Klaus Rainer Röhl

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Klaus Rainer Röhl (born December 1, 1928 in Trockenhütte / Free City of Danzig ) is a German journalist and publicist .

Life

youth

Röhl was called up for labor service as a student in 1944 and was drafted for military service in occupied Denmark two weeks before the end of the war. After a short time in an internment camp, he lived with his family, who had fled from Danzig, near Stade , where he went back to school and in spring 1948 obtained his Abitur at the Athenaeum . Here he met Peter Rühmkorf .

KPD and APO

Since beginning his studies in Hamburg in 1949, he and Rühmkorf in Hamburg developed a lively activity as the founder of a political cabaret ( Die Pestbeule ), a student theater , the Wolfgang Borchert Theater and the jazz cellar Anarche , which also performed modern poetry. Politically, both represented a radical pacifism , which from 1953 brought them into contact with student members of the West German KPD .

In May 1955, after a trial edition in February ( Das Plädoyer , with Eckart Heimendahl ) , Röhl published his own magazine under the name Studentenkurier , which became a mouthpiece for the 58ers . It was allegedly financed by donations raised by a national front (the publisher Ernst Rowohlt was the honorary chairman ). At this time, Röhl often went to East Berlin to receive the money for the newspaper in cash from government agencies in the GDR. Röhl, to whom the KPD gave a relatively free hand in designing his paper, was not a member of the party and only became one when it was banned in the Federal Republic of Germany in autumn 1956 .

The students Courier , renamed in September 1957 in concrete , courted by Röhl line first successful major authors such as Kurt Hiller and Arno Schmidt and lived much of the poets and essayists Werner Riegel and Peter Rühmkorf . For many years it became the national student newspaper with the highest circulation (peaked at 20,000 printed copies). He played a leading role in the movement Kampf dem Atomtod from 1958, from which numerous students became editors of concrete , including Ulrike Meinhof and Erika Runge .

At Christmas 1961, Röhl and Ulrike Meinhof married. Peter Rühmkorf said of the couple's parties that Röhl had to be accepted as an inevitable puke . After the SED tried harder and harder to influence the editorial team as a secret sponsor, it finally broke in spring 1964. The SED gave up no more money for printing and demanded that the magazine be discontinued immediately. But Röhl resisted and carried on specifically on his own responsibility.

Which is now the independent socialist magazine reached concrete 1965 has a circulation of 100,000 copies sold, and in 1967 the leading publications of the new extra-parliamentary student movement, the APO . From 1967 the paper was no longer published monthly, but fortnightly and had its highest circulation (176,000 copies sold). The fact that Röhl, in the early days of sexual emancipation, relied more and more on sexual topics and revealing illustrations, contributed significantly to the success. In the election year 1972 appeared concretely every week.

In the spring of 1968 Röhl's marriage was divorced. Ulrike Meinhof moved to Berlin with her twin daughters Regine and Bettina and from there began a political battle over the management of the magazine (“Raus Kleiner Röhl!”). While Röhl one henceforth in concrete drew escalating violence discussion in temperate orbits, is Meinhof participated in 1970 in the liberation of become known previously as a department store arsonists Andreas Baader . She joined the Red Army Faction (RAF), which was founded shortly afterwards, and which Röhl fought against from the start.

The publisher Röhl was dismissed in the autumn of 1973 after strong differences over the political orientation and the intellectual level and the change in the proportions of the concrete . Still, the magazine went bankrupt . After a year, there was a restart in October 1974 under the editorship of Hermann L. Gremlizas . In late 1973 brought Roehl already politically similarly positioned magazine that since the market that was able to hold only a few years. In 1981 he took over the magazine Spontan , which was at times the greatest competitor from the specific magazine Spontan , which had to cease publication in 1984.

