Michael Naumann

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Michael Naumann (2007)

Michael Naumann (born December 8, 1941 in Koethen ) is a German journalist , publicist , publisher and politician ( SPD ). From 1985 to 1995 he was managing director of Rowohlt Verlag . From 1998 to 2001 Naumann was the first Minister of State for Culture of the Federal Republic of Germany. Then he was one of the editors of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit until 2010 and its editor-in-chief until 2004. He was the top candidate of the Hamburg SPD for the 2008 state election . From the beginning of 2010 to mid-2012, Naumann was editor-in-chief of the monthly magazine Cicero . Since then he has been managing director and from 2012 founding director of the Barenboim Said Academy in Berlin.

Life

Naumann was born the son of a lawyer in the Anhalt town of Köthen. His father was killed in the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942 . At the age of eleven, Naumann had to flee to Hamburg with his mother in 1953 . She was targeted by the GDR Ministry for State Security because of contacts with her Jewish relatives who had emigrated to the USA .

education

After attending high school in Missouri and graduating from high school, he studied political science , history and philosophy in Marburg , at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich (LMU) and at Queen's College at Oxford University . In 1969 he was at the LMU with his dissertation The dismantling of the wrong world. Doctorate in satire and political reality in the work of Karl Kraus . In 1984 he completed his habilitation at the Ruhr University Bochum with the social psychological study Structural Change of Heroism. From sacred to revolutionary heroism , in which he deals, among other things, with the figure of the Irish freedom fighter James Connolly .

Professional and journalistic activity

In 1969 he went to the Münchner Merkur as a foreign policy editor , a year later he switched to the weekly newspaper Die Zeit . He became one of the founding editors of Zeit magazine. After 1972 he worked as a research assistant at the Ruhr University Bochum , then went to Queen's College in Oxford as a Florey scholarship holder in 1976, before returning to ZEIT in 1978 to head the newly founded dossier editorial team of “Zeit”. From 1981 to 1983 he worked in Washington as a foreign correspondent for Die Zeit and soon after took over the management of the foreign affairs department at Spiegel until the summer of 1985.

On December 22nd, 1984 the editing department of Rowohlt Verlag protested in an open letter against Naumann, appointed by the Holtzbrinck Group, as the new managing director of the publishing house, since it had assumed that the publishing house could be filled from within its own ranks; However, Naumann remained in this position from 1985. After ten years of successful work at Rowohlt Verlag - sales doubled and several Nobel Prizes went to the authors of the publishing house ( Toni Morrison , Claude Simon , José Saramago , Imre Kertész and Elfriede Jelinek ) - he followed up on behalf of the Holtzbrinck Group in 1995 New York , to first found the publishing house Metropolitan Books and then to head Henry Holt. His American authors included Salman Rushdie , Paul Auster , Siri Hustvedt , Thomas Pynchon, and many others.

At the end of July 1998, Naumann triggered a wave of criticism across Germany and across all parties after he had spoken out against the construction of the memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin and attested the architect Peter Eisenman's design to be " Albert Speer- like monumentality". The Union parliamentary group chairman, Wolfgang Schäuble , accused him of a "deeply imperfect understanding of culture". The Minister of State in the Chancellery Anton Pfeifer (CDU) described Naumann's statement as "absurd" and saw his stance in complete contrast to the previous "very sensitive stance of the SPD parliamentary group in the Bundestag, especially on this issue". The President of the Bundestag Rita Süssmuth also criticized Naumann clearly. The Berlin SPD regional association also kept its distance from him. Naumann withdrew his comparison shortly afterwards. Naumann campaigned for a museum to be added to the monument, which was previously only planned as a monument. The then revised draft of the architect Peter Eisenman with an underground memorial found a large majority in the German Bundestag in the final vote on the memorial.

In 2001 he published the collection of essays “The Most Beautiful Form of Freedom”.

After his time as Minister of State (see below), Naumann moved to Hamburg in January 2001 as editor of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit . Until August 2004 he was also their editor-in-chief together with Josef Joffe . His successor in this position is Giovanni di Lorenzo .

In 2004 Naumann was sentenced to a fine of 9,000 euros for insulting the Berlin public prosecutor Hansjürgen Karge (SPD). Previously, Naumann had described the investigating public prosecutor as "crazy" in a broadcast on n-tv on the Michel Friedman (CDU) scandal . Naumann lodged a constitutional complaint against the judgment because of a violation of his fundamental right to freedom of expression, which the Federal Constitutional Court granted on May 12, 2009 on the grounds that the designation “crazy public prosecutor” does not necessarily represent an insult.

Between 2004 and 2007 Naumann moderated the discussion program Im Palais on the Berlin-Brandenburg radio station .

Together with Tilman Spengler , he edited the magazine Kursbuch from 2005 to 2008, which was published by Zeitverlag . From October 2007 he was the editor of the series The Other Library founded by Hans Magnus Enzensberger together with the “Zeit” author Klaus Harpprecht .

In 2006 Naumann received the Julius Campe Critic's Prize , which the Hoffmann und Campe publishing house awards annually.

On February 1, 2010 Michael Naumann succeeded Wolfram Weimer as editor-in-chief of the monthly magazine Cicero . Naumann gave up his post as Zeit editor. In May 2012 he was replaced by Christoph Schwennicke .

Michael Naumann has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Thomson Reuters Corporation media group since 2010 .

Minister of State in the Chancellery

In October 1998, Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder appointed Naumann as the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media Affairs and soon afterwards as Minister of State for Culture and Media to the Federal Chancellor, following an amendment to the law on the legal status of Parliamentary State Secretaries ("Lex Naumann") which became necessary because Michael Naumann was not a member of the German Bundestag. During his term of office, the final discussion and the decision of the Bundestag to erect the memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe (“Holocaust memorial”) in Berlin fell.

