Kurt Ziesel

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Kurt Ziesel (born February 25, 1911 in Innsbruck ; † May 10, 2001 in Prien am Chiemsee ) was an Austrian journalist . The right-wing publicist was a co-founder of the Germany Foundation and the right-wing society for free journalism .

Live and act

Life until 1945

Gopher in 1911, the son of doctoral kuk officials Eduard ground squirrel in Innsbruck, Tyrol born.

After eight years of attending secondary school and graduating from high school in Innsbruck in 1930, he studied as a working student at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna. From 1929 Ziesel was active as a Nazi agitator, in 1930 he joined the NS Student Union and in 1931 the NSDAP . At the same time he worked for the National Socialist Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung , after which he emigrated to Germany in 1933 after it was banned. After the war, Ziesel openly admitted that he was an “enthusiastic National Socialist”.

There he was initially a trainee at the Völkischer Beobachter , where he was dismissed without notice due to "unreliability and various irregularities", and then an editor at the Königsberger Preußische Zeitung . He lost this job because of connections with a young woman of Jewish origin and the transmission of “horror news” in writing. Because of this, he was taken into custody for several weeks in April 1934 and temporarily excluded from the NSDAP . Ziesel justified his contacts with the Jewish family with the unbelievable admission that, as an Austrian, he did not know that “ Cohen ” was a Jewish name. The NS-Gaugericht evaluated his written statements as an expression of "youthful self-importance". The supreme party court of the NSDAP therefore lifted the exclusion from the party after several letters of petition from Ziesel and converted it into a “reprimand”. Ziesel's post-war claim that he was banned from practicing the profession for almost two years in this context is demonstrably fictitious.

From September 1935, Ziesel was editor of the NSDAP newspaper Westfälische Landeszeitung - Rote Erde in Dortmund, which he soon had to leave due to disagreements. During this time he also worked as a freelancer for the Völkischer Beobachter , the NSZ-Rheinfront , the Stuttgart NS-Kurier and other papers. From 1936 to 1939 he was the publisher and editor-in-chief of the press office Hanseaten-Dienst in Hamburg and wrote the book “Voices of the Ostmark” (Hamburg 1938). After the “ Anschluss ” of Austria, he returned to Vienna. There he became editor of the Neue Wiener Tagblatt in 1939 and worked as a Viennese correspondent for the NSDAP Gau newspaper Westdeutscher Beobachter in Cologne and the swastika banner .

1940 Gopher became a tank unit moved in, however, was in 1941 with the rank of special leader a war in a propaganda company and at the "Berichterstaffel" of the army high command . He also worked as a poet and editor. Many of his books reached six-digit print runs. His anthology War and Poetry was particularly successful . Soldiers become poets - poets become soldiers (Vienna / Leipzig 1940).

Political stance until 1945

"I would like to emphasize here that no one in the Third Reich could ever be forced or was forced to write or publicly announce anything that was not his opinion." (Kurt Ziesel 1958)

Ziesel was a staunch National Socialist. Already in his student days he waged "war" against the "Vienna Jewish press" according to his own statements. In his later publications he railed against “Jews and Jews servants” and “pests that destroy the people” like the writers Franz Werfel , Max Brod and Manfred Hausmann . He wrote about the assassins of July 20, 1944 on September 3, 1944 in the Wiener Völkischer Beobachter : “What abyss of human depravity or mental derangement must those ambitious people have stood on when they, sinning against the spirit of the whole people, put their hand against the Leaders raised…. Anyone who sins against the spirit of war must be destroyed ”.

Ziesel himself dreamed of a future as an "east colonialist". In 1943 he wrote from Minsk to the State Secretary in the Propaganda Ministry Kinkel about his "longing ... to rule the country here as a squire". Also in 1943 he had his cook arrested by the Secret State Police for "subversive activities". The designation Ziesels used in this context by the SPD in 1976 as a “former Gestapo denouncer” was forbidden by the Munich Regional Court by means of an injunction upon his application .

Ziesel was classified by his contemporaries as well as in later scientific publications as scheming, argumentative and vengeful. Almost all of Ziesel's statements about political differences with the Nazi regime are apologetic interpretations of these career-politically motivated private disputes or they are fictitious. "Ziesel's addiction to self-expression and his tendency to belittle others should be pointed out as a characteristic, which often resulted in conflicts with politically like-minded people," said the political scientist Hans-Dieter Bamberg in his short biography of Ziesel.

