Kurt Zentner

Kurt Zentner (born January 27, 1903 in Bobenthal ; † June 1974 in Grünwald near Munich , also Kurt E. Zentner and Kurt Eicke Zentner ) was a German editor and publicist . During the National Socialist era , from 1933 to 1937, he was head of the service and picture editor of the Berliner Illustrirten Zeitung , designed a special issue for the 1936 Olympic Games and in 1938 designed the magazine Der Stern . This magazine was a glossy and glamorous paper about film stars and reached a circulation of 750,000 copies under Zentner as editor-in-chief. She is regarded as the model for the new Stern magazine founded by Henri Nannen after the Second World War - from the logo to the design of the front pages with high-quality photographs of female models to the setting of themes. From mid-1941, Zentner was a member of the Wehrmacht propaganda group , which he had to leave in November 1941 because he was intolerable as a “ Jewish half-breed ”. After 1945 he became known for his journalistic activities on the history of the “ Third Reich ” and the Second World War . At the beginning of the 1950s he also worked for Henri Nannens new magazine Stern and acted as editor-in-chief on a temporary basis in the second half of 1951.

Life

Origin, studies and professional career

Kurt Zentner was the son of the judge Hans-Ulrich Zentner and his wife Mathilde, geb. Wegmann. He attended the humanistic grammar school in Metz until May 1919 , then grammar schools in Wilhelmshaven , Breslau and Karlsruhe , where he graduated from high school in July 1921 . According to his own statements, he then worked for a year on various mines underground in preparation for a mining course , which he had to take up against his inclinations in Munich and the Clausthal mining academy . However, he did not complete this, but went from September 1923 to January 1924 as a volunteer in the Reichswehr to the mountain machine gun department of the Goslar hunters . From 1925 to 1927 he worked as a student trainee at Dresdner Bank and Prussian Central Cooperative Bank . Zentner studied philosophy, history and pedagogy at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin and at the same time sports at the German University for Physical Education . During his sports studies he was a competitive athlete himself and a German university champion in the 400-meter run . After a year of study in 1927/28 at the Sorbonne in Paris , he completed his studies at the University of Leipzig , and in 1934 at the local professors Walter Goetz and Hermann Altrock at the philological-historical department of the Faculty of Arts doctorate with a thesis on the contribution of Pierre de Coubertin for the development of modern sport. At this point in time he had been working in the press department of the trade fair, exhibition and tourism office of the city of Berlin since his return from Paris in April 1929 .

Period of National Socialism until 1939

After Zentner had been dismissed from the Berlin trade fair office in March 1933 because he - as he explained after the war - was a member of the SPD , he left the party to which he had belonged since 1930. He joined the NSDAP in 1933 . From 1933 to 1937 Zentner worked at Ullstein Verlag as a picture editor and head of the service of the Berliner Illustrirten Zeitung . For the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, he designed a special edition for the Olympics , of which 800,000 copies were sold. The publisher then sent him to the United States for a year to study American newspapers, especially the design of modern, high-profile magazines. The fact that after his return from the USA his status as a “quarter Jew” was established by an examination of church records carried out by the Institute for Research on the Jewish Question did not stop his career for the time being.

Logo of STERN No. 16 / April 1939 with Zentner as editor-in-chief

In 1938 he applied the knowledge he had gained in the USA to the conception of the new magazine Der Stern , which was published by the successor to the broken Ullstein-Verlag, the “Deutsche Verlag”, and of which he became editor-in-chief. The magazine reached a circulation of 750,000 copies with at least three million readers. It was a glossy and glamorous paper about film stars, but also offered reports on the Bayreuth Wagner Festival and the theater scene, served as a guide for help in life, contained star interpretations , a joke page, competitions and serial novels. In doing so, Zentner managed - presented as reports on "dance evenings" or other cultural events - time and again to "bring bare skin into the paper", as the historian Nils Minkmar writes. Minkmar points out that this presentation was very similar to that of the Stern magazine founded by Henri Nannen after the war, at least until the early 1960s. This applies to the Stern logo, the presentation of stories about film stars, from whose shine “the Stern stories lived before and after the war”, but above all for the “continuity of the cover design”. Minkmar mentions the most striking example: "If you see the cover of Stern No. 25 from June 1939 with Brigitte Horney and then put the famous post-war cover with Hildegard Knef next to it, you think you have two issues of the same magazine in front of you." For the historian Habbo Knoch " [made] this first 'star' the mixture of style and culture, stars and sex ”.

