Otto Köhler (journalist)

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Otto Köhler (born January 10, 1935 in Schweinfurt ) is a German journalist and publicist .

Life

Otto Köhler experienced the end of the war in 1945 in a small village near Bad Kissingen as the so-called Pimpf of the German Young People . By his own admission, he could not believe for two more years that Hitler was dead and the war lost - it took him a correspondingly long time to become friends with American literature. Before the Kurt Tucholsky Society in Hamburg he confessed half a century later: "... And if I hadn't had the grace of being born too late, I would have ended up in the Waffen-SS."

As a seventeen-year-old student, Köhler joined the SPD and has been non-party since 1962. From 1953 to 1963 he studied philosophy , German , history and economics in Würzburg and Berlin . In the course of his studies he became involved in the Socialist German Student Union .

In the years that followed, Köhler was a media columnist at Spiegel , an editor at Pardon and specifically . He worked for WDR , Deutschlandfunk , Stern and Zeit as well as for the union newspaper Metall . He is a regular contributor to the daily newspaper Junge Welt and publishes in the weekly newspaper Freitag , as well as for the biweekly Ossietzky , which he also co-edits. Since 1991 Köhler has been writing guest columns for the left-wing daily newspaper Neues Deutschland . He publishes books on historical and political topics. Köhler is a member of the PEN Center Germany .

1980–1982 portrayed Köhler in his concrete column Der / die äßliche Deutsche u. a. Uwe Barschel , Hans Henning von Beust , Birgit Breuel , Reinhard Höhn , Otto Graf Lambsdorff , Gerhard Mayer-Vorfelder , Jürgen Möllemann , Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann and Werner Staak . He wrote several articles about Richard von Weizsäcker for Konkret, for example in Konkret 6/84 a text that was published again on Konkret-online on February 2, 2015 on the occasion of Weizsäcker's death, as well as the text “Für Führer und Vaterland” in Konkret 8/91, which was then also published under the title Für Führer und Vaterland: Weizsäcker won until Moscow in the Konkret volume Otto Köhlers Hitler went - they stayed - 16 examples published in 1996 . He published another text on Weizsäcker in March 2010 on the occasion of his 90th birthday in the Junge Welt, which is also reproduced on NRhZ-Online .

In 2007 the “sharp language and media critic” was awarded the Kurt Tucholsky Prize for his life's work .

Otto Köhler is married to the writer Monika Köhler . He lives near Hamburg.

Fonts

  • I wanted to become a German poet - Kiesinger's words to d. Nation . Edited by Otto Köhler. With an afterword by Kurt Georg Kiesinger from d. Modeled in 1973 by Otto Köhler. Hoffmann et al. Campe, Hamburg 1969.
  • FJ Strauss, the big money candidate . Democratic Initiative Press Service, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-88206-018-2 . (PDI Pocket Book No. 5)
  • Union in concrete terms - security officer Friedrich Zimmermann . Preface by Rudolf Hartung. Democratic Initiative Press Service, Munich 1983. (PDI view to the right, special edition No. 10)
  • ... and today the whole world. The history of IG Farben and its fathers. Hamburg 1986.
  • We typewriters. Journalists under Hitler and afterwards. Cologne 1989.
  • The great expropriation. How the Treuhand liquidated an economy. Munich 1994.
  • The great expropriation. How the Treuhand liquidated an economy. New edition. Das Neue Berlin, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-360-02127-4 .
  • Scary publicists. The repressed past of the media makers. With the collaboration of Monika Köhler, Droemer & Knaur, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-426-80071-3 .
  • Hitler left - they stayed. The German post-war in 16 examples. Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-930786-04-4 .
  • Rudolf Augstein. A life for Germany. Munich 2002, ISBN 3-426-27253-9 .

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quoted verbatim from the acceptance speech for the 2007 Tucholsky Prize (accessed on January 4, 2017)
  2. ↑ Interview in Junge Welt, January 10, 2015
  3. ↑ Junge Welt, September 3, 2016
  4. ↑ Köhler's attitude towards National Socialism and later involvement with the SDS. Source: WDR broadcast Experienced Stories (accessed on November 8, 2014)
  5. ↑ Köhler's political contributions in the program Kritisches Tagebuch (WDR) were often critical discussions of the way in which the Federal Republic came to terms with the Nazi past and the Nazi banking capital.
  6. ↑ Short biography and reviews of works by Otto Köhler at perlentaucher.de
  7. ↑ Otto Köhler: Destroy and cover up , ND guest column from March 6, 2010 (accessed on November 23, 2014)
  8. ^ Conversation with Otto Köhler on October 3, 2011 in Hamburg-St.Georg
  9. ^ The ferret: About the death of Richard von Weizsäcker specifically online February 2, 2015
  10. ↑ "One whom one believes" "One whom one believes" Richard von Weizsäcker's memory of Heinrich Senfft's father and contemporary history
  11. ↑ 90 years and don't know anything , NRhZ-Online on March 24, 2010
  12. ↑ Tucholsky Prize 2007 to Lothar Kusche and Otto Köhler
  13. ↑ ... for the report "Würzburg, I want to sing your song", subtitle: "Nasty portrait of a beautiful German city", published in "Zeit" on February 22, 1963 (accessed on May 5, 2014)
personal data
SURNAME Koehler, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist and publicist
DATE OF BIRTH January 10, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH Schweinfurt