Karl Silex

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Karl Heinrich Silex (born July 6, 1896 in Stettin ; † May 18, 1982 in Cologne ) was a German journalist and editor-in-chief of the " Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung " from 1933 to 1943 and of the " Tagesspiegel " from 1955 to 1963.

Life

Karl Silex came from a Protestant parsonage, his father was a pastor at the St. Gertrudkirche in Stettin. In Szczecin Karl Silex visited the Marienstiftsgymnasium until graduation in 1914. Then he joined as a midshipman ( Crew 1914 ) in the Imperial navy one was in the First World War in 1916 lieutenant and commander of the minesweeper SMS M 65 , taking 1919 as Lieutenant his Farewell. He studied economics at the University of Kiel and at the Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Berlin , where he in 1921 to Dr. phil. received his doctorate.

Silex began his journalistic career in 1921 with the Hamburger Fremdblatt . In 1922 he moved to the Berlin DAZ , for which he worked as a correspondent in London at the end of the twenties. In the 1920s he was close to the German Nationalists ( DNVP ). Silex, who was married to a British woman during these years, published a book about the life of the English at the Seemann publishing house in Leipzig in 1930: John Bull at home. The Englishman in everyday life .

In 1933, the DAZ threatened to be banned because of a critical article about Adolf Hitler , whereupon the Stinnes family asked Silex to take over as editor-in-chief. Silex, who belonged to the “Führer Council of the German Press”, was editor-in-chief of the DAZ until 1943. He wrote in accordance with the regime, but tried, like the editors of the Frankfurter Zeitung , to follow a solid , bourgeois course that was as independent as possible from Nazi propaganda . In September 1939 he was reactivated to the Navy and was used as a clerk at the Navy High Command . He retained his position as editor-in-chief of the DAZ.

In 1943 he was appointed to the command of a mine ship as corvette captain . Most recently, as naval commander of the small combat units in Norway, shortly before the capitulation, he had the ships and boats of his unit sunk.

Silex was friends with Hitler's opponent General Henning von Tresckow , but did not participate directly in the preparations for the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 .

After 1945, Silex first lived in Stuttgart, where he founded his own publishing house, which from 1949 to 1957 published the weekly German comments and from 1952 the books commentaries . Silex criticized Konrad Adenauer's foreign policy early on and favored an armed, neutral Germany as a whole .

His book The March on Madrid was published in the Soviet occupation zone . Spain yesterday and today. A war and travel report ( EA Seemann , Leipzig 1937) was placed on the list of literature to be sorted out.

In 1955 he became editor-in-chief of the Berliner Tagesspiegel . Until 1963 he shaped the style of this newspaper and was considered the "last German editor-in-chief of the old school".

He sold the magazine Die Bücher-Kommentare in 1965. In 1968 he published his memoirs under the title With Commentary. Life report of a journalist . In 1976 he was awarded the title of honorary professor by the city of Berlin.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Ernst Klee : The cultural lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 571.
  2. ↑ Dieter Hartwig : Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz - Legend and Reality , Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2010, ISBN 978-3-506-77027-1 , p. 323.
  3. ↑ See Wolfgang Venohr , Henning v. Tresckow. In: Sebastian Haffner / Ders., Preußische Profile , Munich 2001, p. 274.
  4. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1946-nslit-s.html
personal data
SURNAME Silex, Karl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Silex, Karl Heinrich (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist
DATE OF BIRTH July 6, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Szczecin
DATE OF DEATH May 18, 1982
Place of death Cologne