In World War II

At the end of 1939, a few months after the start of the Second World War , the star was discontinued under pressure from Nazi press chief Max Amann and replaced by the soldiers' magazine Erika published by the Wehrmacht High Command . Direct war propaganda should now increasingly take the place of the integration propaganda cultivated by Stern , which aimed at the supposedly beautiful sides of National Socialism. From the beginning of 1940, Zentner worked as a correspondent for the Berliner Illustrirte and the Illustrated Signal in Lisbon, also published by Deutsche Verlag and exclusively serving foreign propaganda . In March 1940, however, he was excluded from the NSDAP due to his Jewish origins and released from the publishing house in the summer as “politically unsustainable”. Hundreds of tons then reported for military service in the Wehrmacht. Until mid-1941 he was a member of the Wehrmacht Propaganda Troop , specifically he was being prepared in the Propaganda Replacement Department (PEA) to take over the section for enemy article propaganda of Wehrmacht Propaganda Group IV, which was under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Albrecht Blau was in charge. After research by the Israeli historian Daniel Uziel, who works at the Yad Vashem memorial in the Federal Archives-Military Archive in Freiburg, it was now officially announced in the Wehrmacht during a routine personnel check that Zentner was a "Jewish mongrel" and his case was that Head of the Wehrmacht propaganda presented by Hasso von Wedel . According to the minutes of his adjutant dated November 7, 1941, he decided:

"The common soldier Dr. Kurt Zentner, who serves in Group IV, is a mixed breed. The commanders of the W [Ehrmacht] Pr [opaganda] do not want a mixed race as an official member of the OKW . He will be sent back to his original unit immediately. "

In fact, another solution was found. Lieutenant Colonel Kurt Hesse , former head of the Wehrmacht Propaganda Group V and now with the army training department ("Colonel Dr. Hesse, the former director of WPr.V, now serving in OKH's training command"), the hundredweight of his earlier work knew her, asked the PEA whether he could write appropriate writings for him on his behalf ("Hesse knew him before and now wanted him to write a series of books for the commander of the army"), and hundredweight was with them Agreement transferred to Hesse's training department. According to his son Christian , Zentner stayed with Hesse for the duration of the war - apart from a front-line deployment that lasted only a few weeks. On his behalf, he mainly developed brochures for French forced laborers so that they would know what to do in the event of illness. He was also used as the author of translation aids for prisoners of war. With these activities he was able to survive the war and the Holocaust and keep his family of several people afloat financially.

post war period

In the post-war period , Zentner was initially involved in planning the Berlin Tagesspiegel together with the writer and journalist Erik Reger . They were intended as joint editors of the newspaper, but Zentner was the denazification proceedings before Spruchkammer not entirely relieved of the district Berlin-Zehlendorf 1946th In addition, the news that Zentner had been a member of the NSDAP for six years led the declared Hitlerite opponent Erik Reger to stop any further cooperation with his partner as unacceptable. Zentner's return to the front row of post-war journalists had failed, at least for the time being. He tried his hand at a less successful magazine project, which, based on Reader's Digest, was entitled Everything for the inquisitive , and wrote pamphlets against Stalinism , such as a pamphlet entitled Heil Stalin! A primer for those threatened , in which he made a front against Bolshevism and equated Stalin with Hitler.

