Unique (magazine)

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unique magazine

description Interculturality is more ...
language German
First edition 2001
Frequency of publication 4 times a year + special editions
Sold edition 4,000 copies
Editor-in-chief Micaela Speck (ViSdP)
editor Unique e. V.
Web link www.unique-online.de
ISSN (print) 1612-2267

The unique is a magazine that has been published four to eight times a year since 2001 with a focus on interculturality and politics, which is mainly published by students. She attracted attention in 2009 through interviews with an NPD member and a journalist affiliated with Hamas . The unique appears in Jena , Erfurt and Weimar .

editorial staff

Cover picture of the Unique 47

The unique was founded as the "international university magazine" of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena in June 2001, among others on the initiative of Cornelia Hirsch , who later became a member of the Bundestag of the left-wing parliamentary group .

Founded as a student magazine, it is no longer institutionally linked to the university, even if it is still mainly operated and read by students. The magazine appears free of charge in Jena, Weimar and Erfurt as well as nationwide as a subscription magazine.

The journal's editorial focus is on anti-racism , migration policy , culture, social engagement and interculturality. In addition to its own editorial content, unique also offers a forum for numerous other international organizations, such as Amnesty International or the Erasmus Student Network . The magazine is published by the Unique e. V., which is composed exclusively of current and former editors. The entire editorial team and the magazine's mostly two-person chief editor work on a voluntary basis.

The editorial rooms are located in the "International Center - House on the Wall" in downtown Jena. The unique is financed through donations, advertisements and sponsors, such as the student council of the Ernst Abbe University of Applied Sciences Jena or the international office of the Friedrich Schiller University. In addition to publishing the magazine, the editorial team helps organize various cultural events every year.

Interview controversies

Various interviews in the unique were the subject of some fierce controversy. So protested u. a. Protestant congregations after a Baptist interviewee drew parallels between the work of Jesus and neoliberalism in an issue on the subject of criticism of religion . An interview with a porn actress and prostitute on the subject of sexism also provoked outrage.

In January 2009 an interview with a Thuringian NPD functionary appeared in an issue on the subject of political resistance alongside articles on left-wing political resistance , whereupon the Thuringian state parliament dealt with the magazine and the left-wing faction in the Thuringian state parliament announced the resignation of the two editors-in-chief Fabian Köhler and Lutz Thormann demanded. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution is said to have dealt with the magazine at times during the controversy that lasted for several weeks.

Another controversy arose over an interview published in May 2009 with the Palestinian journalist Khalid Amayreh , who u. a. works for the Arab television channel Al-Jazeera , the Iranian news agency IRNA and the Palestinian Hamas and questioned Israel's right to exist in the course of the interview. After the deputy chairman of the Jewish regional community of Thuringia was interviewed on the same topic in one issue, the Jewish regional community in particular was outraged and accused unique of spreading anti-Semitic stereotypes under the guise of interculturality.

The editors themselves described their approach as a deliberate break with "lying journalistic taboos", which should give readers the opportunity to deal with positions that are not accessible to the media and thus want to break the ignorance and stereotyping of social problems such as right-wing extremism and anti-Semitism. In this context, Spiesser magazine questioned whether “amateur media are also allowed to look into social and political gray areas”.

The Jena city council and youth pastor Lothar König uniquely accused of giving space to anti-Semitic statements and one-sided accusations. At the height of the controversy, the Antifa group “Initiative against all anti-Semitism” collected 600 copies of the magazine in exchange for soft drinks from the environment of the Königs Junger Gemeinde, whereupon unique König threatened legal action through a lawyer. A comment in the Jena student newspaper Akrützel described the actions of the unique critics as blind actionism and an expression of a lack of democratic discussion culture, but also accused unique of failing to question anti-Semitic propaganda.

Editor-in-chief dispute 2009

In the October 2009 issue of unique , the newspaper accused left and bourgeois groups, among other things, of Islamophobia, the exclusion and discrimination of Muslims and a content-related proximity to the extreme right. In the same month, an Antifa group in Jena published the hacked email traffic of a well-known local neo-Nazi. The private e-mails published on a website specially set up for this purpose made public not only information about the private life of the then NPD member, information about his employer and regional NPD structures, but also the acquaintance of several months between him and the then unique editor-in-chief Fabian Köhler.

