänssler, Holzgerlingen 2002, ISBN 3-7751-3807-2 (with Helmut Kamphausen, Claus P. Clausen).
  • We will live by atoms. Blanvalet, Berlin 1956 (with Josef Hausen).
  • The Hungarian Revolution. A white paper. The story of the October uprising according to documents, reports, eyewitness reports and the echo of the world public. Colloquium Verlag, Berlin 1957 (with Melvin J. Lasky , Karl Jaspers ).

literature

  • Kathrin Gerlof : Gerhard Löwenthal - Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler (= Fischer. 14183 = opponent. ). Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-596-14183-4 .
  • Stefan Winckler : A critical journalist from Berlin: Gerhard Löwenthal. Snayder, Paderborn 1997, ISBN 3-932319-56-7 .
  • Stefan Winckler: Gerhard Löwenthal. A contribution to the political journalism of the Federal Republic of Germany (= biographical studies of the 20th century. 1). Be.bra Wissenschaft Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-937233-85-7 (also: Chemnitz, Universität, dissertation, 2010).
  • Christoph Classen: Same opponents? Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler and Gerhard Löwenthal as political publicists in the Cold War. In: Martin Sabrow (ed.): The century of parallel biographies (= Helmstedter Colloquien. 19). AVA - Akademische Verlagsanstalt, Leipzig 2017, ISBN 978-3-946281-03-0 , pp. 27-67.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Daniel Koerfer: “The guy has to go,” said Mielke: Gerhard Löwenthal's passionate fight against the transfiguration of the Ulbricht and Honecker regime. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , January 2, 2012, p. 8
  2. ↑ Klaus Arnold, Christoph Classen (Ed.): Between Pop and Propaganda. Radio in the GDR . Ch.links publishing house, Berlin 2004.
  3. ↑ Knut Hickethier : History of German television. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 1998, ISBN 3-476-01319-7 , p. 270.
  4. ↑ http://www.zeit.de/1971/44/loewenthal-hisste-die-weisse-fahne/komplettansicht von Kuehnheim, Haug (1971) Löwenthal hoisted the white flag. in: DIE ZEIT, October 29, 1971 No. 44
  5. ^ Affairs / Weidemann - so burdened ; in: Der Spiegel , issue of December 14, 1970, pp. 88-89.
  6. ↑ http://lyrics.wikia.com/wiki/Floh_De_Cologne:Der_L%C3%B6wenthaler Text at Wikia Germany GmbH , accessed on March 11, 2018
  7. ↑ [1] Book Description at Buecher.de to the book by Kathrin Gerlof : GegenSpieler, Gerhard Löwenthal - Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler
  8. ↑ When the Black Channel was full in Die Welt , October 30, 2014
  9. ↑ "Paid Vacation in the Land of Apartheid" section: A ZDF journalist as a "premium partner" Tagesschau , May 7, 2019
  10. ↑ "Paid trips to South Africa" Report Mainz , May 8, 2019
  11. ↑ Swiss Social Archives, image + sound database, entry on object F 5053-Ob-357
  12. ↑ Obituary notice Dr. Ingeborg Löwenthal , FAZ from October 12, 2019
  13. ↑ knerger.de: The grave of Gerhard Löwenthal
personal data
SURNAME Löwenthal, Gerhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist
DATE OF BIRTH December 8, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH December 6, 2002
Place of death Wiesbaden