In the early 1950s, Zentner worked for Henri Nannens Stern . When Nannen was on the American continent in the second half of 1951, Zentner acted as editor-in-chief for him. In March / April 1952, for example, the series Der große Schwindel , written by Zentner together with Erik G. Verg, was published , which settled the denazification efforts of the Allies in the style of a scandalous story. On the one hand, it was shown that victims of National Socialism had once again been made victims of denazification. On the other hand, the series turned out to be a list of wrong administrative and personal decisions for which the American occupiers were responsible during the handover of the denazification process to the Germans, such as the alleged infiltration of the arbitration chambers by communists.

Then from 1952 to 1954 Zentner was editor-in-chief of the Münchner Illustrierte published by Süddeutscher Verlag . He also wrote non-fiction books and worked on television documentaries on the "Third Reich".

In his paper from 1952 Stalin was able to win only once , he presented him as a "pockmarked, slightly cross-eyed Lord of the Kremlin", who had now "played out". Zentner also summarized the theses of this publication in a corresponding article in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit . In this he saw the western countries as superior in case they avoided repeating the mistakes of the last war.

In 1953/54, Zentner realized a book project based on precise specifications from the publisher Joseph Caspar Witsch , which was intended to demonstrate the wealth-creating effects of the Marshall Plan for the German population by means of word-picture contributions. The "misery [...] until the currency key date", according to Witsch in a letter to Zentner on May 29, 1953, should be countered by the return to the "restoration of morality" and the "fact" of the "purchasing power" that has now been created. The book project was financially supported by the American Economic Cooperation Administration with 150,000 DM. Zentner had the first volume of the work entitled Ascent from Nowhere begin with pictures of existentially endangered and desperate people in urban ruins and end with a sequence on publicity agencies with their advertising messages through to bikini and negligee models. He opened the second volume in 1947 with a street passerby who was robbed down to his shirt and presented at the end a picture of a generously sized bedroom with a double bed and the explanatory note that American money had been used to build such apartments for 500,000 people in Germany. The volumes, which according to the Witsch biographer Frank Möller, irrespective of their propaganda effect, depict a wealth of relevant everyday, social and mental history aspects of the post-war years, were published twice each with 20,000 copies.

Kurt Zentner contributed documentation material to the documentary series The Third Reich . This ARD documentary series on the subject of National Socialism and World War II, which is still the most extensive but at the same time not very critical , was broadcast in 14 50-minute broadcasts from October 21, 1960 to May 15, 1961 at prime time from 8:25 p.m. to 9:15 p.m. Watch broadcast.

Zentner achieved his greatest journalistic success with his popular science books, Illustrated History of the Second World War and Illustrated History of the Third Reich , which appeared in the 1960s and subsequently in many other editions . These were created as illustrated books on glossy paper with accompanying text that appeared neutral and excluded the character of the German warfare as a war of annihilation . Zentner's Illustrated History of the Second World War alone reached 240,000 copies in 1973 in its eighth edition. Daniel Uziel characterizes Zentner's writings after the war as " apologetic books about the Wehrmacht". When Zentner died in June 1974 after a long, serious illness, Karl Ude emphasized in his obituary for the Süddeutsche Zeitung that Kurt Zentner's work would be continued by his son Christian.

Fonts (selection)

• Pierre de Coubertin ! A contribution to the development of modern sport . University publishing house by Robert Noske, Borna / Leipzig 1935, DNB 361350147 (inaugural dissertation, University of Leipzig 1935, 68 pages).
• Hail Stalin! A primer for the threatened . Ruhr-Verlag, Gelsenkirchen 1950, DNB 455806918 (with 32 full-page caricatures).
• The first fifty years of the 20th century. A picture and word show in 3 volumes . Burda, Offenburg / Baden, 1950ff, DNB 452169003 (Volume 1).
• Stalin could only win once. Lessons and pictures from the Russian campaign 1941–1945 . Gruner, Hamburg 1952.
• Ascent from nowhere. Germany from 1945 to 1953. A sociography in 2 volumes . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne / Berlin 1954.
• Illustrated history of World War II . Südwest-Verlag, Munich 1963 (8th edition 1973: 221st to 240th thousand).
• Illustrated history of the Third Reich . Südwest-Verlag, Munich 1965.
• Illustrated history of the resistance in Germany and Europe 1933–1945 . Südwest-Verlag, Munich 1966.
• The Second World War in pictures and factual reports . Volume 1 and 2, Lingen Verlag, Cologne 1970.

