Ulf Wachholtz

Ulf Wachholtz (born October 16, 1920 in Neumünster ; † March 26, 1969 in Düsseldorf ) was a German publisher.

Live and act

Ulf Wachholtz was a son of the publisher Karl Johann Gottfried Wachholtz and his wife Ilse Caroline, née Spangenberg (born May 18, 1895 in Neumünster). At first he lived with his parents in Neumünster. Due to increasing political pressures, his father sent him to Switzerland in 1937, where he was to spend two years of school in a free environment until he graduated from high school.

In 1939 Wachholtz did labor service in the Allgäu, then military service. As a non-commissioned officer he fought with the 30th Division in the French campaign and from the first day until its end as an officer in the Courland Army in the Russian campaign in Ilmensee and Demjansk . Due to illness, he was released from Soviet captivity after the war and reached Neumünster on November 9, 1946.

Instead of a planned law degree, Wachholtz learned the printing trade from January 1, 1947 from his uncle Georg Struve in “Struve's Buchdruckerei u. Verlag “in Eutin . He then got a job as his uncle's assistant. After the licensing of the newspapers had been lifted, he organized the new edition of the Ostholsteiner Anzeiger .

On June 20, 1948, Wachholz married the doctor Gisela Brinkmann (born August 7, 1921 in Lübeck ), with whom he had two sons and a daughter. Due to his father's serious illness, he took over the management of his father's Wachholtz publishing house in September 1950, despite a lack of commercial expertise . Thanks to his skills and commitment, the publishing house was able to open a new Courierhaus in Neumünster in 1954. The building was expanded further in 1954 and 1964. Under his leadership, the Holsteinischer Courier developed into a democracy-based and tolerant medium.

In 1966, Wachholtz acquired the printing and publishing house from W. Struve, which were 225 years old that year. From 1967 to 1968 he had a new publishing house and a modern printing shop set up there. Wachholtz particularly liked book publishing and expanded the line of business very far-sightedly. In particular, he wanted to publish scientific works on regional studies, the prehistory and art history of Schleswig-Holstein and the whole of the north and was prepared to make great sacrifices for this. Many of the works he published did not appear because of financial considerations and foreseeable profits, but because of his personal enjoyment of the texts. This was particularly true of Lilli Martius' book on painting in Schleswig-Holstein in the 19th century and the first volume on the history of art in Schleswig-Holstein, which was published and developed successfully after the Second World War.

Wachholtz, who four years before his death founded an offset printing company on the city limits of Hamburg, left a publishing house with a European reputation. He published 350,000 copies of a topographic atlas and atlases with aerial photographs of all German federal states and Austria.

In addition to the publishing business, Wachholtz was passionately committed to promoting understanding between Germany and Denmark. He supported all helpful initiatives to spread knowledge about Denmark, the history of the country and its inhabitants in Schleswig-Holstein.

personality

Wachholtz was considered a skeptic with a pessimistic view of the future. Even so, he worked according to the Rotary club's guidelines to improve general conditions. He was always very humble and shy of publicity. As a delegate and board member of the Schleswig-Holstein Newspaper Publishers Association, he took part in delegate meetings of the Association of German Newspaper Publishers .

The Schleswig-Holstein Newspaper Publishers Association judged in an obituary that Wachholtz was "a prominent publisher personality", "who had made an outstanding contribution to the reconstruction of the German press and the creation of a new, free German press system".

literature

• Olaf Klose: Wachholtz, Ulf . in: Schleswig-Holstein Biographical Lexicon . Volume 3. Karl Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1974, pp. 277-280