Karl Anders

The title of this article is ambiguous. For Friedrich Ernst Berghoff , who published under the pseudonym Karl Anders , see there.

Karl Anders (actually Kurt Wilhelm Naumann , later Karl Kurt Wilhelm Anders-Naumann ) (born January 24, 1907 in Berlin , † February 27, 1997 in Dreieich ) was a German politician ( KPD / SPD ), journalist and publisher . Anders was the publishing director of the daily Frankfurter Rundschau from 1953 to 1957 .

Life

After elementary school in Berlin, Karl Anders learned the professions of upholstered furniture maker and garden technician. From 1929 to 1931 he attended a workers' high school graduate course at the Karl Marx School (Berlin-Neukölln) and passed the Abitur there.

In 1929 Anders became a member of the KPD and quickly took on leading positions. In 1929 Anders was Secretary General of the World Youth League and from 1929 to 1931 on the board of the Socialist Student Union . From 1931 he became party secretary of the literature and propaganda department in Berlin-Brandenburg within the KPD . After the handover of power to the National Socialists , Anders also supported the KPD in illegality and was an instructor of the Central Committee for Printing and Propaganda. Anders was held in the SA -Heim Wendenschloß in June 1933 during the Koepenick Blood Week and was severely mistreated.

In 1934 Anders emigrated to Czechoslovakia and was political director of the KPD's agit-prop work in Prague until 1936. From 1936 to 1937 Anders was a member of the federal board of Red Aid Germany . From 1937 he was a member of the Salda Committee and Secretary for Slovakia in Bratislava . At the beginning of 1939 Anders went to Poland as a representative of the Refugee Committee of the League of Nations and fled to Great Britain after the start of the Second World War . He was interned there from June to December 1940 as an "enemy alien" . From 1940 he took the pseudonym Karl Anders . After the war he had his official name changed to Karl Kurt Wilhelm Anders-Naumann . In London , Anders joined the group New Beginning and worked for the radio station Sender der European Revolution . From 1943 to 1945 he was editor-in-chief for workers' programs at the BBC . From 1943 Anders gave lectures to German prisoners of war interned in Great Britain .

After the end of the war, Anders returned to Germany as a reporter for the BBC . He reported on the Nuremberg Trials and wrote his first book Im Nürnberger Maze . Anders worked for British newspapers and the BBC until 1949, but began his own publishing activities in Germany as early as 1946. Together with three co-partners, he founded Nest-Verlag in Nuremberg in 1946 , which later moved to Frankfurt am Main . After the three co-shareholders left, Anders managed the publishing house alone until 1960. In 1955 the Frankfurter Rundschau bought 50 percent of the Nest publishing house, later Anders also sold the other 50 percent of the shares and withdrew from the Nest publishing house in 1961. In addition, Anders wrote a monograph on the crime literature Die Weltliteratur in the 20th Century for Herder-Verlag .

From 1953 to 1957 Anders was managing director and publishing director of the Frankfurter Rundschau, from 1949 to 1972 deputy chairman of the Association of Socialist Publishers, Booksellers and Librarians . In the 1960s, Anders became politically active again and in 1961 was appointed to the central election leadership of the SPD. As a consultant to the trade union IG Bau-Steine-Erden , he published their story in 1969 in Hanover in the book stone by stone. The people from Bau-Steine-Erden and their unions . From 1971 to 1974 he was a member of the Basic Values ​​Commission of the SPD, then of the Seniors' Advisory Council. Anders was also active in journalism for Vorwärts during this time . Karl Anders died in 1997 in Dreieich near Frankfurt am Main.

Honors

• 1977: Cross of Merit 1st Class of the Federal Republic of Germany
• 1983: Waldemar von Knoeringen Prize from the Georg von Vollmar Academy

literature

• Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 ( online [accessed June 15, 2012]).

Web links

• Literature by and about Karl Anders in the catalog of the German National Library
• Karl Anders in the archive of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation
• Press release tough detectives and democracy Crow thrillers and time problems: The Nest publishing house by Karl Anders (exhibition Literaturhaus Frankfurt and Frankfurt University Library)
• The man who brought us Hammett, Chandler and Ambler , contribution to the conference Krimis making II, Alf Mayer

Individual evidence

1. ^ Karl Anders on the website of the VVN-BdA Berlin-Köpenick
2. ↑ Crows Books