Political U-turn

After separating from Beton , Röhl slowly turned around politically. Finally, he did his doctorate in 1993 with the historian Ernst Nolte (FU Berlin). Röhl writes about this in Linke Lebenslügen (Berlin 1994): “In the summer of 1987, two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, I wrote to him in view of the excessive and unjustified campaign against Ernst Nolte in the so-called historians ' dispute and made him the suggestion, in solidarity, in a demonstrative way to do a doctorate with him. The choice of the doctoral supervisor was by no means a coincidence. ”The doctoral thesis is entitled: Proximity to the enemy. The cooperation between Communists and National Socialists in the Berlin BVG strike of 1932 .

In 1994 he was one of the authors of the anthology The Self-Confident Nation .

Röhl joined the FDP in 1995 . He was involved in the national liberal wing of the party around Alexander von Stahl , Heiner Kappel and Rainer Zitelmann ("Liberal Offensive").

In 1994 Röhl, together with other journalists from the daily Die Welt (Rainer Zitelmann, Ulrich Schacht and Heimo Schwilk ) , initiated the Berlin Appeal (1994) , in which they warned against an "anti-fascist-democratic order".

In 1995, on Röhl's initiative, Zitelmann, Schacht and Schwilk made another appeal on May 8, 1945 - Against Forgetting , in which the Allies questioned the term “liberation” for the end of the war as “one-sided”. This led to criticism from representatives of all parties represented in the Bundestag.

Röhl writes today u. a. for the Preussische Allgemeine Zeitung (formerly Ostpreußenblatt ). He publishes, according to his own account, in order to explain the “profound, sometimes devastating consequences of the communist and left-utopian activities in which I was involved as editor and commentator”.

Private

Röhl's brother Wolfgang is also a journalist. Klaus Rainer Röhl was married twice. From his first marriage he has the daughter Anja Röhl , from his marriage to Ulrike Meinhof two more daughters, the journalist Bettina Röhl and her twin sister Regine. As the reason for his divorce from Ulrike Meinhof, Röhl stated his relationship with Danae Coulmas , a Greek author and former diplomat with whom he still lives in Cologne today.

In May 2010, Anja Röhl accused her father of at least sexually harassing her as a child verbally and by touching her, if not even abusing her and permanently harming her. In an open letter, Klaus Rainer Röhl protested against the allegations and suspected that the actual background of the accusations was political, namely the "white washing of the RAF icon Ulrike Meinhof".

Bettina Röhl criticized her half-sister Anja, but in May 2010 accused her father of having committed sexual assault against her between 1970 and 1973. There were no violent attacks, "but of course attacks, there was an exploitation of the domestic cohabitation between father and child." This was "a life burden" for her. She broke off contact with her father in the summer of 2007. "Pedophile derailments did not play the decisive role here." Klaus Rainer Röhl has also denied these allegations that they were "untrue or ambiguous" and that they are based "on an adolescent fantasy".

Works

Web links

Wikiquote: Klaus Rainer Röhl  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mr. Meinhof remembers.
  2. ↑ see: Ditfurth, Jutta; Ulrike Meinhof. The biography; Berlin 2009; P. 267 ff
  3. ↑ Hans-Joachim von Leesen: When free speech becomes a risk. In: The Ostpreußenblatt. December 3, 1994, accessed July 16, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Anja Röhl: The time is ripe. In: stern . No. 19 of May 6, 2010, pp. 36–42 (PDF); Nina Apin: Revelations from the left-wing alternative scene. Not just the Indians. In: The daily newspaper . January 22, 2011.
  5. ↑ An open letter from Klaus Rainer Röhl to the "Stern". In: Preussische Allgemeine Zeitung . May 10, 2010.
  6. ^ Matthias Thieme: "RAF was not a children's aid organization". In: Frankfurter Rundschau . May 6, 2010 (interview with Bettina Röhl); Bettina Röhl accuses her father of pedophile attacks. In: Spiegel Online . May 30, 2010.
  7. ↑ Bettina Röhl: My parents . In: Der Spiegel . No. 22, May 31, 2010, pp. 120-123.
personal data
SURNAME Röhl, Klaus Rainer
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist and publicist
DATE OF BIRTH December 1, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Drying hut , Gdansk District, West Prussia