Top candidacy in Hamburg 2008

After the former Hamburg mayor Henning Voscherau had ruled out a renewed candidacy in the 2008 mayor elections , an extraordinary state party conference on March 24, 2007 elected Naumann with 339 of 343 possible votes (three votes against, one abstention) as the top candidate and challenger of the First Mayor Ole von Beust . Naumann was also elected on June 22nd of the same year with 303 of 306 votes (two against, one abstention) on the list for the citizenship election. His co-editing of the weekly newspaper “ Die Zeit ” had been inactive since March 8, 2007. He was also given a leave of absence as the presenter of the rbb program “Im Palais”.

The SPD under Naumann lost the state election on February 24, 2008 with 34.1 percentage points compared to the CDU with 42.6 percent, but was able to gain around 3.1 percent compared to the 2004 election result. Leading candidate Naumann saw the blame for the failure of a red-green coalition among others with the SPD federal chairman Kurt Beck , who had announced the controversial opening of the SPD to tolerance by the left just a few days before the election . Just a few days after the lost election, Naumann wrote a disappointed and angry letter to Beck, in which he personally blamed Beck for a loss of "two to three percent" of the vote and asked the leadership question. His remarks "may have cost us the election victory". In the days that followed, Naumann's letter sparked a heated debate in the SPD about the question of the left-wing course, in the course of which, among others, the Hessian state parliament member Dagmar Metzger prevented the election of Andrea Ypsilanti as Hessian Prime Minister while tolerating the Left Party.

On May 22, 2008, Naumann informed the Hamburg SPD members in a letter that he would give up his citizenship mandate on June 15, 2008. The expenditure of time for his editing work at the Hamburg publishing house “der Zeit” is so great that it is difficult to reconcile it with the expenditure that a citizenry mandate entails.

family

Michael Naumann has been married to the doctor Marie Warburg, the daughter of Eric M. Warburg , since 2005 , with whom he was friends when he was a student. From his first marriage to Christa Wessel, daughter of the former BND President Gerhard Wessel , he has two grown children.

Fonts

  • The dismantling of an upside-down world. Satire and political reality in the work of Karl Kraus . University of Munich (1969). ( Dissertation )
  • Gold: Myth and Reality of a Precious Metal. In: Geo-Magazin. Hamburg 1980, 4, pp. 8-32. Informative experience report. ISSN  0342-8311
  • Tehran. A revolution is being executed. Documents and reports from Die Zeit , Munich (1982).
  • A corporation holds its breath. A political non-fiction book , Reinbek (1983).
  • America is in California. Where Reagan's Power Comes from , Reinbek (1983).
  • The structural change of heroism. From sacred to revolutionary heroism , (1984). ( Habilitation thesis )
  • Made in the USA (USA). New Stories from America , Reinbek (1994).
  • The story is open. GDR 1990: Hope for a New Republic , Reinbek (1996).
  • Great storytellers of the 20th century , Reinbek (1998).
  • Friedrich Hölderlin Prize. Speeches for the award ceremony , Bad Homburg (2000).
  • The most beautiful form of freedom. Speeches and essays on the culture of the nation , Berlin (2001).
  • It must be possible again in this country. Der neue Antisemitismus Streit , Ullstein, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-548-36425-X .
  • The war machine. Armaments and Politics in the USA , Rowohlt, Reinbek 2005, ISBN 978-3-498-04686-6 .
  • Lucky. One life. Autobiography , Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2017, ISBN 978-3-455-00026-9 .

Awards

Web links

Commons : Michael Naumann  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Barenboim-Said-Akademie website [1] .
  2. ↑ a b Holocaust memorial like Speer-Architektur on www.kultur-netz.de.
  3. ↑ a b Naumann's No to the Holocaust Memorial triggers a heated argument . The daily mirror. July 22, 1998. Retrieved April 24, 2013.
  4. ↑ Debate about memorial continues . The world. July 27, 1998. Retrieved April 24, 2013.
  5. ↑ constitutional complaint 1BvR 2272/04 . Federal Constitutional Court. May 12, 2009. Retrieved February 13, 2013.
  6. ↑ "I am the pessimist" . The daily mirror. January 12, 2006. Retrieved February 13, 2013.
  7. ↑ Hoffmann and Campe awards "Critique Prize" 2006 to Michael Naumann . Hoffmann and Campe Verlag. 2006. Archived from the original on September 8, 2009. Retrieved February 16, 2013.
  8. ^ "Zeit" editor Naumann becomes "Cicero" boss . Mirror online. December 11, 2009. Retrieved February 16, 2013.
  9. ↑ Michael Naumann: "I'll throw some new balls in the air" . stock exchange sheet. February 1, 2010. Retrieved February 16, 2013.
  10. ↑ Christoph Schwennicke becomes the new editor-in-chief of Cicero . Cicero. February 7, 2012. Retrieved April 20, 2013.
  11. ↑ Thomson Reuters Trustees . Thomson Reuters. Archived from the original on May 11, 2013. Retrieved April 20, 2013.
  12. ↑ Dr. Michael Naumann . Thomson Reuters. Archived from the original on March 3, 2013. Retrieved April 20, 2013.
  13. ↑ Thomas Delekat: Not there yet . The world. December 12, 1998. Retrieved April 20, 2013.
  14. ↑ "You have put fundamental virtues to the test" . Mirror online. February 28, 2008. Retrieved April 24, 2013.
  15. ↑ Michael Naumann leaves the citizenship . The world. May 22, 2008. Retrieved April 24, 2013.
  16. ↑ Awarding of the medal on the Day of German Unity. In: bundespräsident.de. October 2, 2018, accessed October 2, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Naumann, Michael
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist
DATE OF BIRTH December 8, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Koethen