Karl Korn

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Karl Korn (born May 20, 1908 in Wiesbaden ; † August 10, 1991 in Bad Homburg in front of the height ) was a German journalist , writer and humanities scholar .

Life

In the Silence by Karl Korn (1944)

Korn grew up in the Rheingau and attended the Dilthey School in Wiesbaden. From 1927 he studied philology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main , where he passed the state examination in 1931 and received his doctorate in 1932. From 1932 to 1934 he was a lecturer at the Faculté des Lettres and at the Lycée de Garçons in Toulouse .

From 1934 to 1937 he worked as an editor for the Berliner Tageblatt , then for the literary magazine Neue Rundschau . From May to October 1940 he was the head of the feature pages of the newly founded weekly newspaper Das Reich , which was assigned a special role among the state-controlled press organs, while avoiding punched propaganda formulas and taking advantage of a certain margin for occasional, moderately dissident contributions, the acceptance of the Nazi state to improve bourgeois conservative and liberal readers at home and abroad.

In contrast to his publications in the Berliner Tageblatt and the Neue Rundschau that are “indistinct in the tendency, with a partially oppositional touch”, according to M. Payk's verdict , his contributions to the Reich should “approach National Socialist patterns considerably” and “only little scope for alternatives Reading "have shown. A review of the anti-Semitic film Jud Suss , which was published on September 29, 1940, was particularly disinterested in this regard and later accused him of having served as a “stooge of anti-Semitism” (see below), and Korn did not comply with a conspicuously numerous anti-French invectives the later drawn picture of a resolute opponent of the regime who was forced to express his opposition stance only indirectly and in coded form. Korn was dismissed from his position as early as October 1940 because he had made critical remarks about the “used painting technique” of a painting by the painter Karl Truppe exhibited in the Munich House of Art in an otherwise laudatory contribution to the “Day of German Art” . Although after a while he was able to publish occasional articles in the magazine again and his name was still listed in the list of "editors", his dismissal meant the end of his journalistic career in the Nazi press.

On April 1, 1941, Korn was called up for basic training in the Wehrmacht and then in the Berlin "Inspection for Education and Army", in which otherwise mainly war-disabled Wehrmacht officers were used, in the position of a special leader in captain's rank with mainly technical and logistical tasks at the Production and distribution of "knapsack publications" for the Wehrmacht, including the booklet series Education and Training in the Army . In August 1944 he was transferred to southwest Germany for a planned field use little known about, and probably in April 1945 he was taken prisoner by the French . After his release in 1946, he first worked as a journalist in Berlin, from where he went to the Allgemeine Zeitung in Mainz in 1948 .

In 1949 he founded the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung with Hans Baumgarten , Erich Dombrowski , Paul Sethe and Erich Welter , and was a member of its editorial team until 1973. As head of the features section , he shaped the style of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung significantly in the fifties and sixties.

In the post-war period, Korn avoided public discussion of his own attitude during the Nazi era and only distanced himself indirectly from it, in that he did not join the still prevailing tendency towards glossing over and repression in current controversies about coming to terms with the Nazi past represented comparatively open-minded and critical positions. With his own biography, however, he came under public criticism when the Austrian journalist and novelist Kurt Ziesel , himself a committed anti-Semite and National Socialist during the Nazi era, involved Korn in the public attacks from 1957 with which he politically incriminated journalists and cultural workers who had moved from their previous positions after the war wanted to hold accountable for their “betrayal” because, in his view, their commitment to the democratic development of post-war society in Germany and Austria “out of cowardice, greed or opportunism in the vitality of our people [sinned] and thus made complicit and cronies of the Bolshevik world revolution ”. Ziesel made statements from Korn's contributions to the Reich , in particular his positive appreciation of the film Jud Suss , public again and described him as a “henchman of anti-Semitism”, and because of his subsequent work in the Wehrmacht he made him a slacker and a “Nazi educator and distributors of training material ”. Korn and the other editors of the FAZ initially tried not to draw additional attention to the allegations through public replies, but when the allegations were picked up by other press organs, Korn tried in July 1959, Ziesel and his Munich publishing house to have the allegations prohibited by a court through an injunction. A ruling by the Munich Regional Court wanted to grant Korn's application only on a few points, because most of the allegations were based on facts and the cited film review also adequately supported the designation as “henchman of anti-Semitism”. The Higher Regional Court then overturned the judgment of the first instance on March 23, 1960 and Korn's application was granted in almost all points, but specifically the prohibition of the designation as “stooge of anti-Semitism” was again rejected.