After 1945

"The red character assassination" (1961)

After the end of the war, all of Ziesel's publications were temporarily banned in Austria, and he himself was temporarily banned from speaking. In the Soviet occupation zone and in the German Democratic Republic , several of his writings were placed on the list of literature to be sorted out. In the Federal Republic, on the other hand, he was able to continue unhindered the “fight against the degenerate left that defiles our people” and against the “systematic destruction of beliefs, values, national sentiment and a clean state sentiment”. The ruling CDU was initially targeted. He criticized "that it lacks poise and steadfastness, and that it needs internal renewal and purification." According to the Deutsche Zeitung of October 8, 1960, Ziesel called for the Federal Republic to "restrict the fundamental right to free opinion" and " the reintroduction of the labor service. "

Since the end of the war, his statements on National Socialism had formally adapted to what was constitutionally permitted. Ziesel got used to always adding a qualification to positive statements: "So National Socialism represented 'between 1933 and 1937' ... a policy that every fatherland-loving German could subscribe to". The Nazi ideology "seemed to us to be 'the lesser evil' compared to what Bolshevism did to humanity." Comments on anti-Semitism or the persecution of Jews were kept very concise, which forced the reader to read between the lines. For example, he quotes from a Nazi pamphlet by the former minister of expellees Theodor Oberländer : "Even in the peoples of Eastern Europe there are people who fight Judaism ..." And dryly adds that this is a "purely historical statement that corresponds to the facts" .

Surprisingly for the German literary scene, Ziesel went public in 1952 with the novel Daniel in der Löwengrube (Freiburg / Frankfurt am Main), which contemporary critics perceived as pro-Jewish . Content: “A non-Jewish German accidentally ends up in a Jewish ghetto in Poland and identifies with the victims of Nazi terror. In the end he will be shot like the rest of the ghetto residents. ”It was not until 1997 that the literary scholar Stefan Busch corrected the positive assessment of the work:“ The clichés that are reproduced in the novel place it in the tradition of anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda… The Jews were For him [Ziesel] little more than a backdrop for the figure who is exclusively interested in him, the German victim. "

Processes

The main occupation of the contentious and litigious Ziesel in the first years of the Federal Republic were revelations about the actual or alleged National Socialist past of earlier author colleagues. His instinct for persecution was primarily directed at journalists "who were militaristic, nationalistic, anti-Jewish during the Thousand Year Reich - although according to their own statements they were always against it - and who today compensate for this willing sale of their journalistic dignity by opposing lead those Pharisaic campaigns who at that time believed with a pure heart in what they did and wrote. ”In doing so, Ziesel made use of all legal possibilities. His countless counter-statements , criminal charges , injunctions and lawsuits ultimately even led to a change in German press law in order to prevent willful interference with the functionality of the press in the future.

Other "victims" of Ziesel's wave of lawsuits included writers such as Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass and politicians such as the then Bundestag Vice President Carlo Schmid and ex-Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt . In the “Grass case”, the self-proclaimed “literary connoisseur and critic” Ziesel filed a complaint in 1962 after reading his novella Katz und Maus . Reason: He discovered "dirty things" in it, "which a normal person does not even dare to carve into toilet walls". The case was closed by the Koblenz public prosecutor in March 1963. At the beginning of 1967, when Grass was meanwhile active in the SPD election campaign, Ziesel warmed up the process again, whereupon Grass complained of an omission . In a multi-instance legal dispute, Ziesel was forbidden to call Grass a " pornographer ", but was still allowed to call him the "author of the worst pornographic piggies" and of "denigrations of the Catholic Church ". In 1974, Ziesel filed a criminal complaint against Chancellor Willy Brandt, who had recently resigned, for negligent disclosure of state secrets . Although legally dismissed, he repeated the attack in 1976 and 1977.

Secret service activity

Another subject of several legal disputes was Ziesel's secret service connection, which journalists and scientists had only suspected for many years. Kurt Ziesel worked as an informant for the German foreign intelligence service BND . On a list submitted to the Federal Chancellery in 1970, he appears under the code name Zöllner as a so-called “special press connection” of his liaison leader Dr. Walter Wanke (alias Dr. Wilhelm ) of the Munich office 923. That Ziesel also had close ties to the German domestic secret service became known in 1973 when an internal dossier of the constitution protection about the journalist Kurt Hirsch was published in Ziesel's "Deutschland-Magazin" .

The "Germany Foundation"

In addition to his journalistic activities, Ziesel was also active in the organization. He was a co-founder of Deutsches Kreis 58 , in 1960 a founding member of the Society for Free Journalism , which, according to the 2001 report on the protection of the constitution, was the “right-wing cultural association with the largest number of members” in the Federal Republic, and in 1969 co-initiator of a committee to protect citizens against defamation by the left-wing press .

