Rainer Bieling

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Rainer Bieling (born April 30, 1950 in Berlin-Schöneberg ) is a German journalist and media developer. The PhD philosopher was the editorial director of the information and background service Der Hauptstadtbrief until December 2018 . He was previously the editor-in-chief of the popular magazines Zitty and Guter Rat .

Life

Bieling grew up in Berlin, attended the Klosterfeld elementary school and in 1970 passed the Abitur at the Freiherr-vom-Stein-Oberschule in Berlin-Spandau . From 1967 he had directed the school newspaper Bumerang and participated in the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (APO). In 1968 he joined the Spandau base group and was active in the New Left until 1977 , most recently in the Socialist Office (SB), which at the time was, among others, Elmar Altvater , Wolf-Dieter Narr , Oskar Negt , Dan Diner , Willi Hoss , Detlev Claussen and later also Rudi Dutschke belonged.

Bieling studied from 1970 at the Free University of Berlin , among other things journalism with Harry Pross and Ivan Bystrina, political science at the Otto-Suhr-Institut (OSI) with Elmar Altvater and Wolf-Dieter Narr and at the Sociological Institute with Joachim Bischoff and Urs Jaeggi . In 1974 he completed his studies with a master's thesis on the critique of reflection theory . In 1979 he received his doctorate in philosophy with his work Spinoza in the judgment of Marx and Engels .

In 1979 Bieling first became an author, 1980 responsible editor and 1983 editor-in-chief of the Berlin city illustrated Zitty . In numerous editorials and articles he critically examined the role of residual groups of the New Left in the New Social Movements of the 1980s, advocated the pluralistic interplay between mainstream and off-culture and promoted the mental integration of the alternative movement into parliamentary democracy. In 1986 he left the editorial office and wrote the book The Tears of the Revolution. The 68s twenty years later , in 1988 published by Wolf Jobst Siedler Verlag.

In 1988 Bieling went to Munich as head of department for the now defunct Lui magazine and in 1989 moved to the German edition (published by Hubert Burda Media , Munich) of the US business magazine Forbes Magazine , known for its annual rankings of the richest, as the executive editor of the now discontinued German edition and most influential people in the world.

Bieling returned to Berlin in 1990 and took over as chief editor of the East German consumer magazine Guter Rat (published by Verlag für die Frau , Leipzig, and the Sebaldus / Gong group, Nuremberg). Guter Rat is the oldest magazine still in existence, which was re-established after the Second World War. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was initially only published in the new federal states and under Bieling's leadership - unlike most other earlier GDR magazines - survived the years after the fall of the Wall. The readership recognized the magazine's focus on integrating the new German citizens into the social market economy with stable print runs. In 1997, with the support of the Verlag für die Frau, the editorial team succeeded in introducing Guter Rat also in the old federal states. Today, Germany's first consumer magazine belongs to the Hubert Burda Media publishing group .

Bieling has been working as a journalist and media developer since 1998, implementing analog and digital projects. As his specialty he names "identifying the historical roots of current conflicts and their influence on solutions with or without a future". As Head of Special Editions at Times Media, Berlin, he designed and realized special products for their English-language monthly newspapers The Atlantic Times and The German Times from 2007 to 2010 . In 2011 he oversaw the relaunch of the Berlin information and background service Der Hauptstadtbrief , of which he was editorial director from 2012 to 2018.

Quotes

“The APO generation was - as Rainer Bieling already pointed out in the anniversary year of 1988 - the generation of a completely new sound in beat music. What was for the universities of Rudi Dutschke and Hans-Jürgen Krahl was for the vast majority of our rebellious generation comrades in the companies and schools Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix: 'Music and fashion, drugs and the cult of long hair spoke unacademic no to the social design of the establishment. ' Both cultures of protest dynamized and renewed each other in the current of revolt. "

- Tilman Fichter : The tears of the revolution

“What is wanted above all is the secure appearance of the city magazines because their makers, as Zitty editor Rainer Bieling says in Berlin, consider the 'instability of alternative magazines in the 1970s' to be unproductive. The publication of the former non-conformists, the Hippie, Sponti and K-Gruppe papers, was, according to the publisher, often 'uncertain' or 'irregular'. For the city magazines, on the other hand, securing commercial livelihoods is paramount. Measured against the old alternatives, that is what is really new about them: that they simply accept the market as a forum for attracting readers. “We are,” says Zitty colleague and PhD philosopher Bieling, 34, about the learning process, “a phenomenon of the eighties” - even if the first came out in the seventies. The lesson they learned from the fate of their predecessors was not to abolish conflicts and tendency feuds, but to avoid the self-destructive escalation. A popularized, 'ideologically not so fixed editorial policy' (Bieling) has prevailed. "

- Der Spiegel about market success and counter-publicity of city magazines

“There are moments when Berlin's Rainer Bieling, 45, feels very close to his unity chancellor: 'The people in the East are despondent,' he says, 'and we have to build confidence again.' By 'we' he primarily means himself, the former spontaneous from the West Berlin scene, who co-founded the city magazine Zitty , wanted to become bourgeois in the Burda newspaper Forbes and has remained a 'die-hard Wessi'. But now Bieling is carrying out a mission in the East: He wants to help the new German citizens, who are unfamiliar with the everyday techniques of capitalism, to feel at home in the competitive and consumer world - as editor-in-chief of the former GDR consumer magazine Guter Rat . In 1990 the Nuremberg-based Sebaldus / Gong group took over the good advice! and sent Bieling to East Berlin as editor-in-chief. The West Dynamic prescribed a gloss cleaning for the Ostblatt and gave it color. He introduced direct addressing of readers ('You can with us ...') and forbade his editors to use slang words and anglicisms. He replaced the smiling models on the cover with number graphics and stylized banknotes. Bieling kept the gardening tips, buying advice and product tests - everything that readers had already valued in GDR times: 'We have basically stayed the same - we have not given up the perspective on the East.' "

- Der Spiegel about an Eastern magazine that guides its readers through the labyrinth of capitalism

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stations on the career path after kress Köpf
  2. ↑ Stations of training according to kress heads
  3. ↑ Book cover and description The Tears of the Revolution on the author page of Amazon
  4. ↑ Description Guter Rat - The consumer magazine on the Hubert Burda Media website
  5. ↑ Self-description About me on the Berlin Freedoms blog
  6. ↑ Team description About us on the website Der Hauptstadtbrief
  7. ↑ Tilman Fichter on The Tears of the Revolution in his contribution Meine Uni was the SDS . In: Aesthetics & Communication . Issue 140/141, volume 39, spring 2008
  8. ↑ In dungarees and on high heels . In: Der Spiegel . No. 42 , 1985, pp. 82-91 ( online ).
  9. ↑ Recognize kiwifruit . In: Der Spiegel . No. 22 , 1996, pp. 136 ( online ).
personal data
SURNAME Bieling, Rainer
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist and media developer (analog and digital)
DATE OF BIRTH April 30, 1950
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin-Schöneberg