With the argument that an editor-in-chief with contacts in the right-wing scene is intolerable, several student institutions, the Friedrich Schiller University and the German-Israeli Society , distanced themselves from unique in the following weeks , called for Fabian Köhler's resignation or saw earlier ones Anti-Semitism allegations are now confirmed.

The editors rejected the allegations and calls for resignation as "completely absurd and unfounded". The department for intercultural exchange, Erasmus alumni and members of the Amnesty International University Group Jena protested against the violation of the personal rights of the then unique editor-in-chief and described the contact as a normal journalistic procedure. The controversial editor-in-chief withdrew from the editorial office in 2010 for private reasons.

Development from 2010

After the controversies of 2009 and a pause in the publication rhythm, another issue of UNIQUE (No. 51) appeared in May 2010 under the title “Who was expecting it?”. The intercultural orientation remained untouched: In addition to the guest contribution by a Berlin scholar of Islam on an Iraqi theater project, the Norwegian team of meteorologists from the arctic island of hope was interviewed. Guest articles and columns by scientists have been an integral part of the magazine since then.

Issue 51 was for the first time based on the revised department structure. During the months of the break, the structure of the magazine was evaluated and further developed by the editorial team. As a result, there were four new sections as well as new rubrics, which “expand the range of topics and offer potential writers more opportunities to develop their ideas”. The departments "EinBlick", "WeitBlick", "LebensArt" and "WortArt" have since been coordinated by a responsible, elected department head.

In addition to the acquisition of new members of the editorial team, a “process of responsible handover of the editorial management” took place until the middle of 2010: After the old editors-in-chief had gradually retired from leading positions, a new generation was finally carried out with the election of a new two-person editor-in-chief in August. For the first time, a student from the new Bachelor classes became the magazine's editor-in-chief.

The first issue (No. 53) appeared in October 2010 under the new editorial management. On the twentieth anniversary of German reunification , the topic of coming to terms with the past in Germany and the former Eastern Bloc was dealt with under the title “Old Love Doesn't Rust” . The output was u. a. Realized with a grant from the Weimar Foundation Ettersberg and contained an interview with the historian Joachim von Puttkamer . The editorial team was able to win over Joschka Fischer and Roger Willemsen for interviews for issue 54 (from January 17, 2011) .

In January 2015, the editorial team took the upcoming 100th anniversary of the genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in April as an opportunity to address these explosive historical events and their denial, which was mainly pursued by the Turkish side . With this one wants to "oppose the denial efforts and the forgetting". This was made possible, among other things, by funding from the “Freundinnen und Freunde der Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung e. V. “, with the involvement of recognized experts such as Wolfgang Gust and Rolf Hosfeld, for example, the importance of the Baghdad Railway in the deportations of the Armenians and the role of the Kurds in the Ottoman Empire. As a reaction to this, the Turkish Consulate General based in Nuremberg protested by letter against the presentation of the topic. It states, among other things, that the description of the events as genocide is "legally untenable, from a scientific point of view wrong and morally unjustified."

Editors-in-chief

  • 1: Florin Schneider (ViSdP)
  • 2–7: Undine Schmidt (ViSdP)
  • 8/9: Ellen Sauer (ViSdP)
  • 10–13: Ellen Sauer (ViSdP) / Tino Nazareth
  • 14/15: Norman Hera (ViSdP) / Kati Firnhaber
  • 16-18: Norman Hera (ViSdP) / Sebastian Bucher
  • 19–24: Katja Meyer (ViSdP) / Ellen Sauer
  • 25–27: Christine Probst (ViSdP) / Katja Meyer
  • 28/29: Katja Meyer (ViSdP) / Roman Lietz
  • 30: Norman Hera (ViSdP) / Roman Lietz
  • 31/32: Katja Barthold (ViSdP) / Karin Kießling
  • 33–36: Katja Barthold (ViSdP) / Christin Lüttger
  • 37–39: Katja Barthold (ViSdP) / Christin Lüttger / Carola Wlodarski
  • 40–43: Katja Barthold (ViSdP) / Fabian Köhler
  • 44: Fabian Köhler (ViSdP) / Christine Seifert
  • 45/46: Fabian Köhler (ViSdP)
  • 47–50: Fabian Köhler (ViSdP) / Lutz Thormann
  • 51: Fabian Köhler (ViSdP) / Lutz Thormann / Frank Kaltofen
  • 52: Fabian Köhler (ViSdP) / Frank Kaltofen
  • 53–57: Frank Kaltofen (ViSdP) / Michaela Meißner
  • 58–60: Frank Kaltofen (ViSdP) / Jenny Distler (head of duty)
  • 61–62: Frank Kaltofen (ViSdP) / Carolin Krahl (head of duty)
  • 63–64: Frank Kaltofen (ViSdP) / Finja Wiebe (head of duty, substitute)
  • 65–66: Frank Kaltofen (ViSdP) / Carolin Krahl (Head of Duty)
  • 67–69: Frank Kaltofen (ViSdP) / Barbara Bushart (head of duty)
  • 70–72: Frank Kaltofen (ViSdP), Robert Sittner (editor-in-chief, deputy) / Barbara Bushart (head of duty)
  • 73–78: Frank Kaltofen (ViSdP)
  • 79–81: Frank Kaltofen (ViSdP) / Lara Hartung
  • 82–85: Lara Hartung (ViSdP)
  • from 86: Micaela Speck (ViSdP)