Above all, however, he was active from 1966 as a managing founding member (from 1977 chairman; later honorary chairman) of the Germany Foundation . Members of this organization were right-wing Christian Democrats, but also German nationalists and individual representatives of the extreme right. During the reign of the social-liberal coalition , the foundation led by Ziesel saw itself as the “spearhead of the opposition”.

Ziesel, the driving force behind the founding, used his position as managing director of the foundation and publisher as well as main author of its magazine Deutschland-Magazin to expand his journalistic sphere of activity. Together with his supporters, he controlled the external image of the organization and had a considerable influence on the selection of the winners of the “Konrad Adenauer Prize” awarded by the “Germany Foundation”. In internal organizational disputes up to 1969, the "Ziesel Group", which was part of the right-wing core of the foundation, was able to strengthen its influence even further, which shifted the public image of the "Germany Foundation" to a dubious, nationalist, right-wing sect.

The CDU was initially waiting for the re-establishment, which was essentially due to the fact that Ziesel was "sometimes judged negatively" in government circles. That was to change in the 1970s.

Late recognition

After the social-liberal coalition began in 1969, the relationship between the Union and Ziesel and his “Germany Foundation” improved. Franz Josef Strauss , whom Ziesel supported during the Spiegel affair in 1962 with criminal charges against Strauss critics, honored him with a public tribute on his 60th birthday in 1971. Five years later, Helmut Kohl , Franz Josef Strauss, Karl Carstens and Axel Springer congratulated them on their sixty-fifth. In 1986, Wolfgang Schäuble thanked the jubilee for his "literary and journalistic work over five decades", whereby Schäuble Ziesel's Nazi publications included in the calculation.

With the acceptance of the “Konrad Adenauer Freedom Prize” by Helmut Kohl in 1994, Ziesel and the “Germany Foundation” finally became acceptable. The Bundestag group of the PDS criticized the award by pointing out that it was honoring an organization that propagated “ anti- liberal, anti-democratic , historical revisionist and xenophobic positions.” The “Germany Foundation” then tried to force the PDS into court with a fine of 500,000 DM to refrain from this - according to the Bundestag printed paper - "justified assessment", but lost in two instances. In the question time of the Bundestag on June 26, 1996, the then head of the Federal Chancellery, Minister Friedrich Bohl , was nevertheless unimpressed: “If there should be judgments by German courts that consider a different assessment within the meaning of Article 5 of the Basic Law to be permissible, means not that the federal government has to accept these third party ratings. "

On the occasion of the award ceremony in 1996, Helmut Kohl praised Ziesel for his “advocacy for the free and democratic basic order ”, in 1998 Wolfgang Schäuble was himself an Adenauer Prize winner. And in 2001, shortly before Ziesel's death, the Bavarian Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber attested to him that every historian in the Federal Republic of Germany would “have to deal with you and your work. And you can feel this as an award. "

Ziesel was married to Hildegard Henckel for the second time and had six children.

Fonts

  • Voices of the Ostmark. An evening sequence . Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, Hamburg 1938.
  • Transformation of hearts. Novel . Janke, Leipzig 1938.
  • The little god. Novel . Luser, Vienna et al. 1939.
  • Hours of change . Luser, Vienna et al. 1940.
  • ed .: War and Poetry. Soldiers become poets, poets become soldiers. A folk book . Luser, Vienna et al. 1940.
  • Our children. Experienced on the brink of war . Wiener Verlagsgesellschaft, Vienna 1941.
  • The forgotten. A story from 1940 . Wiener Verlagsgesellschaft, Vienna 1941.
  • The marked one. Narration . Wiener Verlag, Vienna 1942.
  • Aphrodite smiles ... what has been seen, experienced and dreamed of on the island of Rhodes . Mont-Blanc-Verlag, Vienna 1950.
  • Daniel in the lions' den. Novel . Dikreiter, Freiburg im Breisgau et al. 1952.
  • Life does not leave us . Publisher Deutsche Volksbücher, Stuttgart 1954.
  • And what remains is the person. Novel . Stuttgart house library, Stuttgart 1954.
  • The golden days. Roman of the island of Rhodes . Publisher Deutsche Volksbücher, Stuttgart 1954.
  • As long as we love. Novel . Stuttgart library, Stuttgart 1957.
  • The lost conscience. Behind the scenes of the press, literature and those in power today . Lehmann, Munich 1958.
  • The red character assassination. A documentary about the cold war . Schlichtmeyer, Tübingen 1961.
  • Freedom of the press in a democracy 1962.
  • The literature factory: a polem. Dealing with d. Literature business in today's Germany 1962.
  • Does the West abdicate? Eckartschriften Heft 11, Österreichische Landsmannschaft , 1963
  • The endless day . Book club Donauland, Vienna 1963.
  • The German suicide. Dictatorship of the opinion makers . Blick & Bild Verlag, Kettwig et al. 1963.
  • And what remains is the person . Hohenstaufen Verlag, Bodman 1965.
  • Freedom and responsibility. Posts currently . JF Lehmann, Munich 1966.
  • The sensation of goodness. Report on an unusual trip around the world . Book club Donauland, Vienna 1969.
  • Black and white in Africa. Reality and legends. Observations and experiences in Rhodesia, South Africa and South West Africa . Lehmann, Munich 1973, ISBN 3-469-00439-0 .
  • The opinion makers. Spiegel, Zeit, Stern & Co. Universitas, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-8004-1153-9 .
  • The price of fame. Actress novel . Universitas, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-8004-1206-3 .
  • Against the zeitgeist . Busse Seewald, Herford 1992, ISBN 3-512-03085-8 .