literature

• Habbo Knoch: The Long Duration of Propaganda. Popular war representation in the early Federal Republic . In: Wolfgang Hardtwig , Erhard Schütz (Hrsg.): History for readers. Popular historiography in Germany in the 20th century . Steiner, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-515-08755-9 , pp. 205-226.
• Nils Minkmar : The double lucky bag. How Henri Nannen invented the "star" . In: Lutz Hachmeister , Friedemann Siering (ed.): The gentlemen journalists. The elite of the German press after 1945 . Beck, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-406-47597-3 , pp. 185-195.
• Tim Tolsdorff: From the shooting star to the fixed star. Two German magazines and their common history before and after 1945 . Herbert von Halem, Cologne 2014, ISBN 978-3-86962-097-8 .
• Daniel Uziel: The Propaganda Warriors. The Wehrmacht and the Consolidation of the German Home Front . Peter Lang, Oxford et al. 2008, ISBN 978-3-03911-532-7 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Kurt Zentner in the catalog of the German National Library
• Tim Tolsdorff: The brown roots of the "Stern" . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , December 19, 2013.

Remarks

1. ↑ In his dissertation Pierre de Coubertin! A contribution to the development of modern sport . Inaugural dissertation, University of Leipzig. Robert Noske, Borna-Leipzig 1935, appendix to p. 68 (curriculum vitae), mentions Zentner Bobenthal as his place of birth; Metz is mistakenly found in the literature. Zentner begins the curriculum vitae in his dissertation with: "Me, Kurt Zentner", on the title page it says "Kurt E. Zentner". However, the name form "Kurt Eicke Zentner" given in the personal entry in the joint authority file ( here ) is not found in the dissertation. In the literature one always speaks of "Kurt Zentner".
2. ↑ Kurt Zentner: Pierre de Coubertin! A contribution to the development of modern sport . Inaugural dissertation, University of Leipzig. Robert Noske, Borna-Leipzig 1935 (accepted by the university in 1934), appendix after p. 68 (curriculum vitae); We introduce: Kurt Zentner . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 25, 1952 (there also the message about his sporting successes)
3. ↑ Tim Tolsdorff: From the shooting star to the fixed star. Two German magazines and their common history before and after 1945 . Herbert von Halem, Cologne 2014, p. 130.
4. ↑ Tolsdorff: From the Stern-Schnuppe to the Fix-Stern. Two German illustrated magazines and their common history before and after 1945 , p. 139.
5. ↑ Nils Minkmar: The double lucky bag. How Henri Nannen invented the "star" . In: Lutz Hachmeister , Friedemann Siering: The gentlemen journalists. The elite of the German press after 1945 . CH Beck, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-406-47597-3 , pp. 185-195, here p. 190.
6. ↑ Nils Minkmar: The double lucky bag. How Henri Nannen invented the "star" . In: Lutz Hachmeister, Friedemann Siering: The gentlemen journalists. The Elite of the German Press after 1945 , pp. 187–190; The relevant study by Tim Tolsdorff presents a number of other similarities between the two magazines: From the Stern-Schnuppe to the Fix-Stern. Two German magazines and their common history before and after 1945 . Herbert von Halem, Cologne 2014, pp. 318–474, in particular pp. 409f.
7. ↑ Habbo Knoch: The Long Duration of Propaganda. Popular war representation in the early Federal Republic . In: Wolfgang Hardtwig , Erhard Schütz (Hrsg.): History for readers. Popular historiography in Germany in the 20th century . Steiner, Stuttgart 2005, pp. 205–226, here p. 213.
8. ↑ Tolsdorff: From the Stern-Schnuppe to the Fix-Stern. Two German illustrated magazines and their common history before and after 1945 , p. 518f.
9. ↑ Tolsdorff: From the Stern-Schnuppe to the Fix-Stern. Two German illustrated magazines and their common history before and after 1945 , pp. 147–149 (quotation p. 148).
