Thomas Schmid (journalist, 1945)

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Thomas Schmid (born October 6, 1945 near Leipzig ) is a German journalist and was the editor of the daily newspaper Die Welt . In the 1960s he belonged to the West German student movement , in the 1970s to the Sponti scene, and in the 1980s to the politicians of the Greens . He was the first leading activist of the 1968 movement to end the Springer boycott.

Note: Thomas Schmid is not identical to the journalist Thomas Schmid , born in 1950, who was editor-in-chief of the taz from 1995 to 1996 and is an employee of the Frankfurter Rundschau .

Life

Schmid was born the son of a doctor and a doctor. In 1952 the family fled from the GDR via West Berlin to West Germany and settled in North Baden . He spent his youth in Mannheim , Heidelberg and Bensheim an der Bergstrasse . There he graduated from high school in 1965. Until 1969 he studied German , English and political science at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main .

Schmid was once an activist in the Frankfurt student movement. In 1968 he became a member of the Socialist German Student Union (SDS). In addition to Daniel Cohn-Bendit , Joschka Fischer and Matthias Beltz , he was the founder of the left-wing radical group Revolutionärer Kampf (RK), which was primarily dedicated to "company work". In order to win the workers over to the revolution, he worked for two and a half years as a bodybuilder in the Rüsselsheim plant of Adam Opel AG . From 1975 he worked in the editorial department of the magazine Autonomie. Materials against the factory company . In 1979 he wrote the epilogue to Toni Negri's neo-Marxist combat script Sabotage for Trikont-Verlag in Munich.

Between 1979 and 1986 Schmid was a lecturer at the Klaus Wagenbach publishing house . There he was responsible for non-fiction books and Italian authors. At the same time he began to work as a freelance writer for the left-wing magazines Pflasterstrand and Freibeuter as well as the daily newspaper and Die Zeit . From 1983 he shaped the ecological liberal wing of the Greens, to which Winfried Kretschmann belonged, as a pioneer . In an analysis of the 1983 Bundestag election , in which the Greens moved into the Bundestag with 28 seats, he relied on the "upscale new bourgeoisie, to which the radicalism of the scenic left, which is rather unconcerned about concrete successes, is alien". It need not be wrong for the Greens to become a “bourgeois party”, a “green middle class party”. In 1986 he was looking for "ways out of the crisis of the social democratic-union welfare state". From 1989 he advised Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who at the time had become the department head for multicultural affairs in Frankfurt am Main. Together they published the book Heimat Babylon in 1993 . The risk of multicultural democracy .

In 1993, Schmid made journalism his main occupation and became head of the features section of the Ost-Berliner Wochenpost . From 1994 he worked there with the editor-in-chief Mathias Döpfner , and went with him to the tabloid Hamburger Morgenpost in 1996 . When Döpfner became editor-in-chief of the daily newspaper Die Welt at Axel Springer Verlag in 1998 , Schmid also moved there and took over the management of the “Forum” opinion department.

In September 2000 Schmid joined the politics department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . In 2001 he took over the politics department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung as the responsible editor . Schmid returned to the world in November 2006 , where he replaced Roger Köppel as editor-in-chief. From 2008 Thomas Schmid was editor-in-chief of the Welt-Gruppe at Axel Springer Verlag; In addition to the daily newspaper Die Welt, he was also responsible for the weekly newspaper Welt am Sonntag as well as Welt Online and Die Welt Kompakt . From February 2010 to June 2014 Schmid was the publisher of the Welt-Gruppe . He now works as an author and journalist.

Schmid is married to the journalist Edith Kohn-Schmid .

Awards

In 2008 Schmid was awarded the Ludwig Erhard Prize for Business Journalism.

Others

Thomas Schmid gave the eulogy for the historian Karl Schlögel on the award of the Franz Werfel Human Rights Prize 2012 by the Center against Expulsions in the Paulskirche Frankfurt am Main on October 28, 2012.

reception

When it belonged to the “left ideological spectrum”, it sometimes struck “a pointed anti-American or anti-Western tone”, as the political scientist Johann Baptist Müller noted. Schmid attested the Anglo-American cultural area essentially “shallowness”. In the 1980s, Schmid wanted to “ rehabilitate the national revolutionary Claus Heim ” from the autonomous and anti-imperialist milieu in the editorial of the magazine autonomie , according to anti-Semitism researcher Clemens Heni .

In 1994 he was a co-signer of the appeal initiated by Junge Freiheit: “Freedom is always the freedom of those who think differently - appeal on the occasion of the attack on the JUNGE FREIHEIT printing works”.