literature

  • Hans-Dieter Bamberg: The Germany Foundation eV Studies on the forces of the “democratic center” and conservatism in the Federal Republic of Germany (= Marburg treatises on political science. Volume 23). Anton Hain, Meisenheim am Glan 1978, ISBN 3-445-01376-4 .
  • Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): Handbook of anti-Semitism. Hostility to Jews in the past and present . Volume 2/2, De Gruyter Saur, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-598-24072-0 , p. 901.
  • Heinrich Böll : Letters from the Rhineland . dtv, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-423-10602-6 , pp. 158-166.
  • Stefan Busch: “And yesterday, Germany heard us”. Nazi authors in the Federal Republic. Continuity and discontinuity in Friedrich Griese, Werner Beumelburg, Eberhard Wolfgang Möller and Kurt Ziesel (= studies on literary and cultural history. Volume 13). Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1998, ISBN 3-8260-1395-6 ( dissertation University Mainz 1997).
  • Jürgen Hillesheim , Elisabeth Michael (Ed.): Lexicon of National Socialist Poets: Biographies, Analyzes, Bibliographies. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1993, ISBN 3-88479-511-2 .
  • Hans Sarkowicz , Alf Mentzer: Kurt Ziesel. In: Dies .: Literature in Nazi Germany. A biographical lexicon . Europa Verlag, Hamburg / Vienna 2002, ISBN 3-203-82030-7 , pp. 415-417.
  • Axel Schildt : The Nazi Past of West German Intellectuals. Kurt Ziesel's unveiling campaign in the Adenauer era. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. Issue 1, 2016, pp. 37–68.
  • Daniel Sieverding: Kurt Ziesel - the contentious "opportunist" . In: Rolf Düsterberg (Ed.): Poets for the "Third Reich". Volume 2. Biographical studies on the relationship between literature and ideology . Bielefeld: Aisthesis 2011, pp. 269-300.

