Uwe-Karsten Heye

Uwe-Karsten Heye (2018)

Uwe-Karsten Heye (born October 31, 1940 in Reichenberg , Reichsgau Sudetenland ) is a German journalist , diplomat and author . He is a founding member and chairman of the association “ Show your face! For a cosmopolitan Germany ".

family

Uwe-Karsten Heye is the son of the singer Wolfgang Heye, born in Berlin, and his wife Ursula, who comes from Danzig , and was born during his father's engagement at the theater in Reichenberg. When his father was drafted into the Wehrmacht , his mother moved with him and his one year older sister to live with their grandparents in Danzig. After the desertion , his father was first sent to prison and later to a punishment battalion . His mother was then forced to divorce her husband.

The family was supposed to flee in January 1945 with the " Wilhelm Gustloff ", but at short notice they escaped by train to a relative in Rostock . Since his father believed that his family had gone down with the ship, he did not use the tracing service to look for them after the war. His mother had again received the false information that he had fallen. Therefore, it was not until 1960 that his parents found out from each other what was too late for the family to reunite.

After a few years in Rostock, Heye moved with his family to Hamburg and later to Mainz , where he began his journalistic career.

job

From 1974 to 1979 he was press officer and speechwriter at Willy Brandt . In the 1980s he was a freelance writer for ARD and ZDF. In 1990 he became State Secretary and Government Spokesman in Lower Saxony for Prime Minister Gerhard Schröder , from 1998 to 2002 he was State Secretary, Head of the Press and Information Office of the Federal Government and Government Spokesman for the Federal Government under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. From 2003 to 2005 he was Consul General in New York .

In 2004 he published his memoirs , which shed a special light on the war and the post-war period in Germany . The main character is his mother. The book was filmed in 2010 as a two-part television film by ZDF with Maria Furtwängler under the title Schicksalsjahre .

In 2008, the volume won years , in which he deals with the consequences of demographic change . In the book he advocates the thesis that the pressure to change our society is exposed to can also have positive consequences.

From January 2006 to September 2010 Heye was editor-in-chief of the SPD party newspaper Vorwärts . He is also a founding member and chairman of the association “ Show your face ! For a cosmopolitan Germany ”, which has set itself the goal of combating xenophobia , racism and right-wing extremism .

In May 2006, there was severe criticism when Heye in this capacity in an interview with Deutschlandradio on May 17, 2006 warned foreign visitors urgently against visiting “certain areas of Eastern Germany”, which he said could pose a risk to life and limb established widespread xenophobia ( see: No-Go-Area ). A similar scandal last occurred in 1999, when the criminologist Christian Pfeiffer, in an article, blamed the inadequacies of the GDR's educational system for the phenomenon of xenophobic violence in eastern Germany.

Uwe-Karsten Heye (2014)

Heye criticized US President George W. Bush like many others, in 2010 he said in an N24 interview: “We noticed that the intellectual level of the then President George W. Bush of the most important nation was extremely low-threshold. And so it was difficult to communicate with him. "

Heye is married to the cultural consultant Sabine Haack for the third time and has lived in Potsdam-Babelsberg since 2006 . The couple have one son; from his first marriage he has a daughter.

In March 2018, Uwe-Karsten Heye published his autobiography And don't forget in Berlin's Aufbau-Verlag .

Publications

• Just a shadow of happiness. A German family story. Karl Blessing, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-89667-261-4 .
• Years Won or The Revolutionary Power of the Aging Society. Karl Blessing, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-89667-333-6 .
• We wanted another country (with Bärbel Dalichow), Droemer, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-426-27530-6 .
• The Benjamin. A German family. Structure, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-351-03562-4 .
• And don't forget: Autobiography Structure, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3351037154 .

Web links

Commons : Uwe-Karsten Heye  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Wikiquote: Uwe-Karsten Heye  - Quotes

• Literature by and about Uwe-Karsten Heye in the catalog of the German National Library
• Interview with Deutschlandradio Kultur on May 17, 2006

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} “It was no fate” ( memento from February 17, 2011 in the Internet Archive ), Märkische Allgemeine, February 12, 2011
2. ↑ Schröder's ex-spokesman gossip about Bush's intelligence In: Handelsblatt of November 10, 2010