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jesus would be neoliberal . (PDF; 7.8 MB) In: UNIQUE Magazin , December 2008, p. 7.
  2. ↑ Fabik is unpacking. Speech by Fabian Köhler at the general student assembly on November 12, 2009
  3. ↑ A conversation with an anonymous NPD functionary in the Jena student newspaper Unique causes a dispute in Thuringia . In: Thüringer Allgemeine , January 23, 2009
  4. ↑ The other way . ZEIT fault report, March 30, 2009
  5. ↑ Outrage over an interview in a student magazine. In: Ostthüringer Zeitung , May 7, 2009
  6. ↑ Personal statement from Lutz Thormann to the Jena Antifa, January 25, 2009
  7. ↑ and facts about the interview with Khalid Amayreh, UNIQUE Online, May 20, 2009
  8. ↑ What are the young media allowed to do . In: Spiesser, February 17, 2009
  9. ↑ Sören Reimer: A Little War in Jena , Akrützel No. 267, May 14, 2009, p. 10 (PDF; 14.1 MB)
  10. ↑ Sören Reimer: Blinder Aktionismus , Akrützel No. 267, May 14, 2009, p. 11 (PDF; 14.1 MB)
  11. ↑ UNIQUE 50: 1001 Prejudice - Islamophobia in Germany, October 2009 (PDF; 8.8 MB)
  12. ↑ Nazi unpack. Indymedia, October 26, 2009
  13. ↑ Student newspaper UNIQUE criticized for contact with law . Deutschlandfunk , October 29, 2009
  14. ↑ The Jena university magazine 'Unique' has to part with its editorial member Fabian Köhler . ( Memento of the original from November 18, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. DIG Erfurt, November 11, 2009 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / dig-erfurt.de
  15. ↑ Between Nazi contacts, anti-Semitism and interculturality, MUT against right-wing violence, November 4, 2009 ( Memento of the original from November 8, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.mut-gegen-rechte-gewalt.de
  16. ↑ On our own behalf: fabik unpacks - the UNIQUE editorial team expresses its trust in its editor-in-chief Fabian Köhler and firmly rejects the allegations against him and UNIQUE.
  17. ↑ Intercultural university groups criticize handling of UNIQUE, Jenapolis, November 9th, 2009 ( Memento of the original of November 16, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.jenapolis.de
  18. ↑ UNIQUE issue 51 (May 2010) (PDF)
  19. ↑ "The UNIQUE in the winter semester 2010/11: New paths, proven objectives" (self-description of UNIQUE from October 2010)
  20. ↑ "There is a fierce struggle for interpretive sovereignty" - conversation with Prof. Joachim von Puttkamer in UNIQUE issue 53
  21. ↑ “Who the hell is this Nobel Prize Committee?” - Joschka Fischer in an interview in UNIQUE issue 54
  22. ↑ "Forget sights!" - Roger Willemsen in an interview in UNIQUE issue 54
  23. ^ Statement by the editors on issue 69 ("AGHET: 1915 - 2015") on unique-online.de
  24. ↑ Friends of the Heinrich Böll Foundation e. V .: "Who we support"
  25. ↑ a b "A special letter to the editor" unique-online.de
  26. ↑ Student magazine unique from Jena receives prize from the Thuringian Ministry . ( Memento of the original of June 10, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Jenapolis, June 7, 2012 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.jenapolis.de
  27. ↑ "unique" student magazine awarded . Jena TV online, December 14, 2012