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Hans-Dieter Bamberg: The Germany Foundation eV Studies on forces of the “democratic center” and conservatism in the Federal Republic of Germany . Meisenheim am Glan 1978, p. 356ff.
  2. ↑ Kurt Ziesel: The lost conscience . Munich 1958, p. 18.
  3. ↑ also for the following: Ziesel files in the former Berlin Document Center , cited above. n. Hans-Dieter Bamberg: The Germany Foundation eV studies on forces of the "democratic center" and conservatism in the Federal Republic of Germany . Meisenheim am Glan 1978, p. 354f .; see also Frankfurter Rundschau. February 9, 1984.
  4. ↑ Claudia Wagner: The Central Commission to Combat Nazi Literature. Literature cleaning in Austrian. Diploma thesis University of Vienna 2005, p. 78f.
  5. ↑ Stefan Busch: “And yesterday, Germany heard us”. Nazi authors in the Federal Republic. Würzburg 1998, p. 214 note 20.
  6. ↑ Hans-Dieter Bamberg: The Germany Foundation eV Studies on forces of the “democratic center” and conservatism in the Federal Republic of Germany . Meisenheim am Glan 1978, p. 354f.
  7. ↑ Kurt Ziesel: The lost conscience . Munich 1958, p. 25f.
  8. ↑ The lost conscience. 2nd Edition. Munich 1958, p. 34.
  9. ↑ All quotations in this section (with evidence) in: Hans-Dieter Bamberg: Die Deutschland-Stiftung eV Studies on the forces of the “democratic center” and conservatism in the Federal Republic of Germany . Meisenheim am Glan 1978, pp. 356-360; see there also Ziesel's letter v. October 27, 1934: "I am a National Socialist and I am a party member by virtue of the achievement and the struggle and the deeds that I ... have done". Bamberg, p. 355.
  10. ↑ Hans-Dieter Bamberg: The Germany Foundation eV Studies on forces of the “democratic center” and conservatism in the Federal Republic of Germany . Meisenheim am Glan 1978, pp. 353-357; Stefan Busch: “And yesterday, Germany heard us”. Nazi authors in the Federal Republic. Würzburg 1998, pp. 209-241.
  11. ↑ Hans-Dieter Bamberg: The Germany Foundation eV Studies on forces of the “democratic center” and conservatism in the Federal Republic of Germany . Meisenheim am Glan 1978, p. 354.
  12. ^ German administration for popular education in the Soviet zone of occupation: List of the literature to be sorted out . Berlin: Zentralverlag, 1946 ( entry 1 , entry 2 ); Ministry for National Education of the German Democratic Republic: List of the literature to be sorted out. Third addendum. Berlin: VEB Deutscher Zentralverlag, 1953 ( entry ).
  13. ↑ Ziesel quotes by Hans-Dieter Bamberg: The Germany Foundation eV Studies on the forces of the “democratic center” and conservatism in the Federal Republic of Germany . Meisenheim am Glan 1978, p. 363.
  14. ↑ Kurt Ziesel: The red character assassination. A documentary about the Cold War . Tübingen 3rd edition 1962, p. 13.
  15. ↑ Quotes: Hans-Dieter Bamberg: The Germany Foundation eV Studies on the forces of the “democratic center” and conservatism in the Federal Republic of Germany . Meisenheim am Glan 1978, p. 32, 115 u. 60
  16. ↑ Quotes in: Hans Sarkowicz, Alf Mentzer: Literature in Nazi Germany. A biographical lexicon . Hamburg / Vienna (adult new edition) 2002, p. 416; see also Stefan Busch: “And yesterday, Germany heard us”. Nazi authors in the Federal Republic. Continuity and discontinuity with Friedrich Griese, Werner Beumelburg, Eberhard Wolfgang Möller and Kurt Ziesel . Würzburg 1998, pp. 269-280.
  17. ↑ Kurt Ziesel: The red character assassination. A documentary about the Cold War . Tübingen 3rd edition 1962, p. 193; for the following: Hans-Dieter Bamberg: The Germany Foundation eV Studies on the forces of the “democratic center” and conservatism in the Federal Republic of Germany . Meisenheim am Glan 1978, p. 368.
  18. ^ Quotes n .: Franz Joseph Görtz: A revision is not permitted. The Bremen Literature Prize scandal . Radio Bremen 2, first broadcast October 11, 1992; see also Michael Rutschky: Schmutz und Schund. In: The world. February 25, 2006; Kurt Ziesel: Art or Pornography? Munich 1969.
  19. ↑ s. Erich Schmidt-Eenboom: Undercover. The BND and the German journalists . Cologne 1998, p. 193 u. 245; Ders .: Secret Service, Politics and Media. Berlin 2004, p. 105 u. 266f.
  20. ↑ Three little pieces of paper. In: Der Spiegel. No. 17, April 22, 1974, p. 70; This bad sauce always boiled. In: Der Spiegel. No. 22, May 27, 1974, p. 30; Three small pieces of paper - reply. In: Der Spiegel. No. 29, July 15, 1974, p. 45.
  21. ↑ Peter Pragal: Song of praise for the pilot of the future. In: Berliner Zeitung. June 22, 1998, p. 3.
  22. ↑ Hans-Dieter Bamberg: The Germany Foundation eV Studies on forces of the “democratic center” and conservatism in the Federal Republic of Germany . Meisenheim am Glan 1978, p. 197.
  23. ↑ cit. n. Horst Ehmke: Right in the middle. From the grand coalition to German unity . Berlin 1994, p. 152.
  24. ↑ All quotations: German Bundestag: Drucksache 13/6657. December 27, 1996.
  25. ↑ Kohl quote: Hans Sarkowicz, Alf Mentzer: Literature in Nazi Germany. A biographical lexicon. Adult new edition. Hamburg / Vienna 2002, p. 416; Stoiber quote: Comrade Stoiber. In: Archive notes of the Duisburg Institute for Linguistic and Social Research. June 2002; also in: Jungle World. 35, August 21, 2002.
personal data
SURNAME Ziesel, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian journalist
DATE OF BIRTH February 25, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH innsbruck
DATE OF DEATH May 10, 2001
Place of death Prien am Chiemsee