10. ^ Daniel Uziel: The Propaganda Warriors. The Wehrmacht and the Consolidation of the German Home Front . Peter Lang, Oxford a. a. 2008, p. 133.
11. ↑ Uziel: The Propaganda Warriors. The Wehrmacht and the Consolidation of the German Home Front , p. 133: “Private Dr. Kurt Zentner serving with group IV [he was not there yet, DU] is a hybrid. The commander of WPr. do not want to have a hybrid in OKW as an official. He shall sent back immediately to his original unit. The commanders orders are that Zentner's attachment to WPr from the PEA be terminated immediately ".
12. ↑ Uziel: The Propaganda Warriors. The Wehrmacht and the Consolidation of the German Home Front , p. 133.
13. ↑ Tolsdorff: From the Stern-Schnuppe to the Fix-Stern. Two German illustrated magazines and their common history before and after 1945 , p. 149. Tolsdorff gives his survey of Christian Zentner from September 10, 2010 as evidence; All that is known about Zentner's own family is that in addition to their son Christian, there is also a daughter Celia, who later became the editor of Bunte magazine as Celia Tremper . Both were available to Tolsdorff for a survey, which primarily related to the journalistic work of Kurt Zentner.
14. ↑ Tolsdorff: From the Stern-Schnuppe to the Fix-Stern. Two German illustrated magazines and their common history before and after 1945 , pp. 270–275.
15. ↑ Tim Tolsdorff: The brown roots of the "star" . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , December 19, 2013; Nils Minkmar: The double lucky bag. How Henri Nannen invented the “star” , p. 194f.
16. ↑ Tolsdorff: From the Stern-Schnuppe to the Fix-Stern. Two German illustrated magazines and their common history before and after 1945 , p. 269.
17. ↑ Tolsdorff: From the Stern-Schnuppe to the Fix-Stern. Two German illustrated magazines and their common history before and after 1945 , p. 270 u. P. 462; the series “The big swindle” appeared in: Der Stern No. 9–15 / March 2 to April 13, 1952.
18. ^ He became editor-in-chief of Münchner Illustrieren on October 1, 1952; the following month the Süddeutsche Zeitung portrayed him in the article: We introduce: Kurt Zentner . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 25, 1952.
19. ^ Karl Ude: A historian of the moment. Dr. Kurt Zentner turns 65. Our century in documentary illustrated books . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , January 26, 1968; On the death of Kurt Zentner . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , June 18, 1974; Nils Minkmar: The double lucky bag. How Henri Nannen invented the "star" , p. 187.
20. ↑ Kurt Zentner: Stalin could only win once. Lessons and pictures from the Russian campaign 1941–1945 . Gruner, Hamburg 1952, quotation p. 4.
21. ↑ Kurt Zentner: The third world war does not take place. I. Stalin was able to win only once - The West's Never Again - Lessons from the Last World War . In: Die Zeit , February 21, 1952.
22. ↑ Cf. Wigbert Benz : Paul Carell. Ribbentrop's press chief Paul Karl Schmidt before and after 1945. wvb, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-86573-068-X , p. 61 f.
23. ↑ Frank Möller: The book Witsch. The dizzying life of the publisher Joseph Caspar Witsch. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2014 . ISBN 978-3-462-04130-9 , pp. 360–368, quotation from Witsch's letter p. 363.
24. ↑ Fourteen times "The Third Reich". The biggest documentary strip is on television today. In: Die Zeit , October 21, 1960.
25. ↑ Der Spiegel : Documentary Series. Twelve years in twelve hours , dated: November 2, 1960; accessed on: October 17, 2018
26. ↑ Uziel: The Propaganda Warriors. The Wehrmacht and the Consolidation of the German Home Front , p. 361: "It is interesting to note that this man was writing apologetic books about the Wehrmacht about the war".
27. ↑ On the death of Kurt Zentner . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, June 18, 1974 (drawn with -ud , the abbreviation for Karl Ude).

This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on February 11, 2015 .