In 1958 he published a collection of essays in which he dealt critically with the development of the German language under the title “Language in the managed world”. The language is the "heart and core of tradition", which has to be defended against pseudo-modernists.

Korn was considered a conservative publicist who was open to new cultural and social trends. He campaigned for the work of artists such as Alfred Andersch , Ingmar Bergman , Heinrich Böll and Wolfgang Koeppen from an early age . He saw himself as a European patriot , to whom the reconciliation between Germany and France, against which he had been agitating in 1940 in the spirit of Nazi propaganda (see above), and European unification were close to his heart.

Honors

Fonts (selection)

  • Studies on "Joy and Trûren" in Middle High German poets. Contributions to a problem story . Phil. Dissertation, Frankfurt. - Leipzig, 1932, VI, 139 pp. (Also in bookshops as: Von deutscher Poeterey. Volume 12)
  • Transitions. Contributions to the spiritual situation . Berlin: Minerva-Verlag, 1946, 148 pp.
  • The Rheingau years . Berlin: Minerva-Verlag, 1946, 104 pp. (Frankfurt a. M .: S. Fischer, 1955, 108 pp.)
  • The Rheingau Years [autobiography 1912–1926]. Frankfurt am Main: Societäts-Verlag, 1993, 198 pages, ISBN 3-7973-0443-9 (2nd edition, 1993)
  • Long apprenticeship. A German life . [The focus of this autobiography lies in the period of the Third Reich up to 1940]. Frankfurt am Main: Societäts-Verlag, 1975, 314 p .; ISBN 3-7973-0272-X
  • Language in the Managed World [essays]. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Heinrich Scheffler, 1958, 195 p. (2nd, updated edition. Olten; Freiburg i. Br .: Walter, 1959, 229 p.)
  • Over land and sea. Journal from 3 decades . [Karl Korn's travels]. Frankfurt: Frankfurter Societäts-Verlag, 1977, 328 pages, ISBN 3-7973-0301-7
  • Zola in his day . Frankfurt am Main: Societäts-Verlag, 1980, 441 p .; ISBN 3-7973-0362-9 (Ullstein, 1984)
  • Rhenish profiles. Stefan George , Alfons Paquet , Elisabeth Langgässer . Pfullingen: Neske, 1988, 184 pages, ISBN 3-7885-0309-2

literature

  • Marcus M. Payk: The Spirit of Democracy. intellectual attempts at orientation in the features pages of the early Federal Republic: Karl Korn and Peter de Mendelssohn . In: Dietrich Beyrau, Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Lutz Raphael (eds.): Ordnungssysteme - studies on the history of ideas in the modern age. tape 23 . R. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-486-58580-3 .
  • Wolfgang Klötzer (Hrsg.): Frankfurter Biographie . Personal history lexicon . First volume. A – L (=  publications of the Frankfurt Historical Commission . Volume XIX , no. 1 ). Waldemar Kramer, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-7829-0444-3 .

Web links

swell

  1. ↑ Payk 2008, p. 44ff .; Norbert Frey / Johannes Schmitz, Journalism in the Third Reich , Verlag CH Beck, Munich, 4th edition 2011, p. 108ff.
  2. ↑ Payk 2008, p 55
  3. ↑ Payk 2008, S. Frey / Schmitz 2011, p. 113ff.
  4. ↑ Payk 2008, p 47
  5. ↑ Payk 2008, p. 47f.
  6. ↑ Payk 2008, p. 316ff.
  7. ↑ Kurt Ziesel: The lost conscience. Behind the scenes of the press, literature and its rulers today , JF Lehmanns Verlag, Munich [1957], 4th edition 1959, p. 14
  8. ↑ Payk 2008, p 318f.
  9. ↑ Payk 2008, p. 322f.
  10. ↑ Karl Korn: Just a traditional value? In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of May 12, 1959
personal data
SURNAME Korn, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German publicist, journalist and humanities scholar
DATE OF BIRTH May 20, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Wiesbaden
DATE OF DEATH August 10, 1991
Place of death Bad Homburg vor der Höhe