Paul Winkler (publisher)
Paul Winkler (born July 7, 1898 in Budapest , † September 23, 1982 in Melun ) was a Hungarian-French author , journalist and publisher of Jewish origin.
Life
Winkler studied at the University of Amsterdam . In the mid-1920s he went to Paris and founded the press and publishing agency Opera Mundi . Thanks to King Features by William Randolph Hearst , who published Mickey Mouse and made Winkler his European representative, it was the largest agency in Europe 15 years later. At the time, Winkler was also the second largest magazine publisher in France and press advisor to Prime Minister Édouard Herriot . His comic magazine Le Journal de Mickey , which started in 1934, had a circulation of 400,000 copies per week, which at the time was a mighty children's magazine.
With the establishment of Vichy France in June 1940, Winkler emigrated to the United States, where he took his company values and the concept with him. There he was the owner of Press Alliance, Inc. , which, new for the American market, acted as an agency for writers as well as the publisher of magazines (total circulation ~ 1.4 million) in addition to the distribution of press releases. Winkler sold articles and columns and recruited popular authors such as the tabloid journalist Elsa Maxwell .
After the Second World War , Winkler returned to France and re-founded Opera Mundi. As a licensee of The Walt Disney Company he published Donald Duck from 1947 and from 1952 on Hachette again “Le Journal de Mickey” with a weekly circulation of 650,000–700,000 copies. He also founded a number of other French journals, such as the women's magazine Confidences in 1945 , which had already appeared in the USA with 1 million copies during the war. Winkler is also the founder of Editions de Trevise, which specializes in French political biographies, and was general director and editor of France Soir .
plant
The political author Winkler bought his way as a foreign policy columnist at The Washington Post and polemicized against Nazi Germany there. For example, he warned against hoping for “the good German” in Germany, because “there were only two types of evil fighting with each other”, which “should best be carried out together in a pit alone”. Other articles appeared in the New York Herald .
The Thousand-Year Conspiracy: Secret Germany Behind the Mask, published in 1943 under the impact of World War II, together with his wife Betty, serves Germanophobic resentment and is still circulating today as a conspiracy theory . It explains that Germans are following a thousand-year-old conspiracy , which they distinguish from other western civilizations as “Prussian- Teutonic forces”.
The US bestseller “Paris Underground”, which appeared in the same year, is still published today. Under the legend of the real heroine "Etta Shiber" wrote the book Winkler's wife Betty with him as a ghost writer. It was produced as a film in 1945 by Constance Bennett , who stars with Gracie Fields as British and American. The plot tells the life of these women in Paris. They bring Allied airmen to “free France” and are later arrested by the Gestapo . The United States Army saves them from certain death .
Works
- The Thousand-Year Conspiracy: Secret Germany Behind the Mask . Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. 1943
- Etty Shiber [Betty Winkler]: Paris Underground . Scribner's, New York 1943. (German first edition: Stockholm 1944: Bermann-Fischer Verlag)
Individual evidence
- ^ Time September 15, 1941 .
- ^ Paul Winkler: Junkers' Revolt . Washington Post, July 29, 1944
- ↑ Paul Winkler on Disney Legends, accessed August 24, 2010
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Winkler, Paul |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Hungarian-French author, journalist and publisher of Jewish origin |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 7, 1898 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Budapest |
| DATE OF DEATH | 23rd September 1982 |
| Place of death | Melun |