The political scientist and anti-Semitism researcher Lars Rensmann counted Schmid, whom he described as a “formerly radical left journalist”, as one of Jürgen Möllemann's public supporters in the course of the “Möllemann Affair” . In a work on anti-Semitism published in 2003, the historian Georg Christoph Berger Waldenegg pointed out that Schmid spoke of a “historicization of National Socialism” and saw Möllemann as a “taboo breaker”. In 2008, the political scientist Claus Leggewie wrote in an essay on the historians ' dispute that Schmid had "outgrown the red-green milieu [...]". Schmid welcomes the “paradigm shift” in German politics in the 1990s, the “collapse of a historical-political dogma”.

In 2006, the political scientist Albrecht von Lucke , editor of the papers for German and international politics , said that Schmid was an example of how “right-wing extremist violence” was played down in German media.

Works

  • Thomas Schmid: About the left and their part in the technocratic process . In: The dreams are back on the streets. Open questions of the German and Italian left after 1968 , Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 1979, ISBN 3-8031-1087-4 .
  • Thomas Schmid: Black-red-green. About an apparent and a possible turning point. For the 1983 federal election . In: Freibeuter , 16 (1983).
  • Thomas Schmid (Ed.): About the difficulties of the Greens to live and think in society . Hessian State Center for Political Education, Wiesbaden 1983.
  • Thomas Schmid: Liberation from wrong work. Theses on the guaranteed minimum income . Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 1984, ISBN 3-8031-2109-4 .
  • Thomas Schmid (Ed.): The end of rigid time. Suggestions for flexible working hours . Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-8031-2120-5 .
  • Thomas Schmid: Denationalization. New perspectives on the community . Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-8031-2157-4 .
  • Thomas Schmid: State funeral. From civil society . Rotbuch Verlag, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-88022-035-2 .
  • Thomas Schmid: Berlin: the capital error. Arguments for a federalist Germany . Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-8218-1116-1 .
  • Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Thomas Schmid: Heimat Babylon. The risk of multicultural democracy . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1993, ISBN 3-455-10307-3 .
  • Thomas Schmid, Europe is dead, long live Europe! A world power has to reinvent itself , C. Bertelsmann Verlag, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-570-10318-0

literature

  • Albrecht von Lucke: Upper class green . In: Sheets for German and International Politics, June 2008

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas Schmid in the Munzinger archive , accessed on July 28, 2010 ( beginning of article freely available)
  2. ↑ Die Zeit: The Traitors Are Among Us , Edition 17/1999
  3. ↑ Welt Online: "Well, I had long hair and a parka" , October 6, 2010
  4. ↑ Thomas Schmid: About Thomas Schmid ( Memento from June 11, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ^ Wolfgang Kraushaar : Left ghost drivers. Food for thought for an anti-totalitarian left . New Critique Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-8015-0320-8 , p. 266.
  6. ↑ a b c d e Weblog Thomas Schmid: About Thomas Schmid ( Memento from June 11, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  7. ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung , May 29, 2009: "Can I sleep with you?" In conversation: Klaus Wagenbach ( Memento from March 29, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  8. ^ Makoto Nishida: Strömungen in den Grünen (1980–2003) , Münster 2005, p. 106.
  9. ↑ Albrecht von Lucke: Großbürgerlichgrün , in: Blätter für German and international politics, June 2008
  10. ↑ Thomas Schmid: Industry without luck - arguments for a cross-bloc disarmament of work , in: Liberation from wrong work, Wagenbach, Berlin 1986
  11. ^ Berliner Zeitung: "Wochenpost" with a new editor-in-chief , April 26, 1994
  12. ^ Johann Baptist Müller : Germany and the West (= contributions to political science . Vol. 55). Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-428-06777-0 , pp. 73 f.
  13. ↑ Clemens Heni : Salon ability of the new right. "National identity". Anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism in the political culture of the Federal Republic of Germany 1970–2005. Henning Eichberg as an example . Tectum, Marburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-8288-9216-3 , p. 327.
  14. ↑ Horst Meier : Protest-free zones ?. Variations on civil rights and politics . BWV, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-8305-3032-9 , p. 76.
  15. ^ Lars Rensmann : Democracy and the image of the Jews. Anti-Semitism in the political culture of the Federal Republic of Germany . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2015, ISBN 3-531-14006-X , p. 459.
  16. ↑ Georg Christoph Berger Waldenegg : Anti-Semitism: "A dangerous word?". Diagnosis of a word . Böhlau, Vienna a. a. 2003, ISBN 3-205-77096-X , p. 134.
  17. ↑ Claus Leggewie : Historikerstreit - transnational . In: Steffen Kailitz (ed.): The present of the past. The “Historikerstreit” and German historical politics . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2008, ISBN 978-3-531-16132-7 , p. 60 f.
  18. ↑ Albrecht von Lucke : The will to we . In: Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 7/2006, pp. 777–781, here: p. 778.
personal data
SURNAME Schmid, Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist
DATE OF BIRTH October 6, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH near Leipzig