Wilmont Haacke

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Wilmont Haacke (born March 4, 1911 in Monschau , Eifel, † July 23, 2008 in Göttingen ) was a German journalist .

Life

The son of a student councilor graduated from the secondary school of the state educational institution in Naumburg an der Saale and worked as a journalist from 1931, especially after 1937 for the Berliner Tageblatt . He also studied newspaper science in Göttingen, Vienna and Berlin. Haacke already began working for the multilingual London weekly European Herald to deal with the small form of the feature pages and to maintain them himself. His dissertation on the Jewish journalist and editor Julius Rodenberg was not allowed to appear in print, but Haacke ultimately succeeded in establishing himself as a researcher in newspaper studies in the Third Reich.

From 1939 to 1942 Haacke was an assistant at the Institute for Newspaper Studies at the University of Vienna . In 1942 he completed his habilitation at the University of Prague with Erich Trunz and Josef März and in 1942 received the Venia legendi for newspaper studies. He was also active as a writer himself. He published feature collections such as Die Luftschaukel (1939) and Das Ringelspiel (Wiener Feuilletons, 1941), and in 1940 edited corresponding works by Victor Auburtin ( One blows the shepherd's flute ). However, with The Heroic Year , a collection of war fire stories, Haacke now clearly adapted to the zeitgeist (1941). A volume with its own feature section was called the Notebook of the Heart , a novella published in 1943, Die Jugendliebe .

After the Second World War (1946/47), Haacke was initially head of the press office and student advisory service at the University of Mainz. In 1955, Haacke was appointed adjunct professor at the University of Social Sciences in Wilhelmshaven. After this university was merged with the University of Göttingen , Haacke became full professor in Göttingen, but retired in 1973 at the age of 62. Until 1993, Haacke remained co-editor of the journal Publizistik , which he founded in 1956 with Emil Dovifat and Walter Hagemann.

Haacke received multiple honors in his advanced years, on the occasion of his death he was honored as "Nestor of journalism science", internationally respected journalist and journal researcher and the last representative of the humanities direction in his field. His three-volume handbook of the feature pages published in 1951–53 is still considered a standard work today. In Haacke's later years, however, his role in the Nazi era was problematized.

Allegations against Haacke

As early as 1970, the historian Prof. Dr. Helmut Hirsch against the honor of Wilmont Haackes with a commemorative publication (on which he was supposed to work), with Hirsch referring to Haacke's anti-Semitic book "Das heroische Jahr", soaked in Nazi ideology. Especially in the volume published in 2004 by communication researchers Wolfgang Duchkowitsch , Fritz Hausjell and Bernd Semrad: Die Spirale des Schweigens. Regarding the handling of National Socialist newspaper studies (Vienna 2004), Verena Blaum made accusations of massive anti-Semitic passages in Haacke's habilitation thesis, the two-volume feuilletonkunde published in 1942/44 (forerunner of the new edition 1951-53), based on text comparisons . In this work, Haacke expressed himself disparagingly about the "Judaization of the feature pages" and the "barely surpassable cheekiness of the emphatically Jewish and from 1918 to 1933 devastatingly influential Jewish feature columnists" (Volume 1, p. 4). Blaum then added criticism of Haacke and his specialist colleagues for having avoided dealing with these writings and their scientific environment for decades. On the other hand, the objection was raised that the events surrounding Haacke's doctorate (1936/37), when the recorded allegation of a lack of insight into the National Socialist Jewish policy seemed to have ended Haacke's hopes for an academic career, were not properly appreciated by critics like Blaum. By the way , a researcher close to Haacke like Walter Hagemann had already noted in 1950 in the preface to the belated publication of Haacke's dissertation that the arts section had been “distorted by the language regulation and preventive censorship of the Propaganda Ministry”. Hagemann had thus assumed a more opportunistic than ideologically convinced attitude of Haacke.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The document is printed in: Helmut Hirsch, teachers make history . Wuppertal (A. Henn Verlag) Ratingen 1971, pp. 248-250.
  2. ↑ Peter Groos: Review of the book "Die Spirale des Schweigens". In: H-Soz-u-Kult , April 9, 2004.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Haacke, Wilmont
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist
DATE OF BIRTH March 4, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Monschau , Eifel
DATE OF DEATH July 23, 2008
Place of death Goettingen