Otto H. Hess

Otto H. Hess (born December 7, 1911 in Berlin ; † February 24, 1997 there ) was a German publisher and co-founder of the Free University of Berlin .

Life

Due to his partly Jewish descent, Hess was refused a place at university during the Nazi era ; In 1940 he was released from the Wehrmacht as “unworthy of defense ” and deported to a labor camp in 1944, from which he was able to escape in April 1945. After the war ended, he began studying medicine at the reopened Berlin University in 1946 , where he was elected head of the “Student Working Group” and the following year he was elected deputy chairman of the student council.

Also in 1947, Hess became the publisher of the student magazine “Colloquium”, which appeared under an American license and which subsequently publicly criticized the university policy of the SED- led German Administration for Popular Education (DVV) on several occasions. In April 1948, the DVV withdrew his study permit together with two other Colloquium employees, Joachim Schwarz and Otto Stolz. This led to massive student protests in Berlin. In the course of this, Hess demanded the subordination of the university to the then still existing general Berlin magistrate or otherwise the establishment of a "Free University" in the western part of the city. The demand found among others the support of Ernst Reuters and Lucius D. Clay . In fact, the new university was able to start provisional teaching as early as November 1948. As a student member in the founding committee and in the board of trustees of the FU, Otto Hess was one of the co-founders of the FU.

In 1952, Hess finished his studies without a degree in order to devote himself entirely to building up the Colloquium publishing house. In addition to the journal of the same name (until 1971), he also increasingly published non-fiction and specialist books, including numerous series of publications by the German University of Politics , the Friedrich Meinecke Institute and the Ibero-American Institute . The biographical series “Heads of the 20th Century”, in which more than one hundred volumes appeared, was more widely used. Since the end of the 1950s, the Federal Ministry for Pan-German Issues and the Federal Agency for Civic Education have also published educational publications . When the Berlin subsidies were cut after German reunification, the publishing house ran into economic difficulties and finally had to file for bankruptcy in 1992.

Honors

• Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class (1987)
• Honorary Citizenship of the Free University of Berlin (1988)

literature

• Klaus Körner : “Storms the Science Fortress!” Otto Hess and the Colloquium-Verlag 1947–1992 , in: From the Antiquariat No. 6/2006, pp. 415–431.
• Biography Otto Hess in History of the Free University Berlin: Events, Places, People , Frank & Timme GmbH, 2008, ISBN 978-3-86596-205-8 .

Web links

• Short CV Otto Hess in: Against dictatorship. Resistance and Opposition in the GDR
• Small chronicle of the FU Berlin